Mystery

“His sister?” Natchez said. “I didn’t even know he had a sister.”

Past the St. Alwyn Hotel they drove, past the pawnshop and The Home Plate.

“Carmen Bishop is the reason my grandfather singled out Fulton Bishop—Barbara Deane told me about her one night when we were having dinner at her house. She used to be a nurse’s aide, back when Shady Mount first opened. She was about seventeen or eighteen, and my grandfather used to take her out. He did the same thing with Barbara Deane. Both of them must have been very pretty, but they didn’t have anything else in common.”

“Your grandfather was in his thirties—his late thirties—and he had affairs with teenage girls?”

“No, that’s the point. He didn’t have affairs with them. He just took them out. He wanted to be seen with them. I don’t think he had any interest in affairs. He was using them in another way.”

“Which was?” On the detective’s face was a look both interested and skeptical, as if he were asking just to hear what Tom would come up with by way of an answer: as if the whole thing were now no more than a story in which he need take no more than a spectator’s share. It doesn’t come down to only this, his expression said, Fulton Bishop’s sister. And Tom knew without saying it that it did not: it came down to something else—something Buzz Laing had discovered in Boney Milton’s records.

“To make him look normal,” he said, remembering his mother’s dull, thudding screams in the middle of the night. “Better than normal. He did favors for them, and they made him look like a stud. He was around the hospital a lot in those days, and he met a lot of young girls. When he came across Carmen Bishop, he found a perfect match. Barbara Deane said that in the end, he had to learn to respect her. She did what he wanted in the hospital, and went out with him in public, and in return he helped her brother.”

“ ‘She did what he wanted in the hospital,’ ” Natchez said. “Does that mean what I think it does?”

“Barbara Deane’s reputation got ruined when it looked like she caused the death of a patient who was injured in a gun battle with the police.”

“At Shady Mount,” Natchez said. “With Bonaventure Milton running the show.”

“I don’t suppose they built it to be a way of getting rid of inconvenient people, but once it was there—”

“—once it was the most respectable hospital on the island—”

“—someone like Carmen Bishop could be a kind of court of last resort,” Tom said. “I bet Buzz Laing survived the attack on him because he went to St. Mary Nieves.”

“I thought you said von Heilitz never had the time to work on the Blue Rose case.”

“He didn’t—I’m just thinking about something Dr. Laing told me this morning.”

They drove between the can factory and the refinery and dipped down into Weasel Hollow. Tom said, “Have you ever been to the Third Court?”

Natchez shook his head, and in the way he did not look at Tom but idly out at the weedy lots where people lived inside houses that were only blankets wrapped around leaning poles, the boy saw that he had never been inside Elysian Courts at all.

They went through an intersection, and Tom looked up a garbage-strewn street at the rusted, burnt-out hull of a sports car that now rested flat on a sheet of plywood. A sheet of canvas had been rigged to slant over its top, and the back of a chair stuck up where the passenger seat had been. Friedrich Hasselgard’s Corvette had been recycled into a one-bedroom apartment. Natchez turned up the hill toward the island’s near west end.

The street numbers advanced from the twenties into the thirties. They drove past a big peaceful church in a swarm of bicycles, and turned into 35th Street to go past the zoo, then past the perpetual cricket match ticking away in the field at the south end of the park, past the twisted cypresses, and downhill into Maxwell’s Heaven.

The buildings blocked out the sun. OLD CLOATHES CHEAP, HUMIN HAIR BOUGHT AND SOLD. Far down past the leaning tenements lay the dump in coruscating light, and Mr. Rembrandt hung in a gilded frame on Hattie Bascombe’s wall. Tom pointed to a nearly invisible cobblestone path between a dark archway, and said, “Go in there.”

Natchez drove down past peeling walls and windows hung with dirty net until he came to the bottom of the well, a cobbled court surrounded by crossbarred doors and iron bars. “What happens to the car down here?” Natchez said.

“Percy takes care of it,” Tom said, and a door creaked open, and a bearded mountain in a leather apron lumbered out, squinting into the dirty light.