Mystery

The Lincoln drew up beside the front gates of the Redwing compound, and Mr. Spence labored out of the car to let Sarah out. “Come back to our place when you and Buddy have said your hellos,” Sarah’s mother called. “We’ll all have dinner with Ralph and Katinka tonight, I’m sure.”

“Tom, too,” Sarah said.

“Tom has things to do. We won’t impose invitations on him.”

Jerry pulled away as Sarah waved, and the car wound through the trees to the Spences’ lodge.

“Of course we know Aunt Kate,” Mrs. Spence said to her husband. “She’s the one who was married to Jonathan. They lived in Atlanta. She’s—she’d be—somewhere in her seventies now, and her maiden name—see, I even know that—her maiden name was—it was—”

“Duffield,” Tom said.

“See!” she cried. “Even he knows it was Duffield!”

Jerry dropped them in front of the porch of the Spence lodge and turned around on the seat to back down the narrow lake road to the compound. The Spences fumbled with bags and keys and moved up on their dusty porch with perfunctory good-byes to Tom, and he carried his two cases down through the trees to his grandfather’s lodge.

Four twenty-foot-long steps of big mortared fieldstones capped with a layer of concrete led up to Glendenning Upshaw’s covered porch. Tom carried his heavy bags through wicker furniture and rapped on the screen door. To his right, he could see the point at which the trees abruptly stopped and gave way to Roddy Deepdale’s shaved lawn. Light bounced off one of the windows in the long, angular Deepdale lodge.

The door opened to a vast dim space shot with cloudy streaks of light. “So you’re here,” said a tall young woman in black who stepped backwards immediately. “You’re Glen’s grandson? Tom Pasmore?”

Tom nodded. The woman shifted to look behind him, and the impression of her youthfulness vanished. There were grey streaks in her smooth hair and deep vertical lines in her cheeks. She was startlingly good-looking, despite her age. “I’m Barbara Deane,” she said, and stood up straight to face him—for an instant, Tom felt that she was trying to see how he responded to her name. She wore a black silk blouse with a double strand of pearls and a close-fitting black skirt. These clothes neither called attention to nor disguised the natural curves of her body, which seemed to match some other, younger face. “Why don’t you get your bags inside, and I’ll show you your room. This is your first time here, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Tom said, and carried his suitcases inside.

“We have two rooms on this level, this sitting room, and the study that leads out to the deck and the pier. The kitchen is back through the arch, and everything is in working order. Florrie Truehart came in to clean this morning, and it’s all shipshape.”

The walls and floor were of hardwood gone grey and dim with age. Antlers and mounted fish hung on the walls. Large colorless cushions softened the handmade furniture. A round walnut table and six round-back chairs took up a separate area near the kitchen. Big windows, streaky with dust, overlooking the lake admitted dim shafts of light. Two other windows looked out on the porch. Tom was sure that sheets had been taken off the furniture only that morning. “Well,” said the woman beside him, “we did our best. The place will get to look a little livelier after you’ve been here a while.”

“Mrs. Truehart is still the cleaning woman? I thought she’d be—”

“Miss Truehart. Florrie. Her brother is the mailman for this district.” She began to move toward a wide wooden staircase covered with a dull red Indian carpet, and once again seemed like two people to Tom, a strong vital young woman and an autocratic older one.

“When does the mail come, by the way?” Tom had picked up his bags and followed her up the stairs.

She looked at him over her shoulder. “I think it’s put in the boxes sometime around four o’clock. Why? Are you expecting something?”

“I thought I’d write some people while I was here.”

She nodded as if she thought this point was worth remembering, and led him the rest of the way up the stairs. “The bedrooms are on this floor. I’m keeping some things in the front bedroom, so I’ve given you the larger of the other two. There’s a bathroom right outside the door. Would you like help with those bags? I should have asked before.”

Sweating, Tom set them both down and shook his head.

“Men,” Barbara Deane said, and came near to him and lifted the larger of his two bags without any sign of effort.

His bedroom was at the back of the house and smelled like wax and lemon oil. The dark narrow planking of the walls and floor glistened. Barbara Deane lifted the big case onto the single bed covered with a faded Indian blanket, and Tom grimaced and put his beside it. He went to a windowed door in the exterior wall and looked out on a narrow wooden balcony nearly overgrown by a massive oak. “Your mother used this room,” she said.