Mystery

Tom went back inside and took a handful of the stationery from the drawer. He crossed out his grandfather’s name and printed his own beneath it. He thought for a moment, then began writing to Lamont von Heilitz. When he had covered a page, he heard Barbara Deane coming quickly down the stairs. Her footsteps crossed the larger sitting room. The door closed. Tom began on a second page. He heard a car starting up in the woods behind the house. About the time the car reached the wide stony path in front of the lodge, the motorboat started up again. Tom finished his long letter and looked at his watch. It was two-thirty. He folded the letter into thirds, and made another search of the desk drawers until he found a stack of envelopes. He scratched out his grandfather’s name on the first one, wrote Tom above it and printed Lamont von Heilitz’s address, and sealed the letter into the envelope. Then he left the lodge and began walking down the path.

Two cars were parked beside the gate into the compound, and five or six older, smaller cars had been pulled into spaces on the far side of the dusty parking lot in front of the clubhouse. “Who’s that? Ahoy there!” called a voice from overhead, and Tom looked up to see Neil Langenheim leaning over a veranda railing and beaming down at him from beneath a green-and-white-striped canvas awning. His red forehead had begun to peel, and his jowls and double chin lapped over the collar of an unbuttoned peach-colored shirt. Neil Langenheim, the Pasmores’ next-door neighbor, was a lawyer for the Redwings, and before this Tom had never seen him wearing anything but dark suits.

“It’s Tom Pasmore, Mr. Langenheim.”

“Tom Pasmore? Well! You staying at your grandfather’s lodge?”

Tom said yes.

“Well, where are you going, boy? Come up here, and I’ll buy you a beer. Hell, I’ll buy you whatever you like.”

“I’m going into Eagle Lake to mail a letter,” Tom said. “I want to see the town too.”

“Oh, nobody goes there,” Mr. Langenheim protested. “Talk sense. And you can’t write letters up here—nothing ever happens! And even if it did, all the people you’d write to are up here with you!”

Tom waved to him and set off again, and Mr. Langenheim shouted, “See you at dinner!”

Main Street was lined with gift shops, lunch counters, drugstores, liquor stores, cafés with names like The Red Tomahawk and The Wampum Belt, a shop that sold flyrods and hand-tied flies, a bijou little shop that sold Swiss watches and gold jewelry, an ice cream and candy store, shops that sold post cards and calendars with pictures of kittens in pine trees, a photographer’s studio, an art gallery with paintings of ducks in formation and Indians around campfires, and two gun shops. Three small interconnected stores sold T-shirts with tourist slogans, wooden I Pine Fir Yew ashtrays, and kachina dolls. Cars parked on the bias. Jeeps and station wagons crowded with children rolled up and down the street, and families in short pants, fingernail polish, Indian headdresses, and Greek shepherd shirts carried plastic shopping bags printed with images of pine trees and leaping fish down plank sidewalks with hitching posts.

The two-story fieldstone building that housed the Eagle Lake Gazette stood between a wooden post office and the bow-fronted library at the top end of Main Street, where the tourists generally turned back to see if they had missed anything. A little fortresslike police station clung like a granite limpet to the side of the Victorian town hall across the street, and at the end of town hall was a large white sign reading EAGLE LAKE THANKS YOU FOR VISITING, and a smaller one that said MOOSE LAKE 6 MILES, LOST LOON LAKE 12 MILES, NORTH POLE 2,546 MILES. VISIT THE AUTHENTIC INDIAN SETTLEMENT.

Tom entered the newspaper office and went up to a wooden counter. A man with a bow tie and thinning brown hair fiddled with a pen and a stack of galleys at an overflowing desk; behind him, a tall skinny man in a plaid shirt and an eyeshade played a linotype machine like a pipe organ. The man in the bow tie crossed out a sentence on a length of galley, looked up and saw Tom. He pushed himself away from the desk and came up to the counter.

“Do you want to place an ad? You can write it out on one of these forms, if I can find them under here somewhere.…”

He bent to look under the counter, and Tom said, “I was hoping I could look through some old copies of your paper.”

“How old? Last week’s are on the rack beside the davenport there, but anything older gets put into binders and shelved in the morgue upstairs. You just want to see the paper, or are you looking for something in particular?” He looked back at his desk and the stack of galleys. “The morgue isn’t really one of our tourist attractions.”