Mystery

“Magda Upshaw was my grandmother.” He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple felt as big as a baseball.

“Huh!” The editor straightened up. His hands flew to his bow tie and tugged at its ends. “Well, I guess I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—” He moved a step back from the table.

“Why did your father think she was murdered?”

“You can read about it, if you like. He had to be careful about the way he said things, but if you read between the lines you’ll catch his drift.” Hamilton dodged into the stacks again and came back with another old volume. “The Chief of Police in those days wasn’t much—it was Prohibition, remember, and a lot of booze went through Eagle Lake. Some people made a lot of money out of it.” He slid the bound volume on top of the others. “It could be the Chief didn’t pay much attention to ordinary law enforcement, especially when it came to rich summer people who did a lot to keep the bootleggers in business.”

“We have police like that in Mill Walk,” Tom said.

“So I hear. You might notice that people here take a certain attitude toward folks from your island. Truth is, they don’t even spend any money in Eagle Lake.”

He slapped his hand on the stack of bound newspapers. “You’ll probably be coming back tomorrow, so you can just leave these on the desk. But remember about the lights and the door, will you?”

Tom nodded.

Chet Hamilton removed his glasses and slid them back into his shirt pocket. He gave Tom a sober, questioning look: he was a decent man, and he was embarrassed and interested in about equal measure. “Even if I hadn’t opened my big fat mouth, don’t you think you would have realized that by going back a year from the Thielman case you could find out what we printed about your grandmother’s death? It must have had a tremendous impact on your family.”

“I think I had a lot of reasons for coming to Eagle Lake,” Tom said.

“Well, maybe some of them are in this room.” Hamilton thrust his hands into his pockets and shifted from side to side. “I’m kind of sorry I brought the whole thing up!” He backed toward the stairs. “I led you a long way from those break-ins you were interested in.”

“Maybe not so far after all,” Tom said.

“Seeing you up here reminds me of a kind of detective my father had to dinner a couple times, way back when. He was from Mill Walk too. People used to call him the Shadow—ever hear of him?”

“Did the Shadow read the files about my grandmother?” Tom asked.

“No—he was still interested in the Thielman case. I guess it meant a lot to him. It made him a hero around here, I can tell you that.” Hamilton gave a half-hearted little wave, and went down the stairs. Tom heard the door close.

The linotype machine rattled beneath him. Traffic sounds came dimly through the windows at the front of the room. Tom opened the topmost volume, propped it on his lap, and began turning the pages.

S.L.H., Samuel Larabee Hamilton, the founder of the Eagle Lake Gazette, had seen his newspaper as an expression of his aggressively opinionated personality, and during the three hours he spent in the upstairs morgue, Tom learned as much about him as he did about Eagle Lake. Samuel Larabee Hamilton had considered Prohibition and income tax prime examples of governmental meddling. He had detested anti-vivisectionists, advocates of racial equality, female liberationists, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, social security, gun control, the University of Wisconsin, free trade laws, and Robert LaFollette. He loathed criminals and corrupt law-enforcement officials, and had not hesitated to give names.

Twice in the 1920s, some person or persons had fired bullets through the windows of the Gazette office, hoping to kill, wound, or scare off its editor. He had responded with 18-point headlines trumpeting THE COWARDS MISSED! and THEY MISSED AGAIN!

From the first, S.L.H. had opposed the Redwing interest in Eagle Lake as a “foreign invasion.” Mill Walk was a “Caribbean police state” that depended on “every indecent practice known to those who rule by fear.” One editorial was entitled THUGS IN OUR BACKYARD.

When a thirty-six-year-old woman was found dead in Eagle Lake with the pockets of her nightdress filled with rocks and was declared a victim of accidental death and cremated within two days, Hamilton had cried foul at the top of his lungs.

The first picture of his grandmother that Tom had ever seen showed a child’s uncertain square face, hesitant eyes, and what looked like straw-gold hair tied back in a bun. Magda Upshaw was leaning against a railing at the Eagle Lake clubhouse, holding a fat little girl with sausage curls as if she were trying to shield her from something nobody else could see.

The Gazette told him that his grandmother was the daughter of Hungarian refugees who owned a small restaurant in Miami Beach. She had left school in the tenth grade, and had worked in her parents’ restaurant until her marriage to a man eight years her junior.