Mystery

Moths fluttered around the angled spotlights. The moon coasted through the sky. The light in Barbara Deane’s bedroom switched off, and another degree of softness and wholeness appeared in the darkness beyond the circle of light on the deck. Hercule Poirot strolled onstage and began exercising his little grey cells. Tom sighed—he missed Lamont von Heilitz. On the other hand, maybe Monsieur Poirot would appear to explain what really had happened here at Eagle Lake forty years ago.

Tom wondered why the Shadow had not told him that Anton Goetz was an accountant for Mill Walk Construction; and how an accountant had been able to build the enormous house on The Sevens in the early twenties; and who had shot at Lamont von Heilitz; and why Anton Goetz had taken his meals home from the club, just at the time he should have tried most to act normal.

These were exactly the sort of questions to which Hercule Poirot and every other detective like him always had the answer. They were abstraction-machines, and you never had any idea at all of what it felt like to be like them, but by the last chapter they could certainly tell you who had left the footprint beneath the Colonel’s window, and who had found the pistol on the bloody pillow and tossed it into the gorse bush. They were walking crossword puzzles, but at least they could do that.

Tom closed his book and looked across the lake. Featureless as ink blots, the empty lodges sat beneath the enormous trees. An off-duty waiter chorded on a guitar beside an open window on the third floor of the club building. Another person, probably another club waiter going home, carried a flashlight between the lodges across the lake.

But a club waiter only had to go upstairs to go home. The flashlight bobbed along, intermittently visible as it moved between the lodges and the trees. The only other light across the lake shone in an upstairs room in the Langenheim lodge, and the moving light disappeared behind a dark, barely visible corner of this structure. Neil Langenheim went out for a walk to sober up before he went to bed, Tom thought, and read another page of Agatha Christie while most of his mind listened for Sarah Spence’s footsteps coming around the side of the lodge.

The next time he looked up, the flashlight was bobbing along between the Harbinger and Jacobs lodges. Tom watched it flicker until it disappeared. After a time the light emerged from behind the Jacobs lodge and began bobbing in and out of sight in the long stretch of wooded land between the Jacobs lodge and Lamont von Heilitz’s. Tom set down his book and walked out on his dock. A big grey moth flew silently past his head and bumped against a window. From the end of his dock, Tom could see only the shadowy blackness of oaks and maples on von Heilitz’s property and the front end of his stubby dock in the black water, tipped with yellow light from the clubhouse. The flashlight did not appear on the marshy end of the lake, working its way around to the club. When the light did not appear for another several minutes, Tom remembered that at least one empty Eagle Lake lodge had been broken into. He tilted the face of his watch toward the lighted window. It was ten-thirty, and nearly everyone around the lake would be asleep. Tom trotted back along the dock.

He stopped at the door to scribble Wait for me—back soon on the note for Sarah, and then moved down the steps into the dark track around the lake.

Tom ran past the Spences’ lodge, where only the porch light burned, and then back into the darkness beneath the great trees until he came to the club. Tall lights burned in the parking lot, and in second and third-floor windows. The moon sailed through dark clouds and gave them silvery borders. Up at the narrow, treeless end of the lake, frogs croaked in the reeds. The guitarist in the club played the same chords over and over. No light shone among the trees around the Shadow’s lodge. Tom ran around the top end of the lake, and his shoes slapped noisily on the beaten earth. Moonlight gave him the curve of the path back into the trees. The guitar grew fainter. Tom trotted past the narrow road coming down through the forest from the highway, and went back beneath the trees. Von Heilitz’s lodge was only forty or fifty feet ahead, hidden by the darkness and the massive fir trees that grew down to the lake. Tom wondered what he would do if he saw someone carrying stereo equipment out of the lodge.