Mystery

“I keep my horse in that barn,” she said. “I ought to take him out and ride him every morning, but ever since the robbery, I get anxious whenever I’m away from home for too long. I guess I’ll get up early tomorrow morning and take him out for a run.” She pulled out on the track and moved slowly past the lodges.

Tom asked if she knew Jerry Hasek.

“I never actually met him until today.” She drove past the club and onto the open stretch of land at the north end of the lake. “But he looks like his father.”

“You knew Wendell Hasek?”

“I knew who he was.” She turned up the hill. “He worked for Judge Backer, until the Judge fired him. I thought Wendell Hasek was a pretty unsavory character, but then I think his son seems unsavory too, and he works for the Redwings. So apparently I’m no judge.”

“I think you’re right on both counts,” Tom said. “But why did Judge Backer hire this unsavory character? Was he unsavory too?”

She laughed. “Hardly. Wendell was really only a boy when he went to work for the Judge. In those days, there were some honest judges on Mill Walk. Some honest policemen too.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t talk this way. I’m almost completely out of touch about what goes on on Mill Walk. And I suppose I’m a little bitter.”

They did not speak again until she had turned off onto the highway. Then Tom said, “You must remember the summer of Jeanine Thielman’s death very clearly.”

“I certainly do!” She turned her head to look at him. “That was the summer after your grandmother died. You probably don’t know anything about that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“I know Glen Upshaw. He wouldn’t even hear his wife’s name after her death. Cut everything about her right out of his life. I guess he thought it would be better for Gloria that way.”

“Do you think Magda was a good wife for him?”

She gave him a startled glance. “I don’t think I can answer that. I’m not sure any woman could have been what people think of as a good wife to your grandfather.”

“I learned some things about my grandmother not long ago. She seemed like a surprising woman for him to have married.”

Her mouth twitched.

“Do you want to know what I really think?” She looked sideways at him, and he saw that this had been an important matter for her. “I don’t know what you know about Magda, but she was like a child. She had no more independence than a kitten. When Glen met her, Magda was working as a waitress in her parents’ restaurant—a pretty little blond thing who looked about nineteen even though she was in her thirties, and she was as quiet as a mouse. I think that’s what Glen liked, having absolute control over her life. He told her what to wear, he told her what to say—he ran her life. He was like a god, as far as she was concerned.”

“Did she have any friends?”

“Glen didn’t encourage her to have a separate social life. After Gloria was born, she stopped going out. Glen fired their servants—in the days when all their friends had maids and laundresses and cooks and gardeners and God knows what else—and Magda did everything, and took care of the baby too. Like a shy little girl who wanted to please her father.”

“So he had two children,” Tom said.

“He had what he wanted. Most of what he wanted.” She drove slowly down the empty highway.

“Why would Magda have killed herself? It seems to me that she must have had everything she wanted too. She was finally alone with her husband and her baby.”

“Glen left her alone a good deal of the time. He’d take Gloria out with him when he went places, and leave Magda at home. And after Gloria’s birth, Magda began to look her age. And that didn’t do for Glen. Not at all. I suppose he just lost interest in her.”

“So you don’t think there was anything to the rumors about her death.”

“You couldn’t have heard about all this from Glen,” she said.

“I read some old newspapers.”

“Old Eagle Lake papers?” Tom said nothing, and after a moment, “Well, that editor was crazy. He was so against Mill Walk people that when one of them drowned, he saw stab wounds where there were none. Glen probably did pay off the coroner and arrange for Magda’s cremation, but he wanted to hush up her suicide, not conceal a murder.”

Tom nodded.

“Even people who disliked Glen didn’t think he murdered Magda. That ridiculous editor should have been put out of business.”

“You’re very loyal to him,” Tom said.

“I used to be loyal to him, I guess. I cleaned up after his messes, and I took in your mother when he asked me to. He stuck up for me once, when I was in trouble. Now I just work for him. I watch out for his property and I take his money for doing it. I don’t talk about things he doesn’t want me to talk about, so if that’s what you—” She stopped talking and stared straight ahead. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, and she looked old and angry and confused.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She swerved to the side of the road, put the car into the parking gear, and flattened her hands on her thighs. Her hands looked as though they belonged to someone else, rough and knotted with veins.