Mystery

He walked around to her, nodding. Through the window wall on the far end of the room, Tom waved to Roddy Deepdale, who was lying back in a recliner. He wore the same nearly nonexistent kind of bathing suit as Buzz, and his chest and shoulders were turning a smooth, uniform gold. A brown plastic bottle of suntan lotion and a pile of books stood on the deck beside the recliner. Roddy propped himself up on one elbow and waved back. The kettle whistled in the kitchen.

“You’ve succeeded in stirring up my nephew and his wife, at any rate,” Kate said. “There was some kind of unpleasantness between you and Buddy this morning, wasn’t there? Of course everybody’s terribly tactful, but I don’t suppose you’ll be able to keep me entertained at any more family dinners.”

Tom said she probably wouldn’t be able to entertain him, either.

“Maybe not at dinners, anyhow,” she said, and he knew that this wonderful old woman was offering him her friendship. He said he supposed there were other times of the day.

“Well, exactly. Ralph doesn’t think much of Roddy and Buzz either, but we never saw any reason for that to interfere with our enjoyment of each other. The world doesn’t run according to the rules of a few Redwings.” She patted his hand. “I gather that all this has to do with that beautiful young Spence girl. Of course I think it would be a shame for her to get engaged to my grand-nephew. On top of everything else, she’s far too young. Ralph and Katinka will get over the shock sooner than you think, and before you know it Buddy will discover some other girl who will turn out to be much more appropriate. You should just be discreet and get as much out of this summer as you can.”

“So that’s what this talk is all about,” Buzz said, returning with a steaming cup of tea. “Now I know I’d better get out of the way!” He set the tea down on the glass coffee table before them, and padded out through a side door. A minute later, he appeared on the deck, moving past the window toward a lounge chair.

“Does Buzz have a job?” Tom asked.

“He’s a doctor.” Kate Redwing smiled at him. “An excellent pediatrician, I hear. He had some trouble at the start of his career, when he worked with an important doctor, and he’s had some rough patches, but he’s doing very well now.” She frowned into her cup, and then looked at him with bright lively eyes. “But that’s not what you wanted to talk to me about. Weren’t you interested in what happened during my first summer up here? When that poor woman was killed?”

“Didn’t you and your fiancé find her body?” Tom asked.

“I suspect you know very well we did.” She smiled at him again. “I wonder why you want to know about all this.”

“Well,” Tom said, “my mother got much worse during that summer, and I’m sure the murder had a lot to do with the trouble she had.”

“Ah,” said the old woman.

“And I’ve been talking about Mrs. Thielman’s murder with Lamont von Heilitz ever since I met him.”

“So he got you interested in it.”

“I guess you could say that. I think there’s a lot that’s still unknown, or that was never explained, and the more I can find out …” He let the sentence go unfinished. “Maybe I’m not saying this right, but I’m interested in Mill Walk, and that murder involved a whole lot of important people who ran things on the island.”

“I’m certainly glad not to be having this conversation at the compound. But I’ll confess that it’s fascinating. Do you really think that Lamont might have missed something?”

“Probably nothing important.” He looked at the fireplace and saw the bare, slightly paler rectangle spot on the creamy wall above it where the portrait had hung.

“Well, I can tell you one thing. Everything about a murder is probably surprising, because all of a sudden you learn about other people’s secrets, but it really was a surprise to me that Jeanine Thielman had been seeing Anton Goetz. And if it hadn’t been for those curtains—the curtains that were wrapped around her when Jonathan found her underwater—I don’t know if I would have believed that he had anything to do with it. That and the fact that he killed himself, of course. But the curtains were really damning, I thought.”

“He never expected them to be found,” Tom said.

“The lake is surprisingly deep up at that end, and there’s a big drop-off where the reeds end. It was just his bad luck that my line snagged, and Jonathan dove underwater and saw something that looked funny to him.”

“You didn’t think Goetz was her type?”