Mystery

He clumped down the steps to his patrol car.

A male voice came out of the dark. “Officer?” Sarah’s father stepped into the ring of light on Tom’s front steps, looking like someone used to being obeyed by policemen. He was wearing pajamas and a grey bathrobe. “Is this young man in any trouble?”

Spychalla said, “Go back to your lodge, sir. All the excitement is over.”

Mr. Spence glared exasperatedly at Tom, then back at Spychalla, whose face made it clear that he had seen a lot of exasperation. He got in his car and slammed the door.

Mr. Spence put his hands on his hips and watched the headlights moving down the track. Then he turned around and tried to kill Tom with a look. “You are not to bother my daughter anymore. From now on there will be no communication between you and Sarah. Is that understood?” His big belly moved up and down under his shirt as he yelled.

Tom went inside and closed the door. He walked across the sitting room and went into the study. He realized that he was framed in the window, and his stomach froze and his blood stopped moving. Then he began sweeping broken glass off the desk into the wastebasket. After that he searched around the kitchen for a whisk broom and a dustpan, found them in a closet, and took them into the study to sweep the rest of the glass up from the floor.

He was returning the broom and the dustpan when he heard the telephone ringing, and he set them down on the table and returned to the study. He moved out of the line of the window and pulled back the chair. Then he sat down and answered the phone.

“This is Tom,” he said.

“Are they still there?” his grandfather asked in a voice just below a bellow.

“He. There was one cop. He’s gone.”

“I told you to call me when they left!”

“Well, I had to do a few things,” Tom said. “He just left a minute ago. He said what you said. It was a stray bullet.”

“Of course it was. I told you that. Anyhow, thinking about it, I decided you were right to call the police. No question about it. Are you feeling better now?”

“Kind of.”

“Go to bed early. Get some rest. In the morning, you’ll see this in perspective. I won’t tell your mother about this, and I forbid you to write anything to her that might upset her.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Does that mean that you don’t want me to come back right away?”

“Come back? Of course you shouldn’t come back! You have some fence-mending to do, young man. I want you to stay up there until I tell you it’s time to come back.” Glendenning Upshaw went on to deliver a lengthy speech about respect and responsibility.

When he finished, Tom decided to see where one question would lead. “Grand-Dad, who was Anton Goetz? I’ve been hearing—”

“He was nothing. He did a bad thing once, and he was found out, and he killed himself. Committed a murder, if you want the specifics.”

“On the plane up here, Mr. Spence wanted to tell me that you had done him some big favors—”

Upshaw grunted.

“—and he happened to mention this Anton Goetz, who he said was an accountant—”

“You want to know about him? I’ll tell you about him, and then the subject is closed. You understand me?” Tom did not speak. “Anton Goetz was a little man with a bad leg who got in way over his head because he couldn’t control his fantasies. He told everybody a lot of lies, me included, because he wanted social success. I tried to help him out because like a lot of con men, Anton Goetz had a lot of charm. I gave him a job, and I even helped him look more important than he was. It was the last time in my life I ever made a mistake like that. He got up to something with Arthur Thielman’s first wife, and imagined it was much more than it was, and when she put him in his place he killed her. Then he killed himself, like the coward he really was. I held his properties for a long time because I wanted the stench of his memory to go away, and then I sold them to Bill Spence.”

“So he really was an accountant,” Tom said.

“Not a very good one. Come to think of it, Bill Spence wasn’t brilliant either, which was why I let Ralph hire him away from me. And now Bill Spence is aiming for the same social success Anton Goetz wanted, but he’s using his daughter to get it, not his prick. I hope my language doesn’t shock you.”

Tom said that he was grateful for his frankness.

“These men want what you had handed to you on a plate,” said his grandfather. “Now get some sleep and tomorrow try to act like you know how to behave. Let’s get everything sorted out by the end of summer.”

Tom asked about his mother, and his grandfather said that she was doing better—almost off medication. He promised to give her Tom’s love, and Tom promised to write to her.

The light in Neil Langenheim’s bedroom went out, and a thin yellow trace disappeared from the lake. The big lodges across the lake had retreated into the overhanging trees, and uncanny light from the black and silver sky touched the ends of the docks, the tops of railings, and sifting leaves.