Mystery

Any event is altered by the perspective from which it is seen, and for days Tom replayed the events and circumstances of Jeanine Thielman’s murder. He wrote about it in the third person and in the first, imagining that he were Arthur Thielman, Jeanine Thielman, Anton Goetz, his grandfather, even trying to see those events through the eyes on the anguished child who had been his mother. He played with dates and times; he decided to throw out everything he had been told about these people’s motives and experiment with new ones. He saw gaps and holes in what he had been told, and prowled through them, following his instincts and his imagination as he had followed Hattie Bascombe through the courts and passages of Maxwell’s Heaven. Here was his grandfather, just beginning to solidify his relationship with the Redwings and insure both his financial and social future; here was Anton Goetz, a “con man” who charmed women and men with stories about a romantic past and shielded Glendenning Upshaw’s connection to the St. Alwyn hotel and the secret, unseen parts of Mill Walk; here was Lamont von Heilitz, seeing the world begin to come to life around him again.

He dreamed of bodies rising like smoke from the lake, raising their arms above their dripping heads and hovering in place with open eyes and mouths—he dreamed he walked through a forest to a clearing where a great hairy monster, of a size that made his own height a little child’s, bit the head off a woman’s white body and turned to him with a mouth full of bone and gore and said, “I am your father, Thomas. See what I am?”

One night he awoke knowing that his mother had picked up the gun on the deckside table and shot Jeanine Thielman—that was why her father had hidden her in Barbara Deane’s house, that was why she screamed at night, that was why her father had sold her into marriage to a man paid to be her nursemaid. Another sleepless night: but in the morning, he could not believe this version, either.

Or could he?

If his mother had killed Jeanine Thielman, Glendenning Upshaw would not have hesitated to kill to protect her. I am your father. See what I am?

For most of another week, he was alone without being lonely: he imagined himself into the men and women who had come to Eagle Lake in 1925, and felt their shades and shadows around him, each with his own, her own, plots and desires and fantasies. He began sitting at the desk again during the day and at night, forgetting Tim Truehart’s advice, and no bullets exploded through the glass; it had been a hunter’s bullet after all, and he was not a potential victim. He was—it came to him at last—Lamont von Heilitz.

One night at dinner, he went up to the Spence table and ignored the glares to ask Mr. Spence how Jerry Hasek and the other two bodyguards were listed in the books. “Leave us alone,” Mrs. Spence ordered, and Sarah gave him an urgent, irritated look he could not fathom.

“I don’t know what business it is of yours, but I can’t see any harm in telling you. They’re listed as public relations assistants.”

Tom thanked him, heard Mrs. Spence say, “Why did you tell him anything?” and went back to his book and his dinner.

On the Friday of the second week after Roddy and Buzz left the lake, Barbara Deane came in after her morning ride and found him lying on a sofa in the sitting room, holding a pen in his mouth like a cigar and squinting up at a sheet of paper covered with his own writing. “I hope you won’t mind,” she said, “but you’ll have to eat lunch at the club today. I forgot to buy sandwich things, and we’re all out.”

“That’s okay,” he said.

She went upstairs. He heard her door close. The lock on the inside of the door slid into its catch. After a minute or two, water began drumming in her shower. Still later, her closet door creaked and something scraped along a shelf. Fifteen minutes later, she came downstairs changed into her black skirt and a dark red blouse he had not seen before. “Since I have to shop,” she said, “I could pick up some extra things for dinner.”

“That’d be nice,” he said.

“What I mean is, you could come to my house for dinner tonight, Tom.”

“Oh!” He swung his legs over the side of the sofa and sat up, sending dozens of yellow legal-sized papers sliding to the floor. “Thanks! I’d like that.”

“You’ll come?” He nodded, and she said, “I’m going to be busy today, so if you wouldn’t mind walking to town, I’ll drive you back after dinner.”

“Great.”

She smiled at him. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you look like you could use a break. I’m on Oak Street, the first right off Main Street as you come in, and it’s the fourth house down on the right—number fifteen. Come around six.”