Mystery

He said no, it was not necessary, thinking that she would see it as another duty owed to his grandfather.

“Well, I’ve been thinking of coming back there anyhow in a couple of days. You tell me if you begin to feel uneasy, staying there by yourself.”

“I will,” he said.

Their earlier unease had left them, and they talked in the rambling, anecdotal way of people learning to know and like each other. She wanted to know about Brooks-Lowood, and the books and movies he enjoyed, and he asked her about horses and Eagle Lake, and eventually Tom felt that they had known each other a long time. “You don’t have to answer this, of course, but you said you weren’t my grandfather’s type, and ever since you said that, I’ve been trying to figure out what that type was.”

“I suppose that’s an allowable subject,” she said. “After all, we’re talking about something back in the dark ages. I guess it’s safe to say that he liked very girlish, submissive women. Magda, poor soul, was like that. I only knew one other woman Glen saw, a very poor choice, I thought, a girl who worked as a nurse’s aide—that was how they met, back when Glen spent a lot of time getting the hospital to run the way he wanted it to. She was a pretty little thing, but underneath she was very hard. She came from a rough background, but she could make you believe that she was the soul of innocence.”

Remembering his mother’s judgment of Nancy Vetiver, he said, “Are you sure about her—that she was hard, I mean?”

“I’m sure she was calculating, if that’s what you’re asking. She and Glen got what they wanted or needed from each other, and I guess they finally became something like friends. In the end, I suppose he learned that he had to respect her. Carmen Bishop, that was her name—she was about seventeen or eighteen when she started at the hospital.”

The name meant nothing to Tom.

“I think I heard that she got him to help her brother—she probably cared for Glen, but she was certainly using him, too.”

“Seventeen or eighteen,” he said.

“She might have been older—anyhow, I gather she was a match for him. The funny thing was, I don’t think Glen ever did more than take her out to dinner a few times, so that he could be seen with her. That’s all he ever did with me, which is how some people got the idea we were—you know. I think it was important to Glen to be seen with attractive young women, but I don’t think it ever went any further than that, even with Carmen.”

She gave him a slice of apple pie she had baked herself, and then wrapped the rest of the pie for him to take back with him.

It was just past ten when she dropped him off at the lodge, and she told him to call her if he wanted her to begin staying at the lodge. “I know I’ll see Tim Truehart on the street one day,” she said, “and he’ll order me to start taking better care of you!”

“Oh, you do pretty well,” he said, and she drove away.

The next day, Tom wrote another long letter to Lamont von Heilitz and carried it up the hill to wait for Joe Truehart. When the mailman appeared, he came out of the trees and gave the letter to him.

Truehart said, “I hear you think my mom’s gone into the burglary business.”

“I hear she’s pretty good at it,” Tom said, and Truehart laughed and turned his van around and drove off.

Tom realized that he had never opened his grandfather’s mailbox—if Joe Truehart had anything for him, he would have given it to him when Tom gave him the thick envelopes for von Heilitz. He did not even know which aluminum box belonged to his grandfather, and had to go down the length of them, reading the names. Finally he came to Upshaw. He tugged at the catch and opened the box. It was jammed with folded pieces of white paper. There were dozens of messages inside the box. He scooped them out and unfolded the top sheet.

In large flowing black letters that virtually yelled with frustration, it read DON’T YOU EVER LOOK IN YOUR MAILBOX? The word Friday had been scrawled above this sentence, and the name Sarah had been written beneath, in such haste or irritation that it was only a straight line between the large S and the almost embryonic h.

Tom read through the stack of notes on the way back to his lodge. Then he read them all over again. He felt almost dizzy with joy.