Mystery

“Your standards have slipped lately,” Tom said, but before he could say any more, Sarah uttered a low growl and crossed the ground between them and wrapped her arms around him.

“You idiot,” she said. “You moron. You think I’d write anything to you?”

“I should have known better,” he said, hugging her for all he was worth. He lowered his head to her vibrant hair.

“Look,” Fritz said, “is my part done now?”

Sarah raised her face to Tom’s, asking to be kissed. Tom met her lips with his, and the shock of their softness echoed through his whole body.

“I’ll see you guys later,” Fritz said, and stood up.

“No,” Tom and Sarah said, almost simultaneously, and broke apart. “We’re supposed to be having a nice long walk together,” Sarah said. She twined her fingers through Tom’s.

“We could all go someplace,” Tom said.

“An excursion,” Sarah said. “That’s it. You’ve probably never gone on an excursion with Tom Pasmore. All sorts of brilliant things happen. Is there any way we could go out for a drive?”

“Sure,” Fritz said. “I could get the keys to one of the cars.”

“Better yet, you and I will get the keys, so everybody will see we’re still enjoying ourselves, and Tom will walk around the lake and go up the hill to the mailboxes, and we’ll meet him there.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be alone and stuff?”

“Oh, Tom has something else on his mind,” Sarah said.

Tom’s insides froze.

“You worked out a way to get me here, but …” Her forehead wrinkled. “You look terrible. You look like someone else took a shot at you about half an hour ago. What have you been doing for two weeks?”

“I don’t know if I can talk about it now,” he said. “I found something out, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Well, meet us up by the mailboxes in half an hour. That’ll give you time to think about it.”

She took Fritz by the hand and led him toward the door. “Someone else shot at you?” Fritz asked, trudging behind her. Tom shrugged. “He has a very exciting life,” Sarah said, and pulled Fritz toward the door. They went outside, and Sarah leaned back toward the screen, shielding her eyes to see in. “Should I be worried about you?”

“I’ll see you in half an hour,” Tom said.

“If you don’t, I’m calling Nancy Vetiver and asking for a consultation.”

He waved, and she blew him a kiss before hurrying Fritz off the porch and down on the track. Tom heard them talking, Fritz asking baffled questions and Sarah returning elliptical responses like tennis smashes, as they moved away toward the compound. When they were out of earshot, he went upstairs to his bedroom and got his notes down from the closet shelf.

Tom sat at the chessboard table and read everything all over again. Now he saw Barbara Deane hiding behind the trees near the Thielman lodge, Barbara Deane throwing pebbles at a window and snatching up the gun careless Arthur Thielman had left lying on a table.… He had eaten at her table! Ridden in her car! Said she could sleep in the lodge!

When he had ten minutes to get up the hill to the mailboxes, Tom folded the wad of notes in half, and tried to jam them into a back pocket of his jeans. They would not fit. Some contradiction still clamored to be seen, and he pushed the notes back up on the closet shelf with the feeling that it would leap out at him if he scanned the papers one more time.

Tom walked the long way around the lake, chewing on his preoccupations, and reached the top of the hill panting but with no memory of having walked up the long winding track.

He sat on the bench and waited for Sarah and Fritz, who drove up in the Lincoln a few minutes later. Fritz was driving, and Sarah sat beside him in the front seat. “Come on in here,” she said. “This is our reunion, and you’re not allowed to look so gloomy.”

He climbed in beside Sarah, who put an arm around him. “Now we are not going to do anything to embarrass or offend Fritz, but you need to be cheered up. So we are going to drive around and forget about this horrendous mess we’re in. We will not once mention that I am supposed to marry Buddy Redwing.”

“Okay,” Tom said.

“Though someone ought to acknowledge that it was pretty good of me to come up with the idea of being engaged to be engaged.”

“Why did you even do that?” Tom asked.

“Yeah, why?” said Fritz.

“Because it calmed everybody down right away. And Buddy stopped scheming about how he was going to manage to beat you to a pulp. Once you have the security of being engaged to be engaged, you forget all about your rivals and go back to your old pursuits. All I have to do is sit through lots of dinners, and listen to Buddy talk about how cool and far out everything is going to be when I transfer to Arizona. Our engagement is going to become official next summer, except that it isn’t. When I come home at Christmas, I’ll tell my mother I can’t go through with it. Everybody will blame it on the influence of Mount Holyoke, and it’ll be a lot easier to handle than it would be up here.”

Nobody said anything, and Sarah said, “I think.”