Mystery

“A whole lot of stolen property,” Tom said.

“What!” Fritz screamed.

“That’s my boy,” Sarah said.

“What stolen property?” Fritz demanded to know.

Tom told him about the burglaries that had been taking place around Eagle Lake and other resort towns over the past few years. “If you walk away from people’s houses with that much stuff, you need a place to store it until you get it to whoever you know who buys it from you. I think they must have to go a long way to get rid of it, and they can’t get away all that often, so they need a big place.”

They drove past the town hall and the police station, past the signs at the edge of town, and Sarah said, “Here’s the first right.”

Fritz hauled on the wheel, and turned into a two-lane blacktop road. At first they drove past tarpaper shacks on lawns littered with bald tires and junked cars. FREE PUPPIES, read rain-streaked lettering on a crude sign. The shacks grew more widely spaced, and the land stayed empty. Narrow trees stood at the edge of a muddy field. Far off, a stooped figure moved toward a farmhouse.

“Fritz, your uncle would never buy or rent anything up here—in fact, he enjoys turning down deals, even when they might be good for him, because of the way the local newspaper treated his family.”

“Well, here’s the first left,” Sarah said.

“I see it,” Fritz grumbled, and turned into another two-lane blacktop road. Another sequence of muddy fields, these enclosed by collapsing wooden fences, rolled past them. They passed a large white sign reading 2 MILES TO AUTHENTIC INDIAN SETTLEMENT.

“So what?” Fritz asked.

“Two years ago, the Redwing Holding Company rented a machine shop on Summers Street. I saw it in a column in the Eagle Lake Gazette on my first day here.”

“A machine shop?” Fritz said.

“It was an empty building—they probably rented it for a hundred dollars a month, or something like that.”

“Oh,” Sarah said.

Fritz groaned. He put his forehead against the top of the steering wheel. “What am I—what are you trying—”

“It’s Jerry,” Sarah said, once again arriving instantly at an insight.

“Jerry and his Mends probably didn’t know that the paper listed things like that, but they wouldn’t have cared even if they did. They knew no Redwing would ever see it. And on the other side, the name protected them. The police would never suspect the Redwing company of being involved in a bunch of crummy burglaries.”

A lonely set of train tracks crossed the road, coming from nowhere, going nowhere. The Lincoln bumped over them.

Five hundred yards farther on in an empty field, shabby tepees circled a low windowless building of split logs with a sod roof. The hides of the tepees had split and fallen in, and tall yellow weeds grew in all the open places. No one said anything as they drove past.

After another hundred yards, a road intersected theirs. A green metal street sign, almost surreal in the emptiness, said SUMMERS STREET. The road past the abandoned tourist stop was not identified in any way.

“So where is it?” Fritz asked.

Sarah pointed—far down to the right, almost invisible against a thick wall of trees, a building of concrete blocks painted brown stood at the far end of an empty parking lot.

Fritz turned into Summers Street, and drove reluctantly toward the building. “But why would they do burglaries?”

“They’re bored,” Tom said. “They like the feeling of having a little edge.”

The big car drove into the parking lot. Close up, the machine shop looked like the police station that clung to the side of Eagle Lake’s town hall—it needed another building to complete it. Fritz said, “I’m not getting out of the car. In fact, I think we ought to leave right now and go swimming in the lake.” He looked at Tom. “I don’t like this at all. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“They shouldn’t be doing it,” Tom said.

“Hurry up,” Sarah said.

Tom patted her knee, got out of the car, and walked to the front of the machine shop. Above the door was a stenciled sign that said PRYZGODA BROS. TOOL & DIE CO. He leaned forward and peered into a window beside the door. A green chair with padded arms was pushed against one of the walls of an otherwise empty office. A few pieces of paper lay on the floor.

Tom turned around and shrugged. Fritz waved him back to the car, but Tom walked around to the side of the building, where a row of reinforced windows sat high in the wall. Some of the brown paint had separated cleanly from the concrete, and leaned out away from the wall, as stiff as a dried sail. The windows came down to the level of his chin. Tom looked in the first of them and saw only geometrical shadows. Most of the interior was filled with boxes and unidentifiable things stacked on top of the boxes.