Mystery

Tom put his hands to the sides of his head and bent closer to the window. One of the objects stacked on top of the first row of boxes was faced with brown cloth framed by an inch of dark wood. On top of it, half lost in the darkness at the top of the room, sat another object like like it. Then he recognized them: stereo speakers. Tom turned his head and grinned at Fritz and Sarah, and Fritz swept his hand back toward himself again: Come on!

Tom moved down to the next window in line, blocked his face with his hands, and leaned forward. Propped against the row of boxes, the faces of Roddy Deepdale and Buzz Laing looked up at him from the chairs in which they had been painted by a man named Don Bachardy. Tom lowered his hands and stepped back from the window, and in that moment, an overweight figure in a grey suit too small to contain a watermelon belly walked around the back of the tall boxes, shaking something in an open cardboard box and peering down into it like a man panning for gold. Tom jumped back from the window, and a row of white rectangles reflected in Nappy’s sunglasses as he looked up.

Tom bent beneath the windows and ran toward the car. He threw himself into the open door, and Fritz scattered dirt and stones with the back tires, yelling “They saw you! Dammit!” The car jolted forward. Tom reached for the open door and pulled it shut as they shot out on Summers Street. “Duck,” Tom said to Sarah, and she bent forward beneath the dashboard. Tom slid down on the seat and looked out of the back window. Fritz stamped on the accelerator, and the Lincoln’s tires squealed on the blacktop. Nappy LaBarre threw open the front door of the building and ran heavily into the parking lot on his short legs. He waved his short thick arms and yelled something. In a second the wall of trees cut him off.

“He saw us,” Fritz wailed. “He saw the car! You think he doesn’t know who we are? He knows who we are.”

“He’s alone,” Tom said, helping Sarah sit up straight again. “There wasn’t any phone in there, I don’t think.”

“You mean he can’t call Jerry,” Sarah said.

“I think he was putting some of the stuff in boxes for their next trip,” Tom said. “Unless he walks back, he has to wait until Jerry comes by to pick him up.”

Fritz turned left on another unmarked road, trying to find his way back to the village and the highway.

“The further adventures of Tom Pasmore,” Sarah said.

“I want to say something,” Fritz said. “I had nothing to do with this. All I wanted to do was go back to the lake, okay? I never looked in the windows, and I never saw any stolen stuff—I don’t even think I saw Nappy.”

“Oh, come on,” Tom said.

“All I saw was a fat guy.”

“Have it your way,” Tom said.

“My Uncle Ralph is not just an ordinary guy,” said Fritz. “Remember I said that, okay? He is not an ordinary guy.”

Fritz drove along the bumpy road, gritting his teeth. He turned right on a three-lane road marked 41 and drove through a section of forest. Thick trees, neither oaks nor maples, but some gnarly black variety Tom did not know, stood at the border of the road, so close together their trunks nearly touched. Fritz ground his teeth, making a sound like a file grating across iron. They burst out into emptiness again.

“I didn’t see Nappy,” he said.

There was another long term of silence. Fritz came to a crossroads, looked both ways, and turned left again. On both sides muddy-looking fields stretched off to rotting wooden fences like match sticks against the dense forest.

The road went up over a rise and came down on a glossy black four-lane highway across from a sign that said LAKE DEEP-DALE—DEEPDALE ESTATES. Fritz ground his teeth again, cramped the wheel, and turned in the direction of Eagle Lake.

“I don’t know what you’re so upset about,” Tom said.

“You’re right, you don’t. You don’t have the slightest idea.” He turned into the narrow track between the trees that led to the lake, and when they reached the bench, he stopped the car. “This is where we picked you up, and this is where we’re dropping you off.”

“Are you going to call the police?” Sarah asked Tom.

“Get out of the car if you want to talk like that,” Fritz said.

“Don’t be a baby,” Sarah snapped at him.

“You don’t know either, Sarah.”

Tom opened the door and got out. He did not close the door. “Of course I’m going to call them,” he said to Sarah. “These people have been robbing houses for years.” Fritz gunned the engine, and Tom leaned into the car. He looked at Fritz’s furious profile. “Fritz, if you knew you had to see someone again, right after you learned something that made you pretty sure they’d committed murder, what would you do? Would you say anything?”

Fritz kept staring straight ahead. His teeth made the file-on-iron sound.

“Would you try to forget about it?”

Sarah gave him an anxious smile. “I’ll come over tonight—I’ll get put somehow.”