Mystery

“I guess you don’t think she killed Jeanine Thielman.”

“Barbara Deane never killed anybody in her life,” von Heilitz said. “Did you think that Barbara Deane also killed Anton Goetz? Hanged him with his own fishing line?”

“She could have done it. He might have been blackmailing her.”

“And she just happened to be waiting in his lodge to make a payment when he arrived with the news that I had accused him of murder.”

“Well,” Tom said. “I guess that part was always a little shaky.” He did not feel angry anymore—he was relieved not to have to think of Barbara Deane as a murderer. “But if she didn’t do it, and Anton Goetz didn’t do it, then who did?”

“You told me who killed them both,” von Heilitz said.

“But you just said—”

“In your letters. Didn’t I say you accomplished just what I hoped you would?” Von Heilitz lowered the flashlight, and Tom saw him smiling at him.

Something else is going on here, Tom thought. Something I don’t get.

The detective turned around and began moving quickly down the path through the woods.

“Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“In time.”

Tom felt like screaming.

“There’s something else I have to tell you first,” von Heilitz said, still moving rapidly down the path.

Tom hurried after him.

Von Heilitz did not say another word until they had reached the clearing. Moonlight fell on the Truehart cabin, and washed the flowers of all their color. The old man turned off his flashlight as soon as Tom stepped off the path to the grass, and their shadows lay stark and elongated over the silvery ground. The whole world was black and grey and silver. Tom stepped toward him. Von Heilitz crossed his arms over his chest. All the fine lines in his face were deepened by the moonlight, and his forehead looked corrugated. He looked like a person Tom had never seen before, and Tom stopped moving, suddenly uncertain.

“I want so much to do this right,” von Heilitz said. “If I botch this, you’ll never forgive me, and neither will I.”

Tom opened his mouth, but could not speak—a sudden deep strangeness stopped his tongue.

Von Heilitz looked down, trying to begin, and his forehead contorted even more alarmingly. When he spoke, what he asked astonished Tom.

“How do you get on with Victor Pasmore?”

The boy almost laughed. “I don’t,” he said. “Not really.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. He sort of hates me, I guess. We’re too different.”

“What would he say if he knew that you and I know each other?”

“He’d carry on, I guess—he warned me away from you.” Tom felt the old man’s mixture of tension and earnestness. “What is this all about?”

Von Heilitz looked at him, looked at the silvery grass, back up at Tom. “This is the part I have to do right.” He took a deep breath. “I met a young woman in 1945. I was much older than she was, but she appealed to me a great deal—enormously. Something happened to me that I had thought would never happen. I started by being touched by her, and as I got to know her better, I began to love her. I felt that she needed me. We had to meet secretly, because her father hated me—I was the most unsuitable man she could have chosen, but she had chosen me. In those days, I still traveled a great deal, but I started refusing cases so that I wouldn’t have to leave her.”

“Are you saying—”

He shook his head and walked a few steps away and looked at the forest. “She became pregnant, and didn’t tell me. I heard about a very exciting case, one that really intrigued me, and I took it. We decided to get married after I came back from the case, and to—to lessen the shock, we went out in public for a week. We attended a concert together, we went to a restaurant, we went to a party held by people who were not in our own circle, but who lived on another part of the island. It was such a relief to do things like that. When I left for my trip, I asked her to come with me, but she felt she had to stay at home to face her father. I thought she could do that. She had become much stronger, or so I thought. She wouldn’t let me deal with her father, you see—she said there would be time for that when I came back.”

He turned to face Tom again. “When I called her, her father wouldn’t let me speak to her. I gave up the case and flew back to Mill Walk the next day, but they were gone. She had told her father everything—even that she was pregnant. Her father kept her away from Mill Walk, and in effect bought her a fiancé on the mainland. She—she had collapsed. They came back to Mill Walk, and the marriage took place in days. Her father threatened to put her in a mental hospital if I ever saw her again. Two months after the marriage, she gave birth to a son. I suppose her father bribed the Registrar to issue a false marriage certificate. From that time on, Tom, I never accepted another job that would take me off the island. She belonged to her father again—probably she always belonged to her father. But I watched that boy. Nobody would let me see him, but I watched him. I loved him.”