Mystery

“Sarah?” he said—croaked. Razor blades and knives dug into his throat.

“She’s okay. An ambulance is on the way, Tom. You saved her life.”

He fell on his haunches. He was under the trees on the near side of the Spence lodge, and the great fire all the people were watching was his lodge. Wet wool filled his brain. Now Neil Langenheim had also turned to look at him, and there was nothing in his face but distaste.

“Was anybody else in the lodge?” Lamont von Heilitz asked him.

Tom shook his head. “You caught me.”

“I was about to try to get inside when you came running out—just in time too. I think the whole back half of the lodge collapsed about a second later.”

“A second before,” Tom said, remembering the explosion he had heard behind him. “Where’s Sarah?”

“With her parents. You did the right thing by wrapping her in that blanket.”

Tom tried to sit upright, and a heavy blackness swam in his head. “The plane—and people will know you’re—”

“Our flight has been canceled, I’m afraid,” von Heilitz said. “Anyhow, Tim will have to stick around here for a day, trying to work out how the fire was started.”

“Want to see her,” Tom said with his croaking voice, and the razor blades and knives moved another inch or two into the flesh of his throat.

An oak tree on the lake side of the burning lodge began to incinerate in a rattle of leaves.

“She told—she talked about—”

Von Heilitz stroked his arm through the rough blanket.

A black-haired man wearing a brilliant red silk robe over yellow silk pajamas and sucking on a long pipe stood at the end of the row of people watching the fire. He said something to a young man wearing only a tight pair of faded jeans, and the young man, who was Marcello, swept his arm from the fire to the trees between it and the Spence lodge. Somewhere distant, a horse whinnied in terror. Tom was going to ask von Heilitz what Hugh Hefner was doing here, when the irrelevant thought came to him that the publisher of Playboy would probably have the same kind of private jet as Ralph Redwing. Then he saw that the man in the robe was Ralph Redwing, and that Ralph’s black little eye had just flicked toward him and von Heilitz before it flicked away again. On his smooth, firelit face sat an expression of worried concern as abstracted as Jerry Hasek’s.

“Everybody saw you,” he croaked to von Heilitz.

The Shadow patted his shoulder.

“No, they saw you,” he croaked again, realizing that this was terrible, it must be undone.

The fire took another oak tree.

PART EIGHT

THE SECOND DEATH

OF TOM PASMORE

His room was not white, like his old room at Shady Mount, but painted in bright primary colors, lake water blue and sunlight yellow and maple leaf red. These colors were intended to induce cheerfulness and healthy high spirits. When Tom opened his eyes in the morning, he remembered sitting at a long table in Mrs. Whistler’s kindergarten class, awkwardly trying to cut something supposed to resemble an elephant out of stiff blue construction paper with a pair of scissors too big for him. His stomach, his throat, and his head all hurt, and a thick white bandage swaddled his right hand. A twelve-inch television set on a moveable clamp angled toward the head of his bed—the first time he had switched this off with the remote control device on his bed, a nurse had switched it back on as soon as she came into the room, saying, “You want to watch something, don’t you?” and the second time she had said, “I can’t imagine what’s wrong with this darn set.” He just let it run now, moving by itself from game shows to soap operas to news flashes as he slept.

When Lamont von Heilitz came into the room, Tom turned off the set again. Every part of his body felt abnormally heavy, as if weights had been sewn into his skin, and most of them hurt in ways that seemed brand new. A transparent grease that smelled like room deodorizer shone on his arms and legs.

“You can get out of here in a couple of hours,” von Heilitz said, even before he took the chair beside Tom’s bed. “That’s how hospitals do it now—no lollygagging. They just told me, so when we’re done I’ll pack and get some clothes for you, and then come back and pick you up. Tim will fly us to Minneapolis, and we’ll get a ten o’clock flight and land in Mill Walk about seven in the morning.”

“A nine-hour flight?”

“It’s not exactly direct,” von Heilitz said, smiling. “How do you like the Grand Forks hospital?”

“I won’t mind leaving.”

“What sort of treatment did you get?”

“In the morning, they gave me an oxygen mask for a little while. After that, I guess I got some antibiotics. Every couple of hours, a woman comes around and makes me drink orange juice. They rub this goo all over me.”

“Do you feel ready to leave?”