Mystery

Tom felt a reluctant tremor move through his body like a slow electric shock. “When you were up at the lake, did you ever go swimming or fishing? Did you ever do anything that took you out into the lake?”

“Are you asking if I ever actually saw the front of your grandfather’s lodge?”

Tom nodded.

“I never swam, I never fished, I never went out into the lake. I never set foot on his property either, of course. Congratulations.”

But it was not like the time the Shadow had leaned beaming across a coffee table and shaken his hand. Tom fell against the back seat of Andres’s taxi, seeing Barbara Deane wake up in a burning bed.

“He’s so bold,” von Heilitz said. “He told me one huge bold whopping lie, and I swallowed it whole. You know what really galls me? He knew it was the kind of lie—the kind of detail—that would really speak to me. He knew I would go right to town on it. He knew I would build an entire theory on that lie. It didn’t take him an instant to figure all that out. From then on, everything fell into place.”

“Everybody thought he left for Miami the day after Jeanine disappeared,” Tom said.

“But he stayed long enough to kill Goetz.”

Tom closed his eyes, and kept them closed until they pulled up in front of the old hotel. There are things it might be better not to know, Barbara Deane had told him.

Andres said, “Here we are, boss,” and von Heilitz patted his shoulders. A door slammed. Tom opened his eyes to the lower end of Calle Drosselmayer. It was before eight in the morning on an island where nothing opened until ten, and the pawn shops and liquor stores were still locked behind their bars and shutters. A junk man’s horse clopped past, pulling a rusted water heater, a broken carriage wheel, and the dozing junk man. Von Heilitz got out on one side, Tom on the other. The air seemed unnaturally warm and bright. Far up the street, in the fashionable section of Calle Drosselmayer, a few cars rolled east, taking office workers and store managers from the island’s west end downtown to Calle Hoffmann.

Andres carried the old man’s two bags to the sidewalk in front of the hotel, and von Heilitz gave him some bills.

“Aren’t you going home?” Tom asked.

“Both of us ought to stay out of sight for a while,” von Heilitz said. “I’ll be in the room adjoining yours.”

Andres said, “Big change from Eastern Shore Road,” and pulled a little stack of business cards held together with a rubber band from a ripped pocket of his jacket. He pulled one out of the stack and presented it to Tom. The card was printed with the words Andres Flanders Courteous Efficient Driver and a telephone number in the old slave quarter. “You call me if you need me, hear?” Andres said. He watched Tom put the card into one of his pockets. When he was sure it was safe, he waved to both of them and drove off.

Tom turned around to look up at the tall façade of the hotel. Once it had been pale blue or even white, but the stone had darkened over time. An arch of carved letters over the entrance spelled out its name. Von Heilitz said, “I divided my clothes up between these bags, so why don’t you just take that one and use what’s in it as long as we’re here?”

Tom lifted the heavy bag and followed him into the dark cavern of the St. Alwyn’s lobby. Brass spittoons stood beside heavy furniture, and on the wall opposite the desk three small stained glass windows glowed dark red and blue, like the window on the staircase at Brooks-Lowood School. A pale man with thinning hair and rimless glasses watched them approach.

Von Heilitz checked in as James Cooper of New York City, and Tom filled out a card for Thomas Lamont, also of New York. The clerk took in his bandaged hand and singed eyebrows, and slid two keys across the desk.

“Let’s go upstairs and talk about your grandfather,” von Heilitz said. The clerk’s eyebrows twitched above the rims of his glasses.

Von Heilitz picked up both keys and bent to put his hand on the suitcase he carried in. “Oh,” he said, having seen a stack of Eyewitnesses in the gloom at the end of the counter. “We’ll each have one of those.” He straightened up and put his hand in his front pocket.

The clerk peeled two newspapers off the neat stack and pushed them forward in exchange for the two quarters von Heilitz slapped down on the counter, presenting them with the headline in the newspaper’s lower right-hand corner.

The old man folded the papers under his arms, and they each picked up a suitcase and went to the elevator.

In Tom’s room, they sat six feet from the bed in high-backed wooden chairs on opposite sides of a dark wooden table on the surface of which a traveling musician had once scratched PD 6/6/58. Tom reached the end of the article, and immediately began reading it again. The headline said: GLENDENNING UPSHAW’S GRANDSON DEAD IN RESORT FIRE.