Mystery

On the Saturday of the second week in September, two months after the second death of Glendenning Upshaw, Tom Pasmore sat on an iron bench fifty feet inside the entrance of the Goethe Park zoo. Men and women, most of them herding tribes of small children, streamed through the open gates and past him, going toward the balloon vendor and the ice cream cart stationed at the point where the cobbled entrance widened out to meet the concrete that led to the first row of cages and the paths into the zoo. The people pushing baby carriages or strollers, Tom noticed, always relaxed when they got off the cobbles and hit the smooth concrete. They stood up straighter, and you could see the tension leave their spines and back muscles. Some of the people who passed Tom’s bench took a second to look at him: he wore a chalk-striped grey suit with a vest with lapels, a dark blue shirt and a tie of a deep red, and on his feet were a pair of scuffed brown loafers. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and in the dusty gaps between the cobbles lay crushed cigarette packets, the tan specks of shattered potato chips, and one rightangled bread crust fought over by a cluster of chirping sparrows.

Other benches were closer to the zoo’s gates, and some of them were empty, but Tom had chosen this one so that he would be able to watch Sarah Spence come in without her seeing him. He wanted one objective, unmuddled look at her before they had to reckon with each other again: he wanted the reckoning, but he also wanted the moment of pure looking, to see her for the space of a few seconds as anyone else would. Since the night of the fire, Tom had glimpsed her once in a courtroom, while her father had testified about what the government prosecutor had described as the more acceptable face of the Redwing businesses—he himself had been waiting, as he was to wait for two more weeks, to speak about finding his grandfather’s body in the study. There were trials inside trials, trials intersecting trials, and Tom was only peripheral to them, but he had been required to spend three more weeks on the witness benches, and during that time the Spences had left the island. The trials and investigations would go on for another year, it seemed, but Tom’s part in them was done: he spent what seemed like half of every day with lawyers and accountants, but these meetings were about other matters, surprising to Tom, but of no relevance to what filled the headlines of the Eyewitness.

Sarah came in through the gates with a knot of people, distinct from them as a cardinal is distinct in a throng of pigeons, and began floating across the cobbles toward the cages. She wore tight faded jeans—jeans that looked nothing like a boy’s—tucked into high cowboy boots, an oversized white shirt that reminded Tom of Kip Carson and was fastened to her hips by a wide belt, and her thick hair had grown long enough to be gathered at the back of her head into a great loose braid, from which honey-colored wisps and streaks escaped about her face. Fifteen minutes late, she swung along over the cobblestones with long strides, scanning the benches. Her eyes moved past him, and she took another long effortless floating stride before her gaze snapped back to him and she stopped moving. She turned to come toward him with a wondering, slightly bemused smile, and he stood up to greet her.

“Well, look at you,” she said. “You’re a vision of something or other.”

“So are you.”

“I mean those clothes.”

“I don’t,” he said. “I just mean you.”

They stood looking at each other for a moment, not knowing what to say. “I feel kind of embarrassed,” she said, “but I don’t really know why. Do you, too?”

“No,” he said.

“I bet you do, though. I bet if we danced together, I’d feel you trembling.”

He shook his head. “I’m glad your mother let you come.”

“Oh, after everything that happened she got over being so mad at you.” She took a step nearer, and hesitantly put her arms around his waist. “I saw you in the courtroom.”

“I saw you too.”

“Did you call me, once? Right after that article about the fire was in the paper?”

He nodded.

“I knew it. Well, I thought it was you. I didn’t think you could have died, especially since you carried me out.…”

“It was just a mistake,” he said.

“Were you burned at all?”

“Not really.”

She looked up at his face as if trying to read it, and took her arms from around him. “Why did you want to come here?”

“Because I’ve never been here,” he said, and hooked his own arm around her waist. They began to walk along with the crowd toward the cages. “We drove past it once, remember? I thought it would be nice to see the animals. They’ve been here all the time, sitting in these cages, and I guess I thought they deserved a visit.”

“A social call,” she said.