Mystery

Tom became interested in Mill Walk’s few murders, and kept a scrapbook of clippings from the Eyewitness that concerned them. He did not know why he was interested in these murders, but every one of them left behind, on a hillside or in a room, a prematurely dispossessed body, a body that would otherwise be filled with life.

Gloria was distressed when she discovered this scrapbook, which was of ordinary, even mundane appearance, with its dark board covers that resembled leather and large stiff yellow pages—part of her distress was the contrast between the homely scrapbook, suggestive of matchbook collections and photographs from summer camp, and the headlines that jumped from its pages: BODY DISCOVERED IN TRUNK. SISTER OF FINANCE MINISTER MURDERED IN ROBBERY ATTEMPT. She considered removing the scrapbook from his room and confronting him with it, but almost immediately decided to pretend that she had not seen it. The scrapbook was merely one of a thousand things that distressed, alarmed, or upset Gloria.

Most of Mill Walk’s murders were as ordinary as the scrapbook into which Tom glued their newspaper renderings. A pig farmer was hit in the head with a brick and dumped, to be trampled and half-devoured by his livestock, into a pen beside his barn. BRUTAL MURDER OF CENTRAL PLAINS FARMER, said the Eyewitness. Two days later, the newspaper reported SISTER OF FARMER CONFESSES: Says He Told Me He Would Marry, I Had To Leave Family Farm. A bartender in the old slave quarter was killed during a robbery. One brother killed another on Christmas Eve: SANTA CLAUS DISPUTE LEADS TO DEATH. After a native woman was found stabbed to death in a Mogrom Street hovel, SON MURDERED MOTHER FOR MONEY IN MATTRESS—MORE THAN $300,000!

Gloria eventually decided to seek reassurance from a sympathetic source.

Tom’s English teacher at Brooks-Lowood, Dennis Handley, Mr. Handley, or “Handles” to the boys, had come to Mill Walk from Brown University, looking for sun, enough money to live reasonably well, a picturesque apartment overlooking the water, and a life reasonably free of stress. Since he enjoyed teaching, had spent the happiest years of his life at a draconian prep school in New Hampshire, was of an even-tempered, friendly nature, and had virtually no sexual desires whatsoever, Dennis Handley had enjoyed his life on Mill Walk from the first. He had found that apartments on the water were beyond his price range, but almost everything else about his life in the tropics suited him.

When Gloria Pasmore told him about the scrapbook, he agreed to have a talk with the boy. He did not know exactly why, but the scrapbook sounded wrong. He thought it might be a sourcebook for future stories, but the whole tone of the thing disturbed him—too morbid, too twisted and obsessive. Surely Tom Pasmore was not thinking of writing crime novels? Detective novels? Not good enough, he said to himself, and told Gloria, who seemed to have gone perhaps two drinks over her limit, that he would find out what he could.

Some time ago Dennis Handley had mentioned to Tom that he had begun collecting rare editions of certain authors while at Brown—Graham Greene, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, primarily—and that Tom might come to look at these books any time he liked. On the Friday after his conversation with Gloria Pasmore, Dennis asked Tom if he would be free after school to look over his books and see if he’d like to borrow anything. He offered to drive him to his apartment and bring him back home afterward. Tom happily agreed.