Mystery

After 1945, all the clippings were of this kind. Von Heilitz had refused all invitations to assist individuals or police, and instead had followed only newspaper accounts of cases that interested him and solved them at long distance. Telegrams and letters begging for his aid—Dear Mr. von Heilitz, I believe I am a detective too for I have tracked you down to your island lair …—had been marked “No Reply” and pasted into the book. When he had become interested in a case, as with the Fox River Valley Menace, the Beast of Lover’s Lane, and the Tattoo Killer, he had subscribed to community newspapers and written to the local police. “Somebody out there likes us,” said Chief of Police Austin Beer of Grand Forks, Nebraska, after arresting an elderly woman who had killed two children enrolled at a nursery school located across the street from her house. “One day we got this letter that just put things together in a new way. It wasn’t from anywhere around here, but I’ll tell you, this fellow knew all about us—he’d gone and followed property transfers from years back and worked out that Mrs. Ruppert had a grudge against the families of these children. That letter set us going in the right direction. I don’t mind telling you, the whole thing makes you believe in the kindness of strangers.” Chief Beers added that the letter had been signed only with the initials LVH, which had gone unrecognized. Twenty years after the detective’s greatest fame, “The Shadow” was Lamont Cranston, not Lamont von Heilitz.

Then these cases, too, faded out of the big journal. The book’s final pages confused Tom at first, for they contained nothing like the sequence of cases, of solutions flowing from carefully assembled evidence, that made up the rest of the journal. The entire journal seemed to mark a progress toward invisibility as the detective went from prominence to anonymity; in the final pages even the cases seemed to have disappeared. The focus was entirely on Mill Walk, and all the clippings came from the pages of the Eyewitness, but few of them concerned any obvious crime. Tom wondered if Mr. von Heilitz had merely clipped stories at random, searching for a pattern as invisible as he had become himself because none existed.

Tom’s initial sense of dislocation was only partially explained by an odd distortion of the journal’s chronology—the jumble of clippings from Mill Walk jumped back to the twenties. Among them were articles about the end of construction work on Shady Mount Hospital, “a medical facility,” in the words of Maxwell Redwing, its first board chairman, “to rival any in the world.” A row of Mill Walk citizens posed before Shady Mount’s front door. These were the members of the hospital’s first board of governors. Two familiar faces scowled toward him from the photograph. Dr. Bonaventure Milton, already showing the beginnings of his jowls and looking extremely satisfied with his accomplishments, had got himself up like a nineteenth-century prime minister in swallowtail coat, striped satin vest, and black bow tie. And between short, round Maxwell Redwing and pompous, inexplicably successful Dr. Milton, exuding power and rectitude, loomed Tom’s grandfather.

Tom experienced the thrill of mingled respect, fear, and awe Glendenning Upshaw always inspired in him. His grandfather’s wide commanding face stared out from the photograph, challenging all the world to deny that the hospital behind him was the finest it had to show. At thirty, he had recently founded Mill Walk Construction, and his broad bulllike body looked even stronger than it did in the old photographs that hung in the halls of Brooks-Lowood, taken in the days when Glen Upshaw had been the school’s Head Boy and captain of the football team. “Designed to answer the medical needs of every citizen of our island,” read the caption, though in practice Shady Mount had chosen to respond to the needs only of residents of the far east end. Shady Mount left Mill Walk’s less advantaged citizens to the care of the less fashionable facility farther west, St. Mary Nieves. In the photograph above the optimistic caption, Glendenning Upshaw wore one of the heavy black suits he had adopted long before Tom’s birth, after the death of Tom’s grandmother. His large left hand clutched the lion’s head handle of his unfurled, trademark umbrella. His right hand held his flat, wide-brimmed black hat.