The book, a more elegant version of his scrapbook, lay open on the table. Tom read the huge headline on the left-hand page. MILLIONAIRE SUMMER RESIDENT DISAPPEARS FROM HOME. Beneath the headline ran the subhead: Jeanine Thielman, Mill Walk Figure, Last Seen Friday. Beneath this was a grainy picture of a blond woman in a fur coat stepping down from a coach-and-four. A diamond necklace glittered at her throat, and her hair was swept back from her forehead. She looked sleek, rich, and powerful, stepping down from the platform with a long, outstretched leg. Her smile for the camera was a grimace of willed artifice. Tom understood immediately that the woman had been photographed arriving at a charity ball. She reminded him of his mother, in old photographs taken when she had been Gloria Upshaw, a member of Mill Walk’s Junior League.
Tom looked at the name and date of the newspaper—the Eagle Lake Gazette of June 17, 1925.
“The seventeenth of June was the day after I arrived in Eagle Lake that year. Jeanine Thielman, who was the first wife of our neighbor’s father, Arthur Thielman, had disappeared during the night of the fifteenth. Arthur found her missing when he looked into her bedroom in the morning, sent a messenger around to the other lodges, including the Redwing compound, to see if she had been visiting one of her friends, found that no one had seen her since a dinner party at the senior Langenheims’ the night before, and waited through all of the sixteenth before riding over to the police station in the town of Eagle Lake. See? It looks like nothing more than newspaper hysteria over a rich woman. People gossiped about this young couple sleeping in separate bedrooms.”
Mr. von Heilitz pointed to the page on the left-hand side of the big journal. “This is the day I arrived. I found Arthur Thielman sitting on my porch furniture with a big setter bitch lying beside him. He’d heard I was due, and told his servants he was going to take his dog out for a walk. Arthur was a rude man, and he started telling me I had to help find his wife even before I got out of my carriage.” MYSTERY DEEPENS, the big headline read. “Told me I had to stop off in Miami, where they had an apartment, before going back to Mill Walk. I was not to tell anyone what I was doing. He thought the Eagle Lake police were incompetent, but he didn’t want anyone to know he’d hired me. ‘You’re the Shadow, aren’t you?’ Arthur said—he was trying not to yell. ‘I want you to behave like a goddamned shadow. Just find her and report back to me. I want this thing to die down quickly.’ He’d pay me anything I wanted. Then he astonished me—he apologized for ruining my vacation. I told him I wasn’t interested in his money, but that I would see what I could do from Eagle Lake. He wasn’t very satisfied with that, but in the end he was grateful—so I got the feeling that he thought that she might be somewhere in the area, after all. At any rate, by that point he regretted having panicked and gone to the police. Because of these headlines, he was a prisoner in his lodge—he couldn’t show his face at the club, and he was sick of talking only to his servants and the local constable.”
Tom looked at a photograph of Arthur Thielman standing beside his lodge, a rustic building with porches on two levels. Arthur Thielman was a corpulent, aggressive-looking man in a tweed jacket and high muddy boots. His rigid, Victorian face bore only the smallest resemblance to that of his son, now the Pasmores’ middle-aged neighbor.
“Two days later, Kathleen Duffield, a girl from Atlanta who was being groomed to marry Ralph Redwing’s cousin Jonathan, caught her hook on something in the marshy, north end of the lake. Jonathan wanted to cut the line and move to more promising territory—nobody ever fished the north end. Kate just thought it looked pretty up there, I gather. Anyhow, the girl kept on pulling, and eventually Jonathan jumped over the side to prove to his fiancée that all she’d hooked was a sunken row-boat. He followed the line underwater and found that she had snagged her hook on a clump of weeds. Not far away, halfway down a drop-off, he saw a rolled up length of old curtain fabric. He swam over to look at it. When he lifted the fabric, Jeanine Thielman’s body rolled out of it. She had been shot in the back of the head.”
Von Heilitz flipped over the page, and two new headlines blared out at Tom: JEANINE THIELMAN FOUND IN LAKE and LOCAL MAN CHARGED WITH THIELMAN MURDER. Pictures showed three policemen in lace-up boots and Sam Browne belts standing on a pier beneath a rear view of the Thielman lodge; a long slack thing beneath a sheet; an owl-eyed man moving down a corridor surrounded by policemen.
Tom thought: That’s what Eagle Lake looks like. He had a flash of Sarah Spence breaking the surface of the grey water, her hair streaming down her shoulders and her eyes gleeful. Then he felt that he had seen all of this before, in some dream-time before his accident: the very shape of the letters was familiar to him.
“The man they arrested, Minor Truehart, was a half-Winnebago guide who baited hooks and found bass for half a dozen families on the lake, including the Thielmans. He lived in a cabin near the lake with his wife and kids. He stayed sober until about noon, and after that the summer residents found him either annoying or amusing, but hiring him was a kind of tradition. Apparently he had some kind of disagreement with Jeanine Thielman the day before she disappeared—he turned up smelling of whiskey, she ordered him off, he claimed to be able to work just fine, and she blew her top. They were on the Thielman pier, and lots of people heard her screaming at him. Truehart eventually gave up and loped off. He claimed that he couldn’t remember what happened during the rest of the day, and that he woke up in the woods about five o’clock the next morning, with a godalmighty hangover. The police searched his cabin and found a long-barreled Colt revolver under the bed, which they sent off to the state lab for examination.”
“Was it his gun?” Tom asked.
“He said he had a gun, but that wasn’t it. He recognized it, though—he had sold it, he said, to old Judge Backer, a widower who came up to Eagle Lake for two weeks every summer and enjoyed target shooting. His wife said that a lot of guns came in and out of the house. Her husband made a little money dealing in them, looking out for special items for the gun collectors among the summer people. She didn’t recognize that one.”
Tom considered for a moment. “Did she remember the names of any of his gun customers?”
Lamont von Heilitz leaned back in his chair and gave Tom an almost paternal smile. “I’m afraid that Minor Truehart was the sort of husband who never tells his wife anything. But of course I thought about what might have happened to Judge Backer’s gun, all the more so when the Judge denied the entire story. He had never illegally purchased a weapon from anyone, of course. If it could be proved that he had, he could have lost his seat on the bench. I found myself wondering how likely it was that a drunken guide, enraged by the behavior of a customer’s wife, would shoot her in the back of the head.”
“What did you do?” Tom asked.
“I spoke to Judge Backer and his valet, Wendell Hasek, a boy from the west side of the island. I talked to people at the club. I went to the offices of the Eagle River Gazette and looked very closely at issues from earlier in the summer. I spoke to the local sheriff, who knew my name from the publicity about the few cases I had worked on. I had a long talk with Arthur Thielman.”
“He did it,” Tom said. “He stole the gun from the Judge’s lodge, shot his wife, rowed her body out to the end of the lake nobody ever used, and dropped her in. Then he framed the guide by sneaking into his cabin and hiding the gun. He probably tore down one of his own curtains and used it to wrap up the body.”