“Tried to lie her way out of it. But with the shortage of nurses, even Shady Mount has to take what it can get.” He paused. “I trust that now this matter is closed.”
“It’s closed,” Tom said. “Absolutely, completely, irrevocably closed.”
“Glad you can listen to reason. Now, I have a suggestion for you concerning your trip to Eagle Lake.”
Tom said nothing.
“You still there?” his grandfather shouted.
“Still here.” He heard his mother screech something at his father. “Completely, entirely here, and no place else.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m not too sure. I just had a fight with Dad.”
“Give him time to calm down, or apologize to him, or something.” Tom’s mother screamed again. “What was that?”
“The television.”
His grandfather sighed. “Listen. To get to Eagle Lake in the old days, we had to get to Miami and take a train to Chicago, then change trains for Hurley. The whole thing took four days. I just worked out a way for you to do the whole thing in one haul, as long as you can leave the day after tomorrow. I think you should do it.”
Tom nodded, but said nothing.
“Ralph Redwing uses a private plane to take himself and his friends back and forth to the lake. The plane is coming back here to pick up the Spences, and as a personal favor to me, Ralph has agreed to let you tag along. Get your things packed, and be at the field by eight Friday morning.”
Tom said, “Okay. Thanks.”
“Breathe some of that fresh air, take walks in the woods. Get in some swimming. You can use my membership at the club. Don’t worry about getting back. We’ll work that out when the time comes.” Tom had never heard Glendenning Upshaw sound so friendly. “You’ll love it up there. Gloria and I used to think of summers at Eagle Lake as the best time of the year. She loved that place. Used to spend hours sitting on the balcony, looking at the woods.”
“And the lake, I suppose,” Tom said.
“No, some of the lodges have raised verandas overlooking the lake, but ours is on the other side—looks right into the woods. You can sit on the dock, see the lake all you want.”
“You can’t see the other docks from the balcony?”
“Who wants to see other people’s docks? Gloria and I went up there to get away from other people. In fact, until you came along—until Gloria got married and you came along—I used to think about retiring up there with her, when the time came. Didn’t know I’d never want to retire.”
“Wouldn’t she like to come with me?”
“Gloria can’t go back,” his grandfather said. “We tried it once, the year after my wife died—didn’t work. Didn’t work at all. She couldn’t handle it. Eventually I gave up and came back early, got on with my Miami business. Worked out for the best in the long run.”
“Worked out for the best?” Tom asked, appalled.
“I got that hospital built in record time.” Perhaps hearing that he and Tom had been talking about different things, he added, “I made a couple of appointments for Gloria with a doctor in Miami, the kind of fellow they called an alienist in those days. Turned out to be nothing but a quack. Most of those fellows are, you know. He wanted me to come in for appointments, and I told him that I was a lot saner than he was. Pulled the plug on that nonsense. Gloria was a child who had lost her mother the summer before, that was the whole of the trouble.”
Tom remembered his mother gripping her martini glass at her father’s table on the terrace.
“Can you think of anything else that could have upset her that summer?” Tom asked.
“Not at all. Apart from Glor’s trouble, it was a perfect summer. One of the young Redwing boys, Jonathan, was getting married to a pretty girl from Atlanta. A Redwing wedding is always a real event, and it should have been a delightful summer, what with all the parties at the club.”
“But it wasn’t,” Tom said.
“You’ll have better luck. Just get to the airport on time.”
Tom promised to do so, and his grandfather hung up without waiting to be thanked or saying good-bye.
Tom found himself in the hall at the foot of the staircase without any memory of leaving the study. Soft intermittent wails and wordless, high-pitched imprecations came from the floor above. He looked into the wide living room and saw that everything in it was dead. All the furniture, the chairs and tables and the long couch, was dead furniture. “So she gave him the runaround,” he said. “So she tried to lie her way out of it.” His father’s voice rumbled. “It should have been a delightful summer,” Tom said. Upstairs, something crashed and broke. His feet walked him back into the study. He sat on the arm of his father’s recliner and looked at the smooth charcoal screen of the television for a time before realizing that it was switched off. His legs took him across the room, and his hand pushed the power button. In a row of men in sports jackets behind a long curved desk, Joe Ruddler grimaced violently toward the camera. Wide printing at the bottom of the screen announced ALL-ISLAND LIVE ACTION NEWS NEXT! A commercial for auto wax battered the air. Tom turned down the volume and moved to a wobbly rush-bottomed chair and waited.
“I hope you told ’em I’d call right back,” his father said.
Tom turned his head and saw his father standing just outside the doors. “The call was for me. It was Grand-Dad.”
A layer of cells died just below the surface of his father’s face.
“We had a long talk. Probably the longest talk I’ve ever had with him. On a one-to-one basis, I mean.”
Something happened to the dark pouches beneath his father’s eyes.
“Ralph Redwing came up. I’m going up north on your buddy’s plane the day after tomorrow. Grand-Dad sounded pleased with himself.”
His father’s eyes looked bruised—that was it. Not the pouches, the eyes themselves.
“I didn’t say anything about the wonderful visit and the five-dollar cigar. I didn’t tell him anything at all. How could I? I don’t exist.”
Victor placed his hands on the doorjamb and leaned the top half of his body into the room. A black curl of hair plastered itself to his forehead. Victor’s mouth opened, and the bruised look deepened in his eyes. “I’ll take care of you later.” He pushed himself back out of the room.
Brisk, bouncy theme music blared from the set, and a resonant voice announced: “It’s time for your All-island live action news team!”
Bulging cheeks and flaring eyes flashed on the screen for a moment, declaring that Joe Ruddler was prepared to savage words, sentences, and paragraphs between his square white teeth.
Then a blond man with an almost clerical look of concern on his regular features looked at Tom and said, “Tragic death of a local hero. After this.”
For thirty seconds, a shampoo commercial blew images of billowing hair at him.
The blond man looked at Tom again and said, “Today Mill Walk has lost a hero. Patrolman Roman Klink, one of two police officers wounded in the native quarter shootout that resulted in the death of suspected murderer Foxhall Edwardes, suffered fatal gunshot wounds in an armed robbery attempt at Mulroney’s Taproom late this afternoon. When Patrolman Klink, working a temporary part-time job at the Taproom while awaiting full recovery from his wounds, pulled his service revolver and attempted to halt the robbery, his assailants gunned him down. Patrolman Klink died instantly of a head wound. Three men were observed fleeing the area, and though no identifications were obtained, arrests are considered imminent.”
A fuzzy black and white Police Academy photograph of a wide-faced boy in a uniform cap appeared on the screen.
“A fifteen-year veteran of the Mill Walk police force, Patrolman Roman Klink was forty-two years old, and leaves a wife and one son.”