“I’m glad you didn’t take off your tie,” Kate Redwing said to him.
“My mother told me to wear this tie,” said Tom, smiling.
“She would have been thinking of the old Eagle Lake, when things were much more formal. She probably still has memories of eating at the club with her father. I can remember seeing her here, the summer I was engaged. How is she now?”
Tom hesitated for a moment, then said, “She could be better.”
“Is your father a very sensitive man?”
Tom found himself unable to answer that question, and she patted his hand to tell him that she understood his silence. “Never mind. I’m sure that you make up for a lot. She must be very proud of you.”
“I hope she can be,” Tom said.
“I used to worry about your mother. She was a dear little thing, but absolutely forlorn. So very pretty, but so unhappy. This is none of my business, of course.”
Up at the other end of the table, Ralph Redwing was explaining that he saw Eagle Lake as a world apart from his family’s businesses, and that was why he had turned down many opportunities to invest in the area. He would not sully the place with money—he was content with their lake, their friends, their little piece of the woods.
“In spite of what we could do with this area,” he said. This was a speech that required an audience, and all faces were turned to him, even those of Buddy and Kip. “We could turn this whole part of Wisconsin right around—we could wake it up—we could start putting money into people’s pockets …”
“I daresay,” Kate whispered to Tom.
“… and there’s another factor, which is the attitude of some of the locals. Some of these people resented anything new—anything successful. They made life pretty tough on us for a couple of years. We got back in a couple of ways, but it meant that we don’t try to help them any, you can believe that.”
“How did you try to get back?” Tom asked innocently.
“Yes, since you mention it,” said Kate. “I’ve always wanted to know how to get back at someone.”
“Remember, we’re talking about a different time now,” Redwing said. “We made our own perfect place up here, that we and our people enjoy, and they can beg us for help and advice, but we don’t put a penny into the town of Eagle Lake. You see these fine young men who work here at the club? These are the finest waiters in the world, and my father hired their fathers from the best restaurants in Chicago in the twenties, they live right here in damn fine rooms they deserve, and they’re loyal people.”
A respectful silence followed all of this. Mrs. Spence said that she admired his … well, she admired everything, but something in particular, but she just couldn’t find the word, but they all knew what she meant. Mrs. Redwing said she was sure they did, dear, and everybody went back to the same sort of conversations they had been having earlier.
“Do you come here a lot?” Tom asked Kate Redwing.
She grinned. “I’m just a peripheral Redwing from Atlanta, and I don’t get up here more than once every two or three years. When my husband was alive, we used to come every summer. We had our own lodge in the compound, but when Jonathan died, they started putting me in a room in the main house.”
“I want to talk to you about your first summer here,” Tom said. “About my mother and my grandfather, and, if you don’t mind, what happened to Jeanine Thielman.”
“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “You are a remarkable fellow.” She turned to give him a long look full of intelligence and good humor. “Yes, you are. Do you happen to know a gentleman from your island named”—here she lowered her voice—“von Heilitz?”
Tom nodded.
“Well, he was remarkable too.” She continued to look at him. “I think it would be better to have this conversation elsewhere—certainly not in the compound.” She sipped at what was left of her watery martini. “I often drop in to see Roddy and Buzz for tea around four in the afternoon. Why don’t you stop in there tomorrow?”
The meal ended a short time later. Ralph Redwing waved away Tom’s thanks. Buddy waddled around the table toward Sarah, who whispered “Ten minutes” to Tom, and pushed herself away from the table. Tom said good-bye to Kate Redwing, who gave him a pert nod, to the Spences, who seemed not to hear him, and to Mrs. Redwing, who showed all her teeth and said, “Why, you’re welcome!”
Sarah did not appear after ten minutes, nor after twenty. Tom read a page of Agatha Christie, then reread it when he realized that he had understood each individual word, but none of them in sequence. Noises on the porch made him jump up to open the door, but no one was there. The lodge made noises by itself. He looked down the long curved avenue of trees, lighted by his porch light and the Spences’.
After ten more minutes, he wandered out on the dock. Far down to his left, distinct areas of yellow light from the club lay on the black water like paint. The Spences’ dock stood illuminated like a stage set. Moonlight silvered the tops of the trees surrounding the invisible lodges across the lake and laid a broad white path on the water. On the north end of the lake a bird called Chk?, and from past Roddy Deepdale’s lodge a second bird answered it: Chk! Chk!
Male voices floated to him, and lights went on in the Deepdale lodge: another dock jumped into visibility. Tom walked back to the deck, found the switches for the outside lights, and turned them off. Light from Glendenning Upshaw’s study fell out on the deck and the few camp chairs and a rough wooden table threw out long, decisive shadows. Now the dock was only a blur of darkness against the paler darkness of the lake. He sat down in one of the camp chairs and wondered how he would be able to stand the evenings at the club.
He went inside, sat down at the desk, opened the phone book and found the number for the Spence lodge.
Mrs. Spence said that Sarah had not come back from the club yet; and wasn’t she going out to the White Bear with Buddy?
“I thought she changed her plans,” Tom said.
“Oh, no, Sarah always goes out in the evening with Buddy. They have so much to talk about.” She would tell Sarah he called. Her voice was blandly insincere.
Tom wrote I’m on the deck—come around the side on a sheet of his grandfather’s paper, and folded it between the screen and the front door. Then he walked back around the side of the lodge and went up the steps to the deck. He turned on one of the lights and sat down to read Agatha Christie while he waited for Sarah.
Moths fluttered around the angled spotlights. The moon coasted through the sky. The light in Barbara Deane’s bedroom switched off, and another degree of softness and wholeness appeared in the darkness beyond the circle of light on the deck. Hercule Poirot strolled onstage and began exercising his little grey cells. Tom sighed—he missed Lamont von Heilitz. On the other hand, maybe Monsieur Poirot would appear to explain what really had happened here at Eagle Lake forty years ago.