But Kate Redwing came over to say hello and goodbye in the same breath: she, too, was leaving tomorrow; her allotted two weeks were up and she was going back to Atlanta and her grandchildren. All three at the table hugged her, and when she heard of their plans she said they ought to take Tom with them, and Roddy and Buzz smiled politely and said they wished they could, but they would make sure to see plenty of him on Mill Walk. Tom tried to imagine what these two men would say about Victor Pasmore, and what Victor Pasmore would say about them. Kate Redwing embraced him again, and whispered, “Don’t give up! Be strong!” She turned away to follow her family down the stairs, moving away past the Spences’ empty table with hesitant, old-lady steps in her print dress and flat black shoes. A few minutes later, Roddy signed for their meal, and they left too.
They dropped Tom off at his lodge and promised to invite him for dinner when they were back on the island—“as soon as things settle down.”
Tom called Lamont von Heilitz later that night, but again was told that his party did not answer. He stayed up late reading, and went to bed feeling desolate.
The next morning curtains covered the big lakeside windows in the Deepdale lodge. A glazier came from the village to replace the broken pane in his grandfather’s study and said, “A kid like you must have a lot of fun in a place like this by himself.”
Tom swam in the mornings, walked around and around the lake, finished The ABC Murders and read Iris Murdoch’s Under The Net and Flight from the Enchanter. He ate alone. Sarah’s parents did not join the Redwings at the bar before dinners, and Sarah did no more than give him a regretful, chastened glance before her mother snapped her back with a sharp word. He swam for hours every afternoon, and twice Buddy Redwing took out his motorboat and wheeled back and forth in figure eights up at the north end while Tom breast-stroked and sidestroked between the docks on the south end. Kip Carson sat open-mouthed beside Buddy the first time, Kip and Sarah Spence together on one of the rear seats the second. Tom walked to the village and found a rack of paperbacks beside the I Pine Fir Yew ashtrays in the Indian Trading Post. He carried home a stack of books and called his mother, who said she wasn’t getting out much, but Dr. Milton was taking care of her. Victor had been offered a job with the Redwings—she wasn’t too sure what the job involved, but he would have to travel a lot, and he was very excited. She hoped Tom was meeting people and enjoying himself, and he said yes, he was.
Certain rules governed his conversations with his mother—he suddenly saw this. The truth could never be spoken: kindly, murderous hypocrisy was the law of life. It was a cage.
The days went by. Lamont von Heilitz never answered his telephone. Barbara Deane came and went, in too much of a hurry and too self-absorbed to talk to him. Tom could not get Sarah Spence out of his mind, and some of the things Buddy had said came back to torture him. He swam so much that night he dropped instantly into dreamless sleep, forgetting even the ache in his muscles.
On the fifth day after the bullet had exploded through the window, he was sitting on a rock at the edge of the woods where the private road to the lake came out to the highway and saw Kip Carson walking toward him, strapped into a backpack and dragging a duffel bag behind him. “Hey, man,” Kip Carson said. “I’m on my way, man, it was really fun and everything, but I’m gone.”
“Where?”
“Airport. I have to hitch. Ralph wouldn’t let me get a ride, and Buddy didn’t give a shit. Buddy’s an asshole, man.”
Tom asked him if he were going back to Tucson.
“Tucson? No way, no fuckin’ way. Schenectady—my old lady mailed me a ticket. Do you think there’s a barbershop at the airport? I gotta get a haircut before I get back home.”
“I didn’t see one,” Tom said.
“Well, it’s been grins.” Kip flashed him a V with two fingers, hoisted his duffel, and went out to stand by the side of the highway. The second car that passed picked him up.
Tom walked back to the lodge.
On Saturday, the pain over Sarah Spence’s absence still so constant as to feel like mourning, rejection, and humiliation joined together, he realized that he had been waiting for Tim Truehart to come back to tell him about whatever Spychalla had found in the woods. He had liked Truehart, and thought about calling him up as he swam back and forth between the empty docks. Of course Spychalla found nothing, and of course Truehart had other things to do. Then he realized that the reason he was thinking about Eagle Lake’s police chief was that he missed Lamont von Heilitz. He climbed up on his dock, went inside the lodge, dressed, and sat down on the couch in the study to write out everything he knew about Jeanine Thielman’s murder. He read what he had written, remembered more, and wrote it all over again in a different way.
His mind seemed to awaken.
And then the events of forty summers past became his occupation, his obsession, his salvation. He still swam in the mornings and afternoons, but while he swam he saw Jeanine Thielman standing in pale cold moonlight on her dock, and Anton Goetz in a white dinner jacket—looking like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca—limping toward her, bowing in a parody of gallantry when he leaned on his cane and swung his useless leg. Tom still walked around and around the lake, but saw a cloud of Redwings in tennis sweaters and white dresses, chattering about the young woman from Atlanta Jonathan had decided to marry. He sat on his dock, seeing the bulllike figure of the young widower who was his grandfather walk slowly back and forth across the planks, his hand gripping the much smaller hand of a little girl in ringlets and a sailor dress.
Any event is altered by the perspective from which it is seen, and for days Tom replayed the events and circumstances of Jeanine Thielman’s murder. He wrote about it in the third person and in the first, imagining that he were Arthur Thielman, Jeanine Thielman, Anton Goetz, his grandfather, even trying to see those events through the eyes on the anguished child who had been his mother. He played with dates and times; he decided to throw out everything he had been told about these people’s motives and experiment with new ones. He saw gaps and holes in what he had been told, and prowled through them, following his instincts and his imagination as he had followed Hattie Bascombe through the courts and passages of Maxwell’s Heaven. Here was his grandfather, just beginning to solidify his relationship with the Redwings and insure both his financial and social future; here was Anton Goetz, a “con man” who charmed women and men with stories about a romantic past and shielded Glendenning Upshaw’s connection to the St. Alwyn hotel and the secret, unseen parts of Mill Walk; here was Lamont von Heilitz, seeing the world begin to come to life around him again.
He dreamed of bodies rising like smoke from the lake, raising their arms above their dripping heads and hovering in place with open eyes and mouths—he dreamed he walked through a forest to a clearing where a great hairy monster, of a size that made his own height a little child’s, bit the head off a woman’s white body and turned to him with a mouth full of bone and gore and said, “I am your father, Thomas. See what I am?”