One night he awoke knowing that his mother had picked up the gun on the deckside table and shot Jeanine Thielman—that was why her father had hidden her in Barbara Deane’s house, that was why she screamed at night, that was why her father had sold her into marriage to a man paid to be her nursemaid. Another sleepless night: but in the morning, he could not believe this version, either.
Or could he?
If his mother had killed Jeanine Thielman, Glendenning Upshaw would not have hesitated to kill to protect her. I am your father. See what I am?
For most of another week, he was alone without being lonely: he imagined himself into the men and women who had come to Eagle Lake in 1925, and felt their shades and shadows around him, each with his own, her own, plots and desires and fantasies. He began sitting at the desk again during the day and at night, forgetting Tim Truehart’s advice, and no bullets exploded through the glass; it had been a hunter’s bullet after all, and he was not a potential victim. He was—it came to him at last—Lamont von Heilitz.
One night at dinner, he went up to the Spence table and ignored the glares to ask Mr. Spence how Jerry Hasek and the other two bodyguards were listed in the books. “Leave us alone,” Mrs. Spence ordered, and Sarah gave him an urgent, irritated look he could not fathom.
“I don’t know what business it is of yours, but I can’t see any harm in telling you. They’re listed as public relations assistants.”
Tom thanked him, heard Mrs. Spence say, “Why did you tell him anything?” and went back to his book and his dinner.
On the Friday of the second week after Roddy and Buzz left the lake, Barbara Deane came in after her morning ride and found him lying on a sofa in the sitting room, holding a pen in his mouth like a cigar and squinting up at a sheet of paper covered with his own writing. “I hope you won’t mind,” she said, “but you’ll have to eat lunch at the club today. I forgot to buy sandwich things, and we’re all out.”
“That’s okay,” he said.
She went upstairs. He heard her door close. The lock on the inside of the door slid into its catch. After a minute or two, water began drumming in her shower. Still later, her closet door creaked and something scraped along a shelf. Fifteen minutes later, she came downstairs changed into her black skirt and a dark red blouse he had not seen before. “Since I have to shop,” she said, “I could pick up some extra things for dinner.”
“That’d be nice,” he said.
“What I mean is, you could come to my house for dinner tonight, Tom.”
“Oh!” He swung his legs over the side of the sofa and sat up, sending dozens of yellow legal-sized papers sliding to the floor. “Thanks! I’d like that.”
“You’ll come?” He nodded, and she said, “I’m going to be busy today, so if you wouldn’t mind walking to town, I’ll drive you back after dinner.”
“Great.”
She smiled at him. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you look like you could use a break. I’m on Oak Street, the first right off Main Street as you come in, and it’s the fourth house down on the right—number fifteen. Come around six.”
This reminder that other people met for dinner, had normal lives and saw their friends, made him impatient with his own loneliness. He swam for an hour in the morning, and saw Sarah’s father and Ralph Redwing walking slowly back and forth on the sandy ground in front of the club. Ralph Redwing did most of the talking, and now and then Mr. Spence took off his cowboy hat and wiped sweat off his forehead. Tom breast-stroked silently in the water near his dock, watching them pace and talk. At the club that noon, the Spences joined the Redwings at the big table near the terrace. Sarah looked at him hard, twice, knitting her brows together as if trying to send him a thought, and Buddy Redwing grabbed her hand and pressed it to his mouth with loud growls and smacking sounds. Mrs. Spence pretended to find this hilarious. Tom left unobserved, and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to see something fresh in his notes.
He could see them, the tense, lean young Shadow standing on the edge of his dock, drawing on a cigarette—a Cubeb? a Murad?—and his grandfather in an open-necked white shirt leaning on his umbrella and Anton Goetz holding himself up on his cane, talking at the edge of the darkness outside the club. But he could hear their words no more than he could hear Ralph Redwing issuing orders to sweating Bill Spence.
Barbara Deane’s house was a small four-room cottage with ugly, dark brown wooden siding, two small windows on either side of the front door, and a massive TV antenna on the top of the peaked roof. She had planted rows of flowers on the edge of her small lot, and a thick bracelet of flowers, pansies, bluets, and lupines grew all around the house.
“Come on in,” she said. “This isn’t much like the clubhouse, I suppose, but I’m going to try to give you a good dinner anyhow.” She was wearing the black silk blouse, and the pearls were back in place. After a second he took in that she had put on lipstick and makeup. His loneliness recognized hers, and he saw also that Barbara Deane looked very good tonight—not as young as she had seemed in the first seconds of their initial meeting, but young in some internal way, like Kate Redwing, and naturally, instinctively elegant. Elegance had nothing to do with money, he thought, and then thought that she reminded him of the actress in Hud—Patricia Neal.
“I wish you could have seen this place before the burglars redesigned it,” she said, showing him into her living room. “I used to have a lot of things, but I’m learning to live without them.”
One of the things she was learning to live without was the television set that had occupied the empty stand beside the fireplace. Some high shelves stood empty too, for she had lost her mother’s antique crystal, and her record player was gone, but a new one was on order in the village; and her family’s silverware and china was gone too, so they would be using some cheap plates from the gas station—you got a free plate with every ten gallons of gas, wasn’t that odd?—and stainless steel utensils she had picked up in the village that afternoon because she couldn’t face making him use plastic knives and forks.
In spite of what she had lost, the little living room was bright and warm and comfortable, and he sat down on a worn sofa while she opened a bottle of wine, gave him a glass, and went in and out of the kitchen to check on dinner, asking him questions about school and his friends and life on the lake and Mill Walk.
He told her about the Friedrich Hasselgard scandal at the treasury, but did not mention any of his own conclusions and actions.
“And if that’s what they tell you,” she said, “then there’s a lot more they aren’t saying. Sometimes I think the only way to live on Mill Walk is to keep your eyes shut and go around like a blind person.”
In a little while she announced that dinner was ready, and told him to sit at the table, which had been set for two at the end of the living room, near the kitchen. Tom sat down on a metal folding chair—her good chairs had been stolen too—as she carried a steaming tray out of the kitchen, set it on the table, then went back for serving bowls and containers.
She had made delicate, marinated veal rolled and tied around mysterious fillings, wild rice, potatoes, steamed carrots, a fresh green salad, food enough for four. “Young men like to eat, and it gives me a chance to cook,” she said. The food was better than the club’s, and Tom told her so: after a few more bites, he told her it was one of the best meals he had ever eaten, and that was true too.