Mystery. Part 36

"How do you know about the machine shop? I haven't even mailed that letter yet."

Von Heilitz said nothing.

"How long have you been here? You didn't just get to Eagle Lake an hour ago, did you?"

"Did you think I'd send you into this lion's den alone?"

"You've been here the whole time? How did you get my letters?"

"Sometimes I went to the post office and picked them up, sometimes Joe Truehart brought them to me."

Tom nearly jumped off his chair. "That was you you I followed-that was you carrying the flashlight." I followed-that was you carrying the flashlight."

"You almost caught me too. I went to my lodge to pick up some things, and I don't see as well at night as I used to. Let's go, shall we? We ought to get back, and I do want to see more of you than that glimpse I had when you came creeping in. We have a lot to talk about."

"Where are we going?"

Von Heilitz stood up. "You'll see."

Tom watched the dark blur of the older man move toward him. His white hair shone in the moonlight. "That house in the clearing," Tom said. "Mrs. Truehart's cabin."

The tall shape before him tilted forward, and the white hair gleamed. Von Heilitz grasped his shoulders. "She probably wants to apologize to you too. She doesn't normally scare away visitors with a rifle, but I didn't want you to know I was there." He squeezed Tom's shoulders and straightened up.

Tom followed him into the study, and in the moonlight, von Heilitz turned and took him in, smiling. "I can't get over it," Tom said.

"You're what I can't get over," von Heilitz said. "You've done everything I hoped you would, and more. I didn't expect you to solve any burglaries while you were up here."

"I had a good teacher," Tom said, feeling his face get hot.

"More than that," the old man said. "Now open that door, will you?"

Tom unlocked the back door, and von Heilitz moved outside. Tom followed after him, and knelt to lock the door with the key again.

Von Heilitz placed his hand on Tom's shoulder, and left it there as Tom stood up. He did not remove it even when Tom turned to face him at last, and the two of them stood in the moonlight for a second, looking into each other's faces. Tom still felt the shock of pleasure and relief of seeing von Heilitz, and blurted, "I don't think Anton Goetz killed Jeanine Thielman."

Von Heilitz nodded, smiled, and patted Tom's shoulder before he lowered his hand. "I know."

"I thought-I guess I thought you might be angry or something. It was one of your most important cases-I know what it meant to you."

"It was my single biggest mistake. And that's that's what it means to me. Now you and I are going to put things right-after all this time. Let's go to Mrs. Truehart's, so we can talk about it." what it means to me. Now you and I are going to put things right-after all this time. Let's go to Mrs. Truehart's, so we can talk about it."

Von Heilitz jumped neatly off the dock and began moving toward the sh.o.r.eline. At Roddy Deepdale's, he led Tom across the gra.s.s toward the track. They cast identical long shadows in the moonlight. Neither of them spoke until they came to the opening of the path into the woods behind the Thielman lodge. Von Heilitz switched on his flashlight and said, "Tim Truehart arrested your friend Nappy, by the way," and plunged into the woods.

"He did?" Tom followed. "I didn't think Spychalla would give him the message."

"He might not have if Chet Hamilton hadn't been curious about why you were asking directions to Summers Street. He drove out there not long after you did, and got close enough to see Nappy stacking boxes outside the shop. He just turned his car around and went to the nearest phone. Spychalla couldn't ignore two calls."

"But what about Jerry?"

"Nappy is still claiming he did all the burglaries himself. He'll change his mind when it finally hits him that he'll serve a lot less jail time if he turns in his friends. Spychalla is looking for Jerry Hasek and Robbie Wintergreen, but so far he hasn't found them. This must be where you got lost the other night."

The flashlight shone upon smooth grey-brown tree trunks. He moved the beam slightly to the left, and the narrow path reappeared, wandering deeper into the woods. "It looks like it," Tom said.

"I was sorry to have to let that happen." Von Heilitz followed the bend in the path.

"So why did you?"

"I told you. Because I wanted you to do just what you have done."

"Find out that Barbara Deane killed Jeanine Thielman?"

The light stopped moving, and Tom nearly b.u.mped into the old man. Von Heilitz let out a loud, explosive laugh that sounded like "WHA-HAH!" He whirled around and shone the light on the middle of Tom's chest. Even in the darkness and with his face hidden behind the glare of the light, he looked as if he were suppressing more explosive laughter. "Excuse me, but what makes you think that?"

As irritated now as he had been relieved before, Tom said, "I looked into a box I found in her closet, and along with some old articles that almost accused her of murder, I found two anonymous notes. Jeanine Thielman wrote them."

"My G.o.d," von Heilitz said. "What did they say?"

"One said 'I know what you are, and you have to be stopped.' The other one said something like, 'This has gone on too long-you will pay for your sins.'"

"Extraordinary."

"I guess you don't think she killed Jeanine Thielman."

"Barbara Deane never killed anybody in her life," von Heilitz said. "Did you think that Barbara Deane also killed Anton Goetz? Hanged him with his own fishing line?"

"She could have done it. He might have been blackmailing her."

"And she just happened to be waiting in his lodge to make a payment when he arrived with the news that I had accused him of murder."

"Well," Tom said. "I guess that part was always a little shaky." He did not feel angry anymore-he was relieved not to have to think of Barbara Deane as a murderer. "But if she didn't do it, and Anton Goetz didn't do it, then who did?"

"You told me who killed them both," von Heilitz said.

"But you just said-"

"In your letters. Didn't I say you accomplished just what I hoped you would?" Von Heilitz lowered the flashlight, and Tom saw him smiling at him.

Something else is going on here, Tom thought. Something I don't get Something I don't get.

The detective turned around and began moving quickly down the path through the woods.

"Aren't you going to tell me?"

"In time."

Tom felt like screaming.

"There's something else I have to tell you first," von Heilitz said, still moving rapidly down the path.

Tom hurried after him.

Von Heilitz did not say another word until they had reached the clearing. Moonlight fell on the Truehart cabin, and washed the flowers of all their color. The old man turned off his flashlight as soon as Tom stepped off the path to the gra.s.s, and their shadows lay stark and elongated over the silvery ground. The whole world was black and grey and silver. Tom stepped toward him. Von Heilitz crossed his arms over his chest. All the fine lines in his face were deepened by the moonlight, and his forehead looked corrugated. He looked like a person Tom had never seen before, and Tom stopped moving, suddenly uncertain.

"I want so much to do this right," von Heilitz said. "If I botch this, you'll never forgive me, and neither will I."

Tom opened his mouth, but could not speak-a sudden deep strangeness stopped his tongue.

Von Heilitz looked down, trying to begin, and his forehead contorted even more alarmingly. When he spoke, what he asked astonished Tom.

"How do you get on with Victor Pasmore?"

The boy almost laughed. "I don't," he said. "Not really."

"Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know. He sort of hates me, I guess. We're too different."

"What would he say if he knew that you and I know each other?"

"He'd carry on, I guess-he warned me away from you." Tom felt the old man's mixture of tension and earnestness. "What is this all about?"

Von Heilitz looked at him, looked at the silvery gra.s.s, back up at Tom. "This is the part I have to do right." He took a deep breath. "I met a young woman in 1945. I was much older than she was, but she appealed to me a great deal-enormously. Something happened to me that I had thought would never happen. I started by being touched by her, and as I got to know her better, I began to love her. I felt that she needed me. We had to meet secretly, because her father hated me-I was the most unsuitable man she could have chosen, but she had had chosen me. In those days, I still traveled a great deal, but I started refusing cases so that I wouldn't have to leave her." chosen me. In those days, I still traveled a great deal, but I started refusing cases so that I wouldn't have to leave her."

"Are you saying-"

He shook his head and walked a few steps away and looked at the forest. "She became pregnant, and didn't tell me. I heard about a very exciting case, one that really intrigued me, and I took it. We decided to get married after I came back from the case, and to-to lessen the shock, we went out in public for a week. We attended a concert together, we went to a restaurant, we went to a party held by people who were not in our own circle, but who lived on another part of the island. It was such a relief to do things like that. When I left for my trip, I asked her to come with me, but she felt she had to stay at home to face her father. I thought she could do that. She had become much stronger, or so I thought. She wouldn't let me deal with her father, you see-she said there would be time for that when I came back."

He turned to face Tom again. "When I called her, her father wouldn't let me speak to her. I gave up the case and flew back to Mill Walk the next day, but they were gone. She had told her father everything-even that she was pregnant. Her father kept her away from Mill Walk, and in effect bought her a fiance on the mainland. She-she had collapsed. They came back to Mill Walk, and the marriage took place in days. Her father threatened to put her in a mental hospital if I ever saw her again. Two months after the marriage, she gave birth to a son. I suppose her father bribed the Registrar to issue a false marriage certificate. From that time on, Tom, I never accepted another job that would take me off the island. She belonged to her father again-probably she always belonged to her father. But I watched that boy. n.o.body would let me see him, but I watched him. I loved him."

"That's why you visited me in the hospital," Tom said. Feelings too strong to be recognized froze him to the moonlit gra.s.s. He felt as if his body were being pulled in different directions, as though ice and fire had been poured into his head.

"I love you," the old man said. "I'm very proud of you, and I love you, but I know I don't deserve your love. I'm a rotten father."

Tom stepped toward him, and von Heilitz somehow crossed the ground between them without seeming to move. The old man tentatively put his arms around Tom, and Tom stood rigid for a second. Then something broke inside him-a layer like a shelf of rock he had lived with all his life without ever recognizing-and he began to sob. The sob seemed to come from beneath the shelf of rock, from a place that had been untouched all his life. He put his arms around von Heilitz, and felt an unbelievable lightness and vividness of being, as if the world had come streaming into him.

"Well, at least I told you," the old man said. "Did I botch it?"

"Yeah, you talked too much," Tom said.

"I had a lot to say!"

Tom laughed, and tears ran down his face and dampened the shoulder of von Heilitz's coat. "I guess you did."

"It's going to take both of us a while to adjust to this," von Heilitz said. "And I want you to know that I think Victor Pasmore probably did his best-he certainly didn't want you to grow up like me. He tried to give you what he thought was a normal boyhood."

Tom pulled back and looked at the old man's face. It no longer looked masklike, but utterly familiar.

"He did a pretty good job, actually, given the circ.u.mstances. It couldn't have been easy for him."

The world had changed completely while remaining the same: the difference was that now he could understand, or at least begin to understand, details of his life that had been inexplicable except as proof of his oddness and unsuitability.

"Oh, if you think you you made a botch of it-" Tom said. made a botch of it-" Tom said.

"Let's go inside," von Heilitz said.

Less than an hour later Tom was back in the lodge alone, waiting. When Lamont von Heilitz had learned that Tom wanted to return to the lodge to meet Sarah Spence, he had reluctantly let him go, with the promise that he would be waiting outside at one. Mrs. Truehart had gone to bed, and he and the old man had talked in soft voices about themselves, reliving their history. The conversation about Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz would have to wait, von Heilitz said, there were too many details to iron out, too many pieces of information to dovetail-there was a lot of it he still did not understand, and understanding would take more time than they had. "We have at least five hours in the air," he told Tom. "Tim Truehart is flying us to Minneapolis, where we get our plane to Mill Walk. There'll be time. When we land at David Redwing field, we should have everything worked out."

"Just tell me the name," Tom had pleaded.

Von Heilitz smiled and walked him to the door. "I want you you to tell to tell me me the name." the name."

So, too restless to sit down, too nervous about Jerry Hasek to turn on any lights, Tom waited for Sarah, hoping that she had not already tried to find him at the lodge. In the end, he slipped outside and waited behind an oak tree set back from the track between her lodge and his.

He heard the sound of her feet landing softly on the beaten earth, but did not come out from behind the tree until he saw her white shirt glimmer in the darkness. Her face and arms, already tanned, looked very dark against the shirt and the darker blond of her hair. She was walking quickly, and by the time he stepped out on the track she was nearly abreast of him.

"Oh!"

"It's me," he said softly.

"You scared me." She came nearer, seeming to sift through the darkness, and touched the front of his shirt.

"You scared me too. I wasn't sure you were coming."

"My double life takes up a lot of time-I had to go to the White Bear with Buddy and watch him get drunk."

Tom remembered Buddy rubbing her back, and her own hand resting on Buddy's. "I wish you didn't have to have this double life of yours."

She stepped closer to him. "You seem so jumpy. Is it about me, or this afternoon? You shouldn't be insecure about me, Tom, and I think Jerry and his friends ran off. Ralph couldn't find them after dinner."

"Nappy got arrested," Tom said. "Maybe they did take off. But it probably isn't that. I'm going back to Mill Walk tonight. A lot of stuff is happening, and I just found out-well, I just learned something very important about myself. I feel kind of overloaded."

"Tonight? How soon tonight?"

"In about an hour."

She looked at him steadily. "Then let's go inside."

She put her arm around his waist, and together they began walking toward the almost invisible lodge. "How are you getting back? There aren't any planes at night."

"We're going to Minneapolis," he said.

"We?"

"Me and someone else. The Chief of Police has a little plane, and he's taking us there."

She tilted her head and looked up at him as they walked along.