Mystery полностью

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.

“How did you meet my grandfather?” he asked her.