Generally, one was taller than average, blond, blue-eyed. Generally one had perfect teeth. (The Redwings themselves, however, tended to be short, dark, and rather heavyset, and to have wide spaces between their teeth.)
One branch of the Redwing family attempted to install fox hunting—“riding to hounds”—as a regular part of island life, but due to the absence of native foxes and the unfailing ability of the native cats and ferrets to evade the panting, heat-stricken imported hounds, the custom swiftly degenerated to regular annual participation at the Hunt Ball, with the local males dressed in black boots and pink hacking jackets. As the nature of this attempt at an instant tradition might indicate, Mill Walk society was reflexively Anglophile in its tastes, drawn to chintz and floral patterns, conservative clothing, leather furniture, wood paneling, small dogs, formal dinners, the consumption of game birds, “eloquent” portraits of family pets, indifference to intellectual matters, cheerful philistinism, habitual assumption of moral superiority, and the like. Also Anglophile, perhaps, was the assumption that the civilized world—the world that mattered—by no means included all of Mill Walk, but only the far east end where the Redwings, their relatives, friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on lived, and, though this was debatable, Elm Cove, which lay to the western end of Glen Hollow Golf Club. Other outposts of the civilized world were: Bermuda, Mustique, Charleston, particular sections of Brazil and Venezuela—especially “Tranquility,” the Redwing hideaway there—certain areas of Richmond, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and London, Eagle Lake, the Scottish highlands, and the Redwing hunting lodge in Alaska. One might go anywhere in the world, certainly, but there was surely no real need to go anywhere but to these places, which between them made up the map of all that was desirable to a right-minded person.
To a reliable person, one could say.
Tom became interested in Mill Walk’s few murders, and kept a scrapbook of clippings from the Eyewitness that concerned them. He did not know why he was interested in these murders, but every one of them left behind, on a hillside or in a room, a prematurely dispossessed body, a body that would otherwise be filled with life.
Gloria was distressed when she discovered this scrapbook, which was of ordinary, even mundane appearance, with its dark board covers that resembled leather and large stiff yellow pages—part of her distress was the contrast between the homely scrapbook, suggestive of matchbook collections and photographs from summer camp, and the headlines that jumped from its pages: BODY DISCOVERED IN TRUNK. SISTER OF FINANCE MINISTER MURDERED IN ROBBERY ATTEMPT. She considered removing the scrapbook from his room and confronting him with it, but almost immediately decided to pretend that she had not seen it. The scrapbook was merely one of a thousand things that distressed, alarmed, or upset Gloria.
Most of Mill Walk’s murders were as ordinary as the scrapbook into which Tom glued their newspaper renderings. A pig farmer was hit in the head with a brick and dumped, to be trampled and half-devoured by his livestock, into a pen beside his barn. BRUTAL MURDER OF CENTRAL PLAINS FARMER, said the Eyewitness. Two days later, the newspaper reported SISTER OF FARMER CONFESSES: Says He Told Me He Would Marry, I Had To Leave Family Farm. A bartender in the old slave quarter was killed during a robbery. One brother killed another on Christmas Eve: SANTA CLAUS DISPUTE LEADS TO DEATH. After a native woman was found stabbed to death in a Mogrom Street hovel, SON MURDERED MOTHER FOR MONEY IN MATTRESS—MORE THAN $300,000!
Gloria eventually decided to seek reassurance from a sympathetic source.
Tom’s English teacher at Brooks-Lowood, Dennis Handley, Mr. Handley, or “Handles” to the boys, had come to Mill Walk from Brown University, looking for sun, enough money to live reasonably well, a picturesque apartment overlooking the water, and a life reasonably free of stress. Since he enjoyed teaching, had spent the happiest years of his life at a draconian prep school in New Hampshire, was of an even-tempered, friendly nature, and had virtually no sexual desires whatsoever, Dennis Handley had enjoyed his life on Mill Walk from the first. He had found that apartments on the water were beyond his price range, but almost everything else about his life in the tropics suited him.
When Gloria Pasmore told him about the scrapbook, he agreed to have a talk with the boy. He did not know exactly why, but the scrapbook sounded wrong. He thought it might be a sourcebook for future stories, but the whole tone of the thing disturbed him—too morbid, too twisted and obsessive. Surely Tom Pasmore was not thinking of writing crime novels? Detective novels? Not good enough, he said to himself, and told Gloria, who seemed to have gone perhaps two drinks over her limit, that he would find out what he could.
Some time ago Dennis Handley had mentioned to Tom that he had begun collecting rare editions of certain authors while at Brown—Graham Greene, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, primarily—and that Tom might come to look at these books any time he liked. On the Friday after his conversation with Gloria Pasmore, Dennis asked Tom if he would be free after school to look over his books and see if he’d like to borrow anything. He offered to drive him to his apartment and bring him back home afterward. Tom happily agreed.
They met outside Dennis’s classroom after the end of school and in a crowd of rushing boys walked down the wide wooden stairs past a window with a stained glass replica of the school’s circular seal. Because he was a popular teacher, many of the boys stopped to speak to Dennis or to wish him a good weekend, but few even said as much as hello to Tom. They scarcely looked at him. Except for the healthy glow of his skin, Tom was not a particularly handsome boy, but he was six-four. His hair was the same rough silky-looking blond as his mother’s, and his shoulders stuck out impressively, a real rack of muscle and bone under his rumpled tweed jacket. (At this stage of his life, Tom Pasmore never gave the impression of caring about, or even much noticing, what clothes he had happened to put on that morning.) At first glance, he looked like an unusually youthful college professor. The other boys acted as though he were invisible, a neutral space. They stood suspended on the stairs for a moment as the departing boys swirled about them, and as Dennis Handley talked to Will Thielman about the weekend’s homework, he glanced at Tom, slouched in the murky green-and-red light streaming through the colored glass. The teacher saw how thoroughly Tom allowed himself to be effaced, as if he had learned how to melt away into the crowd—all the students poured downstairs through the dim light and the shadows, but Tom Pasmore alone seemed on the verge of disappearance. This notion gave Dennis Handley, above all a creature of sociability, of good humor and gossip, an unpleasant twinge.