Free The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith Page B

on the Alster—Reeves’s apartment specifically—had been bombed once. “For yourself?” asked Reeves.
    “No, someone younger. Not over twenty-one, Reeves, so not an old well-used passport. Can you do that?— You’ll hear from me.”
    Tom hung up and went downstairs again. Raspberry ice had been served. “Sorry,” Tom said. “Nothing important.” He noticed that Frank looked better, that some color had returned to his face.
    “Who was that?” Heloise asked.
    Seldom did she ask him who rang, and Tom knew she mistrusted Reeves Minot, or at least didn’t much like him, but Tom said, “Reeves from Hamburg.”
    “He’s going to come here?”
    “Oh, no, just wanted to say hello,” Tom replied. “Want coffee, Billy?”
    “No, thank you.”
    Heloise did not usually take coffee at lunch, and she didn’t now. Tom said that Billy wanted to look at his Jane’s Fighting Ships books, so the three left the table, and Tom and the boy went up to Tom’s room.
    “Damned annoying phone call,” Tom said. “Friend of mine in Hamburg wants me to put up a friend of his tomorrow night. Just for the night. I couldn’t say no, because he’s very helpful—Reeves.”
    Frank nodded. “Would you like me to go to a hotel or something—near here?—Or just go ?”
    Tom shook his head. He was lying on his bed, propped on an elbow. “I’ll give him your room, you’ll take mine—and I’ll sleep in Heloise’s room. So this room will remain closed and—I’ll tell our guest we’re fumigating the carpenter ants and the door can’t be opened.” Tom laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure he’ll leave Monday morning. I’ve had overnight guests of Reeves’s before.”
    Frank had sat down on the wooden chair that Tom used at his desk. “Is the fellow coming one of your—interesting friends?”
    Tom smiled. “The fellow coming is a stranger.” Reeves was one of his interesting friends. Maybe Frank had seen Reeves Minot’s name in newspapers too. Tom wasn’t going to ask. “Now,” Tom said quietly, “your situation.” Tom waited, noting the boy’s uneasiness, the frown. Tom felt uneasy also, and deliberately pushed off his shoes and swung his feet up on the bed, pulled a pillow under his head. “By the way, I thought you did very well at lunch.”
    Frank glanced at Tom, but his expression did not change. “You asked me before,” the boy said softly, “and I told you. You’re the only person who knows.”
    “We shall keep it that way. Don’t confess to anyone—ever. Now tell me—what time of day did you do it?”
    “Around seven, eight.” The boy’s voice cracked. “My father always watched the sunset—nearly every evening in summer. I hadn’t—”
    Here there was a long pause.
    “I absolutely had not planned to do it. I was not even very angry, not angry at all. Later—even the next day, I couldn’t believe I’d done it—somehow.”
    “I believe you,” Tom said.
    “I didn’t usually walk out with my father for those sunsets. In fact I think he liked to be alone there, but that day he asked me to come with him. He’d just been talking with me about my doing pretty well in school, and how Harvard Business School would come soon and how easy it—well, the usual. He even tried to say a nice word about Teresa, because he knew I—that Ilike her. But up to then, no . He’d been stuffy about Teresa coming to the house—twice only she was there—and saying it was stupid to be in love at sixteen, get married early or something, even though I never said a word about getting married, never even asked Teresa ! She’d laugh! Anyway, I suppose I suddenly had it that day. The phoniness, the all-round phoniness, everywhere I looked.”
    Tom started to say something, and the boy nervously interrupted.
    “The two times Teresa did come to the Maine house, my father was a bit rude to her. Unfriendly, you know? Just because she’s pretty, maybe, and my dad knows she’s popular. Knew. You’d have