Murder on High (12 page)

Charlotte could see why Pyle thought he would have made a good priest. He had an air of gravity that men of the cloth often exhibited, as if they navigated the difficult passages of life in a ship with a deeper keel than that of ordinary men.

“That means that some of these trees are a hundred and seventy years old,” said Tracey, looking up at a giant white pine with deeply fissured bark.

“At least. There are some, like the one you’re looking at, that were skipped over when this stand was logged, and are probably two hundred years old. They logged differently then: it was one man, one horse, one ax; everything didn’t get cut the way it does today.”

“How long will a tree like this live?” asked Tracey.

“Eastern white pine will live to three hundred years or more, so that tree still has a century or more to go.” He nodded at a nearby hemlock. “That hemlock is probably over two hundred years old. You can tell an old hemlock because the bark turns that cinnamon color.”

“I understand that you manage this woodlot,” said Tracey.

“Yeah,” Samusit said. “Not that a woodlot this old requires much management.” He looked around at the big old trees. “Occasionally a tree dies, and I cut it down. That’s about it, except for thinning out the underbrush from time to time to give the new growth a chance.”

“What about the limbing up?” said Tracey, nodding at the hatchet Samusit still held in his hand.

The Indian looked down at the hatchet as if he had forgotten it was there. “The limbing up really isn’t necessary. I do it because I find it relaxing. I came here today because of Iris.” Setting the hatchet down, he took a seat on a fallen log and rubbed his temples with his fingers. “What a shock,” he said.

“How long had you known Mrs. Richards?” asked Tracey.

“Six or seven years. I first came here when I was a forestry student. She used to let the forestry professors bring the students here to see what an old-growth forest looked like. I noticed that the woodlot needed some work, and asked her for the job.”

“And she hired you just like that?”

“Well, not just like that. She only hired me after she found out I was descended from the Indian guide who accompanied Thoreau on his trip to Chesuncook. He was my great-great-granduncle. I thought it was a dumb reason for hiring someone, but she liked the idea of the connection.”

“And you became friends,” prompted Tracey.

Samusit nodded. “I’m the tribe forester now, so I don’t really need this job. But I’ve kept on doing it as a favor to Iris, and also because I like it in here.” He looked again at the tall trees around him.

“I have to ask this next question of everyone who was close to her,” said Tracey. “Where were you on the day she was killed?”

“I understand,” Samusit said. “Though I had no reason to kill Iris. She was … well, I guess you could say she was like a mother to me.” He fixed Tracey with a level gaze. “In answer to your question, I was cruising.”

“On the coast somewhere?” asked Tracey.

“No,” he said with a smile. “On fee land up by Katahdin. I should have said
timber
cruising, as opposed to sailboat cruising.”

Charlotte had always been struck by the fact that inland Maine and coastal Maine were like two different states, one drawing its identity from the woods, the other from the sea. In this case, the same word had different meanings in the two cultures.

Samusit explained. “Surveying the timberland for prospective cuts. Inventorying sample stands. I’d been away for a week. When I came back, I found out that Iris was dead.”

“Were you by yourself?” asked Tracey.

He nodded. “But my girlfriend could confirm when I left and when I returned. Her name is Didias Thomas, and she lives with me on Indian Island.” He gave Tracey the address and telephone number.

“I heard that you’re associated with a retreat center on fee land up by Katahdin,” said Tracey, leading up to the Pamola issue.

“I’m associated with the Katahdin Retreat Center,” he replied. “Everybody thinks it’s on fee land, but it’s not. It abuts fee land, but the land is actually privately owned by a foundation, the Katahdin Foundation.”

“Who controls the foundation?”

“That question would be better put in the past tense,” said Samusit. “The answer is, or was, Iris Richards. She was the founder and the chairman of the board, and it was her money that paid for the land and the building.”

Then it was also her foundation that made the money, Charlotte thought.

Tracey looked as astonished as the fisherman whose aimless trolling has netted him a big one. Charlotte could almost see his brain analyzing the question of what this meant to the case.

For one thing, she reflected, it opened up the possibility that the Pamola business wasn’t just malicious mischief perpetrated by some disaffected tribesman, but part of a deliberate campaign to harass, and possibly even kill, Iris.

“Now, why would Mrs. Richards have founded a retreat center for the Penobscot Indians?” Tracey asked.

“I had an uncle who always said, ‘You can take the woods away from a Penobscot, but you can’t take it out of him.’ The woods are a part of our collective soul; we need the woods, we need Katahdin, and we need the Penobscot River. That’s what the retreat center’s for. But in answer to your question, the retreat center isn’t just for the Indians. Though it’s been the Indians who’ve used it the most. It’s for anyone who’s interested in the vision quest: Native Americans, whites, Thoreauvians.”

“I’m listening,” said Tracey.

“Do you know what a vision quest is?” he asked.

“I have a rough idea,” said Tracey.

“Iris had a theory that the vision quest is expressive of a basic human need to reconnect with the wilderness, and through that connection to explore the wilderness that lies within our souls. She believed that this need expresses itself in various ways in every culture.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” said Tracey, who was writing it all down.

“For instance, Iris saw Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond in terms of a vision quest: a time of living simply, away from the demands of daily life in order to get in touch with one’s deeper self. Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness was a vision quest; Iris’ own annual pilgrimage to Katahdin …”

“I see,” said Tracey, nodding.

“She even wrote an article about it for
The Pumpkin Paper
, in which she talked about how the erosion of the wilderness is affecting this need. That’s why she founded the Center.”

“‘In wildness is the preservation of the world,’” said Charlotte, quoting a well-known line from Thoreau.

“Exactly,” said Keith. “In fact, that’s the Center’s motto.”

“Speaking of vision questers …” said Tracey.

At last, Charlotte thought.

Tracey continued. “One of the park rangers told us that a man dressed up as Pamola appeared to a vision quester at the retreat center earlier this month. It was his theory that the man was an Indian who was trying to scare off the white vision questers. I’m interested in what you think.”

“He may be right,” Samusit replied. “There’s a lot of opposition to the Center from Penobscots who don’t want to see whites participating in Indian rituals, but there’s a lot of sentiment the other way too. Many of our people realize that if we don’t share our medicine, we’ll lose it.”

“Do you think it might be someone who’s angry about what they perceive as the exploitation of Indian culture?” asked Tracey.

Samusit’s dark brown eyes suddenly turned fiery. “Exploitation!” he spat. “If you’re talking about exploitation, let’s talk about opening up tribal lands to gambling. If high stakes Bingo in what’s supposed to be the tribe’s recreational facility isn’t exploitation, I don’t know what is.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Tracey softly.

“Right,” said Samusit. “You wouldn’t. Sorry.”

“Do you have any idea who might be doing this?” Tracey asked again.

He shook his head, and looked down at the unfurled ferns that were pushing up through the mat of pine needles at his feet.

Charlotte had the feeling that he was lying.

“Did you know that this person dressed up as Pamola appeared to Iris at the Chimney Pond campsite on the night before she was murdered?” Tracey said.

Samusit’s head jerked up in surprise.

Tracey went on. “If what you say about tribal resentment is true, she would have been a natural target. It’s because of her that a lot of people—white people, that is—have been drawn to the retreat center, right?”

Samusit nodded. “Do you think there’s a connection?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It could have been a coincidence. But it also could have been a personal vendetta. All I know is that the Pamola prankster is our only suspect at the moment.” Tracey pulled out a card and handed it to Samusit. “If you hear anything more, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know.”

Samusit tucked the card into his breast pocket, but Charlotte doubted that Tracey would be hearing from him. Despite his apparent openness to whites, he was still an Indian, and every Indian she had ever known (which was a fair number, given the Westerns she had done), had no use for white police.

The tall trunks of the trees were casting long shadows on the forest floor, and the stray shafts of sun that pierced the forest canopy were turning the hairs on the moss a golden yellow. It was getting late.

Tracey checked his watch. “Well, I guess we’d better get going,” he said. They said goodbye, and turned back toward the house.

7

It at first seemed odd to Charlotte that of the half dozen people to whom Iris had been close, three of them—Jeanne Ouellette, Keith Samusit, and Mack Scott—had been on or in the vicinity of the mountain on the day she was killed. Thinking about it again, however, as she and Tracey headed back out of the woods, she decided that it wasn’t so odd after all. Iris had apparently been something of a mentor to both Keith and Mack, and Charlotte supposed that their interest in the mountain had grown out of Iris’ own. This was confirmed, at least as far as Keith was concerned, in further conversation with Jeanne, who was still labeling the trilliums when they emerged from the woods. She talked readily about Keith’s relationship with Iris, but with the same tinge of hostility that Charlotte had noticed earlier. Because of Iris’ deep interest in Indian culture—one of the offshoots of her devotion to Thoreau—she had served as cheerleader, sounding board, and ultimately financial backer in Keith’s mission to revive Penobscot culture, and in particular, the tribe’s spiritual heritage. Under Keith’s leadership, the tribe had formed a men’s drumming circle, one of whose goals was to revive forgotten Penobscot sacred music, a lot of which had been written down by nineteenth-century ethnologists; had revived a lapsed tradition of holding an annual Indian pageant for the performance of traditional Penobscot dances; and had launched the tradition of the annual Sacred Run to Katahdin. A retreat center for the practice of Native American religion at Katahdin, and in particular for the enactment of the pan-Indian vision quest ceremony, had been Keith’s dream, and he had worked for years to bring it to fruition.

One thing was certain about the case, Charlotte thought as she and Tracey headed back to the car: the central role in the drama was not a person, but a mountain. She was reminded of what Thoreau had written in his journal about the mountain in a recurring dream of his. In his dream, he was always climbing this mountain, which was situated on the outskirts of Concord where no mountain in fact existed. His climb started out through a dark wood and then proceeded along a rocky ridge studded with stunted trees before finally emerging onto the bare and trackless rocks of the summit, which floated in the clouds. A perfectly shaped Katahdin had insinuated itself into Charlotte’s imagination in a similar manner. She was sure that before this case was over, she would make her own pilgrimage to the sacred mountain, and she was eager to see how the reality squared with the mountain of her imagination.

“Where to now, Chief?” she asked as they got back into the car.

“Well,” said Tracey, “I figure we might as well take a ride over to see Ellsworth Partridge. As long as we’re here in Old Town. That is, if you’re not in a hurry to get back.” He checked his watch. “It’s four twenty. He should still be at his office.”

“Let’s go,” she said.

“I thought I might ask him who Mrs. Richards’ heirs are.”

“Ah,” said Charlotte. “I was wondering when you were going to get around to asking Jeanne that question.”

“Well, I figured she’d get around to it herself in one way or another, which she did, by mentioning that it was Ellsworth who handled Mrs. Richards’ affairs. I figured that rather than asking Jeanne, we’d just go directly to the horse’s mouth. Better to be indirect.”

In Maine, it was always better to be indirect.

“I gather he’s not in the state Senate anymore,” Charlotte said.

Tracey shook his head. “He was always trying to bring the opposing sides together. He had an unusual attitude for a politician: he couldn’t stand discord. Which I suppose explains why he’s not in public office anymore.”

“Unusual for a lawyer, too,” said Charlotte.

“Not in a small town,” said Tracey. “Not if you want to keep the respect of the community. Which Ellsworth Partridge has succeeded admirably in doing, as did his father before him.”

The offices of Partridge & Partridge were located in the three-block section of Main Street that comprised Old Town’s business district. The first floor of the three-story brick building had been given a façade of wood paneling and a fake mansard overhang to create the illusion of modernity, but it wasn’t fooling anybody. Like almost everything else in town, it looked as if it dated from Old Town’s heyday in the mid-nineteenth century when it was a center of the sawmill industry. A pleasant receptionist ushered them into an inner office where they were greeted by a thin, bent-over man with wavy black hair and a hunter-green bow tie that emphasized his prominent Adam’s apple. He also had a jutting chin and prominent nose that gave him, along with his stooped posture and brown tweed suit, a birdlike appearance that corresponded to his name, as if he were half-poised to start pecking at a kernel on the ground. A diploma on the wall indicated that he had been graduated
summa cum laude
from Harvard Law School. He probably could have gotten a job at any of the top, big city law firms. Instead he had elected to return to the small town that he had come from, to practice law in his father’s firm and to serve in public office. No wonder people respected him.