Murder on High (15 page)

Tracey looked at him skeptically. “Makes it kind of hard to keep an appointment, especially when you’re meeting on a mountaintop.”

Mack shrugged his broad shoulders. “It wasn’t a formal thing. If we happened to bump into one another at Thoreau Spring, we’d have lunch; if not,
c’est la vie
.” He considered a liquor bottle for a minute, and then tossed it to one side. “Too cruddy,” he said.

“They don’t accept the dirty ones?” asked Charlotte.

He shook his head. “I save them up. When I get a bunch together, I take them down to the river and rinse them out.”

“What then?” asked Tracey, who was not to be distracted.

Charlotte had noticed a change in his interrogation style since he had joined the state police. He still took a while to get to the point, but once he got there, he stuck with it.

“We ate our lunches, looked at some
Diapensia
colonies. Then we just sat in the sun by the Spring for a while, watching the fog roll in over the Klondike. That’s the bowl between Katahdin and the Katahdinauguoh Range.”

“How long were you there?” asked Tracey.

“About forty-five minutes, I’d say. When the fog finally got to us, Iris went her way, and I went mine.”

“Her way being to Baxter Peak?”

Mack nodded again.

“Which would have put her on Baxter Peak around one-thirty.”

“That sounds about right,” said Mack. “It’s only a mile from the Spring to Baxter Peak, but since it’s all uphill, I’d estimate it would take at least half an hour, and probably a little longer for someone Iris’ age.”

Tracey looked out at the locomotive, which was beginning to rev its engine. “If we assume that she set out on the Knife Edge right away, which I think we can, since she had already eaten, then we can figure she was killed between two and two-thirty.”

“Does that square with what Clough told you?” Charlotte asked.

“Ayuh,” Tracey replied. “He estimated the time of death to be between twenty-nine and thirty-four hours prior to when he examined the body.”

For a moment, conversation ceased as they watched the engine pull out at the head of a string of boxcars. The train was like a sliding curtain, which, once it had been pulled aside, revealed a panorama of the wide green river, still swollen by spring runoff.

Finally Tracey looked back at Mack. “And what was your way?”

Mack tossed a couple of cans onto the Budweiser pile, then leaned back in his chair. “My way was back down. The same way I had come up, via the Abol Trail.”

“You didn’t go to the top?” asked Tracey.

Mack shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Thoreau didn’t make it to the top, and I was following in his footsteps. I wanted to do it just the way he had. Actually, he didn’t even make it to Thoreau Spring, but I made an exception to meet Iris.”

“Did Iris mention meeting anyone on the trail?”

Mack stared out at a pile of scrap metal next to the tracks, thinking. “Now that you mention it, she did. She told me that she’d gotten into an argument with some guy over the
Diapensia
.”

Tracey’s interest was piqued. “What kind of an argument?”

“He had been stomping on it, and apparently she gave him what for. Iris had a temper. She said he was a member of some club. What was it? The High something.” Bending over, he picked up a bottle of Jim Beam. “They climb the highest mountain in every state.”

“You mean, they collect mountains?” asked Charlotte.

He tossed the bottle onto the fifteen-cent pile. “Yeah. Of course, Iris went on about that too. The Highpointers—that was it.”

Tracey wrote down the information. “And how about you?” he asked. “Did you meet anyone else on the trail? Or see anything unusual?”

Mack shook his head. “Of course I saw other people on the trail,” he replied. “But nobody who stands out in my mind.”

“Jeanne told us that there was a man hiking just ahead of her and Iris on the Saddle Slide who was wearing an orange windbreaker. You didn’t see him by any chance, did you?”

Mack thought for a moment, and then shook his head.

“From what Jeanne says, you were one of Iris’ best friends,” Tracey continued, suddenly shifting the direction of the questioning.

“I guess you could say that, but that’s not saying much,” Mack replied. “She wasn’t very good at friendship. She was like Thoreau in that respect; she held people to such high standards that few could measure up.”

“And you measured up?” asked Tracey.

Mack leaned back in the lawn chair and shook his head. “No. She only accepted me because I was beyond the pale.” He smiled. “As far as she was concerned, there was no point in even attempting to apply any civilized standards to me. Just a bum, you know.”

“But she was good friends with Jeanne,” offered Tracey.

Mack shrugged. “She liked to think that Jeanne was her best friend. But Jeanne’s loyalty to Iris wasn’t based on friendship.”

“Why not?”

“Iris took advantage of Jeanne. Bullied her, if you ask me. Do this, do that. Jeanne waited on her hand and foot. Every day, from dawn to dusk. She never had a moment to herself. But she did it all, uncomplainingly.”

“Why?” asked Tracey.

“Security,” he replied simply. “She grew up right here on South Water Street.” He nodded down the street at the forlorn row of run-down houses overlooking the tracks. “As you can see for yourselves, it ain’t exactly the Garden District.”

“The wrong side of the tracks,” said Tracey.

“Sort of.” He smiled again. “Since the river’s on the other side, there isn’t really a right side. Anyway, there were seven children in a teeny-tiny little matchbox of a house, and not a pot to piss in. Working for Iris, she got to live in the nicest house in town.”

“Did she know that she stood to inherit it?” Having found a ready source of information, Tracey was milking it for all it was worth.

“Sure. She not only knew, she was counting on it.”

“And how did Jeanne feel about Iris’ relationship with Keith Samusit?”

“That’s a good question. To put it in a single word: threatened. She was afraid that Keith was going to supplant her in Iris’ affections.”

“Did she have reason to feel that way?”

“Sure did. There were some people who thought their relationship was”—he paused to search for the right word—“unnatural. I don’t think there was anything unnatural about it. It was simply that of a lonely old woman and a young man who made her feel youthful again.”

“Youthful, in what way?”

“There was a sexual element, but only in a minor way. She was always more”—he hesitated—“I wouldn’t say flirtatious because it’s a word that wouldn’t apply to Iris—but she was definitely more
lively
when he was around. But it was really more of an intellectual thing. They shared this feeling for the importance of the vision quest, and they shared the retreat center.”

“Jeanne felt excluded.”

“She
was
excluded. As Keith and Iris became closer, Keith started taking over a lot of the jobs that Jeanne used to do. Running Iris’ errands, answering her mail, getting involved in her business and personal affairs. A lot of this was ostensibly in connection with the retreat center, but the net effect was to push Jeanne out.”

“I can see why she wouldn’t like him,” Charlotte commented.

“It went further than that,” he said. “She was worried that Iris would leave him Hilltop Farm.”

Charlotte’s jaw dropped.

“You mean change her will?” Tracey said.

He nodded. “I don’t know if she would have carried through. It would have been a terrible insult to Jeanne. But she had talked about it.”

So the distrust of Keith that Charlotte had picked up on in their conversation with Jeanne hadn’t been just in her imagination.

“Do you know about the Indian land-claims settlement act?” Mack asked.

Tracey nodded.

“Then you know the Penobscots claim to have been defrauded of hundreds of thousands of acres, including most of Old Town. Of course they were compensated by the settlement act, but Iris sometimes spoke idealistically of giving Hamlin’s Woods back to the tribe.”

The mention of Hamlin’s Woods reminded Charlotte of the black fly attack. The bites on her ankles had now swelled into painful, itching red welts. She bent over to scratch, but it did little to help.

“Like Thoreau, she was an advocate of the Indians,” Mack continued. “She felt it would be fitting for one of the region’s oldest stands of forest to be returned to the tribe. But even if she had carried through, Jeanne needn’t have worried. Iris would have changed her mind again.”

“She was fickle, you mean?” asked Charlotte.

“Not so much fickle as hard to get along with. She’d have a disagreement with someone, and that was that.” He drew his forefinger across his neck in a slicing motion. “She’d never have anything to do with them again.”

“That didn’t seem to be the case with Miss Ouellette,” said Tracey.

“Jeanne was the exception. Which is why I said she needn’t have worried. She always managed to grovel herself back into Iris’ good graces. But there weren’t many people willing to demean themselves to the extent that she was.”

“Iris must have had enemies, then.”

“By the dozens. There was hardly anybody in town she hadn’t pissed off at one time or another. She was always spoiling for a fight. It was as if she didn’t feel fully alive unless she had a windmill to tilt at.”

“Any of them have any knowledge of crossbows?” asked Tracey.

“That I can’t help you with,” Mack said as he continued to sort the bottles and cans. The original pile, now reduced by almost half, was surrounded by half a dozen satellite piles. “Any suspects yet?”

Tracey shook his head. After a few more minutes of conversation, he thanked Mack for his help and they left.

“It takes all kinds,” Tracey said, as they headed back to the car.

On their way back to Bridge Harbor, Charlotte and Tracey congratulated themselves on how much progress they had made. When they started out, they hadn’t even known for sure if they had a case. (Tracey was still angry with Clough for having kept the state police in the dark.) But by late afternoon, they already had one major suspect and a couple of minor ones. Setting aside the minor suspects (the Pamola prankster, Keith Samusit, and the mysterious man in the orange windbreaker) for the time being, they concentrated on the major one, Jeanne Ouellette. Her presence on the mountain combined with the fact that Iris might have been planning to disinherit her put her in the Number One spot. She had lived at Hilltop Farm for thirty-three years; to lose it now would most certainly be a motive worth killing for. As a bonus, she would be getting rid of a bully of an employer. A pistol crossbow seemed like an unlikely choice of weapon for a woman, but she certainly appeared capable of using one. Charlotte remembered how easily she had hoisted the flat of heavy pots. Though she claimed to have been on Hamlin Peak at the time of the murder, she could easily have been lying. Tracey made a note to find out what she had been wearing, and to ask the other hikers who had signed out for Hamlin Peak if they had seen her. Though Jeanne said she hadn’t seen anyone, it would only take one other person to confirm her alibi. He also made a note to find out if she’d had any training in archery.

The first thing Charlotte did upon arriving back at her cottage was to put some calamine lotion on the black fly bites on her ankles. Then she fixed herself a Manhattan, sat down on one of the green Adirondack chairs on her deck, and looked out at dusk descending on the harbor. Though it was June twenty-first, many of the trees still weren’t fully leafed out, and she had a better view than she would have later on. But there wasn’t much to look at, at least as far as the harbor was concerned. The season in Bridge Harbor didn’t really get going until after the Fourth of July, and there were still fewer boats than usual at their moorings. Putting her feet up on the railing, she settled in to ponder the events of the day.

Iris’ connection with Ron Polito had led her reluctantly back to the subject she’d been trying to avoid by taking Tracey up on his invitation: her black years. Charlotte hadn’t been blacklisted, but she might as well have been. Iris had been put out of work because of her politics; Charlotte had been put out of work because of her age. There had been a couple of good roles, but that was it. The only parts that had come her way with any degree of regularity during that time had been TV parts, and there hadn’t even been many of those. Others might have taken solace at such a time in family, but she had no family. She had sacrificed everything to her career, and then her career had turned to ashes. She had eventually made a comeback, but it had been a lurching one. A series of small comebacks was more like it (a critic had once written that her career had been recycled more times than a soda pop bottle). Her black period had profoundly affected her self-confidence. She had always prided herself on her ability to cope with whatever hand life chose to deal her, and she had coped with her black years, but only barely. She supposed those years explained why she was such a glutton for work now. She had no standards: she would take anything. Friends often asked her why she wasn’t more discriminating. An actress of her stature could pick and choose, they said. They hadn’t sat around for ten years waiting for the phone to ring.

But at least she had still had a career, however diminished it might have been. What must it have been like for Iris? To be sitting on top of the world one minute—a job you love, lots of money, a sophisticated lifestyle—and the next minute, nothing. All because you refused to become a stool pigeon. She could see why it would drive someone to the woods.

She checked her watch: eight here, five in Hollywood. Finishing her drink, she went inside to call Ron Polito. As she had anticipated, he wasn’t available, but she left a message with his secretary, who promised he would return her call before the evening was out.

Iris wasn’t the only one who had been driven to the woods, Charlotte thought as she dressed for dinner. She, too, had sought refuge in nature. She had bought her cabin on the mountainside long after her black period had come to an end, but that experience had no doubt provided some of the motivation for wanting a retreat from the world. She had lived here now for seven summers, and had grown to love it with a passion. It had been built by an artist in the late nineteenth century out of native cedar, and she loved the way its mossy roof and hand-hewn siding blended into the mountainside as if it had always been there. Like Thoreau, she loved the solitude and the natural rhythms of the day, but she was far from the ascetic that he had been. A dinner of a baked potato and steamed string beans was not for her. She liked food, and a lot of it. The problem was that she had never learned to cook, at least to cook to her own satisfaction. Nor was there even much of a kitchen in her cabin, the reason being that the original owner had eaten his meals at the inn at the foot of the mountain. After dinner, he would make his way back up the mountain by lantern light, on a footpath he had carved out of the mountainside expressly for that purpose. He had taken his meals at the inn for sixty-five seasons, living well into his nineties. Charlotte hoped that she would do as well. When the real estate agent had told her the story of the artist, she was sold. The combination of rustic solitude and the promise of a five-course meal at the foot of the mountain was too good to pass up. And although there was now a road, Charlotte often took the path back up from the inn after dining, albeit with a flashlight instead of a lantern. The gracious old inn, with its guests who came back year after year—some of them old enough to make Charlotte feel like a youngster—was to Charlotte what the Emersons’ dining room had been for Thoreau, a refuge from the tyranny of too much solitude.