Murder on High (5 page)

Because of a bottle of rum found in her pack, park authorities had at first thought that Mrs. Richards was intoxicated, but Miss Ouellette explained that it was an annual ritual for her employer to make an offering to the Indian god Pamola by emptying the bottle on Pamola Peak. “Mrs. Richards had read about the Penobscot Indian practice of making an offering of rum to Pamola in the book
The Maine Woods
by Henry David Thoreau,” the article quoted Miss Ouellette as saying.

The article went on to say that Mrs. Richards was the president of the New England chapter of the American Thoreau Association and was founder and editor of a journal for followers of the American naturalist, entitled
The Pumpkin Paper
after a quotation from Thoreau’s
Walden
:

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

Reading this, Charlotte felt an odd kinship with the dead woman. She herself was a closet Thoreauvian, and had been a member of the American Thoreau Association for years, though she had never attended any of the meetings.

The investigation into why Mrs. Richards might have fallen off the Knife Edge was now centering on the state of her health, the article continued, quoting the park supervisor as saying that she might have been the victim of a heart attack or a stroke. The article concluded: “The results of the autopsy conducted by State Medical Examiner Henry Clough are expected to be presented to the Baxter State Park Authority at the hearing this afternoon.”

As she read this sentence, Charlotte suddenly had an intimation of why Tracey had asked her along. She was acquainted with Henry Clough as a result of the poisoning case. Though the murder rate in a rural state like Maine was only a fraction of that of any major city, Clough was nevertheless considered one of the country’s ablest medical examiners. He also had a taste for the limelight, as well as a reputation for surprises, on which he seldom failed to deliver.

“I’m beginning to get the picture,” Charlotte said as she refolded the paper and placed it on the seat between them.

Charlotte had originally met Tracey as the result of a best-selling book that had been written about her role in solving the murder of her co-star in a Broadway play. Tracey had read the book, which was called
Murder at the Morosco
, and, when he subsequently needed some help on the poisoning case, had called on her. Now she had the feeling that he was about to call on her again, though she had no idea what her connection with Iris Richards might be.

“Am I correct in assuming that there may be some doubt that Mrs. Richards’ death was an accident?” she asked.

“Let’s just say that some folks suspect otherwise.”

“Like Henry Clough?”

As long as Charlotte had lived in Maine (which was eight years now; she had bought her summer house shortly after the earlier murder), she never tired of driving Maine’s back roads. The roadside advertisements were a lesson in Yankee resourcefulness. The variety of goods that could be wheedled out of the harsh environment with the investment of only a pair of willing hands and a few basic tools was astonishing to her. Every farmstead seemed to offer something new, with the products often being displayed on stands at the roadside: jam, honey, maple syrup, pickles, relishes, pies, bread, lobster, crabmeat, canoes, picnic tables, Adirondack chairs, birdhouses, gliders, decoys, quilts, doghouses, lawn ornaments, moccasins, weather vanes. And that was to say nothing of the piles of broken and rusted junk billed as antiques that were displayed as part of the “yard sales” to which there seemed to be no conclusion as long as there was still some gullible tourist who was willing to shell out five dollars for an old horse collar that could be made into a picture frame, or a washboard that could be turned into a lamp. For the Maine native’s reputation for resourcefulness also extended to a talent for fleecing the out-of-staters of as much of their hard-earned cash as possible during the transitory run of the tourist season.

Charlotte also loved the rural roads of Maine for their beauty, which was all the more apparent on a spring morning like this one. The morning sun behind the soft mist bathed the landscape in a romantic wash, gilding the stalks of the field grasses and turning the bursting buds into glowing pearls.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a prettier spring than this one,” said Tracey, echoing her thoughts.

She agreed, though she found any Maine spring a spectacular event. Instead of a succession of bloom—daffodils, quinces, apples, lilacs, peonies—the blossoming period was compressed by the harsh climate, so that everything seemed to explode into bloom at the same time.

Just before the city of Bangor, they left the secondary highway and took the Interstate to Old Town, which was located about ten miles upriver.

Their destination was Hilltop Farm, which was the name of Mrs. Richards’ home as well as that of her business, a small wildflower nursery. After leaving the highway, they headed east on Stillwater Avenue, named after the Stillwater River, a tributary of the Penobscot, which they crossed just past a strip of gas stations and fast-food restaurants. Past a sign welcoming them to Old Town (Established 1840), the road took on the character of a village street, lined as it was with gracious old farmhouses.

At the top of the hill leading up from the river, they turned into a driveway bordered by an old stone fence onto a property that was concealed from the road by a dense stand of evergreens. Past the evergreens, the driveway opened up onto a field studded with enormous old trees, at the rear of which a rambling old farmhouse with steeply pitched gables stood against a background of towering pines. A small flock of sheep grazed in the field. In a morning filled with charming farmhouses, this was by far the most enchanting.

A blue state police cruiser was parked in front of the house, and Tracey pulled up behind it. The driver got out and came over to Tracey’s window. “Right on time,” the trooper said, checking his watch.

He was wearing a blue state-police uniform and the Mountie-type hat that had earned Maine state troopers the nickname “Royal boys” for their resemblance to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

“Ayuh,” said Tracey proudly, using the Maine substitute for the affirmative, which, in order to be pronounced authentically had to be uttered with a quick little inhalation of the breath.

Tracey obviously suffered none of the insecurities about his promptness that had so plagued Charlotte.

“Is this the lady?” asked the trooper as he removed his hat.

“Ayuh,” said Tracey again, with another little gasp. He nodded at Charlotte. “This is Miss Charlotte Graham,” he said. “Charlotte, this here is Trooper Douglas Pyle from the Orono barracks. He’s assisting me on this case.”

“I see,” said Charlotte. “It’s a case, then,” she added, raising an eyebrow in a skeptical expression that was one of her on-screen trademarks and, as she did so, mentally translating Tracey’s word “fell” to describe the nature of Mrs. Richards’ death to “was pushed” or possibly “was shot.”

Tracey grinned, his cheeks bulging. “I’m not saying anything,” he declared.

Charlotte reached across Tracey’s chest to shake Pyle’s hand. He was about thirty, with yellow-blond hair slicked back in the style of a movie star from her era, and a short, dark mustache.

“Good morning,” Charlotte said as the young police officer returned her handshake with a pleasant grin. “I’m not sure I know what I’m doing here, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.”

“Momentarily,” said Pyle. Coming around to her side of the car, he opened the door for her. “Right this way,” he said as Charlotte stepped out, leading her up a flower-lined flagstone path to the front door.

The door was answered by a woman in her fifties with wispy gray bangs, thick glasses, and a sallow complexion brightened by a slash of too-pink lipstick.

Charlotte studied her with interest. If, in fact, there was a case, this woman, who had been on the mountain with Mrs. Richards, was a prime witness, if not a suspect. She was tall—close to six feet—with strong, broad shoulders: a woman who was certainly capable of pushing someone off a mountain.

Tracey introduced the woman as Jeanne Ouellette, Mrs. Richards’ companion, but introduced Charlotte only as his nameless assistant, knowing how she preferred her anonymity.

Nonetheless, Charlotte had the sense that the woman seemed to know who she was, seemed in fact to be sizing her up. Though Jeanne Ouellette welcomed her visitors politely, Charlotte could sense an undercurrent of fear and worry under the veneer of hospitality. What was she worried about? Charlotte wondered.

Their hostess ushered them into a hall that was presided over by a bronze bust of a young man with an intense gaze and long, curling hair whom Charlotte recognized as the young Henry David Thoreau. She then led them down the hall past a dark-walled, low-ceilinged living room furnished with antiques whose surfaces gleamed in the sunshine that pooled onto the floor.

“This is a lovely home,” Charlotte said sincerely. Unlike many houses of this type, it wasn’t cluttered, but had the spare simplicity that came from plain walls, wood floors, and a few very good things.

“Thank you,” the companion responded with a smile. At the end of the hall, she paused in front of a low door concealed under the staircase opposite the kitchen, and turned to the police officers. “The library,” she said.

“What’s in there?” asked Charlotte.

Miss Ouellette cast a sidelong glance at the two men, and shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said, pushing her glasses nervously up over the bump on the ridge of her nose. “She never allowed me in there.”

“Are you ready?” Pyle asked Charlotte as he pulled a key out of his pocket. It was strung on a long, black, silken cord.

Charlotte threw up her hands in a gesture of bewilderment. “I wish I knew what it was that I was supposed to be ready for,” she said as the trooper inserted the key into the lock.

The door opened into a room with a low, beamed ceiling and a bank of windows overlooking the greenhouses at one side of the property. It was a comfortable room, with walls papered in green, and a worn and faded Oriental rug. A sofa occupied one end, and a wall of bookcases the other.

After the policemen and Charlotte entered, Pyle closed the door behind them, leaving Miss Ouellette out in the hallway.

Charlotte took in the overall effect, then shifted her attention to the details, like the well-tended tray of African violets on the coffee table and the row of photos in silver frames on the shelf under the window. The photographs were all portraits of a glamorous young woman.

Charlotte had been looking at them for several seconds before she realized with a start that they were photographs of her younger self.

“What!” she exclaimed in surprise.

It was like seeing a familiar face among the throng of shoppers in a mirror at a department store, and then realizing that it’s your own. Other photographs of Charlotte as a young woman hung on the walls. The walls were covered; there were literally dozens of them.

For a moment, she just stood there, rooted by shock and confusion. The room was a shrine to Charlotte Graham! In the past, she’d sometimes received letters from fans who said they’d collected fifteen hundred photographs of her, or some such nonsense, but she had never actually set eyes on such a collection before. Moreover, that was when she was still at the peak of her stardom. She hadn’t heard from that type of fan in years. She was more likely to be admired today for her age and her history, like a national landmark.

The photographs were mostly from the forties, with a few from the early fifties. Studio publicity portraits, mostly. Charlotte in a feather boa, Charlotte in a sequined evening gown, Charlotte in a mink coat. All of them with her signature scrawled across the lower right-hand corner. Then there were the movie stills, many of them showing her locked in an embrace with one leading man or another. There were several of her with Linc, who had been her leading man in some of her most popular pictures. She’d always been convinced that their romance had been plotted by the publicity department. A romance between the leading man and the leading lady made for sizzle on the screen and simoleons at the box office, the saying went.

These were some of the thoughts that passed through her mind as she took in the collection of photographs. But as her attention shifted to the bookcase at the end of the room, she realized that her first assumption had been wrong. In each of the photographs on the bookshelves she was accompanied by another woman. Some of the photographs included other people as well, but the woman was in all of them: a woman with a rich, polished look, and with a long face, a lantern jaw, and a dark cap of wavy black hair.

Charlotte was beginning to realize why she had been invited here. She glanced over at Tracey and Pyle, who stood at the door with their arms across their chests and expectant looks on their faces, and then walked over to the bookcase. It was all there—a collection of scripts in elegant leather-bound volumes with expensive gold lettering, the framed awards from the Screen Writers’ Guild, the gleaming Oscar for best original screenplay, 1949. It was the memorabilia of fifteen years as a Hollywood screenwriter.

The room wasn’t a shrine to Charlotte, it was a shrine to a career, a career for which Charlotte’s beauty and talent had been the raw materials in the same way that the planes of a fashion model’s face are for a makeup artist, or a chunk of Carrara marble was for a Renaissance sculptor.

Taking a deep breath, she crossed the room to the sofa, and sat down. Then she said, “She was Iris O’Connor, wasn’t she?”

4

For a moment, Charlotte just sat on the couch, trying to digest it all. She could feel Pyle’s hazel eyes studying her, comparing the face of the seventy-one-year-old woman seated before him to that of the glamorous young woman in the photographs. The comparison held up pretty well, she thought. It was one of her life’s little benisons that the years had been kind to her. She still looked much as she had in her youth. Her best features hadn’t changed: the strong jaw line; the glossy black hair, once worn in a pageboy but now pulled back into a chignon (the gray concealed with the help of the bottle); the thick, winged eyebrows that had become a cause célèbre when she had refused to let studio makeup men pluck them to the pencil-line thinness that was in fashion when she made her first movie in 1939. She had also been blessed with good enough skin that she had never even considered a face lift. But she would never have done so even if she’d had the kind of skin that turned to crepe paper at age thirty; she wouldn’t have wanted to look like an emaciated caricature of her younger self—an old woman in a Charlotte Graham mask—as some stars did who’d been lifted too many times.