Murder on High (29 page)

As Charlotte stood looking at a chunk of brick and mortar from the site of Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond, which was displayed in a lighted Plexiglas box as if it were a crown jewel of the British Empire, a stout old woman with gray hair fixed in a neat bun at the back of her neck emerged from the adjoining gift shop and introduced herself as the docent.

Upon learning that Charlotte was a member of the Association—moreover, a member who had never had the opportunity of visiting the Lyceum before—she waived the two-dollar admission fee, and welcomed her with open arms.

“We’re not a museum,” the woman explained, reiterating the point she had made on the phone. “We’re here to answer questions about Mr. Thoreau’s life and philosophy, to shatter the romantic illusions, so to speak. We like to say we deal with Mr. Thoreau the person, not Mr. Thoreau the phenomenon.”

“That’s good, because I have some questions,” said Charlotte. “But not about Mr. Thoreau himself. About his modern-day followers.”

“Oh, he has plenty of those,” she said. “As you can see from the guest register.” She waved an arm at the book that lay open on a lectern near the door. “We had nearly six thousand visitors last year, from twenty-eight different countries. Would you like to sign?”

“Certainly.” Charlotte went over to the register. “I’m interested in a particular visitor you may have had,” she said as she added her name to the list. “He would have been a man in his forties, from Ouray, Colorado. He would have visited here about two years ago.”

“We get so many people fitting that description,” the docent said. “But you can look through the guest register for that year if you like.” She pointed to a stack of volumes on the lower shelf of the lectern. “We keep the old registers right down there.”

“He would have been looking for a woman named Iris Richards, who had delivered a paper here some time before on Thoreau and the Maine Indians.”

“Oh, I remember that man now. Iris Richards was one of our founders. We know her here very well. He came here looking for her almost exactly two years ago, just after our Thoreau Association meeting. It was held on July twelfth; it’s always on Mr. Thoreau’s birthday.”

“Please, go on,” Charlotte prompted.

“He puzzled me at first because he asked for Iris O’ something.”

“O’Connor?” asked Charlotte.

“That was it, yes. When he told me that she’d delivered a paper on Mr. Thoreau and the Maine Indians to the Association, I figured that he must be talking about Iris Richards. I don’t recall that he was from Colorado, though.”

She pulled out one of the old registers and set it down on a nearby table. Then she opened it up and leafed through the pages until she reached the entries for July.

“I also remember him very clearly because he arrived only a few minutes after a man from India who’d been an associate of Gandhi’s. It was Mr. Thoreau’s essay,
Civil Disobedience
, that inspired Gandhi to follow a path of nonviolent resistance in his quest for independence from British rule.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Charlotte.

“Yes. Mr. Thoreau’s ideas have inspired a lot of political protests—not all of them worthwhile, I hasten to add. His brand of radical individualism can be misinterpreted to justify all manner of immoral behavior,” she said cheerfully. She ran her finger down the list of entries. “Here it is.”

Charlotte looked over her shoulder at the page of entries.

“His name was Gupta. J. D. Gupta. He arrived in a cab from the airport, just as you did. He said he had wanted to visit Concord all his life. When he left here, he was going out to Walden Pond.” She moved her finger down to the next line. “And this must be the person you’re looking for.”

Charlotte looked at the entry: the signature wasn’t that of Brent Crawford, but of a man named J. MacKenzie Scott. The space for the address wasn’t filled in. The name Scott was a common enough one, but Charlotte had a distinct memory of having seen it recently. Then she remembered the wooden sign on the side of the horse trailer on South Water Street. J. MacKenzie Scott was Iris’ friend, Mack! But what would he have been doing here? Then she realized the answer to that question as well. Her memory relinquished the long-forgotten fact that Gloria’s second husband had been named Scott. J. MacKenzie Scott, otherwise known as Mack, must be Linc’s younger son, the one whom she had known as Johnny, and who had burned the last of his money at Elaine Kinney’s kitchen table.

Stunned by this revelation, she took a seat on one of the wooden folding chairs that lined the walls of the room.

“Are you all right?” said the docent, taking notice of Charlotte’s distress. “Would you like me to get you a drink of water?”

“I’m fine,” Charlotte replied. “Just a little dizzy, is all.”

It made sense, she thought, as she regained her composure. If Scott had been Johnny’s guardian, it would have been natural for Johnny to take his name, while Brent, who had been older and had taken off on his own, retained the Crawford name. Just to make sure, she asked the docent what Scott had looked like.

“Not too tall,” she replied. “About five foot ten, I’d say, with a stocky build. Light-colored eyes, if I remember right. A big head of curly hair, dark blond. A reddish beard, rosy cheeks.”

It was Mack, all right. “Did you give him Mrs. Richards’ address?”

“I don’t remember. There would have been no reason not to. But if I didn’t, he could have looked it up. We have our members’ names and addresses on cards in this box.” Opening a file box on the table, she showed Charlotte the collection of cards. “Here she is,” she said, pulling out Iris’ card.

A group of visitors had just entered.

“Excuse me,” the docent said as she moved off to greet the new arrivals. Then she turned back to Charlotte. “I’ll be giving a lecture on Mr. Thoreau’s life in a few moments, if you’d like to stay.”

“Yes, I would,” she replied.

Sitting down again, Charlotte pulled out the copies of the newspaper clippings about Linc’s death. She would read them while she was waiting. She had meant to read them on the plane, but had fallen fast asleep.

The first one was from the
New York Herald News
. The information she was looking for was in the first paragraph:

The dead body of actor Lincoln Crawford was discovered yesterday in a suite at Hollywood’s posh Chateau Marmont Hotel by his two sons from his marriage to the actress Gloria Smithson.

The boys, Brent, 11, and John, 7, had been with their father when he paid a visit to a suite occupied by the director Harold Ames. The boys found their father’s body when they returned to the living room of the suite from an adjoining bedroom.

The boys reported that they had been sent into the bedroom to watch television after an argument broke out between Crawford and a woman caller. The boys were unable to identify the woman, who had left the room by the time they emerged from the bedroom.

The article went on, but there was no need for Charlotte to read any further. It wasn’t just one son who had discovered the body, but both. John MacKenzie Crawford, now known as Mack Scott, had also been present at his father’s death.

Putting the clipping away again, Charlotte asked the docent if she could look through the guest register for the current year.

“Certainly,” the woman said.

When Charlotte and Tracey had spoken with Jeanne, she said she’d noticed the Ford Bronco about a month before, which would have been about two weeks prior to the murder. Charlotte went back through the pages until she got to the middle of May, and then started looking through the entries.

There it was, on May twenty-second: Brenton Crawford, Ouray, Colorado. God only knew how Brent had tracked his brother to the Thoreau Lyceum, but he had. And from there, he’d tracked him to Old Town, Maine.

Standing there, Charlotte at last started fitting the pieces of the puzzle together. After their custody battle, the boys’ idyllic days with their father are over. (If anyone was ever suited to being a father of boys, it was Linc: fishing, hunting, horseback riding, ball games; their boyhood as Linc’s sons must have been a boys’ heaven.) They now spend almost all their time with their crazy mother, who has married Scott. Then Linc dies, thereby eliminating any hopes they may have had of living with him. Their mother’s mental health deteriorates, and she is committed. Scott becomes the boys’ guardian. Brent takes off not long afterward, but Johnny is left with a cruel and uncaring stepfather. For him, it must have seemed as if the moment when his childhood came to an end could be pinpointed to that afternoon at the Marmont when he found his father lying dead on the floor. And who better to blame than the woman who had quarreled with him immediately before his death? She could imagine him in his room at Scott’s house, wondering who the woman was, dwelling on his memory of this one fateful event. Then he finds out that it was Iris who fingered his father, who launched him on the downhill spiral that ended in his death. He sets out on a quest to find her. Maybe he just wanted to confront her at first: to face the woman who had brought him so much misery. Or perhaps he had always planned to find her some day, and take his revenge.

Then he drops out of sight.

It was Charlotte’s guess that Brent, suspecting that his brother was on a mission to kill Iris, had tracked him to Old Town. Hence the Bronco parked on the street in front of Hilltop Farm, hence his presence on the mountain. The next question was: Had he been trying to stop his brother, or to help him? What had they been arguing about when Haakon Hilmers spotted them on the Abol Trail?

Thanking the docent, who was about to start her lecture, Charlotte excused herself and went back out to her waiting cab. She had decided not to go back to New York after all.

An hour and a half later, she was airborne again, this time en route to Bangor International Airport. She had followed the brothers’ trail three-quarters of the way: from California to Concord, and from Concord to Old Town. As in Thoreau’s dream, she had emerged from the deep woods onto the open ridge, but she still had to find her way to the summit. Metaphorically, and literally. It was the last leg of the boys’ journey that was stumping her; the leg that went from Old Town to the summit of Katahdin. The leg that featured the most elusive aspect of the case: the weapon. But the fact that it was Mack instead of Brent whom she now suspected of being the murderer would probably make it easier to track the weapon down. She could work from the assumption that the weapon had come from Old Town, rather than from, for instance, some second-hand sporting goods store in Colorado. It also helped that it was such a distinctive weapon: not a modern crossbow that might have come from any mail-order sporting goods catalogue, but a weapon that had been carefully made by hand many years ago, and that was decorated with a unique Indian amulet.

A thought struck her as the plane circled Bangor—a few high rises surrounded by a wilderness of green. Jeanne Ouellette had been an archery champion at the age of fourteen or so. At that age, one didn’t suddenly develop an overwhelming interest in archery. One had to have been encouraged by an older person—a coach, a teacher, most likely a parent. And Jeanne’s father was still alive, living in a senior citizens apartment in Old Town, according to Doug Pyle. If indeed it had been Jeanne’s father who promoted her interest in archery, he might know what had been going on in Old Town in terms of archery at that time, and specifically, who might have made a pistol crossbow.

She called Jeanne from the airport. Why, yes, she said, it was her father who had encouraged her interest in archery. He had been an avid bow hunter.
Would he like to talk with Charlotte about archery
? (In other words, was he
compos mentis
?) Yes, he would be delighted. He was eighty-four and crippled by arthritis, but he still had all his marbles. (Jeanne had recognized Charlotte’s question for what it was.) He lived at the Bickmore Manor, a senior citizens apartment building on South Main Street.
Would he know who in the area might have made a pistol crossbow
? Why, yes, he probably would, Jeanne had replied, adding, “Now why didn’t I think of that?” She obviously recognized the weapon Charlotte was talking about as the one that had killed Iris. In response to Charlotte’s inquiry, Jeanne provided her with directions to the Bickmore Manor, and told her that if her father, whose name was Earl, wasn’t at home, he could probably be found playing gin rummy with his buddy Reggie Pyle at the senior citizens center at St. Joseph’s Church, across the street.

But Charlotte did find him at the Bickmore Manor, which was an old three-story red brick building located next to the headquarters of the United Paperworkers International Union, Local #80. He was sitting on a bench out in front, watching the traffic on South Main Street go by. His walker stood on the sidewalk next to the bench.

A big man with a thick head of snow-white hair, Earl Ouellette bore a strong resemblance to his daughter. His brown eyes carried the same glint of suspicion, and he had the same bump on the bridge of his nose.

Charlotte broke the ice by asking about the bas-relief frieze of a pair of draft horses that crowned the arched doorway of the building. Above the relief was a panel which read “
1812 DOCTOR 1906
.”

“They used to manufacture the gall cure here,” Ouellette replied. “I worked here then. There’s a relief of a horse inside over the mantelpiece, too. It’s part of the apartment on the first floor now. Can’t see it, unless you know Bessie Cyr.” He nodded at the first-floor windows. “She lives there.”

Charlotte just listened.

Ouellette continued. “Then the newspaper was here. The
Penobscot Times
. I worked there too. Linotype operator. Twenty-seven years for the gall cure; fifteen years for the newspaper. Then the building was converted into senior citizens apartments, and I signed right up.”

“The tenants changed, but you stayed on.”

“Yup.” He chuckled. “I’ve been living with this building for more than fifty years. Longer than I lived with my wife.” He looked over at Charlotte. “What can I do for you, young lady?”