Murder on High (4 page)

Charlotte Graham was sipping a cup of coffee on the deck of her summer cottage in the coastal town of Bridge Harbor, Maine, when she got the call from Howard Tracey. Hearing the phone ring, she set down the script she was studying and hurried inside to answer it. She was hoping it would be her stepdaughter, Marsha, but instead she heard the broad vowels and measured cadences of Tracey’s Downeast accent repeating her name. Her first name. After eight years, Tracey had finally gotten over the formality of calling her Miss Graham. She eagerly awaited what he had to say. Tracey would never have called just to chat, being as parsimonious in the number of words he employed as he was reluctant at dealing them out. Having retired to Maine for a two-week vacation after completing her last movie, Charlotte was now getting a little bored. Actually, more than a little bored. Being a sensible Yankee, she had told herself that she needed a vacation. She had been working very hard. Having been thrown off kilter by a recent divorce, she had turned to work to bring herself into balance again, leaving little time between projects: an adaptation of a Henry James story for public television, a made-for-TV horror film, a feature film for a French director. She wasn’t complaining. Quite the contrary: she was very happy that there
was
work, the number of roles for a woman of her age being limited, though not as limited as it had been twenty years ago. But after seventy-one years, she should have known herself well enough to realize that she dealt as badly with rest, even active rest, as others her age did with activity. She had swum across her favorite lake, climbed her favorite mountain, sailed to her favorite island—her usual anodynes to a too-busy career. Under other circumstances, she would have turned around and gone home, but she had a reason for hanging around.

The year before, she’d signed a contract with a publisher for her autobiography, which was now largely completed. That is to say, she’d written the sections dealing with the beginning of her life and the end of her life, and she was stuck on the middle. It’s been said that the bane of the biographer is the subject who accomplishes a great deal at the beginning of his or her life, and then lives on in obscurity. She had a similar problem, except that her period of obscurity had occurred in mid-life. Her black years, she called them: the period from her mid-thirties to her mid-forties when she’d been too old to play young women and too young to play old women. The development of television had helped, as had Broadway, which had always been her refuge when the going got tough in Hollywood, but the pickings had still been pretty slim. But her difficulty in writing about this period in her life wasn’t due solely to the dearth of events; it was also due to her reluctance to revive painful memories. The lack of work had been bad enough, but her black years had also been painful on account of an event which took place during this period, and which was inextricably linked to it in her mind: the death in 1957 of her lover, the actor Linc Crawford. Linc’s death was symbolic of the downward turn her life had taken.

She had thought that by staying on in Maine, she would force herself to come to grips with her mid-life chapters. Instead, she had just gotten lonely. She missed the company of her circle of friends in New York, and especially that of her stepdaughter, Marsha. Technically, she supposed, Marsha, as the daughter of her former husband, was her ex-stepdaughter, but in this case the ex applied only to Marsha’s father, who had been Husband the Fourth and would probably be Husband the Last. Charlotte had no intention of severing relations with Marsha just because her father’s ego hadn’t been able to withstand living in Charlotte’s limelight, and because Charlotte herself couldn’t tolerate living in Minneapolis, which was where he spent most of his time.

Failing Marsha, however, Howard Tracey would do very nicely. She had met Tracey eight years before during the course of an investigation into the murder of a Bridge Harbor acquaintance, a botany professor who had died as a result of drinking a cup of poisoned tea. At that time, Tracey had been the police chief in Bridge Harbor. Since then, the prospect of financing college educations for his three children had forced him to seek out a more remunerative position, and he had joined the Maine state police, rising rapidly to the rank of lieutenant. She wasn’t surprised at how well he had done. Underneath his country rube persona, which Charlotte suspected he cultivated out of a chameleonlike need to blend in with his surroundings, he was a very smart man.

Despite their disparate backgrounds—though he admitted to having traveled to Boston on a couple of occasions, Tracey was generally loath to leave his little corner of the Maine coast, and was about as unworldly as they come—Charlotte felt a strong kinship with this country police officer. They had a tribal bond, the tribe being that of the old-fashioned Yankee: hard-working, resourceful, persevering, and not without a fair degree of craft and cunning.

Charlotte took a seat on the couch facing the fieldstone fireplace in her living room, telephone receiver in hand. “Ayuh, Howard,” she replied, mocking him gently. He always sounded to her as if he were speaking through a mouthful of pebbles, like Demosthenes practicing his orations.

“Something’s come up that I think you might be interested in.”

Charlotte’s ears perked up. Taking into account the Yankee penchant for understatement, she interpreted this statement to mean that an event of major proportions had taken place, and moreover, that it was an event of the utmost importance to her. What on earth could it be!

“Are you free today?” he asked.

“As a bird,” she replied, thinking guiltily of her autobiography, the deadline for which had already been postponed twice.

“I’ll be over to pick you up in twenty minutes.”

“Are you going to pay me the courtesy of telling me what this is all about? Or are you just going to sit there and let me go on wondering what it could be until you get here?”

“The latter. If I knew what it was about, I wouldn’t be calling you to find out, now, would I?”

True to his word, Tracey pulled the unmarked state police car over on the gravel shoulder of the Harbor Road exactly twenty minutes later. Though he now worked at the state police barracks, which were an hour and a half away in the university town of Orono, he still lived in Bridge Harbor, which was the hamlet that Charlotte overlooked from her mountainside aerie. She was waiting for him at the foot of her driveway, sitting on a granite boulder. When it came to promptness, Charlotte was as irritatingly scrupulous as Tracey. It was an annoying (to her) habit, but she’d never been able to get over it. As a veteran of fifty-one years in front of the cameras, one of the traits she should have acquired by now was sufficient temerity to put someone out, even if it was only once in a while and for a few minutes. She took her habitual promptness as a fault of character, on a par with a childish propensity to tell the truth even when it wasn’t in one’s own or anyone else’s best interests. (Though an unfailing desire to tell the truth was decidedly not one of her character flaws, her aptitude for dissimulation being one of the factors that had prompted her to go into acting in the first place.)

By now, she had learned to accept her promptness, along with some other undesirable character traits that she might at one time have been inclined to overlook but over the years had been made well aware of, thanks to the tireless efforts of one man or another—if not a husband or a lover, both categories being numerous enough, then a director, a co-star, or a playwright. Since each of the many men in her life had designated different areas of her character as being worthy of remediation, she supposed that she had, given the overwhelming nature of her burden, simply given up. Her long experience at being a candidate for reform had also helped her to discern a pattern in these attempts to make her over, namely that the character traits singled out as faults by a particular man often stood in direct contrast to his own, to his mind, blameless habits, i.e., being prompt was only a character flaw in the eyes of the husband who was habitually late. Had she still been married to Husband Number One, she would probably still be worrying about risking a host’s disapprobation by arriving on time for an appointment. She remembered well her habit of those early years, inspired by her husband’s criticisms, of walking around the block in order to arrive fifteen minutes after the appointed hour. Without the perspective of the years, she would never have realized that there were people, Howard Tracey among them, who were as concerned about promptness as she, but nevertheless led perfectly respectable lives, and were even invited back by hostesses who hadn’t had time, on those occasions where the guest in question had arrived on the dot, to set out the crudités or plump the pillows.

As the car came to a halt, Tracey reached over to open the door for her. “Morning,” he said. His round cheeks bulged like a chipmunk’s under the brim of his tan porkpie hat, which was a decided sartorial improvement on the baseball cap he had always worn as police chief.

“
Now
are you going to let me in on what this is about?” she asked as she settled in on the front seat next to him.

Ignoring her, Tracey pulled out onto the road that skirted the harbor. The sun was burning the mist off the water, and it rose in wispy tendrils that wound around the masts of the sailboats at their moorings.

“It’s about a woman named Iris Richards from Old Town,” he said finally. “I think she might be an acquaintance of yours.” He looked over at her inquiringly with his big, watery blue eyes.

Charlotte was convinced that much of Tracey’s success as a police officer had to do with his appearance. Someone with eyes like a baby’s and cheeks like a cherub’s inspired one to cooperation.

She combed her memory. She had known Irises—several of them, the most memorable being “her” screenwriter during the Golden Years, Iris O’Connor. Iris O’Connor had been a genius at the kind of sophisticated comedies that had been Charlotte’s bread and butter. But she had never known an Iris Richards, especially one from Old Town, Maine.

“Doesn’t ring a bell?” he asked.

She shook her head. “What makes you think she might be an acquaintance of mine?”

“You’ll see when we get there,” he replied.

“Are we going to Old Town, then?”

Tracey nodded as he turned onto the secondary highway that led inland in the direction of the mill town that was just north of Orono on the west bank of the Penobscot River.

Though she had never been there, Charlotte was familiar with Old Town as the site of the Penobscot Indian reservation, which had been much in the news in the 1970s as a result of the land claims settlement act, which awarded the Indians millions of dollars as restitution for their loss of treaty lands.

“What’s your interest in this Iris Richards?” she asked.

He looked over at her. “She’s dead. Fell off the Knife Edge two weeks ago. Came to a stop a thousand feet later.”

“On Mount Katahdin?” It was a statement more than a question. Anyone who had spent any time in Maine had heard of the famous trail, so-called because of its resemblance to a knife blade. It was often referred to as the most difficult nontechnical trail in the East.

“I can tell you haven’t been reading the papers,” he said. “It’s been all over the news. There’s going to be an inquiry into her death this afternoon. That’s the second of our destinations. It’s at one.”

Charlotte picked up the folded copy of the
Bangor Daily News
that lay on the seat between them. “Does this tell about it?” she asked.

He nodded. “There’s a photograph there, too.”

Charlotte opened the paper to the story “Hearing to Be Held on Hiker’s Death,” which was at the bottom of the front page. A blurry photograph showed a handsome woman in her sixties, with a long, aristocratic face capped by an unruly head of white hair.

“Do you recognize her?” asked Tracey.

Charlotte shook her head. “There’s something familiar about the lantern jaw and the deep-set eyes, but I suspect it has more to do with a vague resemblance to FDR than any previous acquaintance on my part.”

She went on to read the story, which was about the hearing that was to be held before the Mount Katahdin Tragedy Board of Review, which had been set up to review the accidents that occurred from time to time on Katahdin, with an eye toward instituting policies that would help avert such tragedies in the future. Although, as the article pointed out, mountain-climbing by its very nature carried a certain amount of risk, much of which was unavoidable, and there were actually fewer accidents on Katahdin than might be expected for a mountain climbed by so many people.

But it wasn’t this bureaucratic response to the accident that Charlotte was interested in; it was the accident itself, the details of which she found buried in the middle of the story, their being old news by now.

It seemed that Mrs. Richards had fallen off a narrow section of the Knife Edge into a ravine known as the Tully-Baker Gully. After slipping on the rotten granite, she had then dropped about five hundred feet before hitting a ledge and rolling another five hundred feet. The body had finally become wedged in a cleft in a ravine, where it was spotted the next morning by a park ranger. The cause of death was multiple head injuries.

Though Mrs. Richards had climbed the mountain with a companion, a woman by the name of Jeanne Ouellette, they had separated when they had reached the ridge at the top. Miss Ouellette, being the less experienced hiker, had taken an easier route to another one of Katahdin’s many peaks, while Mrs. Richards had crossed over the ridge to an area of tableland on the southwest side, where she planned to stop at Thoreau Spring for lunch before climbing the mountain’s highest peak, Baxter Peak. From there, her plan was to set out across the Knife Edge.

The article went on to say that although others had died in a similar way as a result of mistaking the head of the ravine for a shortcut off the Knife Edge, this was not presumed to have been the case for Mrs. Richards, who, as an experienced hiker who had climbed the mountain numerous times, would have been aware of the danger of wandering off the trail. If indeed she
had
fallen off the Knife Edge, she was the first to have done so, and one of the purposes of the inquiry was to find out why this might have occurred.