Murder on High (6 page)

God! How she hated being scrutinized like this. Looking over at Pyle, she arched an eyebrow—the same expression that was displayed in several of the photographs. It was an expression that had deflated more than one leading man, and it worked like a charm on young Pyle, who shifted his gaze to the greenhouses out on the lawn, and started twirling his hat nervously in his hands.

That problem resolved, she turned her thoughts back to Iris. It must have been—she did a quick mental calculation—thirty-eight years since she had last seen her. It was now 1990, and the last time Charlotte could remember seeing her was at Musso & Frank’s Grill in 1952. Charlotte had been with Linc, who had gone there to see a screenwriter. Between six and nine in the evening, you could find any number of Hollywood’s screenwriters at Musso & Frank’s.

The physical differences weren’t that great—Charlotte could now see the Iris of old in the wrinkled face of the newspaper photograph—but she had a hard time reconciling the witty, urbane sophisticate she’d known with a woman whose life had been dedicated to a thinker who preferred a pumpkin to a velvet cushion.

Taking their cue from Charlotte, Tracey and Pyle had seated themselves as well—Tracey on the couch next to Charlotte; Pyle on an easy chair next to the window overlooking the greenhouses.

“How on earth did she end up here?” she finally asked. It struck her that Maine was about as far away from Hollywood as you could get, in the continental United States, anyway.

“That’s what we were hoping you could tell us,” Tracey said. “No one here even knew she was Iris O’Connor.”

“Even Miss Ouellette?” Charlotte asked, with a nod at the door.

“Even Miss Ouellette. She always kept this room locked. Miss Ouellette confessed that she had tried several times over the years to get in. ‘Just curious,’ she said. But she could never find the key. As it turned out, Mrs. Richards wore it around her neck. It was among the effects that were turned over to us to pass along to the next of kin.”

That explained the key being on a black silk cord, thought Charlotte. “Who
is
the next of kin?” she asked.

“We don’t know. Miss Ouellette said that she had no brothers or sisters, and that her parents are dead. Again, we thought you might be able to help us out. Any children that you know of?”

Charlotte shook her head. “She was married briefly, but there were no children. I’m pretty sure O’Connor was her maiden name.”

“I wonder where the ‘Richards’ came from,” said Tracey.

“I think that was her husband’s name, though I couldn’t say for sure. It’s been a long time. He was a screenwriter who drank himself to death. It was an occupational hazard. Who’s the heir?” Charlotte asked. She nodded again at the closed door. “Miss Ouellette?”

“We don’t know,” replied Tracey. “We haven’t gotten that far yet. We’re still on Step Number One: identifying the victim. In fact, we don’t even know if we have a case yet.”

“Maybe it would help revive my memory if you told me what you do know,” she said. She looked around her at the green-wallpapered room. “Starting with how you discovered this room.”

“The room part is easy,” said Tracey. “When we learned that we might have a case—” He looked over at Charlotte, and grinned. “If I could arch an eyebrow, I’d do it now, Charlotte, but it’s a trick I’ve never mastered. Anyway, when we learned we might have a case—”

“From Clough, I presume,” she interjected.

Tracey nodded. “—we searched the victim’s home. As I mentioned, the key to this room was found on her body.” He heaved a deep sigh. “I’ll tell you, Charlotte. I don’t think I’ve ever been as dad-blamed hornswoggled as I was when I opened the door and saw all those pictures of you.” He looked around the room. “I still can’t believe it.”

“You couldn’t have been any more hornswoggled than I was.”

“I guess not,” said Tracey. “Anyway, as for the rest of it, I’ll let Pyle here give it to you. He’s from Old Town, so he knows the story firsthand.”

Charlotte was impressed at the easy relationship between Tracey and Pyle, but then, Tracey was an easy man to get along with. She shifted her attention to his earnest young assistant.

“She came here in 1953,” Pyle said. “She inherited this property—it’s about twenty-three acres, including fifteen acres of woods—from an aunt. She’d never met the aunt. The woods out back are unique; they’re one of the last stands of virgin forest in New England.”

“It’s one of the most substantial properties in town,” added Tracey.

Charlotte nodded in acknowledgment of this obvious fact.

“She was a recluse when she first moved here,” Pyle continued. “There was some talk of a drinking problem.” He looked at Charlotte. “An occupational hazard, right? But if she did have a problem, she got over it.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“In a small town, you just know,” Tracey explained. “Especially if every lush in town has to buy their booze at the state liquor store.”

Charlotte had forgotten about Maine’s state liquor stores.

“Miss Ouellette joined her in 1955, part-time at first,” Pyle continued. “But as the wildflower business grew, she moved into a full-time position, and has lived here as Mrs. Richards’ companion for the last thirty-three years, helping to run the nursery and the Thoreau business.”

“What exactly is the Thoreau business?” Charlotte asked. “I read about the Thoreau journal in the newspaper.”

“
The Pumpkin Paper
,” said Pyle.

“Is there any more to it than that?” she asked.

He nodded. “Thoreau passed through Old Town on his trips upcountry,” said Pyle. “The Indian guides for two of his trips—his trip to Chesuncook and his trip to the Allagash—came from Indian Island.”

“Joe Aitteon and Joe Polis,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, his jaw dropping in surprise. “How’d you know?”

“I was in a play once with Thoreau, or rather, with John Redfield, who played Thoreau,” she replied. “So I did a lot of reading about him. I played Margaret Fuller, his editor at
The Dial
. Henry David and I spent a lot of time on stage rowing around Walden Pond.”

“The title was
On Walden Pond
,” said Tracey, who was one of her loyal fans. “Miss Graham was nominated for a Tony award,”

Charlotte nodded. The role was one of her favorites both for the powerful woman she had played—“I wish I were a man,” Margaret had said. “’Tis an evil lot to have a man’s ambition and a woman’s heart”—and for the lifelong fascination with Thoreau it had inspired.

“Anyway,” Pyle continued, “she became a leader in Thoreau studies, I guess you could say. She started
The Pumpkin Paper
, taught a course on Thoreau at the university, led trips upcountry that traced Thoreau’s footsteps—that sort of thing. I know she had quite a following.”

“In what way?” Charlotte asked.

“I only know that before I joined the state police, I was a police officer in Old Town. Not a week went by that someone didn’t stop by the station to inquire how to get to Hilltop Farm.”

They were interrupted by a knock. A moment later, the door opened and Miss Ouellette stuck her gray head through the opening. “How are you doing?” she asked, clearly curious, but afraid to ask outright.

Charlotte noticed that she didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to look around the room, which she thought odd for someone who had presumably been excluded from it for thirty-odd years.

“We’re doing fine, Miss Ouellette,” said Tracey dismissively. “We’re just about finished here.” He checked his watch, then turned to his companions. “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting hungry. How about some dinner?”

Maine was one of those places where people still referred to the midday meal as dinner, and ate accordingly.

“We just have time before the hearing,” he added.

Charlotte and Pyle agreed.

“We’ll be right out,” Tracey said to Miss Ouellette, and her gray head withdrew from behind the door.

She was waiting for them just outside when they emerged a moment later. “Did you find anything, Lieutenant?” she asked tentatively. She had a way of hovering, like an oversized mother hen.

“We’ll get back to you when we learn more about the circumstances of Mrs. Richards’ death,” said Tracey as the small group made its way back down the hall. “Meanwhile, we appreciate your help.”

As she and Tracey followed Pyle to the coffee shop that he had recommended for dinner, Charlotte found herself pondering the metamorphosis of the Hollywood sophisticate into the proprietor of a wildflower nursery in rural Maine. It didn’t make any sense: there seemed to be no overlap between the two. They were as distinct from one another as the austere farmhouse was from the cluttered green room shut away within it. An interest in gardening or a love of the outdoors might have explained it, but the closest to gardening Charlotte could remember Iris ever getting was a story conference at the Garden of Allah, one of Hollywood’s most popular watering holes. Or even a rural upbringing, but she knew for a fact that Iris had grown up in a Chicago suburb, and Pyle said she hadn’t even known the aunt who left her Hilltop Farm. Not that she hadn’t physically fit the part of the nursery woman. With her tall, rawboned figure and patrician bone structure, she’d always looked as if she belonged more on a gentlewoman’s farm than on a Hollywood movie set.

From Hilltop Farm, they followed Stillwater Avenue down the other side of the hill toward downtown Old Town, which lay in the river valley. The road ended a few minutes later at a stop light at the intersection with North Main Street, which ran along the river. To their left, a two-lane bridge arched over the river. Next to it was a sign that read
INDIAN ISLAND, HOME OF THE PENOBSCOTS
. The picture on the sign was of an Indian in profile with two feathers hanging down over his ear and an arm pointing over the bridge. Underneath was a notice that read “Penobscot Nation High Stakes Bingo: Next Game Saturday, June 23 & Sunday June 24.”

“There’s Indian Island,” said Tracey.

Charlotte looked over at the placid island with interest. Old Town had been so-named by the Indians, who called it that because their ancestors had inhabited this spot for ten thousand years or more. Relics of the Red Paint People, the prehistoric ancestors of the Penobscots, had been found buried in red ochre powder in graves on Indian Island. “I don’t know what I expected,” she said, gazing out at the steepled church and clusters of white clapboard houses. “But it wasn’t this.” Somehow she expected an island that had been inhabited for ten millennia or more to look more prepossessing.

“Doesn’t look like an Indian reservation, that’s for sure,” said Tracey. “But I can’t say that I’ve ever seen any other Indian reservations. Except in the movies,” he added.

As they waited for the light to change, Charlotte studied the sign. The Indian was shadowed by a bald eagle with an outstretched wing. The Indian’s outstretched arm and the wing, which merged into one, pointed to a distant, snow-capped mountain. “Is that Katahdin?” she asked.

“Ayuh,” said Tracey, looking over at the sign. “It’s the sacred mountain of the Penobscots. Home of Pamola, the Indian god who inhabits the summit. Part moose, part eagle, with a wicked temper. I’ve heard that the Penobscots won’t go above the tree line for fear that he’ll come after them.”

“Unless they take along a bottle of rum.”

“Huh?” said Tracey.

“The article said that’s why Iris took along a bottle of rum. To pacify Pamola. She got the idea from Thoreau’s writings.”

“I must not have gotten to that part,” Tracey said.

When the light changed, they turned right onto North Main past a row of old red brick mills, once the economic backbone of the city, which had been transformed into senior citizens’ apartments or office buildings, or stood vacant, windows empty and roofs caving in. Beyond the mills the wide, green river flowed south to the sea under a high, light blue sky, the opposite shore fringed with willows whose leaves were still the pale green of early spring. Though its surface was smooth, the river nevertheless gave the impression of enormous power and weight. Charlotte had once read that the Penobscot drained a quarter of the state, and the river seemed to carry the authority that came from having traveled a long distance. The waters that flowed past these mills had once been snow on the summit of Mount Katahdin, and had traveled through hundreds of miles of paper-company-owned forest land before reaching Old Town, which was the first in a string of good-sized towns and cities that lined the river on its path out to Penobscot Bay.

As they approached the center of town, Pyle pulled the police cruiser to a stop in front of an unpretentious eatery called the Canoe City Coffee Shop. Old Town was also known as Canoe City after the Old Town Canoe Company, whose factory outlet store adjoined the coffee shop. Tracey pulled in behind Pyle, and a moment later they were sitting in a booth by a sunny window overlooking an old hydroelectric dam.

The menus, which were propped between the sugar bowl and the napkin holder, didn’t offer any surprises. It was all hearty down-home fare: baked ziti, meat loaf, hot turkey sandwich. “Any recommendations?” Charlotte asked Pyle, who, judging from the welcome he had received, was a regular.

“Everything’s good, but the hot turkey sandwich is especially good,” he replied enthusiastically. “Real turkey breast, thickly cut, with homemade gravy. None of that fake pressed turkey stuff.”

“A hot turkey sandwich it is,” said Tracey, closing his menu.

“How about the mashed potatoes?” asked Charlotte. “Not instant, I hope.”

“No way,” said Pyle.

“That makes three,” added Charlotte. She was a great fan of diners, of which this was the Downeast equivalent. One of the great virtues of a good diner was the ability to do simple food very well.

After they had given their orders to the blue-haired waitress, Charlotte asked Pyle what Iris had been like. She was curious how life in this small Maine river town had changed her.

“Town character’s what she was,” he replied. “An odd duck.”

“In what way?” Charlotte asked. Pyle was clearly one of those taciturn Yankees whom you had to prod a bit to get going.