Tightrope Walker (19 page)

When I woke up the rain had stopped and my watch told me it was midnight. By some curious adjustment of time I was now back inside of my own skin again and able to look sanely at what had happened to me during the past few hours. I decided that back there in Hannah’s box room, when my mind had tried to rationalize away the shock and my senses had shouted
don’t listen
, some kind of split had taken place, blocking off every emotion except what was needed for survival. Now as I emerged from shock I began to feel quite benevolent toward that Amelia; she was all right, she had behaved very soundly. With my mind no longer bruised but able to think again, I could even put aside the idea that a tramp had followed me into the house in Carleton, had playfully locked me into the box room and then set fire to the house. It had been a possibility worth cherishing but I could no longer think why. After all, there was no getting around the fact that Joe and I had come to Maine to look for a murderer, and it was
just possible that we had flushed him out. Certainly whoever had followed me into the house had murder on his mind; it was a coincidence that I couldn’t afford to overlook.

I tried looking at it now but I wasn’t ready for it yet, it only brought a gravelike chill. I walked into the bathroom, ran steaming hot water into the tub and climbed in carrying with me Hannah’s manuscript, which was damp from the rain, anyway. Savoring warmth again, and fortified against any new chills, I resumed my reading of
In the Land of the Golden Warriors.

The story was startling, to say the least.

In the book Colin makes another journey, this time at the request of the Prince of Galt, who has heard of a country far away where the people are wise, their strength great, and their wealth so bountiful that their helmets are lined with gold leaf and shine like the sun. This is the Land of the Golden Warriors. To reach this country Colin must go back through the country he left when he entered the maze at the heart of the castle, a place the Galts call the Old Territory.

Colin sets out alone, but along the way he collects three young people who have been abandoned by the Old Territory people, now grown insulated and selfish. The names of these three young people, scarcely out of their teens, are Rolphe, Jaspar, and Sara, and this is where I began reading with fascination and then horror.

As I watched their characters unfold I read faster and faster, feverishly turning the pages.

Rolphe was thin and serious, with “rusty hair like a squirrel,” fascinated by the tales Colin told each night at the camp fire about his earlier journey through the maze. (“Is there really such a country? How I hunger for it!” cries Rolphe.)

Jaspar was at first glance the heroic figure of the three, a handsome lad, and strong, but ever so subtly it emerged that Jaspar was interested in accompanying Colin to the Land of the Golden Warriors only to steal the gold and bring it back.

And Sara … Sara was beautiful and a delight to Colin, grateful for every kindness, but always her eyes remained fixed upon Jaspar. She followed him everywhere, longing to be noticed, competing with him and then submitting to him, trying every means to gain his approval, desperate for a clue to his affections. There was a vivid scene in a forest where they met a witch and Sara begged for a few minutes alone with her. Colin, worried, followed them into the wood and overheard Sara ask the witch for a spell to make Jaspar love her. “Only if you sell me your soul,” the witch told her. In horror Colin rushed forward to stop them but a tree root tripped him, and before he could reach Sara, the transaction had taken place: Sara had sold the witch her soul in return for a spell that rendered her and Jaspar inseparable.

The ending was poignant: they had many adventures in the Land of the Golden Warriors but, when the time came to leave, a greedy Jaspar was discovered with gold in his travel bags and he was banished to a prison in that country. Because of the witch’s spell Sara was doomed to sit outside that prison, perhaps for an eternity, waiting and waiting, a captive herself. Only Rolphe rode off with Colin; he had chosen to search for the maze in the heart of the castle so that one day he might join Colin in the land of the Galts.

When I had finished reading I sat very still, the steam rising around me in swirls, and then I carefully placed the manuscript out of reach on the floor.

I know that to other people who have read the book by now it is simply a very exciting and beautifully
written adventure story with three characters more realistically and compassionately drawn than any of those in her first book. But for me it was a revelation. Hannah was, as Joe had said, no fool: she had insight, and this was her story of three young people whose lives she had shared and observed. If this was Nora when she was young, if this was what Hannah had seen, had she looked ahead to where such obsession could take Nora, and written of it to warn her? Warn her, too, that the boy she loved was equally obsessed, but with gold?

I had tried so hard to be kind as I struggled to explain Nora’s presence in the house while Hannah was being killed but she had been an accomplice from the beginning, I knew that now. She must have loved John Tuttle with a passion so unhealthy that it turned into obsession, which allows no choice, is need-gone-wild, displacing morality and judgment, reducing vision and awareness to one exclusive object. When John Tuttle had become important to Nora everyone else had stopped existing for her. He had totally possessed her.

The horror of it rocked me, and yet at the same time I was aware of a compassion for her that I didn’t want to admit. A part of me was still back in that forest hearing the witch question Sara, and Sara say, “Jaspar is the sun and the moon and the stars, the mother I never had, the father who never loved me. He is all that I ever want. Make him see me, make him mine.”

The mother I never had, the father who never loved me.
… The resemblance to my own past was acute. I would have preferred to hate or despise Nora, but at this moment I discovered that I understood and pitied her. If this was wisdom it also frightened me.

I wondered what Hubert Holton’s obsession might have been.

I wondered why Jay Tuttle hadn’t married Nora once she was rich. I thought of her growing old at Greenacres, I remembered her ravaged face, and I said aloud, fiercely, “Oh Nora, why couldn’t you have gotten angry just once at what was being done to you?”

As I was angry now at whoever had tried to kill me in the box room. I still didn’t know who, and it was time to find out.

I climbed out of the tub, dressed, tied up Hannah’s two hundred pages of story, and resolutely put aside my thoughts of Nora. I knew that of the cozy foursome who had killed Hannah, two were now accounted for but two were distressingly not: John Tuttle and Hubert Holton. I had to assume that it was one of them who had tried to kill me, except that I couldn’t puzzle out how they’d learned about Joe and me. Unless Garwin Mason had told one of them. Or Mrs. Morneau.

I thought about this. Mrs. Morneau seemed the more likely candidate except for one important detail: Joe and I had left her house at half-past two that afternoon and we had driven straight to the airport without stopping at unit 18. Considering this, how could I explain the van being returned to the Golden Kingfisher Motel and parked precisely under unit 18? It implied an intelligence that chilled me. It also had the effect of making sleep impossible, because even the most confident of murderers was bound to eventually notice that my van was gone; that would be a shock, and so mystifying that he would feel compelled to find it. What I had to do now was get back to Trafton, and to Joe, but without worrying him, for he at least was safe for the moment. What I also had to do was find John Tuttle but under no circumstances was I going to return to Anglesworth and ask Garwin Mason where he was.

“Ask Nora,” Mrs. Morneau had added with a touch of malice.

Very well, I decided, I would ask Nora; there was no harm in that if I could get past Nurse Dawes and persuade Nora to talk. Greenacres was a safe one hundred miles away from Anglesworth and it was on my route back to Trafton. I was fairly sure that Nora would know about Tuttle because I had a hunch that he might be the mysterious friend of the family who paid her bills: I couldn’t think who else would. Robin couldn’t afford to, nor could Mrs. Morneau, and Nora had spent all her money on a glass house and drink.

I left the motel feeling considerably older, and in a sense I was. For one thing I checked the back of the van again, and opened up the hood to make certain that no one had rearranged any wires. For that matter, if anyone had told me a week ago that I would choose to drive alone at half-past one in the morning I would have collapsed in laughter. It was surprising what a simple equation I had uncovered: when one terror outweighs another, the deeper one will triumph over the lesser.

I had driven ten miles before I realized there was one other person who could have betrayed us to a murderer, and that was Mrs. Daniel Lipton if she had run out of drinking money again.

On my long drive down the coast in the middle of the night it seemed as if the most frightening thing about this dark world of greed and conspiracy, of people haunted by a past that relentlessly controlled them, this Hieronymous Bosch landscape that I’d entered—was that it might be reality. It was the old tightrope business again, except that if I glanced down this time I would see not only my mother but Danny Lipton, all bloody from his throat being slashed; Mrs. Morneau stifling her sobs behind a door; Nora lifting herself from her bed to cry over the photograph of a hurdy-gurdy. It was a vision I couldn’t bear as I drove those
dark, empty roads; it tempted me to give up, but that’s what they had all done, and I wanted better company.

Yet there was Joe, and he was reality too. And there was also Amman Singh, and there was Hannah, who had written a book in which the Grand Odlum said, “You must carry the sun inside of you because you will meet with a great and terrifying darkness.” Hannah had known all about the tightrope, of this I was sure, but in the photograph her eyes had been serene and unshadowed, except by a smile.

Both Amman Singh and Hannah had found something important.

Or was it, I thought suddenly, that each of them might have
lost
something, some illusion or impertinence that we’re taught to regard as legitimately ours but which only keeps us bound hopelessly to a treadmill?

This thought occupied me for the remainder of the drive but I felt the lighter for it.

At half-past three I parked in a rest stop beside the highway, locked myself into the back in my sleeping bag, and slept until dawn filtered through the portholes. After that I drove on to Portland and found an all-night diner where I ate breakfast elbow-to-elbow with truckdrivers and night-shift workers. Obviously something was happening to my safety zones.… At half-past eight I bought a toothbrush and visited Western Union to send Joe a telegram. It was a very difficult one to compose; I wanted to write
I
love you, I miss you, I’m scared but I’ve got to handle this alone so that I know that I can.
The telegram I finally sent was
RETURNING HOME
,
MAY STOP IN NEW YORK TO SEE ROBIN
,
REACH TRAFTON LATE TOMORROW AFTERNOON HOPE GRISELDA WAS SPARED LOVE AMELIA
. I would have preferred to telephone him but I was too much a coward, I was afraid I might say too much and alarm him, or
say too little and alarm myself. I felt that a telegram was kinder for both of us: it left out attempted murder, panic, flight, a long night drive, somber thoughts, and breakfast in an all-night diner.

The one thought that never occurred to me was that Joe might have telephoned the Golden Kingfisher Motel during the night to tell me he’d safely reached Trafton. It simply never crossed my conscious mind. This was a symptom, I think, of how I still undervalued myself, and how unaccustomed I was to being tenderly regarded.

In the meantime, at some point during the night I had decided I must deliver Hannah’s manuscript to Robin because it belonged to Hannah’s heirs, and Robin was certainly the only one to whom I could entrust it. I was also hoping that I might find a tactful way to ask him why he had never appealed that Probate Court decision; I thought I knew the answer but Joe’s passion for verifying was infectious.

But first there was Nora to see before I closed the books on this search and turned it over to the police, this Nora who had given everything, including her integrity, to a man who had gone off and left her. I couldn’t understand why Jay Tuttle had abandoned her, but every question I asked seemed to lead into a new one. It was like one of those novelty boxes that you open to find a second box neatly fitted inside of it, and then another and another and another.
Why hadn’t Tuttle married her?
Nora was beautiful, and heaven only knows she’d been devoted. After the murder she was also rich and, as an accomplice, dangerous to him as well. By every law of logic he should have married her, if only to make sure she would never testify against him, but he hadn’t. Why?

This was a good question but unfortunately it exposed another one: Tuttle had gone to enormous
lengths to change Hannah’s will before she was murdered but if he’d simply killed her and then married Nora without that bogus will he would have married a woman with an inheritance of a million dollars.

It implied that Jay Tuttle had wanted $700,000, but not Nora.

But if this were so there was still another question waiting inside of it: Lipton had been murdered because he was an accomplice. Nora, who was even more involved and more dangerous to them both, had been allowed to survive. Why?

By half-past nine I was circling Greenacres, bumping over the woods roads that surrounded it and keeping my eyes on the rear lawn. I had remembered the nurse saying that Nora would be all right after we left her, and by the next morning would be sitting in the sun in the back with the rest of the patients. By ten o’clock there were a number of people sitting in chairs in the sun, distributed like dolls, each very carefully apart from the other, with a nurse in uniform sitting quietly on the rear porch and reading a book. I parked at the south side of the property and finally saw Nora off to one side, in a white chair with her feet on a hassock. From where I stood it looked as if she was staring into nothingness; the waste of it struck me as appalling.