Murder on High Read online

  “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 wind
ow. 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.

  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.