Pick Up Sticks

by Deaver Brown

  “But that’s all guesswork. If you knew who talked to you on the phone, that would be proof.”

  “Well, I just don’t.” Sukey looked at the others for support. “You’ve got to understand that we spent hours here, that first weekend, listening to voices drone on and on—about recreational opportunities and lakes across the mountain and rising land values. We heard the same thing over and over again. From Mr. Valenti and Mr. Quinlan and Mr. Finley and Burt O’Neil, until it all just blended into one voice. Then that phone call came. It asked me to get the two Mrs. Lesters to come to this dinner—about fine recreational opportunities. Of course, it sounded familiar. Tiny Tim would have sounded familiar too.”

  And on that note the party broke up. Quinlan and the Davidsons were rushing back to yet another tour of Fiord Haven.

  “Although how he can have the gall to break out another spiel after what Sukey just said, I’ll never understand,” Henry observed as the three of them made their way to the parking lot.

  “If he didn’t have that kind of gall, he wouldn’t be in this business, Henry,” Thatcher said acutely. “But I’d like to go back to what Mrs. Tilley said. Did she just get back from Florida, Ruth?”

  “That’s right. She’s been there since last December.”

  “And already she’s on to this business about Amanda and Eunice. That’s fast work.”

  Henry could be acute, too. “You forget that Amanda’s been in town all day today. She’s probably been organizing a lynching party for Eunice.”

  Thatcher ignored frivolity. “Would Mrs. Tilley be up on all the gossip, Ruth? Who is she anyway? That was almost a royal progress she was making through the dining room.”

  “Elvira Tilley would know everything within two hours of hitting town. She has a private hot line to all the gossip. You see, she’s a lifelong resident and very active. She was head of the women’s division of the Grange, and big in the Ladies Aid. She’s also one of the first beneficiaries of the land boom started by Fiord Haven.”

  “Ah ha!”

  “I thought that would interest you, John. After the price of land went way up, Elvira sold an option on her farm. She hadn’t really planned to sell yet. She was going to hang on and leave it to Sally, that’s her daughter. But the offer was too good to pass up. So she treated her arthritis to a year in Florida. If Northern Land Development exercises the option, then she plans to go south for the winter every year. It really has done her a world of good. She looks fifteen years younger than she did after that last winter she spent here.”

  “And this Sally is her mother’s daughter?”

  Ruth laughed outright. “Indeed, she is. She’s following right in the family footsteps. Ladies Aid and all.”

  “Then Mrs. Tilley is echoing what everyone is saying. That should make for a very interesting trial here. You realize that the jury will be composed of Mrs. Tilley’s neighbors.”

  Henry was pleased to see that the case of Steve Lester’s murder had not become a foregone conclusion.

  “They can say all they want, John. I’ve heard Frewen talk about the motive Finley had and I just heard Sukey tell me that maybe Steve Lester could drive you up the wall almost as much as a wife. But I still don’t see it. So Lester was going to publicize Finley’s mistakes. Who was going to listen to him?”

  “More important, where was he going to find a forum?” Thatcher asked.

  “That’s right,” Henry rejoined. “Lester might write to the architects’ association, but you can’t tell me that they were going to give a lot of space to their failures. Their pitch is that you hire an architect to prevent the roof collapsing.”

  Thatcher shouldered his responsibilities. “Well, Henry, the trial may be a bare twenty miles from Pepperton. If so, you’ll be able to follow the whole thing then. Right now, the important thing is to get our stuff packed up. You’ve forgotten that we’re going to be back on the Trail tomorrow.”

  Chapter 22

  STUMPED

  HENRY HAD not forgotten. On the contrary, for the rest of the afternoon and evening, he put up a good show of enthusiasm for returning to the Appalachian Trail. After dinner, he heartily unfurled maps and AMC guides. Before dawn the next morning he was downstairs, repacking the Svea stove. When Thatcher joined him, he was counting fruit-and-nut bars with a vengeance. Stephen Lester and Ralph Valenti might never have existed.

  Henry’s good intentions, however, required verbal outlet.

  “Morning, John. We have a glorious day for getting back to the Trail. I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I am. What was that, Ruth? Yes, yes I did make certain we have extra socks. Oh, John, do you realize that we could have been halfway through Connecticut by now, if we hadn’t—oh, well. No use crying over spilled milk. But this time, no sidetracks—right? By the way, John, have you looked through your pack again? I would, if I were you . . .”

  Possibly a stranger might have been deceived by this unflagging zest, but John Thatcher and Ruth Morland were not.

  So, when he and Henry were once again trudging south on the Trail, silence was not the least of its charms. As Henry had reported, the morning was sunny and unclouded. But winter had moved nearer. There was a new bite in the air. And whole mountainsides blazed with color where previously single fingers of crimson had touched the valley to the west. Autumn’s leaves were falling fast since they left the Trail, and they had broader views of the magnificent sweep of the White Mountains.

  “Five-minute break,” announced Henry from up ahead, said with authority. Even on informal outings with friends, he believed in team-and-leader. And there was never any doubt in Henry’s mind about who was the leader-born. Amused, Thatcher had never demurred. The way to handle congenital organizers, he had long since realized, was to give them their heads.

  Almost immediately, Henry shed his Himalayan-team-leader incarnation. Contrary to the principles of sound mountaineering, promulgated by many authorities including himself, he unslung his rucksack and squatted on an inviting slab of granite.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he confessed.

  “Yes?” said Thatcher, with an internal bet on the subject. Even the best intentions can carry a man only so far.

  “James Joel Finley,” said Henry. “It’s all very well to arrest him, I suppose. But I’ve been thinking, John. And honestly, I don’t believe he has the guts to murder two men. You remember the kind he is. You remember the clothes he wears. Now, does it seem likely that a man like that . . .?”

  “Mmm,” said Thatcher evasively. He did not subscribe to Henry’s implied theory that a double murderer must possess unusual qualifications and, hence, strengths. Furthermore, while clothes might make the man, they did not necessarily make the murderer.

  Yet, undeniably, Finley’s arrest did not write a satisfactory finis to the Fiord Haven tragedies, even in minds other than Henry’s. If, and Thatcher was carefully neutral when he used the word even to himself, if James Joel Finley had murdered Stephen Lester and Ralph Valenti, then he had done so with a simplicity that was almost breathtaking. Indeed, the script read like a primer.

  Lester had threatened Finley’s reputation, his pride, and his livelihood by uncovering a flaw in the design for the roof of Fiord Haven’s main lodge. As a result, Finley had taken advantage of a chance encounter at the building site. He had struck Lester down.

  Put that way, Thatcher reflected, it sounded almost biblical. No doubt defense counsel would argue that Finley was mentally unsound, afflicted with delusions of grandeur. Would the prosecution, he wondered, look up credit standings?

  At any rate, after this act of retribution, Finley’s behavior grew even simpler, if that were possible. Once he realized that Ralph Valenti might withdraw his vital alibi, Finley had used the confusion of the Fiord Haven gala at the Prudential Center to murder Valenti.

  Really, despite those confused attempts to involve Eunice and Amanda, James Joel Finley’s motives and methods seemed outstanding for their primitive directness.

/>   “A man like that . . .” Thatcher skeptically repeated aloud.

  Henry, to all intents and purposes, was concentrating on the valley where a string of large ponds gleamed like pearls in the morning light. Nevertheless, he pounced.

  “What was that?”

  “Just another anomaly,” said Thatcher without elaborating. Then, to give Henry something else to brood over, he added, “We ran into the Davidsons just about a mile or two ahead, didn’t we?”

  “That’s right,” said Henry, stiffly. “I guess we’d better push on.”

  He was on his feet and moving.

  Referring to Sukey and Alan Davidson did not distress Henry, Thatcher knew. No, his pique came from another source. He had been reminded of the contretemps that had marred preparations for this resumed trek.

  The night before, Henry, a purist among Philistines, had maintained that the only proper behavior for a true Appalachian Trail buff was to start from scratch.

  “But, Henry,” Thatcher had protested mildly, “why retrace our own steps? After all, we’re not out to set any records, or even to get mentioned in footnotes. Why not simply pick up the Trail where we left it?”

  Ruth had looked up from her knitting to second him.

  Naturally, this was enough to spark Henry’s demon of perversity. In exalted terms, he held forth on standards and excellence, on man and mountain, on nature and the integrity she demanded from those who serve her.

  It made a nice change from murder, but his audience remained adamant. He and Thatcher had rejoined the Trail some miles north of the tree beneath which they had first encountered the weeping Sukey. When they camped tonight, it would be several miles south of that ill-starred spot, and free from all unhappy associations.

  Or so Thatcher hoped.

  Yet even while he was steering Henry away from recent events, Thatcher found his own attention circling back, to the Davidsons, to Fiord Haven, to Eunice, to Amanda Lester, even to Finley. If the police thought they had a case against Finley, no doubt they did. Alec Prohack, and possibly others, might well prove it. But Finley’s arrest left unsolved many problems that had come to light. Thatcher had a feeling that Finley’s conviction might do so, as well.

  What, for example, explained the conflicting accounts of Stephen Lester’s purchase of a Fiord haven lot?

  And if it was understandable why Ralph Valenti had given Finley a false alibi, what had later induced him to do an about-face?

  For that matter, was the naked hatred crackling between Eunice and Amanda entirely credible?

  And Peter Vernon . . .?

  Thatcher found himself wondering if the police had been reviewing Vernon’s movements over the last few days. Lester’s death had removed a threat from Finley, but it had removed a greater threat from his ex-wife. And it had left Eunice with a windfall—a windfall that some men might regard as a dowry.

  Thatcher, automatically following Henry, had to take himself in hand at this point. There is such a thing as going too far. The banker’s bias stood him in good stead nine times out of ten. But there was always the danger of falling into Henry’s error: thinking that, at any given time or place, there was only one correct way to view the situation. Fiord Haven had certainly been the cockpit for enough basic passions to explain violence and murder. Possibly his niggling questions proved, as Henry had ringingly declaimed more than once, that Wall Street diminished the human spirit.

  Just then, the human body reclaimed his attention. A careless step on a loose stone almost cost him his balance. Thatcher called himself to order. Only fools strolled along the Appalachian Trail with wandering wits. Better let the dead bury their dead, and the living keep their secrets, if he hoped to return to Wall Street no more flawed than he had left it.

  Henry, forging effortlessly ahead, stopped to wait.

  “Here,” he said, pointing out a tree identical to the thousands surrounding it, “here is where we first came across the Davidsons.”

  Thatcher was not going to argue. Among other things, this was Henry’s way of showing that he was too generous to harbor a grudge. It also signified that he was still determined to put recent events behind them. This was particularly praiseworthy since they now stood exactly where they had when Henry plunged into the brush, first to find James Joel Finley’s lodge, then Stephen Lester’s body.

  “I believe you’re right,” Thatcher replied.

  With covert amusement, he watched Henry struggle against the temptation to prove incontrovertibly that there could be no doubt about it. But when Henry was magnanimous, he was magnanimous in a big way. After a visible struggle, he kept the conversation general.

  “You know, it’s a damned good thing you can’t see Fiord Haven from here,” he observed. “It hadn’t occurred to me before, but that would spoil this section of the Trail.”

  From here, the view lay westwards, to the valley with the pond large enough to be called a lake anywhere but in New England. The slope eastwards toward Fiord Haven was gentler and heavily wooded with the growth that had been so difficult for Sukey Davidson.

  Yes, Thatcher agreed, it was just as well that Henry and all other defenders of the Appalachian faith should be spared a clear view of the eruption of civilization, as exemplified by Fiord Haven, into their beloved wilderness.

  “I wonder if Fiord Haven will survive, after all,” he said. “They’re going to get more bad publicity during Finley’s trial. And yesterday I rather thought that Quinlan’s optimism was fraying at the edges.”

  Henry put mannerisms aside. “Yesterday was hard on him. On top of Finley’s arrest, there was that scene between Eunice and Amanda . . . But in the long haul, John, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Quinlan will remember that—if he’s not remembering it already. There are millions of people jammed between Boston and Washington—and that’s what will save Fiord Haven and the rest of these places. Everybody wants to get out to the country where there’s space. Of course, none of them realizes that all they’re doing is spreading the blight. They’ll build their cottages, and in ten years, this will be another rural slum, a blot on the landscape. There will be drive-in movies and hot dog stands . . .”

  “You’re old-fashioned, Henry,” Thatcher interrupted to say. “You’re right in essence, but wrong in detail. Drive-in movies and hot dog stands are for renters. Up here, there will be pretentious French restaurants with huge parking lots. A summer theater. And quaint stores, selling candles and homemade jam—”

  “Don’t forget sandals,” Henry added savagely. Then, his normal spirits returned. “God knows what these sandal makers do all winter! Oh well, let’s get out of here.”

  As they moved on, Thatcher conceded that he had been unjust to Henry Morland. Along this portion of the Appalachian Trail, everything conspired against forgetting what had happened. Just when memory had been bullied into quiescence, when a banker’s fascination with money had been beaten down, here was Fiord Haven (A NEW CONCEPT IN COUNTRY LIVING) casting a long shadow over the Appalachian Trail itself.

  And despite the best intentions in the world, the quiet of the forest was not broken only by the chatter of jays, the quick scudding of chipmunks, the bubbling of rivulets soon to be frozen. There were also echoes of remembered voices.

  Sukey Davidson, talking to a salesman. “Here,” he had said persuasively, “let me show you the photographs . . .”

  That youngster in Boston. “. . . he was the kind of guy who thought he was the only one who never made mistakes . . .”

  And a man, now dead. “I wish I had been the one to find Lester’s body . . . because if I had, I’d have rolled it down a mountainside, that’s what I would have done.”

  There were more recent voices. A proper New England lady, yesterday exchanging courteous greetings with total strangers. And Henry, waxing philosophic . . .

  “Good God!” Thatcher exclaimed abruptly. His attention had strayed so far afield that the branch lying across the path was his undoing. After a brief flailing, he crashed
earthwards, face down. The fall was noisy enough to silence not only the forest murmurs, but those distracting voices, as well.

  “John!” Turning, Henry hurried back. Bending over, he demanded, “Are you hurt?”

  Clearly, he was horrified.

  Thatcher righted himself and laughed aloud. Henry’s emotion was half concern and half censure. Of the two, Thatcher knew which was exercising Henry more.

  “No,” he said, ruefully brushing off leaves as he rose. “I am not hurt. And don’t worry. This is not a symptom of premature senility.”

  “Good, good,” said Henry dubiously.

  This was not the time or the place, Thatcher decided, to share his thoughts.

  “You’re sure you feel all right?” Henry pressed, still uncertain.

  Thatcher reassured him and the day proceeded without further mishap. They reached the Wilburn Shelter in very good time.

  It was over their second cup of coffee that Thatcher judged it prudent to present the case to Henry.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking about Finley,” he began.

  Henry became virtuous. By superhuman effort, he had kept himself from reverting to the subject. This, he felt, rendered him superior to those incapable of similar self-denial.

  Nonetheless, he listened intently as Thatcher ticked off the items that he had been weighing as they moved along the Trail that afternoon. When Thatcher finished, there was a long silence, broken only by the hiss of a dying fire. Overhead, thousands of stars shone coldly in a black sky.

  Then Henry exploded.

  “By God!” he roared, jumping to his feet. “You’ve done it! You must be right, John. You’ve got everything down—”

  He broke off, looking around dementedly. Thatcher saw his problem plainly. Henry wanted to take action immediately and a rustic mountaintop shelter, deep in the New Hampshire woods, at ten o’clock at night, was nobody’s ideal of a starting place. This did not stymie Henry long.

  “No,” Thatcher was forced to cut in some moments later as Henry went from forced midnight marches to more ambitious commando tactics. “I think I have a better idea.”