“He had been stomping on it, and apparently she gave him what for. Iris had a temper. She said he was a member of some club. What was it? The High something.” Bending over, he picked up a bottle of Jim Beam. “They climb the highest mountain in every state.”
“You mean, they collect mountains?” asked Charlotte.
He tossed the bottle onto the fifteen-cent pile. “Yeah. Of course, Iris went on about that too. The Highpointers—that was it.”
Tracey wrote down the information. “And how about you?” he asked. “Did you meet anyone else on the trail? Or see anything unusual?”
Mack shook his head. “Of course I saw other people on the trail,” he replied. “But nobody who stands out in my mind.”
“Jeanne told us that there was a man hiking just ahead of her and Iris on the Saddle Slide who was wearing an orange windbreaker. You didn’t see him by any chance, did you?”
Mack thought for a moment, and then shook his head.
“From what Jeanne says, you were one of Iris’ best friends,” Tracey continued, suddenly shifting the direction of the questioning.
“I guess you could say that, but that’s not saying much,” Mack replied. “She wasn’t very good at friendship. She was like Thoreau in that respect; she held people to such high standards that few could measure up.”
“And you measured up?” asked Tracey.
Mack leaned back in the lawn chair and shook his head. “No. She only accepted me because I was beyond the pale.” He smiled. “As far as she was concerned, there was no point in even attempting to apply any civilized standards to me. Just a bum, you know.”
“But she was good friends with Jeanne,” offered Tracey.
Mack shrugged. “She liked to think that Jeanne was her best friend. But Jeanne’s loyalty to Iris wasn’t based on friendship.”
“Why not?”
“Iris took advantage of Jeanne. Bullied her, if you ask me. Do this, do that. Jeanne waited on her hand and foot. Every day, from dawn to dusk. She never had a moment to herself. But she did it all, uncomplainingly.”
“Why?” asked Tracey.
“Security,” he replied simply. “She grew up right here on South Water Street.” He nodded down the street at the forlorn row of run-down houses overlooking the tracks. “As you can see for yourselves, it ain’t exactly the Garden District.”
“The wrong side of the tracks,” said Tracey.
“Sort of.” He smiled again. “Since the river’s on the other side, there isn’t really a right side. Anyway, there were seven children in a teeny-tiny little matchbox of a house, and not a pot to piss in. Working for Iris, she got to live in the nicest house in town.”
“Did she know that she stood to inherit it?” Having found a ready source of information, Tracey was milking it for all it was worth.
“Sure. She not only knew, she was counting on it.”
“And how did Jeanne feel about Iris’ relationship with Keith Samusit?”
“That’s a good question. To put it in a single word: threatened. She was afraid that Keith was going to supplant her in Iris’ affections.”
“Did she have reason to feel that way?”
“Sure did. There were some people who thought their relationship was”—he paused to search for the right word—“unnatural. I don’t think there was anything unnatural about it. It was simply that of a lonely old woman and a young man who made her feel youthful again.”
“Youthful, in what way?”
“There was a sexual element, but only in a minor way. She was always more”—he hesitated—“I wouldn’t say flirtatious because it’s a word that wouldn’t apply to Iris—but she was definitely more lively when he was around. But it was really more of an intellectual thing. They shared this feeling for the importance of the vision quest, and they shared the retreat center.”
“Jeanne felt excluded.”
“She was excluded. As Keith and Iris became closer, Keith started taking over a lot of the jobs that Jeanne used to do. Running Iris’ errands, answering her mail, getting involved in her business and personal affairs. A lot of this was ostensibly in connection with the retreat center, but the net effect was to push Jeanne out.”
“I can see why she wouldn’t like him,” Charlotte commented.
“It went further than that,” he said. “She was worried that Iris would leave him Hilltop Farm.”
Charlotte’s jaw dropped.
“You mean change her will?” Tracey said.
He nodded. “I don’t know if she would have carried through. It would have been a terrible insult to Jeanne. But she had talked about it.”
So the distrust of Keith that Charlotte had picked up on in their conversation with Jeanne hadn’t been just in her imagination.
“Do you know about the Indian land-claims settlement act?” Mack asked.
Tracey nodded.
“Then you know the Penobscots claim to have been defrauded of hundreds of thousands of acres, including most of Old Town. Of course they were compensated by the settlement act, but Iris sometimes spoke idealistically of giving Hamlin’s Woods back to the tribe.”
The mention of Hamlin’s Woods reminded Charlotte of the black fly attack. The bites on her ankles had now swelled into painful, itching red welts. She bent over to scratch, but it did little to help.
“Like Thoreau, she was an advocate of the Indians,” Mack continued. “She felt it would be fitting for one of the region’s oldest stands of forest to be returned to the tribe. But even if she had carried through, Jeanne needn’t have worried. Iris would have changed her mind again.”
“She was fickle, you mean?” asked Charlotte.
“Not so much fickle as hard to get along with. She’d have a disagreement with someone, and that was that.” He drew his forefinger across his neck in a slicing motion. “She’d never have anything to do with them again.”
“That didn’t seem to be the case with Miss Ouellette,” said Tracey.
“Jeanne was the exception. Which is why I said she needn’t have worried. She always managed to grovel herself back into Iris’ good graces. But there weren’t many people willing to demean themselves to the extent that she was.”
“Iris must have had enemies, then.”
“By the dozens. There was hardly anybody in town she hadn’t pissed off at one time or another. She was always spoiling for a fight. It was as if she didn’t feel fully alive unless she had a windmill to tilt at.”
“Any of them have any knowledge of crossbows?” asked Tracey.
“That I can’t help you with,” Mack said as he continued to sort the bottles and cans. The original pile, now reduced by almost half, was surrounded by half a dozen satellite piles. “Any suspects yet?”
Tracey shook his head. After a few more minutes of conversation, he thanked Mack for his help and they left.
“It takes all kinds,” Tracey said, as they headed back to the car.
On their way back to Bridge Harbor, Charlotte and Tracey congratulated themselves on how much progress they had made. When they started out, they hadn’t even known for sure if they had a case. (Tracey was still angry with Clough for having kept the state police in the dark.) But by late afternoon, they already had one major suspect and a couple of minor ones. Setting aside the minor suspects (the Pamola prankster, Keith Samusit, and the mysterious man in the orange windbreaker) for the time being, they concentrated on the major one, Jeanne Ouellette. Her presence on the mountain combined with the fact that Iris might have been planning to disinherit her put her in the Number One spot. She had lived at Hilltop Farm for thirty-three years; to lose it now would most certainly be a motive worth killing for. As a bonus, she would be getting rid of a bully of an employer. A pistol crossbow seemed like an unlikely choice of weapon for a woman, but she certainly appeared capable of using one. Charlotte remembered how easily she had hoisted the flat of heavy pots. Though she claimed to have been on Hamlin Peak at the time of the murder, she could easily have been
lying. Tracey made a note to find out what she had been wearing, and to ask the other hikers who had signed out for Hamlin Peak if they had seen her. Though Jeanne said she hadn’t seen anyone, it would only take one other person to confirm her alibi. He also made a note to find out if she’d had any training in archery.
The first thing Charlotte did upon arriving back at her cottage was to put some calamine lotion on the black fly bites on her ankles. Then she fixed herself a Manhattan, sat down on one of the green Adirondack chairs on her deck, and looked out at dusk descending on the harbor. Though it was June twenty-first, many of the trees still weren’t fully leafed out, and she had a better view than she would have later on. But there wasn’t much to look at, at least as far as the harbor was concerned. The season in Bridge Harbor didn’t really get going until after the Fourth of July, and there were still fewer boats than usual at their moorings. Putting her feet up on the railing, she settled in to ponder the events of the day.
Iris’ connection with Ron Polito had led her reluctantly back to the subject she’d been trying to avoid by taking Tracey up on his invitation: her black years. Charlotte hadn’t been blacklisted, but she might as well have been. Iris had been put out of work because of her politics; Charlotte had been put out of work because of her age. There had been a couple of good roles, but that was it. The only parts that had come her way with any degree of regularity during that time had been TV parts, and there hadn’t even been many of those. Others might have taken solace at such a time in family, but she had no family. She had sacrificed everything to her career, and then her career had turned to ashes. She had eventually made a comeback, but it had been a lurching one. A series of small comebacks was more like it (a critic had once written that her career had been recycled more times than a soda pop bottle). Her black period had profoundly affected her self-confidence. She had always prided herself on her ability to cope with whatever hand life chose to deal her, and she had coped with her black years, but only barely. She supposed those years explained why she was such a glutton for work now. She had no standards: she would take anything. Friends often asked her why she wasn’t more discriminating. An actress of her stature could pick and choose, they said. They hadn’t sat around for ten years waiting for the phone to ring.
But at least she had still had a career, however diminished it might have been. What must it have been like for Iris? To be sitting on top of the world one minute—a job you love, lots of money, a sophisticated lifestyle—and the next minute, nothing. All because you refused to become a stool pigeon. She could see why it would drive someone to the woods.
She checked her watch: eight here, five in Hollywood. Finishing her drink, she went inside to call Ron Polito. As she had anticipated, he wasn’t available, but she left a message with his secretary, who promised he would return her call before the evening was out.
Iris wasn’t the only one who had been driven to the woods, Charlotte thought as she dressed for dinner. She, too, had sought refuge in nature. She had bought her cabin on the mountainside long after her black period had come to an end, but that experience had no doubt provided some of the motivation for wanting a retreat from the world. She had lived here now for seven summers, and had grown to love it with a passion. It had been built by an artist in the late nineteenth century out of native cedar, and she loved the way its mossy roof and hand-hewn siding blended into the mountainside as if it had always been there. Like Thoreau, she loved the solitude and the natural rhythms of the day, but she was far from the ascetic that he had been. A dinner of a baked potato and steamed string beans was not for her. She liked food, and a lot of it. The problem was that she had never learned to cook, at least to cook to her own satisfaction. Nor was there even much of a kitchen in her cabin, the reason being that the original owner had eaten his meals at the inn at the foot of the mountain. After dinner, he would make his way back up the mountain by lantern light, on a footpath he had carved out of the mountainside expressly for that purpose. He had taken his meals at the inn for sixty-five seasons, living well into his nineties. Charlotte hoped that she would do as well. When the real estate agent had told her the story of the artist, she was sold. The combination of rustic solitude and the promise of a five-course meal at the foot of the mountain was too good to pass up. And although there was now a road, Charlotte often took the path back up from the inn after dining, albeit with a flashlight instead of a lantern. The gracious old inn, with its guests who came back year after year—some of them old enough to make Charlotte feel like a youngster—was to Charlotte what the Emersons’ dining room had been for Thoreau, a refuge from the tyranny of too much solitude.
Twenty minutes later, she was dining on an appetizer of hearts of palm at her table by the window overlooking the harbor when the manager came over to tell her that she had a telephone call.
She took the call at the manager’s desk in the lobby, where there was an enormous fireplace in which a fire was always burning. As she suspected, it was Ron Polito. She had left him her number at home and the number here.
“What can I do for you?” he asked after they had exchanged pleasantries. The deep voice on the other end of the phone had lost some of its robustness; was quavery, even. Charlotte wondered if he was ill.
“I didn’t call about me,” she said. “I called about another one of the old dinosaurs.”
“Which dinosaur is that?” he asked.
“Iris O’Connor.”
“Oh,” he replied.
“Did you know she was dead?” Charlotte said.
Ron didn’t seem surprised. The members of their former circle were dying off at such a rapid clip that the news of an old friend’s death no longer carried the same emotional punch that it had even a few years ago.
Charlotte proceeded to tell him the story of Iris’ murder, and her own subsequent discovery that Iris Richards was really Iris O’Connor. She also told him about Iris’ note directing Partridge to contact him in the event of her death. “He’s been trying to reach you for a couple of weeks now.”
“I’ve been incommunicado,” he said.
“I told him I’d use my influence to get you to call him.”
“I’ll give him a call tomorrow.”
“Do you know who the heir to her literary estate is?”
“Yes. I do. The file’s back at the office, and I’m not there right now. But I remember the name.”
“Who needs the file when you’re Ron Polito,” she said. Ron’s memory was legendary. Years after a case, he could recite all the facts, right down to the date of a particular event.
He chuckled, and then replied, “Until about a year ago, the beneficiary was the Henry David Thoreau Museum. It was her pet charity of the moment. She was head of the committee that raised the money to get it started.”
Charlotte struggled to hear over the clinking of crockery and the murmur of conversation from the nearby dining room. “And now?” she prompted.
“About a year ago, she changed the beneficiary to an organization called the Katahdin Foundation,” he continued. “I helped her set it up about three years ago. She used money that she had in bank accounts out here to fund it. Which is why she had me set it up, rather than her lawyer in Maine.”
This was getting interesting, Charlotte thought. “I see,” she said. “If her lawyer in Maine had set it up, she would have been forced to reveal how much money she had, which in turn would have put her identity as a nurserywoman with a modest income into question.”
“More or less. What’s your interest in this, if I may ask?”
“Just sticking my nose into places where it probably doesn’t belong.”
“As in Murder at the Morosco?”
“Sort of. I’m a friend of the state police lieutenant who’s been assigned to the case. And, of course, I have a personal tie to the victim, seeing as how she was my screenwriter for ten years. What about the literary executor?”
“Ah, the literary executor,” he said. “He’s a young man by
the name of Keith Samusit. A Penobscot Indian, from what I understand. He’s also the executive director of the foundation.”
Charlotte nearly dropped the telephone receiver on the desk. “Well, that puts a new wrinkle in the case.” There were now two major suspects, both of them standing to gain significantly from Iris’ death. “How much is her literary estate worth?”
“A lot. Her books are all still in print, so they’re still generating royalties. The Lonely Heart is still selling two hundred and fifty thousand copies a year, world-wide. Someone once called Iris the world’s most widely read, least prolific author. But that’s not really true.”
“Why not?”
“Because she never stopped writing; she just stopped publishing. She’s got half a dozen novels stashed away in a safe at my office. This Indian is going to be surprised to learn just how rich his organization’s going to be.”
Charlotte was puzzled. “Why didn’t she want to publish them?”
“She had some highfalutin reason based on Thoreau; something about avoiding the necessity of selling baskets instead of figuring out how to sell more of them. But I suspect it was just plain orneriness. Why should she deal with publishers if she didn’t have to?”
“Didn’t she care what happened to them after her death?”
“Nope. She wanted me to agent them. But apart from that, she didn’t care. She said this guy Samusit could do anything he wanted with them. If they’re marketed right, they could be a literary sensation. Her books have never gone out of style; they’re classics.”
“Does Keith know the Katahdin Foundation is the heir?”
“Yes. Iris told me that she had told him. He was the only person apart from her companion, Jeanne Ouellette, who knew who she really was.”
The fact that Jeanne knew about Iris’ past life didn’t surprise Charlotte. She had already figured that out from Jeanne’s lack of interest in the locked room, and from her reaction when they’d been introduced.
Ron continued. “They were both sworn to secrecy, of course.”
“With the penalty for revealing her identity being that they would be disinherited?”
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