“Presumably,” he said.
“Well, I guess this puts Keith at the top of our list of suspects. But why kill her now? Why not wait until she died a natural death?” She was speaking as much to herself as to him.
“I know the answer to that question.”
“Yes?” she prompted.
“Iris would change the beneficiary of her literary estate every year or two. She’d become enamored of some charitable organization, but then there would be a falling out, and she’d change her will.”
“Unlike Keith, however, the others didn’t know they were her beneficiaries.”
“Not that I know of,” he said, and proceeded to name some of Keith’s predecessors, which, in addition to the Henry David Thoreau Museum, included the Thoreau Alliance, Save Walden Pond, the Friends of Baxter State Park, and the Maine Nature Conservancy.
“Did Keith know she had frequently changed beneficiaries?”
“Not through me,” he said. “I keep my work confidential. At least as long as the client’s still alive.”
“I know,” she said. Another of Ron’s virtues was that he could be depended upon to keep his mouth shut.
“But Iris may have told him, directly or indirectly. If he was at all close to her, which I presume he was, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out that her allegiances tended to fray after a while.” He continued. “I’ll have a better idea of the value of the literary estate once I start shopping her manuscripts, but I would guess it’s at least a million.”
“That’s not exactly chicken feed,” said Charlotte.
“No, it’s not,” Ron agreed. “It’s certainly reason enough to put this guy Samusit at the top of your list. Though he’s not the direct beneficiary he’ll be able to write himself a very nice salary as executive director. But …”
“But what?” Charlotte interjected.
“I think I may have another suspect for you.”
“Who?” How could Ron Polito have a suspect in a murder that had taken place three thousand miles away? But she didn’t doubt him.
“Are you coming out here any time soon?” he asked, knowing that her refusal to live on the West Coast meant frequent cross-country trips.
“On Tuesday, as a matter of fact. I’m meeting with someone about a project. Turning right around and coming back.”
“I think you’d better drop by and see me. Will you have time?”
“I’ll make time,” she said. After saying goodbye, she pressed the button on the telephone base, and then looked up at the manager, who was busy with some papers behind the desk. “Mind if I make a call to Orono?”
“Not at all, Miss Graham,” he replied.
He shouldn’t mind—she was one of his best customers, she thought as she dialed Tracey. After dropping Charlotte off, he’d grabbed a quick bite to eat at home, and then had gone right back to Orono. When he was on a case, he worked all the time, a fact that didn’t rest well with his family.
“Hello, Charlotte,” he said, picking up the phone right away. “Where are you calling from? I just tried you at home. I was about to try you at the inn.”
“That’s where I am,” she said, looking out at the fire.
“How’s that for detection?”
“It doesn’t take much detective ability to figure out that a woman who can’t cook is at a restaurant during the dinner hour.”
“Especially on a Thursday night,” he added. “How’s the spread?”
The Thursday night buffet at the inn was legendary, and the event, which was followed by dancing on the patio, was a social must for the residents of the summer colony.
“Great, as usual,” she said. “Listen, I have some news for you. I just talked with Ron Polito. He says that Iris’ literary estate could be worth a million or more. Guess who the beneficiary is?”
“You’ve got me,” said Tracey.
“Keith Samusit.”
Tracey let out a long, low whistle.
“Or rather, the Katahdin Foundation, of which Keith is the executive director. What’s more, he knew who Iris really was. The question is, was he on Katahdin on the day Iris was murdered, or could he have been?”
“We know he was in the vicinity,” Tracey said. “We can start by checking the entrance permits.”
“What were you calling me about?” she asked.
“We’re going to try to snag the Pamola prankster. Are you interested in heading up to Katahdin country?”
“Sure,” she said. She had an appointment to keep with the mountain.
9
Charlotte’s first glimpse of the legendary mountain came two days later on the way to Baxter State Park. Actually, on a clear day she could make out Katahdin from some of the mountaintops near her cottage on the coast. But from a hundred and fifty miles away, it was little more than a blip on the horizon. Charlotte and Tracey had driven those hundred and fifty miles earlier that morning, and arrived in Millinocket around noon. After eating at a luncheonette, they had set off for Roaring Brook Campground, which was the location of the trailhead for the trail up to Chimney Pond. They had expected to be disappointed in their wish for a view of the mountain: it was notorious for not emerging from the clouds for days on end, and the morning had been overcast. In fact, it had been raining for two days. But when they came out of the luncheonette they could see patches of blue, and by the time they rounded a bend just outside of town, there it was, its summit clad in a gleaming veil of fresh snow. To be sure, there were higher mountains, but at first glance Katahdin impressed Charlotte as being special for a quality, which for lack of a better phrase, she could only think of as mountainous. It truly was a mountain of the imagination.
Its uniqueness had to do with its unusual formation. An isolated gray granite monolith, it rose abruptly from the surrounding wilderness to a height of a mile. There were no competing peaks or foothills to detract from its solitary dignity, no trees growing on its rocky summit to dim its shining splendor. It was there, seeming to embody all of man’s noblest virtues: serenity, strength, aspiration.
“It kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” said Tracey, as he peered up over the dashboard to get a better look.
Charlotte nodded. She couldn’t take her eyes off of it. Katahdin was also unusual in not being a pointed mountain: it didn’t jut harshly into the sky, but sat there square and rugged, the serene monarch of all it surveyed.
“I bet I’ve seen Katahdin a couple of dozen times over the years, and it always seems new to me,” Tracey said. “The season, the weather, the time of day—it always looks different, but it’s always fascinating.”
“Who would ever have expected to find it capped with snow at the end of June?” Charlotte commented.
“It won’t last,” said Tracey. “But meanwhile it looks mighty pretty.”
As they continued along the winding road, the mountain would disappear, then reappear to rivet their attention once again.
“When was the last time you climbed it?” Charlotte asked. From this vantage point, it seemed so immense that she found it hard to imagine that anyone had ever actually reached the top.
“The last time was about ten years ago. I went with my son’s Boy Scout troop. I’ve climbed it seven or eight times, I reckon. A lot of people do it every year. Always seemed like a nice idea, I just never got around to it.”
“It looks as if it would be a pretty tough climb.”
“Depends,” he replied. “It’s not so bad if you start out from Chimney Pond. But if you start out from down at the bottom, it’s a killer. Nothing like the view from up top, though. You must be able to see a hundred lakes.”
“Do you think you’ll do it again?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” he replied as the mountain came into view once again. “But I don’t know if I’m up to it anymore.”
“Maybe you’ll have the chance to find out before we’re finished,” she said.
“Maybe,” he agreed.
Tracey had spent the entire previous da
y working with Haverty and Sargent on the plan to catch the man who had been masquerading as Pamola. The campers with reservations at the Chimney Pond Campground had been relocated to other campsites to make room for the park employees and state police who would be posing as campers. Each of these pseudo-campers, whose numbers also included Charlotte and Tracey, would be equipped with a walkie-talkie, with which they could buzz troopers stationed at the ranger’s cabin. When the Pamola masquerader appeared, the police would pounce on him, and take him into custody. Or such was the plan, anyway. With two major suspects now on hand, it seemed more unlikely than it had two days ago that the prankster had anything to do with Iris’ murder, but apprehending him would get one problem out of the way. Occam’s Razor, again. As far as the success of the venture went, the great unknown was the weather. So far, he had only appeared on moonlit nights, presumably because he needed moonlight to find his way without a flashlight. The weather in the area had been overcast for three days, and Tracey had been worried that the trend would continue. If the weather kept him underground, all their efforts would come to naught. The reappearance of the sun, however, validated the prediction of a clearing trend by mid-morning on which they had based their plans. Presumably he would be eager to get out again after having been cooped up since Thursday.
The other great unknown was the prankster’s choice of venue. If he chose to appear to one of the vision questers at the retreat center rather than to one of the campers at Chimney Pond, they would be out of luck. They were prepared to try again the next night on the theory that he would alternate between the two locations as he had in the past, but there was a limit to how long they could tie up the time of so many people.
All these thoughts went through Charlotte’s mind as they were driving through the tunnel of trees on the narrow perimeter road that led to the campground at Roaring Brook. Arriving at about one, they parked the car and then headed out on the trail. As they set forth, it struck Charlotte that any reasonable person would have experienced some degree of trepidation at the prospect of coming face to face with someone posing as an evil Indian god at a campground lean-to in the middle of the night. But that wasn’t a concern of hers, at least at the moment. Maybe that would come later. Right now she was worried about just getting to Chimney Pond. The campground was a two-and-a-half-hour hike from the base of the mountain. Charlotte was in good shape for a woman of her age as a result of the long walks she was fond of taking around Manhattan. But except for Murray Hill, and a few of the island’s other modest elevations, her walks were all on level ground. Nor was she accustomed to carrying a backpack; a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag was about as much as she ever toted around. But she was eager to test her mettle. If she made it, she fully expected to be obnoxiously proud of herself.
The Chimney Pond trail wasn’t steep, but it was all uphill, relentlessly uphill. Charlotte had probably stopped twenty times along the way to catch her breath, take off another layer of clothing, and give her neck and back a break from the weight of her backpack and her feet a break from her new hiking boots. New everything, in fact. Climbing mountains was not a sport she had been equipped for. With the exception of the camps on movie sets in various exotic locations, which were so luxurious as to hardly deserve the name, the last time she had camped out was in Girl Scouts. She was traveling light—a sleeping bag (good to zero degrees Centigrade), a foam rubber mat, a mess kit, a battery-operated lantern, a butane camp stove, a change of clothes, a few toiletries, and an assortment of freeze-dried foods—but the hike was a strain nonetheless. There had even been moments when she’d considered turning back. But the thought of Tracey waiting for her at Chimney Pond kept her going. He would be alarmed if she didn’t show up. Though they had planned to hike together, he had left her behind shortly after they had set out. She had urged him to go on ahead when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to be able to keep up.
Whatever doubts she may have entertained about the wisdom of her hiking venture were dispelled, however, about three-quarters of the way up. Following a side path marked by a “scenic view” sign, she emerged from the trees into a sandy, boulder-strewn clearing that gave her her first clear view of the spectacular scenery. Before her a sea of dark green evergreens stretched away to the mountain, at the foot of which lay the Great Basin, like a gigantic, terrible crater at the mountain’s heart. Clouds played over the vertical walls of dark gray granite, which were still streaked with white from the previous night’s snowfall. She could have been in Alaska, she thought as she took a seat on one of the boulders. After resting for a few minutes in this beautiful spot, she continued on. If anything, the trail got steeper as she went along, but she found it easier going, a feeling that she ascribed partly to the anticipation of the glorious scenery up ahead, partly to relief at being so close to the end, and partly to the fact that she’d become more accustomed to the pack. She had discovered that you had to carry your weight differently, leaning more forward than usual. She had also discovered that she had to be careful of her footing. God help her if she tripped; she’d be flat on her face in a second.
Four hours and fifteen hundred feet after setting out, she glimpsed a log cabin through the trees. She had made it! A moment later, she had arrived at the campground, which was as unique as the magnificent mountain at whose heart it lay. It was set in a grassy glade of birches and scrub spruce overlooking a pristine mountain tarn. All around, the perpendicular cliffs of the headwall soared into the clouds. The sight of the headwall reminded her of the slides at the hearing, and she searched in vain to pick out the ravine in which Iris’ body had been found. As her eyes scanned the rocky crags, she thought again of Pamola. This natural amphitheater was said to be the home of the evil spirit, and she could easily imagine him swooping down from the mountain’s fastnesses. Which brought her back to her reason for being here. Following the arrow on a sign, she headed down the path toward the ranger’s cabin.
Arriving at the cabin a few minutes later, she was greeted by Chris Sargent, the young ranger who’d accompanied Haverty to the meeting at Tracey’s office. He was a genial and fit-looking young man with a natural authority that was unusual for someone his age.
“Lieutenant Tracey wanted me to ask you something,” Sargent said after she had signed in at the hiker’s register (noting that she’d arrived a full hour after her traveling companion).
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Pamola has always appeared to older females and, with the exception of Mrs. Richards and Miss Ouellette, to older females camping alone. We have two other women who will be camping together, both of them park employees, but you’re going to be our only solitary female camper.”
Charlotte completed the thought for him: “And he wants me to be the decoy. Tell me,” she said, “did he just decide this, or is this something that he decided to keep from me until I got up here?” She had expected to be a decoy in the general sense, as were the other pseudo-campers, but she hadn’t expected to be the bait in the trap.
“He just decided,” Chris said, smiling. “He didn’t realize until he got here that Pamola had always appeared to female campers. He said he thought you’d be up for it. What do you say?”
What had she gotten herself into? But after making it up to Chimney Pond with a loaded backpack, she was ready for anything. “I guess it’s okay. I presume somebody’s going to be keeping an eye on me.”
“Lieutenant Tracey and Trooper Pyle will be staying in the next lean-to. Pyle arrived last night. We’ve had people arriving at various times, as if they were bona fide campers. You’ll be in number nine, which is the most isolated.”
“Is that the one that Iris was in?” she asked.
He nodded. “It’s just off the Saddle Trail, which we think is the way he gets here. Campers who’ve seen him have noticed that he heads off in that direction. But we have no idea where he goes from there.”
“What about my walkie-talkie?” she asked.
“I’ll give it to you now. C
’mon inside,” he said; leading the way into the office. “In case he’s watching with binoculars.” Inside, he disappeared into a back room with a sleeping porch that looked out at the headwall.
“I like your digs,” said Charlotte when he returned.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do too. It’s a big improvement over the crew cabin, which is where I used to sleep.” He handed her the walkie-talkie. “Keep it out of sight, just in case he’s watching.”
Charlotte pushed the button on the side, and the walkie-talkie on Sargent’s belt emitted an electronic squawk.
“We’re connected,” he said with a smile. “The signal is five beeps, very fast.” He demonstrated with his own walkie-talkie. “Someone will get to you in two seconds. Everyone here will be one of us.”
“How many will there be?” she asked.
“Eighteen. There are still a few real campers here, but they’ll be gone by sundown.” Excusing himself, he went into the back again, and emerged a minute later with a revolver. “Tracey wanted you to have this too.”
She took the gun. It was a .38 Special service revolver.
“Do you know how to use it?”
“I think so,” she said, testing its heft in her hand. She had appeared in enough thrillers to have a pretty good idea of how it worked.
“Let’s see you aim at that,” he said, indicating a poster of a moose that hung on the far wall. “Don’t pull the trigger,” he warned her. “It’s loaded.”
Charlotte raised the gun and took aim at the moose.
“Very good. I don’t think you’ll need it. But if Pamola takes out a pistol crossbow, you have Tracey’s permission to let him have it.”
“I should hope so,” she said.
“I think there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see him tonight. The weather’s clear, and he hasn’t been here in a while. He usually appears between two and three, but don’t bother to wait up. Just go to sleep as you usually would.”
“That won’t be any problem. The hike up was a killer.”
Murder on High Page 13