Murder on High Read Online Free PDF Page A

name. After eight years, Tracey had finally gotten over the formality of calling her Miss Graham. She eagerly awaited what he had to say. Tracey would never have called just to chat, being as parsimonious in the number of words he employed as he was reluctant at dealing them out. Having retired to Maine for a two-week vacation after completing her last movie, Charlotte was now getting a little bored. Actually, more than a little bored. Being a sensible Yankee, she had told herself that she needed a vacation. She had been working very hard. Having been thrown off kilter by a recent divorce, she had turned to work to bring herself into balance again, leaving little time between projects: an adaptation of a Henry James story for public television, a made-for-TV horror film, a feature film for a French director. She wasn’t complaining. Quite the contrary: she was very happy that there was work, the number of roles for a woman of her age being limited, though not as limited as it had been twenty years ago. But after seventy-one years, she should have known herself well enough to realize that she dealt as badly with rest, even active rest, as others her age did with activity. She had swum across her favorite lake, climbed her favorite mountain, sailed to her favorite island—her usual anodynes to a too-busy career. Under other circumstances, she would have turned around and gone home, but she had a reason for hanging around.
    The year before, she’d signed a contract with a publisher for her autobiography, which was now largely completed. That is to say, she’d written the sections dealing with the beginning of her life and the end of her life, and she was stuck on the middle. It’s been said that the bane of the biographer is the subject who accomplishes a great deal at the beginning of his or her life, and then lives on in obscurity. She had a similar problem, except that her period of obscurity had occurred in mid-life. Her black years, she called them: the period from her mid-thirties to her mid-forties when she’d been too old to play young women and too young to play old women. The development of television had helped, as had Broadway, which had always been her refuge when the going got tough in Hollywood, but the pickings had still been pretty slim. But her difficulty in writing about this period in her life wasn’t due solely to the dearth of events; it was also due to her reluctance to revive painful memories. The lack of work had been bad enough, but her black years had also been painful on account of an event which took place during this period, and which was inextricably linked to it in her mind: the death in 1957 of her lover, the actor Linc Crawford. Linc’s death was symbolic of the downward turn her life had taken.
    She had thought that by staying on in Maine, she would force herself to come to grips with her mid-life chapters. Instead, she had just gotten lonely. She missed the company of her circle of friends in New York, and especially that of her stepdaughter, Marsha. Technically, she supposed, Marsha, as the daughter of her former husband, was her ex-stepdaughter, but in this case the ex applied only to Marsha’s father, who had been Husband the Fourth and would probably be Husband the Last. Charlotte had no intention of severing relations with Marsha just because her father’s ego hadn’t been able to withstand living in Charlotte’s limelight, and because Charlotte herself couldn’t tolerate living in Minneapolis, which was where he spent most of his time.
    Failing Marsha, however, Howard Tracey would do very nicely. She had met Tracey eight years before during the course of an investigation into the murder of a Bridge Harbor acquaintance, a botany professor who had died as a result of drinking a cup of poisoned tea. At that time, Tracey had been the police chief in Bridge Harbor. Since then, the prospect of financing college educations for his three children had forced him to seek out a more