Murder on High Read Online Free PDF

remunerative position, and he had joined the Maine state police, rising rapidly to the rank of lieutenant. She wasn’t surprised at how well he had done. Underneath his country rube persona, which Charlotte suspected he cultivated out of a chameleonlike need to blend in with his surroundings, he was a very smart man.
    Despite their disparate backgrounds—though he admitted to having traveled to Boston on a couple of occasions, Tracey was generally loath to leave his little corner of the Maine coast, and was about as unworldly as they come—Charlotte felt a strong kinship with this country police officer. They had a tribal bond, the tribe being that of the old-fashioned Yankee: hard-working, resourceful, persevering, and not without a fair degree of craft and cunning.
    Charlotte took a seat on the couch facing the fieldstone fireplace in her living room, telephone receiver in hand. “Ayuh, Howard,” she replied, mocking him gently. He always sounded to her as if he were speaking through a mouthful of pebbles, like Demosthenes practicing his orations.
    “Something’s come up that I think you might be interested in.”
    Charlotte’s ears perked up. Taking into account the Yankee penchant for understatement, she interpreted this statement to mean that an event of major proportions had taken place, and moreover, that it was an event of the utmost importance to her. What on earth could it be!
    “Are you free today?” he asked.
    “As a bird,” she replied, thinking guiltily of her autobiography, the deadline for which had already been postponed twice.
    “I’ll be over to pick you up in twenty minutes.”
    “Are you going to pay me the courtesy of telling me what this is all about? Or are you just going to sit there and let me go on wondering what it could be until you get here?”
    “The latter. If I knew what it was about, I wouldn’t be calling you to find out, now, would I?”
    True to his word, Tracey pulled the unmarked state police car over on the gravel shoulder of the Harbor Road exactly twenty minutes later. Though he now worked at the state police barracks, which were an hour and a half away in the university town of Orono, he still lived in Bridge Harbor, which was the hamlet that Charlotte overlooked from her mountainside aerie. She was waiting for him at the foot of her driveway, sitting on a granite boulder. When it came to promptness, Charlotte was as irritatingly scrupulous as Tracey. It was an annoying (to her) habit, but she’d never been able to get over it. As a veteran of fifty-one years in front of the cameras, one of the traits she should have acquired by now was sufficient temerity to put someone out, even if it was only once in a while and for a few minutes. She took her habitual promptness as a fault of character, on a par with a childish propensity to tell the truth even when it wasn’t in one’s own or anyone else’s best interests. (Though an unfailing desire to tell the truth was decidedly not one of her character flaws, her aptitude for dissimulation being one of the factors that had prompted her to go into acting in the first place.)
    By now, she had learned to accept her promptness, along with some other undesirable character traits that she might at one time have been inclined to overlook but over the years had been made well aware of, thanks to the tireless efforts of one man or another—if not a husband or a lover, both categories being numerous enough, then a director, a co-star, or a playwright. Since each of the many men in her life had designated different areas of her character as being worthy of remediation, she supposed that she had, given the overwhelming nature of her burden, simply given up. Her long experience at being a candidate for reform had also helped her to discern a pattern in these attempts to make her over, namely that the character traits singled out as faults by a particular man often stood in direct contrast to his own, to his mind, blameless habits,