Murder on High Read Online Free PDF Page B

i.e., being prompt was only a character flaw in the eyes of the husband who was habitually late. Had she still been married to Husband Number One, she would probably still be worrying about risking a host’s disapprobation by arriving on time for an appointment. She remembered well her habit of those early years, inspired by her husband’s criticisms, of walking around the block in order to arrive fifteen minutes after the appointed hour. Without the perspective of the years, she would never have realized that there were people, Howard Tracey among them, who were as concerned about promptness as she, but nevertheless led perfectly respectable lives, and were even invited back by hostesses who hadn’t had time, on those occasions where the guest in question had arrived on the dot, to set out the crudités or plump the pillows.
    As the car came to a halt, Tracey reached over to open the door for her. “Morning,” he said. His round cheeks bulged like a chipmunk’s under the brim of his tan porkpie hat, which was a decided sartorial improvement on the baseball cap he had always worn as police chief.
    “ Now are you going to let me in on what this is about?” she asked as she settled in on the front seat next to him.
    Ignoring her, Tracey pulled out onto the road that skirted the harbor. The sun was burning the mist off the water, and it rose in wispy tendrils that wound around the masts of the sailboats at their moorings.
    “It’s about a woman named Iris Richards from Old Town,” he said finally. “I think she might be an acquaintance of yours.” He looked over at her inquiringly with his big, watery blue eyes.
    Charlotte was convinced that much of Tracey’s success as a police officer had to do with his appearance. Someone with eyes like a baby’s and cheeks like a cherub’s inspired one to cooperation.
    She combed her memory. She had known Irises—several of them, the most memorable being “her” screenwriter during the Golden Years, Iris O’Connor. Iris O’Connor had been a genius at the kind of sophisticated comedies that had been Charlotte’s bread and butter. But she had never known an Iris Richards, especially one from Old Town, Maine.
    “Doesn’t ring a bell?” he asked.
    She shook her head. “What makes you think she might be an acquaintance of mine?”
    “You’ll see when we get there,” he replied.
    “Are we going to Old Town, then?”
    Tracey nodded as he turned onto the secondary highway that led inland in the direction of the mill town that was just north of Orono on the west bank of the Penobscot River.
    Though she had never been there, Charlotte was familiar with Old Town as the site of the Penobscot Indian reservation, which had been much in the news in the 1970s as a result of the land claims settlement act, which awarded the Indians millions of dollars as restitution for their loss of treaty lands.
    “What’s your interest in this Iris Richards?” she asked.
    He looked over at her. “She’s dead. Fell off the Knife Edge two weeks ago. Came to a stop a thousand feet later.”
    “On Mount Katahdin?” It was a statement more than a question. Anyone who had spent any time in Maine had heard of the famous trail, so-called because of its resemblance to a knife blade. It was often referred to as the most difficult nontechnical trail in the East.
    “I can tell you haven’t been reading the papers,” he said. “It’s been all over the news. There’s going to be an inquiry into her death this afternoon. That’s the second of our destinations. It’s at one.”
    Charlotte picked up the folded copy of the Bangor Daily News that lay on the seat between them. “Does this tell about it?” she asked.
    He nodded. “There’s a photograph there, too.”
    Charlotte opened the paper to the story “Hearing to Be Held on Hiker’s Death,” which was at the bottom of the front page. A blurry photograph showed a handsome woman in her sixties, with a long, aristocratic face capped by an