Tightrope Walker Page 9
She leaves as survivors her niece, Leonora Harrington, of Boston, and a nephew, Robert Gruble, of New York City, professionally known as Robert Lamandale. Funeral plans are as yet incomplete.
A formal inquest into the death will be held on Thursday.
“Joe,” I said, pointing to the last sentence.
“Inquest,” he echoed. “Thank God! Find the inquest edition.”
In a fury of haste I turned the pages of the August 5 edition. This time it was on the second page of the newspaper and Nora’s age was listed as twenty-four; Hubert Holton, forty, was described as an associate professor of Political Science at Maine’s Union College; John Tuttle was introduced as a graduate student, age twenty-seven, who had chauffeured summers for Mrs. Meerloo for nine years.
“That’s a very respectable group,” I said, taken aback.
“What did you expect, the Mafia?” countered Joe.
It was not a long report. Dr. Timothy Cox gave his testimony: death due to a basal skull fracture, with subdural bleeding. When asked to enlarge upon this he explained it as bleeding between the pia matter and arachnoid, a wound, he said, that fitted with the circumstances of her death, in this case the head striking cement, causing instant unconsciousness. She had been unconscious but still alive—barely, he said—when he reached the house. She had died in the ambulance.
Nora repeated the story that had been given earlier to the newspaper, and both the chauffeur and the house guest confirmed that they had been awakened by a scream in the middle of the night. The only new person to give testimony was the housekeeper, a Mrs. Jane Morneau, age forty-two, who said it was customary for Mrs. Meerloo to give her, and any other help, their vacations during the month of July because July was “when Mr. Robin or Miss Nora, or both, came to visit her.” Mrs. Morneau said that on July first, the day she left for her holiday, Miss Harrington had already been there, “and very high-spirited she was,” and had been there for a week. She recalled vague plans for Miss Harrington and Mrs. Meerloo to be driven to New York City by John Tuttle to see Mr. Robin in a new play he was appearing in on Broadway. Mr. Holton’s name was vaguely familiar to her but she was sure he was no friend of Mrs. Meerloo’s. He had never come to the house before, and he was a stranger to her now.
The verdict by Judge Henry Tate was rendered as death by accident due to lack of evidence to the contrary.
Joe closed the volume thoughtfully. “Due to lack of evidence to the contrary,” he repeated.
“Funny thing to insert,” I said. “Don’t they usually just say ‘death by accident’?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said, frowning. “What strikes me first is, who is this Hubert Holton the housekeeper may have heard mentioned but had never seen before? Was he a friend of Nora’s?”
“Yes, but there’s something else, too,” I pointed out, reaching for my spiral notebook. “Why did the first report in the newspaper say that Nora had ‘just arrived for a visit’ on the day of Hannah’s death when the housekeeper testified she was already there on July first? Where had she been?”
Joe, still scowling, was lost in thought. I opened the notebook and wrote, Hubert Holton, underscored, and then, If Nora was away, for how long was she gone? I wrote down the other names given, too: Judge Henry Tate, Dr. Timothy Cox, Mrs. Jane Morneau.
“Three people,” Joe said abruptly, with a shake of his head. “Just three people in the house at the time, aside from Hannah, of course: Nora and this Holton chap and the chauffeur John Tuttle in the adjoining building. But Hannah writes about ‘the faceless ones.’ Who could they have been? Do you suppose she could have been hallucinating?”
“Has it occurred to you,” I said, “that her captors might have worn stocking masks when they brought her food? That could explain their facelessness.”
“But what captors?” argued Joe. “The people in the house were known to her, Amelia. Even in stocking masks she would have recognized them: by their gestures, their walk, their voices.”
“There could have been others in the house,” I pointed out. “Nora was the only one related to her, and according to the newspaper account she had only just ‘come back.’ While she was gone there could have been others there, Joe. We have to find out how long Nora was away.”
He nodded. “Okay, where do you suggest we start?”
“Why not at the very beginning?” I asked.
“Why not?” he grinned, and kissed me. “Let’s go.”
I replaced the volume of 1965 Tribunes and followed Joe up the stairs. But at the top I turned and looked back, knowing that I would never forget that electric, almost overpowering moment when I discovered that Hannah Meerloo was H. M. Gruble. Then Joe switched off the basement light and I followed him out to resume—or to really begin—our hunt for clues to a long-ago murder.
8
The real estate agent was a nice little man with a pink cherubic face and bright blue eyes. His name was Bob Tuttle—lots of Tuttles in Anglesworth, he said—and he drove us back to Carleton in his ancient Chevvy, pock-marked and stained from winter road salt.
We hadn’t taken the time to visit the house yesterday, having become so very happily distracted, and so this was our first look at it. At first glance it was disappointing; I guess I’d expected a huge brick mansion after reading the word philanthropist in the local paper. It was large—ten rooms, Mr. Tuttle said—but it was just a comfortable, old-fashioned frame house with a porch running all around it and the south corner of the porch glassed in. It was an inconspicuous dun color that blended with the overgrown, frost-killed lawn around it, although on closer inspection it proved to have started out as olive-green.
“Needs a fresh paint job,” Mr. Tuttle said cheerfully. “The Keppels had it only two years.”
“How many people have owned it in the last, say, fifteen years?”
“Oh, a number,” he said breezily. “Nice old house, you know, but then people see something small and modern and off they go.”
Joe, following my line of thought, smiled. “Has it the reputation of being haunted maybe?”
Mr. Tuttle looked shocked as he braked beside the front steps of the house. “Lot of nonsense,” he said indignantly. “We’ve long winters here and people like their gossip. You get just one person saying a thing like that and soon it’s gospel truth. You can’t believe everything you hear.”
“I never do,” I said innocently as he brought out a huge circle of keys with tags hanging from them. “Although as a matter of fact Joe and I adore haunted houses.”
“Do you now,” he said warily, and, having separated a group of keys from the others, he opened the car door and climbed out. The three of us stood a moment on the circular graveled drive, a copse of birch trees to the right, a long flow of lawn on the left. The sun was shining and there were all kinds of delicious earth smells; spring was late up here but it was on its way, no doubt about it. Through the trees on the right I caught a glimpse of river flowing below the house.
We walked up wooden steps, crossed a wooden porch that crackled dryly under our feet, and entered a very cold house to begin a tour of its rooms.
Every house has its own personality but this one was curiously neutral. Too many people in too few years, I guessed, but the wainscoting in the dining room was freshly painted and the kitchen was modern except for a very old wood-burning cookstove in one corner. That would have been Hannah’s, I decided. There were fireplaces everywhere: in the long living room, in the dining room, in the kitchen, and one upstairs in the master bedroom, Mr. Tuttle said, but Joe announced that he’d like to see the basement first. “To have a look at the foundation and the sills,” he said firmly. This earned him a look of such respect from Mr. Tuttle that from then on he addressed all of his remarks to Joe and ignored me.
The door to the cellar opened at the end of a very long hallway, which I found interesting. It was a hallway that began at the front door and ended at the cellar door, where one turned sharply right into the sunny kitchen behind t
he dining room. Set into this long hall were closets and a dumb-waiter. Mr. Tuttle turned on lights as we walked, and when he turned on the light to the cellar I was startled to find the stairs built of wood, not cement; somehow I had expected cement. These steps marched down at a moderately steep angle, but there was a handrail and nothing unusually dangerous except for the cement floor waiting at the bottom. I followed Joe and Mr. Tuttle down, feeling a little queasy, and stopped at the last step, staring at the floor where Hannah had been found lying unconscious. Of course there was nothing there. I turned and looked back up the stairs. The accepted story, as I understood it, was that Hannah had been carrying a handful of checks, had turned on the light, started down the stairs, lost her balance and fallen to the bottom. But there was something missing here, I thought, and the word was trajectory. The stairs were narrow and they were as steep as the usual basement staircase, laid out to conserve space, but still.…
“But still,” I thought, “how could a body fall down wooden steps and be killed unless she was moving at some terrific speed when she approached the cellar stairs, or was hurled down?”
I was thinking even then of that long approach to the basement door, the hallway running almost the length of the house.
While Joe and Mr. Tuttle examined beams I went up and descended the stairs again, trying to imagine falling from this step or that one. If I lost my balance near the top, I thought, or from anywhere on the stairs, I would automatically throw out my hands to protect myself, wouldn’t I? I’d stumble, bump against a step or two, grope for the handrail, hit a few stairs and possibly break an arm or a shoulder bone when I hit the cement but I couldn’t understand anyone’s being killed by the fall unless by some unimaginable fluke. I tried it again, climbing the stairs and this time closing the cellar door behind me, approaching it from the hall, reopening the door, pretending to turn on the light and then descending. Stopping for all these things made it even more impossible, unless a person were pushed. Or hurried down the hall blindfolded? Or dead before they went down?
“Let’s go upstairs please,” I said in a sudden, panicky voice. “Please. Now?”
Joe shot me a glance that included the stairs and up we went.
“This railing,” I asked as we ascended. “Is it new?”
Bob Tuttle shook his head. “Old as the house and still sound,” he said, tugging at it. “They knew how to build in those days. Mahogany, I’d guess.”
A sound old railing, too. Why hadn’t the doctor wondered about the trajectory and that sort of thing?
The staircase we mounted to the second floor curved in a lovely line. We inspected four bedrooms and two baths with interest before we moved on to the door of the attic. Here the arrangement was curious: the door opened on five shallow stairs and a landing, at which point the stairs turned abruptly right to continue up to the attic. At this landing there was a door.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing.
“What they used to call a box room,” said Mr. Tuttle.
I let him lead us on up the stairs to the attic, where we found two maids’ rooms, a lavatory, and walk-in closet smelling of mothballs, but I knew I wanted to see the box room.
“It’s locked,” said Mr. Tuttle.
“Just give me the key then,” I told him, holding out my hand. “While you and Joe discuss price,” I added brightly to make it worth his while, “because we plan a very large family. I have to see all the rooms.”
After he’d gone through all his keys again I left them, and as soon as I unlocked and opened the door of the box room I knew; I knew in my bones and with every cell in my being that this was where Hannah had been held prisoner. In the first place it was the only room in the house without a window: there was just a metal vent high up near the ceiling with a tiny fan set into it. A solitary light bulb hung from the ceiling without a shade, and there was a rusty iron cot along one slanting wall that looked as if it had been there forever. The room measured roughly 12 by 14 except that the slanted ceiling made it look even smaller. It was empty except for the cot and an old bureau tilted on one leg that nobody had cared about enough to remove. The walls were plaster and had been painted not too long ago.
I sat down on the iron cot and looked around me at what Hannah would have seen, because I was sure now. A box room would have been where they stored trunks in Victorian days; there would have been one or two of those, I guessed, plus the hurdy-gurdy, and perhaps a few other pieces, possibly a rocking horse kept for Robin and Nora to play with when they were young. One of the trunks would have been filled with costumes—what made me know this?—for dressing-up fun on a rainy day. But I didn’t think it would be a good place in which to be trapped: there would have been no daylight, and the mattress—if it was the same one—was filthy and full of lumps and holes. At times the room must have been stifling—it had been July, after all—and it must always have been claustrophobic.
I sat there and I said softly, “Hannah?” and then, “Hannah Gruble?”
I’ve never believed in ghosts, although I do believe that we leave something of ourselves behind us, some imprint of personality or essence, in all the places we live. I believe that people also affect us in this way by their vibrations. This is my only explanation for what happened to me after I spoke Hannah’s name. I mean, if I didn’t explain it in this way I would have to believe in ghosts, wouldn’t I? But a sense of peace, of absolute calm—such as I’d experienced only in the presence of Amman Singh—flowed through me and transfixed me as I sat there. It was a feeling of unbelievable tranquility, almost of communion with someone, and it lasted until I heard Joe and Mr. Tuttle descending the stairs from the attic.
The sound of their footsteps brought me back to the moment with a start, and I remembered why I was here. Wondering if Hannah might have attempted any other messages I walked over to the bureau and examined it but the drawers were empty except for two dead flies and something stuck to the top of one drawer. I had just pried it loose when Joe and Mr. Tuttle walked in.
“Nice house, don’t you think, Joe?” I said. Glancing down into my hand I discovered that all I’d unearthed was a petrified wad of chewing gum.
Joe looked around with interest, lifted an eyebrow and nodded. “But it’s four o’clock already, Amelia, I think we’d better go back to town and talk about it. Mr. Tuttle feels the owners are ready to come down in price quite a bit. It’s all very tempting.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” I said eagerly. “Put a window in here and it would make a lovely little sewing room.”
We moved out into the hall and I noticed that Bob Tuttle forgot to lock the box room. Joe was saying deliberately, “Mr. Tuttle tells me that Dr. Cox is dead but your mother’s old friend Jane Morneau still lives in Anglesworth.”
“Wonderful!” I exclaimed—we were turning into a regular vaudeville team, Joe and I—and remarking on the coincidences of life, of which the most amazing one Mr. Tuttle would never know, we walked out on the landing, down the several stairs to the second-floor hallway, followed it to the staircase, and thus left Hannah’s house behind us.
Parting with Mr. Tuttle, however, proved less easy. He wanted to give us a good many judicious suggestions about the house, he wanted to counsel us on a possible price offer and to explain the attitude of the Keppels, while we in turn wanted to inquire about Hannah’s will before the courthouse closed. It made for a tight squeak; in fact, it was precisely four-fifty when we raced up the stairs of the courthouse again. We ran down long hallways following signs of a flat yellow hand, with index finger pointing and the word PROBATE under them, until we reached a room that was high-ceilinged and cool, with a long counter and desks behind it, and walls lined with legal volumes. I was glad to stop running and catch my breath.
Joe asked the young woman who approached us if we might see the will of Hannah Meerloo, who had died on July 25, 1965. I had the terrible feeling that the clerk would say we needed a court order to see someone’s will but she nodded in a matter-of-fact w
ay, asked us to write the name on a piece of paper for her, and then disappeared into an adjoining room where I could see row upon row of records in drawers and on shelves. I looked at Joe and saw that he was fighting down his suspense. Presently the young woman returned and placed before us a single-page document with a signature at the bottom.
“You’ve just time to photostat it if you’d like,” she said politely. “We close in two minutes. There’s a machine behind you.”
“Yes,” I said, incredulous at its being so easy. “Yes, thank you.”
We made two copies, handed back the original and hurried out of the building in a stream of departing clerks. We began our reading of the will seated outside on the steps in the fading sunshine.
“Joe, look at the date,” I gasped. “July 2, 1965, only twenty-three days before she was killed.”
“I’m looking,” he said grimly.
The single sheet was neatly typed, with the signatures of three witnesses at the bottom. I read:
Let it be known that this is the last Will and Testament of Hannah Gruble Meerloo, and that being of sound mind and body I, Hannah Gruble Meerloo, appoint as co-executors of my estate my nephew Robert Gruble of New York, and my attorney Garwin Mason of Anglesworth.
Since the Greenacres Private Psychiatric Hospital has already been endowed by me with a permanent Trust Fund, and other charities of mine are now self-sustaining I bequeath to my loyal housekeeper Jane Whitney Morneau the sum of $35,000. and, renouncing all previous wills, ask that the remainder of my estate, once taxes have been removed, be divided equally in three ways: one-third of the residual to my niece Leonora Harrington of Boston, one-third to my nephew Robert Gruble of New York, and one-third to my protégé John Tuttle of Carleton, with the hope that he may see fit to continue contributions when necessary to the support of the Jason Meerloo Orphanage in Anglesworth, in which he spent his early years.