Tightrope Walker (11 page)
Authors: Dorothy Gilman
I just stared at him, my head spinning. No, not my head but the thoughts inside of it …
and so she went beyond the horizon into the country of the dawn.… If search you must then I can only give you this advice, the important thing is to carry the sun with you, because there will be a great and terrifying darkness … But I must clear up one detail, my dear young lady, that is not a hurdy-gurdy but a mere hand organ … They’re going to kill me soon—in a few hours I think … Look, whoever this is, she has to be dead now, which makes you some kind of a nut, doesn’t it?
and Amman Singh saying to me,
Trust the wind. Someday you will understand.
I said in a clear hard voice, “I am very much all right, Joe, I am very
much
all right.”
And I sat down at the table, glanced politely at a rather blurred photograph of a woman that capped the story, and began to carefully read the column below it.
July 25/ Mrs. Hannah Meerloo, long-time resident of Carleton and noted philanthropist, was pronounced dead on arrival at Anglesworth Hospital early yesterday morning, following a fall down the cellar stairs in her home on Tuttle Road. Mrs. Meerloo was the widow of Jason Meerloo, killed in World War II, and had lived in Carleton since 1953.
In the house at the time of the accident were her niece, Leonora Harrington, who
had arrived just that day for a visit; a house guest, Hubert Holton, and her summer chauffeur, John Tuttle, a graduate student of Union College. Of the accident Miss Harrington said, “I heard this terrible scream and when I turned on my bedside light it was five minutes after one in the morning. I raced into the hall and bumped into Mr. Holton, who’d heard it, too. We knocked on my aunt Hannah’s door and then went in and found her lights burning but the room empty. We began searching for her, not knowing where the scream came from, and then we heard a pounding on the kitchen door.
“It was Aunt Hannah’s chauffeur, Jay, who sleeps over the garage adjoining the house. He’d heard the scream too. We finally found her lying at the foot of the cellar stairs. She must have been going down to the safe—there were canceled checks lying all around her. She was always up late nights, and the safe is in the basement, in the old preserve closet.”
Miss Harrington was admitted to hospital suffering from shock and gave this account this morning upon being discharged.
Joe said in an astonished voice, “It’s real then, Amelia: a very odd and disputable death.”
We were silent then, each of us immersed, I think, in this explosion of theory meeting fact. Hannah had written that she believed she was going to be murdered, and here was Hannah’s death described for us: a bizarre accident in the middle of the night, one of those inexplicable tragedies that
do
happen to people occasionally,
except that more than a decade later we possessed Hannah’s note.
Joe said, puzzled, “But how was it done, considering what we know from her letter? And by whom? She
knew
these people, Amelia.”
“I think a successful murder has to be like a magic trick,” I said slowly. “Like sleight-of-hand, Joe, with something moving faster than the eye can follow.”
He said, “Give me Hannah’s note to read again.”
I dug it out of my purse and while he reread her letter I finished scanning the rest of the news column. It was Hannah’s obituary, but the pattern and shape of her life had begun to matter to me now as much as her death. It said:
Mrs. Meerloo was born Hannah Maria Gruble in Pittsfield, Mass., in 1925, the daughter of a carpenter and a schoolteacher. At 18 she married Jason Meerloo, whose father was an inventor who made millions from his various patents and inventions, a fortune his son Jason inherited several months before his tragic death in France. Left widowed and wealthy at an early age Mrs. Meerloo traveled extensively for several years and is believed to be the first American woman to have visited Tibet. In 1950, using her maiden name of Gruble she published a book for young people entitled “The Maze in the Heart of the Castle,” of which the New York
Times
wrote, “a small classic, a book for adults as well as children, full of enchantment and insights.” It is the only book Mrs. Meerloo is known to have written.
In 1953 she purchased the old Whitney house on Tuttle Road in Carleton and lived
there in semi-seclusion with her housekeeper. She endowed and built the Greenacres Private Psychiatric Hospital near Portland, established in 1946 the Jason Meerloo Orphanage in Anglesworth, and gave to this city the building which now houses the public library.
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.
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 the 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?