Tightrope Walker (16 page)

“So one is led to believe.”

He tossed the directory to the floor, picked up the phone, and dialed the number I’d scribbled on paper yesterday. “We need Mrs. Morneau more than ever,” he said. “Let’s hope she’s at home finally. At the least she can tell us where to find Tuttle.”

Apparently Mrs. Morneau was at home, and while Joe made an appointment for us to see her after lunch I read the opinion filed by Judge Arthur Pomeroy in December of 1965,
IN RE WILL OF HANNAH GRUBLE MEERLOO
. There was a lengthy analysis of Undue Influence, with references to Barnes
vs.
Barnes, 66 Me. 286,297 (1876) and Rogers, Appellant, 123 Me. 123 A. 634 (1924) but I skimmed through these to read the last paragraph:

To this was appended the message that the appellant, Robert Gruble, was denied his application to have counsel fees paid out of the estate.

On the bottom of the page someone had written in ink: decision made by R. Gruble not to appeal.

I wondered why.

I thought, they could never have gotten away with this without Nora’s testifying for them.

And this, I realized, was the hell that Nora had faced each morning since July 25, 1965.

Mrs. Morneau had said she would see us at one o’clock. It was half-past eleven when we finished reading the Probate Court records, and we had just decided on an early, leisurely lunch when the telephone rang. It was strange hearing it ring in a motel room hundreds of miles from home.

“Oh no,” groaned Joe, and picked up the receiver. “Osbourne here.” He listened and I saw his face tighten. “For God’s sake, Ken, I’m way up here in Maine, you know, couldn’t they have decided this earlier?… Yes, I know, I know, but this is Tuesday, they had all day yesterday and I can’t believe they didn’t know … Christ. Okay, Ken, I don’t know
how
but—right. Okay.”

He hung up and sat down hard on the bed. “Damn. You heard?”

“When do you have to go?” I asked, my heart plunging.

“I’ve got to be in court at nine tomorrow morning.”

I stared at him in astonishment. “In Trafton? But you’ll need a plane, and we don’t even know if there’s an airport, do we?”

The next forty minutes were spent on the telephone. I didn’t even have time to think about Hannah, or court records, or how I would have to drive back to Trafton alone in the van. There was one direct flight out of Bangor for New York each day, but it had already left. There was a flight from Bangor to Boston but too late to connect with the six o’clock plane to New York. We were referred to Blue Harbor Airlines. They had one seat available on a plane leaving for Boston at four o’clock that would connect with the flight to New York at six, which would connect with a New York flight to Trafton at nine, arriving at half-past ten. I hadn’t realized how far from home we were. While we waited for the airline to call back and confirm all these reservations I must say that our conversation turned hilariously prosaic.

I would have to drive home alone in the van, Joe reminded me, and he wanted my promise that I would leave for Trafton first thing in the morning, the earlier the better, and no nonsense about it.

I promised.

He didn’t at all appreciate leaving me here, he said, pacing the room furiously, and he wanted my promise that after we visited Mrs. Morneau, and after I’d delivered him to the airport, I would consider all investigations into Hannah’s death suspended. Done with. Finished. Promise?

I promised.

I was to drive no faster than fifty miles per hour on the highway, he said sternly; he would mark my route on the map and I was not to attempt too much driving in one day, or get too tired, did I understand?

It was really very endearing but I was glad when the airlines clerk called back to confirm space on all three flights. We just had time to buy two packages of peanut butter crackers in the coffee shop and to review en route to Mrs. Morneau’s the questions we wanted to ask, and the tact with which we must ask them: a biography would again be our cover.

With the help of the map I’d bought we found Farnsworth Road. Number 23 was a trim little white Cape Cod house with a picket fence around it, a gate, and a neat little flagstone walk leading up to the front door, which was painted yellow to match the shutters. Everything was very neat, even to the hand-printed name over the mailbox. We rang the bell and the door was opened by Mrs. Morneau. She had a pale, placid face, scarcely lined at all, gray eyes, and iron-gray hair forced into a very neat, stern bun at the nape of her neck. Her figure was what would be called full, and so sternly, rigidly corseted that it thrust out her bosom like a tray.

At sight of us she said, “I didn’t expect you to be so young.” Her voice held a note of sharpness in it.

“Well,” I pointed out, smiling, “Hannah Gruble’s book was for young people, you know. Mr. Osbourne here is thirty-one. And I’m Amelia Jones, by the way.”

We shook hands. “She gave me a copy, autographed,” Mrs. Morneau said, and, apparently forgiving us our youth, allowed us entry. We followed her into a neat, boxlike living room with so many knickknacks on shelves and tables that I could only suppose they were installed to keep her busy dusting them. We sat down, Joe and I on the couch by the fireplace, Mrs. Morneau
opposite us, very erect in a chair with wooden arms, her feet placed primly together on the floor. “Imagine a book being written about her,” she said in an awed voice. “After all these years, too. Of course I knew it was a fine book, but still—I hear you can’t buy it any more in the shops.”

I felt a pang of guilt and temporized by thinking that perhaps, given a few English courses, I might one day write Hannah’s biography; after all, I’d never imagined that I’d own the Ebbtide Shop. I brought out my spiral notebook, laid it professionally on my lap and dug out my pen. “You worked for Mrs. Meerloo a long time, Mrs. Morneau?”

“Oh yes, miss. Ever since she came to Carleton and bought the place on Tuttle Road. You understand she knew how to housekeep very well herself—she’d been born poor, she told me—but she left it all to me. Not one of these women like some,” she added with a sniff, “who go sneaking around seeing if there’s dust on the mantel. She couldn’t have cared less. An angel she was to work for, I can tell you.”

“You were very fond of her then,” Joe said.

“Fond?” Mrs. Morneau approached the word warily. “All I know is, when I heard she’d died I couldn’t stop crying for hours, which is more than I can say for my own father’s passing, heaven rest his soul. And though she did leave me a rare amount of money—well, it seems you need only get money to learn it don’t amount to much if it leaves you alone. I’d gladly give it all back, every penny of it, to have things as they used to be.” Her voice turned nostalgic. “Just her and me living there together and the children coming summers. Her writing in her room or sitting cross-legged on the floor doing her thinking, or saying ‘Jane, it’s time we had baklava, don’t you think?’ She was very partial to baklava, she was.”

“You must be a fine cook,” said Joe encouragingly.

“Good enough for Miss Hannah anyway,” she said, and turned her attention to the table beside her. “Hearing you was coming,” she said, “I went looking for pictures and found a few. You might be interested.” Her voice was careless, a little too casual, and at once I realized two things: one, that I didn’t want to see a picture of Hannah, because I had my own picture of her, inside of me, and two, that in the interval between Joe’s phone call and our arrival Mrs. Morneau had begun writing her own scenario. Already she was seeing herself as Someone Who Had Known the Great, a high priestess dispensing anecdotes of Hannah. Perhaps she even envisioned herself being interviewed on radio or television. “Hannah used to feel,” she would say, or “I remember so well the way she …”

She handed me two snapshots and a faded cardboard photograph, saying, “I’m sure there are more but these might look well in your book.”

“But that will come later,” I told her, smiling, “after the book is complete, and then I believe there are arrangements.”

She understood the word arrangements, and nodded, looking hopeful.

I glanced reluctantly at the photographs. The stiff cardboard photo was Hannah’s wedding picture, clear but taken at a distance. I saw a thin, slight girl in a long, old-fashioned dress standing next to a tall young man in an army uniform and cap. They looked very young, very happy and a little frightened. I turned to the second picture, a close-up dated 1950, and realized how characterless the first picture was, for here was Hannah years later: a small oval face, grave dark eyes with the hint of a smile lurking in their depths; odd, slanted black brows that were no more than a quick deft brush stroke over the eyes; a small chin, mouth
and nose. As Garwin Mason had said, nothing particularly distinctive at first glance, except for those strange eyebrows.… The third snapshot showed a slender figure sitting cross-legged under a tree, reading a book.

“Thank you,” I said, grateful that they in no way threatened my own picture of Hannah. “And by the way,” I added as I handed them over to Joe to see, “before we begin, we’ve heard that Mrs. Meerloo completed a new book just before her death. Would you know anything about that?”

“Ah, that would be Mr. Mason,” she said, nodding. “He’s the one insisted there was a book, for it’s nothing I knew about. Him being co-executor of the estate, and Mr. Robin being busy in New York, it was him and me searched the house for it.”

“And you found nothing?”

“Not so much as a scrap.”

I shook my head sadly. “Well—one question we have,” I said, putting that aside reluctantly. “Mrs. Meerloo gave so much money to her projects but we can’t find any record of the Jason Meerloo Orphanage. Is it still in existence?”

A faint shadow crossed her face. “No’m,” she said stiffly. “It went bankrupt in 1970, and that would have broken Miss Hannah’s heart, I can tell you. The state took it over and the children were moved to Bangor to an orphanage there.”

“I understand John Tuttle, her chauffeur, came from the orphanage when it existed?” I asked.

“Yes’m,” she said.

Joe intervened, his voice smooth as silk. “Could you tell us at what point Mrs. Meerloo became interested in John Tuttle—her protégé, as he was called in her will?”

She looked startled. “So you’ve read the will, have
you? Well, I had to look up that word protégé in the dictionary, I did, my husband being the French one, and me a Pritchett. Means ‘one under the protection and care of another,’ it does.”

“That sounds about right,” Joe said encouragingly.

“Not to me,” she said sternly. “Miss Hannah was not one to treat any of the orphans different from the other. Each summer she hired one of ‘em—sometimes two—to do her yard-work, those who wanted spending money. And when they reached high school age there’d be one of them to stay in the apartment over the garage and drive her car for her. Jay—that’s what John Tuttle was called—was no different, at least not at first. Of course he was the brightest youngster there—they had those IQ tests, you know, and she’d lend him books. Big heavy ones. He never came to the house, though, until he was twelve or thirteen. First he cut grass for her and burned leaves in the autumn, although I will say they talked about books and plays and things a lot on the porch. He had a good mind, Miss Hannah used to say. When he got his driver’s license he began driving for her summers—he was a junior in high school then—and after that she helped him send off his college application, and of course she paid all his bills at college and saw to it he had the same kind of clothes Mr. Robin wore, and pocket money. In that way he was treated different, although she did send one of the girls to fashion design school for two years, and another boy to vocational school.”

“Very generous,” Joe murmured.

“So he was there at the house,” I said, “when Nora and Robin came summers?”

“Nora and Robin,” she echoed, and sighed. “Seems so natural to hear them names, and so long ago, too. Such a pretty little thing Nora was, a real beauty.”

“Which of them chose the words for the gravestone in the cemetery?” I asked.

“Strange words, aren’t they,” she said. “Mr. Robin did that.”

I like you for that
,
Robin
, I thought. “And did they get along well together summers?” I asked. “The three of them—Nora, Robin, and John Tuttle?”

“Children do,” she said vaguely.

“Later as well?” prodded Joe. “When they were no longer children?”

Mrs. Morneau began to look troubled; I could see that these questions were in conflict with the private scenario she’d written. She must have imagined herself telling us what foods Hannah liked best, and what colors she loved, and how the household was run. The idea of relationships was unsettling to her, and I wondered for the first time what might have happened to Mr. Morneau. Perhaps a lifetime of dusting surfaces was infectious, and surfaces were all that she acknowledged.

“How did Mrs. Meerloo feel about John Tuttle?” asked Joe.

“Oh, very pleased,” said Mrs. Morneau primly. “He turned out so well, you know. Very bright. She always hated waste.”

“And may we ask your own personal impression of him?”

Her face stiffened. “You’d do better asking someone else, for I thought he took too many liberties and told Miss Hannah so myself. But she’d only shake her head over me and remind me I went to church regularly every Sunday. Stigma—that was the word she used. Because he was an orphanage boy.”

Mrs. Morneau had not liked John Tuttle. Jealousy, I wondered? The resentment of a native over a local
boy being given special status? I remembered to scribble a few doodles to look professional, and then I cleared my throat and began again. “What we’re looking for just now, Mrs. Morneau—we’ve pretty much sketched in all the facts and reached her death—”