Tightrope Walker (21 page)

I said without thinking, “It destroyed her anyway, didn’t it?”

He said with a sigh, “How was one to know? You can’t possibly realize how it was with us, or what Nora was like when we were growing up together. We were like brother and sister for each summer of the year, living in a magic world that Aunt Hannah created for us. If you’d ever read her book—”

I didn’t interrupt.

“—you’d know Hannah’s inventiveness, the wealth of her imagination. She applied that to living, too. There were picnics, treasure hunts, acting out plays on the sunporch, long evenings reading aloud to each other in front of the fire. Absurd games. A trip to the river every sunny afternoon with an incredible paraphernalia of swimming things, tubes, water wings, robes, and always Aunt Hannah’s Tibetan parasol.…”

“It sounds—lovely,” I said with a catch in my voice.

“But afterward,” he went on, his voice tightening, “Nora would go home to a cold father and an impossible stepmother, both of whom argued tirelessly over money and gave evidence of disliking Nora very much, and I would go back to my father who, following my mother’s death, packed me off to private schools or camps as hastily as possible. Which, by the way, I’ve no doubt that Aunt Hannah paid for. During those endless dismal months of reality we exchanged letters: Aunt Hannah’s tranquil and supportive, Nora’s desperate, and mine lonely.

“We were, you see, very close,” he concluded, and then he added, “at least until Nora fell in love.”

Ah, yes, I thought, now we come to it, and I could feel my pulses quickening. “With Jay Tuttle.”

“You guessed, then?”

I said, “I have the advantage of you, I read your aunt’s manuscript last night. You’ll understand what I mean when you’ve read it, too. Until then I’d hoped she was blackmailed.”

His smile was bleak. “I wonder if one can exclude blackmail in an unholy kind of love like Nora’s.” He shook his head. “It must always have been there but I never saw. Hannah did, because I remember one day when Nora was only eleven or twelve years old, we were down by the river and I saw Aunt Hannah watching her with a very sad expression. I asked her what was wrong and she said, ‘Robin, I want you to promise to be very patient with Nora, and very wise. There’s an emptiness inside of her, a desperate need to be loved, and there’s nothing you or I can do but try and protect her.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about then, but only a few years later the words came back to haunt me. From the moment that Nora met Jay—she was fourteen, I think—no one else existed for her. She dumped everything she was or could be into his lap.”

“Compulsion?”

“Compulsion, obsession, emotional deprivation—” He shrugged. “Whatever you choose to call it. She was so lovely, like a fairy-tale princess. I have snapshots somewhere, I’ll show you in a moment.” He got up and began rummaging in a desk drawer. “She could have had anyone, but Jay arrived first and that was that.”

“Did he seem to care for her too?”

“It was always difficult to know what Jay was thinking or feeling, he was always so bloody charming.” He came back with a large, bulging envelope. “Certainly he was very attentive the last time I saw them together. At Easter, that was, when Hannah told me—in confidence—about her new book. Several weeks after that Nora phoned me in New York one night, terribly excited,
to say that she and Jay were going to be married in the fall.”

“Married,” I repeated, calculating dates very cynically. In the fall … after she had lent her help to a murder.

“Which led,” he added bitterly, “to my final rationalization: it occurred to me after her death that Hannah
could
have changed her will on impulse if she felt that it would make Jay and Nora ‘equal’ enough to marry.”

“That could always have been possible,” I told him for comfort.

He laughed bleakly. “It seemed so to me, too, even though it was completely uncharacteristic of Hannah. But of course the only other possibility was too god-awful to contemplate: that Nora had been just unstable enough, besotted enough—” He shivered. “She adored Hannah, which makes it so—so—”

“They never married,” I pointed out.

“No.”

“Do you know why?”

“I never asked,” he said. “I remained stubbornly in New York, sinking my inheritance into plays that only proved what poor judgment I had, and nursing a dazzling career that shot down as fast as it had shot up. If I considered Nora’s situation at all I’m sure I told myself that Aunt Hannah would never have wanted to see Nora destroyed. Not that I ever considered it consciously,” he explained. “I shoved it under, burying my nagging little doubts.” He looked at me steadily and took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “What do you believe happened? I think I can take it now.”

And so I told him. His aunt a captive. The long days and nights in the box room where I’d found her manuscript. The signing of the will at last, and then being taken out of the box room and led downstairs.

“God,” said Robin, going white again. “And then?”

“It’s only a theory but I think she must have been blindfolded,” I told him. “I think they confused her sense of direction, hurried her along the hall toward the kitchen with the cellar door ahead wide open at the end of that long hall—”

“Yes, I know that hall,” he said, nodding.

“—and when she reached the threshold of the doorway they pushed her. It was the only way to do it—by trickery—that would leave no marks.”

“Who?” demanded Robin.

“John Tuttle and Holton … I think with the help of Daniel Lipton, whose throat was cut five months later.”

“I didn’t know him,” Robin said. “You’re leaving out Nora, aren’t you?”

“I think the last two—Holton and Lipton—were the ‘faceless ones.’ ” Seeing how awful Robin looked I added politely, “It’s really possible, you know, that Nora tried to break away at the end, that she couldn’t face what was happening. She left for those two days, you know.”

“Kind of you,” he said with a twisted smile, “but she came back, didn’t she? How was she when you saw her at the hospital?”

I thought about this. “Like someone who had died a long time ago,” I said quietly, “leaving only a shell behind.”

“I wish I could hate her,” he said. He reached into the envelope, sorted through a few snapshots and handed one to me. “Here’s the Nora I knew and loved.”

She was sitting in a hammock, probably no older than fourteen, wearing grubby pants and a torn shirt that somehow made her beauty all the more potent. I felt a pang of envy—that long blond hair, the eager, radiant face, the flawless features. She was lovelier than anyone I’d ever seen; a fairy-tale princess indeed. “Who’s the boy behind her?” I asked as my eyes moved
away from her face. I frowned. It’s not you, it can’t be, yet he looks so familiar to me.”

Robin leaned over and looked. “Oh. That’s Jay Tuttle.”

“We have yet to find him,” I told Robin. “I don’t suppose you’ve kept track of him at all, have you?”

He looked at me strangely. “You mean you don’t know?”

My frown deepened. “Well, you see, Nora wouldn’t tell me yesterday, and Mrs. Morneau seemed too—too frightened to tell us. She said he’d changed his name, changed a good many other things, too. She refused to tell us where to find him, and under what name.”

Robin’s laugh was harsh. “Morney was never one to go against the Establishment, no.” Getting up he walked over to his bookcase and baffled me by returning with a recent copy of
Newsweek
magazine. “Here,” he said, turning the pages. “Under ‘New Crop of Candidates.’ They’re arranged alphabetically according to states. Look under Maine.”

But of course as soon as he spoke the word “candidate,” the truth struck me. Nevertheless I leaned over the page and searched for the pictures of the two men who were running against the incumbent in Maine for the U. S. Senate. And there they were:
Angus Tuttle
and
Silas Whitney.

“Morney was misleading you,” Robin said. “Jay changed only his first name. Catchier, making it Angus. The plainness of his name always irritated him but believe me, he would
never
consider changing the Tuttle, it brought him too many votes in Maine. If you’d known him you’d have realized
that.
”

He pointed at the toothpaste-ad smile that had bedecked the telephone poles, the restaurant mirrors and the general stores of Anglesworth and Carleton. “There’s your John Tuttle,” he said, “and Holton is his aide.”

I said stupidly, “There are twelve teeth in that smile,” but my stomach had tightened. Dear God, I was thinking, what have I gotten us into, no one on earth is going to believe this man is a murderer.

It was raining when I left New York City, a slanting, silvery rain that was already cooling the air. I had telephoned Joe from Robin’s apartment to tell him about Tuttle but there had been no answer; all I could think about now was getting back to Trafton and seeing him. I think I was channeling all of my shock into picturing Joe’s; without this anticipation I would have had to face the anxiety I was experiencing. After all, Woodward had Bernstein, and Bernstein had Woodward.

What worsened the sense of shock was that I’d honestly never given a thought to what Tuttle might have become, I’d been concentrating exclusively on Hannah. Perhaps because my mother had inculcated such heavy guilts in me as a child I had assumed that Tuttle would be living defensively, as I would, given to trembling
atthe sight of every policeman, with the occasional nightmare from which he awoke drenched with sweat.

Now I realized how unimaginative I’d been.

A murderer, I realized, must first of all have a great and consuming ego, something like an overgrown and poisonous mushroom I decided as I pictured it, even compared it, to my own ego, which I had often felt must resemble a withered prune. There would have to be something missing inside a murderer, a sense of connectedness to other people, so that he would see them as satellites to feed and nourish him, not as human beings just like himself. The thought of any similarity between himself and others would be intolerable, he would be cleverer, more resourceful, realistic and intelligent, and after he had successfully murdered he would think of himself as God, wouldn’t he?

Obviously I had overlooked the conceit and the arrogance. He wouldn’t tremble at the sight of a policeman, he would smile, his secret glowing inside of him, his superiority reinforced.

As to what to do about Tuttle, Joe would know, Joe would know exactly what to do and which people to see, as Robin had not. “I’m an actor,” Robin had explained. “With Hannah’s manuscript I’m on familiar, solid ground, you can trust me there. I know the agent she had, and I know the agent’s going to be excited as hell about this sequel. All this I can handle, it’s part of my scene. Murder, no.”

Of course I had not told him about Hannah’s house burning down, with me very nearly trapped inside, but that had happened in Maine. Now I was leaving New York and heading for Pennsylvania, and Maine felt a long time ago, distinctly unreal and very far away.

I entered Trafton feeling that, given any encouragement, I would jump out of the van and kiss its pavements. It was just six o’clock as I drove down the boulevard,
turned up Grand Street, and then down Cherry so that I would come out on the 900 block of Fleet Street. I had been absent for six days; during that time Trafton had acquired a patina and a charm I’d never before noticed. I slid the van skillfully into a parking slot in front of Joe’s office, slipped a dime into the parking meter, and raced upstairs to his door.

The first thing I saw was my telegram lying on the floor mat. Unopened.

This was certainly jarring. I’d sent this telegram yesterday morning, on Wednesday, and this was early Thursday evening. I couldn’t imagine why it was lying there carelessly on the mat some thirty-four hours later. I rattled the door and then banged on it because there was always the possibility that Joe’s phone had been out of order for days and the telegram had just been delivered, but I was only playing for time while my heart adjusted to disappointment. I’d nobly overlooked Joe’s not waiting for me on the steps outside, I’d forgiven his not seeing me from his window and rushing down to greet me but Joe hadn’t even known I was coming; the let-down was considerable. Like Mrs. Morneau I’d been writing scenarios ever since I left New York City; I’d expected to be crushed in a passionate embrace, told I’d been missed (savagely) and the dialogue, while scarcely immortal, had contained only a few clichés and had flirted here and there with R ratings.

All right
, I thought grimly,
this is the way life is, Amelia.

I climbed back into the van and headed north to my own block of Fleet Street. The shop would have closed at six but I could telephone Mr. Georgerakis and tell him of my return, and I was sure he would have a number of anecdotes as well as a warm welcome for me. This revived me. I reminded myself that Joe would
eventually come home—after all, he lived here—and I could picture his chagrin when he found my two-day-old telegram on his doorstep. I was suddenly anxious to see my shop now, and Pegasus and the hurdy-gurdy.

I parked the van in the alley, fumbled for my keys and unlocked the door of number 688. The shop looked cheerful and tidy. I hurried upstairs to check my plants and found that Mr. Georgerakis had watered them, just as he’d promised. I came downstairs and looked around with satisfaction, noting that three more bathrobes had been sold, two clocks, and quite a few pieces of the willow ware. To round out this satisfying moment someone began knocking on the shop door and my heart lifted as I realized that it could only be Joe. I eagerly unlocked the door and opened it.

It wasn’t Joe. It was a well-dressed, gray-haired man carrying an attaché case.

“I
am
sorry,” he said, noticing my disappointment, “but I’m frankly glad you haven’t left yet, I was to pick up a case of willow ware? I was here earlier, as perhaps the gentleman told you, the one who was in the shop this afternoon.”

“He didn’t tell me. A whole case?” I repeated, charmed by the thought in spite of my second disappointment.