Tightrope Walker by Dorothy Gilman

their Aunt Hannah, whose last name was Meerloo, and this hospital is the gift of Hannah Meerloo.”
    “Wow—paydirt,” Joe said, and whistled. “And so?”
    “I don’t know, except that Hannah lived in Carleton, Maine.”
    “You look scared,” he said, looking me over with a professional eye.
    I nodded. “Suddenly I know her name now and I don’t—don’t know what to do with or about it.”
    Joe grinned. “Then it’s a darn good thing I came along because I know exactly what to do. Climb in and I’ll drive. We’ll look up Carleton on the map and while we drive there you can tell me word for word what happened. What you’re suffering from is shock but you’ll get over it.”
    “Joe, you’re nice.”
    “Of course,” he said blithely. “Uncannily intelligent as well, and suddenly intrigued by this damnfool hunt of yours, I don’t know why.”
    “I’m not,” I said in a small dismayed voice. “I suddenly want to go home.”
    “That’s because you’re afraid of success,” he said forgivingly. “Lack of confidence and all that. A temporary aberration.”
    “She doesn’t sound like—I didn’t realize she’d be rich.”
    “The rich are human, too, and the rich get murdered, Amelia. Most murders are done for love, money, or revenge. The important thing is to remember her note.”
    He was right, of course. I was forgetting Hannah’s note, I was feeling betrayed by superficialities and facts and unpleasant people and—I had to confess—a meeting with reality. But in her note Hannah had spoken to me, don’t ask me why I felt this so deeply because I was only just learning to trust my instincts, but her note was real, and Hannah was real, and it was this I had to hang onto, forgetting petulant nieces and plaques in lobbies.
    I looked up Carleton on the road map and found it to the north, on one of the bays or harbors that scallop the Maine coast. “It looks a long way from Portland,”I said doubtfully. “Maybe a hundred miles up Route 1, and then out on a peninsula.” I turned to the back of the map and read aloud, “Its population is 463.”
    “Then someone will certainly remember a woman named Hannah Meerloo,” pointed out Joe. “What’s the nearest decent-sized town?”
    “There’s only one—goodness what a strange state Maine is! Angleworth’s the nearest city and
its
population is only 4,687.”
    Joe turned onto Route 1 and glanced at his watch. “We’ll head for Angleworth, it’s nearly half-past two already.”
    I could guess what he was thinking: last night we’d stayed at a modest inn and had quite casually and naturally taken rooms at opposite ends of the building: Miss A. Jones, Mr. J. Osbourne. But that was New Hampshire. Nothing much was open at this season in Maine, and the smaller the towns, the more limited the accommodations. Soon we would have to become self-conscious about what lay between us, which was something that had not occurred to me until we’d crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York State yesterday: was Joe expecting me to sleep with him?
    Oddly enough for a virgin it was the word
expect
that terrified me.
Amelia
, my mother used to say sternly,
courtesy means doing the right thing, courtesy is performing graciously what is expected of one.
It sounded like a transaction … courtesy for courtesy, and Joe had certainly been kind to come with me to Maine. I did not labor under the illusion that my mother had intended extending one’s largesse in this sort of situation but the words were nevertheless engraved on my psyche; expectations had always been heaped upon me and were always my downfall. I realized with a sinking heart that if Joe expected this of me then I would probably sacrifice myself like one of those Mayan or Aztecmaidens who leaped off cliffs to appease the gods, or had they immolated themselves instead? I couldn’t even remember which it was, having been a dismal student, which was one more expectation I’d botched. I knew I’d