So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  Her next impulse was to go straight to the telephone— but not now, while she was still in this militant frame of mind. Wait, think it over, remember that Bess, all of them for that matter were in a rather awkward position, living in a house that now belonged to a semi-stranger; naturally they would want to have something settled. And Charles had been variously nephew and cousin: remember that, too. She had known him for less than a year, and been his wife for only six weeks, whereas he had been, even if intermittently, a part of their lives.

  They hadn’t had time to think, at the funeral; they had been busy about telegrams and flowers and all the other merciful preoccupations that obscure, a little, what has actually happened. But they had had time by now. It would be only human for them to have said to each other, “It’s certainly very odd. Married six weeks and then— You can’t tell me it wasn’t something to do with her.”

  Or had they known, had even one of them known, that in marrying Charles she was picking up a loaded gun?

  And where had that idea come from, and why was she walking around the room so rapidly and distractedly? Because they wanted to give her a check and cut her completely away? That was reasonable enough, she had no great or abiding affection for them either.

  But to be set adrift with the monstrous hypothesis of Charles driven to kill himself before she could kill him was something else again. She might have to live with that, but not if she could help it. Certainly not without trying to track down the two names nobody seemed to know anything about.

  Reeves, Elliot. If it were the kind of involvement she imagined, Bess wouldn’t tell her and neither would Kate Clemence. She wasn’t sure about Hunter; he was an unknown quantity. But Milo’s malice, and Evelyn’s wagging tongue. . . She had trained herself not to think about Harry Brendan, and she didn’t now.

  After her dinner, much more calmly, she read the letter again. Then she went to the telephone and called Bess Gideon in Preston.

  “Sarah!” It took Bess a moment to collect her wits and any kind of warmth. “How nice to hear from you. We’ve all been wondering about you, and I’ve thought of calling several times, but it seemed so sort of checking-up.”

  Sarah tucked that away for future inspection and said it had been thoughtful of Bess to write. She hadn’t really had time to think about the farm, what with one thing and another, but now that she had a chance to get out of New York for a few days, would they have room for her if she came up?

  Bess sounded instantly pleased and cordial, which meant nothing at all; she came of a generation which would administer ground glass if necessary but could never be merely rude. “When had you thought of coming? The sooner the better. Let’s see, this is Tuesday . . .”

  They settled on Thursday. Sarah said she could take the Clipper and then a cab from Route 128, but Bess said nonsense, Hunter would meet her. Milo’s crow cawed suddenly in the background, and brought the long-distance strangeness surprisingly close.

  The telephone at the farm was in the dining room. The walls were painted a soft clear yellow above the white dado, the huge fireplace was gray stone, black-and-white toile hung at the windows. The furniture was a deliberate minimum: mahogany table and chairs, radio-phonograph in a cabinet, telephone table and chair in one corner. There were never flowers there, even in the summer, only lemon leaves or ashy sprays of eucalyptus in a silver pitcher. The effect was of standing in a cube of cool uncluttered light.

  Bess, at the telephone, would be signalling at the others with her thin expressive face: at Milo in a doorway with his eyebrows owlishly up, or Evelyn, who would have stopped doing the dinner dishes to see what this latest development was. Hunter Gideon . . . Sarah’s mind tried to grasp at him, and couldn’t. As though a tube had blown somewhere, the whole picture vanished and there was only Bess’s voice saying something about the alligator case.

  “Yes, I’ll bring that. And the watch,” said Sarah precisely. “Oh, and perhaps we’ll have a chance to talk about something else while I’m there.”

  “Oh?” The wire seemed to hum with increased tautness, but Sarah probably imagined that. “Something about. . . ?”

  The crow unloosed a barrage of croaks and clucks, providing a welcome cover. “Thursday, then,” said Sarah, and was about to add goodbyes when Bess said brightly, “You just missed Harry Brendan and Kate. They dropped in for a few minutes on their way somewhere. They’ll be so pleased when they hear . . .”

  Will they indeed, thought Sarah, staring blankly at the rug—but it was not, on second thought, the vacant remark it seemed. Bess wasn’t given to vacant conversation. This was notice that the ranks were being closed.

  She hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to invite herself on these people. Her fingers still felt stiff from their grip on the receiver, the muscles around her mouth must have been producing a smile to go with her voice all that time.

  Thursday . . .

  Sarah went through Charles’s appointment book again, without finding anything more to wonder about. The H or K of the unkept lunch date—or had it been kept, later?— remained an open question. She half expected Miss Ehrhardt to call and say that she had dug Reeves and Elliot out of the files and they were free-lance photographers, or locksmiths, or friendly newspaper contacts, but Miss Ehrhardt did not.

  She wondered whether Lieutenant Welk was still puzzling over her walk on the night of Charles’s death, but as he neither came nor called there was no way of knowing.

  While she packed, she looked for and failed to find the framed snapshot of Charles, a fact which made her coolly and impersonally angry. Surely there was a point where helpfulness stopped and license set in.

  She talked to the superintendent and assured him that she would arrange some disposition of her husband’s suitcases when she returned. She did her nails and had her hair cut shiningly short, but it did not occur to her until shortly before train time that she had been preparing not so much for a visit as—translated from the female—a descent behind the enemy lines.

  Hunter Gideon met her as arranged at Route 128.

  The train got in half an hour late, which put Sarah at a disadvantage; added to that was a thin icy rain that froze as it fell and must have made the fifteen-mile trip from Preston that much more of a nuisance. She began to apologize while Hunter was still crossing the tracks toward her, tall and spare in oilskins, the sheen of the rain seeming to sharpen his brusque high-cheekboned face.

  “No trouble at all,” he said, collecting her bags. “How’ve you been? You look like the very devil.” He paused to peer at the ranked cars. “Now, damn it, where are we?”

  After that little spate of talk, which Hunter himself seemed surprised and chagrined at, they retired into a mutual silence. Sarah was caught in the half-hypnotized fatigue with which long train trips always afflicted her, and Hunter had to concentrate on the icy road and freezing windshield.

  Ask him right now if he had had an appointment with Charles that day? No, thought Sarah, and justified her instinctive refusal, here in the confinement of the car, by the darkness which would conceal any reaction. But he had seen the half-turn of her head toward him and turned his own inquiringly.

  “How—are the pheasants?” Too late, she realized that the question might sound proprietary, but Hunter seemed relieved at the introduction of a topic that would keep them going for a while. They had had one casualty, he said; a black-throated Golden cock, one of his mother’s favorites, had been killed by a mink. There had also been an incident of another kind: the Silver cock had scratched and bitten a neighborhood child who had teased and then loosed him.

  Even with the sudden oppression of the mink farm upon her again, Sarah was amazed. “You mean a pheasant will actually attack a child?”

  “Not most breeds. Silvers are belligerent by nature— they’ve been known to pursue people who’ve teased or harmed them into houses when they’re really aroused. They’re big birds, and they’ve got a tremendous wing span and spurs like knives. And unfortunately
Long John, the one that went after the boy, had lost his bit and could use his beak into the bargain.”

  Sarah remembered the bits some of the pheasants had worn, tiny metal rings inserted through the beaks to prevent pecking and defeathering, particularly when a pair were crated for shipping. Charles had explained that to her on one of those limpidly gold afternoons. The memory struck her into a silence that lasted most of the way home, except for an occasional, “Slippery there,” and, “Yes, wasn’t it?” If Sarah had known the man beside her either less or better, she might have asked a number of questions. As it was, convention, and the peculiar relationship in which they stood to each other, assumed that they were a good deal more at ease than they were.

  They had reached the house, long and yellow-lit in the dark, its ice-coated rail fence glittering briefly in the headlights as Hunter turned in at the gate. He drove into the barn, braked expertly just before the stacked fire-wood, and said without turning his head, “Have you found out yet why Charles killed himself?”

  It was not so much the question itself as the tone of it —the tenseness, the sudden ripping away of politeness—that brought Sarah’s gaze shockedly around. In the carving of light from the dashboard he didn’t look unlike a rather bold pheasant himself; there was the profile spare to sharpness, the poised and total stillness, testing the very air.

  Not a man to share secrets with. “Well, unsound mind . . .” said Sarah, deliberately bewildered, and wondered, when he switched off the lights, whether the darkness hid a look of contempt.

  Bess Gideon kissed her cheek lightly, Evelyn was effusive, Milo said whimsically, “Meanwhile, back on the pharm . . .” Somehow he managed to make the spelling clear and to invest it, like most of his utterances, with a secret amusement. Sarah shook his warm plump hand and barely avoided wiping her own on her coat.

  Hunter made drinks during the little flurry of arrival. Bess said with apology that they were having the guest room re-papered and it was a mess; would Sarah mind using Charles’s old room instead, just for this visit?

  Sarah said, “Not at all. Anywhere,” and wondered whether this was a test of sentiment or a challenge or nothing but what it seemed. Bess was smiling at her so measuringly.

  The older woman had undergone what Sarah knew was her daily metamorphosis. A man came once a week to clean the pheasant pens and chicken house and make any needed repairs, but apart from that Bess took care of the birds herself. She dressed in slacks that suited her lean figure but usually had a tear or a patch or a streak of paint somewhere, and someone’s discarded plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. With work gloves on, a pail in each hand and her short gray hair blown about or rained upon, she had always looked to Sarah like a character actress working hard on a role.

  At six o’clock she seemed to change her skin as well as her clothes. She was invariably in slender unadorned black —with no distraction, the eye went to and stayed upon her haggard and faintly satirical face—and Evelyn, who had looked overdressed all day, now looked underdressed.

  By tacit agreement, nothing of what they were so separately bent upon was mentioned. Hunter made drinks again, and the freezing rain changed to sleet and bounced microscopically off the windows—how black windows were in the country. Milo, with a poker-faced pedantry, told a story that Sarah was amazed Bess would tolerate; she reminded herself, not even pretending to smile, that he was a man with whom insult passed for wit and vulgarity for humor.

  What had she thought she could find out here? Evelyn had sat down beside her and was confiding the domestic problems of a friend who had recently moved to Jefferson City—small wonder, thought Sarah unkindly—but they corresponded and the friend had been so upset to hear about Charles.

  Charles. Surprisingly unreal himself now, but leaving behind a very real burden. How could he have . . . ? Anger and hurt, or perhaps the cocktails after the train trip and the drive here, caught up on Sarah without warning. She said into the smooth flow of Evelyn’s voice, “Yes, that must be awfully hard for them. Is it—” she could not help putting her palms against her cheeks “—very hot in here? I feel. . .”

  Evelyn’s gaze expanded alertly; she was, thought Sarah a little wildly, the only person she had ever seen who could flex her eyeballs. And an idea was dawning on Evelyn, visibly. “Are you— You don’t think you could be—?”

  Sarah stared at her in perplexity until the whisper and the woman-to-woman air sank in. “Pregnant?” she said. “Oh dear, no. That would be awkward, wouldn’t it?”

  It fell resoundingly into an attentive silence. Hunter turned his head hastily away, apparently to ward off a sneeze. Milo slid his glasses to the end of his nose and peered roundly at Sarah over them. Bess said with aplomb, “It is hot in here—look at the thermostat, will you, Hunter? And Evelyn, I think the roast must be done.”

  The roast was not only done but thoroughly grayed. Evelyn, who took care of the meals as Bess took care of the pheasants, was an elaborately bad cook of the fruit-salad school. Nothing was allowed to stand by itself. Peas had to have milk added to them, potatoes were tortured out of and back into their shells with a garnishing of something peculiar. Any oven-cooked meat was either plastered with or surrounded by some foreign element, usually fruit.

  Sarah moved her fork delicately and questingly, and came upon what might have been an apricot. She sat beside Milo, who handed her peas with a murmured, “Let’s see, you’re eating for one, aren’t you?” She bore that in silence, because she had brought it on herself in that unstrung moment, but when Bess moved shakers about and said, “These are all pepper, I think,” Sarah pushed her chair back and said rapidly, “Let me.”

  She had been at the house often enough to know where the table things were kept, and even an instant alone was surcease. In the kitchen she took down a shaker, sprinkled salt experimentally into her palm, turned to go back and saw the man at the window.

  He must have been standing quite close to the glass, in fact pressing against the pane, because otherwise his normal expression would have been distorted beyond belief. Sarah glanced fleetingly at dark hair dipping over a low forehead, splayed nose, mouth stretched in the kind of grin children usually accomplished by the use of two fingers, and was out of the kitchen before the tap could sound at the door.

  Bess frowned, Hunter said, “I’ll go,” and did. The door in the kitchen opened and a low interchange began. Evelyn turned her head listeningly and then devoted herself to her dinner; the man in the kitchen was obviously someone of no interest. Bess said, “Tell me, Sarah, have you seen that new Italian movie there’s such a furor about?” and presently Hunter came back and resumed his dinner without a word.

  Someone wanting to buy a pheasant, explained Sarah to herself, or wanting to trade, as pheasant fanciers always seemed to be doing. Or perhaps someone paying for quail eggs; she thought she had heard the clink of coins. He had only frightened her because she was nervous anyway and, a city dweller, not used to faces framed against the dark.

  They had coffee in the living room, and when Evelyn rose to take out the cups Sarah went with her. She said lightly to Bess’s protest that she had been sitting too long on the train, but it wasn’t that, nor even the faint compassion for anyone whose nightly ritual, taken for granted, was the doing of all the dishes and pots and pans.

  Evelyn washed and Sarah dried, at the other woman’s insistence. Over a rush of water, Sarah said casually, “Who was the man who came during dinner?”

  Evelyn’s allergic rubber-gloved hands deposited a vegetable dish in the rack. “He helps Bess with the pheasants, and I suppose he forgot his pay. Or else Bess didn’t have the cash when he left last time. She’d just paid for a pair of blue-eared Manchurians.”

  Something about the cool air of censure not quite withheld surprised Sarah. She dried the vegetable dish and put it away, thinking back to the sunburned college boy she had seen the last time she was here. “He’s new, isn’t he?”

  “Well, new here,” said Evelyn. “Is
n’t it awful the way some cups get dark at the bottom? When you think of the prices they charge. Actually, he’s been around here a long time, in fact—” she turned from the sink, stripping off her gloves “—he used to work at the mink farm down the road. Peck, his name is.”

  Something in Sarah’s mind jumped unpleasantly. “Peck . . . ?”

  “I see you know about him,” said Evelyn. She sounded almost pleased. “He’s the man they arrested for that murder on the mink farm. You know, the nurse. Miss Braceway.

  vii

  SARAH HADN’T needed reminding. Two echoes came back: of Kate Clemence saying over tea in New York, “They’ve caught the man who killed the nurse. He used to work on the mink farm . . .” and Charles, later, “My God. Poor Peck. . . .”

  And he had slept soundly that night and the next.

  Evelyn was still watching her with that curiously pleasurable air. “The police held him for a while, but then it turned out that he’d been somewhere else when it was done and they had to let him go. Charles used to try and find jobs for him and I suppose Bess felt sorry for him when he came around looking for work.”

  Why was Evelyn liking this? Was it a taste for tragedy, or merely the unfamiliar sensation of being listened to with sharp interest? Sarah said slowly, “If it wasn’t Peck—” and Evelyn blew into her rubber gloves. The limp red fingers became frighteningly lively, a meddlesome pair of hands capable of anything, and died again. “I don’t suppose they’ll ever find out now,” said Evelyn in an abstracted way. “They were so sure it was Peck that they weren’t looking for anyone else, and he’s had plenty of time to disappear.”