So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  “A psychiatrist?” Bess sounded and looked aghast. “What for—what happened?”

  “I only found out a few days ago myself,” said Sarah steadily. “I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”

  Bess got abruptly off the bed where she had been sitting and walked to the window, presenting her back to Sarah. “I can’t imagine Charles . . . didn’t he give you any clue? Didn’t the psychiatrist?”

  “None.”

  “But it doesn’t seem possible. Not with Charles. Of course, he grew up without a mother, and his father’s death —heart, as you probably know, although none of us had suspected it—was a considerable shock. But even so . . .”

  “He was quite fond of his stepmother, wasn’t he?”

  “Nina. Oh, very. We all were. Still . . . Sarah, this is terribly upsetting. To think that Charles might have had some frightful problem his family didn’t know about. . .”

  Touche, thought Sarah wryly, and rose on cue. “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” said Bess gravely; the implication was that while Sarah might be cool about it she herself needed time to absorb this fresh shock. As well she may, thought Sarah, trying to be fair, but just then Bess opened the door so abruptly that the draught acted on the door opposite, releasing the catch and showing a slice of the bedroom inside.

  Sarah knew instinctively that it was Milo and Evelyn’s; Hunter could never have lived in the clutter she only remembered later. At the moment, all she saw was an easel, holding a very bad portrait of a seated woman preparing to wash her hair. There was a basin, and something in the background, but what caught the eye hypnotically was the loosed and tumbled-down hair, a crude beautiful red-yellow. The perspective was bad, the body lines stiff; the hair seemed glowingly alive.

  Bess drew an audible breath, which might have been surprise—the portrait looked new and unfinished—or anger, or chagrin at her own suddenness. She said evenly enough, “Milo isn’t much of an artist, but that’s supposed to be Nina. She did have lovely hair. Watch the stair carpet, Sarah, it slides in spots, and I live in fear that somebody will trip.”

  Mechanically, Sarah had given Charles’s stepmother a comforting bosom, a lot of sensible understanding, perhaps even a whiff of lavendar sachet. According to Milo’s portrait —she would not have been more surprised to come upon Milo himself in a sarong—Nina Trafton could not have been much older than Charles, her bosom had not been designed for stepsons, and she was probably more attuned to Lanvin than to lavendar.

  Evelyn had been gotten to; she avoided Sarah’s eye when Sarah found her in the kitchen. “Do you like tuna fish?”

  “Yes,” said Sarah unwisely and then, with craft, “I’ve just been talking to Bess. It must have been awfully sad about Mrs. Trafton—Charles’s stepmother, I mean.”

  “Yes, it was quite . . . I have noodles,” said Evelyn nervously to herself, “and I have pineapple.”

  “Was she sick long?” asked Sarah, ignoring the frightful implication of what Evelyn was saying, and Evelyn looked at her almost with relief. “No, but she wasn’t very strong, and the doctor warned us right away when pneumonia set in. There was a history of lung weakness, and I think he was surprised when she even—hand me that bowl, would you?”

  Sarah did. She repeated invitingly, “When she even what?” but Evelyn had lost her last night’s eagerness to talk. “Rallied,” she said shortly.

  It was obviously a fill-in word, but then this was a conversation Evelyn could hardly be expected to enjoy, not when her husband was painting the subject of it. And yet she seemed more—muzzled than resentful. Sarah watched her drop noodles into boiling water and butter a large casserole. “Was Charles here at the time?”

  “Oh, yes. He was in the Boston office then and he used to come out for weekends. Toward the end he came on the train every night. He worshipped Nina, and I think he knew that she wasn’t going to get better.”

  Worship was an odd word between contemporaries; surely the woman in the portrait couldn’t have been more than five or six years older than Charles. Not with that long vivid hair . . . Sarah stood in silence for so long that the noodles began to froth over. People still died of pneumonia, in spite of all the new drugs, and pulmonary weakness often hid behind that glowing, look of health. Besides, Sarah thought, faintly horrified at the direction her mind was taking, there couldn’t have been any hocus-pocus, not in such a small town. The fact that the woman who had nursed Nina Trafton was also dead, but by violence, was just an unfortunate juxtaposition of events.

  She realized that in between watching the noodles and draining the tuna fish Evelyn was giving her a number of furtive, tempted glances, much as a woman on a strict diet might keep eyeing a box of chocolates. Evelyn had something interesting to say, but had been told not to say it. Could her reluctant self-control be weakened?

  Sarah said, “Had she and Charles’s father been married long when he died?” and drew a complete blank. Evelyn said without interest, “About three years.”

  “This is rather a damp climate, isn’t it, for someone with chest problems? But I suppose Nina was used to it if she grew up here.”

  Evelyn’s sandy lashes dropped. She was not reaching out for the chocolates; the chocolates were coming to her. “Actually she was from somewhere in the West. Charles’s father met her when she was visiting relatives here . . . she was Nina Clemence then.”

  Behind Sarah, so suddenly that he must have been standing there for some time, Milo said, “Learning to cook, Sarah? Or may we hope that you’re teaching Evelyn?”

  Did he never say anything without a sting in it? Evelyn smiled obediently, and Sarah moved a deliberate step away from the face that seemed too intimately close. “Just gossiping,” she said sweetly. “As women do.”

  Milo gave her a sharp sparkling look. “I trust you brought some fresh gossip with you? It’s hard to get in the country.”

  “You can’t have been reading many best-sellers lately,” said Sarah. “The city isn’t in it with the country. Can I help, Evelyn, or would you rather I got out of your way?”

  Why had Charles never told her that the stepmother he had been so fond of had been a relative of Kate’s?

  There was no sign of Bess. Sarah got her coat, put cigarettes in her pocket, and went outside. The day was still locked in a gray-and-crystal cold. She visited the beautiful, bad-tempered Reeves, trailing their magnificent tails, and the ruddy, white-breasted Elliots who seemed scarcely more amenable. Like all the pens, theirs were equipped with litter, a metal trough filled with turkey pellets, a water-holder.

  What name in his appointment book had been scratched out between Reeves and Elliot? Japanese Copper, Silver, Lady Amherst? It could only have been scratched out because it did not measure up to some requirement, or answer some possibility in Charles’s mind, on the day his reason broke.

  It couldn’t have anything to do with selling or breeding these pheasants, because he had never had a hand or even an interest in that; it was Bess’s domain. Bess had spoken of wheels going around, and it was much more evident in the winter than in the summer. Sarah knew that the property was a working farm, for tax purposes, and that it was Milo’s job to see that whatever requirements that meant were met.

  The annual pheasant hatch alone was surprisingly profitable, the combined chicks averaging about eighty. The hay in the huge back fields was cut and sold every year, and regular shipments of tiny speckled eggs from the Japanese king quail went out to devotees in Newport, Miami, Bar Harbor. Bess kept a constant supply in the refrigerator for their own consumption, pickled in beet juice and vinegar, and served them on toothpicks with cocktails. They weren’t much bigger than robin’s eggs, but as much more delicate than a hen’s egg as a hen’s is than a duck’s.

  . . . She had reached the hickory tree where she and Charles had paused for a cigarette that day in their flight from Evelyn’s friend. Her ears were cold; she dug automatically into her pocket but there wasn’t a scarf, only cigarettes. The scarf, that other time,
and the bluff . . . eerily, as though memory had summoned it up, a stir of wind sent the iced hickory branches crashing lightly together over Sarah’s head.

  She could see the bluff now, through the winter-stripped barrier of birch and aspen and hickory. Before it had been hidden in the leafage of summer. Anyone could have observed them without being seen himself, could have watched that bizarre trick of the wind with the silk square, could have said to Charles later, “Maybe it was her idea of a joke, but she threw it all right. . . .”

  Her mind had gone in a useless circle last night, but it stopped now on a point of clarity. Charles’s nightmare had been born here before she ever met him. Why else would he have written down, completely out of context and in a strictly-business appointment book, the names of three pheasants, one eliminated? And it had something to do with his stepmother—why else would he, otherwise so open and uncomplicated, have shut even her maiden name into a private compartment?

  Carefully now; examine this. Remember Charles’s strained face on her very first visit here, when Kate Clemence had told him that the dead woman on the mink farm was the nurse, Miss Braceway. Skip to New York, after their marriage, and his deep dreamless relief that her killer had been caught.

  He had not been personally attached to Miss Braceway, so that could only mean the wiping out of some secret fear. That someone else had killed the nurse? That there was reason for someone to kill her?

  The relaxedness and the absence of nightmare had lasted for two days before the torment resumed. And if one message from the farm had brought about that calm, it stood to reason that another message from the same source had destroyed it. And twice in that strange blurred week, she had thought she saw faces from Preston—Hunter’s, once, and Harry Brendan’s, and she had looked endlessly at Milo’s round horn-rimmed glasses. It had seemed like a trick of her nerves then. It didn’t now.

  Suppose—although supposition was dangerous and wilfully constructed on air—suppose that someone had come to Charles (H? K?) and told him that the police had released Peck because he had an ironclad alibi for the time of the murder. That would leave the whole thing wide open again, an area of horror for Charles because the people who were closest to him could be concerned in it.

  None of it explained what he had told the psychiatrist, except a theory that seemed to Sarah untenable: that he was in fact frightened of someone and knew he needed help if he were to preserve his marriage, but that at the last .moment, in Vollmer’s office, he had put up Sarah as a smoke screen against something worse.

  What could be worse than a conviction that your wife was planning to push you from a height?

  Sarah walked rapidly back to the house, face aching from the cold. It was hardly conceivable that a fear of such magnitude had been totally unsuspected by Charles’s family and close friends. In that case their silence on the subject of his motive for suicide had not been tact but secrecy, and a willingness to let her bear the full responsibility.

  Perhaps she had not understood the mortal danger in which Charles stood from himself, but the burden belonged right here.

  If Bess Gideon was worried, there was no sign of it at lunch. She told Sarah that Kate had phoned; Harry Brendan was coming out for the weekend and Kate wanted them all for cocktails. Harry became, in Bess’s telling, a belonging of Kate’s which she was willing to share for an hour or two.

  Even so, thought Sarah with a faint unreasonable pang which might well have come from Evelyn’s inspiredly bad casserole, Harry would tell her the truth if he knew it. She was comfortably sure of it until she saw him that evening.

  ix

  “YOU KNOW ROB,” Kate Clemence had said half-wryly, and Bess: “Even Rob can wait five minutes . . Sarah saw the reason for both tones when she met Kate’s brother at a little after six o’clock.

  She caught only a fast glimpse of a bathrobed figure in the commotion of their entrance into the Clemences’ living room. There were reminiscent shivers, the usual, “Isn’t it cold?” and “The weather report said snow,” and “Let me take your coat.” Sarah caught Harry Brendan’s glance with all the shock of the first time, and then she was being introduced to Rob Clemence.

  She had gathered earlier that he was either an invalid or a convalescent, and the bathrobe and a faint tired limp that showed itself later bore that out. He was older than Kate, and startlingly fairer; his sandy hair curled crisply back from a high freckled forehead. Temper or pain had cut deep lines down his cheeks, disconcertingly like scars; and although he was obviously pleased to see the Gideons, Sarah would not have been surprised if the angular jaw had tensed suddenly, and something more than temper flashed out. He was the tightest, tautest man she had ever met.

  He gave Sarah a rapid-head-to-toe glance that came back to settle on her face. “Well, well,” he said with a lift of sandy-tufted brows. “What can Charles have been thinking of?”

  The crudity of it made Sarah catch her breath. He was no taller than she, so she was able to keep her gaze level while she said coolly, “When, Mr. Clemence?” and someone—Milo?—gave a small titter. A hand touched her wrist and Harry Brendan, his face unfamiliarly dark, said lightly, “Where I come from we ask a girl what she’d like to drink.”

  Rob Clemence bowed slightly. “Then I beg your pardon, too. Kate tells me my manners are abominable, Mrs. Trafton, and there might just be a grain of truth in it. What’ll it be?”

  He expected her to say, “Nothing, thank you,” and be put in the position of a sulky, party-spoiling child. “Rye, please, if you have it,” said Sarah, and moved away with every appearance of calm.

  Kate produced crackers and cubes of cheddar cheese; Hunter, his face thunderous, went out to help Rob Clemence with drinks. Talk built gradually up around the raised town taxes, an actress with a summer home here who had taken her third overdose of sleeping pills, and then, with a jump, the missile program. Under it all, Sarah held her anger as carefully as a match that might go out in the wind.

  Bess had known she would walk into this; so, from his instant reaction, had Milo. And what was it, exactly? A verdict against her in the matter of Charles’s death, or merely the resentment and license of speech allowed an invalid?

  Rob Clemence himself settled it, or seemed to, when he leaned for a moment or two beside her chair. He said abruptly, “Ever broken a hip? It’s hell while it’s mending. Just when you think you can stop toddling around like an ancient it kicks you in the teeth all over again. I used to be a commercial airlines pilot, and here I am shuffling around in my slippers.”

  This was an olive branch, better take it. “Did you crash?”

  “In a car,” said Rob Clemence, dangerously sunny. “There was one of those famous little old ladies, the ones that drive only on Sunday, in the other one, and she’s as fit as a fiddle. I’ll be on the watch for her next time.”

  He winced a little as he moved away, but to Sarah’s unforgiving eye it looked like a contrived wince. People in pain or under medical care had liberties denied to the rest of society; they could be as rude as they pleased and not be held accountable. It must, she thought, be a difficult privilege to relinquish.

  Her empty glass was taken suddenly out of her hand. Hunter stood above her, looking down, his face at once brusque and bothered. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” said Sarah up at him, “perfectly happy,” and only realized when he had left with her glass that she sat alone.

  Milo had carried his drink to a window and stood with his back to the room, gazing out. Rob Clemence was like a ticking time bomb as he listened to something that Evelyn was confiding lengthily into his ear. Bess turned the pages of an expensive and beautiful book on archeology; Kate and Harry Brendan sat a little apart, contemplating their drinks, talking quietly now and then. When Evelyn interrupted herself to say alarmedly, “You don’t mean to tell me it’s seven o’clock? Oh, I must go over and look at the chowder,” Sarah rose quickly.

  “I’m nearest—can’t I? What do I do?”


  “But you don’t want to . . . Well,” said Evelyn, giving in happily, “you could add the diced potatoes and a dash of thyme and then turn it down to low. But I really don’t know why you should have to—”

  It had begun to snow, the ground was already a faint crisp white. Sarah walked through the cold as though it were a decontamination room, across the Clemences’ lawn, through the lilac hedge, into the long slope of darkness that the farmhouse lights didn’t reach. It was a pretty, twinkling snow, as much silver as white in the glow from the kitchen window.

  The chowder bubbled loudly on the stove, the only sound in the quiet house. Sarah added the potatoes as instructed and began a search through the spice cupboard for the thyme. Bottles seemed to topple as soon as her hand approached them, knocking over other containers. Why—a pause here to clean up some spilled parsley flakes—did she suddenly feel so nervous and disorganized? Surely not because of a scrap of conversation overheard only minutes ago: Rob Clemence saying to Bess in an undertone, “ . . . think you’re wrong. People like Peck have no rules, and they think we’re suckers because we have.”

  And Bess answering fragmentarily, “—all very well, but what would you have done?”

  Peck, believed for a time to have been a murderer; Peck, staring in through the kitchen window. Sarah turned her head helplessly, looked out at whitening branches of lilac beyond the steamy panes, and tipped the can of thyme.

  The kitchen door opened very quietly. As it swung in Sarah thought wildly that she mustn’t scream; she had read a hundred times that screams triggered fear and set off violence. But some sort of sound emerged from her throat as the door came open, and after a look of total astonishment Harry Brendan walked up and took her simply into his arms, thyme and all.