So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  And where did prescience come from? Coffee downed too quickly on a fluttering stomach, a conviction of something dangerous hidden here, a glance at a heavy blood-darkened stick?

  Peck is dead, thought Sarah. She tried it quickly and irresistibly on her mind, like a child mounting to a forbidden height, and just as the child found out that it could balance there after all in spite of the stuffy warnings from its elders, she knew quite certainly that Peck was dead.

  Hunter had almost finished cleaning the chicken house when she went out. The old litter had been piled in a cart to be added to the compost heap; he had only to line the nesting boxes with fresh hay. The Silkies rocked about with their mixture of swagger and trust, and Midnight came up to plant herself demandingly on Sarah’s boot.

  “I hope,” said Hunter with barely restrained violence, “that the dentist had to pull Milo’s tooth, and that it was quite deep-rooted.”

  All the way down to his toes, thought Sarah, bending to give corn to the fluffed little black hen. “Is this usually Milo’s job?”

  Hunter uttered a bark of laughter. “It’s Peck’s job,” he said dryly, “and failing that mine or Bess’s. Never Milo’s.” He turned to swear briskly at the Silkie rooster, who had suddenly fancied danger to one of the hens and rushed forward with a ridiculous air of menace. The bantam held his ground, stance implying that if the broody hen were disturbed he would tear Hunter to pieces. Hunter by-passed the nest; he was almost done now, and Sarah had still not said what she had come to say.

  “Your mother is certainly patient with Peck, isn’t she?” Even his name seemed subtly dangerous now, but she managed it carelessly.

  “It’s an obligation of sorts,” said Hunter after an instant of total stillness. His strong light-eyed face bent down and away from her, intent upon the distribution of dry sweet hay. “Bess repeated something to the police that the nurse had told her, about having been accosted by a strange man when she was walking in the field here one day. That’s what put them onto Peck in the first place.”

  “Accosted?” said Sarah, her brows going up involuntarily.

  “Miss Braceway’s word, I take it. I suppose he shouted, or said something she took for an improper suggestion. At any rate she told Bess, and Bess told the police, that the man had come from the direction of a hut at the back of the mink farm. So . . Hunter shrugged. “It seemed to add up to Peck, particularly as he’d been in trouble with the police before.”

  How very suitable Peck was in every respect for the role of brutal killer, and what a nuisance for the Gideons that he had not only been freed but was in a position to demand work from them. Only why work, why not just money? Peck didn’t sound like a man to worry inordinately about the devil and idle hands.

  He would have been furious at being arrested on Bess’s hearsay statement, particularly if—this went shockedly through Sarah’s mind—it were pure invention. Miss Braceway had complained of being drugged at the time of Nina Trafton’s death. Bess wouldn’t want that issue brought to light again after all these months, and what better diversion for the police than Peck, already known to be a dubious character?

  Peck was a countryman, and shrewd; he might very well have argued to himself that the Gideons, wilfully implicating him in the murder of the nurse, had something to hide. The fact that Bess hired him on demand would seem to him proof, and he would be emboldened. And he had access to the pheasant pens. . . .

  Hunter stood the hayfork in the corner, surveyed his handiwork, and reached for the door latch. He said over his shoulder, “Has it occurred to you, Sarah, that if you keep on with this you might find out something about Charles that you won’t like?”

  Sarah had thought herself too single-minded to be surprised into anger by anything these people might say to her, but Hunter’s cool curious tone caught her off guard even while her mind registered the openness of the jump from Peck to Miss Braceway to Charles. “You mean,” she said with careful distinctness, “something I’ll like even less than the fact that after six weeks of marriage to me Charles jumped out of a window? Frankly, no, it had not occurred to me. And while we’re on the subject, did you have a lunch date with Charles that day?”

  Hunter, who had opened the door to let in a flutter of white light and biting cold, closed it again, turning a face of almost musical-comedy astonishment. “Lunch date?” he repeated. “In New York?” His tone removed New York to the distance of Hong Kong. “No. What on earth put that into your head?”

  “I just wondered.”

  Hunter’s expression changed. He held the door for her without a word and Sarah walked by him, more shaken by that brief glance than by anything he could have said.

  He might have lied to her only moments ago, but could he have contrived that look of pity?

  Charles had not killed Miss Braceway, she assured herself, rushing at this particular fence in the refuge of her room. Putting everything else aside, he had been in New York at the time, so that she had not, in spite of Hunter’s frighteningly off-hand suggestion, lived with and slept beside a man capable of battering a woman’s head and face so viciously that identification had to be made through other means.

  Was it the obvious thing, then—a physical fear of Sarah after that chance incident on the bluff? Dr. Vollmer had blunted that spear, but it still hurt surprisingly. Sarah tried to reconcile Charles’s nightmares with the possibility that he had confided the subject of them to his family, but she could not. In any case, no matter what the state of his mind, he could not have confused her with a Reeves or an Elliot pheasant.

  There was one other area to explore, and she had to force herself to do it as though she were opening the door of a dark and dangerous room. Harry Brendan had indicated it in that curiously remembering voice when he said about Nina Trafton: “Every man who ever met her was a little in love with her at one time or another.”

  Did it all lie there, the key to the whole business? Consider Nina, married to an embittered man almost twice her age, acquiring in the process a tall good-looking stepson only a few years younger than she. Consider Charles, for that matter, gentle, rather shy, coming into sudden contact with all that ripe and smiling warmth.

  Suppose—but what unpleasant work it was—some escapade of theirs had precipitated Nina’s illness? Charles had not had a nature for involvements, much less forbidden ones; his conscience would have punished him tooth and nail.

  Sarah found herself staring with a trance-like blankness at the floor. How convenient if Charles had kept a journal of some sort, but he hadn’t, only a small red leather book that contained the addresses and telephone numbers of friends and nothing more. It had no lock, although at some time or other she had seen exactly the kind of key that would fit a diary. She had held the key in her hand, wondering idly at the smallness of it. She had been sitting on a bed, as she was now . . . Sarah put out her hand, palm up, and bent her head, using her body to trick her mind.

  And it worked, the other background was suddenly there. It was the day after Charles’s death, and her blood had been pounding savagely at the base of her skull in the type of headache that aspirin couldn’t touch. Irrationally, she had been unable to stand the sight of Charles’s suits hanging there so tidily in the bedroom closet, and although someone had suggested tactfully that she ought to empty the pockets first she had swept the suits from their hangers and folded them frantically into two big suitcases.

  She had repented of that later. Suppose, after the bags were locked away in the basement, that the lawyer should want something, or Charles’s office? When Bess had told her firmly that she must lie down, she had walked docilely into the bedroom, closed the door behind her, and gone through the pockets of the suits. There was no reason why the housewifely action should have seemed so frightful to her, but it did; she felt as surreptitious as a thief, and she didn’t even want to look closely at the little pile that accumulated on the bedspread.

  The tiny key caught her eye, the only one, she realized now, that was loo
se. There were some neatly folded papers and a few cards too, and at length she found a blank envelope and slid everything into that and put it—

  Memory balked there. In a bureau drawer? No, because her search for the snapshot of Charles hadn’t turned up the envelope. In one of her own suitcases?

  Her idly determined search, all this time later, found it in her small dark blue suitcase. Sarah emptied the envelope onto the bed. The diminutive key was there but it was a hollow victory, like having been right about the population of Tulsa in some given year; all it proved was an accurate memory. The business cards held unfamiliar names, the folded letters were a receipted bill, a note from somebody about stock shares, and a doubled-over envelope containing the cancelled part of Pullman tickets to Chicago and back on December first and second.

  Both were early morning trains—and somewhere there had been a tremendous mistake. According to Dr. Vollmer, Charles had kept an appointment with him on the late afternoon of December first. According to the scribbled pasteboard in her hand, Charles had been in Chicago at the time, exactly as he had told her.

  It had to be a clerical error in Vollmer’s office, because otherwise Charles had never been to a psychiatrist at all, and it was some other man who had given his name and his background and said that Charles Trafton went in mortal fear of his wife.

  xi

  BELOW SARAH, like shock made audible, the telephone rang. It rang twice more before a man’s stride crossed the dining room and Hunter’s voice said in the abruptly challenging tone with which he always answered, “Hello?”

  There was a pause while he listened and Sarah listened, too, with a queer and automatic detachment. “No,” said Hunter. “No, we haven’t. . . Let’s see, I think it was Thursday night. . . Yes, we certainly will.”

  Mrs. Peck, thought Sarah in that curiously removed way, beginning to worry about her vagabond spouse, wondering at the length of this particular spree. Coming for answers to—of all people—the Gideons.

  Her mind went chasing fugitively after Peck’s wife, like a guilty child trying to change the subject; it refused, just for the moment, to admit the enormity of what it had discovered. Because if someone had run the risk of posing as Charles at the psychiatrist’s not once but three times, it could only have been to establish a record of mental imbalance. And that in turn would have to mean—

  Make sure of it first, whatever her own frightful certainty. Sarah moved at last, transferring the tiny key and train checks to the zippered compartment of her purse, returning the envelope to a pocket of her suitcase. Why had she never noticed before that the suitcase was only a little bigger than Bess’s travelling case, navy calf instead of dark green alligator, but easily confused in an uncertain light?

  But everything looked different to her now, even her own drained and sharpened face. It was like having read the end of a book in advance, so that every minor incident was colored, every character—now that you knew—invested with his own destiny.

  Mechanically, Sarah went into the guest bath and washed her face in very cold water, chiefly because something had to be done to it before she went downstairs. Lipstick helped, and a faint touch of the rouge she almost never used. She was combing her hair before the dim mirror in her own room when doors began to open and close, voices lifted, someone below her—Bess?—said, “I don’t know. I’ll ask her,” and began to walk toward the back stair.

  Sarah was out of her room in a twinkling, although she could not have explained her unwillingness to be approached there. Bess met her in the dining room doorway. “Oh, Sarah. Harry and Kate are driving into town, and want to know if you have any errands for them.”

  “Or if you’d like to come,” said Harry Brendan; after one rapid glance at Sarah’s face he turned away, as if to divert attention from it.

  “Of course,” said Kate Clemence after a tiny lag. She stood against the dining room fireplace, dressed in the clothes that suited her best: gray ski jacket, its hood back, impeccably tapered gray ski pants that set off her long legs. Her ragged dark hair looked brilliantly black by contrast, so did the brows over the great gray eyes. “Preston isn’t what you might call a shopping center—but I keep forgetting that you know the town.”

  So you do, thought Sarah. She said to an imaginary third person between Harry and Kate, “If you don’t mind an extra passenger, I would like to come,” and went to get her coat.

  She came back to find them congregated in the kitchen: Evelyn stirring something at the stove, Bess sorting quail eggs for shipping, Harry Brendan leaning against the sink and gazing with exasperation at Kate, who sat at the kitchen table with an air of permanence. She had taken off her jacket. She said to Harry, not turning her head as Sarah entered, “No, really, I’d rather. I had nothing pressing to do anyway, and frankly I’ve gotten so comfortable here . . . Do you think I could have a drink, Bess, in honor of its being Saturday?”

  The last had a faintly driven air, like a wisp of steam escaping from under a clamped-down lid. In the car, Sarah said without expression, “Did Charles know she was in love with him, do you suppose?”

  Harry backed clear of the gatepost. “They were unofficially engaged at one point.” After a short pause she could feel his glance swing to her silent profile and away again. “Years ago. Long before you came on the scene.”

  . . . And what else, Sarah wondered astoundedly, might Charles not have bothered to tell her? Sunny, open, clear-as-a-book Charles . . . well, in a way it served her right. It bordered on arrogance to presume that anybody at all was that uncomplicated. Or had there been something about the breaking-off with Kate Clemence that made it a matter of ethics with him not to mention it?

  She said after another string of telephone poles had gone by, “What happened?” and saw Harry Brendan’s hand lift from the steering wheel and then drop back. “Nothing,” he said, but his voice sounded different, puzzled. “It just dwindled off.”

  “About the time of his father’s marriage to Nina Clemence.”

  Harry swung the car in at the snowy curb in front of one of the shops and turned to face her. He said in what sounded like an indictment, “Sarah, you were fond enough of Charles to marry him. Do you realize what you’re trying to prove?”

  The strap of her calf handbag, holding what it held, seemed to burn across Sarah’s wrist. “Yes,” she said, and got out of the car.

  The drugstore’s phone booth was occupied. Sarah bought cigarettes, equipping herself with quarters and dimes, and walked half a block to a street booth. After an interval of long-distance queries and clickings and coins rattling out of the chute and having to be deposited again, she was connected with Dr. Vollmer’s office in New York.

  It was either a bad connection or the waiting room was being redecorated with a power drill. After a good deal of repetition on both sides, Dr. Vollmer’s absence at a convention was established, and—would Mrs. Trafton hold on a minute—the fact that Mr. Trafton had come in for his last appointment on December first. Of course there was no possibility of error, their records were most accurate. In fact, that had been Dr. Vollmer’s mother’s birthday and he had been particularly anxious to leave the office on time. (Aha, mother complex, Doctor?) The nurse remembered quite clearly that as an earlier patient had delayed him, Dr. Vollmer had had to shorten Mr. Trafton’s alloted hour by fifteen minutes.

  And there it was. Sarah had thought she was sure before, but all at once her forced detachment shattered like glass; she had to clench her free hand to keep it from shaking. She said through the rushing in her ears, “What did Mr. Trafton look like?”

  The far-off voice said angrily, “Just one moment. Who is this speaking, please?” The operator came on, requesting more coins; Sarah cried, “Wait! Please—” and her unsteady fingers sent her neatly-spread change rattling off the shelf. Someone tapped metallically on the glass door of the booth, and she turned her head distractedly to see Milo Gideon smiling blandly at her and holding up a quarter.

  Sarah hung up the rec
eiver without a word. She gathered her gloves and purse and opened the door, feeling the icy air in every pore of her damp body; to bend and search for her scattered change was, for the moment, beyond her.

  Milo did that, puffing exaggeratedly, straightening to say chidingly, “Tsk tsk. Easy come, easy go. Here you are.” He dropped the coins into her hand and tipped his round head to one side, studying her brightly. “Evelyn was monopolizing the phone at home, I take it, because Bess isn’t that mean about the phone bill. I happened to see Harry’s car there as I came out of the dentist’s, and somehow I thought I might find you. Do you know that tooth of mine is so inflamed the dentist can’t do anything with it yet?”

  Sarah would not be subjected to an intimate view of Milo’s mouth, which seemed imminent. She said rapidly, “How awful,” and somehow Milo stood directly in the path of the step she started to take away.

  “It promises to be my Operation,” he said mournfully, but his owlish face, without changing a single plump line, had grown as cold and sharp as ice. “What did you think of my portrait of Nina, by the way?”

  So it had not been all imagination, that brush of panic she had felt at the doorway of his room the night before. Milo had come back from the Clemences’ before the others, and looked in through a ground-floor window and seen the light there—or, thought Sarah steadyingly, Bess had told him about the earlier and accidental view.

  A boy bicycled past them on the sidewalk, a woman went by with a baby carriage and two small children who besought her for pennies: “We won’t buy gum-balls, honest, Ma.” Sarah didn’t answer Milo directly, but then he didn’t expect her to. “Why did you paint her that way?”

  “Whimsy,” said Milo after a second. It struck her that he was horribly like his crow—or had the crow picked up from its master the tipped head, the round and mocking stare, the air of secret malice? “I’m as whimsical as all get-out,” said Milo. “But it makes you think, doesn’t it?”