So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  A child’s toy, one of a set of jacks.

  “Those Elwell children,” Bess had said about Long John’s increasing viciousness. “They’re absolute devils.”

  A child might have poked a long stick through the mesh in search of the jack, and excited the Silver’s wrath. But—the flashlight enveloped the cock fully now—a child would not have been up late enough, nor been marksman enough, to open the wound just above the Silver’s spur. Blood still flowed from it, cloaking one rosy leg in a fresh vivid red. It explained the Silver’s excitability when he should have been roosting, and his instant attack upon Sarah.

  It had been done—the knowledge was queerly slow in seeping through—not very long ago, to judge by all that bleeding. Unless it was a tremendously deep cut, or this was a haemophiliac pheasant, the wound had been inflicted quite recently. Not above a few minutes ago.

  How long had she herself stood in the doorway of the barn, knowing that her committal would be complete; how long had it taken her to progress cautiously through the other two pens?

  There was someone in the stable with her, as certainly as there had been someone in the room with her on the night of her arrival here. Breath held, body flattened into shadow, attention pinpointed. Brain groping after hers—no, jumping ahead of hers to this ultimate point.

  A weight in her chest told Sarah that she had stopped breathing herself. She could not move naturally under this new and certain awareness; she straightened and stared uselessly into the blackness beyond the lip of light. She had been observed all the way—that was what had drummed the atmosphere of the barn into every pore—and her very presence in this pen was damning.

  A great deal seemed to depend on pretending not to know she was watched. Her face hot with effort, her body stiff with it, Sarah held the stick mechanically in front of Long John and conducted the search she knew would be unavailing.

  She found the open space toward the back of the pen, where the partition met the floor. It had begun as a rat-hole evidently, and in order to stop the tunnel at the source a foot-long strip of planking had been cut and lifted. The plank was not quite back in place. A line of shadow showed its tilt, and there was a sprinkle of decayed wood where the litter had been displaced.

  There was no sound at all in the stable. The Silver cock had stopped his menacing grunts and stood at the opposite side of the pen, head thrust watchfully forward, ready to attack at the first opening. Not a feather stirred anywhere, nor a wisp of hay. It was an abnormal silence, as though the fierce concentration of someone standing—where? in the far corner near the medicine chest?—controlled even the two hundred year-old timbers of the barn.

  Sarah’s terror was baseless, she knew it even then. She could not be explained away like Nina Trafton, or Peck, or Charles, and as she wasn’t going to find anything at all under the loose plank she didn’t represent any real threat to whoever had killed them. But it was cold comfort. It did nothing to slow the alarming pace of her heart, the rapid thumpings that threatened to run together into one destroying thunderclap thump.

  To stand so close to the hands that had pushed Nina’s head against the faucet, thrust Charles through a high window, sent Peck over the bridge and into the brook, battered at Miss Braceway’s dead face—

  Sanity as well as safety lay in playing out the rest of this useless game. She could not pretend that she was not suspicious, but she could appear balked and baffled. Sarah knew enough not to bend again before the Silver’s eager amber-eyed stare. With the end of the stick and then the toe of her slipper, she tilted the loose section of plank out of place and shone the flashlight into the space beneath.

  Something had lain here very recently, something edible, like leather-bound paper: the crumbled wood and soil wore a surface of blind white questing heads. Sarah saw them without a shudder; she had gone well past the stage of being horrified by worms. She nudged the plank back into position again, and it settled with a dull woody echo that sent the Silver cock flashing forward. Sarah was not quick enough with the stick; his beak stabbed into the calf of her left leg.

  Queerly, she didn’t dare to speak or even gasp at the surprising pain. It was as if any sound at all from her would disturb the infinitely delicate balance of the waiting darkness outside the pen. She had to go carefully toward the mesh door, because the Silver, triumphant at having put her to flight, grew bolder at every step. Her calf burned above a crawling trickle of blood, and at a sudden brand-new awareness of something she hadn’t realized before, the deep curving scratch on her face began to blaze.

  If the Silver’s wound was as recent as she thought, if her presence with a flashlight had trapped X here, then the diary was here, too.

  Her fingers shook over the fastening of the door, but that would be put down to the awkward grip of flashlight and stick, and not the fact that she had to turn her back briefly on that black and soundless corner.

  But all at once the spell broke. Wood creaked in a slow, drawn-out secrecy; cold air came drenching over Sarah’s feverish face. Someone said her name in a whisper, and said it again aloud. For Sarah it was like a stone thrown at glass, a match held to tinder: it destroyed her in a twinkling. She ran without control, stumbling up the wooden ramp into the barn, crying without knowing it, the flashlight beaconing crazily about her.

  If she hadn’t tripped, and gripped at the car fender to keep from sprawling, Harry Brendan would not have caught her there.

  xvii

  “SARAH! OH GOD, are you all right? Sarah!”

  Sarah, still locked in a peculiar horror, flinched at the sound of her name rolling and echoing around the barn, just as her muscles had gone frantically rigid under the grip of Harry’s hand. The rocketing flashlight beam had showed him coatless and tieless, his face wearing the jarred look of someone just waked.

  Later, she could analyze her tongue-tied dread as the instinctive care people showed in the presence of a deadly snake. At the moment, all she could do was nod dumbly at Harry, push her tumbled hair back from her face, try to control her trembling and her heaving breath.

  Harry took the flashlight from her and looked at her in its beam. “You’re not all right,” he said violently. “Who did that? Who’s out there?”

  He lifted his head at the growing sound of voices in the passageway. Sarah became simultaneously aware of two things: a distant barking of dogs, and a draught of cold air from the stable. How long had that been going on?

  The barn was flooded suddenly with light. The blue door opened and Bess Gideon, at the head of what seemed to be a small procession, blinked at them and said with the poise she carried even in the small hours of the morning, “Sarah— Harry. What is all this?”

  Harry had encountered a protruding nail somewhere, he was rubbing absently at a long scratch on the inside of one wrist. He said pleasantly, “Bess, when I find out I will certainly let you know,” and Sarah realized that with his first anxiety gone he was bitterly angry at her for not having confided in him, for attempting this on her own.

  Faces turned toward Sarah and then away as just outside the stable door Rob Clemence’s voice said irritably, “Nonsense, there’s no smoke,” and a moment later he and Kate came up the ramp and into the barn. His sardonic gaze examined the assembly; he said dryly, “I see. It’s a come-as-you-are party, and Sarah and Harry have cheated.”

  . . . By their robes you shall know them, Sarah thought in a savingly unreal way. She could have identified each on its hanger: Bess’s brusquely sashed navy blue, Hunter’s austere Black Watch plaid, Milo’s glittering foulard, Evelyn’s quilted, ruffle-swamped peignoir. Kate wore beautifully tailored rose-red wool, Rob seemed to be poking fun at himself in regulation blue and gray and white stripes.

  All present and accounted for. Which of them had had to make a run for it? Which pair of slippers wore, even after a rapid trip over cleansing grass, traces of the litter that clung to Sarah’s? There hadn’t been time to change slippers. One of them, even now, must be disciplining his lungs in
order not to pant.

  Milo said, “The secretary will now read the minutes of the last meeting,” and the incongruity of the setting came sharply home—the barn floor puddled with sallow light, the vast shadowy loft above, the push of the wind, with occasional slicing success, at the cobwebby windows and the big door. Bess’s poise surmounted even this. Hair wilder than usual, breath coming out in little gray puffs on the icy air, she said concernedly to Sarah, “You’ve hurt your face. What is all this, what’s happened?”

  I was awake, and I thought I heard a noise in the barn, said Sarah soundlessly inside her head, and I thought maybe a mink was after the pheasants and I could frighten him away. But I dropped the flashlight and it went out, and like a fool I went crashing around after it and fell against the woodpile.

  She could say that, and dispel the feeling of naked danger that hung about her like a brilliant spotlight. She had proved to herself that Charles’s death had been a contrived thing, not involving her, and she could take that comfort with her to the train. Harry Brendan would know she was lying, and one other person, but Harry knew his way to her apartment if he cared to find it and she would never see any of the rest of them again.

  And Nina Trafton’s diary—not in a deep bathrobe pocket, that would be too risky, nor even in the stable—could be retrieved and destroyed at leisure. Charles would not be avenged, but she had never undertaken that. She had only . . .

  Rob Clemence had said it, and Harry; she had even said it to herself. She had only wanted to get out from under.

  “I came to look for Nina’s diary but I was too late,” said Sarah, and although all their voices were altered in this big vaulted place, her own sounded unnecessarily loud and shocking. “The diary she really kept, the one whoever killed her took away and hid.”

  What followed had a dream-like quality, although it might have been the pounding of her blood in her ears that removed the scene a little for Sarah. But it was usually in dreams that people stood about robed and pajamaed in a great dim barn, oblivious of the cold, and discussed the dreamer as though she weren’t there.

  After the first blank wheeling of faces, and the outrage that came with realization of what Sarah had said, individual voices broke through and were chopped off by other voices. “Bess, are you going to stand there and—?” “. . . delayed reaction, that’s all. People won’t accept suicide, especially when—”

  “Didn’t anybody tell her about Nina?”

  Sarah didn’t bother to separate the voices. She had braced herself against the cold for so long that there was a dull ache between her shoulder blades, and a deeper sharper ache until Harry Brendan broke his punishing silence. “There wasn’t any suicide,” he said in a short, hard voice. “Charles was pushed out of a window because he found out what Sarah just told you. Nina was killed, and Miss Braceway made the fatal mistake of trying to prove it, too.”

  On the far side of the barn the quail fluttered as blindly as moths, in a self-destructive rhythm that plucked badly at Sarah’s nerves. Hunter said in a low bothered voice, “Harry, if all this is coming up, don’t forget that Charles—”

  “—prepared the way. Yes,” said Harry. “He put a sedative in Miss Braceway’s tea, enough to keep her out of the way so that he could have it out with Nina. But he didn’t kill Nina and he didn’t kill Miss Braceway, so it follows that he didn’t kill himself in a handy fit of remorse.”

  Sarah glanced involuntarily at Kate Clemence. The luminous gray eyes were wide, the pale handsome lips set— and that was all.

  Rob Clemence said harshly, “It seems to me we’re throwing Nina’s name around pretty freely.”

  Well, she had been his cousin, after all.

  “Why?” said Evelyn suddenly and apologetically. “I mean why all this—why kill Nina in the first place?”

  A swarm of answers seemed to fill the air like gnats. Because she was in a position of authority over the previous ruler of the farm, because she was intolerably pretty and efficient, because she was an unfaithful wife, because, used to the attentions of men, she might have scorned one man who couldn’t take scorning, or, more probably, laughed at a man who couldn’t take ridicule.

  Milo shivered elaborately. He said mildly, “If anybody has two sticks I’ll make a small fire,” and nobody looked at him. Attention focussed on Bess, who had walked closer to Sarah with an air of decision.

  “What do you mean, you were too late? Where was this— diary?”

  “In the Silvers’ pen,” said Sarah, returning her gaze steadily. She put a finger to the searing scratch that curved out and down from her eyebrow. Only a faint smear of blood came away, it was almost dried. “You might look at Long John’s leg. It was bleeding pretty badly a few minutes ago.”

  Bess might have stayed all night in the barn, crisply and courteously discussing the question of Nina’s problematical diary; mention of an injury to one of her birds sent her striding off to the stable at once, robe switching agitatedly around her ankles. The light went on there, followed by the metallic sound of the mesh door opening and the anxious croon of Bess’s voice.

  Rob Clemence studied Sarah with his tufty eyebrows up. “Long John gave as good as he got, didn’t he?”

  “I didn’t touch him,” Sarah said coldly, and gradually, stealthily, glances began to slide around. They noted the long scratch on Harry Brendan’s arm, the marks on Sarah’s face and leg; they were balked everywhere else by robes and pajamas and even, on Evelyn’s hands, the little cream-lined gloves she wore at night.

  Something close to an answer shot through Sarah’s mind, and was blanked out by Kate’s cool deliberate voice. “How do you know there was another diary, Sarah? How do you know where it was? Forgive me if I say that I can’t believe Charles told you.”

  Evelyn sucked in a breath of excitement, loud in the wind-brushed silence. Beside Sarah, so close that their shoulders touched, Harry drew in a slower and more dangerous breath. He liked Kate, and he had an old loyalty to her as he had to all these people, but with the peculiar inter-knowledge that had always existed between them Sarah knew that he was about to say something unforgivable.

  She said lightly, “That’s asking quite a lot, isn’t it, Kate?” and then, because it wasn’t entirely a lie, “Charles did tell me.

  The white face, beautifully chiselled under the carelessly cropped dark hair, turned involuntarily as though a blow had landed. Sarah tried to feel sorry and could not. Hunter said frowningly, “If you’re going by a diary—well, nobody goes unscathed in a diary, does he? That’s what they’re for.”

  And suppose, thought Sarah suddenly, that that was exactly why the diary had been kept? If it showed Nina involved in one or more extra-marital affairs, and if she had been killed for a different reason, wouldn’t the diary be the perfect safeguard in case an investigation were pressed? It would point to this man or that; it would obscure any other issue.

  A man had certainly gone to Dr. Vollmer, presenting himself as Charles Trafton, laying the foundation for Charles’s death. But suppose he hadn’t known that at the time, suppose it had been put to him that it was only a necessary measure to discredit anything Charles might say?

  Hunter would have done it for Bess, Rob for Kate. In spite of the automatic mockery which he intended for wit, Milo might even have done it for Evelyn.

  And what was it that had offered itself to Sarah’s brain before Kate dispelled it?

  Bess called from the stable, her voice so controlled that the anger behind it was clear. She was already leather-gloved, she wanted Kate to bring the antiseptic from the wall cabinet. She looked taller and higher-headed than usual, coming back into the barn moments later. Her face was dangerously flushed.

  She said in a clipped voice, “You say you didn’t touch him, Sarah?”

  “No. I held him off with the stick. He flew at me,” said Sarah, “when I went to pick up this.”

  She had been holding the jack in her clenched hand, completely unaware of it all this time. When she
extended her palm, everybody moved forward to look. The jack was obviously new and unplayed-with, its points glittering. Milo said with an air of triumph, “There you are, those Elwell kids. Why aren’t they in a pen, by the way?”

  “The Elwells and their children left for California on Thursday,” said Bess distinctly, “and I changed the litter in the Silvers’ pen this morning—yesterday morning.”

  Milo wouldn’t have known; he had been at the dentist’s. Or had someone else used that as a double bluff? Sarah’s head ached with tension and the effort of trying to remember some small and very significant thing.

  The wind blew through crevices in the barn, the quail bounded, and nobody stirred, nobody said, “Let’s go in.”

  “Someone,” Bess was saying in that ominously clamped-down voice, “nearly broke Long John’s leg. The spur is broken as it is; it won’t heal normally.” At Milo’s surreptitious, “Is that bad?” she wheeled; she said in a cutting voice Sarah had never heard from her before, “Milo, you’re a little old for clowning. Sarah, didn’t you get a glimpse of anyone in the stable?”

  Had she ever said there was someone in the stable with her? Sarah said, “No,” and knew that the brief pause had been dangerous in the extreme. She had shone the flashlight at random when she first entered the stable. How was X to be sure that it had not touched the tips of a pair of motionless slippers, a fold of foulard or plaid or stripes or quilting, or a flicker of rose-red?

  But not Kate, surely, who had loved Charles, who had been engaged to him and then, after Nina Trafton’s appearance on the scene, unengaged. She might have hated Nina for that, but she would never have placed Charles in jeopardy, nor killed him.

  Foulard or plaid, stripes or quilting or rose-red—the barrier in Sarah’s mind came tumbling down. Why had she never seen this before, the one thing that ran consistently through it all? The tale told to the psychiatrist, the tiny thread of fabric under Charles’s fingernail after his death, the rifling of Bess’s travelling case on the night of Sarah’s arrival, the smear of paint on Milo’s portrait of Nina.