So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  A SANE, HAPPILY MARRIED MAN DOES NOT THROW HIMSELF OUT OF A TWELFTH-STORY WINDOW. NOR COULD SARAH TRAFTON ACCEPT THE PSYCHIATRIST’S MONSTROUS THEORY THAT HER HUSBAND CHARLES HAD BEEN DRIVEN TO KILL HIMSELF BEFORE SHE COULD KILL HIM. THAT HIS DREADFUL NIGHTMARES, HIS STRANGE PANIC, HAD BEEN CAUSED BY FEAR OF HER.

  THERE HAD TO BE A RATIONAL REASON FOR HIS SUICIDE. TO FIND IT SARAH RETURNED TO THE PHEASANT FARM SHE HAD INHERITED FROM CHARLES—THE FARM WITH THE BRILLIANT FAIRY-TALE BIRDS WHICH WAS MANAGED BY HIS AUTOCRATIC AUNT BESS, WITH THE HELP OF HER TACITURN SON HUNTER, HER OWL-LIKE NEPHEW MILO, AND HIS FLUTTERY WIFE EVELYN.

  THESE RELATIVES WARNED SARAH AGAINST PROBING INTO CHARLES‘ PAST. EVEN KATE CLEMENCE WHO HAD LOVED CHARLES, AND HARRY BRENDEN WHO OBVIOUSLY LIKED SARAH, IMPLIED THAT FOR CHARLES‘ SAKE IT WOULD BE BETTER IF SHE DID NOT DISCOVER TOO MUCH. AND THEY WERE ALL CURIOUSLY EVASIVE ABOUT THE DEATH OF CHARLES‘ BEAUTIFUL STEPMOTHER NINA.

  HERE IS AN ABSORBING STORY OF A YOUNG WIDOW WHO LEARNS THAT HER QUESTIONS HAVE FORCED HER INTO A DUEL WITH A MURDERER. THAT HER ONLY HOPE OF SURVIVAL IS TO IDENTIFY HER DEADLY ANTAGONIST.

  So Dies

  the Dreamer

  Ursula Curtiss

  DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

  NEW YORK

  © by Ursula Curtiss, 1960

  All rights reserved

  To my mother, Helen Reilly

  The characters, places, incidents and situations in this book are imaginary and have no relation to any person, place or actual happening

  i

  EVEN NOW, three months later, Sarah Trafton could not rid her mind of the idea that it all went back to the mink farm. Or to the pheasants, in some way, although that was even more tenuous.

  It had to go back to something, it had to have started somewhere. Except in the crudest jokes, sane, happy, newly-married men like Charles Trafton did not jump from twelfth-floor windows. On the other hand, had he been sane, at the end?

  Sarah had one pinpoint to proceed from, although she had dug at it so savagely and often that it was now more like an open wound: the night the trouble had first showed itself.

  It was in the small Bermuda hotel where they had spent their honeymoon. She was asleep and dreaming; she had waked, heart pounding with shock, to the frightful sound that seemed even then to lodge itself in her body, like a pain that promised to come again and again. In a woman it would have been a scream; in Charles it was a groan that mounted and quickened and grew, so that only Sarah’s sharp cry and wild reaching for the lamp stopped it from turning into a shriek.

  The room was instantly, abnormally quiet, as though they had both stopped breathing. The bedside lamp had overturned under Sarah’s frantic hand, and shone with foolish tranquillity on the floor. The travelling clock Charles’s aunt had given them said three-thirty. In the other bed, Charles had turned his head inquiringly on the pillow; his narrow intelligent face was calm, his eyes bright. He said, “Hello,” in as alert and amiable a voice as though it were noon, and then, with a faint frown, “What was I doing? Snoring? Making a racket?”

  It was impossible that he didn’t know; his heart must be pounding, if anything, harder than hers. Sarah said shakily, “You were being tom limb from limb. Or else you dreamed you were just getting to the church again. Charles, I never heard such a noise.”

  Charles rolled over on his back—because the light bothered his eyes, or because he didn’t want her to see his face? “Cheese?” he asked reflectively of the ceiling. “That last cordial? The way to a man’s nightmares is through his stomach. Sorry, darling, I won’t do it again.”

  Nightmare. She had had nightmares herself, she had heard other people have them, at home, at college, in the apartment she had shared with another girl before her marriage. But this. . .

  She went into the bathroom for a drink of water, and lit a cigarette on the way. Her panic had not so much subsided as hidden itself; across her mind, put out of it instantly, flashed a recently-read item in a newspaper, about natives in—Africa? India?—who were dying in numbers, apparently of fright, in their sleep.

  Voodoo, said Sarah comfortingly to herself. Bone-pointing.

  They had then been married five days.

  Neither of them made any reference to that peculiar interval in the night the next day, or in the days that followed. Charles looked sunny and unworried, and except for a vague unease before she went to sleep, Sarah firmly forgot the whole thing. They swam a great deal, drank at odd hours, and dined elaborately, trying to outdo each other in their definitions of the wine.

  “A small wine,” Sarah would say gravely, and Charles, after a great deal of sipping and frowning and head-cocking: “I would go further, I would say almost a tiny wine.” His glass lifted, his head went back. “In fact, an invisible wine,” said Sarah.

  The night before they left for home, it happened again: the riven groans, coming closer and louder, mounting to an infinitely beseeching pitch, the stopping just in time. This time Sarah said directly, “Charles, what were you dreaming about just now?”

  “You know what it is?” countered Charles, with an air of worry erased. “It’s all this peculiar food, very rich for a country boy, and all this swimming. My system thinks it’s changed hands.”

  Sarah did not smile. She hadn’t knocked over the lamp this time, and she could see the betraying dampness of his forehead above the clear triumphant gaze. “If you have nightmares, you must have some idea of what they’re about. Everybody does. They’re falling, or trapped in a burning building, or— Charles, you must know.”

  “But I don’t know,” said Charles in a mimicking voice, and looked at her face and sat instantly upright. “Sarah-sweet—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Don’t be silly.” She smiled at him stiffly and consciously, as she might have smiled at some effortful stranger. “It’s just that I’m worried, a little. It can’t be awfully good for anybody to keep dreaming like that, and it’s not, if you follow me, very flattering.”

  “It has nothing to do with you,” said Charles sharply, and, after a moment’s total silence, “You’re right. Tell you what, I’ll have a check-up when we get home. It’ll ease your mind if nothing else.”

  But he didn’t. When they were settled in the apartment in New York’s East Thirties, he said, “Yes. Tomorrow, remind me,” and Sarah reminded him to the point of naggery, but he always slipped out of any positive appointment.

  The nightmares—call them that although it was like calling a hurricane windy—went on, and settled into a dreadful pattern. If he drank a great deal, he slept the night through, but was accordingly edgy in the morning. Three cocktails did it at first, and then three cocktails and wine with dinner; at length a nightcap had to be added, and then increased to two.

  On the nights when he didn’t drink, Sarah went shrinkingly to sleep, knowing that she would be waked, and how. No matter how steeled she was, the impact was always just as frightful. It was like standing outside a torture chamber, knowing what must be going on inside, powerless to help.

  And Charles changed in other ways.

  Sarah had never analyzed her reasons for marrying him, but they were there. By the time she was twenty-two, both her parents were dead. Her only brother had been killed in Korea, her sister was married and living in San Francisco. Inevitably, and with the help of friends in the Connecticut town where she had grown up, she had gone to New York to look for a job.

  It was a typist’s job to begin with, and then a secretary’s, and then a secretary’s in an advertising agency. With some talent and a great deal of luck, she had ended up in the copy department. She was well-bred and quick and attractive, an ornament to trot out for clients, and another two years went by before she realized the sterility of this small pa
rticular world.

  The women she knew were dedicatedly smart, witty, beautifully dressed, intensely clever, and knifingly ambitious. The men she knew were witty, charming, helpful, and married, seldom less than twice. Some of them took her out for cocktails after work, waving a negligent hand at the train their wives would be meeting in the suburbs, before she realized quite what was going on.

  Through a fabrics account, she met Charles Trafton. He wasn’t the client but a friend of the client’s, and he came from somewhere on Boston’s South Shore. He was almost apologetically good-looking: narrow lively face, fairish hair, spare nonchalant height. He didn’t speak the sparkling advertising liturgy, and to Sarah, reacting violently from an attachment to an art director who had kept his third wife and four children under wraps, he was a good deed in a naughty world. He was sunny, he was open, he didn’t need to bolster himself up with a lot of fifty-dollar-an-hour complexes. He worked in the New York office of his late uncle’s Boston publishing house, and he had no plans for advancement over the prone bodies of his colleagues.

  He said the second time he took her out to dinner, “Do you like pheasants?”

  “I’ve only had pheasant once, but then it was— What are you laughing at?”

  It took him some time to recover. “I meant live ones, you know, walking around. Tame. I have an aunt who keeps them, and Id like you to meet her.”

  So tame himself, or rather, trusting, so blessedly open; all she had to do was say, with becoming modesty, that she would like to meet his aunt, too. Sarah gazed at him through her lashes, realized with irritation that it was a trick she had picked up from her group head, and looked at him honestly.

  “What pretty eyes you have,” said Charles Trafton dreamily. “Green. Someone with blue eyes started that business about the green-eyed monster.”

  It was really settled then and there, although another five weeks went by before they became engaged. Sarah and Charles drove up to Massachusetts that Saturday to see his aunt, a startling sixtyish woman who looked like a retired actress but was really the widow of a railroad executive. Her name was Bess Gideon, and the wooden legend at the foot of the driveway said “Pheasant Pharm,” which Sarah loyally did not flinch at.

  There were other people in the old, expensively restored farmhouse. Bess’s son, Hunter Gideon, was perhaps forty, tall, brusque-faced, sun-reddened; give him a mustache, thought Sarah, and he would look like a television lawman of the early West. By contrast, Bess’s nephew Milo was an owl, plump, secretive, with an air of malicious wisdom. His wife, Evelyn, was dismayingly unsecretive; before ten minutes had gone by she had commenced with energy on a list of her—could it really be sixty-four?—separate allergies.

  Sarah, composing her features to the proper blend of fascination and sympathy, gazed back into the busy protuberant blue eyes and had a moment’s faltering. It was true that she was not marrying any of these people, not the lawman nor the owl nor this sandy woman who talked as though her life depended on it, but they were Charles’s background, the only family he had, and he must have been conditioned by them to some extent. Would he expect her to be like Evelyn, for instance, or his rather daunting aunt; would he expect. . . ?

  At that all-important moment Charles caught her eye, gave her a very small rueful smile, and turned back to his conversation with Hunter.

  And there were the pheasants. Sarah, wrapped up in Charles, bothered by his relatives, trying to split herself in two to absorb both factions, was still dazzled by the beautiful, surprisingly calm birds who walked the immaculately-kept wire pens in the angle behind the attached barn. They were black and silver, flame-red and green and cream, bronze and yellow and blue—and then, when the sun struck them, an indescribable range of colors in-between.

  While Sarah watched, a dun-brown bird walked into a shaft of light and became a precise pattern of shimmering blue-eyeleted copper. She was afraid to move, for fear of alarming this exquisite creature, but Charles bent carelessly, plucked a handful of grass blades, and held them to the wire. The pheasant came forward at a delicate questing walk, tipped its head to give Sarah a curious round-eyed glance, and took the grass hungrily.

  “They love dandelion greens,” Charles said, “and they will go anywhere for raisins or boiled potatoes. Look at them, they expect some now.”

  It was August, and the late-afternoon hour when the low sun, in spite of its richness, recaptures the absolute clarity of early morning. The shadows on the clipped grass were deep and exact, the pines that formed a windbreak beyond the far pens seemed to show forth every needle. The air was faintly fragrant, the lacing of bird-calls so peaceful that it was a part of the silence.

  Charles was watching the pheasants; briefly, Sarah watched Charles. His face was quiet with pleasure, clear, uncomplicated. The particular segment of New York she lived in, the barbed brilliance, the smiling, deadly, daily competition, had never seemed more impossible, nor farther away.

  “Time for a drink,” said Charles, almost reluctantly. “I’m sorry about Evelyn. Once she’s run through all her allergies she’ll go off and fasten on somebody else. In a way, they’re the only distinction she has. The thing to do is get your mind firmly on something else, she won’t notice anyway. I’ve composed a lot of letters in my head listening to Evelyn.”

  Sarah, still spellbound with peace, said that she didn’t mind Evelyn at all. They were turning to go back into the house through the stable and barn when a woman’s deep clear voice behind them said, “Charles?”

  Even before she turned, Sarah’s mind registered the impression that this was not a cousinish voice, nor an auntish one. Kate Clemence was obviously neither. She was a tall woman, as tall as Charles, with ragged black hair, cut that way out of carelessness or immense guile, black-lashed gray eyes, and an air of unbreakable calm. She wore dungarees and a man’s white shirt, open at the throat, and if she had walked down Madison Avenue just as she was she would have been snapped up instantly by scouts for something or other. Sarah hated her with a hearty intuitive hatred before she said so much as another word.

  The Clemences—Kate and her brother—lived, Charles told Sarah in the course of introductions, in the house just visible through the pines. (How nice for them, thought Sarah, faintly shocked at her own spite.) Kate was wonderful with birds, it was a touch she had—(Oh, better and better) —and had often helped Bess Gideon doctor an ailing cock, or set traps for an occasional marauding mink from the farm nearby.

  Sarah and Kate exchanged smiles of practised sincerity, and Sarah wandered tactfully away, given an excuse by the sudden appearance of a small, feather-hatted, pantaletted black hen. It was, Charles told her later, one of the Japanese Silkies, bantams kept to hatch the pheasant eggs. Pheasants would not hatch their own young in captivity, while the Silkies would sit on anything, or, if there weren’t anything, on nothing, folding their wings dedicatedly on bare boards. A deep square of sod had to be placed under the nest to provide the dampness necessary for hatching pheasant eggs, but once the chicks had emerged the Silkie would treat them like the one of her own in the same hatch, although hers did not have to be taught how to eat as the pheasant chicks did.

  The hen at Sarah’s feet seemed expectant and a little cross; when she knelt and held out her hand it pecked at her palm and gave her an injured look. Behind her, perhaps ten feet away, Kate Clemence said murmuringly to Charles, “They’ve found out who the dead woman on the mink farm was—did Bess tell you?”

  “No.”

  Kate’s voice dropped cautiously on a name. Charles was not as cautious; Sarah, vainly offering grass to the black hen, heard him say in an oddly fumbling way, “Not the Miss Braceway . . . not the nurse—?”

  Kate Clemence must have nodded. “You know that little hut out there, at the edge of the woods? The police think some man . . .”

  Sarah strolled farther away on that; the compassionate note in the other woman’s voice was not for her ears. The nurse—what echo did that bring up? That Charles’s stepmo
ther, of whom he had been very fond, had died several months ago of pneumonia. Here in this house, in fact. Charles had stayed here toward the end, and he would naturally have gotten to know the nurse.

  Found out who she was. That suggested something singularly unpleasant, some unthinkable effort to prevent identification . . . “Here,” said Sarah summarily to the black hen. “Pheasants like dandelion greens, why don’t you?” Some man. She must have been young, then, or youngish. Above her, Charles said in an almost normal voice, “That’s Midnight. She was raised in the house, and she’s very spoiled. Let’s go in and get that drink, shall we?”

  His face looked strained when Sarah rose. Kate Clemence had gone—having thrown her bombshell, Sarah thought angrily, having wiped out Charles’s quiet contentment. He said abruptly, “That was rather unpleasant. The nurse who took care of my stepmother has turned up dead, in—” he nodded vaguely at pine-hidden distance “—a field up the road. She was fifty if she was a day, sensible, immensely competent— I can’t imagine . . .”

  He broke off, shaking his head. Sarah, released from a shadow burden, said simply, “How ghastly . . . Someone in the woods, do you suppose?”

  Charles shook his head again, blankly, and they went through the stable, converted to pheasant pens, and into the barn, hung with old harnesses, bridles, horseshoes. A blue-painted door opened onto the passageway that led into the kitchen; when Charles opened it a busy pattern of voices filtered through. His face lit; he said to Sarah, “Harry Brendan was going to try and come tonight. I hope he’s here. He’s the one person I’m most anxious for you to meet.”

  . . . Harry Brendan.

  ii

  FOR SARAH, the same instinct that had recognized Kate Clemence was on the alert for Harry Brendan. She knew that she was going to marry Charles, and something in her resented this unseen man whose approval Charles wanted, and to whom he unconsciously deferred. Buttonholed by the allergic Evelyn, aware of Milo’s pseudo-scholarly malice on the fringe of the conversation, she watched the door.