So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  “Drink it,” said Harry Brendan authoritatively, “or I will, and the last state of this man will be worse than the first. Sarah”

  Time seemed to have rolled back, Sarah thought, lifting her glass obediently; this was Harry as he had been in the frightful interval after Charles’s funeral, bending her to his mood, knowing instinctively what she needed, cutting off the dangerous withdrawal.

  Charles’s death had been shocking and inexplicable then; it was at once simpler and more shocking now that it was murder. There was no other logical conclusion to arrive at: no one would bother to set the stage for suicide, no one would have to. Nor, in setting the stage, plant the victim’s wife as a cause of actual fear, a bone to be thrown to some assiduous detective who might question the suicide of a man in Charles’s position. An ace in the hole.

  What Sarah kept seeing was almost invisible—the hair of blue fibre from the dining alcove curtain caught under Charles’s fingernail. Not in the last-second change of heart the policeman had suggested, but in a struggle for his life. Because he had been pushed from the window, thrust out, beaten away from the sill.

  Impossible not to think about what must have led up to that. A telephone call, probably, to make sure that Charles was alone. Charles opening the apartment door to someone he trusted, making drinks; betraying, to this sympathetic and deadly face, something he mustn’t be allowed to repeat. The window in the dining alcove being raised, Charles—because there were no indications of a struggle—being summoned there on some casual pretext. (“Isn’t that Sarah now, at the corner?”)

  How had it felt to be toppling from a killing height, to reach out in a last frantic effort for an anchor and feel only the graze of cloth? Almost everybody knew how it felt in nightmare; Charles must have had a second, or seconds, to know how real it was.

  That was what had turned Sarah’s stomach upside down. She forced herself to go back to the drugstore and buy what had to be bought, and when Harry Brendan came back to the car she was sitting in it very quietly, not crying but swallowing steadily and convulsively.

  If he was surprised, he hadn’t showed it. He had sensibly opened both front windows of the car and, not so sensibly, put his arm around her and held her firmly. He had said a lot of disconnected things, alternately brisk and soothing, ending up with, “Well, you can’t go back to the house like this. Oddly enough, neither can I. Let’s have several drinks, shall we?”

  He was very quiet about it, but Sarah felt suddenly ashamed because he had known Charles much better and longer than she had, over a matter of years. Now, when she had put her glass down, he said, “Are you going to tell Bess about all this?”

  Bess. Hunter Gideon might have gone to Dr. Vollmer, or Rob Clemence, or even Milo. Psychiatrists did not, from Sarah’s hearsay acquaintance with them, demand birth certificates nor any other document; a medical history might be taken but you were who you said you were. (Even, for the time being, Napoleon.)

  “No,” said Sarah, “not yet.” Harry did not appear to have noticed the small package she had carried from the car. “Did you have a lunch date with Charles that day?”

  He didn’t ask what day. “No. I got the night train down when Bess called me.”

  Out of her own shock and bewilderment, Sarah had not telephoned Bess until midnight; she could still remember the long empty drawl on the line while she waited for the ringing to wake someone. That had allowed time for whoever had killed Charles to get back to Boston by plane, and from there to Preston by car.

  The check came. Sarah opened her purse to put her cigarettes away, and the tiny key, nestled with the cancelled train checks inside the zippered compartment, seemed to clank at her. She said, “Did Nina Trafton keep a diary?” Harry’s gaze shot up from his drink. “Indeed she did. Edward Trafton was a bird-watcher and an amateur botanist and a do-it-yourself weatherman all rolled into one, and Nina kept his field journal. The barometer went down so many points, crocuses came up ahead of schedule, cedar waxwings were observed at the bird feeder. Heady stuff. I imagine it’s still in the house somewhere. All set? Don’t forget your package.”

  The diary wasn’t significant, then. On the other hand, why keep a key to a nature log? But it mightn’t be the key of a diary at all, it might have fitted a jewel box or some special drawer; it might even, thought Sarah, suddenly flat, have something to do with Charles’s office, although it would be odd if someone hadn’t come looking for it before this.

  She said briefly, picking up the package, “It’s a camera.”

  “. . . Oh. Yes, I see. From what you’ve seen of this Vollmer, do you think,” said Harry in a neutral way, “that he’s going to admit he was taken for a ride?”

  Sarah stared back at him, shaken. “But he’d have to. Besides, he’d be furious at being used like that; he’d want to get back at whoever did it.”

  “And get his name in the papers in connection with a homicide investigation, if the police see it the way you do . . . Well, maybe.”

  “The way I do? But there’s no other way to see it,” said Sarah incredulously. Some of the sick coldness she had felt in the car came back; it was, in a curious way, reflected on Harry’s narrow tightened face.

  He wasn’t looking at her, but at the table top. “It’s been three months. Granted that someone could know in advance that Vollmer would be out of the way when Charles died—”

  “That’s not so terribly hard,” said Sarah, quiet with an effort. “If you mark off a certain section of the city, and call every psychiatrist in it with a request for weekly appointments, one of them will turn out to be going on a winter vacation, particularly around Christmas, or off to a convention or somewhere.”

  “All right, let that go. It’s still been three months and we’ll presume,’’ said Harry, still not looking at her, “that a lot of people go in and out of Vollmer’s office, and he had no reason to be especially interested in that one patient at the time. Suppose he made an honest mistake, or just plain couldn’t remember? The police might put you down as an overwrought widow wanting to get out from under.’’

  “Not with the railroad tickets to prove Charles wasn’t even in New York that day.’’

  “He could conceivably have gotten those from someone else.’’

  Sarah stood up, sweeping gloves and handbag and camera into a heedless bundle. She said softly and unbelievingly, “You don’t want to find out, do you?’’

  “Me,’’ said Harry musingly, “or Hunter or Milo or Rob Clemence.’’ He smiled up at her without humor. “Yes, I suppose I do. But if the police start digging into it, they are going to go one hell of a long way back.’’

  “Back to Nina Trafton, you mean.’’

  “That’s what I mean,’’ said Harry, matching her tone exactly. “I think it’s eminently possible that Charles killed Nina, and that the whole thing is going to make a twenty-four carat mess.’’

  xii

  SO THIS WAS what Hunter had meant, this was why he had given her that queer compassionate glance.

  In the car, Harry said gently, “Sarah, I’m sorry. I’d much rather not have told you, but it’s—something you’ll have to take into consideration.”

  “Oh, it is, isn’t it?” said Sarah light-headedly. “You must all have been very relieved when Charles decided to marry. Marriage is so steadying; it weeds out those bad little bachelor habits. But you couldn’t be a witness at the last minute, could you, Harry? You begged off, which shows—which shows. . .”

  “I begged off, as you call it, because I found out that I couldn’t stand watching you being married to anybody at all,” said Harry shortly. “And before you go off into a tail-spin, you ought to know a little of the background. For one thing, I’m sure Charles had no intention of killing her beforehand, for another, it was quite—understandable. Nina Trafton . . .”

  Sarah had told herself numbly that she wouldn’t listen, but she did. Edward Trafton emerged again, bitter and lonely, a constant reproach to Charles, who after all had hi
s own life to live. Into this bleak personal landscape, on a chance visit to distant relatives she had just discovered she had, came Nina Clemence, ripe and warm as a peach, mature enough for poise and discretion. Her warmth, her mixture of deference and independence, perhaps most of all the fact of a childhood made difficult by extreme poverty, had captivated Charles’s father.

  After their marriage, she had taken the reins of the household from Bess and managed—to everybody’s surprise— expertly. The butcher was enslaved, and reserved special cuts of meat. The laundry, never counted by Bess, came back with its full complement of shirts and sheets and pillowcases. Nina liked gardening, and the house began to bloom with flowers. Edward Trafton was a different man.

  Largely because of the change in his father, Charles had idolized his stepmother. He could now pursue his own concerns without worry, and Nina, of his own generation, was there to talk to when he wanted. She flirted just enough to flatter her elderly husband—with Milo, with Harry, with Rob Clemence, even, unavailingly, with Hunter—but that was as natural to her as her walk or smile or beautiful heavy hair. But her real attention was for Edward: she went on long expeditions, no matter what the weather, to dig up a rare fern, or log a scarlet tanager out of season. The diary she kept was really a record of success for a marriage that mightn’t have been expected to succeed.

  And all of it had been a mockery.

  Harry Brendan didn’t know how Charles had found out, nor to what extent it went. Charles, coming to him, had been incoherent with shock and rage and, although he couldn’t put it into words, disillusionment and hurt pride. Nina had been laughing at all of them, all along. She had been carrying on an affair or affairs, bringing home, straight-facedly, a lady’s-slipper or Bixton’s fern after her assignation in the woods, basking in her husband’s approbation while she looked forward to the next secret meeting. It even seemed possible that she had enjoyed the game as much as the candle.

  Harry had tried to cool Charles’s dangerous rage, had pointed out that if the object had been to make his father happy, Nina had succeeded, had said when that argument failed, “Wait. If you’re thinking of contesting the will, you’ve got to have proof. Or talk to Nina. Chances are she’ll take a smaller settlement and get out.”

  But Nina Trafton had contracted pneumonia by then, and either because of her illness or because she had asked for protection, the nurse would not let Charles see her. “There are ways around that,” Charles had said grimly. And Miss Braceway, whose tea steeped so handily on the stove every day at an appointed hour, had been drugged on the day of Nina’s death—only it was a little more complicated than death, it was murder.

  Sarah realized that Harry’s voice had stopped moments ago; did he possibly think he could leave it here, come this far and no farther? Her own voice sounded tiny and flat to her, the way it did in a theater lobby between the acts. “Where was everybody that day?”

  At a local game-bird show, Harry told her, held every year by a group of fanciers who bought or traded birds with an eye to the coming breeding season. Normally only Bess and Charles and Kate Clemence went, but this time Nina’s illness, with the resultant tiptoeing and worrying and staying close to the house until she seemed to be out of danger, had given it the air of a dazzling social occasion. Even Hunter had gone, and Rob Clemence.

  Sarah knew what had to come next: the fact that the show was held in a huge auction barn, that people came and went constantly; that, with babies being hoisted on their parents’ shoulders for a better view, cocks crowing militantly at each other, the wild beat of wings and crowding around as a bird was removed from its cage for point-by-point inspection, it was impossible to know where any one person was at a given time.

  “Well then,” said Sarah instantly.

  Harry didn’t inquire into that or even glance at her; he kept his eyes immovably on the road. “Charles came to me afterwards. He said, ‘I never meant to kill her, I swear it. I only wanted to let her know we weren’t the fools she’d taken us for, and tell her to get out.’ “

  And Charles had said exactly that, Sarah knew it from the very expressionlessness with which Harry repeated it. The words weren’t so much said as pronounced. They built up a convincing scene, of Charles confronting Nina while the nurse slept in that heavy drugged sleep (there would have been two cups of tea, of course, the innocent one left); of Nina thanking him mockingly for the opportunity of washing her hair and going ahead, maddeningly, with the preparations for that.

  How vulnerable she would have looked then, this woman to whom his father had left the farm and the major part of his estate, with her back turned and her head bent over the basin. So sure of herself, even knowing from his face why Charles had come, that she paid more attention to the feminine task she was bent on than to the man behind her.

  Actual harm mightn’t have been intended at all, the angry thrust at her head the equivalent of a slap delivered in a moment of unthinking rage . . . No, thought Sarah, suddenly and completely sure. Charles might have done it to a man, but never to a woman. He could never, under the pressure of any rage, have left any woman with her face toppled drowningly into a basin of water under the weight of her hair.

  Someone had done just that. Not Charles, although he had cleared the killer’s path—and was that where the nightmares came from? “I don’t care what he told you,” Sarah said clearly. “I will never believe that Charles killed his stepmother. Drugged the nurse—yes. The rest of it—no.”

  The corner of her eye caught the quick embattled half-turn of Harry’s head, as though he would have liked to agree or even disagree with her and couldn’t quite bring himself to do either. The car rounded the corner that would take them to the house. Sarah said challengingly, “Besides, on the basis that Charles did kill Nina, who killed Miss Braceway? You’re not going to sug—”

  Without warning, and with a roughness that caught her in mid-word, Harry slewed the car in to the side of the road and stopped it. His face was tenser than Sarah had ever seen it, and his eyes darker. “If you think I like any of this one damn bit better than you do—” he began, and paused with an air of weariness, as though the task of explaining was mountainous but he would tackle it anyway. Sarah shrank a little from the thoroughness of his direct stare.

  “I’m not that much older, but Charles was like a kid brother,” he said abruptly. “Very young, in spots. As intolerant as an adolescent in his judgments. He never made allowances for human frailties in anyone—not even in himself. He always had to put haloes on the people he liked. I could have told him that sooner or later Nina’s was going to fall off with a bang. It wouldn’t have helped, but still I could have told him. How do you think I felt when it did, and she died, and Charles began walking around like a guilty secret on legs? How do you think I felt—Old Friend Harry—when he walked up to me with you on his arm? My God, how do you think I feel right now when we’ve got to exhume him like this?”

  Sarah felt violently buffeted. She said to her hands, “I’m sorry,” realizing all over again that Harry had known Charles much better than she, possibly better than his family; that the things in Charles that had come as a surprise to her—the strength that wasn’t there, for instance, had been known to Harry all along and hadn’t affected his liking in the least.

  She said, “I didn’t mean—”

  “Neither did I.” Unpredictably, he was smiling at her, but there was something a little wry in the smile. “Miss Braceway . . . Well, six months had gone by, remember, and she must have worked on a lot of other cases. And she was insatiably curious; she’d have had to be to go prowling into that shack on the mink farm. Maybe there was some drunk holed up in there, maybe some poor guy had stashed away everything he had in the world and came back and found her—”

  He shrugged and started the motor. Sarah said, aware and not caring that she must seem to him like the drip of water on stone, “All right. That takes care of Miss Braceway. Who hunted up a psychiatrist in our neighborhood—one who was go
ing abroad shortly—and went to him and pretended to be Charles? Who killed Charles?”

  The rail fence and the sign that said “Pheasant Pharm”— that would be Milo’s work—came into view around a curve. Harry Brendan said very soberly, “Are you absolutely sure anybody did, Sarah?”

  It took a moment for her unbelieving ears to sort that out. “But the train checks—I showed you—and it was the same date, the nurse . . .”

  Something stopped her, and her voice trailed off. Harry’d swung the car into the driveway and braked it before the barn. He said almost lightly, not looking at her, “How did you manage to get Charles onto a train?”

  And this was it, this was at the bottom of the oddness in him, the parrying. Charles had hated trains with a hearty, almost a holy hatred. There was nothing mysterious or neurotic about it; he hated the dirt, the noise, the food, the service, the inevitable delays. Fortunately his job required almost no travelling, and when it did he flew. So that when Harry Brendan had seen the train checks he had thought—what?

  It was impossible to be angry when her own mind had to grope for the answer. Sarah said concentratingly, “It was —wait, it was right after that terrible crash on take-off in Chicago. I had a touch of flu and I was very unreasonable about everything, especially Charles’s flying at just that point, so in the end he agreed to go by train.”

  And said, smiling at her in one of the unguarded moments that had become so rare between them, “I hope you know that I wouldn’t do this for anybody else.” For some reason the memory was knifing. When Sarah lifted her head from an unseeing study of her hands, Harry said slowly, “He would have. Yes, I see.”

  His voice was calm, but his face had changed indefinably. The reluctance had gone out of it, and the careful reserve. The glance with which he swept the length of the house was as brilliant and measuring as though there were a face at each window. “In that case,” he said, “I’d better have the train checks. Not now, later, and as publicly as possible.”