So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  The house seemed different to Sarah when they went in; her new certainty of Charles’s murder, and Nina’s, chilled and darkened it.

  Evelyn reflected the changed atmosphere, greeting them at the door with a hushed and important gravity. Hunter rose, loomed briefly, and said, “Get you a drink,” but again that hardly scratched the surface of the silence. Even before he opened the door to the dining room, showing a slice of pale yellow wall and window and Bess at the telephone with her back turned, Sarah realized that all of them—Milo, Kate, Rob—had the self-consciously preoccupied air of people overhearing something.

  There wasn’t much to overhear. It was a conversation so one-sided that even Bess’s single syllables were cut off. She said, “Yes, of cou—” and, “I know how you must fee—” and, “If there’s anyth—” and a peculiar tension built up in the living room.

  After a wordless eyebrows-up glance around the room, Harry Brendan had joined the ranks and was studying a framed pen-and-ink as though it had just been hung. Milo, stretched on his spine, peered at a Chinese puzzle that glittered in his short soft hands; the faint repeated clicking of metal brought him oath-like glances from Rob Clemence, tight jaw set, on the couch opposite. Kate sat at a window and gazed at the lawn with a rapt unconscious air that was undone by her strained and rigid throat muscles.

  Sarah lit a cigarette she didn’t want and listened to the infectiously quickened pace of her own pulse and drew in the glass ashtray with the burned match. It was a habit of suspended thought, but this time it didn’t produce the usual random designs. Secretly, horrifyingly, the match in her fingers formed a “P” and then an “E” and a “C”—

  The receiver went down and Bess came in, face shocked, short gray curls wilder than usual because she was pushing blankly at them with a leather-gloved hand. She said unbelievingly, “That was Mrs. Peck. The police just called and told her he’s—Peck’s dead.”

  Nobody moved. In that lightning interval Sarah had erased the letters in her ashtray, so that only a small shining square remained, but it was too late to help Peck.

  “He’d been drinking all day, it seems, and he must have stumbled on his way home and hit his head on a rock in that brook near their house,” said Bess more strongly. “It was so cold last night, and the brook was deeper than usual after all the snow we’ve had. They think he died of exposure.”

  And you could hardly, thought Sarah, tensely not looking at Harry Brendan, put it more clearly than that.

  xiii

  LUNCH WAS a kind of rite for Peck’s memory, in which not everybody joined. Food was deferred by common consent in favor of another drink; even Evelyn, who sipped at sherry only on state occasions, seemed grateful for hers. It was Rob Clemence, freckles showing more than usual on the tight graven face under the crisp curling hair, who said with mordant amusement, “I’m a little confused here; can somebody fill me in? This morning Peck was an absentee nuisance, a known drunk, and, if everybody present will pardon me, a surly son-of-a-bitch. Why are we all wagging our chins like this? Is he changed?”

  “Considerably,” said Harry Brendan dryly.

  “Oh, biologically, yes. Don’t,” said Rob, turning almost clairvoyantly upon Evelyn, “quote De mortuis at me. Anybody who has to be dead to get a good word—”

  “Rob,” said Kate almost pleadingly, and he stopped with a shrug.

  Evelyn hadn’t been about to quote anything at anybody, Sarah thought, watching the other woman curiously. Sudden death was a topic which ought to have set her off on a marathon of other sudden deaths she had known or read about, but instead she sat wrapped in a silence of her own, lashes down over—what? But then what had it been on the night of Sarah’s arrival, when Evelyn had first spoken about Peck? Pleasure, triumph, some secret and malicious excitement?

  Milo had followed the direction of Sarah’s gaze and slid his glasses down, observing his wife over them. “Cat’s got her tongue,” he said blandly to Sarah. “Nice pussy.”

  Evelyn smiled absently without looking up; for Sarah the smile had a spine-prickling quality and she glanced hastily away.

  The others were talking about Peck and what poor Mrs. Peck would do now. (“Heave a great sigh of relief,” said Rob roundly.) It was true that Peck had lost jobs as fast as he got them, but there was always work to be had in the country, and whatever else his faults, Peck had been wise in the way of birds and animals. Mrs. Peck, evidently a woman of strong character, had managed to extract enough of his pay to keep them in food before he went off on his periodic benders. The wonder was that he hadn’t smashed his car into a tree or come to some other violent end long before this.

  Sarah listened and was almost lulled. Drunks did not require pushing; they fell of their own accord, and the soaking in the brook combined with the bitter cold would have done the rest. It was all very predictable for Peck, it fitted him as exactly as the murder of the nurse.

  “I wonder,” said Evelyn almost apologetically, “where he got the money?”

  There was a pause, and a focussing of attention unusual for Evelyn’s utterances. Then Hunter said shortly and gloomily, “He’d just been paid.”

  “But that was Thursday night, wasn’t it?” The bright blue gaze held only an innocent wish for enlightenment. “And if he’d been drinking all that evening, and all yesterday— I mean, Peck usually went through his pay faster than that, didn’t he?”

  A calculation of dollars and cents travelled silently around the room. Rob said sardonically, “Now that we’ve all discovered what a sterling character he was, I suppose I’d better not say that he mightn’t have been too particular about where his money came from.”

  The subject had grown acutely uncomfortable. Perhaps to change it, Kate Clemence said, “What happened to your hand, Bess?”

  “My . . . ? Oh, this.” Bess moved her right hand with a recollected air, showing a stab-like cut, short but vicious, in the flesh between thumb and index finger. “Long John. He’s always had a bad temper and he’s getting worse, although I do think someone’s been teasing him. Those Elwell children, probably. They’re absolute devils.”

  “And he’s never liked his new pen, has he? I suspect that he’s quite an age and set in his ways,” Kate said thoughtfully. “When he calms down you might put the pair of them in one of the outside pens. The Manchurians would probably like—”

  Sarah didn’t hear what the Manchurians would like; the moving of the Silver pheasants was a signal her mind stopped at and stayed with. When had that taken place? Had Charles, when he wrote down “Reeves” and “Elliot”, put the Silvers in the same ill-tempered category, and then crossed out the name because at that time they were in an outdoor pen that held no place for concealment?

  It would make quite a difficulty, if you had hidden something in a pen occupied by tame and docile pheasants—the Lady Amhersts, say—to find it presided over by a trumpeting and militant Silver. At most seasons of the year the Silver would not molest Bess, the source of his food and water and raisins and tomatoes; now, with the breeding season not far off, he would harm any intruder and probably damage himself in the process.

  It was a safeguard, in a way, for something you didn’t dare leave in the house, in case of a search. (But why keep it at all, whatever it was? Why not destroy it?) On the other hand, a delicate balance had been achieved here. Four deaths had been laid variously to accident, suicide, and random violence, and whoever had been responsible for them would not want the balance upset. Say that X had hidden something incriminating in one of the pheasant pens—because it was something that couldn’t be destroyed easily and there wasn’t time after murdering Nina Trafton? Because the laundry truck had stopped and X had fled in a panic? —and, after all these safe and lulling months, along came Sarah, rebelling against the motives for Charles’s suicide, intent on examining the background.

  X would now want to get rid of the tangible object that Charles had known about or deduced, but a distinctive stab on the hand, combined with a breaki
ng of the proud snowy tail feathers and a disturbance of the stable planks, would mark his progress all the way. The hairline division between coincidence and a related plan would be fatally crossed.

  And what had Bess just said about the Silver? “Somebody’s been teasing him.”

  Bess had a cut on her hand.

  “. . . Sarah?” It was Harry Brendan, whose preoccupied silence during lunch had gone unremarked because he was apt to be like that and, a virtual stranger to Peck, not really qualified to speak. “Before I forget, did you ever find that memo of Charles’s for me? He said he’d written it down on the stub of something or other.”

  “Business,” explained Harry in an aside to Bess. “A well-feathered bird in Brookline.”

  “I don’t know,” said Sarah, and although this had been prepared between them in the car, as had the envelope she took from her bag, her voice sounded to her hollow and overdone, something out of an amateur play. “I’m afraid I forgot, but I did gather up all the stubs and tickets and cards there were. Do you suppose it might be somewhere in here?”

  The room listened and watched as the envelope changed hands. “Thanks, it might be,” said Harry, and dropped the envelope carelessly into a pocket and consulted his watch. “Where was it you had to be at three o’clock, Kate? . . .”

  Sarah went up to her room, avoiding Bess’s expectant eye; once she had agreed to sell the farm, any pretext for lingering would be over. Her mind followed Harry Brendan, driving somewhere with Kate beside him; tranquil, quiet equal-to-anything Kate with her disarmingly ragged and shiny dark hair, her white throat, her gray eyes that were big enough to float in.

  Sarah stood in front of the mirror and assessed herself in a blank but careful way, thinking that if that was what Harry wanted, she couldn’t compete. She didn’t look tranquil at all; she looked pale and driven and uneven-tempered, someone whom Harry might have felt so sorry for that he had put his arms around her out of compassion.

  Below her, the house was quiet. Moving quietly and carefully, unbothered by conscience, she shot the little bolt on her side of the guest room door and turned the knob and let herself in.

  One of the twin beds was still pushed against the closet door, as it had been when Hunter confronted her with her raincoat over his arm, and a slipper chair had been placed on top of the bed. Wallpaper stirred around her feet as she crossed the floor, lifted the chair down, listened for any sound that might filter up through the iron-lace hot-air register, and began to move the bed.

  It wasn’t heavy, and it needed only pivoting. The closet held a collection of wire hangers, two plastic bags of summer clothing, and on an upper shelf a number of what appeared to be account books.

  They were. Sarah glanced at random entries: “$350 for garden tractor. Hurricane damage to chicken house, $75. Quail eggs shipped, May to July, 100 doz.”

  Tucked in among the pages of another one were carbon copies of arrangements for land to be plowed, hay fields to be re-seeded, and one strip of land, going northerly some four thousand feet, bounded by etc., etc., to be sold to the addressee.

  There was no date, no heading beyond Dear Sir, and of course no signature. It took Sarah some time to realize that the Gideon property, long land-bound, was or had been in process of being unlocked.

  What value would that add to the property, with the new highway into the South Shore? Beyond eye range, the farm comprised at least fifteen or twenty acres, and what were building lots worth per acre? Was this what she hadn’t been allowed to go near, was this why Bess had sent Hunter so urgently up to this closet to get Sarah’s forgotten raincoat?

  There was another book of some kind, frosted with dust. Sarah reached for it, fingertips identifying the smooth calf even before she lifted it down. It was a pretty little dark-blue volume, its pages gilt-edged. Protruding from the miniature lock was a duplicate of the tiny key in Sarah’s handbag.

  “Gale winds last night, edge of hurricane,” Nina Trafton had written in a rapid curling hand. “Called tree warden to see if split old cherry can be saved. Two bird feeders smashed, must replace . . .”

  And on another page, “First frost. Pretty to look at when the sun came up but a death sentence for our poor asters. Orchards will be deserted now as their tenants go south . . .” Orchards? What orchards?

  Sarah went on leafing through the pages. There were more references to the weather and nature in general, and a lengthy description of bird calls at dawn. “What bird is it that sings under my window like two knives being sharpened against each other?”

  My window.

  The only name that occurred, and that at infrequent intervals, was Edward Trafton’s. Even then he had a dragged-in-by-the-heels sound: “Edward says it will soon be time to mulch the strawberries. Ours are the Cranford variety, very small, but making up in color and delicacy of flavor what they lack in size.”

  “Edward saw a ruby-throated hummingbird this morning.”

  The feeling grew on Sarah that this had not been so much written as copied out of a country-correspondence column in a newspaper, with Edward’s name thrown in for verisimilitude. Even granted a devouring interest in nature, would any woman as ripely attractive as Nina Trafton have been as selfless as this in a diary meant only for her eyes? Would any woman at all—particularly a woman living in a house with her husband’s relatives—have made no personal references anywhere in the diary? It seemed a contradiction in terms.

  On the other hand, if she had been observed in the keeping of a diary, and someone were curious enough to take a look at it, he would reap only comments about mulch and humming-birds and wind velocity for his pains.

  And there was the matter of the extra key. A spare, in case one got lost? Possibly, but Charles would hardly have kept it in that case. He would certainly have kept it, knowing what he did about Nina, if he had found it in a suggestive place after her death and arrived at the obvious answer: two keys, two diaries. The other one the exact mate of this in everything but content, so that Nina could confide in it openly, even amusedly.

  It wouldn’t bum easily or unobtrusively, not with the lock and the triangles of brass that cornered the blue calf binding, but it mustn’t turn up to undo the innocent look of Nina Trafton’s life and death. . . .

  Sarah paced her room until she remembered that every footstep could be heard by anyone in the dining room below, and sat chainedly down on her bed. She had to remind herself that another diary was purely imaginary—but the key wasn’t, nor that notation of Charles’s on the day he died, nor the nightmares.

  Nor was the woman herself. Every word, every glance, every small detail that related to Nina Trafton increased Sarah’s conviction that she had been the victim of some uncontrolled love or hate or jealousy; that she had died simply because she was Nina. She had thought she could balance a tightrope, walking delicately among these various personalities and enjoying the risk, and she hadn’t made it after all.

  Sarah was queerly sorry for her, because whatever else she was she had been warmly alive, and whatever else she had done she had made Edward Trafton perfectly and innocently happy. Even now, after all these months and by a total stranger, she had to be shaken consciously free of, like a beguiling dream.

  Looked at in one light—the fact that Charles had indeed drugged Miss Braceway and gone to Nina but left her alive, perhaps in her bedroom, perhaps coolly gathering her towel and shampoo—the nightmares made a sensible pattern. He would have blamed himself for her death, which must have come as a tremendous shock in spite of his bitterness, but the tragedy for which he had set the scene was simply that —until the murder of the nurse. Sarah could still remember his whitened face on the late summer afternoon when Kate had told him. His inescapable conclusion then would have been that Miss Braceway, doggedly defending her own reputation, had remembered or suddenly been able to prove something that turned Nina’s death into murder.

  And it had to be one of the people among whom Charles lived who had known that the scene was bei
ng set, that the nurse would be unconscious and Nina, to all intents and purposes, alone. Someone in whom he had rashly confided, or who had overheard him confide in Harry Brendan, and watched him very carefully after that.

  Peck’s arrest had been a reprieve, because if the nurse had been the victim of a drunken and senseless violence, it didn’t go back to Nina. Charles was still morally guilty, but he had not been an unwitting accomplice to murder.

  With Peck’s release, the black burden would have become, as all burdens put down even briefly, intolerable. He did not even have the relief of sharing it with his wife. Obsessed with his guilt, unable to forgive himself, he could not believe Sarah’s judgment would be less damning than his own. He did not have the courage to face what he thought would be her inevitable rejection of him, although he knew that his silence was wrecking their relationship as surely as a confession would. His marriage was cracking up, he had alienated himself from his family and friends. He had lost any hope he might have had that time might solve his problems. He must have decided to come forward, at whatever cost to himself and one other member of that close little group, and he must have said so.

  Memory prickled coldly at Sarah, presenting her with the day Charles had come home edged and driven, gaze unnaturally brilliant, mouth twisting with irony at her suggestion of a weekend at the farm. He had made himself an outsize drink with careless haste, but when he repeated his salutation it hadn’t been careless at all but intent and down-staring. “Here’s how . . .”

  X—and what a frightening faceless sound that had— would have soothed him down, would have said, “Wait. Think of Sarah. It’s her future too, you know, and besides, you can’t be sure that the nurse’s murder wasn’t freak coincidence. Look here, I’ll give the police up there a jog and get in touch with you.”