So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  Was it possible that no one else knew? But it was so elemental that it might be passed by as a personal vagary, of no importance. Sarah could take Bess aside and ask her, but could she even trust Bess, whose whole existence lay in the farm, who bore the Silver pheasant’s mark between thumb and forefinger?

  Harry Brendan’s hand drifted to Sarah’s, touched it secretly, held it tightly. Sarah’s head swam a little at the private contact; it seemed, at this moment, much more piercing than a kiss. She couldn’t find a safe pair of eyes, so she gazed beyond the others into the stable, still lighted, as she said, “I didn’t see anybody in the stable, but I know where it all started. As far as I’m concerned, I mean. The psychiatrist said Charles had nightmares about me, about a walk we took together here just before we were married.”

  The narrowing of attention was almost an atmospheric thing, like a sharp drop in the barometer, a promise of thunder. Sarah had to transfer her gaze to the woodpile, because Bess—deliberately?—had not fastened the door of the Silvers’ pen. It hung open a good four inches, and the Silver cock, whose furious grunting had become a part of the background, was just about to find it out.

  xviii

  “CHARLES AND I went through the woods and up to the bluff,” Sarah said. (If only someone would stop the quail’s soft, senseless, ceaseless battering off in the ragged shadows.) She looked at Evelyn, and the full blue gaze met hers and swelled with interest. “A woman had come, with her children . . .”

  “Jane Folsom,” said Evelyn promptly. Her lashes were busy. “She stayed forever, and the children were ghastly. I didn’t blame you and Charles for sneaking off.”

  “I had a scarf in my pocket, and I started to put it on when it got windy. It blew into Charles’s face just as he reached the edge of the bluff. It was only a little bit of silk,” said Sarah steadily, “but it might have made him go over the edge, I suppose.”

  A plank creaked hollowly as someone’s weight shifted. The very corner of Sarah’s eye saw the Silver cock, crimson face thrusting, test the door of his pen, find it open, come jumping out. He stood erect in a position of triumph and menace, great wings beating, and although the wind around the barn covered the rapid clicking sound, Sarah suspected that none of them would have heard it anyway. The tight attention of one had spread to them all.

  “What someone told the psychiatrist in New York was that Charles believed I wanted him to fall, and that it got to be an obsession with him, to the point where he was terrified of me.”

  Kate Clemence’s face had the closed unyielding look of statuary; Bess was rigidly intent; Evelyn’s skin was patched with red. Milo had taken off his glasses and was polishing them on a fold of his robe, as though fearful of missing a single detail; Rob Clemence, hands thrust tensely into his pockets, waited with an expression of incredulity.

  The Silver cock came stalking up the ramp.

  Hunter’s shadowed face moved forward into the light, so bent upon Sarah that they might have been alone in the barn. “Then somebody was obviously out of his mind. As I remember it, the two of you came back holding hands, which isn’t the usual manifestation of terror.”

  Don’t look at the Silver, head furiously down and forward, rose-pink feet, one blood-darkened, quickening as he came closer to the attacker with the slashing stick. “That might have been another day,” said Sarah carefully. “I think I came back first, as a matter of fact.”

  “No, you were together. Charles was wearing the old tweed coat he kept here, and you had on a raincoat and a blue scarf.”

  Oddly, it was a wrench—until she remembered what he had done to Charles, what he had so casually tried to do to her. “It wasn’t blue,” said Sarah, staring at him across three feet of tingling space, “it was green. You saw it the other day when you got my raincoat out of the closet, and you still thought it was blue. You’re colorblind, aren’t you, Hunter? That’s why you got mixed up between my suitcase and Bess’s the first night I was here and you came for the train ticket, that’s why you put that blob of green paint on the background of Milo’s portrait. Did you—” her voice broke without warning “—hold the blue curtain out to Charles as he was going over the—over the—”

  Evelyn screamed and ran scuttlingly; she gasped over her shoulder, “Bess, the Silver’s out!”

  Long John came steadily forward. He was of a bad-tempered breed at best, and age had not improved his disposition. The pain of his broken spur, the memory of having been slashed at in an enclosed place, had wiped out any hesitation before the light and the collection of legs and faces. He had been cunningly silent when he commenced his stalk—now he was uttering his peculiar challenge, half-cry, half-grunt.

  Rob stepped back, and jerked Kate with him. Bess stood with the rigidity of iron; so did Hunter although he looked suddenly ill. Evelyn was crouched in the far corner of the barn; Sarah turned in the hard circle of Harry Brendan’s arm and saw the Silver’s powerful snowy wings stretch to an incredible span.

  “Bess,” said Milo in a mounting voice, “get this damned bird—”

  “No,” said Bess in a voice as still and unflinching as her pose, and the Silver launched himself at Milo.

  It was a frightful thing to watch. Deprived of the stick, of any weapon at all, Milo was caught in a primitive terror of the beating wings, the seeking claws, the furious beak. He ran blindly across the barn, and the Silver, infected by frenzy, plummeted at his back. Blood from the reopened wound made a streak of red on the foulard, more vivid than dye, and drove the cock to fresh fury.

  Milo held an arm across his eyes, but he did not cry out again. It was Harry Brendan who said tensely, “Oh my God,” and walked across the barn fast and snatched the long-handled, metal-rimmed net from its position on the wall. As the Silver flew at Milo’s shining, maddeningly glassed-in eyes, he flung the net. It fell with a clatter, striking one snowy black-veined feather, but it did not deflect the Silver for an instant; if anything it accentuated his rage. The crimson face turned only glancingly, the coarse brilliantly black crest seemed to stand even more erect. Harry threw the net again, and the cock launched himself into a strong web of nylon.

  There was silence, and then a thrashing and a sound of breaking feathers. Cut in two places, Sarah nevertheless turned away; she could not bear to look at the beautiful vicious strength tattering itself inside the net.

  Milo patted his pocket for a handkerchief, found none, and wiped his face with his sleeve. He said pantingly to Bess, “You won’t—have him long—I promise you. There was sleeping sickness—last year—and pheasants are carriers—and this is the end of yours.”

  “Where is the diary?” said Bess. She would, thought Sarah with distant amazement, have been just as stony with Hunter. For all her poses—her battered clothes by day, her stark elegant black after six—she was a woman without compromise in any direction.

  “You know,” said Milo, fumbling at his glasses, sliding them down in a painful parody of his old mocking way, “that diary is better unfound. You don’t show up in it terribly well, Bess, and Edward’s made a total fool of. Charles looks like an idiot, but a dangerous one. Harry had his eye on her, and Hunter used to meet her out in the hut—”

  “To go digging ferns. Edward thought she found them by herself,” said Hunter, but he had flushed darkly, as though at the realization of Nina’s secret amusement. “God . . . I told you about that business on the bluff, because I said we ought to have the woods posted in case children should wander in . . .”

  Long John crouched quietly in the net, guarding his plumage. Bess, her face bitter, put on her leather gloves and bent swiftly, pinning the strong wings and picking up the netted bundle so that the metal handle trailed on the barn floor. She said quietly, “Do you know, I’ve half a mind to let him out again,” and for a nightmarish second it seemed possible that she would.

  Harry Brendan said between his teeth, “You’re being too modest, Milo. Surely you crop up somewhere in the diary? What does Nina have to say about you?
”

  Milo’s face glittered, otherwise he might not have heard. He said in a voice that went high with triumph, “She wasn’t Rob’s cousin at all. Oh, far from it. She was his—”

  Given a chalk, thought Sarah, he would have enjoyed writing obscenities on walls. Something, Rob’s step forward or the fact that Bess still held the Silver cock and had turned, stopped him.

  “Old flame,” said Bess with an urbanity that gave Sarah a wild impulse to laughter. The impulse died when the very tail of her eye caught the look of total shock on Kate Clemence’s face. Obviously Kate had accepted the tale of cousinship, and had put Nina Trafton down as a necessary evil when Charles was so innocently dazzled by her. And that, of course, was the reason behind Rob’s hostility toward Sarah and any investigation of Nina. Kate was not going to forgive him easily or quickly for having introduced the woman who was, in a sense, the cause of Charles’s destruction.

  “Nina had only enough money for her fare east,” Bess was saying coolly, “and Rob was the only person who could give her introductions here. It was all quite a long time ago in any case. Did you really think you had something to hold over Nina’s head, Milo? She told me about it herself. And I really don’t think I care to learn why you wanted something to hold over her head, or what went on between you at all. I have a feeling that it would be rather disgusting.”

  On that she walked off to the stable, her straight back full of distaste, her dignity enhanced, if anything, by the flapping robe and trailing handle of the net. Her voice came back to them soothingly—“There, Long John. There, boy,” —and Sarah’s sense of reality slipped another notch. There was still a lot left of the night, and because a pheasant could not give evidence to the police they would all go back to bed, presently, and wait for the darkness to blow itself away just as though the same roof did not harbor this owlish, head-tipping, murderous man. In spite of everything that had been said and done in the cold echoing barn, the hand-hewn timbers would merely swallow another secret, because there wasn’t a shred of proof. All Milo had to do was deny everything.

  But of course they wouldn’t go to bed, and it would not be quite that simple for Milo. They would get dressed and look for and find the diary, and it would carry Milo’s fingerprints. In the morning Sarah would call Lieutenant—Welk, was it? It seemed so long ago—and Dr. Vollmer, and when Vollmer had identified Milo as the man who had come to him under the name of Charles Trafton, what had been suicide would be re-investigated as murder. And when you held two ends of a string, you could work away little by little at the knots in between.

  Milo turned abruptly toward the passage door. Although he was shivering from the contact of cold air on sweat, he said with a faint and dreadful jauntiness, “Well, I’m not crazy, and I’m going to bed. Evelyn?”

  They had all forgotten Evelyn, still crouched in the corner where she had fled at the sight of the Silver cock. She came forward now with a look of docile obedience, and when she was two feet away from Milo she said with total detachment, “I know why he killed her.”

  And this was what Evelyn had waited for, this was the diamond-sharpness that had peeped out now and then from behind the bumbling and fumbling and inanity. She had borne Milo’s mechanical taunts almost with pleasure, adding them to the limitless price he would pay when he was caught and punished, and it was somehow typical of her that she would do nothing herself but wait for it to come through an outside agency, with a kind of terrible patience.

  Milo’s incredulity touched his face like a spasm and was gone. Evelyn said calmly, “She found that letter of yours, about buying that strip of land when you’d always told Bess the owner refused to sell, and she got curious about where you were getting the money from. She found that out, too, and she told you she’d tell Bess you’d been doctoring tax returns and stealing from the farm for years if you didn’t leave her alone. But you didn’t kill her for that; you killed her for laughing at you when you thought you could have a cozy little affair with her. I heard her. She said if you’d only feather out a little m-more,” Evelyn’s voice stumbled at last, tears began to slip from the edges of her eyelids in a mixture of hysteria and hatred and some old remnant of love, “you’d remind her of a g-great spectacled sapsucker.”

  No one smiled, no one stirred.

  “And you said,” went on the trembling voice, “Funny, aren’t you? Better watch out you don’t kill yourself laughing.’ Sarah, somebody, get me out of here . . .”

  The diary wasn’t hard to find, once the stable itself had been eliminated. In order to have reappeared as quickly as he had, Milo could only have slipped out the stable door into the corral, rounded the barn, streaked across the lawn and entered the house by the front door. Surprised at the foot of the stairs by Bess, he had told her that he too had been roused by the barking of the mink farm Dobermans, always a signal of alarm in the country. And there were barberry bushes in the angle between stable and barn, and a thick clump of rhododendrons at the corral entrance. . . .

  It was a dreadful, flashlight-prowling night that Sarah would remember as long as she lived, although in her exhaustion it went by her in splashes, like street-lamps on an immensely long black journey.

  She sat with Evelyn who talked incessantly in spite of the sedative Bess had given her. Evelyn had kept a mental record of every damning scrap of information that could be used against Milo, shoring up conjecture with her own shrewd analysis of Milo’s reactions as well as with the answers she got from Sarah and the others. The police would find witnesses, break alibis, trap Milo in a web of circumstantial evidence, but their indictment would not be more complete.

  Evelyn went back to the day of Nina’s death when she had watched Milo follow Charles from the game-bird show. It would have been easy for Milo to wait unobserved until Charles had left the farmhouse, to take advantage of Miss Braceway’s drugged sleep to push Nina’s head down in the wash-basin, holding it there while she died. Hiding Nina’s diary in the pheasant pen, Milo had slipped back into the crowd at the game show. He was, said Evelyn grimly, as shocked and incredulous as everyone else when Nina’s death was discovered on their return home. He must have congratulated himself on a perfect murder until Miss Brace-way’s stubborn probing began to arouse curiosity. Her fatal rendezvous with Milo at the hut on the mink farm put an end to that danger.

  After Peck’s release as a suspect for the nurse’s murder, Milo realized Charles would have to be silenced, too. He may have overheard Charles talking about his guilt to Harry. It was just as likely that Milo’s instinct for self-preservation helped him to make a correct diagnosis of Charles’s moodiness. He knew too much about Charles’s involvement in Nina’s death to accept Kate’s theory that Charles was brooding over his recklessly unsuitable marriage. It was easy for Milo to arrange to run into Charles in New York, to maneuver the conversation so that Charles, who was close to the breaking point, would admit his decision to reveal his part in Nina’s death in the hope that her murderer would be found.

  It was then that Charles must have told Milo that he had found the key to Nina’s diary. Evelyn remembered that when they were all in New York for Charles’s funeral Milo had gone into Sarah’s bedroom. He took the framed snapshot of Charles to prevent Dr. Vollmer from seeing it, but he did not find the incriminating key, not even later on at the farmhouse when he ripped the lining of Bess’s travelling case in a final vain search.

  Unfortunately Milo had not taken the time to invite more confidences from Charles before he had sent him plunging from the apartment window. He did not know Charles had guessed the murderer had hidden the missing diary in a pheasant pen. It would have to be an indoor pen with plenty of hiding places, a pen occupied by birds militant enough to stand off an inquisitive meddler. Only a few hours before his death, Charles had listed the names of the ill-tempered Reeves and Elliots. Their pens would be the best to conceal the diary. He had scratched out the Silvers, not knowing that they had been moved indoors, that the diary could be guarded by the savage
Long John.

  If Milo had known about that very last entry in Charles’s engagement book, he could have reclaimed the incriminating diary before Sarah, probing and prying and coming closer to the secret of Charles’s death, had returned to the farm. There would not have had to be the hurried dangerous trip to the stables at night to get the diary, with the risk of injuring an attacking Long John. Milo had hoped that the jack he left in the pen would make Bess believe that the children had damaged the bird. Otherwise he had to trust to luck that his raid would be successful. He could not take the chance of Sarah finding the evidence that would link him to Nina’s death and from there to the murder of the nurse and Charles and of Peck. Probably no one would ever discover if Peck had had real evidence for his blackmail, or if he had merely suspected Milo was guilty. Whichever it was, Peck was a security risk and therefore expendable.

  Milo had seen everyone as a threat to his security—everyone but Evelyn. He had been too contemptuously sure of her stupidity to notice her hostile, unobtrusive spying on his every move. He had never guessed it was she who in a defiant challenge had painted a tiny pair of horn-rimmed glasses above and behind Nina in the portrait, glasses that Milo with forethought had painted out in green. He had thought himself safe from everybody but Sarah. . . .

  Sarah’s eyelids fell, the night lurched and steadied again. And here was the diary, supposition made real in the crumbled dark-blue leather and mouse-nibbled pages. Hunter, who had found it, handled it with grim care; after one glance Bess avoided it as though it were an asp.

  Sleep must have caught her again, because Milo was suddenly there in the living room, emerged from his dangerous silence upstairs and so icily pale that his dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses were like something painted on a subway poster. He carried a suitcase in one of the soft plump hands that had killed four people, but he wore his air of challenge badly. The pounding pulse, the trapped fear, showed under it like a woman’s hanging slip. He said to someone behind Bess in the dining room doorway, “I’ll sue, you know. Slander, defamation of character, false arrest, the works.”