The Dream Walker

by Charlotte Armstrong

  As I well knew, Miss Beth didn’t close shop at any strict hour, but drifted with the human tide. As long as people came, she kept the door open and herself remained, aloof and faintly smiling, never nagging a body to buy or even tell her what he was looking for, seeming to assume that naturally, he would not know until he found it.

  I came to the shop and went in. It was its own glorious mess. There were perhaps ten people in the place, glazed of eye, just as I remembered, pawing happily in the poor light which only enhanced the mysteries. I sought Miss Beth and said to her, “Please help me. I’m looking for a woman, about my height and weight, one who would be a stranger, but who certainly was in town today.”

  “I don’t know, dee-ah,” said Miss Beth, putting on helplessness.

  “She walks,” I bent from the hips forward and pulled my neck out of line with my spine, “or stands like this.”

  Miss Beth said, “You can’t say what she’d be wearing?”

  “No.” She shook her head and I said, “I know it’s almost impossible but I’m very anxious to find her.”

  “Good many women in today, dee-ah,” she said with a faint air of disapproval.

  “When she smokes she puts a cigarette in her mouth and smokes without fuss, without gestures.” Miss Beth smiled blankly. “Her hair would be dark but she’d have it covered.” It was no good. Miss Beth, if anyone, would be able to catch at these wisps of mine. I felt if she couldn’t, no one could. I began to think it unlikely, anyhow, that a wily Darlene Hite would have been tempted into this store.

  I looked around me helplessly. What a romantic I was. Me and my wispy unsubstantial description. What could I do? Prowl the streets? Go up the hill? Try a hotel? Professionals would be working.

  “Her nose,” I said with no faith, and tried describing that. But Miss Beth had lost interest and looked at me as if I didn’t belong. Behind the mad tangle of a high counter, I heard a woman cry, “Look what I found! Henry, come look at this!” I couldn’t help smiling. A word came to me. Serendipity. It’s been getting a bit of use lately. I said it aloud.

  Miss Beth’s smile was not vacant enough to fool me. She’d know the word for that happy quality of being able to find something you want but weren’t really looking for. I then had a peculiar experience.

  I suppose I was strung very tight and vibrating, and there I stood having been transported so suddenly, so far. Stood in this store dedicated to serendipity. And I was, besides, in that enchanted town that for mystical and inexplicable reasons had always seemed to me to be a place to find things. What I felt was a surge of absolutely unwarranted hope. Surely if there was magic, it would work for me, I thought, very well. One had only to fall into the rhythm, the joyful expectancy of the unexpected, a mood in which one does not push anxiously or narrowly. One opens and becomes ready for luck. One lets it happen.

  I don’t know yet. I still think it was the nearest thing to supernatural I’ve ever known. I smiled at Miss Beth and said to her placidly, “I’m not quite sure what I want. May I just look around?”

  It was an unnecessary question. Her business was built on it.

  So I turned and felt hope stir. Anything … anything might be hidden here, mixed in somewhere. As, indeed, anything may be hidden in the great world itself, confused and roaring as it is, upon which men spin and invent their feeble lanes of plan and purpose. But the great globe is a buzz, a throbbing, swiftly shimmering fabric of intermeshed acts, and it cannot be all charted. How do you know what you want until you find it? thought I, in that strange reverie, and turned my head and saw Kent Shaw walk by in the street.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Serendipity? I was struck stock still. Kent Shaw! Why here? He couldn’t have heard about Cora’s latest dream and beaten us here. He couldn’t have come, having heard. So did he know in advance? Or was he visiting relatives? Coincidence? No, no. I’d found something!

  I slipped quietly out of Miss Beth’s and looked to my left. Kent’s topcoated figure was moving rapidly along the street. I followed him. You don’t quarrel, you don’t question. I’d got into the mood to be led, and so I followed.

  The street becomes what you would call a road. The road follows the water. The hill went up to my right, across the way. On the water side there is a little museum, old Fort Pentagoet. I followed Kent Shaw along that road until, before the museum itself, closed of course at this hour, he stopped walking. He was obviously disposing himself to wait.

  Deep dusk had by now fallen on this side of the hill. I slipped behind a huge shrub, twenty yards away, and stood still, tingling. Was it a rendezvous?

  Kent Shaw, here! In Castine, Maine? For the first time, there came into my mind the question I’d never asked myself, although I had heard Marcus make the remark that demanded it. “Someone very clever has designed this thing,” the old wizard had said. The question should have followed. Who, then? Who had invented this plot? Who devised it? Who masterminded it? Not Cora Steffani. I’d been right when I said she wasn’t that clever. Darlene Hite was an unknown quantity, of course, but obscure. And Raymond Pankerman and his money were not in her ken. Nor could he have designed the plot, pudgy-brained Raymond. Where had he acquired the experience or the imagination or the skill to devise such a scheme and direct it and make it work? But Kent Shaw! He was capable. In fact, the whole thing was just like him!

  I had found something. I had found the brains. I was convinced without any proof. I shifted from foot to foot behind that shrub, wild with excitement.

  And Kent Shaw waited by the museum door. I could just see him. I could sense that he, too, danced with anxiety. I could see his arm whip out and strike at the small hedging plants beside the museum entrance. Those movements in the near dark expressed a furious impatience.

  I didn’t know what to do. A few cars drifted by, their headlights froze him momentarily to something still and anonymous. But there were no pedestrians. Yet he was waiting for something. Someone, of course. I felt sure it was Darlene, who, in a plan, was going to meet him there. And I, Olivia Hudson, thirty-four, teacher, female, amateur, was watching, all alone.

  This, however, wasn’t so for long. Something said my name so softly I thought it was a dream. Said it again a trifle more robustly. I became aware of Bud Gray standing close behind me, sheltered, also, in the lee of that bush. He had called my attention skillfully, without alarming me. In a moment, I was clutching his coat and whispering joyfully into his bending ear.

  “Shaw? That him? Okay. We’ll see.”

  I had much excited putting of clues together that I could not possibly whisper then. But, oh, I was glad that he had come.

  We waited. The night air was chilly, but it had, as air has in that place, its own peculiar invigorating clarifying quality. Every breath seems to soothe and rearrange the very cells of the brain. I knew I had found something.

  Meanwhile, the figure of Kent Shaw moved restlessly in a tiny orbit. He kept hitting out at those shrubs, as if pressure inside needed the relief of the gesture. We stood there what seemed hours. Hours. No car stopped. Nobody walked by.

  “She isn’t coming,” I whispered, cramped, stiff, and beginning to despair.

  “Doesn’t seem so.” Too smart, Bud was thinking and I knew his thought.

  We could tell Kent Shaw was on the point of giving up and I was wild. “She isn’t coming,” I repeated. “Oh, pity … pity. But we can’t miss a chance like this, Bud. Listen, why don’t I go? I think I can fool him for a moment, anyhow. If he thinks I’m Darlene Hite, maybe he’ll speak. It could give us something.”

  “Careful,” said Bud Gray, holding me.

  “It’s all right. You can watch, or come behind. Then you can hear if he does speak. Bud, let me try to fool him, for even a second or two. Otherwise, he’s going to leave and we won’t know anything.”

  “Try it,” Bud said abruptly and shoved me a little.

  So I tried to put myself in Darlene’s skin. I didn’t know the role very well. I had such wispy clu
es, such slight indications. All I had, I tried to use—to walk carrying my head as I’d been told she did—to think of myself as cool and businesslike. I had ready in my throat the syllable of his name. I hadn’t taken ten steps around that shrub when Kent Shaw saw my figure moving toward him in the dimness and his restlessness jelled to motionless attention.

  I thought, It’s going to work!

  Then I saw the woman crossing the road. I don’t know where she came from. I wished I could wait until she was by. She was a hulk in a coat that bloomed at the hips like an old-fashioned dolman and she walked splay-footed. I hadn’t far to go. I tried to slow my steps and stall my approach until this lonely figure should pass me by, for she crossed on a diagonal and would come walking toward me, between me and Kent Shaw. She wore a decrepit felt hat pulled down on her brows.

  We would pass. Then I would hear what Kent Shaw might say to Darlene Hite. I thought, Surely Darlene would stall as I am stalling, so it will work. It will be all right.

  But just as she came abreast of me, and we were not thirty feet from Kent’s silent shape, that woman whipped out a flashlight and threw its beam full into my face. She said in a Down East twang, “Tain’t smart to walk here alone by night, dee-ah. Don’t you know no better?”

  “Don’t do that,” I murmured, blinking, exposed. I grabbed for her wrist and turned the beam. It fell on her face. Her eyes were shrewd little slits. Her hair was white, her brows disorderly and pale. So much I saw, when she let go the button and the light went out.

  “Should know better,” she said severely, “Git back where there’s folks.”

  I could have scratched and bitten her! I muttered something and swiveled around her. The light had ruined my vision. But I knew, bitterly I knew, Kent Shaw had gone.

  Then Bud Gray was pinching my arm. He took out a flash of his own and lit it. “Oh damn!” I was almost crying. “Damn that old busybody! Do you see him, Bud? Where did he go?”

  Bud said, professionally undismayed, “No telling, Ollie. Too bad.” He turned his light on the museum door.

  “He can’t be in there!” I cried. “I thought I saw his shadow. Didn’t you? Maybe he ducked up the hill. Can’t we follow?”

  Bud tried the door. It was locked. He turned the beam of light. “What would we say if we caught up with him? He can be found, Ollie. That’s no problem.”

  “Damn, damn, damn old biddy!” I raged.

  “Maybe you were lucky,” Bud said.

  “What?”

  “Look there.”

  I saw the small hedge, then, in the light. Saw how the low shrubs had been cut and mutilated. I remembered the slashing of Kent Shaw’s hand. I said, “What do you mean?”

  “He had a knife, I’m guessing, aren’t you?” Bud said. “And a darned sharp one, at that.”

  The night was very cold. I hadn’t noticed the cold so much before. Bud put his arm around me and I was grateful for the warmth and the shelter of it. We began to walk back toward the shops. It looked a long dark chilly way. No one was abroad. The dwelling houses were smug and tight, with blinds drawn. The old biddy who had swung that light into my face was not to be seen ahead of us. No doubt she was safe from the hazards of the night behind the blinds in one of the houses. Neither was Kent Shaw to be seen behind us, or anywhere.

  Bud said, “I must get on the phone. You’d better be someplace warm.”

  “Kent saw my face,” I said through chattering teeth, “and ran away. Do you think he knows I knew he was there?”

  “No telling.”

  “Where did he go? What will he do?”

  “No telling that, either. Can we go a little faster?”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “You need to hurry. I’m holding you back.”

  “Don’t like to leave you,” he objected.

  “You’ll start a hunt for him? Try to catch him?” I stumbled along as fast as I could beside him.

  “No use to catch him. But I want him watched.”

  “Darlene didn’t come,” I panted. “Why didn’t she?”

  “Because she’s smart.”

  “He had a knife for her? That’s what you think? And she’d guessed he would?”

  Bud said, “If he is the brains and made the plot then he is the killer. I didn’t think Darlene Hite killed Ed Jones. I dunno, I never could believe that. Kent Shaw suits me a lot better.”

  “But he would have killed her? There? In front of that museum? A corpse with Cora’s nose—wouldn’t that …? I can’t understand what he meant to do.”

  “The water is near enough,” Bud said. “And a knife is not only quiet, but handy for remodeling.”

  I was so shocked and revolted I nearly fell and he had to hold me up with both arms. Footsteps rang on cement. We could see the shape of Charley Ives coming in his characteristic lope out of light and shadow ahead. “You all right?” Bud said. “Sorry, I said that pretty brutally.”

  “I’m all right. And here’s Charley. You hurry.” I thrust his arms away and tried to stand by myself.

  “Anything wrong?” asked Charley.

  “Take her other arm,” said Bud. “Get back to the police station. Hurry.”

  So they almost carried me. My feet did not seem to touch the ground. While I was being whisked along, Bud told my cousin Charley, in quick short sentences, what had happened.

  “Wah …!” said Charley. I seemed to rise a foot above the earth on the impulse of his excitement. “Kent Shaw! This is our break! Good girl, Ollie. How did you get on to him?”

  “Serendipity,” I giggled, impelled toward hysterical mirth by my ridiculous rate of progress and the aftershock of danger.

  “The whole damn scheme has practically got his signature on it,” Charley cried. “His style, eh?”

  I remember saying, tearfully (hysterically), “Why Charley, my boy, that’s pretty arty talk for you.”

  He paid no attention.

  “You can see why he’s got to get rid of Darlene,” Bud said. “Now that it’s over, he’s scared she’ll talk. And if she does, he’s in for it, for Ed Jones. Darlene must know that.”

  “She knows all right,” Charley proclaimed joyfully. “Listen to this. Judge Ellsworth meets this dame on the golf course. She wants to know where she is and he tells her. Then she says, ‘My name is Cora Steffani and somebody wants to kill me.’ Then she runs away.”

  “What!” Bud’s excitement made him stop still and I was stretched between them like a rag on a washline. “Why?” yelped Bud.

  “Why say that?” Now Charley stopped and Bud moved and I fluttered in the middle. “Because Kent Shaw has also got to get rid of Cora. Darlene is warning her. He’s a killer and those two women both know it.”

  They then plucked me up, with no more pretense that I was in any way walking, and ran up the steps to the police station.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We didn’t leave Castine until late the following morning. Darlene Hite had not been found.

  Judge Ellsworth, who was seventy-three, retired, and the real thing in a golf fanatic, used red balls because he often played so early in the northern spring that sometimes there was still snow on the ground. He played whenever he felt like it, which was nearly always. But the one inflexible thing about it was his habit of playing four holes, always alone, on his way home to his six o’clock dinner.

  He was a bit confused when we talked to him that evening, refusing to identify me as the woman he had seen. When we straightened that out, he still refused to identify Cora’s pictures. He said it was nonsense and a great nuisance and he didn’t want to hear any more about it.

  He did tell us that when the woman spoke to him he recognized the scene (since the police had already asked him whether it had happened). So he was, he said, suspicious. But all alone. And very much annoyed at becoming one of Cora’s victims. He had not pursued her when she ran away. He had marched on home to this phone and simply called the police.

  CORA WALKS AGAIN, the papers shrieked, DREAM WALKER IN MAINE
. The time discrepancy was fuel, that’s all, for heated argument. The red golf balls were “color.” But the sentence the woman in Maine had said, that the woman in New York had not reported (Somebody wants to kill me), that was sensation! The story rolled … nothing could stop its momentum now.

  But we, of course, pondered these details.

  Kent Shaw. Who, we said to each other, had turned up in the very beginning and seen to it that the very first incident in the series had been carefully recorded before witnesses for future reference?

  Who had somewhat unnaturally withdrawn and taken care not to be seen with Cora anymore?

  Who had written her a cryptic note from Los Angeles, which I tried frantically to quote? Who had been in Los Angeles at the time of Ed Jones’ murder? Who had the chance to signal, on TV?

  Who had told Cora that she could go abroad in ten days’ time, ten days ago?

  Who could have known both women? Who had the fantastical imagination, the genius, the half-mad brain for the job? Kent Shaw. Kent Shaw. He answered all of this.

  And who, finally, had turned up in Castine—with a knife? Oh, we were convinced, and afraid to be convinced. We had no proof of any kind whatsoever.

  The three of us, exhausted, were sitting in the air being carried back. “Why did he want to meet Darlene in Maine?” I asked.

  “Thought it was safer. Couldn’t guess we’d get there that fast. Safer than a meeting in New York would be.” Charley was ready with suggestions.

  “Why did he make it so long after the golf course bit?”

  “Wasn’t so long after five o’clock.”