The Dream Walker

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Darlene Hite frowned faintly and looked up at Bud Gray. Gray looked at Charley Ives. Charley turned his head, ever so slightly. Before he could turn too obviously to me, I knew I was for it. I said, deep in my throat, “Too much ham in me, after all.”

  They all looked at me. Ned Dancer’s neck stretched.

  “Most famous woman in America,” I began to laugh. I arched my back, which I hoped would make the blood flow from my little wound. I put my fingers on the bandage and drew them away and looked at them, as if there were blood. “Changed my mind,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll take this secret to the grave.” I looked insolent. I felt power. (Oh, there is nothing like a Bad Girl role. It’s so comparatively simple and easy.)

  The doctor looked startled and moved and I said sharply, “No, Doctor. If I want to sing a swan song, I shall do it. This is a fine audience, as good as I’d choose.”

  (Charley had to help me. I had to make him help me.) I glanced at Cora only briefly. “Old friend, dear friend,” I said and laughed. “You’ll only be the second most famous woman in America tomorrow morning.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Charley, almost too hopefully.

  “So many men in the world,” I said to him, “why did I want only you?” I sultried my eyes. (Oh, it’s corny. It’s easy.) And Charley was staring at me. “You should know, gentlemen,” said I, “for future reference, that a woman who wants a certain man very much, and cannot get him, really has to protect herself.” I looked only at Charley.

  Did Cora wince?

  “It’s a weird triangle,” said I, “that’s only two parallel lines. I thought you were fond of your wife.” I bit that word out, looking at Charley, for this was necessary. And he did what I wanted. He locked his gaze with mine. “Charley, my boy,” said I and it wasn’t teasing, “can you imagine? Cora thought you were fond of me? But Charley Ives isn’t fond of any woman, is he? And long ago the old man,” I said viciously, “didn’t hold with cousins marrying.”

  I could feel Cora’s stare.

  “Women are dangerous,” I said. “Aren’t we, Cora?” I didn’t turn my head.

  “What are you raving about?” she exploded. I did not look at her.

  Neither did Charley. He kept taut the line of attention between us two.

  “It’s been amusing,” I said. “You thought she was using me, didn’t you, Charley? When I’ve used Kent Shaw. I’ve used Ray Pankerman. I’ve used my old friend Cora. I’m the one with the money,” I said contemptuously.

  People were shocked and silent. I smiled in insolent power. “Don’t you believe it? Why, how funny! How very amusing! How is it that nobody wonders why Kent Shaw went after me with his knife? Little man, loved his little part, he did. Couldn’t even trust me not to tell.” My eyes clung to Charley’s eyes. I tried to pierce him with a look of meanness and power. His face was slowly turning red and horrified. “But now I tell because I choose,” I said haughtily. “Let it smash. I’d like to have killed your ex-wife, Charley, my boy. I could do without her. Such a witty way to do it, too. With a humbug. Oh, if I had and if Kent hadn’t been quite so quick.… But I don’t mind,” said I. “It would have been very dull.”

  I threw back my head and strangled my voice with tension and ugliness. “Two places at once! Wasn’t it fun? And you’re not very happy. You hate her, now. And me, too? Then so much for True Love, Charley, my boy.” I leaned forward. “Still, now that you know what I did, in my Ivory Tower, that I pulled all the strings, will you call me Teacher for this lesson?”

  And Charley said, in a frightened voice, “Cousin Ollie!”

  So I let it all go. I let my heart break. I said, “Charley, I’ve been … hurt … so long. You didn’t care. Did you? Charley?” I fell back.

  Charley flew to me, knelt to me. I put my hand, my fingers spread, on the back of his head, in his hair.

  Cora had her legs curled under her and was on her knees. “That’s just not so,” she gasped childishly. “That’s not so.” She beat her fists and howled for attention. “It wasn’t her money. She hasn’t got that kind of money. I can prove it was Pankerman’s. Kent and I watched him put it in the safe. I think she’s going crazy. Make her tell you,” screamed Cora Steffani, “that she’s just a liar!”

  “Where is this safe?” said Bud Gray quickly, softly.

  She told them where it was. She began to tell them everything.

  “Get me out of here,” I said in Charley’s ear. So he signaled and the doctor wheeled me out.

  In the corridor I got stiffly out of the chair. “You said I can go home? This isn’t so bad I have to stay here?”

  “No, no, go home if you want to.” The doctor was looking at me with a blank expression.

  Ned Dancer came out. I was standing, calm and collected. He stopped in his tracks and said sourly, “Quite an act.”

  “Only way I could think of,” I told him. “She was going to cause too much trouble. The one thing she couldn’t stand was to think I’d fooled her.”

  “Should auld acquaintance be forgot,” said Ned, surprising me with such quick understanding.

  Dr. Harper said with a very phony laugh, “You pretty near fooled me, I can tell you.”

  Charley Ives came flying out of Cora’s room. He shot blue lightning at Ned, who said quickly, “I won’t use it. Couldn’t hope to.” Then, like a male, “Dames, huh?”

  “Takes a dame to fight a dame,” said Charley heartily. “Cora’s tied in Pankerman all right. And she says Kent Shaw gave her the title of that book in March. In a ladies’ room, for gosh sakes. So we’ve got it!”

  “That’s splendid,” said I stiffly.

  He took me by the shoulders. “Wow!” He was grinning. (I didn’t think he was fooled, somehow.)

  “It was a real juicy part, and very melo,” I said in my teacher’s voice, “but, you see, it was sound.”

  “Sound?” Now Charley sounded strange.

  “The feeling. I told you. It was hers. Her own true feeling. The meanest kind of jealousy. So she was afraid what I said might be so, because she recognized the feeling. That’s about the only thing can make-believe. See Dramatics 2, Miss Hudson, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.”

  Charley looked queer. He let me go.

  “But you mustn’t worry,” I said primly. “It wasn’t all because she felt things about you. Or about me. She had several other motives mixed in.”

  “I … daresay,” he drawled. “I’ll try to be tough about it.”

  I heard myself snap, “Now, if you think you can manage, I’d like to go home.”

  He said wryly, “Teacher, we can always call you.…”

  Ned Dancer was gone.

  “Oh, Charley,” I said, “I suppose you thought I was off my rocker. But you can’t act and so I had to. I’m glad if it worked. I hope you understand. I bet you don’t.”

  (I guess he understood.)

  “Rest your imagination,” Charley said kindly and kissed me in a fond cousinly way and sent me home.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The whole thing burst with one last bang. How quickly it died away! What’s duller than a burst balloon? People, on the whole, got that one word. Hoax. They then said, if they could, “I told you so.” And if they couldn’t, they said, and still say, darkly, “There’s a lot more we haven’t been told.”

  Kent Shaw went to a mental hospital. Ray Pankerman collapsed. Wept useless dollar signs. As much money as they found in that safe can’t travel without leaving traces. He even asked for Marcus’ mercy in confessing about the blue envelope. But the law had him.

  The law would have to examine the murder of Ed Jones. Was Cora an accessory? Was Darlene? Then, it would all roll out under the rules and the evidence be presented exhaustively. Millions would be too bored to read every question and answer, or to reason and conclude from these, or take the pains. Yet there, in the questions and answers, would be every careful detail, the very best we could do.

  Marcus’ household was happier
and Marcus on the phone was just the same. Vindicated as far as was humanly possible. But he has a scar.

  My wound healed nicely. It wasn’t much. I stayed at home and talked as freely as I could to all newsmen, all callers. Miss Reynolds had asked me back, since I now began to rank as a clever spy on the right side. The girls came by and made a fuss of me. Oh, I’d go back. When summer was over.

  Meantime, I had no work. I felt empty. All my friends came to see me, but no Cora Steffani, and I missed her like an aching tooth. The pain of that was still in me, the echoes of all the years of tension between us, an occupation lost in a victory that left me empty. I was let down. I felt like a fool, besides. I was really moping. I didn’t go to Washington.

  A week had gone by. It was late, the night he came.

  “Didn’t want to run into a mob here,” he told me. “Have I timed it right?”

  “Everybody’s gone home, Charley, my boy,” said I brightly. “I was about to go to bed, myself. Tell me, how is Marcus?”

  “Marcus is fine. Tough, you know.” Charley sat down. My walls bulged, as ever they did when he came in. “And you?” asked he.

  “Nothing left but an interesting little scar,” I said and hurried on, wishing I hadn’t put it quite that way. “I’m doing business at the old stand. Back to school in the fall. All is forgiven.”

  “Splendid,” he drawled.

  “Where is Darlene Hite?” I asked quickly. “Vanished again? I don’t read about her.”

  “Bud doesn’t want her read about. She’s in Washington, under his wing. He’s fighting to save her, says she’s too valuable to be sacrificed, cites theories of modern penology, wants her free and working for him. I’ll bet he’s going to win. Besides being smart, she’s quite a fine girl, or can be.”

  “Bud always was entranced by Darlene Hite,” said I, amused. “I think he fell in love with her modus operandi.”

  Charley threw back his head and roared.

  “It wasn’t that funny,” I said feebly. I was uncomfortable. I knew, whatever I did, I could put on no act for myself anymore. “Charley, my boy,” I said, “if you will excuse me and come again another day? Us teachers retire pretty early.”

  “Stop that!” said Charley Ives violently.

  “What?”

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll let you pull that Teacher stuff, ever again. You’ve intimidated me long enough.”

  “I …?”

  “Sit still, and I mean still.” (I sat still.) “I am going to tell you some things Marcus said. I—seems, I repeated your remark about you and Cora being measuring sticks. Marcus says that’s so. He says people do that for each other. He says”—Charley looked at me nervously.

  “You and I had a fight,” he stated, starting all over again.

  “We did, indeed. We still fight. We may, any minute,” I said primly.

  “Exactly,” pounced Charley. “Now, Marcus says you were once a moonstruck little girl, thin-skinned, sensitive, timid.”

  “I—I am.”

  “Marcus says you were. But now, he says, you have courage, you have bite and force, and a sense of duty as big as you are, because what I said, on my side of that fight, has rankled all this time.”

  “Oh, I don’t …” I stammered. “I can’t … I’m certainly not all that.”

  “As for me,” said Charley, swelling up, “I was pretty crude. A narrow violent type, hell-bent, slam-bang, and on my way to being the kind who shoots first and asks questions, if any, afterward. But now, he says, I can see grays, and I’ve become sensitive and I may even grow up, someday. Because I’ve brooded many hours on what you said. So, Marcus says, people sometimes are each other’s measuring sticks,” Charley turned his eyes, “in envy and antagonism, or else in love.”

  I could not breathe. I sat still.

  “So I think,” Charley said awkwardly, “you really are my Teacher.”

  “Then,” said I, and our eyes locked, “you are mine.”

  “That’s so,” said he quietly.

  I trembled.

  “Am I a mouse?” said Charley Ives to the wall, “or a cat to look at the queen? To hang around Cora’s apartment because my cousin Ollie loyally wouldn’t have anything to do with me, but she did come there. And then get struck with the notion that you and Bud Gray.…”

  “Charley, my.…”

  “STOP THAT!”

  “Charles,” I said. But, oh, I was warm and my blood was flowing and the world was alive and I was in the fray. “Are you trying to figure out whether we are in love with each other?”

  “I am,” he said. “And, oh, my not-so-very-much-a-cousin Ollie, my apostle of gentle kindness and wildest melodrama, my tigercat with a touchy conscience, my bold, ridiculous, adorable, terrifying little Teacher,” his fingers touched my chin, “wasn’t it true, Love?”

  I told him how true it was, without a word.

  The End.

  Ah, finished, and with a clinch, too! What a mess I’ve made of it! Haven’t put in that Pankerman’s in jail, that Cora got off with a short sentence and is now abroad and God knows how she lives. That Kent Shaw is still in his limbo. That Darlene Hite has “vanished” although I know Bud Gray knows where she is and what she is doing. Oh, well, all this must go in somewhere.

  But I won’t do it. Haven’t time. I’ll look at Portugal on the ceiling and it won’t be long. I can tell.

  Be born, child. I am not afraid. Dr. Harper’s an old fussbudget and Charley is a thousand times worse. Putting me here in the hospital weeks, early! As if I, only thirty-five years old, can’t quite safely bear this child! Never did it before, but Dr. Barron, when he married us, wished us a dozen.

  Boy? Call him Charley? For my husband, my lover, my darling, my foe.…

  Secretary. You, girl. Delete this. Stop where I said “The End.” Mind, now!

  OLIVIA HUDSON IVES

  Nurse?

  EDITOR TO PUBLISHER:

  How about the beginning and ending, Charley?

  G.D.

  PUBLISHER TO EDITOR:

  Leave it the way it is, George. I’ve got a daughter who’ll eat it up when she gets to the romantic age. I’m bound she’ll have it. Never mind what her Mama says. I’ll fight for this.

  C.I.

  About the Author

  Edgar Award–winning Charlotte Armstrong (1905–1969) was one of the finest American authors of classic mystery and suspense. The daughter of an inventor, Armstrong was born in Vulcan, Michigan, and attended Barnard College, in New York City. After college she worked at the New York Times and the magazine Breath of the Avenue, before marrying and turning to literature in 1928. For a decade, she wrote plays and poetry, with work produced on Broadway and published in the New Yorker. In the early 1940s, she began writing suspense.

  Success came quickly. Her first novel, Lay On, MacDuff! (1942) was well received, spawning a three-book series. Over the next two decades, she wrote more than two dozen novels, winning critical acclaim and a dedicated fan base. The Unsuspected (1945) and Mischief (1950) were both made into films, and A Dram of Poison (1956) won the Edgar Award for best novel. She died in California in 1969.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1955 by Jack and Charlotte Lewi Family Trust

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4270-3

  This 2016 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

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/>   CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG

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