by Max Ehrlich
“What’s your name, mister?”
“Peter. Peter Proud,”
“What’s your interest in all this?”
“I—I’m just interested.”
“You haven’t answered my question, Proud,”
“Look, sergeant, all I wanted was some information …”
“Just how did this homicide happen? Can you give us any details?”
“Well, the man was swimming in the moonlight. The woman came up in a boat. Her name was Marcia. She hit the man over the head with her paddle two or three times. He sank …”
“How do you know all this happened?”
“Well, I dreamed it. I just dreamed about it.”
“I see. You saw it all in a dream.”
“Look, sergeant, I’m sorry I bothered you. Forget it …”
“Hold it, mister. Not so fast. Maybe you’d better tell your story to the lieutenant …”
He squirmed as he let his imagination run on.
“I saw it all in a dream, lieutenant. It’s true, it really happened. How do I know? Well, I was the man who was murdered. In my previous life, that is …”
Say that again, Proud. And see how crazy it sounds.
They might do any number of things—simply throw him out, or hold him for observation. They might, out of curiosity, even take the trouble to go back into their files. Suppose they found no record of any homicide at Lake Nipmuck in the forties. That would prove that Marcia had gotten away with it, of course. But the police might be interested enough in what he had to say, no matter how wild it was, to start some kind of investigation—of him. Who had really told him about this? Where had he gotten his information? What was his real interest?
It was late morning, and the sidewalks were crowded with shoppers. Through his car window he stared at the people passing by. He had developed the habit now of peering at faces, trying to match them with the faces he had seen in his hallucinations. Particularly the faces of women in their late fifties.
He headed for the lake. He had originally intended only to visit it, to see how it compared with what he had seen in his hallucination. Now he realized that his search might very well end there. At Nipmuck, it was possible he might find out who he was. If he had any kind of luck.
He turned the car into the Miles Morgan Parkway and then cruised at a steady sixty.
The excitement grew in him. The more he thought of it, the surer he was that his answer waited for him at the lake.
It was a beautiful, clear spring day. To the west he could see the eroded remains of what were once the lofty Berkshires, to the east the ridges of the central Massachusetts hills. Here, in the valley between, there were small farms, the land just being plowed for planting, and tobacco fields. Much of the land was strewn with rocks. Vaguely he remembered from some long-forgotten course in geology that this region had gone through a great glacial period. Enormous ice sheets had ground their way toward the sea, Like giant battering rams, they had pushed tons of rubble and stone before them, strewing the rocky waste all over the region. In places, he saw these deposits piled in rounded drumlins or left in long ridges of gravel. He saw two or three abandoned quarries filled with water.
Again, he had the same eerie feeling I have been here before.
He wondered whether, as X, he had been born and brought up in this Riverside area. It was entirely possible. In the dream, he pictured X as about his own age when he died—twenty-seven. If that were so, and he had died sometime in the forties, as the dream indicated, then he must have been born sometime between 1910 and 1920. Maybe, as a small boy, he had clambered over these rounded hills of trap rock or run along the ridges of gravel. He might have gone skinny-dipping in the cold, clear spring water that filled the quarries, and dived from their tilted rocks, taking care not to break his neck on some rocky protuberance concealed by silt or weeds. Here he might have known the feel of rounded pebbles on bare feet as he waded brook or stream, and heard the singing of water as it rushed down the granite crevasses in the floods of the New England spring, and perhaps he had snagged many a fishing hook on the stony bottoms.
The road sign caught him dreaming. He was almost upon it when he saw the direction: EXIT 16. LAKE NIPMUCK. He put on his brakes hard. The tires screamed on the pavement. Someone blew a horn at him angrily from behind.
In a few minutes he was at the lake. He drove slowly along the narrow, two-lane blacktop as it twisted and turned, following the contour of the shore. He saw the patch of smooth-faced stone on the mountain, exactly as he had seen it in the Lake Dream. The Holiday Inn was standing behind the same grove of pines, built on the site of the Puritan.
But he could not find the cottage. In the Lake Dream he had seen it all so clearly: the outdoor fireplace, the picnic table, the graveled walk lined with whitewashed stones leading down to the dock. And, of course, the dock itself. He remembered the place with woods on each side and a sprinkling of other cottages around the lake. He had been sure he could go directly to it.
But now he was totally confused. The lakefront was jammed with cottages, one next to the other, with very little land between them. In the last thirty-five years or more, the building boom had come here. In some places, there were two or three cottages between the lakeshore itself and the road. Almost all of them had the same kind of dock he had seen in the dream. To his eyes, they all looked vaguely the same, as though the same developer had thrown them all up at once. They were homey folksy places, with small signs saying: “The Wilsons Live Here” or “George and May” or “Fred and Alice” or “Charlie and Joan.” Now, in April, they were all closed. They were all forlorn, looking a little shabby, wearied by the winter.
He drove around slowly. None of them looked the least familiar. Vaguely, he knew it was directly opposite the hotel, somewhere on the south shore. But you could stand at a hundred places on the south shore and be opposite any point on the opposite side. Moreover, he had never seen the part of the cottage he had dreamed about that faced the road, and he couldn’t go tramping around every cottage on the south shore. And in three decades or more the cottage could have gotten a new dock, new walk, new outdoor furniture. The old place could even have been torn down, and a new one put up in the same spot. Despite the fact that some refurbishing seemed to be needed, many of these cottages seemed fairly new, as though they’d been put up in the last five or ten years.
It had all seemed so simple. He had planned to find the cottage, then find out who the owners were. They could tell him who had owned it back in the forties, or tell him where he could find out. Then he would know his own name. But there was no chance of that now.
He drove slowly along the blacktop until he came to a public beach. There was an open area here where he could see the entire lake. He parked the car, got out, and walked to one of the picnic tables on the grassy area just behind the sand itself. He sat on the table and stared out across the lake.
It seemed so quiet here, so empty, so desolate. In a couple of months, Nipmuck would come alive. This beach would be crowded with bathers, laughing and chattering, pretty girls toasting themselves in the sun, children running round, screaming and splashing in the water. The surface of the lake would be covered with small boats, their motors desecrating the silence. And beyond them, on the other shore and the mountain beyond, the naked trees he saw now would be clothed in rich summer green.
But this was April and it was quiet, and there was still a chill in the air. An errant breeze started and stopped at intervals, rippling the surface of the lake.
He fixed his eye on a point toward the middle of the lake. There, he thought, is where I died.
He wondered what had happened after that. Had they found him? Had they dragged the lake for him? Or had his body floated to the surface? Had Marcia reported him dead? Or missing? Maybe he’d been caught in the weeds down there. Maybe he was still down there on the bottom, rotted to the bone, eaten by the fishes.
He continued to stare at the point in the lake where he est
imated he had gone down. Then the sun ducked behind a cloud. Suddenly he couldn’t stay there any longer. He got up and walked slowly back to the car.
He stopped for gas at the juncture of the lake blacktop and the road linking the lake to the parkway itself.
The sign said: Pop Johnson’s Place. It was a combination gas station and country store. The owner came out of the store. He was about sixty-five, and his walk was slow and deliberate. He wore a stained baseball cap and a heavy lumberjack shirt of plaid design.
“Afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.”
“Fill ’er up?”
“Please.”
The proprietor set the pump, inserted the gas line, and then came around to clean the windshield. As the man sprayed the glass with a spray can, Peter studied the wrinkled, wind-beaten face. Maybe he would know.
He’d have to give the man some kind of cock-and-bull story, of course. He got out of the car, went to the soft drink dispenser in front of the store, and dropped the required coins into the slot. A bottle of Coke rattled down. He pinched off the cap and drank while he figured out his approach. The man looked simple enough. There was no reason why he shouldn’t buy it. He walked toward the proprietor.
“Are you ‘Pop’?”
“That’s right.”
“Been here at Nipmuck long?”
“All my life. Born near here.”
“I wonder if you could give me a little information.”
“I’ll try.”
“Well, you see, I’m a writer. I write true mystery stories. Right now I’m doing a series of articles on, well, famous murders of the past here in New England. For one of the Boston papers.”
The old man stared at him.
“What do you know. Murders, eh? My wife’s crazy about that kind of stuff. Watches all those programs on television. Personally, I don’t care for ’em much.”
“Someone told me that there’d been a famous murder here at Nipmuck. Happened a long time ago. Way back in the forties, I think. Got a lot of publicity, they tell me. But this someone who told me about it couldn’t recall the name. I thought maybe you’d know …”
The proprietor thought for a moment, pursing his mouth.
“Back in the forties.” Then his watery eyes lit up. “Yep. Now I remember. That must have been the Grady killing.”
“Grady?”
“Man named Charles Grady. Had a cottage here at Nipmuck.”
“Yes?”
“Found his body floating in the lake. It was something terrible.”
Peter held his breath. He heard himself say, “What happened?”
“Nobody knows. They never found who done it. But Grady’s throat was cut, and he’d been hacked in about ten places with a knife. Some maniac, they say. No reason for it at all. Everybody liked Charlie. Anyway, scared the devil out of people around here for weeks. Bolted their doors, wouldn’t go out nights. They were afraid the maniac would come back and try it again. But he never did. It was in all the papers. I forget the year exactly, but you could look it up.”
“Thanks. I will. And that was the only homicide?”
“Yep. Can’t think of any other. If there was, I’d know.”
Peter swallowed his disappointment.
“I suppose there’ve been plenty of accidents around here.”
The old man peered at him. “Accidents?”
“You know. People drowning.”
“Oh. Yep. Get a lot of drownings over the years. The thing is, there are cold springs out in the lake. People get cramps. Then, someone’s always tipping over a boat or canoe and going down and getting caught in the weeds. There are some pretty thick weeds on the bottom there. Things like that. But that isn’t exactly what you’re looking for …”
“No.”
The old man glanced at the register on the gas pump. “That’ll be $4.85, mister.”
He paid the man, thanked him again, and drove away. And he thought, that’s that.
Good, sweet, beautiful Marcia. She had gotten away with it after all.
As he started his drive back to Riverside it began to rain. In a few minutes it was coming down in sheets.
He had one more card he could draw. This was Saturday. He had to be back in Los Angeles on Monday. The final quarter would begin soon, and he would be heavily involved in all the administrative detail before actual classes resumed. But before he flew home the next day, he had to try this one last possibility. Rain or no rain, he had to check out the Tree Dream. He didn’t give it much of a chance, but he had to try.
He came off the parkway at an upper exit to Riverside itself. The exit spilled out onto a busy four-lane highway, Again, as he drove, he had the same eerie feeling: I have been on this street before. Only then I was driving a Packard Clipper, not a rented Pontiac.
The rain continued coming down in torrents. He looked at his watch: 2:30. He realized he was hungry. He turned into a big shopping center, parked the car, and ran through the rain into a big super drugstore with a lunch counter. He ordered a hamburger from a waitress whose badge said her name was Joan.
“Terrible day.”
“You can say that again.”
“Joan, wonder if you could help me with something. I’m trying to find a certain park here in Riverside.”
“Which park?”
“I don’t know the name.”
“Stranger here, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we’ve got three parks in town. If you don’t know the name, you’ve got a problem.” She glanced at his coffee cup. “Another cup, while you’re waiting?”
“Thanks. As I said, I don’t know the name of this park, but I have an idea it’s a pretty big place. And there’s a mausoleum somewhere on it.”
“A what?”
“A burial tomb. This one’s got a couple of figures on it. You know, statues. A man and a woman. The man has his arm around the woman …”
“Oh, yeah. You’re talking about the Bannister tomb. Frederick Bannister. He gave half the park to the city. Woodland Park. That’s him and his wife standing on top. They’re buried there.”
“Woodland Park.”
“Right.”
She stared at him. “If you knew about the Bannister tomb and all, you must have been there. How come you didn’t know the name of the park?”
“I used to live here when I was a little kid. I remember the tomb, but I forgot the name of the park.”
“Oh.”
“How do I get there?”
“You’re not too far away now. Go straight down Central about half a mile, turn right on Oak. You’ll run right into it.” She turned, picked up his hamburger on the serving counter, and then moved a tray toward him. “Mustard and relish.”
“Thanks.”
“This is a pretty lousy day to be walking in the park,” she said. “If that’s your idea, you’d better wait till tomorrow.”
“I will.”
He bolted down his hamburger. As he left he noticed that the store sold cheap umbrellas, and he bought one. Walking toward his car, he found that it helped, but not much. A hard wind had come up, blowing the rain almost horizontally. He was wet by the time he reached the car.
At Woodland Park he entered the main gate. Rain spattered on the tiny puddles already forming on the clay tennis courts located on each side of the entry road. The downpour was so hard that it made visibility almost impossible. For a moment, he considered canceling the whole idea and going back to the hotel. Maybe he could come out here early the next morning, then catch his plane.
But he decided against it. He was here, and the time was now. He knew if he went back to the hotel now, he would be unable to sleep. It was better to get it over with.
The trees whipped in the wind. His tires splashed through puddles on the road. He passed a wading pool. Beyond this was a series of buildings which he took to be a zoo.
A sign with an arrow pointing to the right said: Bannister Tomb.
He passed a seri
es of baseball diamonds and a bowling green. The citizens of Riverside, he thought, were well provided with recreational facilities. He drove down a road lined with elms and bordered with lily ponds. Then he saw the tomb.
It was perhaps two hundred yards from the road. It stood on a grassy hill, a square, massive structure. The two statues, man and woman, looked sad in the rain. Bits of the statues had already eroded with years of weather. The stone was chipped and worn in places and covered with the white stains of bird droppings. Both figures were leaning forward, as though leaning into the wind. The woman’s long hair was blowing backward. The stone face of the man was half turned toward his wife. In the sense that a face made of stone could show love, the face of Frederick Bannister did.
And inside the thick walls of the tomb they lay in caskets, dead. At least, so everybody thought. But he, Peter Proud, knew better.
Maybe they had already been reincarnated into some future life. He wondered whether they would meet again, as strangers. And whether they would be attracted to each other again, as they had been in this life.
From his memory he focused the Tree Dream. He was about thirteen or fourteen. There was a girl with him about the same age. He had a knife and was cutting some initials into the bark of the tree. The bark was hard, and he worked hard, cutting the initials deep. But he could not see what they were.
The tree was about a hundred yards from the mausoleum. He rolled down the car window, stared out for better visibility, and was suddenly brought up short. In his dream he had seen only one tree. But now he saw a dozen scattered about, all about a hundred yards from the tomb. They were all big trees, old, gnarled. Their high branches, leafless, rattled in the rain. The bark on their trunks glistened with the sheen of it.
The trick was to find the right tree. It had to be one of them, but which one? He tried hard to think of the angle from which he had seen the mausoleum in the dream. But nothing registered. He simply did not know.
Worse, thinking of it now, he saw the odds pyramid against him. He, or X, had been only a boy when he had carved those initials. In that case, the incident would have taken place almost fifty years before. The chances were that the bark had grown completely over the initials, wiping them out completely. Still, there was no way of knowing, at least not from here. It depended on how deep they had been cut.