Come Back Dead

by Terence Faherty

“What about the night Whitehead disappeared? What did you do after you left the dining room?”

  “I went up to check on Marvella.”

  “She didn’t let you in, remember? What else did you do?”

  “Nothing. I don’t remember doing anything.” She drew the wrist I was holding close to her chest. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Did you go back to your room? Did you come back downstairs? Did you go out onto the terrace?”

  She pulled her arm away from me with a force that caught me off guard. I lost my grip on her wrist, and she was gone, her running footsteps disappearing toward the foyer.

  The lightning let me down then. I collided with the coffee table and then with a chair as I tried to follow her. By the time I reached the foyer, I could hear nothing but the steady drumming of the rain on the flags outside.

  Then a door slammed somewhere over my head. I took the stairs two at a time, the ascent feeling like a rocket ride to my dizzy head. The door to Linda’s room was closed but not locked. I pushed the door open and took its place in the doorway.

  With no more lightning to dazzle them, my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. I took in the simple room–bed, bureau, nightstand–without spotting Linda. I did notice something I’d overlooked when I’d checked the room earlier in the day: a framed photo on the nightstand. It was another portrait of Traynor. I felt drawn to it for some reason. Instead of going off to search another room, I crossed to the side of the bed. Just as I picked up the heavy, metal frame, I heard a sound from the corner to my right.

  I turned in time to see Linda step through the connecting door that led to her dead husband’s room. She was pointing a gun at my chest. It looked like a toy gun, even in her small hand: the missing Liberator.

  “Linda,” I said.

  “Don’t die with that whore’s name on your lips,” she said, her voice flat and strange.

  It was all I could do to keep from saying her name again. Instead I said something even more likely to get me shot. “You kept your appointment with Shepard.”

  “I kept it. Not her. I took him by surprise.”

  “You murdered him.”

  “Punished him. For laying hands on my wife.”

  I stepped backward into the nightstand. “Mark Traynor,” I said.

  “You all thought I was dead.”

  I hadn’t in the end, for all the good it did me now. Linda was only a foot or two away from me–too close for me to count on her missing with the Liberator but close enough for me to knock the gun away with the photo I held. If I could find the strength to swing it.

  “You all thought it was safe to move in,” Linda said. “It never will be safe.” She raised the gun a careful inch.

  Before I could make my play, a voice behind her said, “Linda. Wait. It’s Mark. I’m here now. I’m back.”

  The speaker was standing in the hall doorway, where he was nothing more than a shape in the darkness. Linda backed away from me but kept the gun pointed my way.

  “It’s okay, Linda,” the shadow said. “It’s okay. You can put the gun down. I’m back for good now, honey. I’m sorry I was away so long.”

  “It’s too late,” Linda said in the voice I knew. “Too damn late.”

  The Liberator swung from me to the doorway. The figure there had time to say one more word before the gun roared out. He said, “Linda.”

  I’d drawn back the heavy frame when Linda turned. I threw it as the muzzle flash lit the room. It caught Linda on the back of her head and dropped her.

  I stooped over her long enough to check her pulse and collect her gun. Then I went out into the hallway.

  I was expecting to find an escapee from the county hospital named Clark. The man lying flat on his back on the plush carpeting was Gilbert Traynor. He had a hole in his shoulder. It looked like a clean wound, the kind a soldier in combat would pay serious money for. A million dollars had been the going price in 1944.

  Gilbert was thinking of the war himself. “Now what kind of soldier do you think I would have made?” he asked, his words as shaky as my hands.

  The kind of soldier who got himself killed the first day, I thought. I said, “A good one.”

  “Poor Linda,” Gilbert said. “Is she okay?”

  I pressed my handkerchief against his shoulder. “I don’t think she’s badly hurt, if that’s what you mean.”

  “She killed Hank Shepard. John Whitehead, too. Whitehead saw her go into the barn on Sunday night. He heard the shot. That’s what he blackmailed me with. I had to go along. I couldn’t hand Linda over. I knew it wasn’t her fault.”

  “Save it,” I said. “I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “I have to tell you first. It was Mark. He’s taken hold of her.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Gilbert didn’t seem to hear me. “I don’t understand it,” he said, “but it’s true. Mark’s the real killer. He clubbed Whitehead on the terrace. Mother saw the whole thing from her bedroom. Linda had gone out for air. Whitehead followed her and confronted her. He must have told her that he’d go to the police if she didn’t give back Drury’s money. He didn’t know what he was dealing with.

  “Linda struck him with a statue and pushed him into the river. Mother’s been terrified ever since. She said that Linda tried to get into her room last night after you’d gone, that she claimed to be Mark come back to kill her.”

  Gilbert’s eyes were lolling in his head. I started to get up, but he grabbed my sleeve.

  “It’s my fault, too. Mine and Mark’s. I was the one who did this to her. I tried to make it right. I tried to watch her as night came on. I didn’t want it to happen again.”

  He’d gone chalky, and his teeth were chattering. His time was running out, but I still wasted some of it asking a question: “Who is Clark?”

  Gilbert’s hand dropped away from my sleeve. “Clark?”

  “He’s not some soldier you took in because he happened to answer your ad for a caretaker.”

  “No,” Gilbert said. “He’s a soldier from my brother’s squad. He was wounded the day Mark died. I traced him so I could hear about that. When I saw how things were for Clark, I offered him a job.”

  “He’s not your brother?”

  “My brother? No. My brother’s dead. At least he was.”

  45

  I needn’t have bothered questioning Gilbert about Clark’s identity. Sheriff Gustin had already solved that mystery. He’d contacted the veteran’s hospital in Indianapolis where Gilbert had found Clark after the war. The Traynor caretaker was Sergeant Walter Clark of Madison, Indiana, the man who had kept Lieutenant Mark Traynor’s squad in line.

  That discovery did nothing to increase the warmth of Gustin’s greeting when he and his advisors arrived at Traynor House in the wake of the ambulance. Nor did Paddy’s “Third time’s a charm,” which he pronounced on the mansion steps as the still-unconscious Linda was carried down them. Even the ambulance driver and his assistant were looking at me critically. I should pull my next victims out now and save them a round trip, they seemed to be saying.

  Gustin backed me one last time. He sent the ambulance off under Zimmerman’s supervision and then marched up to Marvella Traynor’s suite. The old woman and Greta had been hiding there throughout my cat-and-mouse with Linda.

  Marvella was close to needing her precious hospital herself by the time we found her. She broke down immediately, confirming everything Gilbert had told me about Linda’s attack on Whitehead and her attempt to force her way into Marvella’s room.

  We left Mrs. Traynor in the care of her private physician and her faithful maid. On the front porch of the mansion, Gustin lit a cigarette and offered me his pack. I turned it down.

  “Why did Clark kidnap Nast?” the sheriff asked. “Why did he get himself involved?”

  “For the very reas
on we guessed,” Paddy said, “to keep you off the track of the real murderer. We thought he was acting to protect himself, but it was really out of loyalty to his old lieutenant and the lieutenant’s family.”

  Or because, I thought, he was in love with his old lieutenant’s wife. If so, Clark would never tell us, any more than he’d ever tell us what he’d seen at the farm on Sunday night. He’d let a hint of what he’d witnessed slip just before he jumped me. He said then that if I knew the truth of what had happened, I’d still be running.

  “How could Mark Traynor have taken hold of his widow like that?” Gustin asked.

  Paddy deferred on that question, but not to me. “God knows,” he said.

  In the end, it was Carson Drury, and not God, who did the explaining. Drury was at the hospital when we got there, closeted with the doctors who were examining Linda. When the psychiatrist summoned from Indy arrived in the wee small hours, Drury talked his way into the consultation.

  He was welcome to kibitz, as far as I was concerned. I stayed up until Gilbert was out of surgery and out of danger. Then I caught a couple of hours’ sleep on a waiting room sofa. I’d left a wake-up call with a sympathetic nurse who had a little laugh in her voice that reminded me of Irene Dunne. She shook my shoulder at five and told me I’d better get up if I was going to meet my wife’s train.

  I heard Drury intoning as soon as I entered the hospital hallway. The sound led me to a consulting room where I found the director and Paddy and Gustin. Drury held center stage as usual, which is to say he was seated behind the room’s only desk. Paddy and Gustin sat before him like a pair of patients steeled for bad news.

  “Scotty,” Drury called to me. “I was about to brief the sheriff. I’ve just come from a talk with the psychiatrist they hustled up from the state capital, a nice young chap named Kronenburger.”

  He’d slipped back into his stock tone of glib superiority. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

  “Was this Kronenberger able to tell you why you’re so anxious to ruin yourself?” Paddy asked.

  “We didn’t discuss my case,” Drury said. “I never will discuss it with a doctor. I’m an artist, after all. My problems are the raw materials of my art. I have to work them out for myself. With the occasional aid of an astute private eye, perhaps,” he added with a nod to me, “but in the main, by myself.”

  He might have been trying to sound noble or heroic. He came off sounding lonely. I almost felt sorry for the guy. “What did the doctor say about Linda?” I asked.

  “As I was telling the sheriff, Dr. Kronenburger supports your diagnosis, Scotty, the one that sent you out to Traynor House last evening.”

  “That was no diagnosis,” I said. “That was a bad feeling.”

  Drury nodded. “I had a similar feeling when I heard about your confrontation with Linda. Rodman, my deputy guardian, told me the details. It sounded to me then like we might be dealing with multiple personalities within the same individual.”

  “I don’t believe in the dead taking over the living,” Gustin said.

  “No more do I,” Drury said, “nor in reincarnation. This is nothing like those things, though I dare say our great-grandparents might have mistaken Linda’s illness for a possession or a haunting.”

  “Just what illness are we talking about?” Paddy asked.

  “Multiple personality syndrome. I encountered a description of it in a journal of abnormal psychology during the war. It fascinated me so much, I explored the idea in a film.”

  “The Gentleman from Macao,” I said.

  Drury nodded again. “Interest in the subject goes back much further than the war years, of course–as far back as the nineteenth century and the work of Pierre Janet. It’s been a neglected area, in my opinion, but it remains legitimate.”

  The director studied the desktop before him for a moment, composing his big scene. “It may interest you gentlemen to know that Linda created imaginary friends as a child.”

  “So does my little boy,” Gustin said.

  “So did I,” Drury said. “As a creative solution to the odd lonely moment, there’s nothing wrong with it. But if an imaginative child who’s too young to have a firmly established sense of identity uses the same trick to deal with some traumatic event or unbearable situation, it may be the first step toward fragmentation.”

  Gustin was passing a hand back and forth across his bristly head. The hand stopped halfway through a pass and grabbed hold. “You’re losing me,” he said.

  “Linda’s mother died when Linda was very young,” Drury said. “Linda saw it happen. You didn’t know that, Sheriff, I’m sure. Did you, Scotty?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Her mother stepped in front of a truck. Gilbert told me about it.”

  “I heard of it from another source,” Drury said, “a little girl named Annie.”

  “Who is she?” Paddy asked.

  “Linda’s childhood friend,” I said.

  “Yes,” Drury said, “the first personality Linda created to cope with an unbearable situation. Dr. Kronenburger introduced me to Annie around three this morning. She’s doing all Linda’s talking at the moment. Annie has helped Linda before. Years ago she absorbed the loss of Linda’s mother, so Linda wouldn’t have to. That’s why Linda created her. She couldn’t deal with the pain, so she split part of herself off and delegated her pain to the fragment, to this other personality, this alter ego.”

  I found myself missing Hollywood at that moment, and the little, sordid jobs that Paddy and I often did. They were clean and simple compared with this. Gustin seemed to feel the same way about it. His stolid features were drawn like those of a man whose arm is being twisted. Drury kept talking.

  “And, if it works when you’re a child, chances are you’ll use it again as an adult when the world hurts too much. The more pain you have, the more allies you’ll summon up.” The four of us sat for a moment before Paddy spoke.

  “Are there others?” he asked. “Besides Traynor, I mean.”

  “At least one other. She hasn’t a name of her own, but I suspect that one of you has met her. She’s a personality Linda created to deal with the pressure of being the town’s most famous war widow and with the tension that arose when a still young woman tried to suppress her very natural sexual desires because of her mother-in-law’s expectations or her own loyalty to her dead husband–or both.

  “This fourth personality exists to express the sexual side of Linda. I haven’t met her yet, but I heard about her from Eric Faris. He and I briefly shared a cell yesterday afternoon after he was driven up from Indianapolis.

  “As I said, I think Mr. Elliott has met this sexually aggressive personality, too. I won’t ask him to confirm or deny it. I wouldn’t want him to violate his Hollywood operative code of honor. If you did meet her, Scotty, you’re lucky to be alive. I believe she was the personality who responded to Hank Shepard’s overtures.”

  “But Linda knew about that,” I said. “She knew she’d agreed to meet Shepard. How could she be taken over by this alter ego and still have a memory of what happened?”

  Drury shrugged. “There are varying levels of awareness and control between the primary and secondary personalities. Linda could have been aware of the influences or actions of one of her personalities and been completely oblivious to another’s. I think Kronenburger or whoever takes up the case will find that Linda knows nothing of the Mark personality but that Mark has access to her thoughts and memories. He knew all about the date with Shepard, for example. He even knew where to find that very interesting gun, because Linda had once seen it in the farmhouse. He must have collected it just before Faris brought me home, which means I narrowly missed making his acquaintance myself.”

  Gustin was pulling at his hair again. “Are you saying Mrs. Traynor whipped this Mark personality up just because Shepard propositioned her?”

  “No. I side with th
e theorists who believe that these alter egos always begin as friends, that their initial functions are always positive. They can later become destructive, even self-destructive or homicidal, but they come into being to effect some good. I believe her Mark Traynor personality has been functioning for some time, perhaps only in the background, perhaps as a response to the stress of her position at the Traynor plant.”

  “Linda told me she was in the habit of asking Mark for advice,” I said. “She made it sound like a game she played with herself.”

  “That may be how it seemed to her,” Drury said. “In actuality, her personality was fragmenting again. When Gilbert added to the stress she was already under by using me to disrupt the delicate equilibrium of his family, the shadowy Mark Traynor personality stepped to the forefront. He took control to counter the activities of Linda’s sexual personality–to counter them violently by shooting poor Hank and trying to set fire to the barn.”

  I’d forgotten about Traynor’s–Linda’s–attempt to burn the barn. I remembered her telling me about the wartime barn burnings, acts of retribution against philandering men. They’d occurred just after word had come about Mark Traynor’s death, Linda had said, during the period when she’d been in shock. I wondered now if those burnings hadn’t signaled Traynor’s rebirth as a fragment of Linda’s mind. When she’d set fire to the Riverbend barn, had she been reenacting a memory of those old crimes?

  I didn’t ask the question aloud. Gustin was loaded past the breaking point already. His head was bowed, and his big frame was sagging forward in his chair.

  46

  I’d heard that Drury had had his cast cut off, but it still surprised me when he stood up. The novelty of the action seemed to increase his already impressive height. Or maybe my time in Traynorville had worn me down. I was feeling smaller and older.

  “When you looked in just now,” Drury asked me, “were you on your way to the Roberts?”

  “Just to change my tie,” I said. “I have a date at the train station.”

  “Let’s walk to the hotel together. I want to exercise this leg.”