Dream of Fair Woman

by Charlotte Armstrong

  ‘Show?’ Matt knotted his brow.

  ‘Some TV series that was a big flop. That’s what the waiter said.’

  Betty, who had been wondering why she had gone at all unless it was conscience, watched him with a flicker of amusement.

  Matt said, ‘You know, if true, that’s peculiar. A show?’

  ‘Maybe they get American TV in Uganda.’

  Matt grunted sceptically.

  ‘Tony didn’t notice, either,’ Betty said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They don’t have tigers in Africa.’

  Matt sat still, while his mind raced. Then the sequence of his reasoning lifted him off the chair.

  ‘O.K. Then the girl in the restaurant was not Dorothy Daw. The girl who put the suitcase in the locker, who brought the key to our house, who is in the hospital now is NOT Miss Dorothy Daw.’

  Betty began to squirm and shake her head. ‘Unless she was just putting Megan on.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’m afraid it can’t mean very much. She could have been tempted. It could have been sly. I wouldn’t blame her.’

  ‘But listen, Betts—’

  ‘You can’t count on it.’ Betty was severe.

  Peg said, ‘Oh, leave it to Lieutenant Tate, children. Please, don’t just go around and around.’

  Peg felt and looked tired. She wished they wouldn’t go around again. She had cancelled her engagements. She couldn’t face the questions with the same old answers. Yes, she had felt responsible. No, she was not able to say whether the girl would get well. Yes, it was very strange. She had hoped to be able to say that from now on, the girl was Dorothy. But the young people were going around again. (Meanwhile, Matt was enchanted. Betty was going to be lost to them.) Peg worried about Matt. She worried about Betty. She worried about money, as a matter of fact.

  Betty was saying, ‘I think so too, Peg. Lieutenant Tate is in a much better position to find out stuff than we are.’

  Matt had been pushed back into his chair by the reasonable caution of his womenfolk when Dr Jon Prentiss appeared.

  Peg put him before a second breakfast while he told them the consensus. The girl’s condition might well be emotional. A psychological coma. Oh yes, these could happen. This judgment was not, and could not be, absolute. But it was strongly suspected, at the moment. If so, it was more important than ever to know her history. And—

  Matt said, with excitement, ‘Wait a minute! That’s what she implied.’

  ‘Who implied?’

  ‘This nut! This Alfreda. She came around, dressed in a robe. She said she knew our girl. Said she was a protégée. Maybe she was right. There is a twin, supposed to be religious—whatever that means.’

  ‘You aren’t talking about Dr Ruth A. Dienst?’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘Calls herself plain Alfreda, so I’ve been told. Why, she’s a renegade from the profession. Runs some kind of temple school. A kind of cult, I suppose. A more-or-less faith-healing theory as I understand it, which I don’t suppose I do.’

  ‘A temple? Where is this place?’

  ‘Why, right up the hill,’ the doctor said.

  ‘What hill, sir?’

  ‘There’s a road up this side.’ The doctor was pointing to the east. ‘You go up to the end of this street and the road takes off, a little to your right.’

  ‘A temple?’

  ‘It used to be somebody’s house. Colonial, with white pillars. She’s got some fancy nameplate on it. I knew her slightly, years ago.’

  Matt sat a moment with his mouth fallen open. Then he said, ‘Our girl is the twin. I mean,’ he corrected, ‘there’s a great probability that she is.’

  ‘How do you figure?’

  ‘Because there has never been any explanation of how she happened to be on our street and see the sign on our lawn. Until now. O.K. This house is on the way to this temple.’

  ‘That depends,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s a better road, up the other side of the hill, you know. Isn’t there a higher probability that our girl is Dorothy Daw?’

  ‘Not if Dorothy was not the girl in the restaurant. Or the cab. Or the railroad station.’

  The doctor scowled. ‘Who was that, if not Dorothy?’

  ‘That was our girl.’

  ‘The twin?’

  ‘The alibi.’

  ‘So … you are calling Leon Daw a liar, a deceiver, and a murderer?’

  ‘And nothing loath,’ said Matt, rather gaily.

  Dr Prentiss viewed him with obvious alarm.

  Matt kept talking. The doctor volunteered no comment on the waiter’s remarks.

  ‘Are there tigers in Africa?’ Matt demanded.

  ‘I wouldn’t have the faintest idea.’ The doctor was cold.

  ‘I’m going up to this temple.’

  The doctor said, ‘I’m afraid Ruth Dienst has become a bit of a fringe character. Great waste of training.’

  Something in his eye was saying to Matt, ‘Watch it. Don’t get out of line. Don’t let yourself veer towards the fringes, mind you. Don’t waste your training.’

  Betty said, ‘I’ll go with him, Uncle Jon. We’ll take my car.’

  Then Matt said, out of nowhere, ‘Lilianne!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lilianne! That’s what Tony said, didn’t he? And that’s what this Alfreda called her.’

  Dr Jon said, ‘Humph.’ His stern eye yielded to reason and he nodded.

  Matt drove off in high spirits. Betty beside him was good old Betty again. He was darned glad to have her back. ‘This is it,’ he said to her.

  ‘It looks as if,’ she agreed cheerfully.

  They bore to the right, at the end of the street, upon a steep and winding narrow road that could not be the best way up this hill. It brought them to a wider road along the ridge-top where there was only one house that could be described as Colonial, with white pillars.

  The building looked somehow insecure. As they got out of the car, they realised that it seemed to teeter on a brink. There was very little land between it and a precipice.

  There was a small sign on one of the pillars. Gold on black, it read, THE TEMPLE OF HEALTH THROUGH ART. They went up on the pillared porch. There was no button to push, but a big brass knocker of Oriental design was centred in the door. Matt used it, vigorously.

  When the door opened, there stood the tall woman, in her white robe, with the purple cord around her ample waist. ‘Mr Cuneen,’ she said not uncordially. ‘And who is this?’ Her head with its home-made haircut bent graciously.

  Betty felt the weight of the woman’s gaze as Matt made the introduction. Alfreda’s eyes were dark brown, soft, and powerfully intent. ‘You may come in.’ She led them through a kind of foyer, rather shallow, running along the house to parallel the whole width of the outside porch, and pierced by arches so that it only introduced them to a large room with a wall of glass at the far end.

  ‘It won’t fall down,’ the woman said. ‘See here.’

  She led them across the big and almost empty room, which was furnished only with a grand piano and its bench, and a dozen large bright-coloured floor cushions, towards the glass, which showed nothing but the sky until they were close enough to look directly down.

  A dizzying sixty feet below, there was a supermarket, its new roof bright. The white lines on the parking lot were fresh and sharp. Where the land had been cut back, Alfreda told them, there had been a land-slip. Her building had been condemned and closed. But she had hired engineers and geologists to go into the problem and her temple could, and would, be saved by sinking caissons and building a retaining wall. The market chain was going to have to pay for the work, since she had gone to court and won her case. In the meantime, however, she could not hold her classes.

  Matt drew back from the glass and looked around. ‘What kind of classes, Dr Dienst? What is this place?’

  The woman smiled. ‘I use only the one simple name now,’ she said. ‘Alfreda will do. Why, this is
a place for people who need it. Come, sit down.’ She seemed pleased to see them, as if she had been a little lonely.

  There was nowhere to sit in this room, except on the floor cushions. The huge woman led them back to the foyer, to the right, through a small room, where ordinary chairs were lined up on two walls and a green file cabinet stood against another. Beyond this, there was another small square room, with a desk, and bookshelves, and two fairly comfortable visitors’ chairs. It perfectly resembled a doctor’s office.

  Alfreda enthroned herself behind the desk. ‘You have come about Lilianne Kraus?’

  Matt said, ‘About the girl in the hospital. Tell me, could her last name have ever been Hopkins?’

  ‘She might have used her mother’s name,’ said Alfreda calmly. ‘She prefers Kraus, which is her father’s.’

  ‘O.K.,’ said Matt. ‘That does it. I’m afraid it’s too complicated to go into thoroughly. All I need to say is that since there is still a question of her identity—’

  ‘There should not be,’ said Alfreda, in her booming voice. ‘I told you who she was. I told you, some days ago.’

  Matt gaped. Betty said, ‘You know this Lilianne very well, do you, ma’am?’

  ‘Certainly. Lilianne is very close to me. I permit her to come here, every day, to act more or less as my receptionist. I cannot, of course, permit anyone to live here. But Lilianne makes herself more or less useful—that is, when we are functioning. I have known her very well for at least four, perhaps five years.’

  ‘How do you know our girl is not Lilianne’s twin sister?’ Matt asked. ‘Or didn’t you know she had one?’

  ‘I knew,’ said Alfreda loftily. ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Have you ever seen Alison Hopkins?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Some years ago.’

  ‘Can you tell them apart? Is there a mark?’

  The woman’s brows rose and gave her an expression of tolerant amusement. ‘My protégées sunbathe in the nude, that’s true,’ she said, ‘but we are not nudists, here. Didn’t you ask me about a mark or a scar, on Friday morning?’

  ‘On Friday morning,’ Matt said, rather hotly, ‘you told me she was Lilianne. And now it’s Monday.’

  ‘I do not break the Sabbath,’ Alfreda said.

  ‘Will you come down there now, please? I’ll take you to see her.’

  ‘She still sleeps?’ the woman said placidly.

  ‘Yes. Yes. Will you come?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Miss … Doctor …’ Matt sputtered.

  ‘The contractor has promised to be here, some time today,’ Alfreda said, ‘I cannot leave.’

  ‘You say you are so close to this girl. Don’t you realise she has got to be identified? She may be claimed by Leon Daw.’

  The woman was an immovable mass. ‘No one of that name has a right to claim her. Do you understand that. I may not bring her here, at this time? It is not permitted.’

  ‘You don’t have to “bring” her anywhere. All you have to do is make them believe, down there, that she isn’t Dorothy Daw. That is, if she isn’t. Maybe you don’t know what you are talking about. How come other people haven’t been around to say she’s this Lilianne?’

  The woman pitied him with her look. ‘Because I have taken care to explain to my people, that I have the matter in hand. It is wiser to keep her where she is—’

  ‘All right!’ Matt shouted. ‘But you’ve got to come down and swear—’

  ‘I do not swear. I have told you, very simply—yea or nay—who she is.’

  ‘Tell the hospital.’

  ‘I have told the hospital.’

  ‘Come down there. Please?’

  The more he begged the more immovable she seemed.

  ‘Why not?’ he demanded.

  Alfreda shook her head. ‘You do not listen.’

  ‘I sure as hell don’t understand you at all.’ Matt was furious.

  ‘Quite obviously,’ said Alfreda condescendingly, ‘you are not even trying. But I have said that I will come soon. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow.’

  ‘I thought you were a doctor.’ The sentence condemned her.

  ‘Who told you so, please?’ Alfreda spoke with an air of adult patience towards a child in a tantrum.

  ‘Dr Jon Prentiss. He says he once knew you.’

  ‘Prentiss? A relation?’ The big head turned.

  ‘My uncle,’ said Betty. She was thinking. Why, she is vain, enormously vain. She has power. She likes power. Matt isn’t approaching her in the right way. He can’t tell her what to do.

  Alfreda now graciously told Matt what to do. ‘Then please notify Dr Prentiss, or the hospital, or whoever can receive such a message, that I shall try to be in tomorrow to straighten the matter out.’

  Matt sat glowering.

  Betty inserted herself as oil on the waters. ‘I realise that you must be very busy, ma’am. You treat patients here, do you?’

  ‘In a way,’ the woman said. ‘I prefer to say that I show them how to be healed. I came to a point, you see, where I could afford to do what I am really obliged to do. A point where I could no longer limit myself to orthodoxy. I don’t practise medicine, in the ordinary sense.’ Her eyes flickered to Matt. ‘We are a group. We gather. This is for women. All ages of women. Although men, I am quite sure, could also benefit, I feel that to teach men, too, would be even more easily misunderstood.’ She flashed a cold smile. ‘Now then, we paint and read poetry. We dance. We use colour therapy. Perhaps you don’t realise that I can change the light. We are, of course, religiously oriented, although not conventionally. There is a kind of healing that operates on the soul. This is, to a degree, experimental …’

  ‘But do you make money?’ Matt said edgily.

  ‘My fees are as modest as I can afford,’ Alfreda said, stiffly.

  ‘Oh, well. The girl in the hospital is a poor soul,’ he said with insulting emphasis. ‘She has two hundred and fifty dollars, period, almost all of which she now owes to the hospital.’ He got up and walked out of the room.

  If Alfreda was offended she showed it only by a movement of one massive eyebrow.

  Betty said apologetically, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Please try to understand that he is just so concerned for the sleeping girl …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alfreda. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Betty had a sense that the woman was seeing right through her. ‘Do you read the newspaper, ma’am?’ she asked quickly.

  ‘Not often. Someone called Lilianne’s picture to my attention.’

  ‘Then maybe you haven’t read that Alison Hopkins is supposed to have been murdered?’

  Alfreda said, with such calm as to seem perfectly cruel, ‘That is the way that Alison was going. I never held much hope for her. Or for her mother. They are locked to the material in a romantic sort of way that is inevitably destructive.’

  Betty said with a gasp, ‘Don’t you try to help everybody?’

  ‘I can help the blind,’ said Alfreda, ‘but not the ones who will not see. Now,’ she became brisk, ‘you must believe that I know what I am doing.’

  ‘But do you know what we are trying to do?’ said Betty. ‘You see, one girl has been murdered. We don’t know but what it was a mistake. Maybe the same persons now want to murder this girl.’

  ‘In the hospital?’ said Alfreda with pity.

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘You do read the newspapers, don’t you?’ said Alfreda. ‘I should imagine that the number of people murdered by mistake is very small. Killed, yes. Now, my dear, I have said what I will do. I shall come tomorrow. By daylight. I do not walk by night.’

  ‘May I come tomorrow, then, and drive you there, ma’am?’ said Betty.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the woman remotely. ‘That won’t be necessary.’ She became very still.

  Betty realised she had better not move or speak.

  Finally the woman sighed. ‘The twins are identical in the body,’ she said. ‘I was wondering about a mistake. As I have reason to do, pe
rhaps. But I do not believe that Lilianne is dead. I am too close to her spirit. I should be able to sense if it has departed.’

  ‘We are pretty sure,’ said Betty, quickly following, ‘that it can’t be Alison, in the hospital, because of a certain mark.’

  ‘Do you put your faith in such things?’ said Alfreda with a tilt of her head. Her gaze became a blow. ‘You are not a happy spirit, Miss Prentiss. You are not in tune, are you?’

  Betty said with asperity, ‘I’m afriad that I don’t expect to be happy, all twenty-four hours of every day.’ She got up. ‘Are you thinking that I ought to come to your classes?’

  The woman was really monstrous. It was hard not to be angry with her.

  ‘Not in your present mood,’ said Alfreda flatly. Then with a sudden change of manner, she became crisp. ‘Surely even by your lights, you can see that I must be here. They are coming to discuss and arrange for the future of my house. I must have it put in order. Many people depend on me. I am not understood, Miss Prentiss, by some people. Particularly by people like your young man. Therefore, I take care to break no man-made laws that I need not break. This house was condemned and I cannot have my people here until this work is done. It will do no harm if Lilianne sleeps on, for one more day. Or several.’

  ‘I hope you are right,’ Betty said soberly. ‘I hope you are not making a mistake.’

  She started for the door. The woman did not move. Her eyes were baleful. Betty could read her mind: ‘I do not make mistakes, you poor crawling creature.’ Alfreda was offended.

  Matt was standing in the foyer and when Betty came, he took her arm and swung her towards the door to the porch. They went out, unushered and with no farewells.

  Matt was seething. He whisked them down the hill at a perilous speed. Once on the level, he said, ‘Get out the map.’

  ‘O.K.’ Betty gasped relief that they were safely down. ‘I’ll say it for you. She is not only a nut of the purest ray serene but some kind of monster!’

  ‘But does she know what she is talking about? That’s what we are going to find out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We are going to find out, because I snooped in that file cabinet. There was an address for Lilianne Kraus.’

  ‘Oh, Matt, good for you!’

  ‘So we go there. If Lilianne is missing, that’s one thing.’