A Stranger in My Grave

by Margaret Millar

  “Tell her what?”

  “That I’m married again,” Fielding said. “It’ll be a shock to her, hearing she’s got a new stepmother. Maybe I’d better break the news to her more gradually, say in a letter. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll write her a letter.”

  “No, you won’t. You’re staying right here, Fielding.”

  “How do you know Daisy wants to see me? Maybe she’s dread­ing this as much as I am. Listen, you said before I was a bum. O.K., I’m a bum, I admit it. But I don’t want to have to spell it out in front of my own daughter.” He took two or three defiant steps toward the door. “I’m leaving. You can’t stop me. You hear that? You can’t stop me. You have no legal right to—”

  “Oh, shut up.” The time, Pinata felt, had come. He reached into one of the desk drawers, brought out another pint of bour­bon, and unscrewed the top. “Here. Help yourself to some courage.”

  “You sound like a goddamn preacher,” Fielding said. He grabbed for the bottle and held it to his mouth. Then, without warning, he made a sudden lunge for the door, holding the bot­tle against his chest.

  Pinata didn’t attempt to chase him. He was rather glad to see him go, in fact: the meeting between Daisy baby and her father wouldn’t have been any fun to watch.

  He went to the window and looked down. Fielding was run­ning along the sidewalk in the pouring rain, still clutching his bottle. His step was quick and light for a big man, as if he’d had a lot of practice running in his life.

  Daisy baby, Pinata thought, you’re in for a surprise.

  5

  It is a thought that takes some of the ugliness out of these cruel years, some of the sting out of the tricks of time. ...

  The lettering on the door at the end of the long, dark hallway spelled out stevens pinata. bail bonds. investigations. walk in. The door was partly open, and Daisy could see a dark-haired, sharp-featured young man seated behind a desk, fooling with a typewriter ribbon. He jumped up when he became aware of her presence and gave her an anxious little smile. She didn’t like the smile. It was as if she’d dropped in on him unexpectedly and caught him doing something he shouldn’t.

  He said, “Mrs. Harker?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Steve Pinata. Please sit down. Let me take your coat. It’s wet.”

  She made no move either to sit down or to unbutton her pink plaid raincoat. “Where’s my father?”

  “He left a few minutes ago,” Pinata said. “He had an engage­ment in L.A. and couldn’t wait.”

  “He—he couldn’t wait even a few minutes after all these years?”

  “It was a very important engagement. He asked me to be sure and tell you how sorry he was, and that he’ll be getting in touch with you soon.”

  The lie came out easily. Practically anyone would have believed it, except Daisy. “He didn’t want to see me at all, just the money, is that it?”

  “It’s not quite that simple, Mrs. Harker. He lost his nerve. He was ashamed of—”

  “I’ll write you out a check.” She pulled a checkbook from her handbag with brusque impatience like a very efficient business­woman who had no time or taste for emotional exhibitions. “How much?”

  “Two hundred and thirty. The fine was $200, ten is my straight fee, and the rest is my ten percent commission.”

  “I understand.” She wrote out the check, bending over his desk, refusing the chair he had pushed up for her. “Is this correct?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” He put the check in his pocket. “I’m sorry things had to turn out like this, Mrs. Harker.”

  “Why should you be? I’m not. I’m as much of a coward as he is, perhaps more. I’m glad he ran out on me. I didn’t want to see him any more than he wanted to see me. For once, he did the right thing. Why should you feel sorry, Mr. Pinata?”

  “I thought you’d be disappointed.”

  “Disappointed? Oh no. Not at all. Not in the least.” But she sat down suddenly and awkwardly, as if she’d lost her balance under the weight of something too heavy for her to handle.

  Daisy baby, Pinata thought, is going to cry.

  In his business Pinata had witnessed too many plain and fancy crying jobs not to know the preliminary signs, and they were all there, from the rapid blinking of her eyes to the clenching and unclenching of her hands. He waited for the inevitable, wishing he could prevent it, trying to think of something to say by way of encouragement, not sympathy; sympathy always pushed them over the line.

  Two minutes passed, then three, and he began to realize that the inevitable wasn’t going to happen after all. When she finally spoke, her question took him completely by surprise. It had noth­ing to do with long-lost fathers.

  “What kind of things do you investigate, Mr. Pinata?”

  “Not much of anything,” he said frankly.

  “Why not?”

  “In a city this size there isn’t much call for services like mine—people who need a detective usually hire one from L.A. Most of the work I do is for private attorneys around town.”

  “What are your qualifications?”

  “What qualifications would I need to solve your problem?”

  “I didn’t say there was any problem. Or that it was mine.”

  “People don’t ask me the kind of questions you’ve been asking without having something in mind.”

  She hesitated a moment, biting her under lip. “There is a prob­lem. But it’s only partly mine. Someone else is involved.”

  “Your father?”

  “No. He has nothing to do with it.”

  “Husband? Friend? Mother-in-law?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “But you’d like to know?”

  “I have to know.”

  She lapsed into another silence, her head cocked at an angle, as if she were listening to some debate going on inside herself. He didn’t press her; he wasn’t even very curious. She looked like the kind of woman whose darkest secret could be bleached out with a little chlorine.

  “I have reason to believe,” she said finally, “that on a certain day four years ago something very grave happened to me. I can’t remember what it was. I want you to help me find out.”

  “Help you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not in my line of work,” he said bluntly. “I might be able to help you find a lost necklace, even a missing per­son, but a lost day, no.”

  “You misunderstand, Mr. Pinata. I’m not asking you to pry into my unconscious like a psychiatrist. I simply want your assistance, your physical assistance. The rest would be up to me.” She studied his face for any sign of interest or curiosity. He was staring, blank-faced, out of the window, as if he hadn’t heard anything she’d said. “Have you ever tried to reconstruct a day, Mr. Pinata? Oh, not a special day like Christmas or an anniversary, just a plain ordinary day. Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Suppose you were forced to. Say the police accused you of a crime and you had to prove exactly where you were and what you did—let’s make it two years ago today. This is the ninth of Feb­ruary. Do you remember anything special about the ninth of February two years ago?”

  He thought about it for a time, squinting up his eyes. “Well, no. Nothing specific. I know the general circumstances of my life at the time, where I was staying, and so on. I assume, if it was a weekday, that I got up and went to work as usual.”

  “The police wouldn’t accept assumptions. They would ask for facts.”

  “I think I’ll plead guilty,” he said with a quick smile.

  She didn’t return the smile. “What would you do, Mr. Pinata? How would you go about finding the facts?”

  “First, I’d check my records. Let’s see, February the ninth two years ago, that would be a Sat
urday. Saturday night is usually a pretty busy time for me, since there are more arrests made. So I’d check the police files, too, in the hope of coming across a case I might remember.”

  “What if you had no files or records?”

  The telephone rang. Pinata answered, talked in monosyllables, mostly negative, for a couple of minutes, and hung up. “Everyone has records of some kind.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “No diary? Bank statement? Bills? Check stubs?”

  “No. My husband takes care of things like that.”

  “What about this check you just gave me? Isn’t it drawn on your own account?”

  “Yes, but I don’t write very many, and I certainly haven’t kept track of the stubs from four years ago.”

  “Do you use an engagement book?”

  “I throw away my engagement book at the end of each year,” Daisy said. “I used to keep a diary a long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t recall exactly. I just sort of lost interest in it—nothing seemed to happen to me that deserved writing down, no excite­ment or anything.”

  No excitement, Pinata thought. So now she’s scrounging around for some, looking for a lost day like a bored child during summer vacation looking for something to do, a game to play. Well, Daisy baby, I haven’t got time for games. I won’t play. “I wish I could help you, Mrs. Harker, but as I told you, this is out of my line. You’d be wasting your money.”

  “I’ve wasted money before.” She stared at him obstinately. “Anyway, you’re not in the least concerned about my wasting my money, only about your wasting your time. You don’t understand—I haven’t made you realize how terribly important this is to me.”

  “Why is it important?”

  She wanted to tell him about the dream, but she was afraid of his reaction. He might be amused like Jim, or impatient and a lit­tle contemptuous like Adam, or annoyed like her mother. “I can’t explain that right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re already very skeptical and suspicious of me. If I told you the rest of it, well, you might consider me quite crazy.”

  Bored, Pinata thought. Not crazy. Or maybe just a little. “I think you’d better tell me the rest of it anyway, Mrs. Harker, so at least we’ll understand each other. I’ve been asked to do some pretty funny things, but finding a lost day—that’s a tall order.”

  “I didn’t lose the day. It’s not lost. It’s still around someplace, here or there, wherever used days and old years go. They don’t simply vanish into nothing. They’re still available—hiding, yes, but not lost.”

  “I see,” Pinata said, thinking that Daisy baby wasn’t a little crazy after all; she was a whole lot crazy. He couldn’t help being interested, however; he wasn’t sure whether his interest was in Daisy’s problem or Daisy herself, or whether the two could ever be separated. “If you don’t remember this day, Mrs. Harker, why do you believe it was so important to you?”

  It was almost the identical question Adam had asked. She hadn’t been able to give a satisfactory answer then, and she couldn’t now. “I know it was. Sometimes people know things in differ­ent ways. You know I’m sitting here because you can see and hear me. But there are other ways of knowing things than merely through the five senses. Some of them haven’t been explained yet.... I do wish you’d stop looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “As if you expected me to announce that my name was Josephine Bonaparte or something. I’m quite sane, Mr. Pinata. And rational, if the two can possibly go together in this confused world.”

  “I thought they were the same thing.”

  “Oh, no,” she said with a kind of prim politeness. “Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it’s a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.”

  Pinata looked surprised and somewhat annoyed, as if a pet parrot, which he had taught to speak a few simple phrases, had suddenly started explaining the techniques of nuclear fission.

  “That was a neat trick,” he said at last.

  “What was?”

  “The way you changed the subject. When the box got a little hot for you, out you jumped. What are you trying to avoid telling me, Mrs. Harker?”

  He’s honest, Daisy thought. He doesn’t pretend to know things he doesn’t know or to exaggerate what he does know. He isn’t even very good at hiding his feelings. I think I can trust him.

  “I had a dream,” Daisy said, and before he could tell her he didn’t deal in dreams, she was telling about the stroll on the beach with Prince and the tombstone with her name on it.

  Pinata listened, without audible comment, to the end. Then he said, “Have you told anyone else about this dream, Mrs. Harker?”

  “My mother, my husband Jim, and a friend of Jim’s who’s a lawyer, Adam Burnett.”

  “What was their reaction?”

  She looked across the desk at him with a dry little smile. “My mother and Jim want me to take vitamins and forget the whole thing.”

  “And the lawyer, Mr. Burnett?”

  “He understood more than the others how important it was to me to find out what happened. But he gave me a warning.”

  “Which was?”

  “Whatever happened on that day to cause my—my death must have been very unpleasant, and I shouldn’t try to dredge it up. I have nothing to gain and everything to lose.”

  “But you want to go ahead with it anyway?”

  “It’s no longer a question of wanting to. I have to. You see, we’re about to adopt a baby.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “It won’t be just my life and Jim’s anymore. We’ll be sharing it with a child. I must be sure that this child will be coming into the right home, a place of security and happiness.”

  “And at the moment you think yours isn’t the right home?”

  “I’m checking to be certain. Let’s say you bought a house, Mr. Pinata, and you’ve been living in it for some time quite comfortably. Then something happens, say an important guest is arriving. You decide to check the place over, and you find cer­tain serious structural defects. Would you consult a good contractor to see what he could do about the defects? Or would you just sit there with your eyes closed and pretend everything was fine?”

  “That’s a pretty desperate analogy,” Pinata said. “All it amounts to is that you’re determined to have your own way no matter what comes of it.”

  “I’m not a child demanding a stick of candy.”

  No, Pinata thought, you’re a grown woman demanding a stick of dynamite. You don’t like your life or your house. You’re afraid to share it with a child. So blow the whole thing sky high and watch the pretty pieces come falling down on your head.

  The phone rang again. This time it was Pinata’s cleaning woman relaying the news that the roof was leaking in the kitchen and one of the bedrooms and reminding him that she’d warned him last year he was going to have to get a new roof put on.

  “Do the best you can. I’ll be home at five,” Pinata said, and hung up, feeling depressed. New roofs cost money, and Johnny was having his teeth straightened. I can’t afford a new roof. But Daisy can. If she’s determined to blow up her own roof, at least I can catch some of the lumber to build mine.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll help you, Mrs. Harker. If I can, and against my better judgment.”

  She looked pleased, in a subdued way, as if she didn’t want him to see how eager she actually was to begin this new game. “When do we start?”

  “I’m tied up for a couple of days.” It was a necessary lie
: two days would give him a chance to do some checking up on Daisy, and Daisy a chance to change her mind. “Say Thursday afternoon.”

  “I was hoping right away. . .”

  “No. Sorry. I have a case.”

  “Of jitters?”

  “All right, of jitters.”

  “And you need time to investigate me, find out how many steps I am in front of the butterfly net? Well, I can’t blame you, of course. If some woman came to me and told me the kind of story I’ve told you, I’d be suspicious, too. The only thing is, there’s no need for secrecy. I’m perfectly willing to answer any questions you’d like to ask me: age, weight, education, background, reli­gious preference—”

  “No questions,” he said, annoyed. “But it remains Thursday.”

  “Very well. Shall I come here to your office?”

  “I’ll meet you at three o’clock at the front door of the Monitor-Press building, if that suits you.”

  “Isn’t that rather a—conspicuous place to meet?”

  “I didn’t know this was to be undercover stuff.”

  “It isn’t really. But why advertise it?”

  “Wait a minute, Mrs. Harker,” Pinata said, leaning across the desk. “Let’s get this straight. Do you intend to tell your husband and family that you’ve hired me?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it. I hadn’t even thought about hiring you or anyone else until I noticed the sign on your door. It seemed like fate, in a way.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Harker,” Pinata said very sadly.

  “It did, it does. It’s as if I were guided here.”

  “Misguided might be a better word.”

  Her gaze was cool and stubborn. “You’ve done everything pos­sible to talk yourself out of a job. Why?”

  “Because I think you’re making a mistake. You can’t just reconstruct one day, Mrs. Harker. It may turn out to be a whole life.”

  “Well?”

  “You’ll be kicking over quite a few stones. Maybe you won’t like what you find underneath them.” He stood up, as if he were the one who intended to leave. “Well, it’s your funeral.”