The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  “Research?”

  “The same kind of research he used to do for the newspaper. Remember that state senator down in Staten Island whose secretary went missing a couple of years ago? Well, according to Brad, a lot of people saw Dubin snooping around down there, looking things up in the court records, asking a lot of questions for a month or two. Then he just disappeared like he did the last time.”

  “Sounds like he’s got his disappearing act down to a T.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lynch crushed his Coke cup, shoved it into the garbage bag, and handed the bag to Wozniak. “You never know,” he said, slipping the cruiser into gear. “Maybe he’s getting ready to disappear from around here too.”

  * * *

  Nicole awoke with a feeling of certainty that Hunter had been found. This knowledge must have come from a dream, though she couldn’t remember it. But she did remember hearing Miss Whipple’s voice, as clearly as if it were an announcement on the radio. Miss Whipple had told her not to worry, that Hunter had been found. Nicole called Dr. Hoffmann at the Institute and left a message but he never called back. Finally she called the general switchboard, which opened at 8:00 o’clock. The woman who answered—it was the sexy receptionist Julietta—wouldn’t tell her anything.

  “Have they found Hunter?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss that with you.”

  “Is he still missing?”

  “I said I can’t discuss it with you.”

  At 9:00 o’clock she found herself on the library steps, waiting for Miss Whipple to open the doors as she always did at that hour. She waited what seemed like an eternity but Miss Whipple never arrived. A little before 10:00, a police car pulled into the parking lot. A fat policeman climbed out and walked up squinting suspiciously at Nicole.

  “You want something here?”

  “I’m waiting for the library to open.”

  “The library’s closed today.”

  “How do you know that? Miss Whipple always—”

  “Miss Whipple won’t be coming in today.”

  “Why not?”

  He hesitated. “Miss Whipple’s dead.”

  Nicole felt the world swirling around her. She felt her lips moving but no words were coming out.

  The policeman peered at her curiously. “Can I see some I.D., please.”

  Nicole found her car and somehow navigated her way to the Institute, though she felt almost as incoherent as she’d felt the first time she went there. Only this time, she thought, it’s the world that’s gone mad. First Mrs. Paterson and now Miss Whipple—how could that be? The policeman wouldn’t provide any details. Instead he wrote down her name and address and said she might be needed later for questioning. He referred to her as a witness.

  “A witness to what? What happened?”

  “I can’t give you that information.”

  The Institute looked surprisingly normal, but that was an illusion. Everything that seemed real and normal right now was an illusion. The ivy climbing the front of the building was an illusion. The well-trimmed bushes around the walkway and the steps. Julietta, at the receptionist’s desk, chewing gum and polishing her nails.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I need to see Dr. Hoffmann.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, of course not. I’m here because of Hunter. Have they found him?”

  “I can’t discuss that with you.” Julietta smirked because she’d said the same thing on the phone. She looked down at her appointment book. “You have an appointment scheduled for Thursday. Can’t you wait until then to see Dr. Hoffmann?”

  “I want to see him now.”

  “He’s really busy.”

  “I’ll just go to the cafeteria and wait for Antonia.”

  Julietta narrowed her shadowy eyes. “You can’t do that.”

  “Look, I come here all the time. I’m a patient.”

  “If you’re an out-patient you need an appointment.” Julietta was smirking again. “Or would you rather be an in-patient?”

  Nicole caught a glimpse of her own crazed, desperate face in the mirror over Julietta’s head. Her eyes bobbed like wild green flames. Her lips were set for a scream. Her red hair seemed to be trying to escape in every direction. She did not look normal and that was reassuring. Unlike everything around her, she looked real.

  “No. I’ll come back for my appointment on Thursday.”

  * * *

  Dubin heard the news about Miss Whipple from Susan, who left a desperate message on his answering machine. When he called her back he learned the details that had shocked the Morgans and everyone in town. The librarian had died in exactly the same fashion as Mrs. Paterson: her head had been battered from behind with a blunt object and then she had been hung from a light fixture with an extension cord disconnected from a lamp. Again the similarity to Maria Morgan’s suicide was too obvious to mention or ignore. Even Susan sounded unnerved, though she denied the possibility that Hunter could be the killer.

  “Be careful,” Dubin said, too stunned to say anything meaningful.

  “Thanks,” Susan said. “We’re not going to stop searching for Hunter.”

  “Even if it isn’t Hunter, there’s already a pattern and you could be part of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Just be careful.”

  Early the next morning Dubin drove past Miss Whipple’s house. It was a bungalow on a wooded lot about six blocks from the library. Through the dense shrubbery he could see yellow police tape stretching across the doors and windows, blocking access to the screened porch. He wanted to stop and peek in a window, or even slip inside, to see where the librarian had been found. Everyone was saying Hunter Morgan killed her but Dubin didn’t believe it. In Dubin’s guilt-ridden mind, that theory had a fatal flaw: it let him—Dubin—off too easily. He knew he was guilty. He knew his own actions had led to the deaths of both Mrs. Paterson and Miss Whipple. How could what he felt so remorseful about be explained by a random force like Hunter Morgan’s madness? There had to be more to it than that; it had to be connected with the train of events he’d set in motion.

  But he couldn’t just stop and peek in the librarian’s window. If the police were watching him, which they probably were, they might accuse him of the murder—and there would be some justice in that. But then he would never be able to find the killer.

  Mrs. Paterson, Miss Whipple. Who would be next? Who else had Dubin compromised? The obvious candidates were Susan and Nicole. Both women, both vulnerable, both knowing more than they should know. It would be difficult to protect Susan. She seemed to be in constant motion, working with her husband day and night to find Hunter. But Nicole lived by herself at the top of that rambling old house. She’d been a patient at the Institute and grown close to Hunter and Antonia. The killer might try to find her.

  At night, Dubin thought. That’s when these things seem to happen. At night.

  * * *

  It was two o’clock in the morning and Nicole sat at her desk trying to keep from going crazy. She had spent most of the last two days crying about Miss Whipple and desperately trying to reach Dr. Hoffmann at the Institute, who didn’t return her calls. It never occurred to her that she was in any danger.

  She tried to focus on her work, though at the moment she was thinking about Dubin. There was something inevitable about Dubin, something archetypal if not quite déjà vu, that made him turn up in her thoughts more often than she would have expected. Like Edgar Allan Poe himself, she mused, who haunts our literature like the raven in his own poem, appearing periodically to reclaim his obsessions from those who have appropriated them.

  She scrolled anxiously through her notes and started nodding off to sleep. Suddenly there came a tapping and she looked up to find Dubin watching her from the doorway.

  “Everything OK?”

  She knew he would come back. “Come on in,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “I was just about to make some
tea.”

  They sat at the little table sipping tea and talking about how quiet it was at three o’clock in the morning. “I didn’t mean to leave the door open,” she said sheepishly. “It was because the landlady’s cat kept scratching to go in and out.”

  “Somebody ought to tell that cat where she lives. Do you feed her?”

  “I serve her tea sometimes.” As soon as she said that she realized how odd it must have sounded. “With milk,” she added.

  Dubin smiled. “You’ve got to be more careful now.”

  “Now that what?”

  “Now that—I assume you’ve heard what happened to the librarian.”

  “Sure,” Nicole said. “I’m a wreck from crying about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She was a wonderful lady.”

  Dubin nodded. “You’ve got to be more careful. There’s a pattern to these deaths and it could lead to you.”

  “To me?”

  “Maria Morgan, Mrs. Paterson, and now Miss Whipple—”

  “It could only lead to me if the killer is Hunter.”

  “We won’t know what the pattern is until it’s complete.”

  “Until the last act?” she smiled, a little cryptically. “When all the bodies have been counted?”

  Nicole stood up and carried the teapot back to the stove to refill it with hot water. The cat had appeared beneath her feet and she stooped down to pour some milk into its bowl. “Have you thought any more about that letter?” she asked Dubin as she slipped back into her seat.

  “I’ve thought about the letter a lot,” Dubin admitted, relieved that she had brought it up. With Miss Whipple’s death, the letter had taken on a new and possibly crucial significance. “Do you think I could see it again?”

  “Sure.” She found the letter where she’d hidden it on the counter and handed it to him. Then she sipped her tea while he read it for what seemed an eternity.

  “Do you think Maria Morgan was murdered?” she finally asked.

  “That’s the hypothesis I’ve been going on.”

  “And do you think the same person killed Mrs. Paterson and Miss Whipple?”

  “It’s very likely.”

  “Then Hunter shouldn’t be a suspect in any of the killings.”

  Dubin looked up from his reading for the first time. “Why not?”

  “For one thing he was only fourteen years old when his mother died. And when you read that letter you realize there was this whole thing going on between Avery Morgan and the secret lover, and if anyone killed her it was probably one of them. Which means it was also probably one of them who killed Mrs. Paterson and Miss Whipple.”

  “Why?”

  “They must have known something. I think it was Avery Morgan.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it would explain Hunter’s madness.”

  Dubin set down his teacup and spread the letter carefully on the table. “You’re going to have to explain that one for me.”

  “Hunter thinks he’s Hamlet. He’s constantly watching videos of Hamlet movies and he’s got all of Hamlet’s lines memorized. Everyone thinks he goes around ranting and raving like a madman, but when I was there I realized that what he was doing most of the time was quoting from Hamlet.”

  “And that’s not crazy?”

  “It may be crazy but it’s not insane. It’s a disguise, don’t you see? The madness is just a disguise, as it was for Hamlet.”

  “You think Hunter has just been faking it for the past seven years?”

  Nicole shook her head. “I think Hunter, by playing Hamlet, is trying to tell us something. He’s trying to tell us that his own madness is self-protective, like Hamlet’s. If he saw his father kill his mother he must have known he would be next unless he rendered himself harmless. So that’s exactly what he did.”

  Chapter 20

  Susan sat in the windowless kitchen at the back of the stone barn, sipping coffee as she thought about the irony of Dubin worrying about her safety. The kids were staying at her mother’s with the au pair and with them had fled any semblance of normality. Halloween, with its festive images of death, had come and gone. It was too early for holiday cheer or long evenings by the fire—only November rain and moldy leaves clogging the drain spouts, boggy mists oozing up from the pond to smother the boxwoods and the wilting ferns. Mud everywhere, crusted with frost in the mornings, flowing like a stream by mid-afternoon. A cold wind whispering down from the north with a rumor of snow, more likely sleet and freezing rain. They might have snow in the mountains where Avery had gone to search for Hunter with his army of volunteers, but here you could be sure it would be nothing but rain and mud. If she was lucky the mud would engulf the boxwoods and swallow their sickly odor that she’d hated from the first day she set foot in this place.

  No, she wasn’t afraid although Dubin seemed to think she should be. Three women were dead, and if there was order in the universe, that pattern was likely to continue until the killer was brought to justice. But she doubted that there was any order in the universe that couldn’t be overcome if you had enough money and knew the right people. When she’d come here ten years before, what was she? Just a baby sitter for two screwed-up kids she never much liked, hired to give them what their screwed-up mother couldn’t provide because she was so obsessed with her career. After the mother’s death it wasn’t difficult to step into her shoes. Avery needed a wife and Susan was there for him, ready to comfort him in his loss. The terms of their bargain were clear but never openly stated. For him, a home, children, and no more sex than was absolutely necessary. For her all of the above, plus money—so long as she never asked how much he had—and the freedom to sleep discreetly with other men. The main thing was the money. Avery was old money which meant he never had to work for it. “I own things”—that’s how he always answered when some nosy neighbor asked what he did for a living. And that was what Susan liked about him—he wasn’t ashamed to be rich, even if the class he represented had been consigned to godforsaken corners of the world like this one where their only prerogative was to be left alone.

  When darkness fell, she locked up the barn and dragged her mud-soaked golden retriever behind the house to hose him off. She locked the dog in the back hall to dry along with her muddy sneakers and washed up in one of the downstairs bathrooms. Then she cleaned up the dirty dishes in the kitchen, heated up some pasta and sat down at the kitchen table to read the local paper, which was breathless with the news of the two murders and Hunter’s disappearance. The town was thriving on fear. Along with the search parties, it was reaching its tentacles out into the countryside, even to this rotting redoubt of old money and hereditary insanity. Yes, women seemed to be the target, and she knew that if trouble came knocking, her idiot of a dog would run off into the woods and disappear. But was she the one who ought to be afraid? Frank Lynch had told her all about Nicole—how Nicole had grown close to Hunter during her stay at the Institute, how she spent every night with Dubin in her apartment. That was a scenario Susan could not bear to think about for very long. Dubin was a cold fish but Susan was paying him to be her cold fish. How much would she have to pay him to spend the night with her? She liked the idea of paying a man for doing nothing—of owning him, in a sense. Sooner or later he would give her what she wanted—she knew that. That was her consolation for spending her life surrounded by these rotting leaves and that punky boxwood smell that had oppressed her for so many years. I own things.

  There was nothing to be afraid of.

  * * *

  Dubin balanced uncertainly on his bar stool, chasing the last grey goose over a blurry landscape in his mind’s eye.

  “Last call!”

  His vision dissolved and he found himself staring straight ahead, infinitely replicated in the mirror behind the bar. “Give me another one of these.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  In the turmoil of his anguished mind, Dubin had decided that his b
est course was to stick with the original plan. Using the fictitious manuscript as bait—though in a sense it had backfired—had brought him closer to the core of things than he could have ever imagined. He’d assumed Avery Morgan had bought the Offenbach letter and would also want the manuscript, but the bird he’d unexpectedly lured into his trap was Peter Bartolli, the banished co-founder of the Palmer Institute. There were fifteen messages on his answering machine from Bartolli asking about the manuscript. He had left them all unanswered. The longer he waited, the more desperate Bartolli would become. For Dubin it was a struggle of almost metaphysical proportions. He hated and feared psychiatrists the way a medieval peasant feared the Devil. You can’t hide from them, you can’t deceive them, you can’t bargain with them except at the risk of your soul. If you think you’re on a lucky streak, it’s only because you’ve surrendered to the fate they have devised for you. Worse than blackmailers: collectors of souls.

  Dubin drained the last of his Grey Goose and plodded steadily outside. The stakes were getting higher by the hour.

  He stepped up to the wide front porch, wondering if Bartolli would answer the door. A black cat darted out from behind a bush and reared up at him, hissing silently as if trying to scare him away. Bartolli appeared and opened the door a crack to let the cat slink inside.

  “My name is Dubin. You wanted to talk to me about the Offenbach manuscript.”

  Bartolli widened the opening and glared at him incredulously. “You’re the man who was supposed to meet me in the food court.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were sitting there the whole time.” He looked ready to fly across the threshold and knock Dubin to the ground. “Reading a newspaper. You let me wander around with my umbrella for an hour and didn’t say a word.”

  “It was a test,” Dubin said without blinking.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was a test and you passed it. I followed you home and now that I’ve had a chance to find out who you are, we can continue our discussion.”

  “All this to buy a manuscript?”

  “It’s a very unusual manuscript. My client doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”