The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  “No,” she blushed. “I mean, I always suspected it, but I wasn’t sure.”

  Maybe he was your lover too, Dubin thought. “I think he killed her.”

  She seemed more curious than surprised. “Why?”

  “Jealousy, most likely.”

  “No, I mean what makes you think he killed her?”

  “I found a letter he wrote a few days before she died. Evidently your husband knew about their affair and was trying to stop it, and Bartolli was threatening to do something drastic if he got in the way.”

  She looked down at her coffee, avoiding the obvious question.

  Dubin supplied it for her. “How do I know the killer wasn’t your husband? Remember the three items that were missing from the studio? I think the person who killed her was the one who went back to the studio after Frank Lynch had completed his inventory and removed those three items. One of them, the record, turned up at the Institute. Could Hunter have taken it there?”

  “No. I was here when they came for him. He didn’t take anything with him but a few clothes. Neither did Antonia.”

  “They can be ruled out then. And it’s safe to assume that Avery didn’t sneak those items out of his own barn and stash them at the Institute. That leaves the jealous lover. He admits to giving her the kaleidoscope. He denies taking it back, but there are dozens just like it in his house. One of them was probably hers.”

  Susan lowered her head and began to cry. Was it because Avery was innocent or Bartolli was guilty? Dubin had no way of knowing and he decided he didn’t care. He came around the table and leaned down to put his arm around her as she cried. It was a position he couldn’t maintain for very long, and after a few minutes he sat down on the couch. She nestled beside him, wiping her tears on his shirt.

  “I can’t stand this much longer,” she said. “This has got to end.”

  “It’s going to end soon.”

  She turned and kissed him on the mouth. It was not a chaste kiss but it was not a sensuous one either, more a request than a demand. He answered it with a gentle kiss on the cheek, tasting the salt of her tears, and held her as she started crying again. Yes she was a cynic but he didn’t want to take advantage of her cynicism, even at the price of his own. He would have felt diminished, as if he’d been paying for sex, or being paid for it. And he kept thinking about Nicole—even though he’d never touched Nicole—and how he would owe her an explanation. Susan seemed to understand all this without his saying anything. They both knew it was a moment that would pass and never happen again.

  When she had finished crying he stood her up and wiped her face with a damp washcloth. She stood in front of the mirror staring into her own vacant eyes. “Does this mean you’re not blackmailing me any more?” The old ironic tone was back in her voice.

  “I never was,” he said. “I’m a detective, remember?”

  “I almost forgot.” She rustled through the papers on her desk until she found her checkbook. “Don’t you still need a client?”

  “Not really. Ever since those two women were killed, I’ve been self-employed.”

  “You must have expenses.”

  “I sort of enjoy being my own boss.”

  She tossed the checkbook on the table. “I have to tell Avery something. I can’t tell him you’re helping out with Antonia because you wouldn’t sleep with me.”

  “No,” he said, pulling on his jacket. “Don’t tell him that.”

  He smiled ambiguously and headed for the door. She followed him past the horse stalls and out into the driveway.

  “Avery’s going to be home soon.” There was a note of panic in her voice. “He’ll go ballistic when I tell him about Antonia. He’ll jump back in his car and drive over there to get Antonia, even if he has to kill Peter to do it.”

  “Make him wait until tonight. Tell him to humor Bartolli, let him think you’re playing into his hands. Antonia will be all right.”

  Dubin climbed into his car and started the engine. She tapped on the window and he rolled it down so he could hear her. “Will you come with us tonight?”

  “Give me a call when you’re ready to go.”

  She leaned closer. “Promise me something.”

  “I never make promises.”

  “Promise me you’ll see this through. For Hunter’s sake, and Antonia’s—and mine.”

  “I never make promises,” Dubin repeated. “Even if I intend to keep them.”

  Chapter 31

  Ned Hoffmann and Nicole filed out of Dr. Klein’s office in stunned silence, followed by a security guard who had been summoned to escort them along with Hunter to a locked waiting area. There they were to remain for two hours until Frank Lynch arrived to drive them all back to the Institute. For liability reasons, Dr. Klein would release Hunter only to the police. Ned was reluctant to let either Hunter or Nicole out of his sight.

  “Why did you tell Dr. Klein that Hunter’s story was all a fantasy?” Nicole asked Ned as they padded down the hall. “You know there was a lot of truth in it. His piano playing, the two deaths, your rivalry with Dr. Gottlieb—”

  “Keep quiet!” Ned whispered, pulling her along by the elbow. “Dr. Klein doesn’t need to know about any of that.”

  The waiting area adjoined the emergency room and seemed to have been designed for mental patients. There was nothing in it but plastic chairs and a few old magazines—and no way out without the blessing of the security guard, who parked himself by the door reading a newspaper. Ned and Nicole took seats near the door and wrestled with their private thoughts. Hunter sat in the corner as far away from the others as possible and started flipping through magazines at a furious pace as if he expected to find encoded messages stuck between their pages.

  Nicole thought about the tale Hunter had told and was astonished at the breadth of his genius. He had memorized and internalized Hamlet along with every other book at the Institute. He had deconstructed her thesis topic and demolished whole schools of philosophy and literary theory in the process. He had taught himself to play the piano by listening to a record and turned all the people around him into characters in The Tales of Hoffmann by watching a video. She was one of those people, one of those characters—of course she’d told him about her childhood traumas and her work with Dr. Hoffmann and the agony of writing her thesis, so it wasn’t surprising that these elements had found their way into his story. But it was humbling to realize that many of the words he put in her mouth were more insightful than anything she’d actually thought of on her own.

  “I feel like one of those authors I’ve been writing about,” she said to Ned Hoffmann in a low voice, “meeting myself in someone else’s story.”

  “Scary, isn’t it?”

  Ned stood up and wandered off in search of coffee, avoiding Hunter’s eyes, which were aimed at him across the top of the magazine. He felt exhausted, shaken, exposed. When he passed a mirror in the hall he instinctively looked away: he couldn’t bear to see the shambling, unkempt figure he’d become after ten days of scouring the wilderness for this delusional young man who, in his own wild imaginings, had turned into himself. He ached with a sense of repugnance and fear that no patient had ever aroused in him before. He felt that Hunter had captured his personality or something even deeper than his personality. In that five-hour narration, Hunter had displayed all of Ned Hoffmann’s favorite gestures and facial tics; he even spoke in a simulation of Ned’s voice. He wasn’t just pretending to be Ned Hoffmann: he was Ned Hoffmann, and no one knew that better than Ned himself. It was as if Hunter had observed Ned from within and molded his delusions out of Ned’s deepest secrets. His meanest impulses, his weirdest fantasies, his most shameful self-deceptions—they were all there in living color: the affair with Peter Bartolli’s daughter “Olympia” (that wasn’t her real name, of course, but she really was like a wind-up doll and Hunter had been diabolically clever in describing how she lured Ned with sex and then dropped him when she realized he couldn’t help her father), the fascination wi
th Julietta, the jealous resentment of Gottlieb, even the fantasy that Nicole was in love with him. But Hunter had taken this admittedly embarrassing material and distorted it beyond all recognition. Ned wasn’t insane and he wasn’t the monster depicted in Hunter’s story—he’d never been to Venice, never stabbed or strangled anyone, never actually said or done anything the least bit unprofessional or malicious. He’d never stalked Julietta or had those crazy conversations with Olympia or Nicole or Dr. Palmer; in fact none of his secret fantasies would have come to light if Hunter hadn’t worked them into his delusions. And how did Hunter find out about them? Did he spy on Ned? Gossip with the staff? Or was his own illness so finely tuned that he could detect the merest whiff of mental derangement in others?

  Over an hour had passed in the hospital waiting room. Hunter had devoured every magazine—back issues of People, Newsweek and various medical journals—while Nicole drifted in and out of sleep. The security guard had made slow progress with his newspaper, as if he were studying an ancient text.

  Ned touched Nicole’s arm to wake her up. “Remember when you tried to warn me that the opera plot was taking over everybody’s life?”

  “I didn’t really say that.”

  “No, of course not. He said you said it. He had you saying it in his story.”

  “Right.”

  “You didn’t really say it.”

  “No. But it was a clever thing to have said, wasn’t it? So I won’t deny that I would have said it, if I had really been me.”

  The security guard looked up from his newspaper. “You folks patients at the Institute?”

  They all laughed, except Hunter. It was a few minutes before Ned dared to continue, and then he lowered his voice to keep the guard from overhearing. “What happens in the next act?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Assume that you—I mean your other self, the Nicole in Hunter’s story—were correct that the opera plot was taking over. What would happen next?”

  Nicole grinned and darted her eyes toward the guard. “Are you serious? Or are you just—”

  “Assume for the moment that I’m serious,” Ned whispered. “Near the beginning of the story he said he’d become obsessed with three women—an artist, an ingénue, and a nymphomaniac—each of whom brought him a step closer to ruin.”

  “I remember him saying that.”

  “Obviously the nymphomaniac was Julietta. And the artist—”

  “That would be Olympia, the dancer.”

  “Right. Which leaves the ingénue. What the hell is an ingénue, by the way?”

  “It’s an innocent young girl. Invariably a virgin.”

  “That’s what I thought. Don’t you see? He’s talking about Antonia. She’s next.”

  “Next? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Nicole’s face had been drained of all its color. “I do,” she whispered. She glanced up at the guard, who was still engrossed in deciphering his newspaper. “Let me tell you what happens in the next act.”

  * * *

  “Your daughter is like an enchanted princess who has fallen under a spell. I know the magic that can wake her from her seven year sleep.”

  Peter Bartolli stood on the stage in his underground theater, fixing his fierce eyes on Avery Morgan. Antonia sat beside him in a folding chair facing the audience, her eyes wide but unseeing. Her father, who had just arrived with Susan Morgan and Dr. Palmer, seemed momentarily transfixed by Bartolli’s imperious gaze.

  “Don’t do anything sudden,” Dr. Palmer told Avery Morgan in a whisper that everyone could hear. “You and Susan have a seat. Let me handle this.”

  Dubin watched from the doorway. He had followed the Morgans and Dr. Palmer in his own car after meeting them at the Institute. At Bartolli’s house they found a note on the door inviting them to proceed to the basement. The theater was dark except for a spotlight on the stage and a half-dozen candles flickering from a candelabra on the grand piano. Over the stage hung a photograph of Maria Morgan. Dubin wondered if it was the one Bartolli had taken from her studio.

  “It’s not the kiss of a prince that will break the spell,” Bartolli continued, “but the charm of music, which speaks directly to the soul. And not just any music, but the voice of one of the finest sopranos who ever lived.”

  “Peter,” Dr. Palmer said in an even voice, “I hope you’re not—”

  “The voice that more than one critic called the voice of an angel. The voice of Antonia’s mother, Maria Morgan.”

  Avery Morgan glared at Bartolli with a fury he made no effort to suppress. “I won’t stand for this.”

  Dr. Palmer clamped a hand on Morgan’s arm and pulled him back from the stage. “Sit down, Avery.”

  Avery and Susan dropped into seats in the front row and Dr. Palmer sat beside them. “What are you getting at, Peter?” he asked wearily.

  Bartolli seemed eager for an opportunity to explain. “As you know, Antonia hasn’t spoken more than a few words since her mother died,” he said. “But on rare occasions she’s been known to sing, in a hauntingly beautiful soprano voice that comes as a shock to anyone who ever heard Maria Morgan.”

  “She has severe asthma,” Avery Morgan argued. “She shouldn’t be allowed to sing.”

  “The asthma began at the time her mother died. It’s a symptom of the same illness that made her stop talking. She believes that when she sings it’s really her mother singing through her—that by singing she can, in effect, bring her mother back to life.”

  Dr. Palmer shook his head. “Voice projection is a common delusion in schizophrenia.”

  “That’s true,” Bartolli agreed. “And like any delusion it can be used therapeutically. The patient must be allowed to experience the personality that’s speaking through her—”

  Avery Morgan interrupted: “You’re going to make her sing?”

  “If she wants to. She will only get better if she can bring her unconscious memories to the surface.”

  Dr. Palmer stood up and took a step toward the stage. “Peter, let’s put a stop to this right now. Any prolonged singing could trigger a serious asthma attack. You’re jeopardizing her health and all the progress we’ve made with her.”

  “There’s been no progress. This is the only way to help her.”

  “Please. I insist that you let us take her back to the Institute.”

  “I’m going to proceed as planned.” The candlelight flickered defiantly in Bartolli’s cavernous eyes. “You mustn’t interfere or interrupt while she’s under hypnosis. It could have the most serious consequences.”

  Dr. Palmer sat back down and whispered something to Avery Morgan, probably to confirm the dangers of disturbing a patient under hypnosis. Bartolli pushed some buttons on the sound equipment at the back of the stage and disappeared momentarily behind the puppet theater, which was still concealed beneath its canvas cover. Susan glanced over her shoulder at Dubin, silently pleading with him to stop this train wreck before it was too late, but her goal—and her husband’s and Dr. Palmer’s—was only to protect Antonia. Dubin was there to catch a murderer, and before he could spring the trap he had to allow Bartolli to set it. He couldn’t see very far into that twisted mind, nor did he aspire to. But he had a hunch that the performance they were about to witness, played out before a hand-picked audience of the injured and the frightened and the guilt-ridden, was Bartolli’s symbolic way of returning to the scene of his crime. And why did the killer return to the scene of the crime? It was a ritual of triumph from which he imagined he would once again escape unscathed.

  Dr. Palmer was the first to break the silence. “I’m almost afraid to ask what you’re going to ask her to sing.”

  “A few highlights from The Tales of Hoffmann, of course.”

  Avery Morgan growled, “That’s the opera Maria was rehearsing when she died.”

  “Yes,” Bartolli agreed, “but it will be quite different from anything you’ve heard before. What you are about to see i
s Hoffmann as it was meant to be performed.”

  Chapter 32

  Frank Lynch arrived at the hospital before Nicole could tell Ned Hoffmann about the last act of The Tales of Hoffmann. He strode into the waiting room murmuring into his cell phone and shook hands with the security guard without ending the conversation. Then he stepped toward Ned Hoffmann, paying no more attention to Hunter or Nicole than he paid to the pictures on the wall. “Listen,” he said, “I just found out something you need to know. Our friend Dr. Bartolli has pulled one of his famous stunts. He took Antonia out of the Institute and has her over at his house, where he says he’s going to give her some kind of hypnosis therapy.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently nobody was watching.”

  “Are they bringing her back?”

  “They’re afraid to do anything sudden, in case she’s in distress or already under hypnosis. Bartolli wants everybody to come over at eight o’clock tonight.”

  “Everybody?”

  Lynch leaned closer. “You and Dr. Palmer, and Avery and Susan Morgan. And Hunter too.”

  “Hunter?”

  “He wants Hunter there.”

  Ned agreed to leave his car at the hospital so he could return in the police cruiser with Lynch and the two patients. He sat in the back seat bouncing between Hunter and Nicole as Lynch piloted the cruiser over winding mountain roads. “Could you slow down a little?” Ned called through the barrier that separated the driver from the back seat. “There’s—”

  “No, keep going!” Nicole interrupted, pulling Ned back. It was the first time she’d spoken since Lynch arrived. “Don’t slow down. We’ve got to get there as fast as we can.”

  “What do you mean? There’s plenty of time to get there by eight o’clock.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, turning back to face Ned. “You still don’t know what happens to Antonia.”