So Dies the Dreamer Page 8

  It began as reassurance—‘Who did you think it was?” “That man, that horrible Peck”—and turned gradually into a shaken kiss that quieted and held and grew stormy again. Harry said muffledly, “That’s what I didn’t do when I left you in New York,” and Sarah, with the kitchen growing up around her, said in an equally obscured voice, “The chowder’s boiling over.”

  She moved away and took off the lid unsteadily and turned the heat down; mingled with the extraordinary lightness of body and mind was the warning memory of Bess’s voice: Harry and Kate . . . Harry and Kate.

  Behind her Harry said with an odd violence, “I think we deserve a drink,” and went to get ice cubes.

  “We ought to be going back.”

  “But we aren’t,” said Harry. “Who will take care of this motherless chowder if we don’t?” He switched on the light in the little pantry between kitchen and dining room, and the caged crow said obediently, “Hi, Milo,” and sank back to sleep in a ruffle of feathers.

  “Now,” said Harry, planting drinks on the kitchen table, “what’s going on? You look like a ghost, and it can’t be only Evelyn’s cooking. You’re more than a match for Milo. Is it Hunter? Bess?”

  Quietly, not tasting her drink but turning the icy round of it with one hand, Sarah told him. She held nothing back —that seemed impossible at the moment—and when she had finished Harry gave his dark head a shake as though he had just emerged from water.

  “No wonder you look . . . Well, let’s see. For one thing, Nina was so distantly related to Rob and Kate, and even then by marriage, that I don’t think Charles ever connected them in his mind. He was thirty when his father married Nina, and she was thirty-six.”

  The chowder muttered in another world. “It was one of those idyllic May-and-December affairs, or maybe June and November, that outsiders never quite believe in,” said Harry. “Edward Trafton was a very odd guy, and he’d been lonely and bitter for years. Nina changed all that, and at the same time she was close enough to Charles’s age to understand him, too. He’d never seen his father happy before, and at least he had that to hang on to after the heart attack. He and Nina were closer than ever then, so that when she died—”

  His voice had been gradually slowing; it stopped in a trailing way, as if he had forgotten that he was speaking and even that Sarah was there at all. The glass she hadn’t lifted was cold and wet inside her hand, and she was holding it much too tightly. She said with a peculiar feeling of trespass, “Did she die of pneumonia?” and Harry Brendan’s gaze swung up and struck her like a slap.

  “No,” he said.

  Sarah stood up and walked unseeingly to the sink, and after a few seconds of thunderous silence Harry’s even voice began again.

  Nina Trafton had been understandably vain about her beautiful hair; she had been painted a number of times with it hanging rich and loose. After three weeks of illness and fever—she had refused to be removed to a hospital—she was as illogical as a child about insisting that it be washed. She had actually gotten out of bed once, and crashed lightheadedly into a doorway, cutting her forehead.

  On an afternoon in February, with the house briefly emptied of everyone except the nurse, she had succeeded. Weakened by fever and drugs, warned by the doctor of the seriousness of a relapse, she had nevertheless gone into the bathroom, clad only in her nightgown, and moved a high stool into position before the basin. She had pinned a towel about her throat and stood a bottle of shampoo on the glass shelf and filled the basin. She had bent her head with its long tangle of fever-dulled gold, and struck the faucet so sharply that her head went into the water and stayed there.

  Sarah hadn’t turned from the sink; she felt incapable of moving. Milo had painted Nina ready to wash her hair— and how frightful that was, it gave him a new and ugly dimension. No wonder Bess had caught that knife-like breath when his bedroom door creaked open to show the easel. Sarah said into the stretched-out silence, “Where was the nurse all this time?”

  “Asleep,” said Harry Brendan shortly. “She said later that her tea had been drugged, but the laundryman who stopped at the house that day saw her moving around upstairs.”

  Sarah did turn at that, incredulously. With this frightening affair so recently behind them, all these people had shaken their heads blankly over Miss Braceway’s murder and wandered what could have been bothering Charles. She felt as though she had landed in a gathering of well-behaved maniacs, who persisted in thinking that the cobra in their midst was a garter snake, until Harry went on.

  Someone had had the presence of mind to preserve Miss Braceway’s teacup—the tea set to steep for her punctually at one o’clock every day and left on the stove—and the dregs were tea and nothing else. As her relief had not arrived the night before, she had been on duty an unbroken twenty-four hours. What more natural than to take a look at her patient, who pretended to be asleep, and lie down herself for a few minutes of badly needed rest? The times involved didn’t agree with the laundryman’s account, but the curtains in two of the upstairs rooms were straight-hanging white net, and the draughts that old houses were full of might have set one of them stirring so that it looked, to a casual glance from the lawn, like a moving uniform.

  After the first shock, no one blamed the nurse. Her record was impeccable, she had exhausted herself in caring for her patient, and although she was familiar with the irrationality of fever and female vanity, she hadn’t bargained on Nina Trafton’s obsession. As a professional woman whose reputation was her living, it wasn’t surprising that she clung to her story of having been drugged; as far as that went, Nina was easily capable of it.

  “I’m afraid I’ve drunk your drink up,” said Harry, light with an effort. “Say that six times fast.”

  “Milo painted Nina that way, getting ready to wash her hair.”

  “Milo—?” Harry’s forehead wrinkled and then cleared. “I know she’d sat for him a couple of times before she got sick —she liked being painted with her hair loose and Milo fancies himself as an artist. I suppose he couldn’t resist a dramatic touch later, or maybe he wanted to imply an attachment. Although for that matter I think every man who ever met Nina was a little in love with her at one time or another.”

  Of course; no wonder even talking about this had made him white. Sarah went to the stove and gazed blindly at the chowder, which rewarded her with a scalding burst of steam. She said before she could stop herself, “That must have made it nice for her husband.”

  The stillness behind her was absolute. Not quite daring to turn her head, not trusting either Harry or herself, she said, “Tell Evelyn, will you, that Ym putting in the rolls?” and after a long moment the kitchen door closed with furious calm and she was alone in the house.

  So the subject Charles had kept locked up so tightly was still not to be examined, no matter what her own necessity. Never mind that Miss Braceway was dead, and Charles. Where Nina Trafton was concerned, you might look but you mustn’t touch.

  Sarah set the oven to heat for the rolls, thinking remotely that Evelyn, left to herself, would have inserted currant jelly and sour cream or some other unlikely mess. Whatever else Harry Brendan had done in that disturbing interlude, he had exorcised Peck. When she looked at the steamy window-panes she saw Nina instead as Milo had painted her, stiff and out of drawing but with the surprising life that a child can sometimes produce with crayons.

  Towel at her throat, Harry had said, but Sarah didn’t remember a towel. Maybe Milo had left it out for aesthetic reasons, or maybe it was there in folds of—white, would it be?

  Having gone that far, she was lost. Slipping into other people’s bedrooms was hardly the best guest behavior, but then that was a rule not strictly observed in this house. Sarah went rapidly through the house and up the stairs to the door of Milo’s room, as nerved to this as though it represented the blackest kind of danger instead of the embarrassment of being caught.

  And there was Nina seated on the backless white stool, brilliant head poised ete
rnally over the basin that had killed her. She wore a puff-sleeved nightgown of pale blue, and there was no towel about her throat. Milo had evidently had second thoughts about his portrait since the morning, because at the right edge of the canvas, close to the top, something in the blue background had been painted out in a sharp, noticeable patch of green.

  Sarah reached for the wall-switch with a lightning hand. Her overstrained ears manufactured a sound of returning voices, and for one queerly terrified second she was afraid that she would reach the top of the stairs and find a man’s face waiting furiously for her at the bottom. Milo’s, stripped of spite and secrets, or Hunter’s, the eyes gone like ice, or Rob Clemence’s, his temper let off its leash and bounding up to meet her.

  But there was no one there at all; there was no one in the house until safe moments later, and by that time Sarah had the rolls in and was closing the oven door. Evelyn, coming in ahead of the others, thanked her volubly, tasted the chowder and began dropping things into it. Sarah was speechless, even when Evelyn said chattily, “What would you say to a few cloves?”

  Whatever had been painted out of Milo’s portrait, or painted in and then obliterated, had occupied a space behind and a little above Nina Trafton’s head.

  x

  PECK DID NOT COME the next morning, although the chicken house and pheasant pens awaited their regular Saturday cleaning. Sarah suspected that Bess was glad, in spite of the extra work it meant; it gave her a chance to demonstrate that farm life was not all a matter of open fires and pristine snow and beautiful idle birds.

  She said crossly, “How that man does drink, and always the night before you need him most. I don’t wonder that Hopkins fired him,” but the grumble was unconvincing. She made a great play of getting into her outdoor clothes, bundling up, Sarah thought interestedly, as though she were setting out for Little America instead of twenty yards beyond the barn. The heavy boots and gauntleted gloves and woolen scarf were all intended to say, “This is what you’d have to do all winter if you lived here, and how would you like that?”

  Milo had assessed the situation early and disappeared. To the dentist, he said; he was unruffled by Hunter’s dry compliment on his bravery in having stood such a painful tooth all the day before. Sarah said after breakfast, “Isn’t there something I can help with? Can I carry in the pheasants’ water jugs, or bring out feed?”

  Bess cast a significant glance at her lilac tweed suit. “Now, Sarah. Hardly.”

  “I have an old coat here,” said Sarah suddenly, remembering it for the first time. “A raincoat I used to leave for weekends. If someone has a pair of boots I could borrow—”

  Her feet were instantly assessed, with unflatteringly doubtful glances. Hunter said without a trace of a smile, “If you really want to go out, and you wear some heavy socks under them, I have a pair that might stay on you.”

  “Coat?” said Bess blankly. “Where, Sarah?”

  “Upstairs in the guest room closet. Don’t bother, I’ll get it; I have to go up anyway.”

  “But there’s all that furniture in the way. Hunter—”

  He had already gone. Bess said briskly, “Better have some more coffee while it’s hot, Sarah,” and Sarah said with equal briskness, “I’d love some when I come down,” and walked rapidly through the dining room and up the little back stair. Quick as she was, Hunter had been quicker. When she shot back the bolt on her side of the guest room door and opened it as though she would save him the trouble of looking for the coat, he was standing at the closed closet door with it over his arm.

  It was a very old raincoat, badly in need of cleaning, and the sight of it gave her an unexpected pang; she had worn it last on that final weekend here with Charles. A petal of green silk scarf escaped from one pocket, and he had said that the color of it made her eyes as green as leaves.

  Her face must have altered, because Hunter, toweringly tall and restless in this enclosed place, took an abrupt step toward her. “Sarah—?”

  Bess’s voice reached crisply up the stairs. “Hunter? Did you find Sarah’s coat?”

  Hunter looked goaded and annoyed at his mother for the first time since Sarah had met him. He called back that he had and she waited, but if there had been a moment when he was going to tell her something it was gone.

  For some reason, perhaps because he had always kept so brusquely to himself, Sarah had never thought of Hunter as a source of information. It had come as a shock to her that he knew, from that unexpected question in the car, exactly what she was about here. Charles had never said much about him, but she had put that down to the fact that men took each other more for granted than women did, or perhaps there just wasn’t much to say. Now she wondered.

  Bess was at the far side of the barn, collecting quail eggs like a croupier from the tiered cages that were built shallow so that the quail, who flew straight up at the slightest alarm, could not gain enough momentum to knock themselves senseless. She said over her shoulder that she had put the feeders in the stable; Sarah could fill those with turkey pellets and, in this cold, add a sprinkle of corn. Bess herself would replace the feeders; she didn’t trust the Silver with strangers, or even the Reeves.

  Reeves. . .

  Sarah took her time with the turkey pellets, examining these three enclosed pens with a more careful eye than before. They had originally been stalls, and the small windows high up under the slanting roof left the rear part in shadow except for the white snow-light that streamed through the small exists to the outside runs. At the moment, the only tenant in occupancy was the mild ungainly Silver hen, hiding from her warlike mate and listening hopefully to the rattle of the turkey pellets.

  Bess had stood the water-holders in a row to be thawed at leisure as the pheasants would eat the fresh-fallen snow. With the feeders also out, the pens were empty except for the Reeves’; this held a propped hickory branch where they could roost and dispose their sweeping tails without damage. That left only the long, narrow nesting boxes and the litter covering the planked floor, but the nesting boxes were cleaned regularly and the litter swept out and replaced from the bale in the corner. So that whatever Charles had thought was here—the thing so important that he had broken a self-imposed rule by writing a private memo in his office engagement book—could hardly be here any longer.

  Or could it? Was it coincidence that two of the three names had been the doubtful-tempered breeds which Bess insisted on caring for herself? The illegibly crossed-out name might have been Amherst or Copper; on the other hand it might have been Silver, which would confine his interest to the stable area.

  What had Hunter said about the Silvers in the car driving home? “A tremendous wing span, and spurs like knives . . . Long John had lost his bit.”

  How big Long John was, three times the size of the Amherst cock, twice the size of the Reeves. The Manchurians seemed to wear their weight comfortably; Long John’s was all power and alertness. Sarah’s eye left him and went probingly around the stable. There was a medicine cabinet nailed to the wall above the bale of litter, and it held surprisingly human remedies: Argyrol, alcohol, sterile cotton, a tube of antiseptic, cod-liver oil, antibiotic tablets.

  “It’s pretty much kill or cure with pheasants,” said Bess’s even voice directly behind her. “We’ve been quite lucky so far, nothing more than a frozen toe or an infected eye now and then. Thanks for doing the feeders, but hadn’t you better go in and warm up? You look frozen yourself.”

  Sarah wasn’t frozen, only unaccountably chilled at that brisk reasonable “kill or cure.” In the corner behind the bale of litter stood Milo’s mink-killing stick, business end up; from nowhere came the horrifying thought that if this were summer that darkened spot on the wood would have been clotted with flies. The mink’s body had disappeared . . . and where was Peck?

  (“People like Peck have no rules, and they think we’re suckers because we have.” That was Rob Clemence’s voice in a short sharp indictment, with Bess’s emerging after it: “. . . what would yo
u have done?”)

  “I think I will go in and get some coffee,” said Sarah; she had begun, actively, to shiver. “Won’t you, too, or can I bring you out some?”

  “Oh, no. I’m used to this, but then,” said Bess, delicately triumphant, “after all these years I ought to be.”

  In the kitchen, so spotlessly cleaned after breakfast that not so much as a spoon showed, Evelyn said sufferingly, “Oh, no trouble at all. I’ll just—” and began to assemble an army of implements.

  Sarah glanced into one of the flung-open cabinets. “Isn’t that instant coffee?” Over Evelyn’s protests and insistent taking-apart of the newly washed percolator she put on water to boil and spooned the powdered coffee into a cup. She said while she waited, “Does Peck do this often?”

  Evelyn, putting the percolator away again, dropped the glass top with a clatter. She said, “Oh dear. Milo says he’s always waiting for the day when I’ll be all fingers. Yes, Peck’s done it before; that’s why he lost his job at the mink farm. The trouble is that about once a month he seems to—” Evelyn flexed her blue gaze at Sarah, preparing the way for a witticism “—drink up his pay.”

  “But then doesn’t somebody call to say he isn’t coming?”

  “His wife does and says he has a touch of flu. Milo says that’s short for under the influence.”

  “Milo is certainly droll,” said Sarah, watching with wonderment Milo’s daily victim. “Such a quick tongue. Did Peck’s wife call this morning?”

  “She must have,” said Evelyn practically. “Or maybe he didn’t even come home and she thinks he’s here. You can’t tell with people like that, can you?”

  “People like that.” “People like Peck.” Peck was employed by the Gideons, then, out of the direst necessity. Knowing Bess, Sarah could not quite swallow Evelyn’s earlier suggestion of philanthropy because Charles had been sorry for the man. Kill or cure was Bess’s nutshell philosophy, and there was no room for faltering or sentiment. Somehow, Peck had been in a position to force the Gideons to hire him when he was released from jail.