The Dream Walker Page 14

  “Of course,” Kent said, “we want to please you. Don’t we, Ollie?” And Kent went away.

  I thought it was feeble persiflage, chatter, nothing. What they were really saying to each other, I didn’t hear. I can hear it now.

  HE: It will be over soon.

  SHE: Yes.

  HE: Ten days from now.

  SHE: I know. I remember.

  HE: Then you will be rewarded.

  SHE: I expect to be.

  HE: I expect to pay.

  SHE: I know the date.

  HE: Don’t fail. No lemons wanted.

  SHE: Just be ready with the sugar, the money.

  He agreed. And I sat by, her old friend who knew her well, and asked her when he had gone if she really thought of leaving the country. She said she had really thought of it. She said she was weary of all the public uproar. It occurred to me to wonder how she could afford it. But that was all.

  So time dragged on, ten more days of it. And it was a dreadful time. Hard-headed investigators, of course, took no stock in the supernatural. But they could not find Darlene although hundreds of women with noses anything like Cora’s had been crucified for a day. And now the gags began. Wisecrackers called Darlene Hite a white herring. Marcus was being red-washed, some said. And this frothy stuff hurt him and cheapened him, and broke my heart.

  Worse, of course. The envelope had been in Marcus’ house, and none could explain who had put it there or how. Unless it had been handed to Marcus in the park, where Raymond Pankerman had been, at the right time. No one could explain how, if Pankerman was behind it all, how … how … how could Cora Steffani in New York know what she had known.

  … What Dr. Barron would say on a given afternoon in Colorado … the look of the book that Marcus owned … and always the dead man in the ferns … that hardy haunt would rise.

  Even so, I didn’t know how bad it was for Marcus until the day Charley Ives came back, the twentieth of May, and met me in the little snack bar at the hospital.

  If Marcus went to the park, Charley told me, knots of people tended to gather. They would keep their distance but they stared without pleasure, uneasy, doubtful, hideously curious. That was the public. Marcus no longer went, every day, to the park.

  What was happening to him privately, Charley said, was hard to define, impossible to prevent. A thing as uncapturable as a breeze. The withdrawing of respect and confidence. Softly, without proclamation, people withdrew. They did not cry angry disillusion or even cut him dead. But it was not the same anymore. Secrets were not spilled out to him in perfect flow. Problems were not opened before him, pro and con, in full detail. His advice was not asked for. His store of wisdom and experience was not drawn upon, but rested, unused, unregarded. Charley said it was a spiritual punishment that could kill a man. So Marcus read a lot, kept by himself. Those of his household, Charley said, were in an agony of surface cheer and helpless grief.

  Well (although because I am so much smaller, it only happened to me in a smaller way), I knew what it was. From me, also, people drew away. They did not understand me. (At the hospital so much, with this freak of a woman. Did I believe in her supernatural powers? An educated modern person like me? Or did I know something?) They shunned me for an unknown quantity or despised me for a traitor to Marcus. Washed their clean hands of someone so freakish and incomprehensible. Oh, I felt it. It hurt. How precious a thing it is to meet everywhere an assumption that you are most probably decent and normally intelligent. If this is lost, you are left in the loneliest kind of place, a world without any fellows where you find no peers and don’t belong.

  Charley himself was clearly in anguish over Marcus. He said he wished he could figure out how to put Cora over some kind of rack and wring the truth out of her. But he said ruefully that racks don’t wring truth, unfortunately.

  I said regretfully that I, in my part, wasn’t getting anywhere. I said she used me gladly, even cynically. But she would never confide in me.

  “Just the same,” he said, “try to hang on and stick to it, coz. May help us yet. We never know what’ll help.”

  “Oh, I agree,” I said. “And nothing matters now but to help Marcus.”

  He looked at me with a tiny curl of the old teasing light in his eye. “What, nothing?” said he.

  “Nothing at all,” said I.

  And I thought to myself, someday, somehow, I may find the role for me, the one I can play-act for Cora Steffani that will strike close to the bone and shake her heart and upset her defenses. I will find the rack on which to stretch her.

  Bud Gray came in. We looked at him hopefully.

  “That Darlene,” he said, gloomily, climbing on a stool at my other side. “She’s the clever one. I sure could use a dame who knows how to get invisible the way she does.”

  “What would you do with her?” I asked idly.

  “Use her in my business. Have her steal the papers … out of the black portfolios of the bearded strangers,” said Bud in bitter jest. “And then vanish.”

  “Charley, my boy,” I said suddenly, “speaking of stealing, what on earth did you think I ever stole from you?”

  “Photograph,” he said absently, “from my dresser.”

  “Oh?” I said, stunned. “That?”

  “I’d have given it to you,” he chided gently, “if I’d known it offended you. No matter.” (His mind wasn’t really on me. It shouldn’t have been … I knew that.) I asked no more questions.

  Why he’d had my picture there, I’d never know. But I was thinking that Cora must have stolen it and taken it away. But why? Because she was jealous? Jealous of me and Charley Ives? How could that be? But of course she was. She had let that out. “Cousin … Teacher.” It was possible. After all, I had thought he cared for her and was drifting back to her. Although he did not and was not, or so he contended. She could have made the mistake the other way around. We were a triangle without a base, Cora and Charley Ives and I. Jealousy. Well then, thought I excitedly, how can I use it? Small … human and small … but such a thing as jealousy, compound of love and hate, that moves the blood. How could I fit it into a role?

  The girl back of the counter said, “Aren’t you Olivia Hudson? Dr. Harper wants you. Room 862. Right away.”

  “Oh?”

  “He says Miss Steffani has gone into a trance.” She rolled her eyes.

  We flew for the elevator.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On the afternoon of the twentieth of May (ten days after Kent Shaw’s visit), Cora went through her trance performance for the sixth time. It was much like the rest. At four after 3:00 P.M., she opened her eyes and told us where she had been walking.

  On a golf course, she said, that lay high on a headland projected into water. She had been wearing her dark red jacket, a gray skirt, and a gray-and-red paisley scarf around her neck. She had spoken, this time, to a golfer, an elderly man with a pure white mustache and slanted white eyebrows. “But it can’t be real,” she whimpered, clutching the black silk collar of her Chinese jacket. “There is no such thing as a red golf ball.”

  “What did you say to the man?” asked Gray with quiet intensity.

  She had said her usual lines. Where am I? and so on. She threw in the usual flat statement that she had felt afraid.

  “Where was this?” asked Charley Ives softly.

  Why, she had been in Maine. Where in Maine? Castine.

  At this word, Charley Ives and Bud Gray oozed out of the room. I think Cora was shocked to see them so swiftly slip away. She was about ready to go into the weeping part, the hysteria, and she cried my name for a beginning. But her performance had become a most superficial reading. I thought she was working against a certain lassitude. But I didn’t intend to stay for the aftermath.

  I said shrilly, “Can’t she have a sedative, Doctor? Don’t let her suffer. Stop this, can’t you?”

  “Don’t leave me, Ollie.…” Her wail was mechanical.

  “I can’t stay in this room,” I said to the docto
r. “It scares me.…”

  I must have given a good performance because he responded helpfully, snapping, “Better go put your head down.”

  So I ran out of there. I ran in the corridor. I jittered in the elevator. I raced across the green carpet in the lobby. I was about to hurl myself through the revolving door when Charley and Bud came along behind me. I found myself flying through the door in my own compartment as if I were a badminton bird.

  “You can’t come,” said Charley sternly in the street, but I scrambled into Bud’s car with them, just the same. They had no time to argue with me. Any hope of catching Darlene Hite lay in speed, of course, so the car roared northward, to where the amphibian and its pilot waited at a small airport in Westchester. Now flying is no gypsy business, any more. But Charley and Bud had certain mysterious connections upon which I did not spy. (They had, for instance, a way to get in touch with each other through some third relay station.) Through this channel they could and did insert our sudden purpose into regulated patterns. They arranged permission to land on water, as they had foreseen might be the way to come down closest to an unknown destination.

  Yet it had taken us more than an hour to become airborne and the amphibian was no jet. We would not get to Maine for hours more.

  Yes, we. Oh, they hadn’t got rid of me. It was a four-place plane. There was room. I was stubborn.

  Once we were sitting still in the sky watching time turn, the flurry died and we caught our breaths. Charley said, “Cousin Ollie, why didn’t you stay with her?”

  “She wouldn’t have said anything helpful. She just goes into a silence. You know how she does. I’ll bet you one thing. This is the last stunt. She was let down, and relieved too. I think her dream-walking is all over.”

  “Could be,” Bud agreed. “But Maine’s too far. We’re not going to make it, kids. This will be what is known as a wild goose chase.” He stretched his legs as far as he could and sighed. His nice undistinguished face was soberly unhopeful.

  “Be thankful it isn’t Arizona,” said Charley Ives. “And if it’s our last chance, all the more reason for taking it.”

  “Darlene’s too smart,” Bud said. “She’s not going to hang around.”

  Charley had himself draped with radio connections. “If the police get her, we’ll hear,” he told us.

  “The police in Castine?” said I. It seemed they had phoned, downstairs in the hospital. “Why, they will.” My hope revived. “Castine’s not a big place and out on a point of land the way it is.… I’ve been there.”

  Gray was wagging his head negatively.

  “If they don’t,” I asked, “what shall we do?”

  “Beginning to wonder,” said Charley grimly.

  “Talk to this golfer, whoever he is?”

  “Not a lot of use. He’ll only confirm, like all the rest.”

  Gray roused himself somewhat. “You know, I wonder why they take the risk. Darlene, for instance, is certainly smart enough to know damn well the risk of getting caught gets greater every time and it’s about maximum right now. Could be in the contract, of course, that she gets no pay until the finish of the series. Must be some such motive.”

  “It may be in the contract, exactly so,” said Charley. “Cora took the risk, didn’t she? We’ll come down on water, close to the middle of town. And Ollie, I don’t know what to do with you.” I felt like excess baggage. “You shouldn’t be seen. You’re known. Picture in the papers. Darlene Hite would recognize you.”

  “You, too, Charley, my boy,” said I.

  “Not me, though,” said Bud with relish. “So I’m the one to track down Darlene Hite.” All along he’d been keenly interested in this name.

  “Suppose I go see this golfer,” said Charley nobly. “Pick up what I can and no harm done. But Ollie, how you can lie low I do not know because we’ll fly in about as secretly as a zeppelin. Better tag along with me. What are you doing here, anyhow?” Charley was exasperated.

  “I know more about Darlene Hite than either of you,” said I. “She won’t answer her official description, for goodness’ sakes. But I know things about her she may not trouble to conceal. Her walk, her hands, way she holds her head.…” They looked at me kindly, with only a little pity. “You may take no stock in my methods, my dear Watsons,” said I, “but I do.”

  “Well,” drawled Charley, “we can’t throw you out.”

  “This hope’s so damn forlorn,” Bud said, meaning to be sweet to me, “let Ollie try.”

  “By the way, boys,” said I briskly, “amateur though I am, may I ask if it’s discreet to be seen chatting cozily in that snack bar? Cora’s probably getting full reports on the hospital grapevine. I betcha the betting’s about even among the help as to which side I’m spying on. How can I make her believe I am an ally when I’m hobnobbing with the enemy downstairs?”

  “She’s right,” Bud said. He was smiling.

  Charley said, “Forlorn hope. You can never fool Cora.” He grinned and I could have slapped him. “I doubt if you could fool anybody, coz. You’ve got a certain transparency, and I’m not being derogatory.”

  “That chap, Shaw, said it pretty well,” Bud put in. “A dedicated person, honest as the sun.”

  “Oh, pish tush!” I cried. “Little do you reck, Charley, my boy.”

  “Now, she’s offended. There’s a female for you,” Bud chuckled. “Tell a lady she shines with integrity. What happens? She’s just annoyed. You’ve maligned her femininity.” He was teasing. His nice face smiled upon me fondly. Charley was silent in a thunderous kind of way.

  “You forget,” I said in a thin aloof voice. “I am not only female, but I teach the art of make-believe.”

  Charley murmured, “For the Lord’s sweet sake, let’s not get into that.”

  “Marcus,” said I. We shut our mouths, both of us.

  Bud Gray’s thoughts went back to the job. “If I can only just cross, just once, the trail of Darlene Hite, and dig up the slightest indication to go on, I’ll guarantee I’ll track her.” Now he seemed to be taking, if not hope, at least resolution. He and Charley began to discuss methods, how to inquire of places of lodging, depots of transportation, what ways there were to find a moving person. They were all-policemen.

  I suppose we made very good time indeed. It was too slow. By six we were still two hours away from Castine. The radio spoke to Charley. Round and about, through channels, the news was sent. Police in Castine knew of a man who actually used red golf balls. A certain Judge Ellsworth. They had gone to the golf course atop the hill and found him playing there. No incident. Nothing had happened there at three o’clock that afternoon. Nothing at all.

  “A failure!” cried Bud Gray. “Darlene defaulted. Too smart, like I said. Bet she’s a thousand miles away from Castine now.” He was completely deflated suddenly.

  “Proves they are faked,” I suggested feebly, “doesn’t it, Charley?”

  Charley was in touch with New York. He wrestled with the air waves for twenty minutes. Meanwhile, the plane droned ahead and Bud and I looked bleakly at the subtly failing light.

  Charley wrenched at his gear. “It’s out,” he said angrily. “Through people in the hospital. Sensation,” he stated bitterly.

  Bud said, “What now?”

  “We aren’t far.… Shall we go on?”

  “Let’s go on,” I urged. I couldn’t bear to think of turning back into the seething, the publicity. “Suppose this Judge Ellsworth is ducking, just not admitting—I wouldn’t blame him. It’s been ghastly for the people like Jo Crain. There may be something we can find out.”

  Nobody told the pilot to change the course. We flew on. We were peering ahead for the magnificence of Penobscot Bay when the radio spoke again.

  “What!” yelped Charley. Bud and I nearly climbed into the earphones with him. Charley lit up with energy and surprise. “Here’s a twist for us! The incident happened!”

  “Happened? Did the judge admit …?”

  “The judge repor
ted to the police at five twenty. Woman stopped him … but it happened at five o’clock!”

  “Five! Not three, but five! Two hours late!”

  “Golfing! At five P.M.?”

  “The old chap lives the other side of the course and plays his way home to dinner,” said Charley.

  “Slip up?” Bud Gray looked as if he would here and now jump the rest of the way.

  But we knew, whatever it was, it gave us a chance, it cut down the margin.

  “She did it,” cried Bud. “Darlene Hite. She is there.” He yearned at the horizon.

  Dusk was creeping in at the day’s edges as we came down on the stretch of water inlet from Penobscot Bay that (and for the life of me, I’ll never understand why) they call the Bagaduce River. We were certainly not inconspicuous. A boat, divorced from the shore by sheer curiosity, came out and fetched us. So we stepped up on the dock at the base of the center of town. Charley Ives loped off, straight up the hill. Bud Gray started for the police station. I pulled my dark tweed coat close in the sharp air. I’d found a scarf in my pocket and tied it around my head. I walked away from the boatman’s stare. Suddenly, all alone.

  Ah, but that town is an enchanted town. Castine. Time and space conspire to give it distinction. But the long fascination of its history, the magnificence of its situation, do not entirely account for the enchantment. I knew Castine.

  I turned to my left on the street at the base of the hill, thinking to myself that I had my methods. There is a store. I don’t suppose any tourist ever missed it. I knew no better place to begin to look for someone who might have seen Darlene Hite. I doubted if much escaped Miss Beth, for all her professional pose of vague sweetness.

  Miss Beth’s Variety Store is distinguished for being a place of confusion and disorder. I’ve exchanged notes with people who, years after, tell about finding a box of chocolates among the overshoes, or a string of beads under a frying pan, or woolen socks in a glass lamp chimney. I bought a blue silk nightgown there, I think because I found it in a keg of copper paper clips. The entire store is a place where the customers root happily for hours among the wares, stirring them (with no protest from Miss Beth) into even more startling juxtapositions. I don’t know how Miss Beth stumbled into her peculiar way of shopkeeping, but I’m sure she is shrewd enough to know its charm and never change. Something is answered there, some vacationing rebellion against classification and discipline. Some feeling for luck unearned. The place is always crowded with people digging and hunting and uttering cries. There, everything one buys has been discovered, like treasure.