“Maybe it is, David." She pauses. "I feel happy when I’m with him. I think that’s important." David nods. "If you’re happy, then so am I," he says and, he realizes with surprise, it’s true.
She smiles. "You’ll meet him tonight, David. I’m having both of you over for dinner."
K
aren Duffy could not believe that Christian had simply left the house. When would he return?
Would
he return? But that was silly. Of course he would. Why would she even ask the question?
She didn’t know what to do. She was worried about him, worried about his irrational behavior in the past few days—in reality, ever since David’s apparent suicide attempt. But she did not like being in his house. In point of fact, she did not like being with him anymore. She did it only out of respect for the idea of love that had developed between them.
Perhaps that’s all it was. An idea. Something they had cultivated because it was something that was easy to cultivate.
She had known him for several years. Why now, only in the past few weeks, had she "discovered" that she loved him? Perhaps something inside her was playing a kind of easy and convenient game, both with her and with him—with both of them.
But where was he now? And why had he so desperately needed to go after David?
~ * ~
"We must ask important questions," the tall, apparently middle-aged woman exhorted the crowd before her. Her long dark hair, touched by gray at the temples, shown in the light. Her blue eyes were wide with excitement and wonder. "We must ask about
bone structure, tea leaves, disco, whole life, mini-buses, catsup, napkin rings, toilet articles, pinkie rings, Meerschaums, etiquette, rose, talking boards,
hauntings
, love signs
. All of these have come to me in dreams. The dreams can tell us much, if only we know how to interpret them.”
An apparently young man in the crowd called out, "But these dreams don’t mean anything. They’re just . . . images in the head. And these words, which we’ve all heard, I think, are only whispers in the dark." There was no sarcasm or chastisement in his tone. He was making a simple statement of fact, as he saw it.
The woman said, shaking her head, "No. I think they’re as important as . . ." She paused, then continued, "Somehow, I believe that they’re as important as the darkness that interrupts the day."
A few in the crowd, shaking their heads in bewilderment, moved off toward the lush green forest nearby. There had always been people who talked the way this woman was talking, and there always would be. It did not affect the way things were. Things were as they were for reasons that no one could understand. The darkness interrupted the day for its own reasons. Words came to them all in dreams for unfathomable reasons (reasons, perhaps, that only the Creator could understand). Talking about it was a futile gesture. Better to keep moving.
"I’ve heard these words in dreams," the woman reiterated, as if to underscore their importance. But it was a pronouncement that others had made. "
I have heard these words in dreams—words like
Mousketeer
, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, and New Deal, laissez-faire, steam calliope
." Nothing had ever been found in the words, or in the dreams that spawned them, that bore significance, although there had always been those, like this woman, who argued that their significance lay in what was to come, in the existence that followed this existence.
So some who were listening wandered off into the forest nearby, because they had heard many others make pronouncements such as she was making.
David, who was standing just inside the perimeter of the forest, could not hear her. He heard only a high-pitched humming sound, like a distant hive of bees.
But he could see the woman clearly. She was on a small rise; he could see the crowd around her, and those that had turned away and were walking toward him, toward the forest.
The people in the crowd and the people walking toward him were dressed in many ways—some in hoopskirts, some in jeans and T-shirts, some in garish Bermuda shorts, a few in suits. And their faces were masked in shadow. He saw only the suggestion of faces beneath, as if he were looking at these faces through dark water.
The day was bright and cloudless.
There was a frenzy of light at the horizon, as if the sun were shining through thick, moving, and imperfect glass.
Around him, there were the commingled sounds of animals, though he heard only the high-pitched humming sound he had heard since the tunnel had pulled him here.
And he was very frightened. More frightened, even, than he would have been at the prospect of his own death. Because he was in a place whose sounds he could not hear, and the people in it had faces that he could not see.
And he could not feel the tug of gravity from below.
And the patchwork landscape was the soft landscape of a dream.
And the breezes caressed his face too strongly, as if intending to redo it and make it into someone else’s.
And the tall grasses clutched at his bare feet like hands reaching for him from the earth beneath.
And though he asked himself again and again,
Where am I?
, he had no answer.
~ * ~
Fred Collins wondered where he would look first. Because all of the official looking had been done, and it had been incredibly thorough. Everything in the house, the house that had kept Anne Case company in the last ten years of her short and painful life, had been catalogued and investigated and compared. Cupboards and drawers had been looked into and then looked into again; even the shelf paper had been taken up. Acoustical ceilings in the kitchen and dining room had been dismantled and then put back together. The five chests of drawers in the house had been stripped of their contents and examined thoroughly. A grandfather clock on the first floor had been denuded of its working parts, and then reassembled; though, after that, it no longer kept time. The rugs had been looked under, and the closets peered into a half dozen times; clothes—blouses, pants, dresses, underwear, bras—had been handled by first one investigator, then another, and yet another. The pocket of a blouse had yielded what looked to be the beginnings of a letter, but there had been no salutation, only the words, in pencil, on a yellow legal pad:
There is a monster in the house. It comes to me at night and mocks me
. The legal pad itself had not been found. The three wastebaskets in the house had been empty.
So, whatever secrets Anne Case had that might have helped in the investigation of her murder were secrets that had not been unearthed in the thorough search of her house.
No letters. No poetry. (Though her brother, David, had said that she wrote poetry; it was possible, Collins thought, that she destroyed whatever she wrote, thinking it unworthy even of saving. The idea seemed farfetched. People who wrote were, he guessed, people who usually saved what they wrote. Wasn’t that part and parcel of the process of writing?) And there had been nothing hidden in books, nothing in the attic except the usual attic accumulations of an old house which had supported an old family; accumulations (a dollhouse, a rocking horse, trunks filled with useless clothing, postcards—circa 1940—a clothes tree, a battered oak armoire) which had yielded nothing to the investigation. The house had been clean. Or, as Collins had thought more than once, it had been
cleaned
. That was an idea which was shared not only by Leo Kenner, but by the homicide captain, as well, and by the forensics people who had gone through the house.
The only fingerprints in the house had been Anne’s. Partials of another person’s fingerprints—found in the third floor ballroom—had been useless.
Investigation of carpet fibers had shown that the only dirt imbedded in the rugs was dirt that had probably come from just outside the house, where Anne kept her garden.
Foodstuffs in the refrigerator and the cupboards—indicative of Anne’s vegetarianism—had shown no hint that she had been entertaining someone, or planned to.
The house had been clean.
Cleaned
.
And that was certainly not the act of someone who later confesses, and then commits suicide, Collins told himself. Cleaning the house so very thoroughly was the product of brutal calculation. Brian Fisher had been a man possessed by his passions, a man clearly and deeply in love with Anne Case.
Collins sighed. If it was all true, then so what? Where did it take him? Only here. Back to the house. Back to Anne Case’s house.
He closed the door behind him, flicked the light switch. No lights came on. He tried the switch again. "Dammit!" he breathed. He crossed the short hall to the expansive living room and tried the switch there. The crystal ceiling fixture stayed dark. The room held the soft, yellowish glow of late afternoon sunlight filtered through windows in the west wall of the house.
There were several heavy, functional-looking pieces here—a red couch, a blue upholstered wing chair, walnut bookcases brimming with books against one wall. The floor was bare, random-width pine.
Collins stepped into the living room. He hesitated.
He could feel Anne in here. Not her spirit, but the substance of her that she had left behind. It was gentle and probing; and there was humor in it, too. He liked that. He could hear her soft, pleasant laughter ringing through the house.
He said, "Who did you let in to this house, Anne?" The room darkened slightly as clouds passed in front of the sun. Then it lightened.
He went to the phone on a small dark table next to the couch, dialed Information, got the number of the local electric utility company. He dialed the number.
Five minutes later, he had learned that Anne Case, at 115 Troy Road, had not paid her bill, so the electricity and the gas had been turned off the day before.
He hung up. He could try to get it turned on under a police order. But for now he was content merely to be here, in her house, inhaling the substance and fragrance of her, being
with
her, being a part of her existence, which continued. Of course. Continued in her house; her
things
continued it. And there was nothing metaphysical about that. Nothing mystical. People became their
things
—their homes, their belongings, their clothing, their furniture. Their letters. Their poetry.
"Hello, Anne," he said. It was not the first time he had said hello to her, but it was the first time that he had been so aware of it, and so embarrassed by it, as if someone were watching. He repeated it, as if that would negate his embarrassment, as if the very
fact
of his words would overcome his growing consciousness of them.
"Hello, Anne."
The sound of his voice was lost in the big, darkening room; the heavy furniture soaked it up, the bare floors threw a whisper in echo back to him, as if it were an afterthought.
"Hello, Anne."
"Hello, Anne."
Dammit, who murdered you?
But there was no small answering echo to that question.
"Who murdered you, Anne?" he whispered. He barely heard himself.
"Who in hell murdered you?" he said aloud. The sound of his voice whispering back from the big room unnerved him. He wished suddenly that the lights were working, that there was more than the dying light of late afternoon here.
"Talk to me, Anne," he pleaded.
But he knew that she was beyond that. Only the Anne that existed in his brain talked to him.
D
avid put his hand on the shoulder of a woman with long, black hair. The woman stopped walking and turned her face toward him. He tried hard to peer through the darkness there, around her face. He saw the suggestion of lips, the glimmer of eyes turned questioningly toward him. But perhaps this, he told himself, was only what he thought he
should
see, as if he were looking at a cartoon face that was minus one or more of its parts—the mind fills in the missing parts.