The Rules of Dreaming (14 page)

Chapter
14

The night before his world would change forever, Dubin stared at the TV screen surrounded by a mob of football fans whose beery excitement buoyed him in his own desperate anonymity.  It wasn’t his usual bar but he was sipping his usual drink and thinking his usual thoughts, and the more he thought the more he wanted to drink.  What had he been doing for the past couple of months?  Chasing a story that had no beginning, no middle and no end, a story that made no sense even to the people it was supposed to be about.  He told himself he was only in it for the money—but that wasn’t true and he knew it.  He was in it for the story, just as he’d been back in his days as a journalist.  And even then he couldn’t resist the temptation to delve into the story a little deeper than necessary, even to start making it up if he couldn’t get all the pieces to fit together.  The missing Offenbach manuscript—that was something he’d made up, wasn’t it?  And now people were talking about it, acting on it, weaving it into the plot, as if it really existed.  He had to be careful.

As always it was the women he had to be most careful about.  The librarian had turned against him and that was a bad sign—she was like a Greek chorus, knowing all, predicting all, ultimately judging all.  And his new friend Nicole—what was he to make of her?  She was beautiful and young and brilliant and probably as mad as a hatter, with enough crackbrained ideas to send his story into post-modernist hell and ruin his chances of success as a blackmailer. Yet he found her hauntingly attractive and he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay away from her.  Susan Morgan?   She was as alluring and dangerous as thin ice glistening on a pond.  He knew he couldn’t trust her and she knew she couldn’t trust him and in that mutual distrust they’d found a common bond.  Obviously she wanted to sleep with him and just as obviously he was determined to resist.  He still hadn’t cashed her $5,000 check and he probably never would.  She’d left him several messages, and the next morning when Avery Morgan was out of town he’d visit her again and go upstairs to take another look at Maria Morgan’s studio and then he’d leave without giving her what she wanted.  But none of this mattered to Dubin as he knocked down his third Grey Goose martini and thought about going home to bed.  It wasn’t Susan Morgan, or Nicole either, who troubled his dreams.  Of all the women he’d met in the past two months, the one he had to try to forget wasn’t Nicole or Susan, it was poor old Mrs. Paterson, whose frightened face he could still see peering out from under her umbrella as he dogged her steps up to the post office peppering her with questions.  It made him think of his mother, who had suffered for months before she died.  There was sadness and pain enough for ten lifetimes in that face, and he’d become one of her tormentors.

Susan Morgan stood at the top of the stairs watching Dubin impatiently as he inspected
Maria Morgan’s studio as if for the first time.  “Haven’t I seen this movie before?”

“Not exactly.”

“No.  Last time it was enlivened by witty dialogue.”  She turned away to gaze out the window at the bare crazed trees around the duck pond.  “Are you looking for something?”

“Not exactly.”

“I’m going downstairs.”

Dubin spent another ten minutes checking the contents of the room against the list he’d copied from Frank Lynch’s files.  He checked every knick-knack, every book title, every poster.  There were only three things missing—a publicity photo of
Maria Morgan, a kaleidoscope, and a phonograph record and its jacket.  Just one out of dozens of records and CDs on the list, and that struck him as interesting.  He lifted the sheet that covered the old record player; the turntable was empty.  Plugging the record player into a wall socket, he saw that it still worked in spite of its battered condition.

Then looking across the room he noticed something he’d missed before: a little loft in the shadows at the far end, reachable by climbing a grid of boards arranged like steps on the wall.  He pulled himself up the ladder and peered in through the dim light.  The loft was about eight feet wide and filled almost entirely with a double mattress moldering beneath a wool blanket and a couple of dirty pillows.  The whole space was littered with soda cans, snack food bags, a scat
tering of tape cassettes and a Walkman whose battery had burst and leaked over one of the pillows.  If you didn’t mind crawling into that low berth you could lie there and watch everything that went on in the studio while you ate potato chips and drank Coke and listened to your own music—the tapes were all heavy metal and rap—instead of operas or whatever your mother was playing on the turntable, and if you were quiet maybe she wouldn’t even know you were there.  That’s what it was, Dubin realized as soon as he peered into that dusky space—a teenage hideout, known or unknown to Maria Morgan, apparently unknown to Frank Lynch, since there was nothing about it in his report.  Was it Hunter or Antonia? Dubin wondered.  Or maybe both?  Had they been eyewitnesses to their mother’s death?

Back downstairs, he brushed the dust off his clothes and decided not to mention it to Susan.  She smiled at him with a mixture of irony and vulnerability that told him the next move was up to him.  “Can I get you something to drink?”

“I’ve got to be going.”

“Is that a ‘no’?”

He turned around to wash his hands in the sink, and when he turned back around her smile had frosted over.  She stood with her arms crossed, anxious to get on with her life as Mrs. Avery Morgan.  There were charity balls to be planned, well-known names to be bandied about, contractors and caterers and tennis instructors to be abused or appeased as the occasion demanded.

The telephone rang and after she answered it she leaned over the sink as if she was going to vomit.  “What?  What do you mean?  Oh my God!  Avery’s not here.  No, he’s traveling.  I can’t reach him until his plane lands.”

She hung up and stood facing Dubin.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Mrs. Paterson hanged herself.”

“What?”

“She’s dead.  Mrs. Paterson’s dead.”

Susan was crying now, choking on her tears.  “She’s dead.  And—oh my God!  Hunter’s gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hunter’s gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“He
disappeared.  They can’t find him.”

 
II.  Julietta

Chapter
15

The morning death came to the Institute, like so many other unforgettable moments in my life, had an air
of unreality about it.  Time and the retelling have made it my own.  But on that dour November morning it all seemed to be happening to someone else.

The day began routinely enough.
Breakfast was served to ambulatory patients in the dining room beginning at 8:00 o’clock.  At that hour Mrs. Paterson would arrive with Hunter and Antonia and they’d help themselves to cereal and orange juice—cream of wheat and coffee for Mrs. Paterson—from the buffet.  But that morning they were late, which was so unusual that at first no one noticed it.  A little before 8:30 a nurse named Eileen made a joke about Mrs. Paterson oversleeping and went upstairs to look for her.  We didn’t hear a scream but what we heard was even worse: Eileen gagging on her tears as she staggered back into the dining room to say that Mrs. Paterson was dead.  I ran up to her room with some of the others, half-expecting a false alarm, and found the poor woman strung up to the light fixture like an old coat, still swinging from Eileen’s panicked touch.  Her eyes were wide open and when we took her down she was limp and heavy and cold.  I ran through the usual emergency procedures and noticed something surprising, even before I had any reason to think about it: her eyes were open but not popping out, her face wasn’t bloated or purple—in other words, she bore none of the signs of strangulation.  But there was no doubt she was dead.

I sent Julietta, the receptionist, who’d run upstairs with me from the dining room, back down to call the police and hospital security.  Then I went looking for the twins.  Antonia was sitting up in her bed, smiling patiently as she waited for Mrs. Paterson to rouse her for breakfast.  Hunter was nowhere to be found—not in
his room, not in the dining room or in the patient lounge where he spent so much of his time.  I met Gottlieb and we searched every room and ran back upstairs, where three security guards had gathered to wait for the police.  We told them that one of the patients was missing and they called out on their radio.  Then we went back to Hunter’s room and found that he’d taken his shoes and his jacket and a few odds and ends.

“Don’t touch anything,”
Gottlieb said.

“Why not?”

“How do you know Hunter didn’t kill her?”

I felt a little sick when I heard Gottlieb say that.  “This isn’t a joke.”

I headed back to Mrs. Paterson’s room and found Dr. Palmer, ashen-faced, his voice quivering as he conferred with the police.  There were two or three cops with their radios chattering, taping off the area as they helped the EMTs remove the body.  “I can’t understand why she would have done this,” Dr. Palmer told the officer in charge.  “We didn’t find a note.”

“Sometimes they don’t leave a note.”

“Especially when somebody else kills them,” Gottlieb said.

Dr. Palmer looked sick.
  “What are you talking about?”

“Did you examine the body?”

“No, I just got here.  Is there something I don’t know?”

The officer took a step forward and lowered his voice.  “I don’t want to prejudge the situation,” he said to Dr. Palmer, “but there’s evidence of a struggle.  The back of the victim’s head is bloody and her face doesn’t display the usual signs of strangulation.” 

“In other words,” Gottlieb said, “she was already dead when she hung herself.”

It was a shock to learn that Mrs. Paterson may have been murdered—and an even greater shock to realize that Hunter Morgan, suddenly on the loose after seven years, was the leading suspect.  Dr. Palmer was unable at first to accept the implications
of what the officer had told him.  “No,” he sputtered, visibly shaken, “this is not possible!  Hoffmann?  Did you hear this?”

“Let’s go down to your office,” I suggested. 

“That’s not a bad idea,” Gottlieb agreed.

We followed Dr. Palmer downstairs to his office and closed the door behind us.  I’m embarrassed to admit that we were all thinking more about Hunter—and about ourselves and our careers—than his victim.

“Do the police know that Hunter’s gone?” Dr. Palmer asked.

“We told security,” I said.  “I don’t know if they told the police.”

He reached for his phone and dialed security.  “Have you found Hunter Morgan yet?” he demanded.  “All right.  But you don’t need to involve the police.  He can’t be far.”

We each took a seat and watched each other unsteadily.  I felt almost sick to my stomach with the growing realization that I might have contributed to this disaster.  Gottlieb’s eyes darted between Dr. Palmer’s and mine, as if he was waiting for the right moment to strike.

Someone knocked on the door.  It was the police officer.  “I understand one of your patients is missing,” he said.  “Do you think he’s dangerous?”

“Hunter?” Dr. Palmer exclaimed.  “No, absolutely not.  He’s just a boy.”

“Have you got a picture of him?”

“Listen, you don’t need to worry about Hunter.  We’ll find him.  He’s probably still in the building.”

The officer looked to me for support but didn’t find any.  “Dr. Palmer,” he said.  “This woman didn’t kill herself.  She was murdered.”

“What does that have to do with Hunter?”

The officer turned and headed for the door.  “We’re putting out a bulletin on him.”

When the officer left, Dr. Palmer buried his face in his hands and we all sat trying to grasp the implications of what was
happening.  Finally Dr. Palmer looked up and said, “I’ve got to call Avery Morgan.”

He picked up the phone and dialed a familiar number.  Apparently Avery was not at home and he spoke with his wife.  “Avery’s traveling,” he said when he hung up.  “His wife can’t reach him until his plane lands.  In a way that’s good, because by then we’ll have Hunter back.”

“I hope you’re right,” Gottlieb said.

“He can’t be far.”  Dr. Palmer closed his eyes.  “God, I hope she can reach Avery.  I don’t want him to see this on the news.”

*   *   *

For Nicole the day began like any other, with two cups of coffee and a half hour of BBC news, which kept her remarkably well informed about Africa and the Middle East but serenely ignorant of anything that might touch her own life.  She lived in superstitious dread of distraction.  At that stage of work on her dissertation, anything—a stray phone call, a random meeting with a friend, a news story on the internet—could entice her away from her topic, or worse, set her research in a new direction, adding months, possibly years to the project.  Her encounter with Peter Bartolli at the library and the subsequent visit from Dubin had set her back a week or longer.  She’d spent two days on the internet reading recent scholarship on
The Tales of Hoffmann
and another day locating a video of the 1993 Lyon Opera production in which the characters are inmates in a lunatic asylum and Hoffmann degenerates into a psychopathic killer.  This, according to Dubin, wasn’t even the worst of it: there was a monstrous final Hoffmann who was so brutal and degraded that Offenbach, on his deathbed, had to smuggle his tale out of the house to keep it from being burned by his wife.  Before long, Offenbach would probably be a character in someone else’s fiction, composing further iterations of his masterpiece with a new and different Hoffmann in every one.  And so Hoffmann and Offenbach would recycle endlessly on the wheel of birth and rebirth that we call literature. 

That’s good,  Nicole thought.  The wheel of birth and rebirth that we call literature.  She wrote it in her notebook.

After lunch, which consisted of tuna fish and biscuits and a cup of tea—she was trying to lighten up on the coffee—Nicole decided to stroll down to the library for a chat with Miss Whipple.  It was a bright, crisp day and the walk put her in good spirits.  But the moment she stepped into the library her world changed, as if she’d slipped into darkness.  Her throat tightened, her breath faltered and she tasted the dizzying terror she would live with in the days to come.  All this from one glimpse of the librarian:  Ms. Whipple’s usually cheerful face, peering up grimly from behind her desk, was the face of death.   “Have you heard the news?”

Nicole tried to remember.  Was there something in the Middle East.  “What news?”

“About Mrs. Paterson.”

“Mrs. Paterson?”

“She was found hanged in her room at the Institute.  They’re saying it was suicide, but—”

“Suicide?”

“—I have my doubts.”

In fact Miss Whipple had more than doubts.  She was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the poor lady had been murdered.  “There’s no way it was suicide,” she went on.  “A sixty-year old single woman who spent all her spare time reading the Bible—what could have led her to commit suicide?”

“What could have led someone to murder her?”

The librarian’s face darkened again into a mask of death.  “There are things.  There are th
ings that could have happened.”

“There are?”

She nodded.  “Nicole, I want to ask a favor.”  She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a small manila envelope and handed it to Nicole.  “I want you to take this and keep it for me.”

“What’s in it?”

“Never mind what it is.  I don’t want you to open it.  But if anything happens I want you to have it.”

“If anything happens?  What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. After this, anything’s possible.”

*   *   *

I was amazed how quickly the police did their work and moved on.  After a couple of hours, apart from the yellow tape across the door to Mrs. Paterson’s room, you would hardly have known anything was amiss at the Institute.  Hunter was gone, of course, but the other patients—including his sister—required the usual attention.  The staff needed more than the usual attention, since it was one of their number who had died.  At that point they still thought it was suicide, that Hunter had fled in horror after discovering the body, and naturally I said nothing to imply the contrary.  But Julietta, the receptionist, who’d been with me when I found the body, seemed to have suspicions of her own.  She came from a rougher background than most of the people who worked there—it was rumored that she moonlighted as an exotic dancer or worse—and she proved to be surprisingly well informed about the forensic aspects of hanging.

“Mrs. Paterson didn’t look bloated or anything,” Julietta said.  “Her face wasn’t, like, puffed out or purple or anything.”

“That’s true,” I admitted, keeping my voice low.  I glanced around to make sure no one was watching us.  Under the circumstances I felt awkward, even a little guilty, chatting with Julietta in front of the reception desk during my afternoon break.  I told myself there was nothing to feel guilty about—we all needed something to take our minds off the horrors of that horrible day.  And at that moment in my life what I needed was sympathetic female companionship.  My relationship with Olympia was over.  She had fallen apart at the end of Hunter’s second past-life regression, or I should say in the middle of it, when Dr. Palmer burst in and interrupted the hypnosis, leaving Hunter somewhere back in the nineteenth century and Olympia writhing around on the floor in a trance.  I’d had a premonition of that catastrophe in one of my recurrent nightmares, in which I dreamed I was a patient of Dr. Palmer, who was explaining that Olympia was a symptom of my illness, not a cure.  For all her fragile beauty and her compulsive interest in sex, she wasn’t the woman of flesh and blood I needed and deserved.

Julietta, by contrast, was the real thing—a sensuous creature who knew how to attract and love a man, even a loser like Gottlieb.  A large mirror filled the wall behind her desk and another mirror hung on the wall across from it, creating the illusion that she ruled an infinite space in which her charms were endlessly replicated.  She slept with Gottlieb—everyone knew that—and it was a revolting thing to contemplate.  But even on that depressing day I found a certain excitement in the notion of beating Gottlieb at his own game, making him as jealous of me as I was of him.

“I hope you weren’t too upset when we found the body,” I said.

“Not really,” she said.  “I had a girlfriend who hung herself
in the locker room after Larry Barbato gave her a handful of downers.  She looked horrible.  All puffed out, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I’ve seen people like that.”

“And purple as a plum.  Not that Mrs. Paterson would be, you know, the same color.”

“No, not exactly.”

“So that means she didn’t choke, doesn’t it?”

Had Gottlieb been talking to her? I wondered.
  “I guess that’s something the police will have to figure out.”

“And now there’s a madman on the loose.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.”

The phone rang.  “Palmer Institute,” she said in her receptionist voice.  “How can I help you?  Please hold while I ring his line.”

My break time was up.  I started to walk away.

Julietta put her hand over the receiver and jiggled her eyelashes at me.  “You’ve made me feel a lot better, Ned.”

I could see my face in the mirror behind her, and it surprised me.  My shy smile, reverberating through the infinity of mirrors over her head, was twisted into a concupiscent leer.  It was as if I had freed myself of Olympia but not of the obsession she had led me into.  I cast my eyes down and hurried back upstairs.