The Rules of Dreaming (17 page)

“Wait a minute,” she said, a little sheepishly.  “I want to show you something.”

With a leap, she climbed on top of the kitchen counter and groped behind a cabinet, locating a manila envelope which she brought down and handed to him.  “Open it.”

Dubin removed the smaller envelope addressed to Maria Morgan and studied the postmark before he pulled out the anonymous letter, which he read two or three times before looking back up at Nicole.

“Where did you get this?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Dubin frowned and read part of the letter aloud:  “‘A. is a fool to think he can keep you away from me—if he succeeds I may do something drastic.
There are worse things than unhappiness.  I think about you constantly, even when I’m supposed to be concentrating on my work.  A textbook obsession, I’m afraid.  Like Hoffmann in the Venice act, or my little friend Nero racing around and wagging his tail when he sees me coming and moping when I’m gone.’”  He read it again silently and smiled.  “So the opera singer was having an affair.”

“Evidently.”

“And ‘A.’—obviously that’s Avery Morgan—found out about it and was trying to stop it.  And the lover was threatening to do something drastic if he succeeded.”

“Do you know exactly when she died?”

Dubin stuck the letter back in its envelope.  “About a week after this letter was postmarked.”  He lurched to his feet and paced around the little room like a tiger in a cage.  “Avery Morgan is an autograph collector but this is one priceless item that he let slip through his grasp.  Where did you get it?”

“It was entrusted to me.  I can’t tell you any more.”

“Do you realize how important this is?   It’s the smoking gun that gives Morgan a motive for murdering his wife.”

Nicole looked a little queasy.  “Maybe I shouldn’t have shown it to you.”  She took the letter from Dubin’s hand and tried to put it back in its hiding place, but she was too shaky to climb back up on the counter.
Instead she stuck it inside a cookbook and buried the cookbook in a pile of papers next to the stove.

“There’s no way Avery Morgan will ever know you have that
letter,” Dubin reassured her.

“And the other man?  The lover?”

“Whoever he was, he had a dog named Nero.  That shouldn’t be too hard to nail down.”

Chapter
19

One afternoon after a heavy rain, when clouds of mist were still drifting over the landscape, I put on my raincoat and walked along the gravel path that sketched the perimeter of the Institute’s grounds.  Inside the iron fence, the lawns and gardens had been raked and put to bed for the winter, but the other side was a thicket of thorns and hemlocks that encircled the Institute like a forest closing in on an abandoned castle.  As I walked through the mist I thought back over the bizarre series of events that had unfolded in the three months since Hunter’s first performance of Schumann’s Kreisleriana.  My affair with Olympia, which had burned so brightly and so briefly that in retrospect it almost seemed like a dream.  A brutal murder, leaving Hunter at large and my brilliant career hanging in the balance.  My own troubling symptoms—lately I’d been hearing voices, dimly, as if a radio had been left on in a nearby room, warbling in some foreign language that was impossible to understand.  And all the while the figure of Nicole hovering over me like some half-crazed Cassandra, warning me that my life was being taken over by an opera plot.  Now it was the growing obsession with Julietta that threatened to send me off in new and dangerous directions.  What could I do to keep things from getting worse?  How was I ever going to find my way out of this labyrinth?

On the other side of the iron fence, in the densest part of the thicket, a man in a hooded parka stood staring back at me.  My heart leaped—it was Dr. Neuberger!  My innermost wish had been fulfilled.  At last I could breathe free, at last I could unburden myself of the crushing weight that had been building over me these past three months.

I stepped closer, wondering who would be the first to speak.  He pushed his hood back and instead of Dr. Neuberger I recognized the dark, angular face of Peter Bartolli.
He smiled and called my name.

“You’re not supposed to be here!”  I yelled.

Bartolli shrugged.  “I’ve often spoken with Hunter here.”  He looked over my shoulder, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of Hunter coming up the path.

“Where’s Olympia?”

“Gone.  You won’t be seeing her again.”

“Hunter’s gone too, as I’m sure you know.”

He nodded.  “Is my brother blaming me for that?”

“Mostly he’s blaming me.”

He smiled sympathetically.  It was the same smile he’d aimed at Hunter when he was hypnotizing him.  I tried to look away but found myself being drawn into the depths of his chthonic eyes.  I wondered if I could trust him the way I trusted Dr. Neuberger.

“You should search for Hunter yourself,” he said.  “He won’t run away from you.”

The idea made me uncomfortable.  “I can’t,” I objected.  “I’ve got other responsibilities, other patients...”

“But finding Hunter must be your highest priority.”

“I can’t leave here.”

“You want to stay with Julietta,” he said.  It wasn’t a question.

“Who’s been talking to you about Julietta?” I roared, amazed at how deftly he’d been able to play on my emotions.  “Is it Gottlieb?  Have you been talking to Gottlieb?”

“I know about Julietta,” he nodded, without answering my question.  “But Gottlieb—I wouldn’t waste my breath talking to that man. You’re right to be afraid of him.”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

“Then you ought to be.  He’s the main obstacle keeping you from Julietta.”

I was starting to feel desperate, as if one of my panic attacks was coming on.  “What can I do?”

“Keep your eye on him.  And be careful: he can be violent at times.”

“Violent?”

He lowered his voice to a whisper.  “Do you have a weapon?  A small knife, perhaps, that you can carry in your pocket?”

A knife?  Was I hearing him correctly?  “Yes”—I remembered the paring knife I’d lifted from the kitchen—“I have a small knife.  But I...  I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“You’ve already lost Olympia.  Are you going to let Julietta sail off into the sunset with a man like Gottlieb?”

He turned and disappeared into the thicket and I found myself gripping the iron bars of the fence as I caught my breath and tried to frame my answer to his question.  I felt like one of the inmates, peering through the bars into the woods and wondering whether I’d been hallucinating.  Had Peter Bartolli been standing there a moment before—or was it really Dr. Neuberger?  

“No,” I finally said, calling after him.  “I’m not going to let that happen.  Did you hear me?  I’m not going to let that happen!”

*   *   *

Miss Whipple stayed late at the library, afraid to venture out in the darkness, afraid most of all to spend another night alone in her bungalow.  The previous night she’d heard something—or someone—rattling around in the basement, having entered (she supposed) through the bulkhead in the back.  It could have been a raccoon or even a fox—such varmints had been known to pilfer
from her basement pantry at this time of year—or it could have been an intruder of a more dangerous sort, even a creature of her own fevered imagination or her guilty conscience: entering in the nighttime, lying in wait by day, ready to torment her when she returned home to sleep.  She gave scant credence to the theory that Hunter Morgan was still in the neighborhood.  Even a madman would know enough to head north into the mountains, and with all the search parties about he surely would have been caught by now.  No, it wasn’t escaped lunatics she was worried about, but the other kind, the kind who don’t have to escape because no one knows they’re mad.  No one but her, that is.  No one but her

Miss Whipple locked the library door and turned off the outside light.  Then she sat down at her desk and loosened the laces of her sensible shoes, which, to tell the truth, had begun to feel like a pair of steel vices by the end of the day.  Luckily she found a container of yogurt and an apple in the little refrigerator beneath her desk, and after consuming these she hoisted her reading glasses to the bridge of her nose and sat back to relax with a copy of
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote, one of her favorite books.  After a chapter or two she dozed off and fell into a dreamless sleep, awakening in confusion and panic two hours later.  Eleven o’clock!  An hour earlier she could have called one of the women from church to drive her home, but now she’d slept too long.  There was no one she could call at this hour.  She gathered her belongings—her purse, her knitting and the Capote book, even though she was unlikely to read any more of it that night—and quietly eased herself out into the darkness, locking the library door behind her.  Then with an air of resolution she shuffled through six blocks of shadows and fallen leaves until she came within sight of her bungalow.  There were no lights on in the surrounding houses: all the neighbors must have gone to bed or been murdered like the Clutter family so long ago.  Her house looked the same as it had looked the night before—dark, sequestered, the porch screen still banging in the wind—but she stopped in her tracks when she saw it.  Without the rustling of the leaves beneath her feet, the house stood all the more forbidding in its silence.

It was too late for second thoughts.  All she had to do was brush her teeth and put on her nightgown and go to bed, which she’d done ten thousand times before. Why shou
ld this night be any different?

*
*  *

“What’d you get on Dubin?”

Frank Lynch sat in the police cruiser with Captain Tom Wozniak digging into a couple of Spicy Italians they had just extracted from the proprietor of Val’s Sub Shop.  It was five in the afternoon, near the end of a gloomy, tedious day.  The cruiser hovered like a space ship in Val’s parking lot, its defroster roaring uselessly as the two men steamed up the windshield with their exhalations of prosciutto and onions and hot Italian peppers. 

“It’s like you thought,” Wozniak said, taking a sip of his Coke.  “He’s not really a writer.”

“
New York
magazine never heard of him?”

“They’ve heard of him, all right.”

“What are you talking about?”

Tom Wozniak proved to be a more resourceful detective than Lynch had expected.  On the phone with
New York
magazine, he’d pressed his inquiries from one desk to another until he hit pay dirt—an old timer named Brad Cornelius who not only knew Dubin in his previous life but seemed to have an axe to grind against him. 

“Dubin used to be an investigative reporter for the
Times
.  A regular boy wonder.  Won all the awards. Then he got caught up in one of those scandals.”

“Plagiarism?”

“No, the opposite.  He was just making the stuff up.  Falsifying his notes and travel records and writing fake articles for the paper.  He denied it, claimed he was only guilty of sloppy recordkeeping, but the paper fired him anyway.  And after that none of the other papers would touch him.  He made some noise for a while, threatened to sue, even got into a brawl with a couple of editors from the
Times
.  And then he just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“Nobody knew what happened to him. He’d been drinking heavily, his wife left him.  They figured he had a breakdown or went into rehab somewhere.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Seven, eight years.”

Lynch lowered the remains of the Spicy Italian to his lap and wiped his hands with a napkin.  “I thought he looked familiar.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”  He crumpled his garbage into a paper bag and wiped his hands again.  “So your friend Brad never heard of him again?”

“I told you, this Brad guy—I don’t know if I believe everything he says.  He seems to have it out for Dubin but he wouldn’t say why.  He says he’s heard rumors that Dubin showed up back in the area and was going around doing research.”

“Research?”

“The same kind of research he used to do for the newspaper.  Remember that state senator down in Staten Island whose secretary went missing a couple of years ago?  Well, according to Brad, a lot of people saw Dubin snooping around down there, looking things up in the court records, asking a lot of questions for a month or two.  Then he just disappeared like he did the last time.”

“Sounds like he’s got his disappearing act down to a T.”

“Yeah.”

Lynch crushed his Coke cup, shoved it into the garbage bag, and handed the bag to Wozniak. “You never know,” he said, slipping the cruiser into gear.   “Maybe he’s getting ready to disappear from around here too.”

*   *   *

Nicole awoke with a feeling of certainty that Hunter had been found.  This knowledge must have come from a dream, though she couldn’t remember it.  But she did remember hearing Miss Whipple’s voice, as clearly as if it were an announcement on the radio.  Miss Whipple had told her not to worry, that Hunter had been found.  Nicole called Dr. Hoffmann at the Institute and left a message but he never called back.  Finally she called the general switchboard, which opened at 8:00 o’clock.  The woman who
answered—it was the sexy receptionist Julietta—wouldn’t tell her anything.

“Have they found Hunter?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t discuss that with you.”

“Is he still missing?”

“I said I can’t discuss it with you.”

At 9:00 o’clock she found herself on the library steps, waiting for Miss Whipple to open the doors as she always did at that hour.  She waited what seemed like an eternity but Miss Whipple never arrived.  A little before 10:00, a police car pulled into the parking lot.  A fat policeman climbed out and walked up squinting suspiciously at Nicole. 

“You want something here?”

“I’m waiting for the library to open.”

“The library’s closed today.”

“How do you know that?  Miss Whipple always—”

“Miss Whipple won’t be coming in today.”

“Why not?”

He hesitated.  “Miss Whipple’s dead.”

Nicole felt the world swirling around her.  She felt her lips moving but no words were coming out.

The policeman peered at her curiously.  “Can I see some I.D., please.”

Nicole found her car and somehow navigated her way to the Institute, though she felt almost as incoherent as she’d felt the first time she went there.  Only this time, she thought, it’s the world that’s gone mad.  First Mrs. Paterson and now Miss Whipple—how could that be?  The policeman wouldn’t provide any details.  Instead he wrote down her name and address and said she might be needed later for questioning.  He referred to her as a witness.

“A witness to what?  What happened?”

“I can’t give you that information.”

The Institute looked surprisingly normal, but that was an illusion.  Everything that seemed real and normal right now was an illusion.  The ivy climbing the front of the building was an illusion.  The well-trimmed bushes around the walkway and the steps.  Julietta, at the receptionist’s desk, chewing gum and polishing her nails.

“Can I help you?”

“I need to see Dr. Hoffmann.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, of course not.  I’m here because of Hunter.  Have they found him?”