A Stranger in My Grave Page 2

  “I guess so.”

  “Then tell me about the dream.”

  “There’s not very much to tell.” She lapsed into silence, her hand moving uneasily beneath his, like a little animal wanting to escape but too timid to make any bold attempt. “I dreamed I was dead.”

  “Well, there’s nothing so terrible about that, is there? People often dream they’re dead.”

  “Not like this. It wasn’t a nightmare like the kind of dream you’re talking about. There was no emotion connected with it at all. It was just a fact.”

  “The fact must have been presented in some way. How?”

  “I saw my tombstone.” Although she’d denied that there was any emotion connected with the dream, she was beginning to breathe heavily again, and her voice was rising in pitch. “I was walking along the beach below the cemetery with Prince. Sud­denly Prince took off up the side of the cliff. I could hear him howling, but he was out of sight, and when I whistled for him, he didn’t come. I started up the path after him.”

  She hesitated again. Jim didn’t prompt her. It sounded real enough, he thought, like something that actually happened, ex­cept that there was no path up that cliff and Prince never howled.

  “I found Prince at the top. He was sitting beside a gray tomb­stone, his head thrown back, howling like a wolf. I called to him, but he paid no attention. I went over to the tombstone. It was mine. It had my name on it. The letters were distinct, but weathered, as if it had been there for some time. It had.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The dates were on it, too. Daisy Fielding Harker, it said. Born November 13, 1930. Died December 2, 1955.” She looked at him as if she expected him to laugh. When he didn’t, she raised her chin in a half-challenging manner. “There. I told you it was funny, didn’t I? I’ve been dead for four years.”

  “Have you?” He forced a smile, hoping it would camouflage his sudden feeling of panic, of helplessness. It was not the dream that disturbed him; it was the reality it suggested: someday Daisy would die, and there would be a genuine tombstone in that very cemetery with her name on it. Oh God, Daisy, don’t die. “You look very much alive to me,” he said, but the words, meant to be light and airy, came out like feathers turned to stone and dropped heavily on the table. He picked them up and tried again. “In fact, you look pretty as a picture, to coin a phrase.”

  Her quick changes of mood teased and bewildered him. He had never reached the point of being able to predict them, so he was completely unprepared for her sudden, explosive little laugh. “I went to the best embalmer.”

  Whether she was going up or coming down, he was always willing to share the ride. “You found him in the Yellow Pages, no doubt?”

  “Of course. I find everything in the Yellow Pages.”

  Their initial meeting through the Yellow Pages of the tele­phone directory had become a standard joke between them. When Daisy and her mother had arrived in San Félice from Denver and were looking for a house to buy, they had consulted the phone book for a list of real-estate brokers. Jim had been cho­sen because Ada Fielding was interested in numerology at the time and the name James Harker contained the same number of letters as her own.

  In that first week of taking Daisy and her mother around to look at various houses, he’d learned quite a lot about them. Daisy had put up a great pretense of being alert to all the details of construction, drainage, interest rates, taxes, but in the end she picked a house because it had a fireplace she fell in love with. The property was overpriced, the terms unsuitable, it had no termite clearance, and the roof leaked, but Daisy refused to con­sider any other house. “It has such a darling fireplace,” she said, and that was that.

  Jim, a practical, coolheaded man, found himself fascinated by what he believed to be proof of Daisy’s impulsive and sentimen­tal nature. Before the week was over, he was in love. He deliber­ately delayed putting the papers for the house through escrow, making excuses which Ada Fielding later admitted she’d seen through from the beginning. Daisy suspected nothing. Within two months they were married, and the house they moved into, all three of them, was not the one with the darling fireplace that Daisy had chosen, but Jim’s own place on Laurel Street. It was Jim who insisted that Daisy’s mother share the house. He had a vague idea, even then, that the very qualities he admired in Daisy might make her hard to handle at times and that Mrs. Fielding, who was as practical as Jim himself, might be of assistance. The arrangement had worked out adequately, if not perfectly. Later, Jim had built the canyon house they were now occupying, with separate quarters for his mother-in-law. Their life was quiet and well run. There was no place in it for unscheduled dreams.

  “Daisy,” he said softly, “don’t worry about the dream.”

  “I can’t help it. It must have some meaning, with everything so specific, my name, the dates—”

  “Stop thinking about it.”

  “I will. It’s just that I can’t help wondering what happened on that day, December 2, 1955.”

  “Probably a great many things happened, as on any day of any year.”

  “To me, I mean,” she said impatiently. “Something must have happened to me that day, something very important.”

  “Why?”

  “Otherwise my unconscious mind wouldn’t have picked that particular date to put on a tombstone.”

  “If your unconscious mind is as flighty and unpredictable as your conscious mind—”

  “No, I’m serious about it, Jim.”

  “I know, and I wish you weren’t. In fact, I wish you’d stop thinking about it.”

  “I said I would.”

  “Promise?”

  “All right.”

  The promise was as frail as a bubble; it broke before his car was out of the driveway.

  Daisy got up and began to pace the room, her step heavy, her shoulders stooped, as if she were carrying the weight of the tomb­stone on her back.

  2

  Perhaps, at this hour that is very late for me, I should not step back into your life….

  Daisy didn’t watch the car leave, so she had no way of knowing that Jim had stopped off at Mrs. Fielding’s cottage. The first sus­picion occurred to her when her mother, who was constantly and acutely aware of time, appeared at the back door half an hour before she was due. She had Prince, the collie, with her on a leash. When the leash was removed, Prince bounced around the kitchen as if he’d just been released after a year or two in leg-irons.

  Since Mrs. Fielding lived alone, it was considered good policy for her to keep Prince, a zealous and indefatigable barker, at her cottage every night for protection. Because of this talent for bark­ing, he enjoyed the reputation of being an excellent watchdog. The fact was, Prince’s talent was spread pretty thin; he barked with as much enthusiasm at acorns falling on the roof as he would have at intruders bursting in the door. Although Prince had never been put to a proper test so far, the general feeling was that he would come through when the appropriate time arrived, and protect his people and property with ferocious loyalty.

  Daisy greeted the dog affectionately, because she wanted to and because he expected it. The two women saw each other too fre­quently to make any fuss over good-mornings.

  “You’re early,” Daisy said.

  “Am I?”

  “You know you are.”

  “Ah well,” Mrs. Fielding said lightly, “it’s time I stopped living by the clock. And it was such a lovely morning, and I heard on the radio that there’s a storm coming, and I didn’t want to waste the sun while it lasted—”

  “Mother, stop that.”

  “Stop what, for goodness’ sake?”

  “Jim came over to see you, didn’t he?”

  “For a moment, yes.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Oh, nothing much,
actually.”

  “That’s no answer,” Daisy said. “I wish the two of you would stop treating me like an idiot child.”

  “Well, Jim made some remark about your needing a tonic, per­haps, for your nerves. Oh, not that I think your nerves are bad or anything, but a tonic certainly wouldn’t do any harm, would it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll phone that nice new doctor at the clinic and ask him to prescribe something loaded with vitamins and minerals and what­ever. Or perhaps protein would be better.”

  “I don’t want any protein, vitamins, minerals, or anything else.”

  “We’re just a mite irritable this morning, aren’t we?” Mrs. Fielding said with a cool little smile. “Mind if I have some coffee?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Would you like some?”

  “No.”

  “No, thanks, if you don’t mind. Private problems don’t consti­tute an excuse for bad manners.” She poured some coffee from the electric percolator. “I take it there are private problems?”

  “Jim told you everything, I suppose?”

  “He mentioned something about a silly little dream you had which upset you. Poor Jim was very upset himself. Perhaps you shouldn’t worry him with trivial things. He’s terribly wrapped up in you, Daisy.”

  “Wrapped up.” The words didn’t conjure up the picture they were intended to. All Daisy could see was a double mummy, two people long dead, wrapped together in a winding sheet. Death again. No matter which direction her mind turned, death was around the corner or the next bend in the road, like a shadow that always walked in front of her. “It wasn’t,” Daisy said, “a silly little dream. It was very real and very important.”

  “It may seem so to you now while you’re still upset. Wait till you calm down and think about it objectively.”

  “It’s quite difficult,” Daisy said dryly, “to be objective about one’s own death.”

  “But you’re not dead. You’re here and alive and well, and, I thought, happy. . . . You are happy, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Prince, with the sensitivity of his breed to a troubled atmo­sphere, was standing in the doorway with his tail between his legs, watching the two women.

  They were similar in appearance and perhaps had had, at one time, some similarity of temperament. But the circumstances of Mrs. Fielding’s life had forced her to discipline herself to a high degree of practicality. Mr. Fielding, a man of great charm, had proved a fainthearted and spasmodic breadwinner, and Daisy’s mother had been the main support of the family for many years. Mrs. Fielding seldom referred to her ex-husband, unless she was very angry, and she never heard from him at all. Daisy did, every now and then, always from a different address in a different city, but with the same message: Daisy baby, I wonder if you could spare a bit of cash. I’m a little low at the moment, just temporarily, I’m expect­ing something big any day now. . . . Daisy, without informing her mother, answered all the letters.

  “Daisy, listen. The maid will be here in ten minutes.” Mrs. Fielding never called Stella by name because she didn’t approve of her. “Now’s our chance to have a little private talk, the kind we always used to have.”

  Daisy was aware that the private little talk would eventually become a rather exhaustive survey of her own faults: she was too emotional, weak-willed, selfish, too much like her father, in fact. Daisy’s weaknesses invariably turned out to be duplications of her father’s.

  “We’ve always been so close,” Mrs. Fielding said, “because there were just the two of us together for so many years.”

  “You talk as if I never had a father.”

  “Of course you had a father. But...”

  There was no need to go on. Daisy knew the rest of it: Father wasn’t around much, and he wasn’t much when he was around.

  Silently Daisy turned and started to go into the next room. Prince saw her coming, but he didn’t budge from the doorway, and when she stepped over him, he let out a little snarl to indicate his disapproval of her mood and the way things were going in general. She reprimanded him, without conviction. She’d had the dog throughout the eight years of her marriage, and she sometimes thought Prince was more conscious of her real emo­tions than Jim or her mother or even herself. He followed her now into the living room, and when she sat down, he sat down, too, putting one paw in her lap, his brown eyes staring gravely into her face, his mouth open, ready to speak if it could: Come on, old girl, cheer up. The world’s not so bad. I’m in it.

  Even when the maid arrived at the back door, usually an occa­sion for loud and boisterous conduct, Prince didn’t move.

  Stella was a city girl. She didn’t like working in the country. Though Daisy had explained frequently and patiently that it took only ten minutes to drive from the house to the nearest supermarket, Stella was not convinced. She knew the country when she saw it, and this was it, and she didn’t like it one bit. All that nature around, it made her nervous. Wasps and humming­birds coming at you, snails sneaking about, bees swarming in the eucalyptus trees, fleas breeding in the dry soil, every once in a while taking a sizable nip out of Stella’s ankles or wrists.

  Stella and her current husband occupied a second-floor apart­ment in the lower end of town where all she had to cope with was the odd housefly. In the city, things were civilized, not a wasp or snail or bird in sight, just people: shoppers and shopkeepers by day, drunks and prostitutes at night. Sometimes they were arrested right below Stella’s front window, and occasionally there was a knife fight, very quick and quiet, among the Mexican nationals relaxing after a day of picking lemons or avocados. Stella enjoyed these excitements. They made her feel both alive (all those things happening) and virtuous (but not to her. No prostitute or drunk, she; just a couple of bucks on a horse, in the back room of the Sea Esta Café every morning before she came to work).

  While the Harkers were still living in town, Stella was content enough with her job. They were nice people to work for, as peo­ple to work for went, never snippy or mean-spirited. But she couldn’t stand the country. The fresh air made her cough, and the quietness depressed her—no cars passing, or hardly ever, no radios turned on full blast, no people chattering.

  Before entering the house, Stella stepped on three ants and squashed a snail. It was the least she could do on behalf of civi­lization. Those ants sure knew they was stepped on, she thought, and pushed her two hundred pounds through the kitchen door. Since neither Mrs. Harker nor the old lady was around, Stella began her day’s labors by making a fresh pot of coffee and eating five slices of bread and jam. One nice thing about the Harkers, they bought only the best victuals and plenty of.

  “She’s eating,” Mrs. Fielding said in the living room. “Already. She hardly ever does anything else.”

  “The last one was no prize either.”

  “This one’s impossible. You should be firmer with her, Daisy, show her who’s boss.”

  “I’m not sure I know who’s boss,” Daisy said, looking faintly puzzled.

  “Of course you do. You are.”

  “I don’t feel as if I am. Or want to be.”

  “Well, you are, whether you want to be or not, and it’s up to you to exercise your authority and stop being willy-nilly about it. If you want her to do something or not to do something, say so. The woman’s not a mind reader, you know. She expects to be told things, to be ordered around.”

  “I don’t think that would work with Stella.”

  “At least try. This habit of yours—and it is a habit, not a per­sonality defect as I used to believe—this habit of letting every­thing slide because you won’t take the trouble, because you can’t be bothered, it’s just like your—”

  “Father. Yes. I know. You can stop right there.”

  “I wish I could. I wish I’d neve
r had to begin in the first place. But when I see quite unnecessary mismanagement, I feel I must do something about it.”

  “Why? Stella’s not so bad. She muddles through, and that’s about all you can expect of anyone.”

  “I don’t agree,” Mrs. Fielding said grimly. “In fact, we don’t seem to be agreeing on anything this morning. I don’t understand what the trouble is. I feel quite the same as usual—or did, until this absurd business of a dream came up.”

  “It’s not absurd.”

  “Isn’t it? Well, I won’t argue.” Mrs. Fielding leaned forward stiffly and put her empty cup on the coffee table. Jim had made the table himself, of teakwood and ivory-colored ceramic tile. “I don’t know why you won’t talk to me freely anymore, Daisy.”

  “I’m growing up, perhaps that’s the reason.”

  “Growing up? Or just growing away?”

  “They go together.”

  “Yes, I suppose they do, but—”

  “Maybe you don’t want me to grow up.”

  “What nonsense. Of course I do.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re not even sorry I can’t have a child, because if I had a child, it would show I was no longer one myself.” Daisy paused, biting her lower lip. “No, no, I don’t really mean that. I’m sorry, it just came out. I don’t mean it.”

  Mrs. Fielding had turned pale, and her hands were clenched in her lap. “I won’t accept your apology. It was a stupid and cruel remark. But at least I realize now what the trouble is. You’ve started thinking about it again, perhaps even hoping.”

  “No,” Daisy said. “Not hoping.”

  “When are you going to accept the inevitable, Daisy? I thought you’d become adjusted by this time. You’ve known about it for five whole years.”

  “Yes.”

  “The specialist in Los Angeles made it very clear.”

  “Yes.” Daisy didn’t remember how long ago it was, or the month or the week. She only remembered the day itself, begin­ning the first thing in the morning when she was so ill. Then, afterward, the phone call to a friend of hers who worked at a local medical clinic: “Eleanor? It’s Daisy Harker. You’ll never guess, never. I’m so happy I could burst. I think I’m pregnant. I’m almost sure I am. Isn’t it wonderful? I’ve been sick as a dog all morning and yet so happy, if you know what I mean. Listen, I know there are all sorts of obstetricians in town, but I want you to recommend the very best in the whole country, the very, very best specialist....”