A SANE, HAPPILY MARRIED MAN DOES NOT THROW HIMSELF OUT OF A TWELFTH-STORY WINDOW. NOR COULD SARAH TRAFTON ACCEPT THE PSYCHIATRIST’S MONSTROUS THEORY THAT HER HUSBAND CHARLES HAD BEEN DRIVEN TO KILL HIMSELF BEFORE SHE COULD KILL HIM. THAT HIS DREADFUL NIGHTMARES, HIS STRANGE PANIC, HAD BEEN CAUSED BY FEAR OF HER.

THERE HAD TO BE A RATIONAL REASON FOR HIS SUICIDE. TO FIND IT SARAH RETURNED TO THE PHEASANT FARM SHE HAD INHERITED FROM CHARLES—THE FARM WITH THE BRILLIANT FAIRY-TALE BIRDS WHICH WAS MANAGED BY HIS AUTOCRATIC AUNT BESS, WITH THE HELP OF HER TACITURN SON HUNTER, HER OWL-LIKE NEPHEW MILO, AND HIS FLUTTERY WIFE EVELYN.

THESE RELATIVES WARNED SARAH AGAINST PROBING INTO CHARLES‘ PAST. EVEN KATE CLEMENCE WHO HAD LOVED CHARLES, AND HARRY BRENDEN WHO OBVIOUSLY LIKED SARAH, IMPLIED THAT FOR CHARLES‘ SAKE IT WOULD BE BETTER IF SHE DID NOT DISCOVER TOO MUCH. AND THEY WERE ALL CURIOUSLY EVASIVE ABOUT THE DEATH OF CHARLES‘ BEAUTIFUL STEPMOTHER NINA.

HERE IS AN ABSORBING STORY OF A YOUNG WIDOW WHO LEARNS THAT HER QUESTIONS HAVE FORCED HER INTO A DUEL WITH A MURDERER. THAT HER ONLY HOPE OF SURVIVAL IS TO IDENTIFY HER DEADLY ANTAGONIST.

So Dies

the Dreamer

Ursula Curtiss

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

NEW YORK

© by Ursula Curtiss, 1960

All rights reserved

To my mother, Helen Reilly

The characters, places, incidents and situations in this book are imaginary and have no relation to any person, place or actual happening

i

EVEN NOW, three months later, Sarah Trafton could not rid her mind of the idea that it all went back to the mink farm. Or to the pheasants, in some way, although that was even more tenuous.

It had to go back to something, it had to have started somewhere. Except in the crudest jokes, sane, happy, newly-married men like Charles Trafton did not jump from twelfth-floor windows. On the other hand, had he been sane, at the end?

Sarah had one pinpoint to proceed from, although she had dug at it so savagely and often that it was now more like an open wound: the night the trouble had first showed itself.

It was in the small Bermuda hotel where they had spent their honeymoon. She was asleep and dreaming; she had waked, heart pounding with shock, to the frightful sound that seemed even then to lodge itself in her body, like a pain that promised to come again and again. In a woman it would have been a scream; in Charles it was a groan that mounted and quickened and grew, so that only Sarah’s sharp cry and wild reaching for the lamp stopped it from turning into a shriek.

The room was instantly, abnormally quiet, as though they had both stopped breathing. The bedside lamp had overturned under Sarah’s frantic hand, and shone with foolish tranquillity on the floor. The travelling clock Charles’s aunt had given them said three-thirty. In the other bed, Charles had turned his head inquiringly on the pillow; his narrow intelligent face was calm, his eyes bright. He said, “Hello,” in as alert and amiable a voice as though it were noon, and then, with a faint frown, “What was I doing? Snoring? Making a racket?”

It was impossible that he didn’t know; his heart must be pounding, if anything, harder than hers. Sarah said shakily, “You were being tom limb from limb. Or else you dreamed you were just getting to the church again. Charles, I never heard such a noise.”

Charles rolled over on his back—because the light bothered his eyes, or because he didn’t want her to see his face? “Cheese?” he asked reflectively of the ceiling. “That last cordial? The way to a man’s nightmares is through his stomach. Sorry, darling, I won’t do it again.”

Nightmare. She had had nightmares herself, she had heard other people have them, at home, at college, in the apartment she had shared with another girl before her marriage. But this. . .

She went into the bathroom for a drink of water, and lit a cigarette on the way. Her panic had not so much subsided as hidden itself; across her mind, put out of it instantly, flashed a recently-read item in a newspaper, about natives in—Africa? India?—who were dying in numbers, apparently of fright, in their sleep.

Voodoo, said Sarah comfortingly to herself. Bone-pointing.

They had then been married five days.

Neither of them made any reference to that peculiar interval in the night the next day, or in the days that followed. Charles looked sunny and unworried, and except for a vague unease before she went to sleep, Sarah firmly forgot the whole thing. They swam a great deal, drank at odd hours, and dined elaborately, trying to outdo each other in their definitions of the wine.

“A small wine,” Sarah would say gravely, and Charles, after a great deal of sipping and frowning and head-cocking: “I would go further, I would say almost a tiny wine.” His glass lifted, his head went back. “In fact, an invisible wine,” said Sarah.

The night before they left for home, it happened again: the riven groans, coming closer and louder, mounting to an infinitely beseeching pitch, the stopping just in time. This time Sarah said directly, “Charles, what were you dreaming about just now?”

“You know what it is?” countered Charles, with an air of worry erased. “It’s all this peculiar food, very rich for a country boy, and all this swimming. My system thinks it’s changed hands.”

Sarah did not smile. She hadn’t knocked over the lamp this time, and she could see the betraying dampness of his forehead above the clear triumphant gaze. “If you have nightmares, you must have some idea of what they’re about. Everybody does. They’re falling, or trapped in a burning building, or— Charles, you