The Listening Walls (24 page)

“I can't—tell you.”

“Can't, or don't want to? Which?”

She covered her eyes with her hands. She was not aware that she was crying until she felt the tears drip down between her fingers.

“What's the matter, Daisy? Have you done something you don't want to tell me about—wrecked your car, overdrawn your bank account?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“I'm frightened.”

“Frightened?” The word displeased him. He didn't like his loved ones to be frightened or sick; it seemed to cast a reflection on him and his ability to look after them properly. “Frightened of what?”

She didn't answer.

“You can't be frightened without having something to be frightened about. So what is it?”

“You'll laugh.”

“Believe me, I never felt less like laughing in my life. Come on, try me.”

She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her robe. “I had a dream.”

He didn't laugh, but he looked amused. “And you're crying because of a
dream?
Come, come, you're a big girl now, Daisy.”

She was staring at him across the table, mute and melancholy, and he knew he had said the wrong thing, but he couldn't think of any right thing. How did you treat a wife, a grown woman, who cried because she had a dream?

“I'm sorry, Daisy. I didn't meant to—”

“No apology is necessary,” she said stiffly. “You have a perfect right to be amused. Now we'll drop the subject if you don't mind.”

“I do mind. I want to hear about it.”

“No. I wouldn't like to send you into hysterics; it gets a lot funnier.”

He looked at her soberly. “Does it?”

“Oh yes. It's quite a scream. There's nothing funnier than death, really, especially if you have an advanced sense of humor.” She wiped her eyes again, though there were no fresh tears. The heat of anger had dried them at their source. “You'd better go to your office.”

“What the hell are you so mad about?”

“Stop swearing at—”

“I'll stop swearing if you'll stop acting childish.” He reached for her hand, smiling. “Bargain?”

“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.

 

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MARGARET MILLAR
 

Available as individual ebooks or in a special seven-volume collector's set

 

Volume I

 

The Paul Prye Mysteries

The Invisible Worm
(1941)
The Weak-Eyed Bat
(1942)
The Devil Loves Me
(1942)

Inspector Sands Mysteries

Wall of Eyes
(1943)
The Iron Gates
[
Taste of Fears
] (1945)

 

Volume II

 

Fire Will Freeze
(1944)
Experiment in Springtime
(1947)
The Cannibal Heart
(1949)
Do Evil in Return
(1950)
Rose's Last Summer
(1952)

 

Volume III

 

Vanish in an Instant
(1952)
Wives and Lovers
(1954)
Beast in View
(1955)
An Air That Kills
(1957)
The Listening Walls
(1959)

 

Volume IV

 

A Stranger in My Grave
(1960)
How Like an Angel
(1962)
The Fiend
(1964)
Beyond This Point Are Monsters
(1970)

 

Volume V

 

Tom Aragon Novels

Ask for Me Tomorrow
(1976)
The Murder of Miranda
(1979)
Mermaid
(1982)

 

Volume VI

 

Banshee
(1983)
Spider Webs
(1986)
The Couple Next Door: Collected Short Mysteries
(2004)
It's All in the Family
(1948) (semi-autobiographical children's novel)

 

Volume VII

 

The Birds and the Beasts Were There
(1968) (memoir)

 

For more information visit
www.syndicatebooks.com