Chapter 25

“Beginnings are always easier if someone asks the right question,” Meredith said. She felt rather than saw Arthur’s nod as he stared down at his beer glass.

“Did you bring me those things to sell because it was too painful to give them away yourself?”

“I brought them because I had to. I didn’t want to come anywhere near that house.” His voice was low and troubled, but the honesty was clear. “I don’t want to spread my trouble around. From any point of view it’s madness.”

Meredith decided to take a chance. He would either answer or else excuse himself and leave. His honesty would allow no other choice. “Were you compelled by dreams?” she asked. “Did dreams make you come to my house?”

Arthur seemed stunned, unable to speak. His fingers tapped on the bar, and his hands trembled. “Dreams,” he whispered.

“Did you dream that you and I were . . . more than strangers?” She had to know the answer. In dreams she had made love to this man all night. She had spent days talking to him as his spirit hovered about her house.

“I had to get away,” he whispered. “That’s the reason for the job in Europe. Otherwise I’ll keep coming back to that house. I know I will. I’ll return and return until we are lovers or somebody throws me into an asylum. That’s how strong the dreams have been.” He was embarrassed, blushing, and even embarrassment could not hide the low tone of terror in his voice. “I’ve always been a very sane man,” he said helplessly. “Up ’til now.”

“You’ll deal with it. We’ll deal with it, because we’re both sane,” she told him. “Something awful has been happening, but it’s not because we’re crazy. I’ve also had dreams. You’d best tell me everything about Patty.”

Arthur seemed suddenly relieved. He was not inquiring about her dreams, almost as if he did not want to know. He was hesitant but gained confidence. “My wife is, my wife is . . . Patty was a wonderful woman. If you know it was my house, perhaps you know she’s dead.”

Meredith nodded without explaining how she came by this knowledge.

“Dead. First time I’ve actually said it. It seems so final, like letting go of those things last week.”

“You loved your wife, Patty, very much?”

“Not enough.” The words were harsh, and a rocklike hardening of the cords in his neck nearly squelched his voice. He cast a sideways glance too quick to betray its meaning. “She committed suicide. It was my fault, and it wasn’t. I told you, it’s a long, miserable story.”

Meredith allowed the silence to lengthen, her hand trembling as it touched the stem of her wineglass. She took a sip. “Was it completely unexpected? Even now, you seem in shock.”

“Not completely. I should have guessed, should have done better. You see, Patty wasn’t as strong as most people. Her parents died in a car accident when she was young. She grew up being told it was her fault.”

Beneath the fabric of his shirt, a shudder tightened the contoured muscles of his back and shoulders. He suppressed it. “They were on their way to pick her up at her grandmother’s house. The grandmother had been babysitting. They were late, maybe driving too fast, maybe drinking. At any rate, after they died the grandmother raised Patty.”

Meredith listened without interrupting his troubled words. Occasionally words would fail him, trailing off in a sign of frustration, and she would prompt him gently, probing further with brief questions to let him know she was still listening and that she cared. Arthur spoke in a monotone without looking at her. The story he told felt oddly familiar, as if she had lived through it a long time ago, herself the seven-year-old child consigned to the care of a resentful grandmother, punished daily with blame. “She was told that if she had wanted to stay with her grandmother overnight, her parents would not have been driving to pick her up,” Arthur said softly. “And that she was to blame for their deaths.”

By the time Patty entered a private high school, Arthur explained, she was barely able to look her classmates in the eyes. A jittery bundle of frayed fears and self-hatred, she would panic if she heard a door slam.

“Did you meet her there? Were you both in private school?”

“We met at the movies.”

Patty had loved movies, he said. “And I was an up-and-coming usher for matinees after school.” He smiled slightly and sipped his beer. “She always sat in the back. Didn’t want to block anyone else’s view.”

Arthur had watched the shy, star-struck girl for three weeks before he spoke. He saw a fragile, beautiful child, avoiding his eyes as she hurried into the theater, curling up in her seat to become lost in wonder at the fabulous images spread out on the screen. Then one day, searching for words to get her attention as she left the theater, he managed to stammer out that she looked like the star in the film.

“I felt dumb the minute it came out. Typical teenage come-on, huh? But I couldn’t believe how she took it. Like I was the sun and she could unfold like a flower. It didn’t happen all at once, of course, but she sort of smiled that day. Before she got out the door, I found out her name.”

Arthur had coaxed her, in the weeks that followed, into going out for walks after the movies. Supposedly they were taking her home, but Patty never wanted to arrive there. They would dawdle, staring into shop windows and strolling through department store furniture displays, pretending the place was a huge house that they lived in. Together they would fill out the fantasies; they would be rich and have servants to wait on them, they would have heaps of children, each with rooms of their own, and a place in the country with animals. Then one day Arthur got scared. They were both about to graduate and he would go to college, but he knew he wanted to marry this delicate, whimsical girl who was so unlike the loud, pushy girls at school. But what if Patty really did want the dreams they talked about? He figured he would go to college, graduate, and get a good job, but doubted that he would ever be rich. Even good salaries did not pay for their kind of dreams.

“So I asked, straight out, would it have to be like that, swimming pools and cars and long vacations everyplace the sun was shining. Could she live without that?”

“And?”

“Patty said none of that mattered, except for the children. At which point I proposed.”

Strained lines in Arthur’s face seemed to soften gradually as he poured out the memory. Now he glanced toward Meredith’s glass. Like his own, it was empty. “Like another?”

Meredith nodded. “Actually, she sounds very special. I can see why you loved her.”

Arthur trembled, hearing the words in the past tense. He turned and signaled to the bartender. When the drinks arrived, Meredith asked, “So you got married?”

Arthur nodded. “My parents paid for a wonderful honeymoon. We went to a lake.”

Meredith interrupted, fearful of the memory the words stirred in her. “And you went to college?”

“College? Yes. Patty seemed stronger in those days. She had a job.”

They had lived in a small apartment while he attended classes, his wife working days as a cashier. Scholarships and study through summers let him finish in three years.

“Patty was ecstatic when I got a good job. We bought a house.” Arthur paused. “That house where you live. She quit her job and we began planning for the way we always wanted to live. Patty wanted children right away; we both did. Patty would read books about raising kids and talk to the neighbors, at least one.” He broke off suddenly and pressed his lips tight, straining for control. His eyes glittered. “Maybe you know Elsa Johnson?”

“Unfortunately,” Meredith said, offering a grim smile. “For someone like Patty, Elsa would not be easy to take.”

“I wish it had been so simple.” Arthur’s voice was harsh with resignation. “Elsa was one of Patty’s few friends, if you can call her a friend. Patty wanted kids and Elsa would get her talking on that. I wasn’t home all day. We needed extra money, planning for a family. I coached basketball in the evenings at the high school. Maybe that was wrong.” Arthur’s voice faltered and he turned his head away before going on. “I sound like I’m making excuses, but I loved her. We wanted so much for the child . . . . She thought she was pregnant. I should have been there that night.”

He was blaming himself for something, but Meredith could not quite understand. She searched her memory, trying to discover what had happened. His wife had not died at night—Sally said it was during the day. Elsa had found her. And Arthur had said nothing about the house being gray, about Patty’s collapse into what had to be madness. Was he deliberately leaving out part of the story?

At her side, Arthur smoothed a finger over and over the scar on his forehead. He was not lying, only terribly sad. He sat silent.

“When I moved in, the house was, well, pretty depressing,” she said. “Was it always that way?”

“No.” Arthur seemed to have come to a decision to go on. “That was afterward. After what happened. Anyway, I was coaching and one night I got home pretty late. I figured Patty would tease me, kidding around that she was beginning to believe Elsa. Elsa kept insisting that I had another woman. Patty never believed it—not then. Elsa could be so cruel, damn her.”

He paused a moment to calm himself. Patty had not been home, he explained. A note told him she’d run to the grocery store. She took the car but it was only a few blocks’ walk. When he got there, the car was parked in the lot. He went into the store to catch up with her but she was gone. The clerk said she ought to be home by then.

Meredith felt a chill pass over her skin. The memory felt familiar, but not like the others she had known. This was darker, filled with violence and terror, an inky pool in the depth of her mind. This was a place where even the young wife had not dared lead her.

“She was in the car.” Meredith breathed the words, unsure they were audible. “You . . . found . . .” She closed her eyes against the thought that Arthur’s words would not shut out.

“Rape. He was all over her. A big son of a bitch with a rubber Halloween mask. I don’t know who or what he was, only the smell of whiskey. I pulled him onto the pavement but he had a knife.”

“Your scar?”

“That and a couple of others. Nothing serious. I was too late, Meredith. Poor Patty, beaten up and lying there too frightened to move; me with blood across my face like I’d been murdered. We didn’t even call the police, just got the hell out of there.”

Meredith listened, and one by one the gaps in her memory filled. She saw the man who sat by her now as he had been that night. He had tried to comfort his wife, drive her home, get her into clean clothes and to bed. But neither of them could sleep. They had lain awake, her form frozen beside him in stony silence. He tried to get her to talk, but she merely stared back helplessly. When they finally fell asleep, he moved close to her during the night and she woke up screaming.

“I don’t think Patty always knew after that. I mean whether I loved her, even who I was all the time. I tried to talk to her about it, and tried not to talk about it, to distract her, to leave her alone.”

“Nothing worked?”

“Nothing,” Arthur echoed. “I wanted to get her help, but just going out of the house terrified her. She would say no, pretending to be too busy or tired, but we both knew. I kept telling myself how she had been back when we met. If she could come out of that, I would bring her out of this somehow. “

He had thought that changing the house, those rooms where she spent all day alone, might help. Patty insisted on doing the work herself. She was afraid, he realized now, of having anyone else around. At first he thought the gray paint was only for trim, but gradually it had covered the walls and ceilings. Patty argued when he objected to it.

“In a way I guess it was a dumb idea, but I thought letting her do that might make up for the crying. She never cried, at least not in front of me. She would freeze up if I tried to talk about what happened. I thought maybe by painting the house gray, she could see, outside her mind, what her feelings were like. Maybe she could recognize them when they were on the outside.” He paused and looked toward Meredith with a helpless shrug. “Does that make any sense?”

“Not logically, but emotionally it does. At least it was a place to start expressing what she felt.”

Meredith turned the memories over and over in her mind. She saw a young woman wanting a child, yet afraid of her own husband’s touch, unsure what love was anymore, not even able to cry. Then those terrible gray walls, her one attempt to deal with her feelings. It was too ugly to contemplate, but it had happened. In her mind’s eye, she saw Patty, trapped in the prison she had created, dozing off into dreams of movie stars and gleaming limousines. It was an escape, but Arthur no longer shared it. She had been so alone, it was no wonder.

“So the feelings, that house, finally became too much,” she said quietly.

She studied the slender, sensitive man at her side. His face was etched with exhaustion and pain. It had been months since Patty’s death, but he had lived that day over and over, blaming himself because he had been gone that night, because he had not found help or been strong enough to pull her through and back to reality.

Arthur shook his head slowly, but did not answer. Instead he spread his hands open on the polished bar. Meredith saw the wide gold band on his ring finger.

“I put it back on today,” he said, lifting the hand and letting it fall. “I know she’s gone, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I dream about her. Sometimes I’ll see a woman hesitate before crossing a street, and I think it’s Patty. Or hear a voice. That wrong number today.”

Meredith wanted to speak, and knew now that he could probably understand how her entire being had been taken over by whatever dwelt in that house. At the same time, it might make him more fearful. It might make him feel more guilty, as if he were to blame for what had happened to her.

A sudden movement saved her from having to decide whether to tell him. Arthur stared into the mirror behind the bar, then stood. “We have to go. Let’s walk.” He turned to the bartender. “We’re using the back door, Bill.”

The bartender looked up from the television. He grunted. Grinned.

“I don’t mind a walk . . .” she began. Arthur’s hand held her elbow, and he steered her through a back room stacked with beer cases. “What’s wrong?” she said. “What’s happening?”

They stepped into an alley. He led her along the alley back to the street.

“Sorry.” Arthur’s grip loosened. “He came past the window and I figured you didn’t need that.” The night was getting chilly, but he trembled with more than cold. Anger made his voice like ice.

“Need what?” Meredith stared in amazement. His arm encircled her protectively.

“I thought you saw.” Arthur’s arm pushed her gently toward the tavern’s window. “Take a look.”

The lower part of the window was steamy with fog, but over the hazy ridge she saw a bulky-looking man take a seat at the bar. Then Meredith saw his face.

“Ed Johnson,” she said, startled. “Elsa’s husband.”

“He came past the window, and he’s come before,” Arthur said bitterly. “Someday, somebody will hit him between the eyes with a hammer.” Arthur looked up and down the street. “He’s most likely here to meet some woman.”

“How much does Elsa know?” Meredith whispered.

Arthur stood in the mist and tried to control his anger. “You’re new in that neighborhood. Hasn’t anyone there tipped you off?”

“I haven’t met many people.” She stood, trying to remember what Sally had told her about the Johnsons.

“It’s a perverse game,” Arthur said. “Elsa lets Ed date any woman who can stand him, and Ed covers the town as Elsa’s reporter. It isn’t that big a town.” He continued to look through the window at Ed Johnson. “No marriage is safe with those two around, including yours. I don’t know how he suspected you were here. Maybe he doesn’t suspect. This is one of his regular stops.”

“Spying?”

“You can bet your life on it.” Arthur’s fury caused him to whisper his hatred. “He spies on everybody.”

He was so troubled that he sagged against the wall of the building. “I was with a woman. The only time I was ever with another woman. I’ve always suspected that Elsa told Patty, but I never asked. Patty couldn’t have stood that kind of bluntness, and I didn’t want to know. Maybe I had no right.”

Meredith felt the knowledge slip gently into place, like the last tumbler releasing a lock. The door of her memory opened. Arthur could not know, but she did. Elsa had told Patty and had killed her as surely as if she had knotted the noose. And Elsa knew it, too. It was vicious, evil, more cruel than even Meredith could believe.

She said nothing, thankful she had not tried to explain all she knew. She had felt only Patty’s feelings, never Arthur’s. Whatever he had done, there had to be a reason. She turned to study the profile outlined dimly in the fog. Arthur stood like a condemned man.

“You blame yourself for seeing another woman,” she said flatly. “Patty, all those months you could not touch her, feel her love.”

“It wasn’t love.” Harsh words cut her off. “What I did. Call it desperation. Call it lust. Cunning. I even rented a room where I could be alone a few hours a day. Then I met a woman. I took her to that room. Once. But what it amounted to was that I turned from Patty when she needed me most.”

“What did you need?” Meredith tried to force perspective on him. “Escape? What else? Walls that weren’t gray, and arms that weren’t closed against you?”

“It can’t be forgiven.” Arthur’s voice was so filled with pain that he could hardly speak.

“I can forgive it, if you can’t,” she said. “Whether you can forgive yourself or not, at least we can get past what is harming us. It’s scary, but not as bad as living the way you’ve been living.” She thought of her own problems. “I have to live in that house. We have to get this situation fixed so I can do that.”

He was so filled with guilt and anger that he seemed not to hear.

“I have a plan,” she told him. Not only had the tumblers of the lock clicked, but now a door seemed open. She felt nearly able to predict events. Meredith knew what she must do. “I’ll need your help and every bit of luck we can get hold of.”