“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?”