“It’s who?”
“It’s the woman I saw last night. It’s the same face, the same pose.”
“Her shoulders are bare. What happened to the shawl?”
“What difference does it make? It’s the same woman. She’s holding a rose. She held one in the dream.”
“With blood on the thorns.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe it’s colder in your room. Maybe that’s why she needed the shawl.”
“Damn it, Jeff—”
He approached the picture, examined it closely. ”Where did this come from, Bobbie?”
“Ariel found it in the attic. It may have been there for a century or more. David hung it for her the other day.”
“And you saw it then?”
“I barely glanced at it.”
“But you had a look at it before last night.”
“Yes, but—”
He spread his hands. “The defense rests. It’s simple enough. If you dreamed a particular face, red rose and all, and then subsequently you saw a portrait for the first time and it was the same face, then you might well have something that indicated something. You wouldn’t have evidence of anything, certainly, but you’d have food for thought. But you saw the portrait first.”
“So?”
“So you remembered it and it sparked your dream. You said yourself that the woman you saw when Caleb died was vague and insubstantial. She probably didn’t look like anything in particular. And when you saw the portrait the other night you didn’t make any connection because there was no connection to be made. But perhaps there was a superficial resemblance, enough for you to link something up unconsciously, and last night you expressed your perceptions in a dream. You dreamed of the woman you saw earlier, but you fleshed out the apparition by giving her the features you saw in the portrait.”
She resisted what he was suggesting. But he went over the argument a second time, and she found herself nodding, allowing the logic of what he was saying.
“I just glanced at her, Jeff.”
“The brain takes very vivid pictures even when we don’t think it registers anything at all. I could show you a photograph for a couple of seconds and you’d swear you barely saw it and didn’t remember anything but the most general impressions. Then, if you were to be hypnotized, you might very well be able to describe that photo as if you were still looking at it. The same sort of thing can happen in a dream.”
“I suppose so...”
“The portrait’s very likely of someone who lived in this house, or of a member of the family, at least. Now if there’s such a thing as ghosts... let’s pretend, for the sake of argument... and if that’s what you saw when Caleb died, it’s not inconceivable that the ghost was a relative of the woman in the portrait. Perhaps you sensed a family resemblance between the two and that was enough to set you up for the dream—”
“I think it was the same woman.”
“All right, suppose it was. She lived here and died here and every once in a while her ghost plays a command performance in the bedroom. Maybe you caused her to appear, Bobbie.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You loved Caleb, you were close to him. That special closeness of a mother for her child. Maybe you had a premonition without even identifying it as such. You sensed that something was wrong with Caleb, that he was in danger, and maybe your unconscious fear conjured up the woman, or whatever, that you saw in the bedroom.”
“You’re saying I imagined her.”
“No.”
She lit a cigarette, glanced at the portrait through a haze of smoke. The woman’s eyes had been painted in such a way that they seemed to follow one around the room. They held Roberta’s eyes now.
“Who’d you buy the house from, Bobbie?”
She had to think for a moment. “A young couple,” she said at length. “Why don’t I remember their names? I could look it up.”
“Don’t bother. Had they lived here long?”
“Less than a year. He was transferred to Charleston and they bought the house, and after nine or ten months they transferred him out again so they sold it. They wanted a fast sale and we got a good price. Traphagen, that was the name. Carl Traphagen, and her name was Julie. I don’t remember where they were transferred. Somewhere in the midwest, I think.”
“It doesn’t matter. Do you know who had the house before them?”
“No.” She frowned, grappling with a shred of memory. “She was pregnant,” she said. ”Julie Traphagen. Not enough to show, but she happened to mention it. I wonder.”
“You wonder what?”
“I wonder what would have happened to her baby,” she said. “If she’d had it in this house.”
Fourteen
“That was him,” Ariel said. Erskine looked at her. “The funeral man, the lawyer, you know.”
“Channing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I didn’t see him. Where?”
She pointed down the street. “In his car,” she said. “In fact all I really saw was the car. He just drove on by. I don’t think he even saw us. Maybe he was at my house.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe Roberta asked him over to check out the stove.” She hefted the flute. “It’s a shame he couldn’t stop and say hello. I could have played for him.”
“You still haven’t played for me.”
“I told you,” she said. “Today’s your lucky day.”
She had brought the flute and the tape recorder to school with her that morning in order to save time. Now she was anxious to get to Erskine’s house. As soon as they were settled in his attic room she opened her flute case and fitted parts together, then set up the tape recorder.
“I taped this last night,” she said. “Then when I played it back I accompanied myself. Listen to this.”
She started the tape, sat back on her heels, put the flute to her lips. After the tape had run for a few bars she joined in, hesitantly at first, then with confidence.
It was just so much fun playing along with herself this way. She didn’t even have to think about what she was doing. She had played against this particular tape twice the preceding night, and now she was doing it again, but playing entirely differently from the way she had played then. Her musical mood was different, just as it differed from the track on the tape recorder, but all the same everything seemed to fit together just right. Her fingers automatically selected the notes that would fit into the right places, as if all the music was happening simultaneously in her brain and she could sit back and decide what spaces to fill in and what spaces to leave empty in order to make the musical picture take whatever shape she wanted it to have.
She continued playing for ten minutes or so. Then the intensity of her concentration became painful. Her head ached and she had to put the flute down at her side. Erskine reached to stop the recorder.
“That’s really far out,” he said. “You played two completely different things and made them go together, so that they wound up being parts of the same thing.”
“You could tell.”
“Sure. I don’t understand music, but I could hear what it is that you do.” He frowned. “This is no good. We need another tape recorder. Then you could tape back and forth and lay one track on top of the other the way they do when they make records. Of course you wouldn’t get professional quality because the surface noise would pile up but at least the music wouldn’t just run off in the air and get lost. You see what I mean?”
She nodded. “I don’t know if there would be room for a third track,” she said. “Let me think.” She closed her eyes. “Maybe it would fit in,” she said.
“The thing is you could experiment.”