The Bohemian Murders (11 page)
Read The Bohemian Murders Online
Authors: Dianne Day
Reassured, I returned to
The Merchant of Dreams
precisely where I had left off, with Heloise waiting amid circles of silence:
I shifted my weight restlessly from one foot to the other; closed my eyes and held in my mind the face of a clock, with a sweep-second hand ticking away time in an orderly fashion. When I had passed a few seconds in this fashion, the angelic fellow’s voice called out: “Dr. Morpheus will see you now, if you care to proceed along the hall.”
I opened my eyes and, after a brief bit of disorientation, saw that a door had opened far down the hallway. From that open door a square of golden light proceeded. The same light bathed the Botticelli head and turned its fair hair into a halo. I felt dazzled and most strange, burning with desire to see what lay beyond that golden door while deep inside me something whispered: “Turn away and run!”
But alas! I did not run. I did not fear the strange situation as much as I feared the things I knew poverty could drive me to do. I would sooner kill myself than live as a fallen woman. So I uprooted my reluctant feet and step after step went down that long, long hall.
Once again the change in light made it difficult to see; the tall, standing figure of Dr. Morpheus wavered for a moment in my vision and then, as my eyes adjusted, took shape: an intensely handsome man of exotic mien, as if from another place and clime. Long black hair that swept his shoulders, totally out of fashion; broad cheeks and a high brow; pale eyes but with dark rings around the iris like a Persian cat.
“My name is Jonah Morpheus,” he said. His accent was British but that did not tell me where he was from; the British empire reaches all over the world.
“Heloise Goodenough,” I said. My voice came out clear as a bell. “I have come in response to your advertisement about dreams.”
Jonah Morpheus invited me to take a seat; he dismissed the man who looked so much like an angel, calling him Thad; he himself sat behind an imposing desk upon which stood a fantastical lamp fashioned all of colored glass, even its shade. This lamp threw jeweled light across his face as he made a steeple of his fingers and set his chin atop it. “Tell me about your dreams,” he said.
I smiled, albeit rather stiffly. “I am here to strike a bargain. Your advertisement made no mention of the particulars. I should like to know these before I talk about my dreams.”
“A wise woman,” said Dr. Morpheus, and he smiled. At that moment a cat leapt upon the desk—huge, black, long-haired. The cat went first to Morpheus, rubbed its chin on his hands, and purled a greeting deep in its throat; then with its plume of tail held high, padded daintily across the surface of the desk and sat at the edge, regarding me soberly through eyes that were exactly like its master’s.
This is some kind of a strange test,
I thought, but how he had arranged it I could not imagine. I decided to ignore the cat. I said, “Well, sir?”
Again, that smile. Slow and sensual, it played over his face and drifted through the air to touch me like a caress. His voice was both rich and rough. “I am collecting dreams for a project whose purpose must remain secret until all collection is complete. And as the advert said, I will pay.”
He seemed to think that was enough explanation, but it was not—at least, not for me. I asked, “Presumably at some point this project would be for publication?”
“Presumably.”
“In other words, if I tell you—
sell
you—my dreams, they’ll be out there someday for all the world to see?”
The smile grew broader. I fancied that the cat
smiled, too. Jonah Morpheus said, “Your protection will be complete anonymity. No one will know which dreams are yours.”
“I … I see.” I moistened my lips with my tongue, for my mouth had gone dry. “How much?”
“For each night’s dreams, ten dollars.”
Ten dollars! Why, in a month I would have three hundred! It was a fortune! So much that I immediately grew suspicious. “Why so generous a sum?” I asked.
He leaned forward across the desk. The cat turned its elegant but flat-faced head to watch him. “Because,” he said, “it is not easy to buy dreams. Or to sell them, for that matter. There are conditions, and a contract, which is binding.”
“Ah. Tell me.”
“First, the duration of the contract is three months. For that time you must either live here at the Morpheus Foundation—room and board provided, of course—or you must agree to come here first thing each morning; in either case, you are not to speak to anyone until you have told me your dreams from the night before.”
I nodded my understanding.
“Second, you must tell me everything you dream, in its entirety, no matter if the subject matter is nonsensical to you, or repulsive, or embarrassing. If you attempt to hold anything back, I will know, I assure you. I am highly skilled in this area.” His strange eyes bored into me hypnotically, and I could well believe him. The cat turned its head back and stared at me, too, making an eerily doubled effect.
“And what,” I asked, “if there is a night when I do not dream?” I did have such nights, frequently.
He laughed, a rough rumble. “That is extremely unlikely. One interesting finding I have made already: the more a person tells his—or her—dreams to another, the more vivid the dreams become, and the more frequent.” He leaned back again and steepled his fingers, a pedantic posture. “Did you know, Miss Goodenough, that there are some cultures which are based on the sharing of dreams?”
I shook my head.
The cat jumped down from the desk with a light thud and to my great surprise, sprang into my lap. “Good heavens!” I said.
Jonah Morpheus smiled approvingly as his cat turned around three times in my lap, kneaded my skirt a bit with its paws, then curled itself into a warm, purring lump. “The cat’s name is Shadow,” he said.
“Is Shadow a boy or a girl?” I stroked the pretty creature’s silky head.
“Neither,” he said enigmatically.
I did not inquire further.
“So what is it to be? Do the conditions pose a difficulty for you?”
The cat purred, Morpheus smiled, and I tried to think. But all I could think was that in three months of selling my dreams I would have earned almost a thousand dollars. Perhaps ‘earn’ was not the right word. It seemed so easy.…
“I will do it. Draw up the contract,” I said.
“Ask him,” said Quincy early the next morning. He pointed to a male figure across the dunes, bent almost double as he walked along the rocky shoreline. “That’s Junior, so-called on account of his name’s Joe and he claims to be the son of the one what they named Point Joe after. Anyway, Junior’s kind of a hermit; he’s lived in the Del Monte Forest all his born days. He smells a mite rank, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly, Miss Fremont.”
“All right, I’ll catch up to him and ask, but I swear, Quincy, if you don’t quit calling me Miss I’m going to fire you!”
Quincy seemed shocked, but soon the twinkle was back in his eyes. He was getting to know me. Good!
“Hitch up the shay while I’m gone, will you?” I grinned, and set off over the dunes.
When I caught up I soon saw why Joe, Junior was so bent over. The poor man was ancient and almost blind, his eyes clouded with milky cataracts. “Eh?” he said, rearing back and almost losing his balance. I grabbed at
his ragged arm for fear that he would fall off the rocks into the sea.
I said loudly, though I did not know if he were also slightly deaf, “I’m Fremont Jones. I live in the lighthouse, and Quincy, who works there, said you might be able to tell me where in Del Monte Forest a certain person lives.”
“Might,” he conceded, stepping from the rocks onto the sand and laying down his burden, a large burlap sack full of who-knew-what. Junior was, apparently, a scavenger. He put his head over on one side in a canny manner. “Depends who the certain person is.”
And what the reward might be, I thought, reaching into my pocket. I pulled out a quarter; not much, but all I had with me. “Braxton Furnival,” I said, holding up the money. Overnight the weather had cleared, and the morning sun struck silver from the coin.
“That be a siller dollar?” Junior asked.
I moved upwind before answering. “No, it’s just a quarter, but if you tell me where he lives and follow me up to the lighthouse, I can get another seventy-five cents.”
Junior shrugged. “Ain’t hardly worth a dollar noways.” He reached out his hand palm up and I deposited the quarter in it, relieved that he did not want more. My relative poverty both embarrassed and scared me at times; in truth I did not have a whole dollar to spare.
Junior said, “You goes in the forest by the Pacific Grove gate. First two times the road forks, you take the left fork each time. Pretty soon you comes on up a rise and there she be. Can’t miss ’er. Biggest darn house you ever seen round these parts, and ugly as sin. Har!” He laughed raucously, which made his poor eyes stream. He wiped at them as he continued: “Lives all by hisself in that big place—leastways, that’s how he tells it. Har!” He wiped his eyes again and squinted. “You going up there by yer lonesome?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
Junior shouldered his pack. “Then you best be careful.”
KEEPER’S LOG
January 19, 1907
Wind: W light
Weather: Cool; clear and sunny
Comments: Steamships out to S in early a.m.; also whales
going S, local boats in pursuit
B
raxton Furnival, or his architect, had read too many novels about European royalty and/or made one too many trips to the Black Forest. His house was in the Grand Germanic Hunting Lodge style. If it were mine (a staggering thought) I should name it “Grosse-Dark,” I thought as I came up a track overhung by the low-sweeping branches of old cypress trees. Although the forest between Pacific Grove and Carmel certainly had space for such a monstrous dwelling, in every other way it seemed out of place. In fact, it was quite jarring to
come upon anything so large and dark and bulky all of a sudden, even if one were seeking it out.
“Well, really!” I commented to Bessie, as with a touch of the reins I guided her through a stone gateway, one side adorned with a wooden shield-shaped heraldic crest, which I presumed Braxton had invented. The crest featured a boxing bear on one side, three pinecones on the other, the name
FURNIVAL
arched across the top, and on a sort of waving banner at the bottom the words
VITA ET PLENITUDO.
“Life and wealth,” if my memory of high school Latin served. Such ego the man had! And, it seemed, the wherewithal to support it. Certainly no baron of the German kaiser’s court ever had a grander woodland hunting lodge; but who would want to live in a place like that all the time?
Not I! It was all great gables and rough shingles and huge beams intentionally left unfinished so they still resembled trunks of whole trees—and all of it, down to the last splinter, an oppressive dark brown. One got the idea that Fafnir could not be far off, and Siegfried (who I personally think must have been thick between the ears) would come bounding along at any moment. It was all so excessively masculine and virile that for a moment I stood in the entry portico feeling overwhelmed.
The knocker on the massive front door was iron—what else?—and raising it required both hands. I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, lifted, and discovered that the knocker made quite a satisfying racket when it came crashing down. Once, twice, three times I repeated this process before concluding that Braxton Furnival was not at home.
“O-o-oh … botheration!” I said, biting my lip because I wanted to say something much stronger.
Now what? I found it hard to believe that anyone would live in such a huge house without at least one servant to help take care of it. So in spite of what old Joe, Junior had said, I walked clear around it and every now and then called out, “Hello? Anybody home?”
In the back I had a surprise—a broad patch of cleared land, planted with grass to make a sloping lawn, rolled down a considerable distance toward the sea. Ocean and
sky seemed to be having a contest out there, to determine which could be the purest, deepest blue. Neither won; the result was a perfect tie. Deer grazed on the grass, but they bounded gracefully away, white tails flashing, as soon as they got my scent.
“He probably hunts them,” I grumbled, wishing I could tell the shy, pretty animals to come back because I would do them no harm. Deer came to the lighthouse grounds, too, whole families, each with their antlered buck, to eat the scrub grass among the dunes. Actually I had found that they will eat almost anything, including some things you’d prefer they didn’t, such as Hettie’s daisies.
I turned around and looked at the house from this side. Impatient as I was to be getting on with things, I was also curious, so I went across a flagstone terrace and looked in through a gigantic bow window. As one might have expected, it was dark and gloomy inside. I gazed at a large, open room that, with the addition of a long table and chairs, would have made an impressive banqueting hall. Its most notable feature was a stone fireplace large enough (predictably) for a person to stand inside. I wrinkled my nose in distaste.