The Sleepwalker

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

Marian Tansey appears to be living a happy life. She has great friends, a job in a thrift shop, and she has just bought a new car. She may even be falling in love with Dick Lang, who sold it to her. She could be on top of the world, but there are a few clouds in the sky.

There is a mystery surrounding the car. It has been 'borrowed' during the night by someone unknown. But most of all there's the frightening fact that, although she hasn't admitted it to any of her friends or colleagues, Marian lost her memory a year or two ago and has no idea who she is. Then, there is a murder ...

Release date: March 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

SOMETHING ABOUT his eyes—bright, dark, direct—made me uneasy.

An inner voice said: This man is dangerous. Have nothing to do with him.

I am not superstitious about first impressions. I ignored the inner voice and smiled.

“I’m Marian Tansey. I telephoned. You’re holding a car for me.”

“The convertible.”

“How did you know?”

“I took your call. You wanted a convertible, white or cream, with seat belts, power steering and hydromatic drive.”

“And no down payment. That’s what your commercial said on the radio this morning. Or am I wrong?”

“You’re right.” He grinned. “The cheese in the trap. Be with you in a minute, ma’am.”

I noticed for the first time that his voice was slightly southern.

It was one of several things that distinguished him from the other two working around the gas pumps. He moved with a controlled suppleness that would have been called grace in a woman. He was
taller than the others and he said “Yes” or “No.” They said “Ye-ah” or “Na-a.”

All three had names embroidered in script on their breast pockets: Tom, Dick and Harry.

“Real names or a joke?”

“Real. I’m Dick Lang.”

He was wiping his hands on a piece of cotton waste when he noticed the puppy. “Yours?”

“Yes.”

He leaned down to pat a sleek head. A first plucking had left my little dog’s coat more beautiful than it would ever be again—jet-black and rippled like watered silk.

“Name?”

“Bart.”

“Funny name for a Scottie.”

“Don’t you remember the Dog Bartholomew who baffled Bertie Wooster?”

“At Totleigh Towers, of course! There are three kinds of dog people: those who call dogs Fido or Rover or Spot, those who call dogs Champion Apricot Powderpuff Third of Poodlefake Kennels,
and those who call dogs Flush or Argos or the Dog Bartholomew.”

“And Bart for short. Stay, Bart!”

He stayed, but his eyes followed me as I went into the showroom. Bart was at the age when a Scottie isn’t quite sure whether he is supposed to keep his ears up or down. He had got one up,
but he hadn’t made up his mind about the other. This gave him a lopsided, touchingly immature look like a small boy with a gap in his teeth on one side of his mouth.

There was only one white car left. It didn’t have the bloated, bulbous look of some cars that were new that year. Whenever its suave, sloping lines came naturally to an angle, that angle
was cut cleanly. It was immaculate inside and out. I had never hoped to own such a little jewel box of a car.

“It looks new,” I said.

“Better than new,” said Dick. “A demonstration car. Only ten thousand miles on the clock, broken in, tuned up, but never overworked or neglected. No dealer can afford to have
anything wrong with a demonstration car. We only sell them when we have to start demonstrating newer models.”

“And the price?”

“Including interest? Around three thousand on this one, with three years to pay.”

That would work out at about eighty-six a month. I could manage that, but . . . would they consider me a good credit risk? I had none of the credentials that everyone else has.

We took the car out on Cambridge Street. I drove it for half an hour on the Southeast Expressway. It responded to the lightest touch with dreamlike precision. The engine purred almost inaudibly
like a cream-fed kitten. Already it was my car. Only the money part of it worried me now.

The office was a small, glass box between showroom and repair shop. Chairs and desk and floor overflowed with an accretion of flotsam and jetsam that must have been accumulating for
years—discarded snow tires, muddy boots, torn work gloves, old income tax forms, canceled checks, screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches.

On the wall above the desk was a last year’s calendar decorated with meaty girls bursting out of tight bathing suits.

Thumbtacked to other walls were cards printed with stale aphorisms:

An honest politician is one who stays bought.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

If your wife can’t cook, don’t drown her! Keep her for a pet and go to the automat.

The master of this little kingdom had an unpleasantly loose face—drooping eyelids, splayed nose, slack lips. He looked at me suspiciously, while Dick Lang found chairs for me and
himself.

“We do all the financing here! No banks.”

“I’ve no objection.”

“Your name?”

“Marian Tansey.”

“Miss or Mrs.?” His glance went to a gold band on my left hand.

“I spell it ‘Ms.’ ”

He wrote “Miss.”

“Your mother’s ring, I suppose. Address?”

“Mount Vernon Street.” Stupidly I couldn’t think of the number at that moment. I had to look in the telephone book.

Now he was really suspicious.

“Pretty funny to forget your own address!”

“My memory has always been bad.”

“Been there long?”

“A year.”

“Business address?”

“I have a job in the Thrift Shop on Charles Street.”

“The shop run by that Mrs. Haviland?”

“Mrs. Haviland manages it for The Committee.”

“What committee?”

“We just call it The Committee.”

“What do you sell in a shop like that?”

“Old things donated by friends of The Committee—jewelry, clothes, furniture.”

“In other words, a junk shop.”

“Not quite. Everything is repaired and cleaned before it goes on sale.”

“Who gets the profits?”

“We’re a nonprofit corporation. We support a nursery school for children of working mothers.”

“I’m against it. Mothers should stay home and look after their kids.”

I didn’t bother to tell him that most of our working mothers were unmarried and many of them were black. I was sure he would be against that, too.

Years ago Ruth Haviland’s mother had insisted we concentrate on helping illegitimate children because their death rate was so much higher than that of legitimate children. She had turned
an amateurish Victorian enterprise, called the Boston Committee for Alleviating the Condition of the Poor, into The Committee, a tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation that employed professional social
workers.

There was enough work in connection with the Thrift Shop, selecting, transporting and appraising things donated for sale, to keep the volunteer workers busy. Only one full-time, paid worker was
needed to run the shop. That was my job.

I tried to turn the conversation. “Don’t you think you have asked me enough questions?”

“We do the financing. Remember? So we got to find out all about you. You got social security?”

“I had to get it when I took this job.”

“How long have you had this job?”

“Nearly a year.”

“How did you get along before that?”

If you keep silent, people will often answer their own questions. It worked this time.

“Remittances from home, I suppose,” he said. “What are your credit references?”

“My bank and my employers.”

“What kind of old car are you trading in?”

I felt as Napoleon must have felt when Blücher appeared at Waterloo.

“I haven’t got an old car to trade in. That was not mentioned in your radio commercial.”

“You shoulda taken it for granted! Did you think you could skip the down payment and the trade-in both?”

“Then I can’t have the car?”

“Not unless you got some other assets. Any bonds or real estate?”

“No, just savings and salary.”

“A salary paid by a bunch of creepy old dames like that Mrs. Haviland, who’ll shut down that Thrift Shop as soon as they get bored with it.”

“It’s been here since eighteen sixty-nine.”

“So what? Suppose you lose your job? Suppose you get sick and drop dead? The payments stop, the car comes back to me as a used car worth less than it is now. What about your folks? Would
they help? Could they borrow on insurance or something?”

“No.”

“You just being independent or are they dead?”

I didn’t want him to probe, so I lied. “They’re dead.”

“Then you’d better forget the whole thing.”

I have no clear recollection of how I got out of that office.

Yesterday I had had no idea of buying a car. Now, just because I had listened to a radio commercial at breakfast, I felt as if I had lost my last friend.

Spring had something to do with it. When pussy willow and forsythia bloom, I long to get out of Boston for weekends. A car would make it so easy.

As I turned into Charles Street, I became aware of footsteps behind me. I looked back.

It was Dick Lang. He had taken off his overalls. He was wearing blue jeans and a russet shirt. The muted red was becoming to his tanned face and chestnut hair.

“You followed me?”

“I followed Bart.”

The puppy recognized his name. He wagged his whole hindquarters as puppies do.

Dick fell into step beside me. “You really wanted that car, didn’t you?”

“I should have realized it wasn’t possible.”

“No way you can borrow money?”

“None.”

He sighed. “The only compensation I can offer is luncheon with me. Care to?”

My first impulse is always to say “no” to a stranger. This time I temporized.

“I never lunch. I just snatch a coffee yoghourt in my own kitchen.”

“Why not a coffee yoghourt with me in that snack bar across the street?”

Over the yoghourt, he confided that he was a dropout from Harvard Medical, born in North Carolina and now looking for a place to live in this neighborhood.

I told him that a young couple who lived over the Thrift Shop wanted a tenant for their extra room. They had asked me to put a card in our show window that very morning.

“As soon as you get back to the shop, take that card out of the window,” said Dick. “They’ve got a tenant.”

“But you haven’t seen the place!”

“I don’t have to. All I care about is being able to walk to work.”

“Suppose you don’t like it once you’re in there? I’ll feel responsible.”

“That would make us even. I feel responsible for your not getting that car. I should have told you about the trade-in when you telephoned.”

“Wasn’t that cheese in the trap, too?”

“Oh, yes. You’d be surprised how many people fall for that no-down-payment bit and forget all about the trade-in. Makes me squirm sometimes, but not much I can do. I’m just a
hired hand there. This Mrs. Haviland, you know her well?”

“She’s the best friend I have. She owns the house where I live. She found me this job when she heard I needed one. I had no claim on her. I was just one of her tenants.”

“Would she co-sign a loan?”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask her to do anything more for me. She’s done so much already.”

But the seed was planted. . . .

Ruth Haviland’s house, like so many others on Mount Vernon Street, is an old house made over into apartments. There is no elevator, but the half-basement was converted
into a garage when Ruth discovered that no one wanted an apartment so close to the street, even if she called it a “garden apartment” and put bars on the windows.

Her own place is on the first floor above the garage. Her son, Bill, has an apartment on the floor above hers and mine is above his. At that time the attic floor was vacant.

When I got home that evening, I rang Ruth’s bell.

She opened the door herself and took me into the living room. I sank gratefully into an easy chair, for I had been on my feet all day.

Ruth stood facing me, back to the fireplace, a tall woman with untidy gray hair. It is her eyes that hold your attention. They are a lustrous silver, set deep under dark brows, innocent and
friendly.

I had meant to ask her just one question: Is there any bank in Boston that will lend a person in my circumstances money to buy a car?

I might have known she wouldn’t let it rest there. In three minutes she had got the whole story out of me.

“There’s only one sensible way to do this. I’ll borrow on one of my savings accounts.”

“And lose interest for three years?”

“Oh, no. I said borrow on, not borrow from. I won’t withdraw the money. I’ll just pledge some of it as security for the money I’m borrowing for you. That
way I’ll get interest right along, and the bank will charge a lower interest rate on the money I’ve secured for you than you could get by yourself.”

She took my breath away. “Why doesn’t everybody buy cars this way?”

“Not everybody has collateral. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given . . . but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away. Driver’s license?”

I was struck dumb.

“Lost or expired?”

I dodged that one. “I don’t know just where it is. I’ll go upstairs and look.”

“No hurry. If you can’t find it, you can always take a test and get a new one. You’d better keep the car in the garage downstairs.”

“Only if you’ll let me pay rent for garage space.”

“Of course. Did you think I wouldn’t?”

Ruth had tact. She knew that too much generosity can be as great an affliction as too little.

The first Saturday after I got the car was a diamond day—clear, cold, hard, brilliant.

Bart and I hurried through breakfast. On our way down to the garage, we stopped at Ruth’s door. Would she care to take the first drive with us?

“Thank you, Marian, but I have flu. Don’t come near me. You might catch it.”

No one has to tell you to drive carefully when your car is new, without a scratch on it, and you’re out of practice. After about an hour, my driving reflexes “came back,” the
way swimming or riding or piano-playing reflexes come back from wherever they sleep during months of disuse. By the time we got to South Chatham, I was at home in the car.

Bart and I had a picnic luncheon on the sandy beach and walked beside the sea all afternoon.

Back in the garage that evening, I made a perfect fool of myself dusting the new car all over inside and out. I even used window-cleaning stuff to wash and polish the windshield and windows on
both sides until they shone. By the time I was through, it was as sparkling clean as when I drove it out of the showroom.

I put up the top, closed the windows and locked both doors, first making sure that I had left the gear indicator on P for Park and pulled out the hand brake.

I was too tired to bother with dinner. I ate some cold tongue left over from the picnic and fell asleep a minute or so after I crawled into bed.

I woke to bells. Boston has numberless church bells and they all ring every Sunday.

When I went to the open window, the sun felt warmer.

“Let’s try the North Shore today,” I said to Bart.

He wagged his tail, which means “yes.” One-sided conversations with Bart make living alone bearable.

His toenails made scratching noises on the linoleum as he ran after me down the stairs to the garage. I switched on the rather dim overhead light and crossed the floor to the parking space where
my car had fitted so neatly the night before.

At least I had thought it had. Now I saw that I hadn’t done quite as neat a parking job as I thought. The car had entered the space on a slant. The front was too close to Ruth’s car
and the rear too close to the wall.

As soon as I opened the door of the car, Bart jumped past me and settled down on the front seat.

I put our picnic basket on the back seat, slid into the driver’s seat and shut the door.

As I eased off the hand brake, I found that my feet couldn’t reach the gas and brake pedals. That was odd. Both pedals had been within easy reach yesterday.

The front seat was adjustable, but it took all my strength to push it forward until the pedals were in reach again.

When I fitted the key into the ignition, I noticed that an ash tray had been pulled out from the dashboard. In it were three cigarette stubs with filter tips.

I had never smoked. I had a horror of the habit.

For a moment I was uneasy. Then I remembered. This was a demonstration car, not a car that had never been used before. Someone—Dick Lang perhaps—had . . .