Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone Read Free Book Online Page B

careful. I get a strong feeling, inescapable; but who’s to know what it means, if it’s even true. Sometimes it’s nothing.”
    “Sometimes the bodies are buried there in the cellar.” I felt very uncomfortable. “Will you say who you think wants to kill you?”
    “One reason I have to be so hesitant is that these pictures are most intense when I’m ill, or upset. Even a fever from a cold. They came strongest when I was younger. They weren’t pleasant, most of them. I’ll tell you one I never told the police. When Charles was dying, I was at the hospital with him one night when I suddenly saw an image of Bainton Ames out in a boat on Pine Hills Lake.” She stopped to erase part of her drawing.
    I pulled my chair to the fire. The room was too large, the log beams too high over my head, the corners too shadowy. I began to want another drink. “Was that the same night that Bainton actually drowned?”
    She nodded. “Yes. But in my…vision, his death was not an accident. There was somebody hidden in the boat behind Bainton, somebody who leapt up and struck him on the head, somebody he knew.” She moved her leg slightly with her hands and smoothed the blanket.
    A twitch behind my scalp pulled at my hair, even while I was thinking, easy enough to say all this so long after the fact. “Who was the somebody?”
    Again she didn’t respond to my questions, but said, “Finally, my uneasy feeling about Bainton’s death grew so acute, I told Cloris. She was, naturally, reluctant to believe me. She didn’t believe me. In fact, she was angry. There was a painful scene. She asked me not to mention my, as she called them,
fantasies
to her again.” The even voice dropped. “Well, that was many years ago.”
    Snow had stuck in an oval around the corners of the huge window, making an old-fashioned frame. Through it, black lake and black sky were slipping into each other. With my shoe I pushed a log deeper into the fire’s cave.
    She kept drawing. “You see, Justin, a week ago Sunday, out on St. Simons, I dreamt that Cloris Dollard came to me and told me to find her diary.”
    “You mean you just
dreamt
she had this diary?”
    The gray eyes frowned, disappointed in me. “Dreams are often wiser than the people who have them. They are, in many cases, certainly more honest.”
    I held up my hands. “God knows.”
    “In my dream, Cloris was dead. Her hair was bloody, and her face blank white. She held out her hand, unclenched her fist, and pearls spilled from it.”
    “You had this dream the night she died?” I came over to her couch and sat down.
    “Yes. She said she’d been killed because Bainton had been killed.”
    “Before you’d heard about her murder?”
    “Yes.”
    “You could have read about the head wound, or someone could have told you about it after you got down here, and you fed the details back into the dream without knowing it.”
    “I could have.”
    “But you didn’t?”
    “No.” She lifted her long white hand from the opened sketchbook and turned it toward me.
    I whispered, “Good Christ.” Covering the page was a drawing of Cloris Dollard
exactly
as I had looked down on her that Monday morning. She lay on the flowered quilt, one arm turned back, one foot dangled off the bed’s edge. Joanna had drawn the pillow pressed over the head, drawn the pearls on the rug below, drawn even the ripped right sleeve of the suit. Nothing about that sleeve or about the pearls had been in any public report I’d read. She took the sketchbook back from me, and said quietly, “I told you the images I see are very vivid, Justin.”
    I stood up to walk. “What do you mean she said she was killed because Bainton was killed? Bainton Ames died years ago. We have a man now in custody, a petty thief from East Hillston, on this Cloris case. You don’t think he killed her?”
    “Do you?”
    I turned and stared at her. “I don’t know. Who do you think killed Cloris? If he’d pressed you, what would you have