A Stranger in My Grave Read Free Page A

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?”
    â€œOf 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.
    â€œDaisy,” he said softly, “don’t worry about the dream.”
    â€œI can’t help it. It must have some meaning, with everything so specific, my name, the dates—”
    â€œStop thinking about it.”
    â€œI will. It’s just that I can’t help wondering what happened on that day, December 2, 1955.”
    â€œProbably a great many things happened, as on any day of any year.”
    â€œTo me, I mean,” she said impatiently. “Something must have happened to me that day, something very important.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œOtherwise my unconscious mind wouldn’t have picked that particular date to put on a tombstone.”
    â€œIf your unconscious mind is as flighty and unpredictable as your conscious mind—”
    â€œNo, I’m serious about it, Jim.”
    â€œI know, and I wish you weren’t. In fact, I wish you’d stop thinking about it.”
    â€œI said I would.”
    â€œPromise?”
    â€œAll 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