A Stranger in My Grave by Margaret Millar Page A

different things,” Pinata said with a faint smile. “No, I’m not positive, Mrs. Harker. I saw a straw and grasped it.”
    â€œBut you’re holding on?”
    â€œOnly until I find something more substantial to hold on to.”
    â€œI wish I could help. I’m trying. I’m really trying.’’
    â€œWell, don’t get tense about it. Perhaps we should stop for today. Have you had enough?”
    â€œI guess so.”
    â€œYou’d better go home. Back to Rainbow’s End.”
    She stood up stiffly. “I regret telling you that about my hus­band. It seems to amuse you.”
    â€œOn the contrary. It depresses me. I had a few plans on the drawing board myself.” Just one of them worked out, Pinata thought. His name is Johnny. And the only reason I’m trying to track down your precious day, Daisy baby, is because Johnny’s having his teeth straightened, not because you got your head stuck in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
    He turned the roll of microfilm back to the beginning and switched off the light in the projector.
    The girl in the horn-rimmed spectacles came hurrying over, looking alarmed as if she expected him to wreck the machine or at least run off with the film. “Let me handle that,” she said. “These things are quite valuable, you know. History being made right before our eyes, you might say. Did you find what you wanted?”
    Pinata glanced at Daisy. “Did you?” “Yes,” Daisy said. “Yes, thank you very much.”
    Pinata opened the door for her, and she began walking slowly and silently down the corridor, her head bent as if she were study­ing the tiles on the floor.
    â€œNo two are alike,” he said.
    â€œPardon?”
    â€œThe tiles. There are no two alike in the whole building.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œSomeday when this current project of yours is finished and you need something new to amuse yourself with, you could come down here and check.”
    He said it to get a rise out of her, preferring her hostility to her sudden, unexpected withdrawal, but she gave no indication that she’d heard him or even that he was there at all. Whatever corri­dor she was walking along, it wasn’t this one and it wasn’t with him. As far as she was concerned, he had already gone back to his office or was still up in the library looking at microfilm. He felt canceled, erased.
    When they reached the front of the building, the carillon in the courthouse tower across the street was chiming four o’clock. The sound brought her to attention.
    â€œI must hurry,” she said.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œThe cemetery closes in an hour.”
    He looked at her irritably. “Are you going to take some flow­ers to yourself?”
    â€œAll week,” she said, ignoring his question, “ever since Monday, I’ve been trying to gather up enough courage to go there. Then last night I had the same dream again, of the sea and the cliff and Prince and the tombstone with my name on it. I can’t endure it any longer. I must satisfy myself that it’s not there, it doesn’t exist.”
    â€œHow will you go about it, just wander around reading off names?”
    â€œThat won’t be necessary. I’m quite familiar with the place. I’ve visited it often with Jim and my mother—Jim’s parents are buried there, and one of my mother’s cousins. I know exactly what to look for, and where, because in all my dreams the tombstone is the same, a rough-hewn unpolished gray cross, about five feet high, and it’s always in the same place, by the edge of the cliff, underneath the Moreton Bay fig tree. There’s only one tree of that kind in the area. It’s a famous sailor’s landmark.”
    Pinata didn’t know what a Moreton Bay fig tree looked like, and he had never been a sailor or visited the cemetery, but he was willing to take her word.