About Pat,” he answered, and I saw
Harlan start and clench his teeth, “they found her at the bottom of that embankment near Merrick’s corner this morning in her wrecked car—dead ! Her mother called me about a half an hour before they found her. She asked if I knew where she had gone for the night. She said Pat had decided suddenly around eleven o’clock last night that she had behaved foolishly about refusing to go to the party and had climbed into her roadster, chuckling over the surprise she would give us when she walked in time for the banquet. Her mother seemed to have a premonition of what would happen for she said it had been drizzling when Pat left and she had cautioned her against driving too fast on the slippery road. I—I hadn’t the heart to tell her we hadn’t seen Pat. I was afraid, too, so I dressed and went out—but they had discovered her body. Poor little Pat,” he finished with a sigh.
Harlan had slumped into a chair and sat staring into space. I motioned Bob to follow me into the studio, and without a word we took the thing of bones and replaced it in its corner. As we turned away, I noticed a strand of hair caught in the bony fingers of the left hand!
“Probably Sally’s—last night,” Bob said, “She was nearest, wasn’t she?” I didn’t answer but I felt cold all over as I walked away.
I have never told anyone of the dream Harlan so vividly related to me that morning. I’d merely be thought an impressionable fool if I did, I guess.
To the rest of the world, Pat was just a member of the reckless younger generation, speeding in typical fashion on a slippery night road to join a party of waiting friends and ending disastrously at the bottom of a cliff. Too bad, but quite a natural denouement these days!
Call me superstitious if you will, but I can’t think of the affair without having grave doubts as to its natural conclusion.
If spirits do live on, in that vague place we call the Borderland, retaining their earthly personalities, then they must indeed retain their earthly emotions as well.
Novello had loved Pat. Can death change that? Since Pat continued to love his memory, was he not, as Harlan had said, still the lucky rival ?
But he was a rival unable to defend his mortal memory from the blasphemous and unsportsmanlike treatment to which it had been subjected! Suppose this fact had taunted him into contemplating an interrupted victory—into taking Pat across the misty frontier that had intercepted their love?
Who knows?