Germaine raised piteous eyes to me. "Do you want to make me ill, with your talk of collies?" she asked. "Now come on down to the den and tell me what's been going on in town."
"Well, Jimmie," I began, "it's a long, long story—"
[CHAPTER 14]
"If it's going to be long," she said, "we'd both better have a drink. You always think better if you have a glass in your hand."
"Now, what is it you want to know?" I answered, after we were comfortably settled in front of the electric fire.
"It's—it's just that everything is so queer," Germaine began. "You've changed so that you almost seem like a different person. You even look better, not so flabby, as though you took regular exercise. At least I see a change, and then suddenly I find that you've been carrying on with that Briggs girl and I can't tell whether you've really changed or are just trying to fool me. She's a nice person, of course, and if you must have another girl, I'd rather have you pick someone—oh—safe and comfortable like her. But you said you hadn't been playing with the office girls. And then there's Ponto. He used to adore you and you swore by him. Now he tries to bite you and you want to get rid of him. And then there's all this talk about where you were during Holy Week and that F.B.I. man and Myrtle tells me they've been asking a lot of questions about you and Virginia. What have you been doing, dear, that you can't remember when our whole life may depend on it?"
"Jimmie," I told her. "I wish to God I knew. You must believe me when I tell you I can't remember things before Easter Monday. That was the second and today is the eleventh and I can remember everything that's happened since then. Before that it is all blank and all mixed-up in that dream I had."
She moved away from me, slightly. "You can't tell me that the F.B.I. would be interested in your dreams," she said sharply. "Not in time of war."
"They are in this dream," I told her. "You see I dreamed—if you want to call it that—that a certain American ship blew up in the North Pacific. The trouble is that the public hasn't been told that there is such a ship, like that 'Old Nameless' in the Solomons, and that the Navy Department doesn't know what happened to it. I believe that it did blow up. Harcourt believes my story, in the main, but from the F.B.I. angle they have to check up on whether I'm not part of an Axis spy-ring which could have caused the explosion. If I could only remember where I was and what I was doing the week before I could clear myself."