Kinley nodded but said nothing.
“I came up to her,” Dora went on. “I thought she was crazy. There’d been a lot of talk. I didn’t know what she might do.” Her voice softened. “But she wasn’t exactly crazy. Something else. Tormented.” She paused a moment, as if attempting to get everything in order before going on. “She watched me come up to her,” she continued finally. “And then she smiled.”
“Smiled?”
“A strange smile, of course,” Dora said. “You know, sort of taunting, as if she’d discovered my secret.”
“Yes, I’ve seen that,” Kinley said.
“Anyway, I said hello to her,” Dora went on. “And she just pointed to the well, and she said, ‘Is she down there?’ Just like that. Then she asked the same question again. ‘Is my little girl down there?’” She shook her head. “I didn’t know how to answer that. It had never occurred to me that my father had killed Ellie Dinker, and so the well, what might be in it, that had never crossed my mind either.”
“When did you look?”
“I did it right at that moment,” Dora answered. “I thought it was the only way to prove to Mrs. Dinker that my father hadn’t killed her daughter.”
“So you went down into the well while she was there?”
“Yes,” Dora said.
“Alone?” Kinley asked admiringly.
“Alone, yes,” Dora answered matter-of-factly. Something in her earlier confidence seemed to give a bit. “Does that seem crazy?”
“Just unusual.”
“I don’t want to go nuts,” Dora said. “I don’t want to end up like Mrs. Dinker.”
Kinley thought of all the ripped and blasted lives his work had brought him into, the empty chairs at the family table. He wondered why he’d never felt the same peril.
“Anyway, there was nothing down there, of course,” Dora said, “and when I came up, I told Mrs. Dinker that.”
“Did she believe you?”
“Yes, I think she did,” Dora said. “She walked away, and that was the last time I spoke to her. I’d see her from time to time after that. She was always hanging around the courthouse. But I’d never spoken to her again.”
She came toward him, gathered her skirt under her and sat down on the floor beside him. “Are you warm yet?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
She smiled quietly. “Ray was the first one to come along who was willing to help me on my …”
“Quest?” Kinley said.
Dora did not look amused by the grandeur of the word. “Reason to live,” she said.
“If that’s what it is, then it might be better if you never found out.”
Dora shook her head. “No, it’s not like that. If I ever found out who killed Ellie Dinker, it would be like being released from prison. Even if it turned out that my father really was the one who did it. Even that would release me.” She turned toward him slowly, her eyes glowing in the red light of the heater. “Do you think he did?” she asked. “Do you think he killed that little girl?”
There was always a moment, Kinley knew, when judgment had to be rendered, sometimes in the presence of overwhelming evidence, sometimes on the basis of nothing more than a primitive intimation. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think he did, Dora.”
She seemed neither relieved nor surprised by his answer. “Ray didn’t either,” she said. “I think that’s what it was between us.”
“Not love?” Kinley asked.
Her eyes closed softly, then opened. “Maybe for him.”
“And for you?”
Some slender rod in the great, unbending structure of her character loosened toward him, releasing a subtle confidence. “Sometimes, you just get tired of going to bed alone,” she said.
Kinley’s mind swept down the long chain of his nights, an indistinguishable landscape of interchangeable rooms, sentiments, people. “Yes,” he said. “You do.”
It had come upon them in an instant, lingered for a time, then departed. Kinley could feel his head pressed deep into the pillow beside her, his eyes watching the air beyond her bedroom window. In the early morning light, he could see the mists rising over the brow of the mountain, gray and billowy, as he remembered them from his home on the canyon.
She slept at his side, her dark face balanced on his shoulder, and as his eyes shot over to her, he felt a grave, nearly uncontrollable need to nudge her into wakefulness, so that he could tell her about his days with his grandmother in the small house, his long walks through the canyon depths, that first journey to the wall of vines, Ray’s face like a ball of light in the deep green sea of the canyon floor, his voice full of a desperately whispered conspiracy: no one could ever find you here.
She shifted slightly, her cheek moving like a soft, brown cloth across his arm. He could smell her hair, her skin, feel the texture of her flesh, but the sensation was so new to him, so different from his past experience, that it came to him like an innovation, a sudden, revelatory instant within a process that was infinitely old and familiar.
She awakened with a start. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d stay all night.”
“You didn’t want me to?”
“I just didn’t think you would. Ray never did.”
“He had a wife.”.
“Even after that,” Dora said, “even after the divorce.”
“Well, there was Serena.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t Serena. It was Sequoyah. It’s too small for things like this.”
She got up, drew on a long red robe and walked to the small window of her bedroom. “It may rain,” she said idly as she stared out into the mist. “It’s been a while. It’s time for it to rain.”
He pulled himself up slightly, pressing his back against the headboard as he watched her at the window. Her back was fully to him, so that he could see only the long fall of the robe, its red tide sweeping over her shoulders and plunging nearly to the floor.
“Dora,” he said softly.
She turned to face him. “No,” she said firmly, then pushed her hands out, a barrier between them. “It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
He looked at her accusingly. “That sounds like a line you’ve said before.”
The hands retreated. “You’d better go now.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the way it is.”
“With people?”
“With me,” Dora said. “I don’t mean to be hard, but there’s a kind of woman I can’t stand. Hopeless, clinging. You know the kind?”
“Victims.”
“That’s right,” Dora said. “I haven’t made much of my life, Kinley, but I haven’t become something like that, and I don’t intend to start now.” She nodded toward the floor, where his clothes lay in a tangled mass. “I’ll let you dress alone,” she said, then left the room, closing the door behind her.
He dressed quickly and headed into the other room. It was empty, and so he kept going, out onto the porch, then down the stairs to where he found her standing near the edge of the cliff, her eyes fixed on the town below.
She continued to stare out over the slope of the mountain. “You have to be careful, don’t you?”
“About what?”
“Not to be trivial,” Dora said.
“No one can ever be safe from a judgment like that,” he told her.
“You can if you do something,” Dora said.
“What do you want to do?”
She stared at him determinedly. “I want to find out who killed Ellie Dinker,” she said. “I don’t want to die in this fucking town without at least knowing that.”
He looked at her coolly. “Does that explain last night?”
The sound of her hand as it struck him, he thought, must have echoed for a thousand miles.
TWENTY-FIVE
No one had ever done that.
No one.
Ever.
At first he’d been unable to abs
orb it, the look in her eyes, the whirl of her arm, the blow on his face, slamming it to the right so that the whole fogbound valley had become an insubstantial blur. In the brief aftermath, he’d gone entirely numb, his eyes glaring at her in a smokey stillness, until she’d finally turned abruptly and disappeared into the house. After that, he’d had no option but to return to the house on Beaumont Street.
He slumped at the desk in Ray’s office, took a deep, exasperated breath, and let his eyes move hazily along the line of books, then inch downward to settle on the computer’s unlighted screen.
In a learned, unwilled gesture, he turned it on, then typed in the familiar code: OVER:MYS. When the file flashed onto the screen, he scrolled down, moving like a bird over the mysteries of Overton and Dinker, until the darkness at the end of the line flowed over the entire screen.
On its blank surface, he typed in the only heading that seemed possible for him at the moment:
QUESTIONS ABOUT DORA
For a few sluggish minutes, he tried to imagine exactly what those questions might be, but found that he knew so little about her, had done so little “research,” that he had not even reached the point where he could formulate a list. She was not his in the way that certain things which swam about and included her now seemed to belong to him, facts and suppositions, the accumulated data of the Overton case.
He hit the delete key, instantly obliterated the last word, replaced it with another, then gazed silently at the new formulation:
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE INVESTIGATION
That was one thing that was incontestably his now, the investigation he’d mounted into the fate of Ellie Dinker. It was a part of him as much as it had ever been a part of Ray before him, or Dora before that, as much as it had been a part of Martha Dinker during those first apprehensive seconds when she had peered out at the darkening sky and wondered why her only daughter had not yet come home. It was his now, passionately his, and he would not let it go.
He found Ben Wade much as he had left him a few days before, his large frame hunched over the latest FBI reports.
“Makes for pretty rough reading,” he said as Kinley came through the door.
Kinley nodded.
Wade laughed derisively. “Reading this stuff, you wouldn’t think a guy could make it to the grocery alive.”
Kinley smiled quietly, in no mood for levity. “It’s a little overdone,” he admitted dryly, “especially the crime clocks.”
Wade chuckled. “Every two seconds a this, every three seconds a that. Makes the human condition look pretty grim.” The laughter died away. “You work in this business long enough, you come to think the whole world’s rotten to the core.”
Kinley walked to the chair in front of Wade’s desk and sat down. “I had a talk with Riley Hendricks,” he said evenly, almost in a tone of accusation.
“Oh yeah? Does he still like teaching school?”
“We didn’t talk much about it,” Kinley said. “We talked about the investigation of Ellie Dinker’s murder.”
Wade remained silent, his eyes peering expressionlessly into Kinley’s as if they were no more than two blue dots drawn on a white wall.
“About the well,” Kinley said, letting the word drop like a heavy weight on Wade’s battered desk.
“Yeah, that bothered him,” Wade said languidly, “the way they never looked in the well.” The hinges on his swivel chair creaked wearily as he straightened himself. “Riley kept thinking Dinker’s body must be there, but nobody ever went to look for it.” He fished a stick of gum from his shirt pocket, peeled off the wrapper and plunged it into his mouth. “We looked every damn place else, though,” he added, “all through the woods, all up and down Rocky River. We drug it from the falls where Overton said he’d dumped it to what must have been as far as ten miles downstream.” He shrugged. “We didn’t find anything. Not a trace.”
“But not the well,” Kinley said. “You never looked there.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“The best I can figure, it just never entered anybody’s mind,” Wade answered. “We’d go into Sheriff Maddox’s office, and everybody would be there. I mean everybody. Me, the DA, half the Fire Department, even old Mayor Jameson a couple of times. I mean, everybody. And the Sheriff, he’d have his county map spread out across his desk, and he’d point at this place and that place, all the hell around, and he’d say, ‘Look right here,’ and put a little dot on the map, and off we’d go.” He looked at Kinley helplessly. “But he just never put a little dot at the well in Charlie Overton’s backyard.”
“And you never mentioned it to him?”
Wade gave a low grunt. “Floyd Maddox wasn’t the sort of man that a deputy made suggestions to.” He tapped the side of his head. “We’re not dealing with the smartest guy that ever lived, you know.”
Kinley nodded. “I see.”
Wade sat back, the mouth moving in slow circles. “Turns out it didn’t matter, though,” he said.
“What didn’t matter?”
“Whether we looked in that well or not,” Wade said. “Because the girl’s body wasn’t there.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Ray said so,” Wade told him.
“I thought he didn’t talk about the Dinker case.”
“He mentioned the well one time,” Wade said, “and the only other time was the day he died.”
“The day he died?”
“That’s right,” Wade said. “It was the day they found him in the canyon. He came up the stairs. He was really out of breath, and he walked over to the desk there, and he unlocked the bottom drawer. I guess it must have been the one he kept all the Overton stuff in.” He bent to the right and spit the gum into the garbage can beside his desk. “Anyway, he scooped everything out of it, scooped it all into a plain old yellow envelope. Then he looked over at me, and he said, ‘It’s just this Dinker stuff.’ Then he said he was through with it and that nobody should talk about it.”
“Nobody should talk about it?”
“Me. That I shouldn’t mention it,” Wade explained. “Like it was maybe a little embarrassing for him to have ever bothered with it in the first place.”
“And this was Sunday?”
“That’s right,” Wade said. “I wouldn’t have been here at all if I hadn’t left the keys to my tool chest in my desk.”
“Would anyone else have been in the courthouse that day?”
“On a Sunday afternoon?” Wade asked loudly. “You must be kidding.”
Kinley let his eyes shift over to the desk in a slow, thoughtful motion that Wade caught immediately.
“Something bothering you, Jack?” he asked. “It’s okay if I call you Jack, I hope?”
Kinley turned his attention back to Wade. “It’s the secrecy,” he said. “That’s what bothers me. The way Ray was keeping everything to himself.”
Wade shrugged. “If you want to look in that drawer, go ahead,” he said indifferently. “Ray wouldn’t have cared. He took the lock with him.”
Kinley took Wade up on his offer without hesitation, walked to the desk and pulled out the drawer. There was nothing inside but a green folder identical to the ones he’d found in the file cabinet in Ray’s office on Beaumont Street, but without any label of any kind.
“Too bad about Ray,” Wade said quietly. “He was a first-class investigator.”
Kinley turned toward him. “What time did you see Ray that day?”
“Around one-thirty, I guess.”
“And he was found dead two hours later?”
“That sounds about right.”
“In the canyon.”
Wade nodded. “Must have gone directly there.”
“Not quite,” Kinley said.
“What do you mean?”
“Because whatever he took out of the drawer, it wasn’t with him when he died.”
“How do you know that?”
“The Incident Reports,” Kinley told him
. “They didn’t mention anything but the body.”
Wade’s face grew very solemn, but he said nothing.
Kinley let his eyes rise toward the small square window in front of Ray’s desk. He could see the slender gray flagpole on the courthouse lawn, the long gray steps where Martha Dinker had kept her vigil, and beyond them, the green slope of the mountain which rose like a great wall to shield the canyon from his view.
He was on his way down the corridor when he saw Mrs. Hunter rise quickly from her desk and approach him.
“Well, I wasn’t sure I’d be seeing you again,” she said brightly.
Kinley nodded politely.
“I wanted to let you know that I found an answer for you,” Mrs. Hunter said.
“An answer?”
“You know, about Mrs. Dinker,” Mrs. Hunter said. “About what she’d been interested in when she came and looked over the evidence in the case.”
“Oh, yes,” Kinley said, recalling an interest that seemed purely technical to him now.
“Well, Harriet Calhoun had been away for a few days,” Mrs. Hunter went on. “But I finally got in touch with her last night, and she told me that every time Mrs. Dinker came to the office, she just wanted one thing.”
“One thing?”
“Just one particular volume of the transcript.”
“Did she remember which one?”
“Yes, she did,” Mrs. Hunter said proudly. “It was volume four.”
Kinley’s mind did its job and called the volume up. “Volume four,” he said. “That was her own testimony.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Hunter said, “but she didn’t read the whole volume, just one part of it.”
“One part?”
“Just one page, Harriet said.”
“Did she remember the page?”
A great glow of accomplishment swept over Mrs. Hunter’s face. “Well, it turns out that Mrs. Dinker came here a lot, and she’d always get the same book, and she’d sit and read it, but she never would bring it back over to the desk. She’d just leave it open on the table.”
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