Places in the Dark

by Thomas H. Cook

  According to Sheila Beacham, who’d sold her the ticket, Dora had looked nervous and upset when she bought her ticket to Portland. She’d gone directly to her bus, then taken a seat at the very rear.

  After that, she had simply vanished.

  And so, during the next few days, I’d searched Dora’s house again and again, gone through closets, the small attic, even dug through the ashes in her fireplace and peered up its blackened chimney, looking everywhere for some sign of where she’d fled. I’d found only the battered anthology of English verse she’d left behind. The label inside read Ex Libris, Lorenzo Clay, Carmel, California, a clue, perhaps, to where she’d once been, but not to where she’d gone.

  “I know you want her caught fast, Cal,” Sheriff Pritchart said the afternoon he summoned me to his office.

  He’d found out that I was conducting my own investigation and wanted to stop me, he said, before I “got into trouble.”

  “It’s up to other people to find Dora March,” T.R. told me. “Not you, Cal. That’s not your job at all.”

  He leaned against the gun cabinet in his office, a row of rifles propped on their stocks behind the glass door. A steel chain was threaded through each trigger guard, then locked to an eyebolt in the wooden frame.

  “You understand?”

  When I gave no answer, he watched me silently, then said, “You look like hell, Cal.” He noticed me studying the lock on the gun case, the ravaged look in my eyes. “I wish William had just steered completely clear of Dora,” he added.

  An earlier judgment reared its head, Death follows her.

  “But he just couldn’t keep away from her, I guess,” T.R. said wearily.

  “He loved her,” I told him in a matter-of-fact tone that gave no hint of the boiling wave I rode.

  “It cost him his life.”

  That seemed the most bitter of all conclusions, that Billy had died for love. I recalled the joy and peace that had come over him during the last hours of his life. It was as if he’d finally solved the great riddle of his existence, found in Dora the one key that unlocked him.

  “Some money too, I guess.”

  T.R. was referring to the embezzlement, paltry sums stolen from petty cash, fraudulent notes made in Dora’s hand.

  “He didn’t care about that,” I said. “William didn’t care that Dora was a thief?” T.R. shook his head. “He was just going to forget about that?”

  “He would have done anything for her,” I said quietly. “There was something about her that—” I stopped, recalling the touch of her hand.

  T.R. looked at me cautiously, like a hunter who’d just spotted bear prints in the snow. “Something about her that what?”

  “That made my brother want to live.”

  T.R. shook his head, again unwilling to be diverted by such notions, and returned to the reason he’d called me to his office. “I know you’ve been talking to people, Cal. Joe Fletcher. Art Brady. Others.”

  I could feel the noose tightening. T.R. would soon go the rounds, instruct the good citizens of Port Alma to keep their mouths shut if I should happen by, asking questions about Dora March.

  “What would you do if you found her?” he asked.

  I gave him the minimum, a shrug.

  “That’s not a good enough answer, Cal.”

  “It’s the only one I have, T.R.”

  “Well, before you burst through Dora’s door, you ought to give one thing some pretty serious thought. If that woman killed William, she’d sure as hell kill you. So, where does that leave us, Cal?”

  He wanted me to tell him that I’d give it up, stop searching for Dora, let what was left of his investigation run its course through the remaining official channels. But that was a pledge I could not make, knowing I would never keep it.

  “If the money didn’t matter to William, then maybe what we’re dealing with here is a lover’s quarrel,” T.R. said. “I’ve seen it quite a few times. Spats that get out of hand, and somebody ends up dead.”

  “He loved her,” I repeated.

  “But did she love him?”

  I saw her eyes lift toward mine, I can’t.

  “Yes, she did.”

  “I’ve seen love make people do good things,” T.R. said. “But at the same time, I’ve never seen it stop a person from doing something bad.”

  T.R. was nearing seventy. In him, the illusions of romance had died long ago. He saw love’s passionate certainties as little more than fleeting claims, eternal love a thing that would endure no longer than a season.

  “Maybe she said no, that’s what I’m getting at, Cal. Maybe that’s what started it. He offered her the ring, and she said no. And as to why she said no. Well, that could be the oldest story there is, son. Maybe she had another man. You wouldn’t know about anything like that, would you?”

  “No.”

  “William never mentioned some other fellow Dora might have fancied instead of him?”

  Truth rose like a bloody gorge into my throat, but I choked it down again.

  At my silence, T.R. shook his head despairingly. “Who was she, I wonder.”

  I saw the dingy trawler turn toward the sea, heard my brother’s voice in all its youthful ardor, She’s out there somewhere.

  “She was the one he’d hoped for all his life,” I said.

  “You ask me, he’d been better off picking a name out of a hat.”

  I glanced toward the window, snow falling thickly beyond the clouded glass. “He couldn’t do that. He loved Dora. Only Dora.”

  “Yeah, that was William, all right,” T.R. said in a tone of undisguised pity. “He never grew out of it, did he? That kid way of looking at things.” He squinted at me knowingly. “It’s better to be like you, Cal.”

  “Like me?”

  “The type that never gets swept away.”

  I felt my hand on her white throat, quickly got to my feet. “I’d better be on my way,” I said.

  “Remember what I told you,” T.R. warned.

  “I will,” I said, then left him to his paperwork and his guns and trudged back to my house.

  Once there, I stripped off my coat and hung it in the front closet, pulled off my winter boots and placed them on the mat. A storm was raging now, angry gusts rattling my windows, sending frigid bursts of air across the cold wooden floor. I made a fire in the hearth and huddled close beside the flames. As children, Billy and I had often done the same, wrapping our arms around each other, amazed by the heat our bodies generated. Thinking of those times, I felt my brother’s death sink deeper and deeper into me, thick as a black dye, staining everything, past, present, future, leaving its mark on everything I touched.

  One by one, I returned to the events of the past year—Billy’s Four Lines, my first sight of Dora as she’d swept past Ollie’s Barber Shop, meetings, conversations, the words that had passed between us, moments when we’d touched. And yet, as the evening wore on, my mind returned more and more determinedly to a particular night, a man, a child, a burning house, Billy in the distance, Dora beside me, her eyes upon the fire, staring at it so intently, her gaze seemed almost to feed the flames.

  The fire had started just after nightfall. A Friday night, January 17, to be exact. Snow had been falling steadily since nine o’clock that morning, blocking roads, slowing traffic, so that by the time the town’s volunteer firemen reached Carl Hendricks’s house on Pine Road, the ramshackle building was already a lost cause.

  By the time I arrived, flames had spiraled up the front stairs and blown out the single dormer window on the second floor. They now clawed at the roof with fiery red fingers.

  There’d been nothing anyone could do to save the building. But a few of us, rather than merely milling around while it burned, had formed a line and dutifully relayed water buckets from a nearby creek to douse the little shed behind the house.

  Carl Hendricks had joined the relay for a time, then slouched away to stand a few yards from his home, wrapped in a tattered blanket, his daughter M
olly standing silently at his side. He was a large man, with a fleshy face and a crooked, flattened nose. His ears were small and curled, and from the side they appeared apish. Molly looked like someone else’s child. She was eight years old, with golden hair that fell to her waist and skin so smooth and luminous it looked like polished porcelain.

  Billy arrived a few minutes before the house finally groaned its last, shuddered briefly, then collapsed, his battered old Ford sedan clattering through the snow until it ground to a wheezy halt beside my own car. He wore his brown overcoat, frayed at the lapels, the expensive red scarf I’d given him for his last birthday wrapped around his neck, and a felt hat tugged far down, so that he resembled some melodrama detective.

  What I noticed most, however, was that he was not alone.

  She stepped out briskly, closing the car door behind her, her eyes leveled upon the fire, studying it intently, as if its thick smoke and red flames were a riddle she was determined to solve.

  I recognized her instantly, of course. She was the young woman I’d seen first through the window of the barbershop, then later at Ed Dillard’s house on the night of his death.

  “I believe you’ve met Dora,” Billy said when they came up to me.

  In the shadows carved by the fire, my brother looked older, more experienced, and I suppose I should have guessed that she was already beginning to deepen and enrich him, bestow upon him that sense of “something to lose” that lies at the heart of all maturity.

  “Yes I have,” I said. I touched the brim of my hat. “Good evening, Miss March.”

  “Mr. Chase.” She dipped her head slightly.

  “Dora’s working at the Sentinel now,” Billy told me. “We were there when the call came in.” His eyes swept toward the house. “Looks like a goner.” He pulled a notebook from his coat pocket and glanced at Dora. “Well, let’s look around.”

  I watched them as they made their way toward the house, snow swirling thickly, cloaking the ruin in a robe of white. Billy stopped to point something out to Dora, scribbling a note into his pad as he spoke. She listened to him with the greatest attention, then, at his signal, moved forward again.

  “Who’s the woman with your brother?”

  I turned and saw Hap Ferguson standing next to me. He was my boss, the district attorney of Jefferson County, a plump, gray-haired man nearing fifty, cheerful, sometimes bawdy, with a Highland flush to his cheeks.

  “Dora March.”

  “Name rings a bell,” Hap said.

  “She was Ed Dillard’s housekeeper. You probably read her name in my report. She was living with him when he died last month.”

  Hap grinned slyly. “Lucky Ed.”

  I kept my eyes on Dora for a while. When I finally returned my attention to Hap, I saw that he was peering at me thoughtfully.

  “You seem a little moonstruck, Cal.”

  I waved my hand, dismissing the comment. “I don’t get moonstruck.”

  “Already too old and world-weary for that, are you?”

  “What’s on your mind, Hap?” I asked bluntly.

  Instead of answering, he yanked something from his coat pocket. “This may not be the best moment, but take a look at this, will you? Her name’s Rachel. Rachel Bass. She’s a cousin of mine.”

  In the leaping firelight, the photograph showed a lanky woman with broad shoulders and a frank expression, her face the type I’d seen as a boy, usually on women-in-war posters, the nurse who braves the fire and shrapnel, bears the wounded soldier home.

  “Rachel’s about your age,” Hap said. “Her husband’s been dead a couple years now. She’s got a five-year-old named Sarah.”

  Rachel Bass wore a cheap dress dotted with flowers, the sort that hung on metal racks in general stores. Her hair fell just above her shoulders, full and wavy, parted in the middle. In the photo, she stood on the porch of a wood-framed house, a tin thermometer nailed to the post she leaned against. A white cloth dangled from her hand, and the apron she wore seemed slightly soiled. A little girl stood beside her, the right side of her face pressed against her mother’s left leg, one small hand clutching her stained apron. More than anything, Rachel Bass looked like a woman who’d put in a full day, cooked and cleaned and washed, explained to the grocer that she’d have the money by the end of the week. She needed rest, I thought, not a man like me.

  “She taught English at Royston High School for a few years,” Hap went on. “Now she rents rooms to keep things going.”

  I brushed the snow from the photograph and offered it back to him. “Not my type, Hap.”

  “And what might that be?”

  I dared not tell him, since I knew that for all the blue stories he told at work, my weekend visits to a waterfront bordello in Royston would not be welcome news from a prosecutor in his employ.

  “I guess I’ll know it when I see it. But it’s not her.”

  “Hell, I know she’s no spring chicken. But she’s still a handsome woman. And she’s got a pretty good education. Reads anything she can get her hands on. I figure you might like her.” He faced the house, leaving the photograph still dangling from my fingers. “So just hold on to that, Cal. Give it some thought.”

  Before I could offer any further protest, he turned his attention to Carl Hendricks. “Poor bastard. His second wife died two months ago, you know. My God, what will he do now?” He shook his head at the multitude of misfortune that can befall a single life. “Well, let’s go over and extend our sympathies.”

  We walked over to where Carl Hendricks stood with his daughter. The heat from the fire had sufficiently warmed the air immediately around it so that Hendricks had let the blanket drop from his shoulders. It now lay wet and crumpled at his feet, while he stood in shirt-sleeves, one large hand gripping tightly to Molly’s shoulder.

  “Terrible thing, Carl,” Hap said, gazing at the fire. “Anything I can do?”

  “Didn’t have no insurance on it,” Hendricks muttered. “Couldn’t afford none.” Hendricks seemed dazed by his misfortune, stricken and befuddled. I suspected that even in the best of times, Carl Hendricks was a man of starkly limited resources, the sort who forever finds himself pushed, battered, backed finally into a corner, his life like a bar brawl he didn’t start or know how to finish. “Sprung up in the kitchen,” he muttered. “Spread all over.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  The house was little more than a scorched outline on a field of flame. Billy and Dora were walking back toward us.

  “Fastest thing I ever saw, that fire,” Hendricks said as they came up. He nodded to Billy, his eyes glancing briefly toward Dora, then skittering away. He pointed to the blanket that lay curled at his feet. “Tried to beat it out. Nearly caught fire myself. Seems like everything caught fire at once.”

  As for Molly, she’d been upstairs when it started, Hendricks told us. The fire had moved so swiftly, she’d very nearly gotten trapped. But at the last moment, she’d managed to open a window, crawl out onto the roof, then jump into a saving bank of snow.

  I saw Dora’s eyes fix on the little girl. She started to touch her hair, then drew back and dropped her hands into the pockets of her coat.

  “Everything I got.” Hendricks’s fingers squeezed his daughter’s shoulder. “All caught fire at once.”

  With a groan, the roof gave way. A geyser of glowing cinders exploded into the air, mingled briefly with the falling snow, then mutely fell to earth. Molly glanced up at Dora. It seemed to me that their eyes locked, Dora’s suddenly agitated, as if she’d glimpsed something grave and alarming in Molly Hendricks’s pretty, young face. With a quick backward step, she turned and walked to an isolated area some twenty feet away.

  It attracted me, the way she stood so silent and solitary while others milled around her, and so after a time I also drew out of the circle and headed toward her, all but following the very tracks she’d left in the snow.

  “You’ll have to get used to seeing this sort of thing,” I said as I neared her. “Since
you’re working at the Sentinel now, I mean.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “And worse,” I added. “Port Alma’s a small community, of course. But even so, things happen. Fires like this one. Logging accidents. Drowning. We have a crime or two once in a while. We even had a mass murder about twenty years back. A whole family carved up. Man and his wife. A little girl.”

  Her eyes shot over to me, then swiftly away, her gaze now fixed on the smoldering timbers.

  I decided to pursue a less disturbing subject. “You’re going to need a more substantial coat if you stay here in Port Alma.”

  “William said the same thing.”

  “I’ll bet Billy offered you his own coat,” I said, lightly mocking my brother’s old-fashioned chivalry. “He’s a knight in shining armor.”

  Something in her face softened. “Yes, he is.”

  “Stray dogs. Stray cats. He was the one they were always following home,” I added.

  She looked at me quite frankly. “And what followed you home?”

  I felt my answer like a subtle weight added to my soul. “Nothing followed me.”

  She faced the fire again, making no further comment, but in some sense I felt that she was still watching me. Judging me. My first and only impulse was to get away.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like there’s much more I can do around here. So I’ll just say good night, Miss March.”

  I left her and made the rounds, told Hap and Billy I was leaving, offered my sympathies to Carl Hendricks, then walked to my car and got in. As I pulled away, I glanced back at the scene, struck by the glowing mound of embers and boiling gray smoke, the shadowy figures huddled among stripped and icy trees, silhouettes against the snow. If hell were a wintry landscape, I thought, it would look like Maine. Then I caught sight of Dora again, standing alone, my brother now striding toward her, eager and responsive, as if he alone had heard her silent call.