Places in the Dark

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Does it help you sleep?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  I inched toward the forbidden. “What would?”

  “The desert,” she replied. “Sometimes, when the wind blows over it, the desert sounds like the sea. Very peaceful.”

  “You’ve lived in the desert?”

  “When I was a little girl.”

  She glanced up at me. Her hair glimmered in the moonlight. It was all I could do not to touch it.

  “You must have been a beautiful little girl, Dora.”

  Something tensed in her eyes, but she said nothing. Instead, she tilted her head toward the stars.

  I knew that the passage of the years would surely modify the pain I felt when I was with her, smooth its sharp edges, and yet, at that moment, as I stood beside her in the darkness, saying nothing of what I actually felt, I could not imagine that this ache would ever end, that there would ever be a time when I no longer felt it.

  All of that surged within me, but once again I managed to contain it, give no hint of the rising water I was drowning in.

  “Well, good night, then,” I said.

  She didn’t turn, didn’t go. Instead, she held her place, still looking up at the night sky. And I thought, She doesn’t want to go in. She wants to be with me. Here. In this darkness.

  “I had a telescope when I was a boy,” I told her. “I learned all the constellations. But I’ve forgotten most of them since then. Except for Diana.”

  She laughed, a soft, tripping laughter that seemed to lift her toward some world she’d only glimpsed before.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I thought she might be the one you remembered.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because she’s the huntress,” Dora said. “She would appeal to you.”

  “Why would a huntress appeal to me particularly?”

  “You’d like the hint of danger.”

  “Not at all. I like everything safe.”

  She cocked her head almost playfully, a gesture I’d never seen before. “I don’t believe that,” she said.

  “I can prove it.”

  “Go ahead, then,” she said in mock challenge.

  I released truth like an arrow aimed at her heart. “I go to whores.”

  A darkness gathered in her face.

  “It’s the only kind of ‘romantic’ relation I’ve ever had,” I added. “And what could be safer than that? No risk. No risk at all. Of anything.”

  She smiled very delicately, and to my surprise took my arm and urged me forward, toward the house, leaves tumbling before us in small, frantic circles.

  “I’ll always remember you, Cal,” she said.

  There was an unmistakable finality in her voice, so I realized absolutely that she was going, that she had always known she would be going, perhaps even known the date of her leaving on the day that she arrived in Port Alma. That was why she’d have no need for a new coat. Because by winter, she would be gone. It was also the reason she’d so emphatically refused even to discuss taking over the Sentinel. She was going. She was leaving me behind like something whirling in her white wake. And there was nothing I could do about it.

  And so, at her door I said only, “Well, I’ve brought you safely home.”

  “Good night, Cal,” she said, then disappeared into the house.

  I walked to the edge of the yard, stopped, and turned. I saw her step to the window, draw the curtains together. Then, one by one, the lights went out inside. And yet, I didn’t leave. Instead I remained in place, watched the darkened windows, imagined her beyond them, sinking down upon her pillows, lying sleepless in the darkness, perhaps thinking of that very desert she’d mentioned minutes before, the one place where she’d found peace, and to which, I knew now, she would soon be returning.

  And so, when Hedda Locke turned toward me, her face framed by the desert landscape that swept out beyond her window, I imagined that it might be Dora, the same green eyes upon me as they had been that night, a pair of gold-rimmed glasses held delicately in her hand.

  But it was an entirely different woman who faced me, older, and clearly quite ill.

  I took off my hat as I stepped into the room. “My name is Calvin Chase,” I said.

  She leaned forward, squinted. “You can go, Maria,” she said to the small, plump woman who’d escorted me into the dusty room where she lay. Despite the suffocating heat, she was wrapped in an Indian blanket, her fingers curled around a steaming cup of coffee.

  “Sheriff Vernon told me where to find you,” I said when Maria had left us.

  “He must have been surprised that I came back.” Hedda fingered her blanket. “Everybody was. The return of the prodigal daughter.”

  Her hair was jet black but streaked with iron, her eyes sunken, two rheumy, dark pools. She started to speak, stopped abruptly, and coughed into a dark red handkerchief. Once the spasm had passed, she brushed her mouth roughly, then lowered her hand into her lap. “Sorry,” she said almost bitterly. “I’ve not been well.” She glanced out the window, into the blinding sunlight beyond it, a white-hot sweep of desert sand. “I didn’t want to come back here, but I owned this little house. Free and clear.” She shifted slightly and a pair of small brown feet peeped from the blanket. “They said it would help me. Coming back here. The climate. The dryness.” She fanned herself with an open hand. “A good place to die.”

  I saw something of the thwarted life she’d lived, felt the death that would soon bring it to an end. “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  She looked at me intently, like someone studying a map. “Maria said you came all the way from Maine.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you looking for, Mr. Chase?”

  “Catherine Shay.”

  The oldest of her wounds opened before my eyes.

  “So this is really about Adrian Cash,” she said. “What I did to Catherine by saving his life. You’d have thought him being locked up would have been enough to ease her mind.” She fell silent for a moment, then said, “Tell me, do the people in Twelve Palms still believe I fell in love with Adrian?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, suppose I did. You can’t help who you fall in love with, can you?”

  I heard my own fated pronouncement: I love you, Dora.

  “No,” I said. “You can’t.”

  “Well, just for the record, I fell in love with my duty, not Adrian Cash,” Hedda said. “My duty as a lawyer. And they never forgave me for it.” She wiped a line of sweat from her upper lip with her hand. “End of story.”

  “It’s not the end of Catherine’s. She’s still running from him.”

  She squinted slightly. “You look like a priest, Mr. Chase. One of those worldly priests.” She sucked in a raspy breath. A hot breeze rustled the blanket at her feet, sent tremors through her hair. “You know the type. A fallen, fallen man.”

  I saw Dora’s house swing into view, blurry through the sheeting rain, my brother’s car in the muddy driveway, felt my feet press down upon the sodden earth, my body move forward through silver wires of rain.

  “The type who can’t forgive himself,” Hedda said.

  The stairs creaked as I went up them, a chorus of tiny, aching cries.

  “Something eating at him. Something he did.”

  The door was partly ajar. I stopped, a moment, nothing more, then pressed my hand against it, called her name, Dora.

  “Something…”

  Then stepped inside, searching for her in the dim light, finding someone else instead. “… terrible.”

  William.

  Hedda’s eyes now bore into mine so fiercely that for an instant I believed she’d seen the images in my mind. “Well, I’m like that too,” she said. “Fallen. Because of what I did. Saving Adrian Cash from the hangman. What that did to Catherine.”

  The only words I could muster were “Help me find her.”

  “You shouldn’t have m
uch trouble doing that,” Hedda said bluntly. “She’s not hiding anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Adrian Cash is dead. Died three months ago in the state prison.” She turned toward the small table that stood beside the couch. “He willed me his entire estate.” She pulled open a drawer, reached inside, and drew out a battered silver ring. “This is it,” she said as she handed it to me. “All he had left.”

  I turned the ring over in my fingers.

  “I don’t know where Catherine Shay is, Mr. Chase,” Hedda said. She plucked the ring from my fingers, her eyes still on me intently. “But I’m sure her father knows that Adrian is dead. That Catherine is safe now. And so, like I said, she doesn’t have to run anymore, hide anymore. My guess is, her father’s probably already gotten in touch with her, told her to come home.”

  I suddenly felt Dora so near to me that I could all but feel her breath in my hair. “Home?” I asked.

  Hedda nodded toward the window. “Not far from here.” She pointed toward a line of dark, ragged cliffs that rose in the distance. “She’s out there somewhere. With her father. In the mountains.”

  At that moment, as I’ve since calculated, she was sitting on a granite stone, her legs drawn up beneath her, peering into an icy mountain stream.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Billy was at the window when I came into the study.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he answered softly. He continued to stare out into the yard. He was fully dressed, sitting in an upright chair, both hands on the handle of his cane, massaging it rhythmically.

  “You’re low on firewood,” I told him. “I’ll get some from the basement.”

  He continued to stare out the window.

  “It won’t take long,” I assured him. “I’ll try not to disturb you.”

  He said nothing until I turned to leave. Then he said, “That woman, the one you visit in Royston. Do you ever feel anything for her, Cal?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t confide in her?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “She’s a whore, Billy. I don’t pay her to listen to my troubles. Besides, I don’t go there anymore.”

  “You don’t? Why not?”

  “I guess I’ve … well … I don’t know why.”

  He looked at me with genuine puzzlement, then said, “Cal, who do you talk to?”

  “I talk to you.”

  “No, you don’t. Not really. Not anymore.” His gaze became oddly tender. “At least not about yourself.”

  “Then nobody,” I told him. “If not you, then nobody.”

  He glanced about, suddenly agitated, like someone trapped in his own mind, scrambling to leap free of the web it had become, gray and knotted, a tangle he could not escape. Then something shot into his brain, so that he abruptly focused his attention upon me again.

  “Do you talk to Dora?”

  “No.”

  “Does she talk to you?”

  I shook my head.

  Again he lapsed into silence. I waited, not wanting to draw him out on so disturbing a subject.

  “Dora doesn’t talk to me either,” he said finally.

  I faked a laugh. “What do you want her to tell you? Some deep, dark secret? Maybe she doesn’t have one.”

  “I think she does.” Again his mind seemed to flutter about. “Do you remember what Mother used to say, that everyone wants at least one thing in life that doesn’t change?”

  I remembered it very well. She had said it during our last visit before her stroke. “And that we want that thing to be love,” I said.

  “Yes, love,” Billy said thoughtfully. He paused, then added, “Dora doesn’t confide in me, Cal. If you love someone, you confide in them, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “She’s hiding something, Cal. Something she’s afraid for me to know. But there’s nothing that would change the way I feel about her. Nothing at all.” He looked at me imploringly. “I love her, Cal.”

  If I’d ever doubted the depth of my brother’s love for Dora, any such doubt would have ended at that moment. His pain now came from the possibility that the one he’d finally found to love might not love him back.

  “I know you do,” I said softly.

  He seemed to glimpse the world we’d once shared, the love and trust we’d once known. “You’d help me if you could,” he said with his old confidence that I was still the brother he remembered, the one who’d dove into the water so many years before, who’d always swum out to save him.

  “Of course, I would,” I told him in a voice that no doubt sounded brotherly to my brother, sweet, devoted, having nothing but his best interests at heart, as Iago’s voice must have sounded to Othello.

  I spent the next hour doing a few final chores, bringing firewood up from the basement, coal for the old iron stove he’d never removed from his study. By then Billy had gone upstairs, so that as I worked, I could hear the soft tap of his cane as he paced back and forth within his room, brooding, as seemed obvious, about Dora.

  Once I’d finished the work, I shouted a quick “Good night,” listened for his reply, then, when none came, headed out the door. I’d just reached the stairs when I saw Henry Mason pull up to the curb.

  “I think Billy’s sleeping, Henry,” I said as I came up to him.

  “Sleeping? He just called me.”

  “Called you?”

  Henry’s pale face seemed even more ghostly in the dark air. “He says he’s coming back to work.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, I guess. He wants to see the books.”

  “The books? He doesn’t know anything about the books.”

  “I know,” Henry said. “But he wants to see them.”

  I glanced into the backseat of Henry’s car, saw the ledgers stacked in a single cardboard box, a weight far too heavy for a man as frail as Henry Mason to bear up the stairs.

  “I’ll take them to him,” I said.

  Henry did not resist the offer. “Whatever you say, Cal.” He opened the car door, then stepped aside while I lifted the box to my shoulder.

  “Sorry for the trouble, Henry.”

  Henry looked at me worriedly. “Is William … is he … all right?”

  “He’s fine,” I assured him, then turned and headed up the stairs.

  Billy was sitting in bed when I came into the room.

  “Henry brought these,” I told him. “Where do you want them?”

  “Just put them on the bed.”

  I placed the heavy box at the foot of the bed. “Well, good night again,” I said.

  “Good night, Cal,” my brother said, then, just as I turned away, he grinned his old grin, the one I’d seen so often in his youth, the one he’d never failed to give me when I shared a piece of candy or offered him a turn at some game I was playing with my older friends, a grin I’d not seen since his accident, and which seemed, in every way, to summon back a bright and innocent world, the brotherhood we’d once known, and which in my wild innocence I had thought would last forever.

  I went directly home, made dinner, then went to my study and tried to read. But as the hours passed, the room’s solitary atmosphere began to oppress me. I heard my father’s words again, There’s nothing like loneliness to bring you to your knees, and wondered if I had reached that point where solitude itself became an accusation.

  By eight the sound of my own breath had driven me from the house, sent me pacing aimlessly, with no particular destination in mind, so that it seemed almost providential when I suddenly noticed Dora coming toward me, her long black skirt flowing like a dark wave over the walkway.

  “I was on my way to William,” she said when she stopped before me.

  “I saw him earlier this evening,” I told her.

  “How was he?”

  “Fine. At the moment he’s going over the books.” />
  “What books?”

  “The accounting books. For the Sentinel. He asked Henry to bring them over.”

  “Why did he want to see the books?”

  “He’s preparing to go back to work, I suppose.”

  I expected her to nod briskly, continue on her way. But she remained in place just long enough for me to recall my last meeting with my brother, the things he’d said about Dora.

  “Dora? Do you think we could have a talk?” I asked.

  Before she could refuse, I added, “Billy’s quite focused on the Sentinel’s financial records at the moment. It’s probably better to leave him alone until he gets tired of them.”

  I touched her arm, moved her down the walkway, heading now in the opposite direction from my brother’s house.

  “Billy and I had a talk this afternoon,” I began.

  She didn’t look at me, but I sensed a subtle tension come over her.

  “About his feelings for you,” I added quietly, laying little emphasis, letting my words fall upon Dora like flakes of snow, with no indication of the dark suspension in which I hung.

  We walked on a little way, then I stopped and faced her. “You know what those feelings are, don’t you?”

  “I do, yes,” Dora said. “But, Cal, I’ve never given William any reason to think that I—” She halted. Her eyes glowed in the darkness. “This is hard.”

  I felt a circle tightening around us, drawing us together.

  “What should I do, Cal?” she asked. “He’s getting better. I wouldn’t want to do anything that might…”

  “You don’t love him, do you?”

  “No.”

  A fire blazed in me. “And never can?”

  “Never.”

  With a confidence I had never felt in my life, a confidence like my Mother’s, swift and sure, I took Dora’s arm and led her toward the bay. We said nothing until we reached the water’s edge.

  “I don’t want to hurt him, Cal,” Dora said.

  “I know you don’t.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing you can do.”

  “I didn’t mean for William to—”

  “You can’t help the fact that you don’t love him, Dora. You can’t choose who you love. Neither can Billy. He can’t help it if he fell in love with you.” I faced her squarely, threw the die, and held my breath. “Neither can I.”