Places In The Dark Part 27

I heard Dora's voice sound in my mind, There's something you don't know, then whispered her true name at last, Irene.

Chapter Twenty-five.

In the newspaper photograph, her long, stringy hair obscured her face. And yet, looking closely, I could see Dora as if in pentimento below the starved and savage visage of Judith Irene Dement. The caption below the picture had given the stark facts: Teenager charged in Dayton family murders.

"Irene was thirteen," Tom Shay said as he drew the picture from my hand. "Not much more than a kid herself." He returned the photo to the grim sc.r.a.pbook he'd maintained through the years. "They really didn't know what to do with her. Too young for prison, but they couldn't just let her go." He closed the sc.r.a.pbook. "So they gave her to the nuns."

"The nuns?"

"The Sisters of Charity," Shay replied. "They have a home for girls over near Lobo City. They said they'd take Irene in, keep her with them until she'd served her sentence. Fifteen years, that's what the jury gave her. Three people dead." He glanced over to where Catherine sat in the far corner of the cabin, staring blankly out the window. "And another half dead. And all Irene got was fifteen years. In a convent, can you believe it? Not even a prison."

In all the time since Dora's arrival in Port Alma, there'd been but one real clue. I think I know your secret. She'd looked at me with unmistakable dread until I'd added only, You're a Catholic. It was the sole thing I'd gotten right about her, the one truth I'd gathered from the cloud that surrounded and concealed her.

Shay returned the sc.r.a.pbook to the drawer of his desk, locked it. "It's good for you though, I guess."

"What do you mean?"

"As far as finding her is concerned. Because if anybody knows where Irene Dement is, it would be the Sisters."

He accompanied me to my car a few minutes later, Catherine following idly behind us, watching vacantly as I sat behind the wheel, saying nothing, standing motionless and forever damaged as I pulled away.

It was only fifty miles back along the winding mountain road that had taken me to Catherine Shay, then into the desert once again, through Lobo City, past the little thrift shop the nuns maintained on its dusty main street, then along a narrow gravel road, and into a circular drive, the high oak doors of the Sisters of Charity Home for Girls looming before me.

They opened at my first knock. A tiny woman peered at me, dressed in full habit. "I'm Sister Colleen," she said. "May I help you?"

"My name's Calvin Chase. I'm looking for Irene Dement."

Sister Colleen seemed surprised that given my bedraggled state I hadn't asked for work or food. "May I tell Mother Superior why you're looking for Irene, Mr. Chase?"

I managed an official pose. "It's a legal matter."

Sister Colleen's eyes darkened. "I see." She stepped back from the door. "Follow me, please."

I trailed behind her, first into a simple vestibule, then along an unadorned corridor, and finally through a thick doorway and down an arched colonnade. A sandy garden had been planted at the end of it, ablaze in flowering cacti and desert roses.

"Wait here, please," Sister Colleen told me, indicating a stone bench, then disappeared down one of the walkways.

I sat alone, letting my gaze drift along the colonnade, following the strangely restful rise and fall of the arches, gentle as lapping waves, remembering what Dora had once said she wanted most in life, Peace, trying to imagine how, given a life on the run, her murderous past, she'd ever expected to attain it. Or perhaps she'd never wanted anything of the kind, the sentiment entirely false, merely part of an elaborate disguise.

After a moment, I heard footsteps, turned, and saw a figure moving down one of the archways, an elderly woman dressed in full habit, a rosary hanging from the belt at her waist.

"Mr. Chase," she said when she reached me.

I nodded.

"I'm Mother Pauline." She sat down beside me, folded her hands together, and lowered them into her lap. "I understand that you've come about Irene Dement."

"When I knew her, her name was Dora March."

The false name did not seem to surprise her.

"She never mentioned the Daytons, of course," I added.

Mother Pauline's fingers touched the rosary. "People do evil things, Mr. Chase."

I saw my brother in his b.l.o.o.d.y ruin. "Yes, they do."

"They also have evil things done to them," Mother Pauline said. "I'm speaking of Irene now. Of what was done to her."

I heard my dead brother's voice. Something happened to her, Cal. Something happened to Dora.

"She didn't go to the Dayton ranch that night because she wanted to, Mr. Chase," Mother Pauline said. "She'd been abandoned. Years before. By her father. Left in the desert with nothing to eat but a few sc.r.a.ps. When that was gone, she started foraging. Like an animal. Eating anything she could find. She was only eight years old."

She appeared to me as a little girl, peering out at the desert waste, clothed in a tattered dress, left to live like the wild child whose name she'd later taken.

"So you can imagine how she felt when she saw a man coming out of the desert," Mother Pauline added. "How relieved she must have been. Someone to help her, take care of her, maybe even love her."

Dora's warning sounded in my mind, Be careful, Cal. Of needing love too much.

"Adrian Cash," Mother Pauline said.

In one of the photographs from Tom Shay's sc.r.a.p-book, he'd appeared tall, thin, and lanky, insanity like a fire leaping in his eyes.

"Cash had been living in the mountains," Mother Pauline went on. "He told Irene that a voice had told him where she was, that it was up to him to take care of her. They lived together for five years, and at first, he didn't hurt her." She drew in a taut breath. "Then the voice spoke again. Evidently, it told him that children had to be chastised. After that, he did terrible things to Irene. To purify her, he said."

The bedroom door opened on a chair stacked with pillows, a bed with bare springs.

"Terrible things," Mother Pauline murmured again.

Her red robe dropped away, revealing a crisscross of white scars.

"She was thirteen when Cash decided he'd had enough of the desert," Mother Pauline continued. "So they simply walked out of it. It took them two days. They weren't looking for the Dayton ranch. It was just the first place they came upon."

The lights of the Dayton ranch flickered in my mind, Cash slowing down as he approached it, pus.h.i.+ng Irene ahead of him, Tell them you're hungry. Ask for food.

"You already know what happened once they got there," Mother Pauline said.

I saw Catherine Shay pressed upon the wooden floor, a man and a teenage girl peering down at her, Irene Dement with dead green eyes, following Adrian Cash's commands, Hold her down, Pull up her blouse.

"But do you know what Irene said to Catherine Shay?" Mother Pauline asked.

"Said?"

"Just before Cash cut her, Irene leaned over and whispered into Catherine's ear. 'It won't hurt.' That's what she said." Mother Pauline smiled quietly. "She had no malice in her heart, Mr. Chase. That was why she flourished here."

I glanced about the garden, imagined how, if Dora had remained a continent away from the rocky cliffs of Maine, I would still be with my wh.o.r.es and my brother would still be dreaming of his one true love.

"When did she leave?" I asked.

"Just over a year ago," Mother Pauline answered. She watched me a moment, as if trying to determine some issue in her mind. Then she said, "She loved you both, you know." She looked at me pointedly. "You and your brother, William."

I stared at her, astonished. "You've talked to her since..."

"Yes."

"Do you know where she is?"

Mother Pauline rose, nodded toward the archway to my right. "There," she said, then turned and walked away.

She stood beneath the archway, clothed in a plain white dress, her blond hair cut short, a pair of gold-rimmed gla.s.ses cradled in her hand.

"h.e.l.lo, Cal," she said, then stepped out of the shadows and came toward me.

My lips parted silently as I watched her move down the colonnade until she reached me.

"I didn't want to leave Port Alma the way I did, Cal," she said. She sat down beside me. "Without speaking to you. I mean, face-to-face." For a moment she seemed at a loss as to where she should begin. "But I was afraid."

"Of what?"

"Everything," she said.

"Me?"

"You, yes. And William." She shook her head. "But myself more than anyone."

"What happened, Dora?"

The question seemed to release a tide in her. "I couldn't think of any way out, Cal. It's as simple as that. I didn't want to hurt anyone. Not you or William. I couldn't be with either one of you. All I could do was leave."

I saw the golden ring on the floor of her cottage, the blood-drenched roses, imagined Billy flinging them to the ground in a sudden surge of bitter disappointment. "He asked you to marry him."

"He was going to. That's why I couldn't face him."

"Face him? You didn't see William at all the day you left?"

"No," she answered. "The night before, he'd told me that he wanted us to go to Fox Creek together in a day or so. Then suddenly he said, 'Tomorrow. I'll come for you tomorrow.' I knew then that he was going to--And I couldn't, Cal. Like I said in the letter, I just--"

"What letter?"

"The one I left."

Her empty cottage swam into my mind. "Where did you leave this letter?"

"With Mr. Mason," Dora said. "I saw him in the office when I pa.s.sed by on the way to the bus station."

"Henry was in the office on a Sunday afternoon?"

"Yes, he was. He was going over the ledgers."

A dark shape gathered in my mind.

"Did you tell him you were leaving Port Alma?" I asked.

"Yes," Dora said. "And that William would be going over to my house that afternoon. That's when I gave him the letter. So that he could give it to William."

I saw Henry Mason's hand reach for Dora's letter, hold it silently as she turned, made her way toward the door.

"It was raining," she added. "He offered to take me to the station."

"Did you tell Henry what was in the letter?" I asked.

"No." She looked at me, puzzled. "He never gave William my letter?"

"No," I answered quietly, the shape rising now, dark and sinister, like something from the murky depths. "No, he never did."

At that instant, it broke the surface. I saw Henry in his car, watching though the rain-black trees as Billy arrived at Dora's cottage with roses and the ring, knowing that she was already gone and that, without the letter she had left with him, my brother would never know why or where she'd gone, nor have any way to find her. By then he'd no doubt composed a lie he thought Billy surely would believe, that Dora had betrayed him, stolen from him, fled from him, that she had never, ever loved him, a tale to which Billy could have responded only with the words Betty Gaines had heard as she'd pa.s.sed Dora's house.

Don't say that.

I don't believe it.

It's not true.

Then the moment of shattering recognition.

It's you!

I could feel the anguish that must have broken over my brother, then the rage that seized him, drove him forward, fierce and wrathful, Henry, stricken that his plan could have gone so desperately awry, now stumbling backward, through the kitchen, hands flailing, finding in their panicked flight a long kitchen knife, breathless, wheezing, begging my brother to please, please, believe him, determined to do what must be done if he did not.

"Billy," I said, now lost in memory, rus.h.i.+ng toward Dora's cottage, driving through the rain, listening to the heavy thump of the winds.h.i.+eld wipers, loud and rhythmic, as if the car itself had sprung to life, its metal heart beating as urgently as mine.