Places In The Dark Part 6

We went in order of seniority that afternoon, as always. I don't remember what my father recited, but he was inclined toward aphorisms, particularly when neatly housed in heroic couplets, so it was more than likely something from Pope or Dryden. For my part, I'd quickly thumbed through Bartlett's Quotations an hour or so before and located a few lines about the law. I recited them without enthusiasm, then nodded to Billy for the last recitation of the day.

"Your turn," I said.

My father drew in a somewhat impatient breath, already suspecting that he would not much care for Billy's choice. "Your brother had rather cut gra.s.s with a mustache trimmer than read anything other than that romantic drivel his mother pushes on him," he'd grumbled years before as the two of us sat in his study, gravely pondering Euripides, while Billy frolicked in the yard, tumbling madly, hand over hand. It was a judgment he'd never changed, although I think my mother's departure had greatly challenged it, suggested that he might have learned something from the poets she'd cherished, their ardent songs of love.

"So, William, what do you have for us?" he asked now.

The rhythmic motion of my brother's feet stopped suddenly. He smiled softly, fiddled unnecessarily with the right cuff of his s.h.i.+rt, then rose, his eyes quite still, his voice very nearly solemn as he recited.

The desire of the moth for the star.

Of the day for the morrow.

The yearning for something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow.

When he finished, he sat down and fixed his gaze on the hearth. A soft golden light danced in his face, an effect that gave him an exposed and vulnerable look, something I'd never seen before.

"Who's the poet?" my father asked.

"Sh.e.l.ley."

"Your mother's favorite," my father said. "No wonder. She was always looking for something afar."

Billy nodded. "Still is, I suppose," he said softly.

I looked at him intently. "Are you?" I asked.

His eyes drifted over to me. "Maybe," he said with a quiet, strangely somber smile.

Two weeks would pa.s.s before I put it together, the quotation he'd chosen, the pensive mood with which he'd offered it. Two weeks before I learned that in fact he had found that afar thing he'd spoken of that afternoon.

And that her name was Dora March.

Part Two.

Chapter Seven.

In the days immediately following my brother's murder, Sheriff T. R. Pritchart made every effort to find Dora March. He traced every lead, talked to everyone who might have known anything about where she'd gone. From me he learned that the ring we'd found beside Billy's body was my mother's. From Betty Gaines he discovered that a car had been parked on the road behind Dora's house not long before Billy's death. She'd also heard a voice coming from Dora's house, a male voice, Betty insisted, though she could not be sure it was Billy's. Rus.h.i.+ng through the rain, skirting along the edge of the lawn, she'd been able to make out only a little of what she'd heard.

Four lines:.

I don't believe it.

It's not true.

It can't be true.

It's you!

As to Dora's whereabouts, Henry Mason, an employee at the Sentinel, turned out to be the best witness. He'd seen Dora that day walking on the road that led to Royston, he told T.R. She'd been carrying a suitcase and headed toward the concrete pillar that marked the stopping place of the Portland bus. It had been raining, he said, and so he'd stopped, picked her up, and driven her to the bus station in Port Alma. She'd looked very tense, according to Henry, but she'd given no explanation as to why she was leaving town. From the look on her face, he'd gotten the idea that something had happened, the sudden illness of a relative, perhaps, or some other distressing news that had abruptly called her away. He'd asked her where she was going. She'd replied only, "Away for a while," so that Henry had fully expected her to return to Port Alma in a few days, had not in the least guessed that she was "on the run." He'd dropped her off at the bus station at "somewhere around three" in the afternoon, he told Pritchart, and had then driven directly home.

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 gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sionate 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 gla.s.s. "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 pa.s.sed 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 Molly 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.