Places in the Dark

  I could feel myself fading, turning into dust, and so I acted quickly to reconstitute myself, draw life back in again, as if on a gasp of breath.

  “When she first came to Port Alma, she had short hair,” I said. “It’s longer now. Blond.” The sheer paucity of what I actually knew of Dora nearly overwhelmed me, but I went on. “She had green eyes. And she wore reading glasses.”

  “It’s really not a lot to go on, is it, Mr. Chase?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But it’s all I have.”

  “Is she a suspect in this murder?”

  A series of images slashed through my mind, a woman running through the rain, a car drawing up beside her, a question she could not answer: Where are you going, Dora?

  “She ran away,” I said. “That’s all I know.”

  Clay glanced down at the book. “I suppose you thought I might be connected to this woman.” He seemed amused by such a notion. “Well, that would certainly have been a new experience for me. I might actually have enjoyed it. Being thought of as a criminal.”

  “Most people don’t enjoy it,” I said dryly.

  All humor drained from his heavy face. “No, I suppose not.”

  I lifted the book, held it in the air between us. “Do you have any idea how Dora March could have gotten this?”

  “Well, I often give books away,” Clay said. “Usually to hospitals, asylums, prisons. In the case of that particular book, I can only tell you that it didn’t come from my library here in Carmel.”

  “It says Carmel.”

  “Yes, it does,” Clay said. “But if you look at the label closely, you’ll notice a small D in the left-hand corner.”

  I looked at the place he indicated.

  “The D means that it came from the old Dayton ranch,” Clay said. “I sold that ranch several years ago. At that time, I got rid of the contents of the house. In all likelihood, the books were donated to whatever private or public institution my staff could find in the general area of the ranch.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Out in the desert,” Clay said.

  Dora’s lips whispered in my ear, Sometimes, when the wind blows over it, the desert sounds like the sea.

  “Where in the desert?” I asked.

  “Near a little town called Twelve Palms. It’s about a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. Do you know that area of California?”

  “No.”

  “It’s very beautiful in its own way,” Clay said. “I enjoyed having a place out there. But my wife never felt comfortable at the ranch. She simply couldn’t get it out of her mind. What happened there, I mean.” He leaned back slightly. “A whole family was killed. By this drifter and his girlfriend. Then they tried to burn the house down.” He smiled. “They’d have gotten away with it. But they made one very big mistake. They left a living witness. A little girl.” The air around him seemed to darken suddenly. “My wife insisted she kept seeing the child at the top of the stairs. Because that’s where they left her. To die, I mean. All cut up.”

  “Cut up?”

  “Her back. All cut up.”

  It flooded over me like a wave, a surmise as wild as any my brother had ever had. I saw Dora standing in the darkness, the lights of Carl Hendricks’s shabby, burning home shining in her eyes, then later, as the red robe had dropped from her shoulders, revealing a field of scars.

  “How old was the little girl?” I asked.

  “Eight, perhaps.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “Shay, I believe. Catherine Shay.”

  “Do you know where she is now?”

  “No,” Clay answered. “She could be anywhere. It’s been twenty years, Mr. Chase. Why are you interested in Catherine Shay?”

  I held myself in check, said only, “The woman I’m looking for, her back was badly scarred.”

  Clay nodded thoughtfully. “And since she seems to have come from somewhere near the Dayton ranch, you think this woman might be Catherine?”

  “Not very likely, I know, but…”

  “But it’s all you have left to go on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you think there’s a chance of it, you should talk to Sheriff Vernon over at Twelve Palms,” Clay said. “He could give you more details. He might even know where Catherine is. You can mention that you spoke to me. Vernon will do what he can.”

  I rose to leave. “Thank you, Mr. Clay.”

  Clay walked me to the door, offered his hand.

  “I hope you find the woman you’re looking for, whoever she is,” Clay said. “I admire the lengths you’ve gone to to track her down, traveling such a distance and so forth.” His final words cut through me like a blade. “You must have loved your brother very much.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  You must have loved your brother very much.

  We’d brought him home from the hospital three weeks after the accident. By then he’d regained some of his strength but still needed a great deal of assistance. He’d broken both legs, and although he could hobble about on crutches, his sense of balance had been impaired by the crash, so that he was nonetheless quite unsteady on his feet.

  Still, he had remained adamant about returning to his own home rather than moving in with me or our father. Both of us had been more than willing to take him in. At first, we’d even insisted that he live with one of us, but at each insistence, Billy had grown more adamant in his refusal.

  By then we’d all noticed how much he’d changed. It had been evident almost from the moment he’d regained consciousness, and it had become more so during the weeks that followed. He was less able to read and concentrate, and he seemed far more troubled, as if some dark music were forever playing in his brain.

  But even worse was the air of suspicion that seemed continually to surround him, blotting out the peace he’d once known, the delight he’d been able to take in small things, and finally that sense of trust he’d extended so generously in the past. It was as if all of that had been flung out of him as the car spun round and round, leaving him still whirling in its aftermath.

  And so it didn’t surprise me one evening only a few days before he was set to return to Port Alma that he suddenly decided he wanted to leave the hospital immediately. “I want to go home, Cal,” he insisted. “I don’t like being kept here.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” I told him. “I mean, you can barely get out of bed, much less…”

  “Someone will help me.”

  “I’ll help you, but I think—”

  “No,” he said sharply, a tone he’d come to use increasingly during his time in the hospital. “I want to go home.”

  “All right,” I said. “You can stay with me until you—”

  “Stay with you, why?”

  “So I can—”

  “Keep an eye on me? Why is that important to you, Cal?”

  “Keeping an eye on you is not important to me at all. I’m just trying to think of what would be best.”

  “Best for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want to go home. That’s what would be best for me. My own house. Not a strange place.”

  “My place would hardly be strange.”

  He shook his head with exaggerated force. “No.”

  For an instant, he looked like our mother, no less determined to take his own course, live where he pleased, as he pleased, no less confident that he knew his own mind, could chart his own course. I knew I would be no more successful in persuading him than I had ever been in persuading her.

  “All right,” I told him. “If that’s what you want.”

  And so, a week later, my father and I bundled him up, took him out into a light rain, and drove him back to his house in Port Alma. On the way, he stared vacantly at the road, save for the curve where he’d lost control of his car almost a month before. “Right there,” he said as we went around it. “Right there’s where it happened.”

  There was no sign of where
he’d gone off the side of the road, the rain having long ago washed away the tracks of his skid, but in his mind, Billy seemed to see the accident play out again. His whole body grew rigid as we approached the curve.

  “It broke, you know,” he said once we’d rounded it.

  “What broke?” I asked.

  “The part that guides the car.”

  “The steering cable?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The policeman told me. The one who came to the accident.” He looked at me intently. “He said it was strange. The way it broke. For no reason.”

  My father and I exchanged glances.

  “Sometimes things just happen, Billy,” I said.

  My father leaned forward. “William, you need to relax,” he said, patting him gently on the shoulder. “Just relax and let your mind settle down.”

  Billy’s face remained troubled, but he said no more about the accident. Instead he asked, “Why didn’t Dora come with you?”

  “She’s getting the house ready,” my father told him.

  “Why? Did something happen to the house?”

  I glanced into the rearview mirror, saw the worried look on my father’s face. “No,” I told Billy, “it’s just that you’ve been away for so long.”

  “It got dusty,” my father said. “It needed to be cleaned.”

  Billy fixed his eyes on the road, his features drawn, concentrated, as if he were deciding on some grave issue. “Is Mother all right?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “I’ll need to visit her.”

  “Of course,” I said. “As soon as you get settled in.”

  Dora was standing on the porch when we arrived, one hand clutching the other, like a woman in waiting. She seemed at home in the role, as if she had been long schooled in service. Billy waved to her, but I saw no pleasure in his eyes.

  “Steady now,” I said as I tucked the crutches beneath his arms.

  He took hold of the hand grips, his eyes fixed upon Dora as she made her way toward us, her blond hair falling to her shoulders, a vision that struck me so powerfully at that moment that I briefly lost control.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  Billy’s eyes shot over to me, a simmering alertness in his mind, so that I felt like a shadow beyond the fire line, another creature stalking his terrain.

  “You’re a lucky man,” I added quickly, offering a broad smile. “A very lucky man.”

  Billy turned his gaze toward Dora, his expression now curiously altered.

  It was a change Dora perceived instantly. She slowed, giving my brother time to adjust to her approach, clearly sensing what he most needed to regain was trust.

  “Hello, William,” she said when she reached him.

  He nodded, his eyes upon her with a fierce intensity, like someone trying to penetrate the nature of her disguise, where the real face ended, the illusion began.

  “Your room is ready,” she added. Then, very softly, “Welcome home.”

  She stayed with Billy for the next few hours, while my father and I remained downstairs, where we briefly busied ourselves with various chores, then retired to the small front room.

  “Well, it’s good to have him home,” my father said as he lowered himself into the old wooden rocker my brother had retrieved from our mother’s cottage on Fox Creek.

  I leaned forward, lit the fire. “I talked to Dr. Goodwin before we left.” The kindling began to crackle and burn, filling the room with a vaguely orange light. I watched it a moment, then turned my back to the flames. “He doesn’t know what to expect. From Billy, I mean.”

  “So he could stay this way?”

  “Yes. Or he could get better overnight. There’s no way to tell.”

  My father rubbed his eyes softly. “Of all people,” he said. “Of all people, William.”

  “He could recover quite soon,” I added, now trying to put the best light on what Dr. Goodwin had told me. “I mean, there’s no real impairment. Of his intelligence.”

  “It’s not his intelligence I’m worried about,” my father said.

  “No.” I took the metal poker from its stand and needlessly churned the fire. “We’ll just have to see what happens.” I returned the poker to its stand, then took a seat. “He wants to go back to work as soon as possible.”

  “As soon as possible? What does that mean?”

  “I really don’t know. I suppose that’s up to Billy to decide.”

  My father looked at me solemnly. “He shouldn’t rush things, Cal,” he said. “The people at the Sentinel, they’ll be expecting the William they remember, the one who was so … He’s not ready. We both know that.”

  “But what can we do about it?”

  My father considered the question, then, without offering an answer, pulled himself to his feet. “I’ll sleep on it, Cal,” he said. “I’m tired now.”

  I walked him to the door, followed him out onto the small wooden porch. The rain had stopped, the clouds parted, a brilliant moon glistened on the leaves.

  “He’ll get better, Dad,” I said. “He’ll be all right, believe me.”

  He shook his head. “Why is it always the ones who love life, Cal? Your mother. Now William. Why is it always the ones who love life that are taken? The ones who want so much from it, give so much to it?”

  “They aren’t taken any more than others, Dad. It just seems that way.”

  He nodded slowly. “Seems that way, yes. Because they’re the ones we miss.”

  I sat down beside Billy’s fire, and let my eyes roam about. Despite my long familiarity with the general physical disarray in which my brother lived, I was still amazed by the sheer density of the clutter, the way he’d turned a spacious room into a cramped one by stacking books and papers all about. He’d given strict orders that nothing be moved in his absence, and the hard edge of his tone as he’d said it had been the first sign that something had been dislodged from his character, the gentleness that had always seemed so inseparably a part of him. We had all obeyed him, of course, tidied up as much as we could without actually altering the chaos in any measurable degree.

  It was a disorder that had often annoyed me in the past but which now I looked back on with an unmistakable longing. For it seemed part of a brother who was now disturbingly altered, and whose future I could no longer predict.

  After a time, I picked up a book and began to read, though an hour later, when I heard Dora padding down the stairs, I could not have told anyone a single detail of what I’d actually read.

  She stopped at the entrance to the room, the dying firelight reflected in the lenses of her glasses.

  “William wants me to stay a little longer,” she told me. “He wants me to read to him.”

  I gestured at the engulfing clutter, stacks of books and magazines, piles of newspapers. “Well, you’ve got plenty to choose from.”

  “He mentioned one book in particular,” Dora said.

  “Does he have a clue where in all this mess it might be?” I asked, surprised by the edginess in my tone.

  “It’s at my house,” Dora said. “He brought it over the day before the accident.” She turned to leave. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Let me get it for you,” I said quickly. “It’ll make me feel useful. Besides, I need a walk.”

  “All right,” Dora said. “It’s on the mantel.”

  It was the first week of September, a fall chill already in the air, and I found myself dreading the approach of winter, a dread I’d never experienced before. In the past, I’d always looked forward to its raw cold, the way it drove everyone else inside, left the snowbound streets to me. But as I made my way toward Dora’s house that night, I found that I no longer welcomed the coming freeze. I’d even begun to see it as something I’d favored because of the isolation it had forced upon me, a wall of winter added to my other walls.

  Dora’s house was completely dark save for the one lantern she??
?d left burning in the front room. The door was unlocked, as almost all doors remained in those days, and I could see the book my brother had asked for in the place she’d indicated, lying on the mantel. I picked it up, saw that it was one of his boyhood favorites, Two Years Before the Mast, the sort of youthful, romantic adventure tale he’d all his life preferred. It was a brand-new edition, and from the cracking sound of the spine as I opened it, I knew that Dora had yet to begin it.

  Her own book lay on the chair beside the fireplace, an anthology of poetry she’d opened to Matthew Arnold. There, underscored in black ink, were Arnold’s most famous lines, the bleakest, as they had always seemed to me, in all the history of verse, a final, terrible admission made on the shores of Dover Beach, that in all the wide, wide world, there was neither faith, nor hope, nor certitude, nor any end to pain, and against whose black tide was set only the pledge of two people to be true to one another.

  Suddenly, like a blow, I felt the whole structure of my long resistance to Dora collapse. It was the single most searing emotion I had ever felt, so powerful and shuddering that I knew it had come from the deepest, most needful and explosive part of me, a place that Dora March had entered and in which she would forever dwell. And I thought, This is what it is, then. This is what it is to be in love.

  It was still raging through me when I returned to Billy’s house, a storm twisting through my mind, leaving all behind it in fearful disarray.

  I could hear him talking quietly as I made my way up the stairs. He fell silent when I entered his room, his gaze leveled upon me oddly, as if he suspected that I’d lurked outside his door for some time, been secretly listening as he talked with Dora.

  “I brought the book you wanted,” I told him.

  “Book? What book?”

  I laid it on the foot of his bed. “Two Years Before the Mast.”

  He nodded but said nothing, so that I reflexively glanced toward Dora.

  She sat beside his bed, her hair a wave of gold, her eyes soft but oddly penetrating behind the lenses of her glasses. For a moment, I could not draw my gaze away. When I did, I saw that Billy was watching me closely, squinting slightly, like someone struggling to bring a vaguely troubling image into focus.