She looked at me as no woman ever had. “Cal.”
“It’s true.”
Her eyes glistened, and I knew.
“Dora,” I whispered.
A wave rushed me forward. I drew her into my arms.
It was a kiss such as I had never known before, and while it lasted I felt our bodies flow seamlessly one into the other, a stillness all around us, perfect and unbroken, with nothing but the sway of the sea grass and the distant crash of a rushing wave to suggest that anything at all existed beyond or outside the circle of our arms. And I thought, this is what it must surely have been like, the first kiss that ever was, with nothing fixed in all the spinning world but love, all else a maelstrom and a chaos, our only hope, this utter and complete surrender.
When she spoke, her voice was barely audible above the wind in the reeds, but in its very quietness bore a chilling message.
“William.”
“I know.”
“We can’t do this, Cal.”
I held her tightly. “We can do anything.”
“He’s your brother.”
“I don’t care.”
“William,” she repeated, this time emphatically. “William.”
I stopped her with a kiss. We sank down onto the sand, my body pressed against hers, feeling her need as fiercely as my own, a sense of devouring and being devoured at the same time.
Finally, she pushed me away. “No,” she breathed. “I can’t.” She started to rise, but I grabbed her hand. “We have to find a way.”
She pulled her hand from my grasp and got to her feet. I expected her to rush off into the night, like all those fevered heroines so beloved by my mother. But she stood motionless, a curious wonder in her eyes that love had come to her by such an unexpected route. “I never thought that anything like this could…”
I started to rise.
She lifted her hand to stop me. “Tomorrow,” she said, then turned and strode away.
A high rapture swept over me.
And I thought, She’s mine.
I was still floating in the aftermath of that wild happiness when I arrived at Billy’s house the next morning.
He was sitting up in bed when I entered his room, still wearing the clothes he’d worn the night before. One of the ledger books lay open in his lap, others were scattered here and there about the room, pages marked or dog-eared. He looked like a student in the midst of final examinations, the same drawn and weary look in his eyes.
“Something’s going on, Cal,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Something strange at the Sentinel. With the books. Money is missing.”
“You can’t be serious.”
He closed the ledger. “It’s true. For the last six months. More and more each month. From petty cash. Taken.”
I stared at him, amazed that even in his delusion he could think that anyone at the Sentinel would steal from him. “Billy, listen to me,” I said slowly, deliberately. “You can’t really believe that someone at the Sentinel would—”
He waved his hand over the pile of ledgers. “Check them yourself,” he said.
I stepped toward the bed. “No, I’ll let Dora check them.”
Something ignited behind his eyes. “Dora?”
“Isn’t that who you’d want to check them?”
“Why Dora?”
“Well, she writes the checks, doesn’t she?”
“How did you know that? I didn’t tell you that.”
I stared at him silently.
“Did Dora tell you?” he demanded.
“Why, was it a secret?”
“Did Dora tell you?” he repeated evenly.
“No, she didn’t.”
“Who did?”
“Henry.”
“What did he say?”
I didn’t want to give my brother the slightest hint as to Henry’s own doubts about Dora. “Nothing. Just that she was writing checks. That you’d given her the—”
He seemed genuinely pained by what he next said. “You’re lying, Cal.”
“Why would I lie?”
He looked at me desperately. “I have to trust you, Cal.”
“You can, Billy.”
“I have to trust—” He stopped, looked at me brokenly, as if, for all his wounds, this latest was the deepest yet. “What if she’s a thief?”
I faked a laugh but heard my own desperate fear within it. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
He lifted his arms, placed the palms of his hands against the sides of his head, pressed them against his skull. “I have to trust … someone.”
I rushed over to him, drew his arms down to his sides.
“It couldn’t be Dora,” I said emphatically. “For God’s sake, Billy, look at the way she lives. What would she do with money?”
He seemed captured in a cloud of dark confusion. “Use it to go away. Maybe that’s it. To go away with …” His eyes widened. “With someone else.”
“Someone else?”
“Another man.”
I felt my arms around her body. “What makes you think there’s another man?”
He stared at me intently. “There couldn’t be another man, could there, Cal? There couldn’t be someone else.”
I knew that he was waiting for me to assure him that in all the world there was no one else for Dora but himself. But I felt her lips on mine, her body in my arms, I couldn’t do it.
“Billy, you…”
It was then I saw the question rise like a black cloud in his mind: Is it you?
My eyes cut away from him, then back. “I’m sure there’s some mistake, Billy,” I said. “I’ll go over the books myself. I’ll prove it to you. Nothing’s missing. Nothing at all.”
He remained mute as I gathered up the books, but his eyes never left me, nor ever stopped repeating their terrible question: Is it you?
“Everything’s fine, believe me,” I told him as I heaved the box into my arms.
His gaze followed me across the room, then down the stairs, as it seemed to me, and out into the yard, forever at my back, silent, staring, and which, weeks later, as I made my way toward Tom Shay’s mountain home, I could feel behind me still.
Chapter Twenty-three
The road to Tom Shay’s cabin wound through the mountains along a sheer, rocky ledge. A wall of granite rose on my right, while at the left, I could see a rapidly flowing stream that swirled white and foamy around gray stones. From time to time, a curl of smoke snaked up from a mountain cabin, but for the nearly sixty miles I drove among the mountains that day, following Hedda Locke’s vague directions, I never saw a single human being, nor so much as a cat or dog.
And so it seemed to me that Shay had done what any father would, given the circumstances. He’d summoned his daughter into the mountains, away from the desert with its nightmarish associations, the bite of the metal blade as it raked her back. So deep into the mountains that as the road grew more narrow, it seemed to form a prison around me.
As I drove, I felt that I was moving toward the end of it, found myself returning to my brother’s final days, letting the pieces fall into place, everything that had occurred from the time I’d left his house, bound for the Sentinel, the box of ledgers cradled in my arms, until three days later, when I’d entered Dora’s cottage, found him waiting for me there.
Henry Mason turned toward me as I came through the door of the newspaper office, his eyes shining anxiously.
“Well, was everything to William’s satisfaction?” he asked.
I lowered the box of ledgers to his desk. “Not exactly.”
He looked at me, alarmed.
“Just a few small things,” I said.
I couldn’t bring myself to repeat my brother’s suspicions, implicate Dora, confirm Henry’s own grave doubts. His words returned to me, spoken as we’d sat in Ollie’s Barber Shop, strange, unstable, Dora already the subject of a deep unease.
And so I hid behind a lie. “He just aske
d me to go over the books myself at some point. To check a few things out. Nothing important.”
I’d hoped to give no further explanation, but Henry would not let me off so easily.
“So there were problems,” he said matter-of-factly.
“A few small things,” I repeated, still unwilling to go into detail, convinced that it was an illusion, something that existed only in my brother’s tormented mind, that Dora, no matter whatever else she might be, whatever else her past might reveal, could not be a thief.
But I knew Henry wouldn’t stop gnawing at it until he got a morsel. “There might be some money that’s unaccounted for,” I told him.
“Since when?”
“During the last six months or so.”
“The last six months?”
“Yes.”
I could see his mind working meticulously, sorting through the vague references I’d given him, offering, then dismissing, various possibilities.
“At the moment, I can’t even be sure that a single dime is missing, Henry,” I said quickly, like a man covering his footprints on the forest floor.
Henry looked aghast. “This is hard to believe, Cal.”
In order to protect Dora, I shifted the blame to my brother.
“I know it is, but I wouldn’t get too upset about it. Billy has been a little off base lately. In his thinking, I mean. Since the accident.”
Henry seemed barely able to get his breath, a pallor descending upon him, his breathing suddenly more labored. “But surely William doesn’t think that anyone here at the Sentinel would—”
“No, of course not,” I assured him. “Not at all.”
Despite my effort, I saw the dreadful thought surface.
“Six months,” Henry said thoughtfully. “Wasn’t that about the time when Dora—” He stopped, stared at me wonderingly. “Could it be Dora?” he asked.
I leaped to stamp out any such speculation. “Look, Henry, this is probably all just a big mistake. I want you to promise me that you’ll keep it to yourself until I’ve straightened it out.”
Henry’s eyes narrowed into tiny slits. “Dora. My God.”
“She’s not a thief, Henry,” I said sharply. “She absolutely is not. And I don’t want the question raised. Do you understand me? I don’t even want the question raised.”
He nodded reluctantly. “All right, Cal,” he said.
“This stays between us. Everything. Until I’ve had time to sort it out.”
Henry stepped back, a small, docile animal edging away from a larger, far more threatening one. “Whatever you say, Cal.”
“I’ll talk to you after I’ve had a chance to go over the books,” I told him.
“Of course,” Henry said. “However you want to do it.”
“Believe me, Henry, there’s nothing to any of this. Nothing at all. The whole thing is just a mistake. It’ll all go away.”
“I’m sure it will,” Henry said, all but trembling before me now.
But it didn’t go away. And for the rest of the day, each time I tried to push it from my brain, my brother’s face would swim into my mind, utterly aggrieved that he’d stumbled upon something dark and terrible in Dora, a dishonesty he had not guessed, all her innocence nothing more than a clever ruse.
That would have been bad enough. But I knew that Billy had glimpsed something even darker than Dora’s fraud. Over and over, I heard him say, Another man, then saw the question in his eyes: Is it you? Far more than the missing money, or even the possibility that Dora, for reasons still unfathomable to me, might have embezzled it, his question circled incessantly in my mind. For although my brother might be wrong about the books, he had incontestably been right about me.
Is it you?
It had not been a question at all. It had been an indictment, based on evidence that only Billy could have seen, some exchange of word or look between Dora and myself. He had sensed betrayal, I felt sure, sensed that something more than money had been stolen from him.
Repeatedly, incessantly, I relived the kiss Dora and I had shared by the bay, the look in her eyes as I’d drawn her into my arms. My brother could not have seen any of this, nor heard a single word of what had been said beforehand. And yet I could not escape a grim conclusion: He knows.
And so, almost as a way of distracting myself from the disturbing force I felt gathering within and around me, I returned to the Sentinel late that night, when I knew no one would be there.
Henry had returned the ledgers to their place on the shelf, and one by one, seated at Billy’s desk, my face no doubt pale and ghostly in the yellow light of the lamp, I read through the endless lines of figures, the evidence building one insignificant discrepancy at a time, a few dollars removed from petty cash, or withdrawn to pay a nonexistent bill, and always fraudulently recorded in the distinctly fractured script that gave no room for doubt that the recording hand was Dora’s.
It was past midnight when I finished, a faint light rising at the horizon beyond the windows. I returned the books to their place atop the wooden filing cabinet, then strode out into the early morning mist and made my way to the seawall, where, for a long time, I peered toward MacAndrews Island, trying to reason it all out, find some clue as to why she’d done it.
I knew that it had been my brother’s boyish trust that had made this possible, along with the fact he was unlikely ever to go over the accounting books with sufficient thoroughness to notice anything amiss. Dora would have known that about him, of course, and so she could have felt quite certain that she’d never be found out. Had a small gear not broken on an old machine, sent him off to Portland, where he’d swerved into a ditch and dislodged something in his mind, I had no doubt that he would never have come across the slightest hint of missing funds.
But what struck me most about the discovery, during that long night, was how little I cared that Dora was a thief. I even tried to convince myself that her reasons were pure. I imagined her handing the money over, bill by crisp new bill, to the men who lived in the hobo village outside of town, an angel of mercy, they would call her, sent to help them get back on their feet. It was pure fantasy, of course, but I was now captured in a world of fantasy, feeling nothing so powerfully as the memory of her lips on mine, the searing pleasure of her body in my arms. I resolved that I would do whatever I had to do in order to feel that happiness again. I gazed across the bay, dead-eyed and silent, at the great hump of MacAndrews Island, imagined Dora standing atop its black cliffs, and felt my love for her crash over me in a boiling wave, heard its steamy whisper pronounce a single word, Anything.
She opened the door tentatively. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“I had to.”
“It’s past midnight. I’m not dressed.”
“I have to talk to you, Dora.”
“Just a minute.”
The door closed. I lingered on the porch, motionless in the utter blackness, until it swung open.
“All right,” she told me.
She stepped back, watched me come into the room, her gaze following me as I strode to the small fireplace, then turned to face her.
She was wearing a long, dark robe, her feet barely visible below its hem. Her hair, long and in disarray, shimmered in the firelight, filaments of gold.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” I said. “On the beach. The way we …” I felt everything within me grow fierce and bold, as if suddenly enamored by a single, stirring truth. “I can’t let you go, Dora.”
She shook her head gently. “Cal, please, there’s something you don’t know.”
I saw her script in the ledger books. “It doesn’t matter, Dora.” I swept forward, drew her into my arms, felt her body grow taut. “I don’t care what you’ve done. Nothing matters to me but you.”
She eased herself out of my embrace. “I can’t, Cal.”
“Why not?”
She seemed unable to answer, so I provided an answer of my own.
“I know you don’t want to hur
t Billy,” I said.
She looked at me regretfully. “I already have.”
“You can’t help who you fall in love with.”
She said nothing, and so I made the only demand that mattered to me. “Tell me you love me.”
She touched my face. “I do.”
“Then?”
She drew her hand away. “I can’t, Cal.”
“You can do whatever you want.”
“No,” Dora said.
“I won’t let him stand in the way.”
Her eyes flared, and I saw a terrible resolve rise in her. She walked to the fireplace and stood beside it, rigid now, suddenly more stone than flesh. “You’d better go, Cal.”
“I won’t give you up. I’ll do anything, but I won’t give you up.”
“You don’t care who you hurt?”
“No.”
I moved toward her again, but she stepped aside and quickly opened the door.
“Please go,” she said.
“I’ll do anything,” I repeated as I stepped outside. “Remember that.”
“Good-bye, Cal,” she said in a tone that sounded so final, I whirled around, determined to appeal it.
But the door was already closed.
Chapter Twenty-four
And you never saw Dora again?
It was Hap Ferguson’s voice, sounding urgently in my mind as I drove the final miles toward Tom Shay’s cabin. He’d called me in the day following my brother’s funeral. Later, as we’d talked in his office, he’d sometimes scribbled notes into the same small pad in which he’d once written Dora’s name.
And you never saw Dora again?
No, never again.
And during that last meeting, Miss March didn’t say anything about leaving Port Alma?
No.
You only talked about business? Yes.
The fact that she might need to take over for William?
That’s all we talked about.
Where did you go after you left her house?
I walked home.
I heard my footsteps in the autumn leaves, moving along the walkway, headed home.