Places in the Dark (21 page)

“Yes, he will,” she said determinedly, as if by will alone she could make it so.

An hour later Dr. Goodwin escorted us into Billy’s room.

He lay in a narrow metal bed, his head swathed in bandages, blood soaking through the gauze, his eyes black and swollen, a body suddenly small, frail, broken, utterly
physical
in the sense of being composed exclusively of flesh, capable of being scraped, torn, battered. I saw his soul as well, like his body, no less naked and exposed, doomed to a thousand shocks and terrors. And yet, for all that, I didn’t rush over to him, take his hand, let him know that I was at his side.

It was Dora who did all that.

“William,” she said softly, then swept over to his bed and clasped his hand.

He stirred slightly, and I could see a subtle movement
beneath his closed lids, as if he were searching for her, like a child in a darkened room.

“It’s Dora,” she said quietly, not as a call for him to awaken, but only to let him know that she was there.

His fingers curled around Dora’s fingers. She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead.

We stayed for hours in his room, left it only when Dr. Goodwin returned, two nurses just behind him. “I need to do an examination,” the doctor told us. “There’s a waiting room down the hall.”

It was a plain area with wooden chairs and a checkered floor. Ashtrays here and there. A single large window faced the hospital’s asphalt parking lot, the black tar slicked with rain.

“He can stay with me when he leaves the hospital,” I said. “In the room upstairs.”

“He’s lucky to have you, Cal.”

I shook my head. “No. He’s lucky to have
you.”

I instantly realized that inadvertently I’d revealed a glimpse of my true feelings for her, touched her, almost physically.

She seemed to feel a dark heat rising from me. “I’ll do what I can for him” was all she said.

“I’m sure you will,” I said, then detailed how much I, too, was willing to sacrifice for my brother, all of it geared to demonstrate the depth of my devotion to him.

“Over the years, I’ve gotten used to taking care of Billy,” I said, then echoed one of my father’s biblical references, “I am my brother’s keeper.”

It was a role I’d played so long, and cherished so devotedly, a sentiment I’d expressed with such convincing sincerity that even months later, as the lights of Carmel, California, glittered distantly in the dark hills, I could still almost believe that it had been true.

L
orenzo Clay was not hard to find, since, as it turned out, he was one of the richest men in Carmel. He lived in a large house on a rocky beach, its grounds bordered by a high white wall topped with red slate and protected by a towering wrought iron gate.

The entrance door opened and a swarthy man in a dark, carefully tailored suit walked to the gate. “Yes?”

“My name is Calvin Chase,” I said. “I’m here to see Lorenzo Clay.”

“Is Mr. Clay expecting you?” He spoke with a slight accent.

“No.”

“Well, then, I’m afraid that you’ll have to—”

“I’m investigating a murder.”

The man’s face tensed. “A murder?”

“In Maine, two months ago.”

“What would that have to do with Mr. Clay?”

I handed him the book. “The person who last saw the victim alive had this book. As you can see, it once belonged to Mr. Clay.”

He looked at the book, even flipping through the pages while he considered what he should do. Finally, he glanced up and said, “Just a moment.”

He went back into the house, carefully closing the door behind him. While I waited, I gazed out over the wide grounds of Lorenzo Clay’s estate, heard Dora’s voice repeating once again the thing she’d claimed most to need:
Peace.
I saw my hand take hers, draw her to her feet, our eyes, in that instant, fixed in a terrible collusion, all hope of future peace cast to the wind.

The door opened and the man returned to the gate. “Mr. Clay would be happy to see you,” he informed me.

He unlocked the gate with a large brass key and led me down the walkway, up a short flight of stairs and into the house. It had a spacious foyer, a marble floor partially covered by a wide Oriental carpet. If Dora had actually lived here, I could not imagine the adjustment she had made, the route that had taken her from such wealth and luxury to her spartan cottage in the wood.

“Mr. Clay is in his study,” the man told me as we swung left and headed down a long corridor. At the end of it, he opened a door, stepped to the right, and gestured me inside.

“Mr. Calvin Chase,” he said formally, then backed away, leaving me alone with Lorenzo Clay.

He sat behind a massive oak desk strewn with books and papers, the brocade back of his chair rising several inches above the top of his head. I couldn’t tell how tall he was, only that he was quite obese, with a thick neck and arms. He was completely bald, and had practically no eyebrows, so that he looked as if he’d been dipped in acid, all his features melted into a doughy mass. His eyes were hazel and perfectly round, small coins pressed into the dough.

“I hope you’ll excuse the disorder. I wasn’t expecting any visitors today.” He nodded toward a chair. “Please, have a seat.”

I did as he asked, glancing about the room as I lowered myself into one of the two chairs that faced Clay’s desk. There were no cases filled with curios, no sculpture. Only a few small oil paintings hung on the walls, all other space taken up by towering bookshelves. For a moment, I imagined Dora drawing books from their shelves, touching them in the way she’d touched mine, as if they were small and alive, tiny, purring things.

“Would you like something to drink?” Clay asked.

“No. Thank you.”

He held the book I’d brought from Maine in his hands. “You’re correct in what you told Frederick,” he said. “This book certainly once belonged to me. You’ve come a long way to return it.”

“That’s not why I came.”

He seemed to hear the stark tone in my voice, dead and without inflection.

“So I was told,” he said quietly. He placed the volume on his desk, then slid it toward me. “Frederick mentioned that it has something to do with a murder.”

“Yes.”

“When did this murder take place?”

“Last November. The twenty-seventh to be exact.”

“And you’ve come all the way from Maine?”

I nodded, caught my own profile reflected in the window glass to my left, a gaunt figure, gnawed to the bone.

“That’s a very long way,” Clay said. “The victim must have been someone quite important.”

“The victim was my brother.”

For the first time, Clay’s tiny round eyes appeared capable of something other than suspicion. “I’m sorry,” he said. He lifted the book. “And this book is connected in some way to your brother’s murder?”

“The woman who owned it, she was—” I stopped, saw her in my mind, the two of us alone in her small, bare house, her eyes aglow in the firelight. “My brother was in love with her.” I felt my hands cup her face, draw it toward mine, so close that as I spoke, my breath had moved her hair:
I won’t let anything stop me.

“She went by the name of Dora March.” I recalled her tiny signature in the ledger books, proof positive both of her larceny and of how little it had mattered to
me, how easily I’d dismissed it, love, more than anything, a process of erasure. A terrible heaviness fell upon me, the awesome weight of what I’d done.

“It was all a lie,” I said.

“A lie?”

“Her name. Everything.”

“How do you know?”

“She had a magazine.” The garish pages fluttered in my mind, a wild child huddled in a corner, her thin brown legs drawn up to her chest, blond hair falling to the floor. “It had an article in it. About a young girl. The girl’s name was Dora March.”

“She took her name from a magazine article?” Clay asked, clearly intrigued.

“Yes, she did.”

“Do you have a picture of this woman?”

“No.”

“What did she look like?”

“She was in her late twenties, I think,” I said. “It was hard to tell exactly how old she was.”

“Why?”

I saw her face me mutely, sound my black depths, realize in a fearful instant how far I’d go to have her.

“She seemed older than she looked,” I told Lorenzo Clay. “More experienced.”

“In what?”

The word came from me before I could stop it. “Pain.”

Once again Clay’s eyes softened. “I see.”

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.”

Y
ou 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.