Places in the Dark (3 page)

A hand yanks her blouse up to her shoulders.

The blade descends. A second voice whispers in her ear.

It won’t hurt.

Then the blade rakes the pale skin of her back in swift slicing motions, like someone carving hugs and kisses in the soft bark of a tree.

I
’m sure Dora relived this moment many times as she made her way over the Rockies and across the Great Plains, taking the same roads I later took, following the last slim lead I had.

She reached the East Coast, lingered for a time, then fled northward, no doubt winding through New England along Route 1. Finally, in late October, the leaves in their autumnal glory, she reached Port Alma, a
town fixed to a rocky coast, bordered by a seawall, graced with a long stone jetty and a jeweled island in the bay.

Local legend had it that Port Alma had been named for a sea captain’s wife. It was Billy who set the record straight in a little talk he gave two days before his sixteenth birthday, the town historical society gathered in the front room of the old lending library to hear him speak.

“Alma was the captain’s lover, not his wife,” Billy explained. “She was a beautiful young woman who lived in Seville.”

According to Billy, Captain Brennan had sailed up the Guadalquivir River, master of an eighteenth-century merchant ship in search of olive oil and Spanish sherry. The captain had been graciously entertained by the local Spanish aristocracy, invited to their dances, shown their fabled gardens, where flowers hung in perfumed abundance from brightly painted walls. It was during one of those long, scented evenings that Brennan had met Maria Alma Sanchez. Seventeen. Olive-skinned. Raven-haired. They’d walked along the narrow streets of Santa Cruz, kissed at the Torre del Oro, alongside the same river down which Columbus had set sail.

Then the story darkened. The couple was forced to part. Worse things after that. Alma’s suicide. Captain Brennan set wandering again. He’d finally settled on a remote beach in Maine, where he’d built a small trading post. He christened it Port Alma. “It was the perfect place for Captain Brennan,” Billy concluded, relishing the high romance of his tale, glancing at our mother, who watched him approvingly from the front row, “because every other place served only to remind him that he had sacrificed the one true love of his life.”

That was the last line of Billy’s talk. And I remember how Mrs. Tolliver dabbed her eyes at the end of it. How strangely Mr. Tolliver gazed at her, as if some long suspicion about his wife had been suddenly proved true. I don’t know if my brother noticed their reaction, but had he noticed it, I know he would have been pleased. For all his life Billy loved the idea that people had secrets they held within themselves like gemstones in a velvet pouch, precious, dazzling, rare. Perhaps that was what initially drew him to Dora. Not her beauty, but how grotesquely it had been marred. Not what she let him see, but what she
hid.

“It was a beautiful talk, Billy,” my mother said as the three of us stood together on the steps of the building, the main street of Port Alma crowded with its usual weekend throng. Her eyes were like soft blue lights. “Very beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Billy said. He smiled happily. “Cal’s giving a talk next month.”

She turned to me. “Really? What about, Cal?”

“Civil disobedience,” I answered.

She laughed. “Against it, I suppose?”

“Adamantly.”

She pressed her hand to my cheek. “Your father’s son,” she said with a bright, indulgent smile. She turned back to Billy. “Well, congratulations. It was a lovely talk.” With that she strode down the stairs, turned to the left, and grandly sailed down Main Street like a great ship through a tangle of lesser vessels.

“She’s so sure of herself,” I said once she was out of earshot. “So sure that she’s right about her view of things.”

With an insight that even then struck me as older than his years, Billy said, “If she weren’t, she wouldn’t
be able to live. She would die, Cal. She would just curl up and die.”

We went for a walk after that, more or less following our mother’s route through a town bustling with activity, people coming in and out of shops, then along a beach strewn with families, children darting in all directions.

The crowd had thinned by the time we reached the jetty. We stopped at its edge, peered out over its huge gray stones.

“It looks like the backbone of a dragon,” Billy said. I studied the jetty, decided he was right. “Yes, it does.”

He climbed onto it, then said, “What do you think it was like between our parents? In the beginning, I mean. Before they got married.”

“I have no idea.”

“They couldn’t have known each other very well.”

“Probably not.”

“Maybe that’s the way it should be, Cal, when you fall in love.”

“It’s the way it has to be. Or you won’t.”

He offered me a hand, pulled me up beside him. “You’re just like Dad.”

“In what way?”

“The way you think everything through.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, except that in the end, you pick everything apart. Bit by bit. Until there’s nothing left.”

“And you’re like Mother.” I peered down the length of the jetty, where white water surged and retired around the stones. “You trust everything.” I glanced up at the sky. All afternoon a storm had been bearing down from the north. Now it hovered overhead, its clouds thick and billowing, like a poisonous gray smoke.

“We’d better be getting back,” I said. “The rain could hit any second.”

Billy paid me no mind, turned, and strode out toward the end of the jetty, where he stood, facing the bay, his coat flung over his shoulders, hanging from them like a cape.

I lifted my collar against the wind and followed after him.

He turned suddenly as I drew in upon him. The wind tossed his hair.

“She’s out there somewhere,” he said, nodding inland.

I held my eyes upon the bay, where a rusty trawler slogged wearily toward the open sea, its wake flowing behind her, white and ragged, like an old woman’s hair.

“Who is?”

“The one,” Billy answered.

I looked at him quizzically.

“Don’t you remember what you said?” he asked. “That night, after Jenny Grover? You said that she was ‘out there somewhere.’ My one true love.”

“I was joking,” I told him.

“Of course you were,” Billy said. “But what if you were right, Cal? What if she really is out there?”

I could see that my brother had actually come to believe that there might be such a person, a one love for whom he was destined.

“Well?” he asked.

I knew that during the years I’d been away at college he had been pursued by a host of village girls, earthy, willing, destined to work the canneries or marry those who did. According to my father, he’d shown no interest in returning the attentions of such girls no matter how blatantly they’d expressed them. Now I knew why. Romance had become his sword and shield, made of him a true romantic. Simply put, he could not lust
for one he did not love, and had come to believe, with all his heart, that he would love but once.

“If she’s out there, I hope you find her,” I said, though with no expectation that he might.

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“Do you ever think that there’s this girl out there who’s…”

“No,” I said firmly. Which was true enough. Such vaporous notions had never had any power over me. As for the last few years, I’d concentrated exclusively on my studies at Columbia Law, torts and the rules of civil litigation, broken contracts, and unsupported claims.

“Mother believes that for every person there is…”

“I’m sure she does,” I said, abruptly weary of such talk. “She’s probably as sure of that as she is about everything else.”

Billy grew quite serious. “The thing is, I believe it too, Cal.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

I could see no harm in going along with my brother’s romantic suppositions. “Well, perhaps you’re both right.”

But I didn’t in the least believe that either of them was right. In fact, the possibility that my brother’s one true love might actually appear never occurred to me at all. Nor that within eight months of her arrival in Port Alma, she would vanish no less mysteriously, leave blood-spattered roses in her wake, and in me the merciless resolve to track her down.

L
uther Cobb was the first person I talked to on the day I began my search for Dora. Cobb had managed the bus station in Port Alma for thirty years, seen scores of sinister figures arrive, linger, then depart. And yet he looked at me warily as I approached him, as if I were a stranger. It was a wariness I’d gotten used to by then. I knew that in the time since Billy’s death I’d taken on a thin, starved look, that I cast, in every light, the shadow of a predator.

My brother had been dead for thirty-seven days before I began to look for Dora. Terrible days during which I’d felt the worms wriggling within me as surely as they wriggled within him, felt a ruthless and insatiable devouring. I’d slept only fitfully, ate only enough to keep my body going, continually replayed the story in my mind.

And so, on the thirty-seventh day after Billy’s death I decided that there had to be an end to it, that I couldn’t let her escape. The order had seemed to come from the crisp cold air around me,
Find her.

Luther Cobb was my first stop on the road to Dora March.

“‘Morning, Cal,” he said as I stepped up to his counter.

Without preamble, I told him what I wanted, whom I was looking for. “Dora March,” I said, and in that instant saw her standing there in Port Alma’s dusty bus station, a spectral figure, clothed in shadow, her face without expression, dead green eyes.

“Dora March.” Luther peered at me intently. “What a strange one she turned out to be.”

“What do you remember about her?” I asked. “The day she came to town, I mean.”

“Came at night. Got off alone. ‘Round midnight, as I recall. Can’t tell you much more. Just that nobody met her.”

Luther had a smooth face, round as a coin, with sunken, curiously stricken eyes. His son Larry had drowned in 1911, his boat sunk and never recovered from what, by all accounts, had been a tranquil sea. The mystery of that lost boy hung like a veil over Luther’s features. I had no doubt that he’d spent the long years since his son’s death in a fruitless conjuring of possibilities: murder, suicide, a serpent rising from the placid depths. Studying him that morning, I knew that if Dora got away, I’d be locked in the same dark prison all my days.

“That time of night, you’d expect someone to meet a woman alone,” Luther said. “Nobody did though.”

A rider stepped up to the counter, middle-aged, a ragged hat pulled low across his brow. He asked for a ticket to Rockport.

“Be right with you, Cal,” Luther told me, then went about the business of selling the man a ticket.

I stepped aside and waited.

A loudspeaker called the passengers to board the Portland bus. People began getting up, gathering their bundles. Young and old, they heaved duffel bags or struggled with suitcases, trunks, battered cardboard boxes wrapped with twine. Only in the narrowest sense, it seemed to me, could they know where they were going.

“She came up to the window,” Luther said once he’d given the man his ticket and his change. “Wanted to know where the nearest hotel was. ‘Out the front,’ I told her, like I always tell anybody that asks that question. ‘Then turn left.’”

I watched as she drifted past the old red Coca-Cola machine, then beneath the station clock. The sound of her footsteps beat softly in my mind.

“Didn’t say another word,” Luther added. “Just headed for the door.”

A breeze rushed forward across the station’s speckled linoleum floor, swept over her plain black shoes, then curled up the opposite wall to finger the tattered pages of an old drugstore calendar.

“Thick fog that night.” Luther shook his head. “Doubt she could have seen the lights at the hotel. But she headed for it anyway.”

I saw her step resolutely into the fog, saw her as Luther had that first evening in Port Alma, a woman briefly glimpsed, then instantly enshrouded.

“Never saw her again,” Luther added.

Each time I closed my eyes, I saw her.

“Didn’t make a lasting impression.”

For a moment she stood motionless at the curb. Then, without warning, she spun around to face me, her eyes flaring, pronouncing their grim warning,
Go back.

It was all I could do not to answer her aloud,
I can’t.

A
nd so I followed Dora’s route down Main Street to the Port Alma Hotel. A light snow had begun to fall. It reminded me of something my father had once said, that if life worked like the weather, we’d get some warning of the storm ahead. True enough, perhaps, but at the same time it struck me that my brother had wanted no such predictability. Billy had always preferred, no matter what the cost, a life of wonder or surprise. “I’d rather each day hit me like a stone,” he’d once said. At that moment, I’d draped my arm over his shoulders, hugged him close, muttering “William the Lion-Hearted,” and with those words felt the one sure thing I knew in life: that even if I lived alone forever, wifeless, childless, there would always be at least one person I truly loved.