Places In The Dark Part 19

"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 reconst.i.tute 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 gla.s.ses."

"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 inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sistance. 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.