Places In The Dark Part 17

I looked up, realized that I'd drifted once more into a grim meditation. "What?" I answered.

The man behind the desk eyed me suspiciously, as if I were the one in flight, leaving b.l.o.o.d.y tracks across the pale blue carpet.

"Our dining room is to the right," he said. "Will you be dining with us this evening?"

I was tired and hungry, but the lash struck again: Find her.

"No, I won't," I replied, took the key from his hand, and went directly to my room.

The room was spare, with nothing but a bed and small bureau, a worn carpet on the floor. I locked the door behind me, then walked to the window and looked down at the street. A dirty snow lined the gutter, blackened by soot and car exhaust, people slogging through it, clutching bags, packages, the collars of their coats, the wind forever howling at their backs. In every face I searched for Dora's.

The Tremont Residence Hall for Women was only a block away. It was an ugly brick building, five stories high, with a s.p.a.cious vestibule furnished with two sofas and a few tables and chairs. Potted plants stood here and there, along with reading lamps at almost every chair. It looked like the student lounges I remembered from my college days.

The man who approached me was short and stocky, with the cauliflower ears of an ex-prizefighter and a body that rolled toward me heavily, like a cannon ball. He introduced himself as Ralph Waters, and although he offered a friendly smile, his gaze remained steely, full of silent warning. Here was the guardian of women against the dark obsession of disordered men.

"Is there something I can do for you?"

I told him my name, where I'd come from, and that I wanted to see the woman who ran Tremont Hall.

"I believe her name is Cameron," I added.

"Mrs. Posy Cameron," Waters said respectfully, as if her married status were a royal t.i.tle. "She'll want to know what this is about."

"Tell her it's about a young woman who once lived here."

One eyebrow arched. "And that would be?"

"Dora March."

The name registered in his eyes, but Waters said nothing of what it had sparked in his mind. Instead, he pointed to a wooden bench nearby. "Have a seat," he said, almost as a policeman would address a felon, my appearance perhaps so changed since my brother's death and Dora's flight that I now gave off a criminal air.

At the bench, I watched as Waters headed toward the back of the building. He knocked at a closed door, then stepped inside.

While I waited, the residents of Tremont House came and went. Most of them were in their twenties. They glanced at me furtively as they pa.s.sed, somewhat fearfully, so that I felt like a wolf among them, grim and predatory, a creature they should, at all cost, avoid.

Posy Cameron appeared a few minutes later. She was in her sixties, I supposed, a small but imposing woman, who dressed with a clear eye to modesty. Even from a distance, she gave off a no-nonsense authority, which, along with the look of command she offered the young women who greeted her as she made her way across the room, reminded me of Maggie Flynn, the sort of woman for whom young women felt, in equal measure, a daughter's trust and fear.

I rose as she came up to me.

"Mr. Chase?" she asked.

"Yes."

She seemed to glimpse the grave task I'd set myself.

"Perhaps we should speak privately," she said, then led me into a small, uncluttered office, its walls lined with neatly arranged shelves and cabinets. There was nothing on her desk but a notepad, a telephone, and a few pencils, all carefully lined up along one side. A photograph of President Roosevelt hung in a large wooden frame on the wall behind her, his jaunty grin determinedly at odds with the gloomy state of things.

"Please, sit down," Mrs. Cameron said. She lowered herself into the plain wooden chair behind her desk. "This is about Dora March, I understand?"

"Yes, it is."

"You're not the first person who's made inquiries about Miss Dora March," Mrs. Cameron told me. "Another man came by some months ago. He was also from Maine, as I recall. He said he worked for the district attorney."

"So do I," I told her, the lie tripping from my mouth as easily as the truth.

"Doing what?"

"Looking for Dora March."

"Has something happened to Dora?"

"Not just to Dora."

"Well, the other man only asked questions about Dora," Mrs. Cameron said. "He didn't mention anyone else. Any other problem. I take it the information I gave him was not enough."

"At the time, it was."

"But now you need more?"

I saw my brother stumble backward, his eyes wide, unbelieving, no doubt astonished, in his last instant, that his love could end this way.

"Since then there's been a murder," I said.

"A murder?" Mrs. Cameron asked unbelievingly. "And you think Dora had something to do with it?"

"She was the last person to see the victim alive." I kept my voice steady, gave no hint of what the words themselves summoned up in me.

"A man was killed," I said. He returned to me in all his splendor, first as a boy rolling in the gra.s.s, then a young man singing duets with our mother, and finally as I'd seen him in his last hours, emboldened by romantic certainty, a man of diamond purity, a heart swelled with romance. "He loved her," I added softly.

"Loved Dora?" Mrs. Cameron asked.

I saw them together on the old wooden bridge that spanned Fox Creek. "Yes," I said.

Mrs. Cameron nodded. "I see." She studied me like one waiting for the pool to clear, catch a view of its dark bottom. "What makes you think Dora had something to do with this man's death?"

"She fled the scene," I answered in what was left of my official voice. "That's why I'm looking for her."

Mrs. Cameron continued to watch me warily, perhaps suspecting the very motive I labored to conceal. I took out a notepad, hoping it would give me a purely dispa.s.sionate appearance, suggest that I was just a man doing his job, with only the faintest connection to the one he sought.

"You told Mr. Stout, the other man, that Dora March stayed here only around a month," I said.

"Yes."

"Do you know where she came from?"

"No."

"Did she make any friends in the residence?" "Not that I know of. She kept very much to herself."

"You never saw her with anyone?"

"No," Mrs. Cameron said. "She always seemed rather distant, Mr. Chase. I had the feeling that she really didn't want to have any sort of relations.h.i.+p. That she preferred being alone."

I saw Dora rise from the moist ground, brush the sand from her dress, then stretch her hand toward me.

"I don't think she wanted to be alone," I said before I could stop myself.

Mrs. Cameron looked as if I'd suddenly confirmed a faint suspicion. "So you knew Dora?"

My own voice sounded in my mind: Don't go, Dora. Not yet. Please.

"Yes, I knew her."

Mrs. Cameron's eyes were two small, probing lights.

"A little," I added, then glanced down at my notebook, away from Posy Cameron's penetrating gaze. "Do you know why she left New York so suddenly?"

"No," Mrs. Cameron answered. "She didn't say a thing to me about it. But I had the impression that the city disturbed her. The crowds. The noise."

My question: What do you want, Dora?

"I felt that she might have come from a very different sort of place," Mrs. Cameron continued. "With more s.p.a.ce. That she wanted..."

Her answer: Peace.

"A more tranquil setting," Mrs. Cameron said. "In any event, that New York wasn't the place for her."

"Did she ever mention her family?"

"No."

"Do you know if she ever got a job of any kind?"

Mrs. Cameron shook her head. "She paid the rent on time, that's all I know."

"You have no idea where that money came from?"

"No."

"And after she left, you never heard from her again?"

"Not a word."

I had only one other place to go. "She left a book behind. I think she must have had it for a long time. There was a label inside. It said that the book came from the library of a man named Lorenzo Clay. Did you ever hear her mention that name?"

"No."

"Carmel, California, did she ever mention living there?"

Mrs. Cameron shook her head. "What was the book?"

"Just a book of poetry," I answered.

Mrs. Cameron looked surprised. "Poetry. I wouldn't have expected Dora to care much for poetry." She saw something in my eyes, something deeper even than the weariness and grief, perhaps some glimmer of the pa.s.sion I had known. I could see that she was bringing it together in her mind, connecting the flying strands of my own story, thought she now knew why I was tracking Dora March. "Of course, you no doubt knew her much better than I did."

I felt Dora's lips on mine, pressed hard, then drawing away swiftly, like someone alarmed by her own deep need.

"Dora is a suspect, I take it?" Mrs. Cameron asked.

"She's the only suspect."

"Because she 'fled the scene,' as you put it?"

I saw her rus.h.i.+ng through the rain, the brown suitcase hanging heavily from her hand, her coat flying as she raced through the wood, then out onto the road, toward the white pillar that marked the Portland bus stop.

"Yes," I replied.

"But are you sure she was really fleeing? Maybe she was--"

"Someone saw her."

Henry Mason's sedan drew up beside her, the door opened. I heard Henry's wheezy voice: Where are you going, Dora? For a moment, I felt myself poised behind the wheel of Henry's car, my question quite different from the one he'd asked: What are you running from, Dora?

"Of course, a woman can run away from many things," Mrs. Cameron said. "The women here at Tremont House are often running away from something. Poverty. Bad families." She looked at me pointedly. "Even love."

Even love, I thought, then felt Dora pull herself out of my embrace, stride toward the door, open it, and step out into the darkness. Where would a woman go, I wondered, if she were fleeing that?

Chapter Eighteen.

It was a long drive to California, plagued by fierce weather and badly tended roads, a tale of breakdowns and delays, my car rattling ever more loudly with each pa.s.sing mile, its once-bright sheen finally buried under layers of dust and grime.

As the days wore on, I began to break the monotony by picking up hitchhikers along the way. They were ragged and bereft, carrying scarcely little more than the stories of themselves, chronicles of loss and dispossession, the love or hatred they had left behind. They spoke of fires, floods, drought, of closed factories and confiscated farms. Wives and children appeared briefly in their stories, then fell away in rancor, betrayal, early death. While they talked, they slapped dust from their hats, sc.r.a.ped mud from their shoes, cleaned their nails with pocketknives. They carried matches to light their fires, tin skillets to heat their suppers, and ice picks to fight off men yet more desperate than themselves. They never asked for money, or for pity, or to spin their tales for longer than I cared to listen. When the ride was over, they got out of the car, nodded, wished me luck. "Hope I didn't bore you," they would often say.

They never did. For each had, in his way, told a different story. And yet, in time a single theme emerged, that people were equally undone by things both great and small, from our grandest pa.s.sions to our most petty needs, events as vast as war and as small as a misplaced note. In my own version, as I came to realize, the great thing was Dora in her dark allure, the small one nothing more than a tiny broken gear.

At first no one noticed. There was a slight smudge on the "n" and "m" as the paper ran off the press. A small gear had cracked in the mechanism that turns the inking cylinder, thus slowing its turn just enough to smear the ink sufficiently for the human eye to catch it. After looking over the damage, Billy decided that the old press was falling apart in various ways, and should simply be retired. But Henry Mason informed him that there wasn't enough money to buy a new press, that replacing the broken gear was my brother's only option.

Billy left for Portland on the morning of August 3, spent most of the day tracking down exactly the right gear. He'd finally found it late in the afternoon, then headed back toward Port Alma. About halfway home, caught in a driving rain, the car had begun to skid, then spin, turning in full, slicing circles until it had finally careened into a ditch half filled with muddy water.

Billy was found slumped over the wheel, bleeding and unconscious, and taken to the nearest hospital.

I answered the phone at just after nine that evening.