Places in the Dark

by Thomas H. Cook

  I’d gotten halfway to it when I noticed that there were no tracks in the snow around it. Clearly, neither Hendricks nor Molly had been outside for a time. They might be huddled in the shed, of course, but no smoke came from the black pipe that pierced its roof, and in the cold, it seemed unlikely they would have remained inside without a fire.

  I tapped lightly at the door. When no one answered, I stepped over to one of the windows. The blanket appeared to have been put up hastily, leaving an uneven space of nearly two inches above the sill. I peered inside. In the shadows I could see Molly Hendricks lying faceup on a sagging cot. Her eyes were closed, her face colorless save for the slender line of blood that ran from the left corner of her mouth, then gathered in a frozen pool near her head.

  Inside, I found them both, Molly with a single bullet hole at the back of her head, her father sitting upright in a wooden chair no more than five feet away, a smear of dried blood caked around his mouth and spreading in a black stain across the front of his shirt. The bullet had gone through the roof of his mouth, exited at the rear of his skull. His eyes were wide open, so that he looked shocked, perhaps horrified, either by the force of the explosion or by his first glimpse of the world that awaited him, no less cruel and inadequate, on the other side.

  Billy was waiting on the curb, stamping his feet in the deepening snow when I pulled up at the Sentinel. He was not alone. Dora stood beside him. Puffs of condensed air burst from her lips, and even after my brother had ushered her into the backseat of my car, she looked deathly cold.

  We said nothing as we headed toward Pine Road, nothing as I guided the car into Carl Hendricks’s drive. In that silence, Dora seemed truly distant and inscrutable, like a statue that draws light into it rather than giving it off, darkens whatever space it occupies.

  After discovering the two bodies, I’d gone directly to my office, of course, called Hap, told him what I’d found in the shed, then phoned the Sentinel and given Billy the same details. “I’m going back out there,” I told him. “You want to come?”

  “Yes, of course,” he’d replied.

  “I covered Molly’s face,” I told Billy as we got out of the car. “I left everything else the same.”

  Dora had gotten out along with us, and was now standing beside the car, her arms gathered protectively at her chest, flakes of snow gathering on her shoulders and clinging to her hair. “You want to see this?” I asked her.

  “No, I don’t,” she answered firmly, sinking her hands into the pockets of her thin coat. “I’ll stay here.”

  Billy and I walked past the remains of the gutted house, then to the shed. “I hope you’re ready for this,” I warned him as I opened the door.

  For a time he gazed at Molly Hendricks. Then he turned to Carl, flinching suddenly. “Good God,” he whispered.

  “Isn’t very pretty, is it?” I asked.

  His eyes returned to Molly. “She’s just a child. You always wonder how someone could hurt a child.” He looked at me. “But then, most people can’t. I guess that’s what we cling to.”

  That was true enough, although I knew that I’d long ago accepted such lethal mayhem as the inescapable result of our disordered nature, and which no scheme for improvement, no matter how trivial or vast, would ever change one whit or in any way undo.

  Billy bent forward, touched a curl of Molly’s hair.

  Watching him from the door, I sensed the tenderness he extended toward everything, an almost primordial sympathy, something taken with us out of paradise.

  He straightened, moved to the stove and touched it. “It’s been cold for a long time,” he said softly.

  “My guess is, they were already in here when I came by Saturday evening. Already dead, I mean.”

  “Probably,” Billy said. He looked at Molly again. “Poor thing” was all he said.

  A moment later, we walked out into the swirling snow.

  “I guess Carl just couldn’t figure any way out,” my brother said.

  “Then he should have thought a little harder.”

  “People get trapped in things, Cal.” He glanced toward the car, Dora standing beside it. “She was terrified that this was going to happen.”

  I ducked my head against the cold, thought of old Ed Dillard, now this. A thought passed through my mind: Death follows her.

  Hap pulled into the drive just as Billy and I reached my car.

  “T.R.’s on his way,” he told me. He looked at Billy. “Well, I guess you were right. There was something wrong here.” He glanced toward Dora, his gaze lingering on her briefly, so that he appeared to recognize her distantly, like a photograph he’d once seen in a book. Then he stepped away, moving purposefully toward the shed. Halfway to it, he snapped a branch from a bare sapling. He slapped it softly against his leg as he walked the rest of the way, scattering a burst of snow.

  I gave the little shed a final glance, then looked over to where Dora and my brother stood together. Billy was talking quietly, no doubt describing what he’d seen inside it. Even served cold, it would be a disturbing vision, and I expected Dora to do the usual womanly thing upon receiving it, either collapse in my brother’s arms or bury her weeping face into his broad shoulder. She did no such thing, however, only nodded from time to time, as if in response to quite ordinary news. It wasn’t until after Billy had stepped away that I saw her body tighten suddenly, grow taut, rigid, as if to squeeze back into its cage whatever raged inside her.

  Chapter Twelve

  A few days of unseasonably warm weather thawed the ground enough to bury Molly Hendricks six days later. Hap thought someone from the office should make an appearance at the funeral, and since my brother had to some extent been involved in what Hap called “the Hendricks matter,” he gave the job to me.

  The ceremony, such as it was, was almost over by the time I got there. Standing at a distance, I could see Billy and Dora gathered with a few of Hendricks’s neighbors from Pine Road.

  Reverend Cates conducted the funeral with his usual solemnity. The course of every life, he said, followed a strange and unknowable direction. We might work to probe the mystery, but it would always elude us. For we were lost, like sheep in a deep valley, wandering in the darkness, without guidance or direction, driven here and there by mere circumstance, undone by pure chance. The darkness was impenetrable, and so we groped and stumbled, fell into traps and snares. We had been brought here to suffer, he told the small gathering,to be broken into submission, wounded again and again, so that we might find within those wounds the force and grace of love.

  When it was over, Reverend Cates grabbed a handful of snow-encrusted earth and tossed it onto the plain wooden coffin the citizens of Port Alma had managed to buy for their murdered daughter. After that, we headed in ragged lines down the hill to the main road. Only Billy lingered at the grave, no doubt gathering thoughts for the column he’d write later that day, leaving Dora to make her way down alone.

  “Well, you were right, Dora,” I said as I came up behind her. “About Molly, I mean. That her father intended to kill her. My brother told me that you sensed things.”

  I’d meant it as a kind of praise, a recognition of her intuitive powers, but I could see she had little use for compliments. Still, I did not relent.

  “What did you sense in Molly Hendricks?” I asked, my tone suddenly insistent. “That she was going to be hurt?”

  “That she’d already been hurt.”

  “And that looked like … what?”

  “Helplessness. Like someone was holding her down.”

  “Why didn’t I see it?”

  She didn’t answer, but I saw the answer in her eyes: Because it’s never happened to you.

  “I saw you, you know,” I told her. “At the seawall that night. In the fog.”

  Dora held her attention on the black, wrought iron gate at the bottom of the hill. “You walk at night,” she said. It was not a question.

  “Sometimes.”

  She appeared to take my answer as
confirmation of my solitary habits, the improvisations I had built to hold my life together. I sensed that she’d built a similar structure, erected walls and fences to keep in what she needed, keep out what she could not endure.

  “I prefer the night,” I said.

  “Why?”

  The question seemed innocent enough, and yet I felt that I was suddenly under interrogation, like a suspect in a detective novel, squirming in his chair, the naked bulb shining cruelly overhead. “I’ve never really thought about it,” I answered. “I suppose I like the solitude.”

  “Do you draw at night?”

  “Draw?”

  “Billy says you draw.”

  I laughed. “I haven’t drawn anything in years. He means when I was a kid.”

  “Did you keep them?”

  “Yes, I did. I hung them in my study.”

  “I’d like to see them sometime.”

  “I wouldn’t bother. They’re not any good. I’m not the artist type. And even if I were, I’m not—”

  “Not what?”

  To my surprise, the answer pained me. “Gifted at anything.”

  She smiled quietly. “Neither am I,” she said.

  We walked on down the hill in silence, said goodbye at the bottom of it. I headed for my car while Dora remained in place, standing by the old iron gate, waiting for my brother to join her there. It was perhaps the last time I felt that she was no more than she seemed to be, of few words, with an edginess that was clearly more intense than most, but still well within the range of other women I’d known, no less likely to get over whatever it was Billy felt so certain had happened to her.

  I gave her no further thought as I drove back into town. Once there, I went directly to my office, hoping to catch up on my work.

  But when I arrived, I found Jack Stout coming down the corridor that led to my office. He’d just delivered Charlie Younger to Sheriff Pritchart.

  “‘Afternoon, Mr. Chase.”

  I could tell by the congratulatory sparkle in Jack’s eyes that he’d brought news from New York.

  “I had some luck on that job you gave me. About that woman. Dora March.” He said her name with a curious emphasis.

  I ushered him into my office, offered him a cigar, which he took but didn’t smoke, slipping it into his shirt pocket instead.

  “What did you find out?”

  “Well, she lived at that residence hall, all right,” Jack said. “Tremont Residence Hall for Women, it’s called.” He took a scrap of paper from his pocket, soiled, sticky. “An old woman runs the place. ‘Bout sixty, I’d say. Name of Mrs. Posy Cameron.” He looked up from the paper. “That’s who I talked to.”

  “Did she remember Dora?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Remembered that she’d lived there.” He glanced at the note again. “But not much about her.”

  I remained silent, waiting. I knew there was more.

  “She gave me something though,” Jack said. “Something the woman left in her room. Mrs. Cameron kept it in storage, thinking Miss March might send a forwarding address. But she never did.” Again he reached into the pocket of his jacket, drew out a magazine, rolled up and held curled by a rubber band. “So she gave it to me,” he said as he handed it across the desk. “Told me to give it to Miss March, but I figured I’d give it to you first.”

  I stripped off the rubber band and let the magazine unroll in my hand. It was called Astonishing True Stories, and seemed to be a religious publication of sorts, with lead lines that suggested tales of miraculous cures, unexpected rescues, answered prayers, the reappearance of the dead.

  “I was flipping through it on the way home, and I found a story you might be interested in.” Jack’s tone darkened somewhat, as if it were not a magazine at all but some creature he’d stumbled upon in the deep wood, neither snake nor scorpion, but small and deadly anyway, something he’d never seen before. “Page thirty-one.”

  I began leafing through the pages, strange pictures flashing here and there, a boy with three arms, a dog riding a goat, a boa coiled around a dugout canoe.

  “The story’s about a little girl,” Jack said. “Left out in the open.”

  I found the story and began to read it, following the first sightings, a little girl running naked in the wilderness, her skin brown and leathery, the soles of her feet thick as shoe soles, but graced, as the magazine’s only color illustration made clear, with a wild mane of long, blond hair.

  “It’s the second page that has the punch,” Jack said.

  I turned the page, found what he meant. “Dora March,” I said.

  Jack grinned. “That’s what they named her. Them doctors.”

  I nodded, then read on, followed the story as far as the magazine presented it, the fact that it was English doctors who’d finally claimed her, brought her to London from the Spanish Pyrenees, where she’d first been sighted, named her Dora, from d’oro, Spanish for “of gold,” meaning the color of her hair, and Marzo, also Spanish, for the month she’d first been sighted, and which the English had later Anglicized to “March.” In a final rendering, “Dora March” squatted naked in the corner of a bare room, scrubbed clean, her legs drawn up against her chest, her waist-length hair gleaming in the hard white light.

  “Looks like her, don’t it?” Jack asked.

  “Looks like who?”

  “That woman at the Sentinel. You think it could be her, Mr. Chase?”

  “You didn’t get to the end of the article, did you, Jack?”

  “No, sir.”

  “This little girl was found in Europe. In 1889.”

  Jack peered at me wonderingly.

  “She died twenty years ago.”

  Jack grinned. “Well, couldn’t be Dora, then,” he reasoned.

  “No, it couldn’t,” I replied.

  “Just a coincidence, you think? Them having the same name?”

  I took a five-dollar bill from my wallet and gave it to him. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to keep this whole thing between us.”

  He plucked the cigar from his shirt pocket, wrapped the bill snugly around it, and returned both to his pocket. “Sure, Mr. Chase,” he said with a wink. “Stuff like this, I’m a regular fence post.”

  For the rest of the afternoon I considered how I should tell my brother what I’d learned about Dora. It was not as strange a tale as Jack Stout had imagined, but it was curious nonetheless. There was certainly reason to believe that she’d plucked her name out of a magazine. There had to be a reason for her doing such a thing, it seemed to me, a true identity that she had reason to conceal. Until Billy knew that reason, he could not know her.

  I was still pondering exactly how I was going to break all this to him when I pulled up in front of his house later that evening. Night had fallen, and from the street I could look directly into the lighted dining room, see him moving about, putting a cluster of flowers on the table. Two candles flickered in a crystal candelabrum, the very one my mother had given him years before, insisting that it should be used only for “romantic occasions.” Because of that, I had no doubt as to what was going on. My brother was preparing to receive Dora, making everything just right.

  I got out of my car and started up the little cement walkway that led to his door, Astonishing True Stories rolled up in my coat pocket. I was utterly intent on revealing, for whatever it might be worth, exactly what Jack Stout had found. Then, out of the darkness, I heard my father’s voice as clearly as if he were standing beside me, repeating the words he’d said in his parlor a few days before: There’s nothing like loneliness to bring you to your knees.

  At that instant, it struck me that Billy had finally reached the point in his life when he wanted nothing more than to put an end to his romantic longing, place his heart on the red nine, and spin the wheel.

  Who was I to stop him?

  And so I went back to my car, pulled myself behind the wheel, then glanced toward my brother’s house a final
time, fully expecting to see him still busy with his preparations. He was in the dining room just as before. But he was no longer alone. Dora stood beside him, helping him set his table, chatting quietly with him until he suddenly turned and left the room, leaving her to stand alone, holding an empty goblet, a slender figure in a plain white dress. In such a pose, she seemed little more than a wisp of breath, not at all robust, and wholly inadequate to Maine. In this harsh land, lashed by wind and sea, I felt certain she would wither.

  But she bloomed.

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirteen

  It began with the smallest bud, Dora’s flowering, then opened steadily after that, so that by spring of ‘36, I could hardly imagine that she’d ever seemed in the least insubstantial to me, someone to be dismissed without consequence, a woman who might come and go, leave no lasting mark behind.

  During the preceding winter, I’d seen her only rarely, usually in company with my brother. I knew that she continued to work at the Sentinel, always at the copy desk, a very able grammarian according to Billy, but with no interest in actually composing stories. From time to time I’d glimpsed her within the throng of locals who shopped in Madison’s on the weekend, but had always stepped away quickly, feeling no need to address her. Once Billy had suggested that we all “go out” together. Rather than refuse, I’d reminded him that I would surely be the third wheel in any such gathering, since I had no woman to “go out” with in the sense he meant.

  And so it was not until early April that I found myself alone with her for the first time since we’d strolled down the hill from Molly Hendricks’s frozen grave. She’d rented a small cottage at the edge of town by then. I’d gone there as a favor to Billy, who’d asked me to pick her up that evening. Earlier that day, he’d gone to the state capital to cover some new plan for social improvement that FDR’s followers in the legislature had devised. Typical of my brother, he’d gotten swept up in the debate, no doubt offering his own wild scheme, left later than he’d expected, then broken down on the way home, his old Ford barely lurching into a service station before it expired altogether. He’d called to tell me that he’d be arriving late for our customary Wednesday night dinner with our father.