Evidence of Blood (28 page)

“Help me,” he breathed.

He saw the figure draw away, and he dragged at the rope, his feet whipping wildly in the empty air, as he dragged again and again, his feet no longer of any use, but
simply great, soggy weights which hung in the blackness somewhere down below.

“Help me.”

His hands twitching at the rope, grasping, grasping as he dragged upon it again and again, the eye of the shaft growing larger, as if he were tugging it mightily toward him.

“Help me,” he repeated, then gave a few last furious pulls on the rope, his legs drawing up beneath him as his hands released the rope and he grasped wildly for the stone rim of the well, the tips biting into the hard rock, the nails scraping silvery patterns into its dry stone, the grip loosening even as he pressed it down again, his body edging back helplessly toward the dark pit.

“Help me,” he said as he felt himself drift backward, sinking into the darkness, his hands suddenly breaking free of the stone, but still grasping, grasping.

Suddenly she was over him, leaning into the dark eye of the well, her long white arms reaching for him, holding him, drawing him up with a long, mighty pull that swept him over to the rope again, his hands wrapping around it with a sudden, unfathomable calm.

She wrapped him in a blanket, made a cup of black coffee, then watched him drink it as he sat beside a small electric heater in the living room.

“It was just a lead I was following,” Kinley explained, “something Riley Hendricks said.”

Dora said nothing, but only waited.

“He wondered why the police had never checked the well behind your father’s house,” Kinley added.

“So you decided to check it?”

“You have to eliminate certain possibilities as you go along,” Kinley told her, the voice of the schooled professional now reasserting itself determinedly.

“So you thought my father might have dumped Ellie Dinker’s body in the well?” Dora asked softly.

“I wanted to eliminate that possibility,” Kinley answered weakly. “I mean …”

Dora raised her hand to silence him. “You don’t have to explain.” She stood up, walked to the window, glanced out quickly, then turned back to him. “Besides, I’d already checked it,” she said, “six years ago.”

“You? Why?”

She leaned against the window, the dissolving glow from the lights in the valley rising in a faint aura from her shoulders. “Because of Mrs. Dinker,” Dora said. “I came home one afternoon, and she was in the backyard. She was standing by the well, still wearing that black dress.”

Kinley nodded but said nothing.

“I came up to her,” Dora went on. “I thought she was crazy. There’d been a lot of talk. I didn’t know what she might do.” Her voice softened. “But she wasn’t exactly crazy. Something else. Tormented.” She paused a moment, as if attempting to get everything in order before going on. “She watched me come up to her,” she continued finally. “And then she smiled.”

“Smiled?”

“A strange smile, of course,” Dora said. “You know, sort of taunting, as if she’d discovered my secret.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that,” Kinley said.

“Anyway, I said hello to her,” Dora went on. “And she just pointed to the well, and she said, ‘Is she down there?’ Just like that. Then she asked the same question again. ‘Is my little girl down there?’” She shook her head. “I didn’t know how to answer that. It had never occurred to me that my father had killed Ellie Dinker, and so the well, what might be in it, that had never crossed my mind either.”

“When did you look?”

“I did it right at that moment,” Dora answered. “I thought it was the only way to prove to Mrs. Dinker that my father hadn’t killed her daughter.”

“So you went down into the well while she was there?”

“Yes,” Dora said.

“Alone?” Kinley asked admiringly.

“Alone, yes,” Dora answered matter-of-factly. Something in her earlier confidence seemed to give a bit. “Does that seem crazy?”

“Just unusual.”

“I don’t want to go nuts,” Dora said. “I don’t want to end up like Mrs. Dinker.”

Kinley thought of all the ripped and blasted lives his work had brought him into, the empty chairs at the family table. He wondered why he’d never felt the same peril.

“Anyway, there was nothing down there, of course,” Dora said, “and when I came up, I told Mrs. Dinker that.”

“Did she believe you?”

“Yes, I think she did,” Dora said. “She walked away, and that was the last time I spoke to her. I’d see her from time to time after that. She was always hanging around the courthouse. But I’d never spoken to her again.”

She came toward him, gathered her skirt under her and sat down on the floor beside him. “Are you warm yet?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

She smiled quietly. “Ray was the first one to come along who was willing to help me on my …”

“Quest?” Kinley said.

Dora did not look amused by the grandeur of the word. “Reason to live,” she said.

“If that’s what it is, then it might be better if you never found out.”

Dora shook her head. “No, it’s not like that. If I ever found out who killed Ellie Dinker, it would be like being released from prison. Even if it turned out that my father really was the one who did it. Even that would release me.” She turned toward him slowly, her eyes glowing in the red light of the heater. “Do you think he did?” she asked. “Do you think he killed that little girl?”

There was always a moment, Kinley knew, when judgment had to be rendered, sometimes in the presence of overwhelming evidence, sometimes on the basis of nothing more than a primitive intimation. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think he did, Dora.”

She seemed neither relieved nor surprised by his answer. “Ray didn’t either,” she said. “I think that’s what it was between us.”

“Not love?” Kinley asked.

Her eyes closed softly, then opened. “Maybe for him.”

“And for you?”

Some slender rod in the great, unbending structure of her character loosened toward him, releasing a subtle confidence. “Sometimes, you just get tired of going to bed alone,” she said.

Kinley’s mind swept down the long chain of his nights,
an indistinguishable landscape of interchangeable rooms, sentiments, people. “Yes,” he said. “You do.”

It had come upon them in an instant, lingered for a time, then departed. Kinley could feel his head pressed deep into the pillow beside her, his eyes watching the air beyond her bedroom window. In the early morning light, he could see the mists rising over the brow of the mountain, gray and billowy, as he remembered them from his home on the canyon.

She slept at his side, her dark face balanced on his shoulder, and as his eyes shot over to her, he felt a grave, nearly uncontrollable need to nudge her into wakefulness, so that he could tell her about his days with his grandmother in the small house, his long walks through the canyon depths, that first journey to the wall of vines, Ray’s face like a ball of light in the deep green sea of the canyon floor, his voice full of a desperately whispered conspiracy:
no one could ever find you here
.

She shifted slightly, her cheek moving like a soft, brown cloth across his arm. He could smell her hair, her skin, feel the texture of her flesh, but the sensation was so new to him, so different from his past experience, that it came to him like an innovation, a sudden, revelatory instant within a process that was infinitely old and familiar.

She awakened with a start. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d stay all night.”

“You didn’t want me to?”

“I just didn’t think you would. Ray never did.”

“He had a wife.”.

“Even after that,” Dora said, “even after the divorce.”

“Well, there was Serena.”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t Serena. It was Sequoyah. It’s too small for things like this.”

She got up, drew on a long red robe and walked to the small window of her bedroom. “It may rain,” she said
idly as she stared out into the mist. “It’s been a while. It’s time for it to rain.”

He pulled himself up slightly, pressing his back against the headboard as he watched her at the window. Her back was fully to him, so that he could see only the long fall of the robe, its red tide sweeping over her shoulders and plunging nearly to the floor.

“Dora,” he said softly.

She turned to face him. “No,” she said firmly, then pushed her hands out, a barrier between them. “It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

He looked at her accusingly. “That sounds like a line you’ve said before.”

The hands retreated. “You’d better go now.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way it is.”

“With people?”

“With me,” Dora said. “I don’t mean to be hard, but there’s a kind of woman I can’t stand. Hopeless, clinging. You know the kind?”

“Victims.”

“That’s right,” Dora said. “I haven’t made much of my life, Kinley, but I haven’t become something like that, and I don’t intend to start now.” She nodded toward the floor, where his clothes lay in a tangled mass. “I’ll let you dress alone,” she said, then left the room, closing the door behind her.

He dressed quickly and headed into the other room. It was empty, and so he kept going, out onto the porch, then down the stairs to where he found her standing near the edge of the cliff, her eyes fixed on the town below.

She continued to stare out over the slope of the mountain. “You have to be careful, don’t you?”

“About what?”

“Not to be trivial,” Dora said.

“No one can ever be safe from a judgment like that,” he told her.

“You can if you
do
something,” Dora said.

“What do you want to do?”

She stared at him determinedly. “I want to find out who killed Ellie Dinker,” she said. “I don’t want to die in this fucking town without at least knowing
that.”

He looked at her coolly. “Does that explain last night?”

The sound of her hand as it struck him, he thought, must have echoed for a thousand miles.

No one had ever done that.

No one.

Ever.

At first he’d been unable to absorb it, the look in her eyes, the whirl of her arm, the blow on his face, slamming it to the right so that the whole fogbound valley had become an insubstantial blur. In the brief aftermath, he’d gone entirely numb, his eyes glaring at her in a smokey stillness, until she’d finally turned abruptly and disappeared into the house. After that, he’d had no option but to return to the house on Beaumont Street.

He slumped at the desk in Ray’s office, took a deep, exasperated breath, and let his eyes move hazily along the line of books, then inch downward to settle on the computer’s unlighted screen.

In a learned, unwilled gesture, he turned it on, then typed in the familiar code: OVER:MYS. When the file flashed onto the screen, he scrolled down, moving like a bird over the mysteries of Overton and Dinker, until the darkness at the end of the line flowed over the entire screen.

On its blank surface, he typed in the only heading that seemed possible for him at the moment:

QUESTIONS ABOUT DORA

For a few sluggish minutes, he tried to imagine exactly what those questions might be, but found that he knew so
little about her, had done so little “research,” that he had not even reached the point where he could formulate a list. She was not
his
in the way that certain things which swam about and included her now seemed to belong to him, facts and suppositions, the accumulated data of the Overton case.

He hit the delete key, instantly obliterated the last word, replaced it with another, then gazed silently at the new formulation:

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE INVESTIGATION

That was one thing that was incontestably his now, the investigation he’d mounted into the fate of Ellie Dinker. It was a part of him as much as it had ever been a part of Ray before him, or Dora before that, as much as it had been a part of Martha Dinker during those first apprehensive seconds when she had peered out at the darkening sky and wondered why her only daughter had not yet come home. It was his now, passionately his, and he would not let it go.