Something in her face softened. “Yes, he is.”
“Stray dogs. Stray cats. He was the one they were always following home,” I added.
She looked at me quite frankly. “And what followed
you
home?”
I felt my answer like a subtle weight added to my soul. “Nothing followed me.”
She faced the fire again, making no further comment, but in some sense I felt that she was still watching me. Judging me. My first and only impulse was to get away.
“Well, it doesn’t look like there’s much more I can do around here. So I’ll just say good night, Miss March.”
I left her and made the rounds, told Hap and Billy I was leaving, offered my sympathies to Carl Hendricks, then walked to my car and got in. As I pulled away, I glanced back at the scene, struck by the glowing mound of embers and boiling gray smoke, the shadowy figures huddled among stripped and icy trees, silhouettes against the snow. If hell were a wintry landscape, I thought, it would look like Maine. Then I caught sight of Dora again, standing alone, my brother now striding toward her, eager and responsive, as if he alone had heard her silent call.
D
uring the days following the Hendricks fire, as I passed the
Sentinel
on my way to and from work, I sometimes took note of Dora as she sat at the little metal desk my brother had assigned to her, but I had no occasion to speak with her again. She was usually bent over her desk, hard at work by all appearances, intent upon whatever paper lay before her. She never looked up, never noticed me, certainly never saw my eyes latch on to her as I passed, linger briefly, drawn to her perhaps, but coolly, like an animal drinking at an icy stream.
A week after the fire Hap called me into his office.
“Your brother thinks there’s something fishy about that blaze at the Hendricks place. Has he mentioned anything to you about it?”
“No.”
“I happened to be in the probate office yesterday afternoon, and William came up and started talking about it. I got the feeling he had a funny feeling about it.”
“Funny feeling?”
“Like he thought maybe something was amiss, you know?”
“Did he say that?”
“Not in so many words, but I think you should go out there anyway, poke around a little, see if anything looks fishy.”
“What am I looking for, Hap? The place burned to the ground.”
“Just show the flag, that’s all I’m saying, Cal. Cover us. Anything comes up, we can say we’ve been looking into it.”
It was the sort of political task I disliked but could not avoid, and as I drove out to the Hendricks house an hour later, I found myself mildly annoyed that it was Billy’s chance remark that made my trip necessary. I could not imagine where his notion that there was something “fishy” about the fire had come from. After all, I’d gotten there quite some time before he’d arrived, helped the other volunteers douse the shed behind the house. At no point during that time had I seen anything to make me doubt that the fire had begun and spread exactly as Carl Hendricks had described it.
I was still wondering where my brother’s sinister idea had come from when I pulled my car into the slushy driveway of what had only recently been Carl Hendricks’s home.
Then I knew.
She was standing with her back to the road, facing the charred rubble of the house. She turned when she heard the car, and I saw that her shoes were soiled and wet, as was the bottom of her coat. She held what appeared to be a charred piece of paper.
“Good morning,” I called as I got out of the car.
She nodded as I approached, drew off her glasses
with one hand, sank the paper into the pocket of her coat with the other.
“I didn’t expect to find you out here.”
I noticed that her fingers were dotted with soot, took a handkerchief from my pocket and handed it to her.
She wiped her hands, then gave the handkerchief back to me. “Thank you.”
The blackened skeleton of the small house was laced with melting snow. An acrid smell tainted the air.
“I hear my brother has some suspicions. He mentioned them to my boss. Hap Ferguson. The district attorney. I wonder if Billy can seriously believe that in times like these a man would burn down his own house.” I took out a cheroot and lit it, dropped the match into the dirty snow at my feet. “An uninsured house, by the way.”
Her gaze touched on the soggy blanket that lay half buried in the snow a few yards away. It was the one that had dropped from Hendricks’s shoulders the night of the fire. She said nothing.
“How’d you happen to get out here?” I asked her.
“William dropped me off. I told him I’d walk back.”
“Well, I can take you back into town if you want. This ‘investigation’ won’t take long.”
With that I stepped away and headed over to the sodden rubble of Carl Hendricks’s house. While Dora waited, I walked among the charred timbers, kicking at them or prying among them with a stick. I even bent down from time to time, plucked something from the ruin, and sniffed it for gasoline or heating oil.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Something out of place or stupidly left behind, a kerosene can in the scorched remains of what had once been a bedroom. I’d
long ago discovered that a criminal mind was usually a dull one, woolly and unskilled, capable of quite comic idiocies. As a type, our local criminals were guileless, crippled by poor memory and limited concentration. They tripped themselves up more often than the authorities tripped them. If Carl Hendricks had set his house on fire, I had no doubt but that he’d probably left some sign of it.
But I found no indication of arson, nor any attempt to conceal it. The rubble was exactly that, heaps of burnt wood, naked mattress springs amid soggy piles of scorched bedding, a kitchen stove, blackened but otherwise intact, save for the collapsed pipe that lay in broken pieces around it.
I tossed my cigar into the snow and trudged back toward Dora. “Okay, we can head back to town now,” I said when I reached her.
In the car, Dora sat quite still. But in that stillness I thought I could detect some fierce movement in her mind, a strange, inner darting, like a bird flitting right and left, forever alert and on guard.
About halfway back to the main road, I steered clear of a fallen branch, then made a hard right around the road’s final curve. Perhaps a hundred yards ahead, two figures lurched toward us. It wasn’t until I drew near that I recognized Carl Hendricks and his daughter.
He’d halted abruptly when he caught sight of the car and placed a restraining hand on the little girl’s shoulder. She stopped in her tracks, then waited as her father continued forward, a tattered wool scarf wrapped loosely around his mouth and nose, a knit cap pulled over his ears, his eyes leveled on us as if he were taking aim.
“‘Morning, Carl,” I said as I pulled up beside him.
He jerked the scarf below his chin and tucked it there. His lips were blue and trembling, his cheeks shadowed with stubble. “‘Morning.”
“Where you headed?”
“To the shed.” His head slumped forward, massive as a stone. “Me and my girl’s living there. It’s got a wood stove in it.”
“I could take you to it.”
Hendricks looked past me to where Dora sat, staring straight ahead. “No,” he said as he looked at me again. “I guess I’ll be on my way.” He nodded once, then stepped back from the car and began to trudge down the road again, motioning Molly to follow along.
I pressed the accelerator. Molly had begun walking again, but she stopped as we drew near. Her eyes were fixed on Dora imploringly, reaching for her like two small hands.
Within an instant, I’d swept by, but in the rearview mirror I could see Carl Hendricks as he trudged down the road, ponderous, hunched. Molly trailed behind him, head down, leaving small gray footprints in the snow.
When I turned back to Dora, I saw, to my surprise, that she was deeply shaken, like a child who’d seen something terrible but knew no way to describe it.
“Could you stop the car,” she said. “Let me out please.”
We’d turned another bend in the road. Neither Hendricks nor Molly was visible behind us. I pulled over, then watched silently as Dora left the car and walked a few paces up the road. She’d dropped her hands deep into her pockets, and I could see her fingers twitching inside them, quick and frantic, like someone grasping for a line.
After a time, those same desperate motions diminished, then finally stopped. She took a long breath, turned, and walked back to the car, stamping snow from her shoes before she got in.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Carsick?” I asked, though I suspected that it was nothing of the kind.
Dora nodded briskly but said nothing.
I dropped her off at the
Sentinel
a few minutes later, then returned to my office. Hap Ferguson was standing in the corridor, munching a sugar cookie from the bag of them his wife made each week.
“Find anything over at Carl’s place?”
“Nothing,” I told him.
“Wonder why’d William got the idea that …”
“I think maybe someone else at the paper had some suspicions.”
“Who?”
I gave the only answer possible. “The woman who came with him to the fire.”
There was nothing more to say. It seemed to me that the matter had ended, that there’d be no more talk either of the fire or of my brother’s unfounded suspicions. And yet, I noticed that as I turned to leave, Hap drew a pen and notepad from his pocket and wrote down Dora’s name.
I
met Billy for lunch at the Bluebird Cafe that same afternoon, but I told him nothing about Dora, the way Hendricks had stared at her, nor the agitation that had followed. I had no wish to talk about her, nor any woman like her, the type it was impossible to get a fix on. I preferred my woman on the waterfront, the one I
called Jane or Celia or any name that occurred to me at the moment, who smoked my cheroots and drank my whiskey and led me to her bed with a clear understanding of what I was to give and get. She was broad in the hips and thick in the ankles, and she took me into the safe harbor of her arms without expecting me to lose my senses over her, or ever promise more than a single night’s attention.
And so it was my brother who brought Dora up that afternoon. In fact, he seemed more or less unable to think of anything else.
“Dora said you met Carl Hendricks on the way back from his house this morning.”
I nodded, forked a bite of meat loaf into my mouth. “We ran into him.”
“What do you think, Cal? Could he have done it?”
“I haven’t seen any evidence of any crime at all, Billy,” I said sternly. “In my profession, I need that. As a matter of fact, I think you’re supposed to require a little of it in yours too.”
He looked at me as if I’d slapped his face. “What’s the matter, Cal?”
I decided to be blunt. “Well, for one thing, because of you, of what you said to Hap, I got sent on a wild-goose chase this morning. Had to go out to Hendricks’s place, poke around like I had the foggiest notion of what I was looking for. And for all that, I didn’t find a damn thing to suggest that Carl Hendricks torched his house.” I shoved my plate aside. “Let me ask you something, Billy. Was it Dora March who put the idea in your head that there was something odd about the Hendricks fire?”
He was clearly stricken by my question. Instead of answering it, however, he said, “Dora senses things, Cal.”
“Senses things?”
“Yes,” Billy said. “I think she … experienced something that made her—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “Just wait a second. First, what do you actually know about her? Details, I mean. Like, where she was living before she came to Port Alma?”
“New York City,” Billy replied. “At a residence hall there. For women. As a matter of fact, I even know the address, Eighty-fifth and Broadway.”
“What was she doing in New York?”
“Like I said, living there.”
He added nothing else, and so I suspected that he’d already pretty much exhausted his information.
But rather than release him, I closed in. “Does she talk about her past?”
“Not much.”
“So as far as you know, she just popped up here in Port Alma?”
“Yes.”
“Why here, I wonder. I mean, it’s a long way from New York. And very different.”
“Cal, what are you getting at?”
“I’m trying to make a point.”
“What point?”
“Just that you don’t know much about her.”
“What would I need to know?”
“A lot before you start giving her … powers.”
Billy grinned and leaned back in his seat. “That’s the difference between you and me, Cal.”
I laughed. “You don’t
want
to know about her. That’s the real difference between you and me, Billy. You don’t want to know about her. You might find out she’s pretty ordinary. Probably just some shopgirl from Macy’s who climbed onto a northbound bus one afternoon, ended up here because her money ran out.”
My brother’s expression turned grave. “Something happened to her, Cal.”
I wasn’t buying it. “She was born. She lived. More than likely, that’s all that ever ‘happened’ to her.”
“No.” Billy said it firmly. “Something happened to Dora.”
“Something tragic, no doubt.”
“Yes.”
I’d had enough. “Why do you want to believe that something ‘tragic’ happened to Dora? Is it because it would make her different from other women? Why can’t you just face the fact that nobody’s really that different from anybody else? We’re just people. Plain. Ordinary. Nothing great about us. Nothing splendid. We come out of the dirt and we go back to it.”
“I know you believe that,” Billy said. “Dad does too. But I don’t.” For the first time in his life, my brother regarded me with pity. “I don’t want to live like you, Cal. Spend my life like you.” He searched for the right words, then said them: “Like someone waiting for a change in the weather.”
He’d never drawn the line more clearly, never delineated more precisely what distinguished us as brothers and as men. For me, the prospects of life, and certainly of love, would remain innately limited. Human life was lost in folly. No human was truly worthy of devotion, and so I would not offer it. What one could not worship, it seemed fitting to despise. These were my true beliefs, and I didn’t in the least feel compelled to deny them. And so I said, “You were born to be disillusioned, Billy. Born to have some woman kick your heart out. Because you want something impossible.”