Places in the Dark (25 page)

Once I’d finished the work, I shouted a quick “Good night,” listened for his reply, then, when none came, headed out the door. I’d just reached the stairs when I saw Henry Mason pull up to the curb.

“I think Billy’s sleeping, Henry,” I said as I came up to him.

“Sleeping? He just called me.”

“Called you?”

Henry’s pale face seemed even more ghostly in the dark air. “He says he’s coming back to work.”

“When?”

“Soon, I guess. He wants to see the books.”

“The books? He doesn’t know anything about the books.”

“I know,” Henry said. “But he wants to see them.”

I glanced into the backseat of Henry’s car, saw the ledgers stacked in a single cardboard box, a weight far too heavy for a man as frail as Henry Mason to bear up the stairs.

“I’ll take them to him,” I said.

Henry did not resist the offer. “Whatever you say, Cal.” He opened the car door, then stepped aside while I lifted the box to my shoulder.

“Sorry for the trouble, Henry.”

Henry looked at me worriedly. “Is William … is he … all right?”

“He’s fine,” I assured him, then turned and headed up the stairs.

Billy was sitting in bed when I came into the room.

“Henry brought these,” I told him. “Where do you want them?”

“Just put them on the bed.”

I placed the heavy box at the foot of the bed. “Well, good night again,” I said.

“Good night, Cal,” my brother said, then, just as I turned away, he grinned his old grin, the one I’d seen so often in his youth, the one he’d never failed to give me when I shared a piece of candy or offered him a turn at some game I was playing with my older friends, a grin I’d not seen since his accident, and which seemed, in every way, to summon back a bright and innocent world, the brotherhood we’d once known, and which in my wild innocence I had thought would last forever.

I
went directly home, made dinner, then went to my study and tried to read. But as the hours passed, the room’s solitary atmosphere began to oppress me. I heard my father’s words again,
There’s nothing like loneliness to bring you to your knees
, and wondered if I had reached that point where solitude itself became an accusation.

By eight the sound of my own breath had driven me from the house, sent me pacing aimlessly, with no particular destination in mind, so that it seemed almost providential when I suddenly noticed Dora coming toward me, her long black skirt flowing like a dark wave over the walkway.

“I was on my way to William,” she said when she stopped before me.

“I saw him earlier this evening,” I told her.

“How was he?”

“Fine. At the moment he’s going over the books.”

“What books?”

“The accounting books. For the
Sentinel.
He asked Henry to bring them over.”

“Why did he want to see the books?”

“He’s preparing to go back to work, I suppose.”

I expected her to nod briskly, continue on her way. But she remained in place just long enough for me to recall my last meeting with my brother, the things he’d said about Dora.

“Dora? Do you think we could have a talk?” I asked.

Before she could refuse, I added, “Billy’s quite focused on the
Sentinel’s
financial records at the moment. It’s probably better to leave him alone until he gets tired of them.”

I touched her arm, moved her down the walkway, heading now in the opposite direction from my brother’s house.

“Billy and I had a talk this afternoon,” I began.

She didn’t look at me, but I sensed a subtle tension come over her.

“About his feelings for you,” I added quietly, laying little emphasis, letting my words fall upon Dora like flakes of snow, with no indication of the dark suspension in which I hung.

We walked on a little way, then I stopped and faced her. “You know what those feelings are, don’t you?”

“I do, yes,” Dora said. “But, Cal, I’ve never given William any reason to think that I—” She halted. Her eyes glowed in the darkness. “This is hard.”

I felt a circle tightening around us, drawing us together.

“What should I do, Cal?” she asked. “He’s getting better. I wouldn’t want to do anything that might…”

“You don’t love him, do you?”

“No.”

A fire blazed in me. “And never can?”

“Never.”

With a confidence I had never felt in my life, a confidence like my Mother’s, swift and sure, I took Dora’s arm and led her toward the bay. We said nothing until we reached the water’s edge.

“I don’t want to hurt him, Cal,” Dora said.

“I know you don’t.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Maybe there’s nothing you can do.”

“I didn’t mean for William to—”

“You can’t help the fact that you don’t love him, Dora. You can’t choose who you love. Neither can Billy.
He can’t help it if he fell in love with you.” I faced her squarely, threw the die, and held my breath. “Neither can I.”

She looked at me as no woman ever had. “Cal.”

“It’s true.”

Her eyes glistened, and I knew.

“Dora,” I whispered.

A wave rushed me forward. I drew her into my arms.

It was a kiss such as I had never known before, and while it lasted I felt our bodies flow seamlessly one into the other, a stillness all around us, perfect and unbroken, with nothing but the sway of the sea grass and the distant crash of a rushing wave to suggest that anything at all existed beyond or outside the circle of our arms. And I thought, this is what it must surely have been like, the first kiss that ever was, with nothing fixed in all the spinning world but love, all else a maelstrom and a chaos, our only hope, this utter and complete surrender.

When she spoke, her voice was barely audible above the wind in the reeds, but in its very quietness bore a chilling message.

“William.”

“I know.”

“We can’t do this, Cal.”

I held her tightly. “We can do anything.”

“He’s your brother.”

“I don’t care.”

“William,” she repeated, this time emphatically. “William.”

I stopped her with a kiss. We sank down onto the sand, my body pressed against hers, feeling her need as fiercely as my own, a sense of devouring and being devoured at the same time.

Finally, she pushed me away. “No,” she breathed. “I can’t.” She started to rise, but I grabbed her hand. “We have to find a way.”

She pulled her hand from my grasp and got to her feet. I expected her to rush off into the night, like all those fevered heroines so beloved by my mother. But she stood motionless, a curious wonder in her eyes that love had come to her by such an unexpected route. “I never thought that anything like this could…”

I started to rise.

She lifted her hand to stop me. “Tomorrow,” she said, then turned and strode away.

A high rapture swept over me.

And I thought,
She’s mine.

I
was still floating in the aftermath of that wild happiness when I arrived at Billy’s house the next morning.

He was sitting up in bed when I entered his room, still wearing the clothes he’d worn the night before. One of the ledger books lay open in his lap, others were scattered here and there about the room, pages marked or dog-eared. He looked like a student in the midst of final examinations, the same drawn and weary look in his eyes.

“Something’s going on, Cal,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Something strange at the
Sentinel.
With the books. Money is missing.”

“You can’t be serious.”

He closed the ledger. “It’s true. For the last six months. More and more each month. From petty cash. Taken.”

I stared at him, amazed that even in his delusion he
could think that anyone at the
Sentinel
would steal from him. “Billy, listen to me,” I said slowly, deliberately. “You can’t really believe that someone at the
Sentinel
would—”

He waved his hand over the pile of ledgers. “Check them yourself,” he said.

I stepped toward the bed. “No, I’ll let Dora check them.”

Something ignited behind his eyes. “Dora?”

“Isn’t that who you’d want to check them?”

“Why Dora?”

“Well, she writes the checks, doesn’t she?”

“How did you know that? I didn’t tell you that.”

I stared at him silently.

“Did Dora tell you?” he demanded.

“Why, was it a secret?”

“Did Dora tell you?” he repeated evenly.

“No, she didn’t.”

“Who did?”

“Henry.”

“What did he say?”

I didn’t want to give my brother the slightest hint as to Henry’s own doubts about Dora. “Nothing. Just that she was writing checks. That you’d given her the—”

He seemed genuinely pained by what he next said. “You’re lying, Cal.”

“Why would I lie?”

He looked at me desperately. “I have to trust you, Cal.”

“You can, Billy.”

“I have to trust—” He stopped, looked at me brokenly, as if, for all his wounds, this latest was the deepest yet. “What if she’s a thief?”

I faked a laugh but heard my own desperate fear within it. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

He lifted his arms, placed the palms of his hands against the sides of his head, pressed them against his skull. “I have to trust … someone.”

I rushed over to him, drew his arms down to his sides.

“It couldn’t be Dora,” I said emphatically. “For God’s sake, Billy, look at the way she lives. What would she do with money?”

He seemed captured in a cloud of dark confusion. “Use it to go away. Maybe that’s it. To go away with …” His eyes widened. “With someone else.”

“Someone else?”

“Another man.”

I felt my arms around her body. “What makes you think there’s another man?”

He stared at me intently. “There couldn’t be another man, could there, Cal? There couldn’t be someone else.”

I knew that he was waiting for me to assure him that in all the world there was no one else for Dora but himself. But I felt her lips on mine, her body in my arms, I couldn’t do it.

“Billy, you…”

It was then I saw the question rise like a black cloud in his mind:
Is it you?

My eyes cut away from him, then back. “I’m sure there’s some mistake, Billy,” I said. “I’ll go over the books myself. I’ll prove it to you. Nothing’s missing. Nothing at all.”

He remained mute as I gathered up the books, but his eyes never left me, nor ever stopped repeating their terrible question:
Is it you?

“Everything’s fine, believe me,” I told him as I heaved the box into my arms.

His gaze followed me across the room, then down the stairs, as it seemed to me, and out into the yard, forever at my back, silent, staring, and which, weeks later, as I made my way toward Tom Shay’s mountain home, I could feel behind me still.

T
he road to Tom Shay’s cabin wound through the mountains along a sheer, rocky ledge. A wall of granite rose on my right, while at the left, I could see a rapidly flowing stream that swirled white and foamy around gray stones. From time to time, a curl of smoke snaked up from a mountain cabin, but for the nearly sixty miles I drove among the mountains that day, following Hedda Locke’s vague directions, I never saw a single human being, nor so much as a cat or dog.

And so it seemed to me that Shay had done what any father would, given the circumstances. He’d summoned his daughter into the mountains, away from the desert with its nightmarish associations, the bite of the metal blade as it raked her back. So deep into the mountains that as the road grew more narrow, it seemed to form a prison around me.

As I drove, I felt that I was moving toward the end of it, found myself returning to my brother’s final days, letting the pieces fall into place, everything that had occurred from the time I’d left his house, bound for the
Sentinel
, the box of ledgers cradled in my arms, until three days later, when I’d entered Dora’s cottage, found him waiting for me there.

Henry Mason turned toward me as I came through the door of the newspaper office, his eyes shining anxiously.

“Well, was everything to William’s satisfaction?” he asked.

I lowered the box of ledgers to his desk. “Not exactly.”

He looked at me, alarmed.

“Just a few small things,” I said.

I couldn’t bring myself to repeat my brother’s suspicions, implicate Dora, confirm Henry’s own grave doubts. His words returned to me, spoken as we’d sat in Ollie’s Barber Shop,
strange, unstable
, Dora already the subject of a deep unease.

And so I hid behind a lie. “He just asked me to go over the books myself at some point. To check a few things out. Nothing important.”

I’d hoped to give no further explanation, but Henry would not let me off so easily.

“So there were problems,” he said matter-of-factly.

“A few small things,” I repeated, still unwilling to go into detail, convinced that it was an illusion, something that existed only in my brother’s tormented mind, that Dora, no matter whatever else she might be, whatever else her past might reveal, could not be a thief.