“About the money. There’s nothing missing. Not a penny.” He grasped his cane and drew himself to his feet in a single graceful sweep. “So you don’t have to go over the books. They’re perfectly in order.”
There’d been no mistake, of course. Billy had simply decided to blind himself permanently to whatever darkness he’d glimpsed in Dora, no doubt realizing what we all must realize in the end, that it is only by choosing not to see that we can love at all.
He walked to the window, parted the curtains. “You haven’t spoken to her, have you?”
“To Dora? About the ledgers? No, I haven’t.”
“I don’t mean the ledgers.”
“What, then?”
He released the curtains but did not face me. “About me,” he said softly.
I felt her lips touch mine, heard again our fervent whispers. “I haven’t talked to Dora at all,” I lied.
He turned to face me. “Good. Because I’ve decided to do it myself. Tell her how I feel.” His voice took on a fierce certainty. “Without her, I wouldn’t have made it through, Cal. I’ve been thinking about all she did for me. While I was hurt, sick, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, it came clear all of a sudden. What love really is.” His eyes shone brightly, a knight again, sword at the ready. “It’s sacrifice, Cal. It’s how much you’re willing to sacrifice what you want for what someone else needs. That’s what I feel for Dora. That’s how I know I have to do it. Offer myself. Everything. Now.”
I started to speak, tell him the awful truth, that it was all an illusion, that Dora did not love him, never could. But he raised his hand to silence me.
“I know you don’t believe any of this, Cal. You never have. But it doesn’t matter. It’s just between Dora and me now.”
I heard my question,
Do you love him?
Then her answer,
No.
Again, I started to speak, but again my brother stopped me.
“I’ve made up my mind, Cal.” His eyes sparkled with anticipation. “But first I want to show her how much better I am. That I can drive, walk, that I’m almost like new.” He tossed the cane aside, wobbling slightly, his arms outstretched.
I reached for him. “Be careful.”
He waved me away. “Watch,” he commanded. Then he turned and walked from one side of the room to the other, an arduous, painful journey carried out by love and will alone. “Pretty good, huh?” he asked breathlessly as he lowered himself into a chair.
“Very good,” I replied, my voice oddly brittle.
He seemed to rise on a wave of victory. “Dora saved me, Cal. I was drowning. I could feel it. I couldn’t breathe. Something in my mind couldn’t breathe. But she saved me.”
He struggled to his feet again. “I need a favor, Cal. A big favor.”
The word came from me emptily. “Anything,” I said.
He wanted you to drive him out to Fox Creek?
Yes.
And you did that?
Yes, I did.
Why didn’t he drive himself? His car had been repaired by then, hadn’t it?
Yes, it had. But he wanted me to go with him. We’d done it many times before. Gone to Fox Creek together.
Why did he want to go to Fox Creek in particular?
Because he’d picked it.
Picked it for what?
Picked it as the place he intended to bring Dora. The place where he intended to ask her to marry him. He was going to bring her there, walk along the creek, the way our father had done with our mother. He wanted to practice that walk. So he wouldn’t stumble.
And he needed you to help him?
Yes.
I
t was just after ten in the morning when we arrived at Fox Creek. Billy had managed to drive us there himself, hunched behind the wheel of my car. He’d placed his cane in the backseat, but he didn’t reach for it when we arrived. Instead, he pulled himself from the car without its aid, then stood, clearly pleased with himself, looking first at our mother’s abandoned cottage, then toward the water.
“That’s the place to do it. Don’t you think so, Cal?”
“I suppose,” I answered dryly.
He looked at me with a brother’s care. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re very quiet.”
“I get that way sometimes.”
“Anything wrong?”
“No.”
He glanced back toward the cottage, briefly lost in thought, then returned his attention to me and said, “Two children. I’d like us to have two children. Dora and me. Two boys. Like us, Cal. Brothers.”
With that, he headed toward the coursing stream of Fox Creek, shuffling slowly, but with ever-increasing confidence, across the cool, leaf-strewn ground.
I followed behind him, watching as he struggled forward, a gusty wind whipping around, but not in the least deterring Billy from the goal he had in mind. He was going for the bridge that arched over the creek, and as I moved silently behind him, my hands deep in my coat pockets, my head bent against the wind, I knew that it was precisely at that spot he intended to pour out his heart to Dora, ask her to marry him as our father had once asked our mother.
He reached the bridge, then mounted it far more easily than I had expected. As he grasped the wooden railing and stared out over the swirling water, he seemed incontestably renewed and invigorated, a figure strong and resolute, thrillingly bold, ennobled by romance.
“She won’t say no to me, Cal,” he declared.
I said nothing, but simply held my place at the end of the bridge, leaning against its weaving, unsteady rail.
“Come up here,” he said, almost playfully. “Stand with me. Like when we were boys.”
I hesitated, but he waved again.
“Stand with me, Cal,” he repeated. “My best man.”
The old timbers creaked as I reluctantly mounted the bridge, then stood, just behind my brother, the two of us poised over the dark current, watching a vortex of sodden leaves swirl madly beneath us.
“I’ll never let her go,” he said. “I’ll never give up. No matter what she says tomorrow.”
A blast of wind struck suddenly, and Billy staggered forward, as if pushed from behind, the wind pressing him against the old wooden railing which, as I noticed, yielded dangerously to his weight, so that it seemed to make a slow, deliberate bow toward the black water, urging him into its turbulent depths.
“Good God,” he said with a quick, nervous laugh as
he straightened himself. He let go of the rail, grabbed my hand, held it tightly. “I thought I was going into the drink.”
A second gust battered us, but by then he’d regained his footing. He stepped away from the railing, lifted his face toward the clouds. “They say a storm’s coming in this afternoon. Could be rain. Could be snow.”
I seized a final opportunity. “Either way, you might have to wait until it’s over to bring Dora out here,” I told him.
Billy heaved himself forward, now moving off the bridge with surprising speed and agility. “No. I’m not going to wait. I’ve waited long enough.” He’d already returned to the car and pulled himself behind the wheel when he added, “No matter what, Cal, I’m going to do it tomorrow.”
We drove back to Port Alma, and now, elated with how well he’d maneuvered himself during the previous hour, Billy refused to allow me to accompany him into the house.
“I don’t think I’m going to be needing all that much help anymore,” he said confidently. He smiled. “Thanks for everything you’ve done,” he added. “I know I’ve been pretty difficult lately.”
I didn’t bother waiting until he got to the door, but simply moved behind the wheel and drove away. In the rearview mirror, I could see him struggling up the walkway, the wind whipping at his coat. At the bottom of the stairs, he paused and drew in a long, restorative breath. Then, with that courage he had always shown toward life, he bore himself upward once again.
So that’s all you know about William’s last day?
Yes.
You didn’t see him again until several hours later?
When I found him.
Already dead.
In my memory, I saw my brother’s eyes peer into mine, heard his anguished question once again:
Cal?
Cal? He was already dead when you found him?
Yes. Already dead.
I remembered that with my final answer, Hap’s face had taken on a deep sympathy for what I’d been through, the deep, enduring nature of my loss.
T
he Shay house was little different from the few others I’d passed on my way to it, a log mountain cabin with a roof of corrugated tin. A stone well stood near the middle of the yard, covered with a sheet of plywood, a wooden bucket dangling from a length of thick gray rope. To the left, there was a small stable and corral, both apparently empty, and a sagging storage shed. A battered saddle had been flung over one of the fence rails, along with a pair of reins and a bridle.
The air was crisp and clean, but I could feel only the heaviness of things, the weariness of my long search, all that had conspired to bring me so far from home.
I walked toward the house, then stopped as the door suddenly opened and a man stepped onto the porch. He wore a flannel shirt and dark blue pants. His boots were dusty but not caked with mud, and I could see where he’d scraped them against the steps before going inside. A long mane of gleaming white hair hung about his shoulders. It gave him an even more formidable and commanding look, like a patriarch in some Old Testament story.
“Can I help you, mister?” he said.
“My name’s Chase.” Dora’s face rose in my mind, cupped in my hands. “I’ve come to see your daughter.”
“My daughter?” He looked at me sternly.
“Catherine,” I said. “Catherine Shay.”
He remained silent, wary, one animal watching another approach his burrow. “Catherine isn’t seeing people,” he said.
“She’ll see me,” I told him.
He stepped to the edge of the porch, tall, powerful, ready to do anything to protect his daughter. “Why? Is Catherine expecting you?”
I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps, even as she’d fled, Dora had known I would follow her, track her down. And so I said, “I don’t know. Maybe she is.”
“Why do you want to see her?” Shay asked.
How could I answer such a question? Instead, I relied on my usual device, put on my professional disguise. “I’m from the district attorney’s office,” I said.
Shay seemed suddenly deflated. He looked at me resignedly, as if he’d been expecting such a visit. I thought of Sheriff Vernon’s remark:
She’s had some run-ins with the law.
“What did she do?” Shay asked. “Did she steal something?”
I didn’t answer, merely looked at him steadily.
“Whatever it is, I’ll pay it,” he assured me. “Every cent. I always have. You can ask anyone. I’ve always made good on whatever she did.” He stepped off the porch, coming toward me slowly, now oddly at my command, asking that I go gently on his daughter. “She’s not responsible, Mr. Chase. It started after what happened to her.” He fell silent, unwilling to go further, to describe once again a young girl crouched in the darkness, watching a beam of yellow light crawl toward her,
the face that had peered at her from behind that light, then bent forward, knife in hand.
“Do you know what happened to her?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s when it started,” Shay said. “People react this way sometimes. That’s what the doctors told me. Something happens to them and they start doing things they’d never done before. Bad things. Stealing and—”
“It’s not about money,” I told him.
“What, then? What is it about?”
Suddenly all the weeks that had passed since the moment of my brother’s death vanished. I felt my foot press down upon the accelerator, heard the rhythmic sweep of the windshield wipers, the mad beating of the rain as I raced toward Dora’s house, so desperate and driven that everything seemed to blur around me, the town in which I had been born, the hills, the sea, all of it dissolving into an insubstantial haze, my only thought, on that last day, to get to Dora before Billy did, claim her for myself.
“What did Catherine do?” Shay asked.
Her cottage swung into view, and there it was, sitting in the flooded driveway, Billy’s car, lashed by wind, leaves scattered across the roof and hood. He’d acted impulsively, as I realized instantly, unable to wait until the next day, or for the weather to clear, for Fox Creek and the perfect place to speak to her. He’d determined to win her then, at that very moment. I imagined him before her, making his case, so pure and noble at that moment in his life that he could hardly be rejected, a knight upon bent knee before his lady, awaiting the slow fall of her white handkerchief.
“What did Catherine do that you’ve come all this way?”
The door had creaked open as I’d stepped inside the
cottage, a dim light washing over everything, so that I’d seen nothing, heard only the rain pounding everywhere, and so had called her name,
Dora.
“She ran away,” I told Shay. I saw her rushing through the undergrowth, toward the road where Henry Mason would ultimately see her, drenched and trembling, offer her a lift, take her to the bus station in Port Alma.
Shay looked at me demandingly. “What’s this about?”
“A murder,” I said.
The gravity of the word seemed to strike him like a stone. “A murder? Catherine couldn’t have been involved in a murder.”
A blade glinted in my mind. My voice turned steely. “Let her tell me that.”
He nodded firmly, with a father’s faith that his daughter was free of guilt, couldn’t possibly have done whatever she was charged with, love like a blindfold wrapped around the eyes. “All right,” he said. “I will.”
I followed him around the house to where I saw her sitting on a gray stone, facing the mountain lake that stretched before her, mirroring the sky.
“Catherine,” Shay called loudly as we moved toward her across a carpet of thick green grass.
She stirred, began to turn, her long, blond hair shimmering in the sunlight.
“She still has awful nightmares,” Shay told me as we closed in upon her. “Not about the man though. Always about that girl. The one who held her down.”