I took her hand and squeezed it gently. “I know” was all I said.
T
he snow had begun to fall again when I left her an hour later. It lay in a crisp white layer over the sidewalk and outlined the bare limbs of each tree and shrub. I remembered how often Billy had taken his sled up the
high hill behind our house, then hurtled down it, colliding with the huge drifts that lay at its bottom, then leaping to his feet, rapturous, covered in snow, laughing, dared me to join him on his next plunge. I heard his voice again,
You miss all the good stuff, Cal.
It was only a short walk from the house to Fisherman’s Bank. Joe Fletcher, the bank president, sat behind his desk, a few papers neatly arranged on his blotter, others impaled on a thin metal stake.
I took the chair in front of his desk, asked my first question.
“Miss March came in every Monday morning, as I recall,” Fletcher answered. “She’d make a cash withdrawal of twenty dollars.” He was a broad-chested man, dressed in a dark double-breasted suit. Overall he had the look of a man long used to holding others in suspension, dashing or fulfilling thousands of small dreams. I could tell that he was treating my request for information about Dora as if it were a loan, trying to determine how I might use whatever he gave me, gauge its profit or its loss.
“Did you ever learn much about her?” I asked him. “Not really, no.”
“Did she open an account of her own?”
“You’re thinking she may have tried to pull one over on Ed Dillard?” The suggestion amused Fletcher. “Old men are easily taken in, of course. And Miss March was quite lovely, as you know, but…”
The phone rang.
“Excuse me,” Fletcher said as he picked up the receiver.
While he spoke, I looked out the window into the narrow street that ran through Port Alma, shops on either side, a piece of the bay snagged between the hard
ware store and the bakery, frozen and opaque, dull as a dead man’s eye. The snow was falling relentlessly now, lacing the power lines in white, gathering windswept mounds along the curb. Those few people who were still on the street trudged through it determinedly, the snow merely something added to their burden.
Fletcher had put down the phone when I looked back at him. He was watching me worriedly, observing my wintry features, I thought, the leafless tree I had become.
“You took it hard, didn’t you, Cal? What happened to William, I mean.” He leaned forward, an older man, offering advice. “It’s a shame, a real tragedy. But a man has to go on, don’t you think?”
It wasn’t a question I could answer.
“As to what I might know about Miss March,” he said when I gave no response, “I saw her only once. Outside the bank, I mean.”
“When was that?”
“About two weeks before Ed died,” Fletcher replied. “He was sitting in that little room off his parlor. Miss March brought him in there when I told her I had some papers for him to sign.”
I remembered the room. I’d seen it when Ruth Potter had taken me to the house. It had a polished wooden floor and there were terra-cotta pots hanging here and there. The pots were empty when I saw them, and according to Ruth they’d remained empty during the time she’d worked at the house. It was Dora, she said, who’d “spruced the room up” with flowers and greenery, then removed it all after Mr. Dillard’s death.
“Ed was fully dressed,” Fletcher continued. “Not in pajamas and that old bathrobe he’d been wearing when I’d dropped by at other times. But pants and a shirt. And
his hair was combed too. Looking at him, you’d have thought he was back to normal.”
“The papers you brought. What were they?”
“Business papers. Evaluations of what his real estate holdings were worth, that sort of thing. Ed had asked me to gather it all together. He wanted to look over it all. Check out the books, you might say.”
In my mind, I saw my brother’s eyes drift up from the ledger book, heard his stricken, unbelieving voice, afraid to admit what he knew she’d done,
Something’s wrong.
“Did Dora look at the papers?”
Everything Joe Fletcher had ever learned of human venality during his forty-three years as a banker in Port Alma flickered behind his eyes. “I usually know when something like that’s going on, Cal. Some kind of fraud, I mean.”
“Why would Ed Dillard have wanted all this financial information about himself?”
“He was intending to make a will.”
“He’d never made one before?”
“He’d never had anyone he wanted to name before. As a beneficiary, that is.”
“But suddenly he did have someone?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
I could see a dark wind blow through Fletcher’s mind. “I don’t know,” he answered, then stared at me silently, so I said the name myself.
“Dora March?”
“I wouldn’t know that, Cal.”
“Who would?”
“Art Brady was Ed’s attorney.”
I realized that something in my eyes, or in the tone
of my voice, had suddenly warned Fletcher not to tell me anything else about Dora or Mr. Dillard. “If you found Miss March, you’d turn her over to the authorities, wouldn’t you, Cal?” he asked.
By then my heart had told so many lies, my mouth had no trouble with another.
“Yes.”
T
he snow was ankle-high as I left the bank. The wind howled through the trees, whipped along the seawall, rattled signs and awnings, fierce and snarling, like a cornered dog.
Art Brady was in his office, standing before a wall of books, all with uniformly black spines. They towered above him, a dark obelisk, the grave, unbending laws of unimpassioned Maine.
“What can I do for you, Cal?” he asked as he turned toward me. He was a short man, wiry as a jockey, with gleaming white hair swept back over his head and parted in the middle. He had a close-cropped beard, also white, which made him look like a figure from a distant century, someone who’d put his ornate signature on a famous document no one read anymore.
“I talked to Joe Fletcher down at the bank. About Ed Dillard.”
Brady shoved a book into its assigned place on the shelf. “What about Ed?”
“Joe said Mr. Dillard intended to make out a will.”
“And?”
“Well, you were Ed’s lawyer.”
Brady sat down at his desk. He didn’t invite me to take the chair opposite it. “This is about Dora March, isn’t it? You’ve decided that Miss March had a bad
character. You suspect her of being involved in William’s death. You think she may have had a reason to murder Ed Dillard too.” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Well, you couldn’t be more wrong, Cal.”
He rose, walked to a file cabinet on the far side of the room, rifled through a line of folders, and returned to his seat carrying a single sheet of paper. “This is the ‘will’ Ed made,” he said as he handed it to me.
I took the paper and read the five words written on it. The letters were thick and awkwardly formed, but I could easily make out what it said:
Draw will. Everything to Dora.
“As you know, as a legal document it won’t hold up,” Brady told me. “For one thing, there’s no last name. For all I know, ‘Dora’ might be one of Ed’s long-lost cousins.”
“Except that a woman named Dora happened to be living with him.”
“But as you, of all people, should understand, knowing something and giving it legal force are two different things.” Brady drew the page from my hand, eyed me coolly. “Look, Cal, if I hadn’t seen Miss March with Ed, then I might have had the same suspicions you do.” He smiled, but not lasciviously. It seemed rather the smile of one who’d come to accept our frailties, the pitfall of desire. “It’s happened to old men before. But it didn’t happen to Ed Dillard. And I can prove it.”
He’d gone to Ed Dillard’s house the day following the old man’s death, Brady told me. It was two days before Christmas. Dillard lay in an open coffin in the front room, his face rouged and powdered. Dora sat stiffly in a chair a few feet away while other people, mostly aging business acquaintances, milled about, talking quietly.
“I waited until everyone had left, then I showed that to Miss March.” Brady gestured toward the paper he’d set on his desk. “She read it and handed it back to me. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anything.’ Simple as that. I told her she could make a claim based on the note. She said she had no interest in Ed’s money. So I said, ‘Well, why don’t you take some small thing from the house. Ed would want you to do that.’” He fell silent, looking down at the page Dillard had written.
“Did she?” I asked. “Take something from his house?”
“Yes,” Brady said. “A little porcelain figure. Ed had scores of them. She took one of a little girl with long, blond hair.”
It rose into my mind exactly as I’d seen it, illuminated by a single candle. “Naked. Sitting on a rock,” I said. “With her legs drawn up.”
“So you’ve seen it?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t much of anything. Just a little china figure. Cheap, not worth much. But that’s the one she chose.”
It had rested on the bureau in her bedroom, and other than her clothes and the leather suitcase she’d packed them in, she’d taken nothing else from the cottage on the day she fled.
“She never asked for anything else?”
“Nothing,” Brady said. “I always got the feeling that Dora didn’t want very much from life.”
In my mind, I saw her on the bank of Fox Creek, bending over to dip her fingers in the swirling water, a strange delight in her eyes, small and fierce and frail, like something lifted on the tiniest wings.
“And I certainly never thought she was the sort of woman who’d take advantage of an old man.” Brady
considered his next words carefully. “I have some evidence of that.”
“Evidence of what?”
“That she cared for Ed. That it wasn’t just some sort of act.” He leaned back in his chair. “One evening, I dropped by Ed’s house just after work. This was a few days before he died. He was sitting in the front parlor, in his wheelchair, dressed up, like he was going to church or a wedding. He even had a tie on. Looked handsome.” He’d chosen the wrong word, and corrected himself. “Well, not handsome. You couldn’t look handsome in Ed’s condition. But he looked calm. Not mad at the world, the way he usually did.”
When he arrived, Brady told me, Dora had been seated on a chair beside Mr. Dillard, a book open in her lap.
“After a while, she went to the kitchen and brought out a cake she’d made. She’d cut Ed’s piece into small squares.” He studied me closely, seemingly determined to prove his point. “And she got down on her knees, Cal. She got down on her knees and fed cake to that pitiful old man.” He waited for the image to sink in, then added, “She was good to Ed. That’s my point, of course. Very good to him. Because she cared about him. Not to get something for herself. And she read to him hour upon hour.”
I remembered her in my study, her face in the firelight, the way her hands caressed the book she’d taken from the shelf, then later, in her cottage, the book I’d found open on the small table by the window, the stark lines she’d underscored.
Brady gave his final word on the subject. “Dora was good to Ed, Cal. From the moment she started working for him until the night he died.”
The night he died.
I remembered that night well, the sound of a Christmas bell somewhere as I knocked at the door and waited, then a hand parting the white lace curtains, after that a woman’s face, beautiful and still, her green eyes peering catlike from the darkened house.
E
d Dillard’s house was set far back from Maple Street. It was the only one that bore no sign of the Christmas holidays, no candles in the windows, no gleaming tree, nor any obvious sign that the house was occupied at all.
Then I saw a woman in a second-floor window, her arms held stiffly at her sides so that she looked as if she’d been placed there, like one of those stone figures that the ancients used to guard the portals of their souls.
She’d come downstairs by the time I reached the door. When she parted the curtains, I saw only her face, white and luminous, a cameo pinned to black velvet. Then she opened the door and a slant of light fell over her, slicing her in two, casting her eyes in deep shadow but bathing everything else in a treacherous yellow light.
“Sheriff Pritchart said you called,” I explained. “He’s got a pretty bad cold, and his deputy’s gone to Portland. So he asked me to come over.” I took off my hat. “Cal Chase. I work in the district attorney’s office.”
She stepped back. “Please come in,” she said.
I had seen Dora before, on that morning as she passed by Ollie’s Barber Shop. But I’d never seen her close up. Now I noticed that she’d cut her hair short and without regard to style. I noticed other things as well. That her skirt fell to her ankles, her sleeves to her wrists, as if her body were a thing she sought utterly to conceal.
“Mr. Dillard is upstairs,” she said.
He lay in his bed, eyes closed, a blanket drawn over him and tucked just beneath his chin. The pillow his head rested upon looked newly fluffed, the case crisp and white. A water glass rested in a silver tray on a table beside his bed, along with a blue china cup, half filled with tea. A white candle burned fitfully in a crystal holder; a single red rose, fresh and impossibly fragrant, had been placed in the small vase that stood beside it.
I glanced at the rocking chair on the other side of the bed. A book lay upturned on its seat, a pair of gold-rimmed glasses beside it.
The House of the Seven Gables.
I’d read it in high school, remembered well how the old man had died, his eyes wide, frantic, glaring, his mouth spitting blood.
By all appearances Ed Dillard had died the way people wanted to, peacefully in his sleep. I doubted that he’d actually gone that way, of course. I’d had enough experience with death by then to know that people died like old cars, shaking and clattering, spewing fluids, gases. I suddenly remembered my mother as I’d found her in the cottage, alive but barely, sprawled across the floor, her nightgown sticky with sweat and urine. My old anger leaped up in me again, like a cat in wait. When I glanced toward Dora, I saw something move across her features, swift as a shadow. I felt that she’d
seen the very image that had darted through my mind, had sensed how quickly grief turned to rage in me.