Places in the Dark Read online

  “No.”

  I smiled. “And, of course, the drawings are for sale.”

  She laughed. “Even that one?” She pointed to a small, rather crude drawing of a young girl with long, dark hair, dressed in white, her figure ghostly, vaporous, almost translucent, something the slightest breeze would have torn apart. “It’s different from your other drawings.”

  “It should be,” I said. “I didn’t draw it.”

  “Who did?”

  “Billy.”

  “Who is she?” Dora asked.

  “She’s no one,” I said. “She’s imagined.”

  Dora glanced at me quizzically.

  “Billy thought of her as his … how shall I put it? His damsel in distress, I suppose.”

  She laughed again, a quick, self-conscious laugh, which, for all its slender brevity, seemed to lift her like a wind. “You don’t like it, do you?”

  “No. I hang it only because Billy gave it to me.”

  “Why don’t you like it, Cal?”

  “Because the woman is unreal. An illusion.”

  Dora smiled quietly. “Pascal would understand.”

  “Yes, he would.”

  She said nothing else, but only stepped away and headed for the door.

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked quickly. “Tea. Coffee.” I lifted my half-empty glass. “Something stronger?”

  “No. I’d better be getting home.”

  “Well, good night, then,” I said when we were on the porch again.

  “Good night.”

  I stood and watched as she headed back down the walkway to the street. She seemed curiously self-possessed as she moved through the darkness, and I recalled how, only a few short months before, I’d stood outside my brother’s house, pronounced her far too frail for Maine. Now she seemed carved of native stone. So much so that I could not imagine how my brother might ever penetrate, much less win her.

  And yet, even at that moment, he’d already hatched a plan.

  I learned about it two weeks later as Henry Mason, Billy’s employee at the Sentinel, and I sat in Ollie’s Barber Shop. It was late in the afternoon, only an hour before closing, a blue evening shade already falling beyond the twirling barber pole.

  “I guess you heard about the new arrangement,” Henry said, his breathing somewhat labored, as it always was, his voice coming through a shaky wheeze.

  “What arrangement?”

  “At the paper.”

  Henry was in his late sixties, a frail, sickly man, surrounded by a consumptive air, so that he seemed forever on the brink of physical collapse. His wife had left him years before, and since then he’d been the sole support and caretaker of a retarded daughter, Lois, who, now in her forties, often wandered from her home, sending Henry in all directions looking for her. “What will she do when I’m gone?” I’d often heard him ask my brother plaintively. “Who’ll take care of Lois then?”

  “The arrangement with Dora March,” Henry said, then coughed into his fist.

  “What about her?”

  “Well, you know how William is.”

  “What do you mean, Henry?”

  “The way he’s never taken much interest in running the paper.” He cleared his throat, shifting in the chair, his bony fingers gripped to its padded armrest. “I mean, the day-to-day affairs.”

  “What does that have to do with Dora?” I asked just as Lloyd Drummond, Ollie’s second-string barber, began applying a thick white lather to my face.

  “She can write checks now,” Henry replied. “Write checks from the company book. William never let anyone do that before.”

  Ollie stepped over, snapped a wide white cloth, then draped it over Henry’s chest and lap.

  “He says he wants to bring her more into the business,” Henry said anxiously. “I think he wants to show her how much he trusts her.”

  “Trusts her,” I repeated, almost to myself.

  Lloyd flipped open the straight razor. Its long, flat blade winked in the light.

  “She always worked the copy desk before,” Henry added. “But now—” He stopped suddenly. “Well, William can do whatever he wants at the paper.”

  “Yes, he can.”

  Ollie took a pair of clippers and a comb from the shelf below the mirror, eased Henry’s head forward, and began to clip at the nape of his neck.

  “I mean, if he wants to turn things over to a stranger, then, well…”

  “She’s not exactly a stranger, Henry.”

  “No,” Henry said quietly, averting his eyes somewhat. “Not exactly.”

  “What’s bothering you?” I asked. “About this new arrangement.”

  The question released a dam in him. “I can’t help it, Cal. You know how I feel about William. He’s like a son to me almost. But he’s the type of person that someone has to look out for. You know that.”

  He waited for some type of confirmation. When I offered none, he continued. “Anyway. We all do the best we can. All of us at the paper. We keep an eye on him. For his own good. Then … all of a sudden … this woman …” He heaved a weary sigh. “But it’s none of my business what he does. What he lets Dora do, I mean. But you know the way she is, Cal. It worries me. Him giving her access, you know, to the money.”

  “What do you mean, the way she is?”

  He turned my question over in his mind. “The way she reacts to things. It’s strange. Unstable.”

  “What are you getting at, Henry?” I felt my patience slipping.

  Henry glanced about. “Take the other day. We were cleaning out the back issues. Taking them downstairs.”

  Ollie passed between us. After he’d stepped away, Henry said, “So we were talking about some of the old papers. The old stories. Wally and me. What was the biggest story the paper ever covered. That sort of thing. And the Phelps mansion came up.”

  “You mean, what happened there.”

  “That’s right.” Henry nodded, wheezing slightly. “Twenty years ago. The murders.”

  The murders.

  I’d heard of them all my life, how Simon Phelps and his wife had been slaughtered, their daughter Abigail taken into the groundskeeper’s shed, butchered there, then the great house set afire. I could even recall the name of the man who’d done it. It was a name whispered as a warning to the children of Port Alma for over twenty years, finally turned into a scary little rhyme:

  Be good or he’ll get you.

  Cut your throat, do you in.

  Then vanish in the shadows Evildoer.

  Auckland Finn.

  “Wally really went into the details,” Henry went on.

  “Especially about little Abigail. What was done to her. The way Finn had taken her out to the shed, held her down, cut her up.” His features tensed. “That’s when we noticed Dora. She’d been sitting there all along. At her desk, like always. None of us had noticed her She was pale as a sheet, Cal. Pale as a sheet. We just looked at each other, Wally and me. We didn’t know what to do. It was strange, the way she looked. So … unstable. She looked like she couldn’t move, like she was being held down. Living through it herself. Like she wasn’t even in the same room with the rest of us. But in that shed, you know.” His eyes were fixed in grim amazement. “With Abigail.”

  “Did my brother see this?”

  “No. He was in his office.”

  “Did Dora say anything?”

  “No,” Henry answered. “She just came back to herself after a little while. Then she got up, walked away. Got about as far as she could get from anybody else.” He offered a pointed gaze. “But you could see the terror was still in her.”

  All that evening, I tried to get the vision out of my mind, Dora in the grip of terror. I recalled the conversation we’d had as we’d walked down the hill from Molly Hendricks’s grave.

  What did you sense in Molly Hendricks? That she was going to be hurt?

  That she’d already been hurt.

  And that looked like … what?

  Helplessn
ess. Like someone was holding her down.

  Why didn’t I see it?

  In my mind, I repeated the answer that had flashed into her eyes: Because it’s never happened to you.

  By midnight, I could no longer stop myself. I closed the book I’d been trying unsuccessfully to read for the last four hours and made the short walk from my house to the paper’s offices.

  Felix Miller was just finishing up his nightly cleaning duties when I arrived.

  “It’s past midnight, Mr. Chase,” Felix protested as he opened the door.

  “I know. But I need to look up something, Felix. In the back issues. For a case I’m working on.”

  “They moved them back issues down the basement.” Felix eased backward, tugging the door along with him. “I’ll show you where they are.”

  He led me to the basement stairs, unlocked the door, and turned on the light.

  “You don’t have to hang around after your work’s done,” I assured him as I headed down the stairs. “I can let myself out.”

  It didn’t take long for me to find the issues I wanted, begin to review the same grim story of a family’s slaughter. It had happened on November 12, 1915, and the Sentinel’s front-page coverage had begun the following day, my father having selected a special typeface, not only bold and black, but cut in a style similar to that seen on old tombstones in the town cemetery: Phelps Mansion Scene of Fire and Carnage.

  He’d made other embellishments as well. A large photograph of the Phelps mansion, stark, massive, poised grandly atop MacAndrews Island. Photographs of the individual victims were positioned around it, rather like a wreath, the faces staring out from oval frames, like cameos, and hung with a not very artful rendering of black crepe. Beneath the photographs, my father had composed a single grim line: Three Dead in Brutal Slayings.

  The photograph of Simon Marcus Phelps, thirty-five, showed a thin, nearly skeletal man, the bony structure of his skull so prominent, his face seemed draped over it like a cloth. His dark hair was slicked down and parted severely in the middle. The eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses were so small and round, they gave him a fragile and unhealthy look.

  Dressed in her finery, with large bright eyes, Madeline Inez Phelps seemed as robust as her husband appeared sickly. She held her head erect, the chin slightly lifted, in the style of English matrons posed in the reading rooms of their country houses, but the corners of her mouth tilted upward in a youthful, perhaps slightly coquettish smile. Her hair was done up in a typically Edwardian mass of carefully arranged dips and swirls, but even so, Madeline Phelps appeared extraordinarily vibrant, filled with the life she was about to lose.

  But it was the picture of Abigail Dorothy Phelps that most captured my attention. She was eight years old, dressed formally in a white blouse, her throat encircled by a delicate swirl of lace, her hair so light that even in the black and white photograph it seemed to shimmer. She wasn’t smiling, and so looked somewhat severe, a pose the children of the wealthy were often taught to assume in those days. And yet, despite the formal attire and mirthless face, Abigail Phelps gave off a sense of that innocent mischief for which she was, according to my father’s accompanying article, “well known and much treasured by the residents of MacAndrews Island, as well as the loving parents who were also murdered.”

  The savagery of the murders had been awesome, and although I’d known of the deaths from the time I was a boy, I’d never actually looked into the details of what had happened on MacAndrews Island on November 12, 1915.

  On that day Simon Phelps returned to Port Alma after a weeklong business trip to New York City. He’d taken the overnight train back to Portland. Witnesses had placed him in the smoking car with several other men until almost midnight, when he’d finally retired to his Pullman car. He’d arrived in Portland at just after six A.M., then driven south through a steadily building rain and nearly gale-force winds, so that it was already midafternoon when he finally reached Port Alma. Two witnesses saw him get out of the car and fight his way to the town pier, wind and rain tearing at his coat and hair. At the pier, he found his boat, the Little Abigail, empty, then strode to the battened-down office of the harbormaster, Samuel Clark, and inquired into the whereabouts of the young groundskeeper he’d recently employed. Phelps’s exact words were quoted in my father’s article: “Have you seen a young man at my boat? He has long, red hair. His name is Auckland Finn.”

  Auckland Finn, as it turned out, had spent most of the afternoon waiting at the Seaman’s Tavern. He’d sat in a back corner, witnesses said, downing one dark ale after another while the storm mounted and raged outside. By all accounts, Finn had been quite drunk by the time Simon Phelps pushed through the tavern door in search of him. According to several witnesses, Phelps fiercely berated Finn for his drunkenness. Finn responded no less sharply, though with considerably more profanity, an exchange my father described simply as “having words.” The altercation lasted for no more than a few minutes, after which Simon Phelps slammed back to his boat. Ignoring the harbormaster’s warning, he’d sallied forth into the storm, leaving Finn alone and fuming in the Seaman’s Tavern.

  Nearly an hour later, Simon Phelps had arrived at his great house on MacAndrews Island. He’d looked “quite angry and upset” according to Louise Payne, the family cook, and the only servant left in the house, the others having been sent home to their families because of the approaching storm.

  At dinner that evening, Simon Phelps spoke of his business trip, and of the torturous journey from Portland to Port Alma, according to Louise. Then, rather suddenly, he turned to his wife and said, “By the way, we’ll be looking for another groundskeeper. I fired Auckland this afternoon.”

  Louise left the mansion at approximately eight o’clock that evening. By then the storm was raging even more violently than before, rattling windows and banging doors, the wind so loud and howling, it sounded like “a bunch of squealing pigs.”

  And she said more. My father quoted her at length:

  After dinner, Mrs. Phelps asked me if I wanted to stay there at the house. But I said no, I had a family of my own waiting for me at home. And so I wrapped myself up good and proper and headed toward the road. It was about eight. Dark as midnight already, that’s for sure.

  Dark, to be sure, but not dark enough to have kept Louise from seeing a figure stagger up the very steps that led from the beach to the crest of the island.

  It was Finn. Our groundskeeper. He came stumbling up them stairs and saw me at the gate. For a second, he just stared me cold in the eye, bold as brass. Then he grumbled something and pushed by me. I smelled liquor on his breath.

  At that point Louise had turned her own steps toward home. She’d never seen Auckland Finn again.

  The exact time of the killings had never been determined, only that they had taken place at some point between eight in the evening, when Louise Payne met Auckland Finn at the cliffside gate, and just after five the following morning, when a local fisherman spotted the mansion in flames.

  Later that same afternoon, the charred remains of Simon and Madeline Phelps were pulled from the smoldering ruin. Abigail, however, remained missing. Speculation arose that Finn had abducted the child and taken her with him. That ended when, just before nightfall, her body was found in the groundskeeper’s shed. She’d been strapped, facedown, on a workbench, her blouse pulled up to her shoulders, her back flayed open.

  At that point, the only remaining mystery was the whereabouts of Auckland Finn. Part of that mystery had been solved the morning following the blaze. A twenty-five-foot schooner, the Laura Booth, had been stolen from the marina. Four witnesses had seen its dark blue sails fluttering in the dawn air as it slipped away from MacAndrews Island, the flames of the Phelps mansion already visible at the crest of the island. One witness had seen a man at the foremast. He had red hair, and was later identified as Auckland Finn.

  For the next three months, authorities along the entire East Coast searched for the Laura Booth, everyplace f
rom the rocky inlets of Maine to the lush tropical maze of the Florida Keys. My father dutifully reported dozens of “suspected” sightings during that time, one in Cape Cod Bay, another in the Chesapeake, still others in the tidal estuaries of the James River. The schooner was seen as far out as Bermuda and as far inland as Cape Fear, a ghost boat forever drifting in and out of tidal fogs and swamp mists, the Laura Booth with its blue sails, piloted by a figure whose red hair now hung to his shoulders.

  By the following year, the Laura Booth had become a vessel of dark renown, routinely added to any list of macabre sea tales, from coffin ships to the fate of the Flying Dutchman. It might have passed entirely into legend had it not been found on August 17, 1918, drifting aimless in San Francisco Bay.

  By then she hardly looked herself at all. The blue sails were gone, replaced by nondescript ones of white. The boat had been repainted, its name changed to the utterly ordinary one of Wanderer.

  But where was Auckland Finn?

  No one knew, my father diligently informed his readers, although everyone suspected that Finn had climbed into the small four-person lifeboat that had once been lashed to the Laura Booth, and rowed himself to shore somewhere along the rocky coast of northern California.

  It was very late when I returned the old Sentinel editions to their wooden cabinet. I’d read everything available about the Phelps murders, and yet I still had no idea why Dora had reacted so violently to our local tale of murder and escape. Nor did there seem any way for me ever to know.

  And so, when I left the Sentinel a few minutes later, I intended to go directly home. Then, quite unexpectedly, a powerful urge overtook me, a need, strange as it seemed, to be near Dora, feel her presence physically, as if, in some demented way, I wanted to assure myself that she was real. And so I turned, almost without willing it, like a figure on a music box, and headed toward her cottage.

  When I reached it, I could see a yellow light burning in Dora’s bedroom window. I saw nothing else until she suddenly glided past the window, her body draped in a dark red robe. From my place among the trees, I saw her bend forward to blow out the candle on the table beside her chair. At that instant, the robe slipped from her shoulders, and I glimpsed her back, the deep scars that gouged it. In the silence, I heard her voice, Because it’s never happened to you. Words that should have come to me in warning, but formed a siren song instead.