Places in the Dark Read online

  Instead, he encountered a solemn face, stern, dark eyes.

  “Don’t you think that was rather foolhardy, William?” my father asked.

  Billy stared at him quizzically.

  I sensed trouble on the wing, set down my knife and fork, and waited expectantly.

  “You have to think before you act,” my father said. “That’s what the mind is for.” He tapped his forehead to emphasize the point. “It reins in our impulses. And if you don’t pay heed to it, then…”

  “What are you telling him, Walter?”

  It was my mother’s voice, firm, determined, a sword flourished in the air between them.

  I knew that the old battle was about to erupt again, my father in command of reason’s stolid force, my mother the determined general of passion’s fiery legions. It had been going on for years, though the end seemed already settled, the spoils divided, I the sturdy coin claimed by my father, Billy my mother’s golden treasure.

  “What’s that, my dear?” my father replied, his tone not so much condescending as already seeking to dampen the fuse he’d unintentionally lit. It was a tone I’d come to expect on such occasions. For although my father could appear impressive, a man of strong opinions who peppered his talk with learned citations, I’d early recognized that he was, in fact, curiously weak. When faced with confrontation, he was always quick to retreat, particularly before the formidable and unbending figure of my mother.

  She faced him from the opposite end of our dining table, blue eyes leveled with resolve. “Do you think Billy should have let Jenny drown? Is that what you would have done, Walter?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But why not? Wouldn’t you have controlled any impulse to save her?”

  “I’m not twelve years old, Mary,” my father replied. He glanced at me, his usual ally at such moments, but I offered nothing. “William could have drowned. That’s the long and the short of it. He could have died. Would you have wanted that?”

  True to her nature, my mother chose not to answer a question she recognized as purely rhetorical. “The real issue is not whether Billy might have drowned,” she replied. “It’s how he should live his life.”

  “And how is that?” my father asked, folding his napkin now, placing it tidily on the table beside his plate.

  “Certainly not by ‘controlling his impulses,’” my mother said.

  “Mary, I was only making the point that—”

  “I know precisely the point you were making.”

  “I’m not sure you do.”

  “That Billy should live as a coward.”

  “That was not my point at all.”

  “You can dress it up any way you like, Walter, but it amounts to the same thing.”

  My father adjusted his fork, spoon, water glass. He said softly, “What do you think he should have done?”

  “Exactly what he did,” my mother answered.

  “Risk his life?”

  “Follow his passion.” Her gaze fell proudly on my brother. “We’re not always directed by our minds.”

  “Follow his passion,” my father repeated, allowing only the slightest skepticism in his voice. “Without rules of any kind.” A small, faintly timid smile fluttered onto his lips. “The voice of the apostate, my dear.”

  It was a reference to the fact that my mother had been raised a Catholic but had long ago rejected that faith, substituting the romantic poets for the Holy Father, their wild verse for the harsh injunctions of Mother Church.

  “Call it whatever you wish,” my mother snapped.

  “Do you really believe, Mary, that passion can guide a life?” my father added, his voice barely above a whisper.

  My mother stared at him unflinchingly. “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “So the heart is the only reference one should consult?” my father asked, now assuming a professorial manner, as if trying to neutralize the confrontation he’d unwittingly started and now wished only to defuse.

  “Yes.”

  My father pretended to consider my mother’s idea. “And so, for William, that would mean following his heart regardless of the consequences?”

  “Regardless of ‘thinking’ about the consequences,” my mother answered stiffly.

  “Passion,” my father mused. “William should let passion be his guide. It’s a noble idea, Mary. No one can argue with that.” Nodding sagely, he offered my mother a conciliatory smile. “I’m glad you have such ideas, my dear. Romantic ideas.” As he ticked them off, he tried to look as if he actually took them seriously. “That we should listen to our hearts.”

  “What else should we listen to?” my mother countered.

  He did not answer her question, but continued with “That good triumphs over evil.”

  “It does when it stands its ground.”

  “That love is eternal.”

  “Some love is,” my mother said, glancing toward her favorite son.

  “That there is but one true love for each of us,” my father concluded.

  “Do you doubt that too, Walter?” my mother demanded, now exasperated with the lightness of his tone. “Do you dismiss that too?”

  “Not at all.” Peace was my father’s only goal now, truth and candor merely obstacles on the way to it. He got to his feet, a creature in full retreat, placed his hand on Billy’s shoulder. “I’m sure there’s just one true love for William.”

  I looked at my brother with mock seriousness. “Just one, Billy,” I said.

  He smiled his boyish smile.

  I raised a finger and pointed it toward the window, the world of night that lay beyond it. “She’s out there somewhere,” I teased, grinning widely now, no more believing that such a one existed for my brother than I believed in the glittering mermaids the old salts spoke of when they were in their cups.

  And yet, as I’ve since calculated, she had just turned eight years old that summer, a little girl with deep green eyes, already so real, so terribly in the world, that had my finger extended infinitely westward, it might have touched her long, blond hair.

  Chapter Two

  I often think now of the darkest moment of her life, of how much it shaped her, and in shaping her shaped Billy and me, shaped all that happened after that.

  I watch children as they skate heedlessly across a frozen pond, slicing circles in the ice, laughing as they go, never imagining the lethal depths beneath them, nor that buried within themselves there are places in the dark, deep and hidden, from which their fates uncoil. Then suddenly, I think of Dora, and see a little girl running through an unlighted house, stalked by a man with shaggy hair gone white before its time, and a teenager in ragged, bloody jeans. The girl finds the stairs, slips up them as silently as she can, then huddles, terrified, at the top. Below, the man stops. The beam from his flashlight sweeps about the ground floor rooms of the house, then settles at the bottom of the stairs. The teenager stands at his side, watching mutely, the beam now nosing hungrily up the stairs, as if the light itself has caught the scent of a living thing.

  The child watches the light inch toward her, squeezes her eyes shut, draws her knees tight against her chest, makes herself as small as possible, a little ball of life.

  There she is, the man says.

  Footsteps pound up the stairs. A pungent odor sweeps over her. She opens her eyes. The teenager hangs, a ragged scarecrow, above her, staring down, now joined by the man, his voice cold, matter-of-fact, strangely ceremonial.

  Turn over.

  The child turns obediently onto her stomach, her cheek pressed against the dusty hardwood floor. Skinny fingers close over her mouth. A filthy hand chokes off her whimper.

  Lay flat.

  With one eye, she watches as the shadow of a knife crawls up the wall.

  A hand yanks her blouse up to her shoulders.

  The blade descends. A second voice whispers in her ear.

  It won’t hurt.

  Then the blade rakes the pale skin of her back in swift slicing motions, like
someone carving hugs and kisses in the soft bark of a tree.

  I’m sure Dora relived this moment many times as she made her way over the Rockies and across the Great Plains, taking the same roads I later took, following the last slim lead I had.

  She reached the East Coast, lingered for a time, then fled northward, no doubt winding through New England along Route 1. Finally, in late October, the leaves in their autumnal glory, she reached Port Alma, a town fixed to a rocky coast, bordered by a seawall, graced with a long stone jetty and a jeweled island in the bay.

  Local legend had it that Port Alma had been named for a sea captain’s wife. It was Billy who set the record straight in a little talk he gave two days before his sixteenth birthday, the town historical society gathered in the front room of the old lending library to hear him speak.

  “Alma was the captain’s lover, not his wife,” Billy explained. “She was a beautiful young woman who lived in Seville.”

  According to Billy, Captain Brennan had sailed up the Guadalquivir River, master of an eighteenth-century merchant ship in search of olive oil and Spanish sherry. The captain had been graciously entertained by the local Spanish aristocracy, invited to their dances, shown their fabled gardens, where flowers hung in perfumed abundance from brightly painted walls. It was during one of those long, scented evenings that Brennan had met Maria Alma Sanchez. Seventeen. Olive-skinned. Raven-haired. They’d walked along the narrow streets of Santa Cruz, kissed at the Torre del Oro, alongside the same river down which Columbus had set sail.

  Then the story darkened. The couple was forced to part. Worse things after that. Alma’s suicide. Captain Brennan set wandering again. He’d finally settled on a remote beach in Maine, where he’d built a small trading post. He christened it Port Alma. “It was the perfect place for Captain Brennan,” Billy concluded, relishing the high romance of his tale, glancing at our mother, who watched him approvingly from the front row, “because every other place served only to remind him that he had sacrificed the one true love of his life.”

  That was the last line of Billy’s talk. And I remember how Mrs. Tolliver dabbed her eyes at the end of it. How strangely Mr. Tolliver gazed at her, as if some long suspicion about his wife had been suddenly proved true. I don’t know if my brother noticed their reaction, but had he noticed it, I know he would have been pleased. For all his life Billy loved the idea that people had secrets they held within themselves like gemstones in a velvet pouch, precious, dazzling, rare. Perhaps that was what initially drew him to Dora. Not her beauty, but how grotesquely it had been marred. Not what she let him see, but what she hid.

  “It was a beautiful talk, Billy,” my mother said as the three of us stood together on the steps of the building, the main street of Port Alma crowded with its usual weekend throng. Her eyes were like soft blue lights. “Very beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” Billy said. He smiled happily. “Cal’s giving a talk next month.”

  She turned to me. “Really? What about, Cal?”

  “Civil disobedience,” I answered.

  She laughed. “Against it, I suppose?”

  “Adamantly.”

  She pressed her hand to my cheek. “Your father’s son,” she said with a bright, indulgent smile. She turned back to Billy. “Well, congratulations. It was a lovely talk.” With that she strode down the stairs, turned to the left, and grandly sailed down Main Street like a great ship through a tangle of lesser vessels.

  “She’s so sure of herself,” I said once she was out of earshot. “So sure that she’s right about her view of things.”

  With an insight that even then struck me as older than his years, Billy said, “If she weren’t, she wouldn’t be able to live. She would die, Cal. She would just curl up and die.”

  We went for a walk after that, more or less following our mother’s route through a town bustling with activity, people coming in and out of shops, then along a beach strewn with families, children darting in all directions.

  The crowd had thinned by the time we reached the jetty. We stopped at its edge, peered out over its huge gray stones.

  “It looks like the backbone of a dragon,” Billy said. I studied the jetty, decided he was right. “Yes, it does.”

  He climbed onto it, then said, “What do you think it was like between our parents? In the beginning, I mean. Before they got married.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “They couldn’t have known each other very well.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Maybe that’s the way it should be, Cal, when you fall in love.”

  “It’s the way it has to be. Or you won’t.”

  He offered me a hand, pulled me up beside him. “You’re just like Dad.”

  “In what way?”

  “The way you think everything through.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, except that in the end, you pick everything apart. Bit by bit. Until there’s nothing left.”

  “And you’re like Mother.” I peered down the length of the jetty, where white water surged and retired around the stones. “You trust everything.” I glanced up at the sky. All afternoon a storm had been bearing down from the north. Now it hovered overhead, its clouds thick and billowing, like a poisonous gray smoke.

  “We’d better be getting back,” I said. “The rain could hit any second.”

  Billy paid me no mind, turned, and strode out toward the end of the jetty, where he stood, facing the bay, his coat flung over his shoulders, hanging from them like a cape.

  I lifted my collar against the wind and followed after him.

  He turned suddenly as I drew in upon him. The wind tossed his hair.

  “She’s out there somewhere,” he said, nodding inland.

  I held my eyes upon the bay, where a rusty trawler slogged wearily toward the open sea, its wake flowing behind her, white and ragged, like an old woman’s hair.

  “Who is?”

  “The one,” Billy answered.

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “Don’t you remember what you said?” he asked. “That night, after Jenny Grover? You said that she was ‘out there somewhere.’ My one true love.”

  “I was joking,” I told him.

  “Of course you were,” Billy said. “But what if you were right, Cal? What if she really is out there?”

  I could see that my brother had actually come to believe that there might be such a person, a one love for whom he was destined.

  “Well?” he asked.

  I knew that during the years I’d been away at college he had been pursued by a host of village girls, earthy, willing, destined to work the canneries or marry those who did. According to my father, he’d shown no interest in returning the attentions of such girls no matter how blatantly they’d expressed them. Now I knew why. Romance had become his sword and shield, made of him a true romantic. Simply put, he could not lust for one he did not love, and had come to believe, with all his heart, that he would love but once.

  “If she’s out there, I hope you find her,” I said, though with no expectation that he might.

  “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Do you ever think that there’s this girl out there who’s…”

  “No,” I said firmly. Which was true enough. Such vaporous notions had never had any power over me. As for the last few years, I’d concentrated exclusively on my studies at Columbia Law, torts and the rules of civil litigation, broken contracts, and unsupported claims.

  “Mother believes that for every person there is…”

  “I’m sure she does,” I said, abruptly weary of such talk. “She’s probably as sure of that as she is about everything else.”

  Billy grew quite serious. “The thing is, I believe it too, Cal.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  I could see no harm in going along with my brother’s romantic suppositions. “Well, perhaps you’re both right.”

  B
ut I didn’t in the least believe that either of them was right. In fact, the possibility that my brother’s one true love might actually appear never occurred to me at all. Nor that within eight months of her arrival in Port Alma, she would vanish no less mysteriously, leave blood-spattered roses in her wake, and in me the merciless resolve to track her down.

  Chapter Three

  Luther Cobb was the first person I talked to on the day I began my search for Dora. Cobb had managed the bus station in Port Alma for thirty years, seen scores of sinister figures arrive, linger, then depart. And yet he looked at me warily as I approached him, as if I were a stranger. It was a wariness I’d gotten used to by then. I knew that in the time since Billy’s death I’d taken on a thin, starved look, that I cast, in every light, the shadow of a predator.

  My brother had been dead for thirty-seven days before I began to look for Dora. Terrible days during which I’d felt the worms wriggling within me as surely as they wriggled within him, felt a ruthless and insatiable devouring. I’d slept only fitfully, ate only enough to keep my body going, continually replayed the story in my mind.

  And so, on the thirty-seventh day after Billy’s death I decided that there had to be an end to it, that I couldn’t let her escape. The order had seemed to come from the crisp cold air around me, Find her.

  Luther Cobb was my first stop on the road to Dora March.

  “‘Morning, Cal,” he said as I stepped up to his counter.

  Without preamble, I told him what I wanted, whom I was looking for. “Dora March,” I said, and in that instant saw her standing there in Port Alma’s dusty bus station, a spectral figure, clothed in shadow, her face without expression, dead green eyes.

  “Dora March.” Luther peered at me intently. “What a strange one she turned out to be.”

  “What do you remember about her?” I asked. “The day she came to town, I mean.”

  “Came at night. Got off alone. ‘Round midnight, as I recall. Can’t tell you much more. Just that nobody met her.”

  Luther had a smooth face, round as a coin, with sunken, curiously stricken eyes. His son Larry had drowned in 1911, his boat sunk and never recovered from what, by all accounts, had been a tranquil sea. The mystery of that lost boy hung like a veil over Luther’s features. I had no doubt that he’d spent the long years since his son’s death in a fruitless conjuring of possibilities: murder, suicide, a serpent rising from the placid depths. Studying him that morning, I knew that if Dora got away, I’d be locked in the same dark prison all my days.