Places in the Dark Read online

  I’d known Billy was her favorite long before he was given the Sentinel. It had been clear from the time he was a little boy. She loved his energy and his unruliness.The great mess in which he kept his room filled her heart with hope. During the long New England winters, when my father and I hunkered in his study, gravely discussing the works of ancient Greece and Rome, Billy and my mother would curl beside the fire, chatting quietly or playing board games, while outside, Maine slowly sank beneath its yearly pall of snow.

  She believed that Billy illuminated everything, and in doing that, illuminated her, offered living proof of the ideas she had in her own youth so fiercely embraced and never since abandoned. Passion. Freedom. Love. The fact that he took no academic prizes, graduated without honors, chose not to go to college, a circumstance that deeply aggrieved my father, did not in the least disturb her. “I’m sure Billy’s a disappointment to you, Mrs. Chase,” I once heard a teacher say to my mother. I’d never forgotten the force of her swift reply: “I would be disappointed in my son,” she answered, “only if he did not know his heart.”

  Now she had only me.

  “How are you?” I asked as I drew my chair up to her bed.

  She dipped her head, then glanced toward the window, bright sunlight on the glistening untouched snow. Since Billy’s death, she’d sunk into a grave silence, rarely initiating conversation, replying to questions in short, clipped sentences, hardly ever asking any of her own. It was as if the inner light that had glowed from her had been rudely snuffed out, leaving her in shadows.

  “The weather’s cleared up a little,” I said.

  Her eyes followed a flock of Canada geese as they glided across her glimpse of sky, smooth and sure, like skaters on an ice-blue pond.

  “Dad seems to be doing all right,” I told her.

  In fact, of course, he was not doing well at all, drink his only consolation. The few times I’d suggested that he visit my mother, he’d waved his hand in abrupt refusal, adding only, “She’s got trouble enough without seeing me.”

  “He’s eating well,” I added.

  She watched me silently for a moment, then, “And you, Cal?”

  “I’m getting along,” I assured her.

  Her head trembled as she drew her attention to the nightstand beside her bed, the gold ring that lay in a velvet box beside the lamp, resting on a month-old edition of the Sentinel. Her eyes returned to me.

  “Dora?”

  “There’s still no sign of her.”

  She released a defeated breath, her body shriveling before my eyes, life seeping from her inexorably, like air from a punctured tire.

  In her present state, it was hard to think of her as the woman she’d once been, the beautiful, lively, infinitely rebellious daughter of a prominent Catholic family. She’d been taught music and manners in the hope of making her ever more desirable to the many quite suitable young men who’d waited for her in the curtained drawing room of her father’s gracious house. Various finishing schools had been offered, but she’d turned any such “finishing” aside, and had enrolled in a nursing school instead, a lowly profession her father had regarded as only a small step removed from domestic service. Upon graduation, she’d taken a job with a Dr. Benjamin Putnam, a Port Alma physician whose modest small-town practice catered mostly to the hardscrabble farmers, trappers, and cannery workers, the wretched of the earth to which she had intended to devote her life.She’d been twenty-four when she met my father, an established newspaper editor twelve years her senior. In a world of loggers and fishermen, where people ate clams from brine-soaked newspaper, washed down with a frothy ale, he’d no doubt shone like a comet. “He’d read a lot,” my mother always answered crisply when Billy pestered her about what had attracted her to a man so clearly different from herself. Then, with a peal of laughter, she’d added, “But only the old stuff. Greeks and Romans. Nothing A.D.”

  They’d met when my father turned up at Dr. Putnam’s clinic. He’d gotten his hand caught in a printing press. Dr. Putnam had been injured in a hunting accident two days before, however, so it was my mother who treated my father’s wounded hand. “There were younger men, of course,” she’d tell Billy, “but I preferred the bread to the yeast.” They were married eight months later, lived together for the next twenty-five years.

  I’d been at work in the district attorney’s office for four years when she left my father in order to “be with her thoughts,” as she put it.

  She’d chosen to live in a tiny cottage on Fox Creek, only a stone’s throw from the old bridge that spanned it, and from which I’d watched my brother guide his raft across the water. She’d furnished the cottage sparsely. A bed, a few chairs, books, almost nothing else. She wanted to “pare things down,” she said, the only explanation she ever gave. But the little cottage, spare as it seemed, was always flooded with light and music, the quick step of my mother’s feet when suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, some bit of verse struck her and she rushed to her books, searching for the reference.

  In the years before her stroke I’d visited her often at Fox Creek, usually in company with Billy. On occasion we’d find her inside the cabin, humming as she swept the floor or washed the dishes. At other times she’d be sitting along the bank of Fox Creek, an old cane fishing pole stuck in the ground beside her, her eyes fixed on the little red bob that floated idly in the stream, a book of poetry always in her lap.

  My brother worshiped her, of course, referred to her teasingly as “The Great Example,” as in, “The Great Example came by the paper this morning.” Or “I had a talk with The Great Example last night.” He adored her for her joy and energy, the way her laughter rang like bells, but more than anything for the one great lesson he said she’d taught him, that you’re alive only when you feel you’re alive, all else “a breathing death.”

  We’d last been together at Fox Creek on a bright day in early summer. Billy brought a blanket for Mother and spread it on the ground beside the creek. After picking a cluster of mountain laurel, she lowered herself gracefully onto the blanket and sat Indian-style, her back propped against a tree. She had been living at Fox Creek for four years by then, and during that time her hair had turned completely white, though her skin remained remarkably smooth, with only a few telltale wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She seemed to know that something was coming for her, something she could only wait for, see like a dark horse in the distance. Her own mother had died at forty-three, her father at forty-six, both, she said, of poor hearts. Even so, she wanted to continue as The Great Example. And so she worked at being cheerful, discussed her gardening with me, bantered merrily with Billy. But after a time, her mood seemed to alter. She looked out over the creek, the lush green meadows beyond it. “How perfect it all is,” she murmured.

  “You’ve never regretted it?” I asked. “Leaving Dad? Moving here? Living alone? No doubts that…”

  Billy touched her hand. “Mother has never doubted anything,” he said.

  She looked at me as if I’d challenged her. “Not anything basic, Cal,” she said.

  I could see how certain she remained, how convinced of her wisdom, assured that she’d never deluded herself nor misled anyone, that by following her heart she had arrived at the small paradise she now occupied along the banks of Fox Creek.

  The stroke came three days later.

  I found her. Lying faceup beside her bed, her eyes open, staring, her mouth pulled down on the left side, fixing her face in a terrible scowl. She’d soiled herself, and a dull yellow stain spread across her nightdress. That she had lain for many hours in such indignity sent a fire through my brain.

  “She shouldn’t have been out there by herself,” I told Billy as we paced the hospital corridor the following night. “She could have lived with me. Or with you. Maybe even moved back in with Dad. At least, that way, she wouldn’t have laid there, all alone, helpless…”

  A nurse swept past, pushing a metal cart.

  “She wanted to be al
one,” Billy said, defending her to the last, no less convinced than she’d always been of the decision she’d made, the path she’d followed. “That’s why she moved out there in the first place.”

  I shook my head at how extreme her action had been, how unnecessary that our mother had so isolated herself.

  “She wanted freedom, Cal,” Billy said emphatically.

  “Freedom?” I mocked. “And what did she hope to get from that?”

  “Wisdom,” Billy answered.

  He clearly admired her for it. And since his death, I’ve often wondered if, had he lived, my brother might have done the same.

  It was a thought that occurred to me again as I sat with my mother that morning—months later—doing the best I could to show her that she still had one son left, though the one who’d most believed in her was gone. I thought of all my brother might have learned. All he might have given. And in that instant, I saw him as an elderly man, sitting beside Fox Creek, feeling the sun’s warmth, letting it all fall into place, his eyes beginning to sparkle as he closed in upon a final wisdom. I saw a smile form on his lips, heard his voice in the air around me, Now I know, Cal. Now I know.

  “Cal?”

  My mother’s voice drew me back to the present. “Yes?”

  “Cal … I?”

  A dreadful unease seized her eyes, as if she’d glimpsed something terrible in her own mind, something she couldn’t say but which I took to be yet another expression of her loss, her grief, the fact that the one who’d most nearly shared her vision of the world, taken most to heart her wild instruction, believed in her as much as she’d believed in herself, her one true son, was dead.

  I took her hand and squeezed it gently. “I know” was all I said.

  The 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.”

  The 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.”

&n
bsp; 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.