Places in the Dark (4 page)

The snow had just begun to gather on my coat by the time I reached the Port Alma Hotel. Back in what the old men called “whaling times,” the building had served as the county courthouse. The stairs that led to its second floor were wide, with hand-carved mahogany banisters that Preston Forbes, the current owner, polished every day. It was the only part of the hotel that offered an aura of elegance. The rest of the building had been left to languish, its carpets frayed at the edges, its velvet curtains faded. There was a dustiness in the air. It gave the place a dispirited and exhausted look, like a man who’d been passed over again and again, abandoned at altars and in moonlit gardens, the one he wanted rushing forever into someone else’s arms.

But for all its forlorn appearance, the Port Alma was the only hotel we had. On the night of her arrival, Dora had had no choice but come here.

According to Preston Forbes, the front door was
locked when she arrived. Most of the people who stayed at the hotel were full-time residents rather than transients. That was why Preston had been so surprised to see her that night, a woman alone, arriving so late, lugging a battered leather suitcase.

“She was just standing there with her suitcase in her hand,” he told me. “Nothing I hadn’t seen before, of course. A woman with a suitcase.”

He watched with undisguised curiosity as I took the notebook from the pocket of my overcoat, flipped open the cover, and began to write. “So I guess you’re looking into this yourself, then, Cal?”

I nodded silently, a man of few words now.

Preston wore a faded brown suit, shiny in the pants, the jacket speckled with curls of cigarette ash. His eyes were small and slightly popped, his nose sharp and pointed, with practically no chin, a face that seemed to take small bits of whatever it gazed upon.

“I heard you resigned from the district attorney’s office, Cal. Don’t blame you at all. For going after her, I mean. A stranger wouldn’t care as much.”

I couldn’t imagine what a stranger might feel, staring down at my brother in his bloody ruin. What stranger would know of his goodness, his courage, the fierce hope that had flooded his final hours, or of how fully, in his last breath, he’d pledged himself to her?

“Is it pretty clear she did it, Cal?” Preston asked.

My mind presented the evidence Sheriff T. R. Pritchart had been able to accumulate: Dora’s notations in the
Sentinel’s
ledger books, providing by their fraudulent entries the sole motive he could find. He’d learned of the angry words that had come from Dora’s cottage near the bay, seen the bloody kitchen knife on the floor
beside my brother’s corpse, the gold ring and red roses, also splattered with his blood. As for Dora, she’d been seen sitting rigidly at the rear of a departing bus that same afternoon, her brown suitcase in the rack above, her green eyes shining in the shadows.

“T.R. thinks so,” I said.

Preston shrugged. “Well, I wish I could help you, Cal. But the fact is, I just didn’t have much to do with her. Just checked her in that night. That’s about it.”

He’d heard the buzzer used to signal him on those rare occasions when someone arrived after midnight, he told me. His first thought was that the woman had come to visit one of the old people who lived at the hotel, Mrs. Kenny or Mr. Washburn. “I figured maybe she was somebody’s long-lost relative.” He fished around for the right words to describe her. “She had a look. Not exactly spooky. But, well, like nothing good had ever happened to her.” He grabbed a shoe box from beneath the counter and began to flip through the cards he’d stuffed inside. “She would have come about when?”

“Around the middle of November,” I said.

He worked the cards, then plucked one from the rest. “Here it is. I remember now. I gave her Room Seventeen.” He handed the card to me. “Probably not much help, Cal, but it’s all I can tell you.”

She’d signed the register but left the rest of the card blank. Her signature was quite small and oddly fractured, the name broken into fragments, like something smashed with a hammer, a script so different from any other I’d ever seen that when Henry Mason had looked up, shocked and amazed, asked his question,
Could it be Dora?
, my mind had instantly given an answer I could not bring myself to say,
Yes.

“I offered to take her bag,” Preston said, “but she
didn’t want that. Looked real skittish. Like she thought I might do something to her.”

“Do what?”

“Maybe touch her in the wrong way, you know.

Skittish like that.”

I wondered if that thought had actually occurred to Preston. His wife, Mabel, had been dying for weeks by then, and terrible odors were said to come from the room where she lay. Maybe the sight of a young woman, fresh, beautiful, perhaps even vulnerable, had summoned something from its dank cave, Dora once again the object of a grim, relentless need.

“Anyway, I kept my distance after that.” Preston added. “Didn’t say another word. Just gave her the key. She went up to Room Seventeen, and that was that.”

I glanced toward the stairs. A woman was making her way up them. She was dressed in a dark blue coat, drab and inelegant. The hotel’s red plastic key holder dangled from her left hand.

I turned back to Preston. “Did Dora come down again that evening?”

“Not that I noticed,” Preston replied. “But Claire Pendergast might be able to help you. She was making up the rooms back then. And she’s nosy. It’s one of the reasons I let her go. Couldn’t keep her mouth shut about the guests, you know. She works at the shoe factory now.” He hit the plunger of a small chromed bell and Sammy Hokenberry stepped up. He was wearing a navy blue jacket, military style, with frayed gold epaulets. It was at least a size too big for him, so that Sammy looked like a battlefield scavenger, the jacket something he’d stripped off the corpse of a braver man.

Preston handed him a package wrapped in plain brown paper. “Take this to Mr. Stimson.”

Sammy took the package and sailed across the lobby to where Mr. Stimson sat playing checkers with himself, twisting the board around with each new move.

“And nobody came to visit her that night?” I asked Preston.

He shook his head. “Nobody could have gotten in without me knowing it.”

“How about later? Did anyone ever come around asking for her?”

“Just Ruth Potter. With that note she left. About the job she was offering. Someone to take care of Ed Dillard. You know about that, I guess.”

I nodded, saw Dora’s fingers open the note, imagined what Ruth had written inside:
Elderly gentleman needs housekeeper. 210 Maple Lane.

“Yes,” I said.

“Don’t know anything else about her,” Preston said.

“Did she get any mail while she was here?”

“Never noticed any. She just came and went, you know.” He shrugged. “I wish I had more to offer you, Cal.”

I thanked him and walked out of the hotel, swung to the right and made my way to the bay. The sidewalk was slippery with snow, people grabbing anything they could find to steady themselves, the old ones locked in a dreadful fear of falling, children laughing heedlessly at the same icy peril. A cold front was sweeping down from Canada, bringing with it a blinding wall of white. Everything seemed to be waiting for it. The bay lay flat, like someone under fire. The seabirds hunkered down in their stone aeries. At the far end of the pier an old gull preened itself silently, raking its long beak across raised wings, while just below my feet cold water swirled
at the wooden pylons with little gulping sounds, desperate and gasping, like a drowning child.

I thought of all the times Billy and I had raced along this pier, then saw him lying faceup on the floor, the roses he’d brought her scattered all around him, their petals sticky with his blood. A wave of loathing swept over me, deep and pure, carried on her name, the way it had fallen, soft and needful, from my brother’s lips,
Dora.

If the love he’d dreamed of came to me now, I thought, it would hit like water on a granite slab.

T
he great timbers of the north woods rose all around me as I drove along Bluefish Road. Several miles outside town, I passed the Hooverville that had sprung up near the rail lines and now spread almost to the road. It was a shantytown of clapboard structures, unsteady lean-tos plugged with cardboard and newspaper, roofs slapped together using scraps of rusty tin and jagged strips of discarded asphalt shingles. A thick smoke hung over it, dense and acrid, as if blown in from some vast pit that smoldered eternally at the heart of things. Lean, hungry men shambled beneath the smoke or gathered beside large metal drums, feeding slats into a crackling fire. They had the baffled look of the dispossessed, like people after a storm, shocked that such destruction could have swept down upon them so abruptly, taken them unawares, left them with nothing.

I imagined Dora crouched among them, passing as a man, with soot on her face and dust in her hair, careful to keep herself apart, give no sense of her true identity, a figure fixed forever in a web of grim deceit.

The shoe factory sat on a muddy lot scraped out of the surrounding hillside. A rutted gravel road curved
into a parking lot where a few cars huddled together, rusty and dilapidated, like old mules in a broken-down corral. I recognized Claire Pendergast’s Ford from two years before, when I’d prosecuted her on a bad-check charge. She’d made restitution and apologized to all concerned, but I’d always expected her to do it again. Claire was like a lot of the people who’d recently drifted down to Port Alma from the hills, not so much malicious as simply unable to think things through.

She didn’t seem apprehensive when I spotted her on the factory floor and motioned her over to me. She asked a fellow worker to take her place stamping shoe soles out of wide red sheets of rubber, then led me to the room where the workers took their breaks. It had whitewashed cinder-block walls and a cold cement floor. A few tables with spindly legs and wooden tops carved with initials were scattered here and there. In one corner, a battered tin coffeepot rested on a black potbellied stove, a broken wicker basket on an unpainted stool beside it. A hand-lettered sign had been taped to the wall above the basket:
We trust you. Coffee 5 Cents.
No pictures adorned the walls except for a photograph of the factory hung in a plastic frame, its original workers, grinning young men in flannel pants and checkered shirts, grinning girls in floral dresses. The date said October 17, 1922.

“The Polasky sisters are still working here.” Claire pointed to two of the girls in the photograph, both with bobbed hair, smiling brightly at the camera, relieved to be employed. “Can you imagine that? Stuck in this crummy place for fifteen years.”

“I’m trying to find Dora March,” I said.

She dropped a nickel into the wicker basket and poured a cup of coffee. Black. “I guess Mr. Forbes
mentioned me.” She took the coffee and led me to a table in the corner. “So, what’d he have to say?”

“That you might remember Dora better than he did.”

She sipped her coffee. Steam rose from it and fogged the bottom third of her glasses. “That’s possible,” she said. She yanked a pack of cigarettes from her blouse, thumped one out, seized it with her lips, then offered the pack to me.

I shook my head.

“You don’t say much, do you?” Claire asked. “Tall, silent type, I guess.” She took a long draw and eased back in her chair. “Well, that’s probably better. The ones that talk don’t end up saying much.”

She was probably in her early forties but looked older. Her hair was brown with curling wisps of gray, her skin as parched and dry as the tobacco in her cigarette. Bony shoulders poked from her dress like sticks in a pillowcase.

“When I went into her room, I noticed it right away,” she began. “At first I thought Preston must have given me the wrong room number, that no one had been in this one. Then I noticed that the chair was pulled up to the window. I always put the chair at the other side of the room. So I knew that whoever had stayed in the room that night had brought it over to the window.” She brushed a wrinkle from her dress, leaving two equally unsightly ones untouched. “That was the only thing she did, far as I could tell. Just move that one chair. Didn’t use the bed at all. The bedspread was just like I’d left it the day before. Tucked under the way I tuck it. So I knew the bed hadn’t been slept in and made up by whoever took the room. It just plain hadn’t been slept in. Pretty strange, don’t you think?”

“Did you see anything in the room?” I asked. “Mail. A newspaper.”

Claire used her little finger to scrape a speck of tobacco from the corner of her mouth. “It’s been over a year, Mr. Chase. Even if I’d seen something like that, I would have forgotten it by now.”

“Anything at all.”

She worked her mind a few seconds. I pictured it as a stamping machine, unoiled and poorly maintained, the cogs grinding slowly, producing very little.

“Fact is,” she said finally, shaking her head. “Fact is, in that job, if you don’t find something disgusting in a room, you don’t much notice what you find.”

“Did you ever talk to her?”

“Twice, I think it was,” Claire answered. She took a hard drag on the cigarette. A patchy burst of smoke once more exploded from her lips. I could tell her mind had caught the groove, was now spinning more smoothly. “She come down the stairs and over to the desk. She says, ‘Should I pay now?’ You know, like a person who’d never stayed in a hotel before, didn’t know how the bill was paid, or when. I told her there was two ways to do it. Weekly or daily. A little was knocked off on the weekly, but you had to pay it in advance. I think she took the weekly, but I can’t be sure.”

“And the second time?”

“The second time was a day or two later,” Claire replied. “Preston wanted me to get some fresh eggs over at Madison’s. On the way, I passed the park and there she was, sitting on a bench. She had glasses on, reading the paper. She took them off when she saw me coming over to her.”

I imagined Dora facing Main Street, the granite Revolutionary War Monument to her left, the old band
shell to her right, her coat wrapped tightly around her. A copy of the
Sentinel
rested in her lap, two hands placed on top, her fingers delicately wrapped around a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.