She stepped out briskly, closing the car door behind her, her eyes leveled upon the fire, studying it intently, as if its thick smoke and red flames were a riddle she was determined to solve.
I recognized her instantly, of course. She was the young woman I"d seen first through the window of the barbershop, then later at Ed Dillard"s house on the night of his death.
"I believe you"ve met Dora," Billy said when they came up to me.
In the shadows carved by the fire, my brother looked older, more experienced, and I suppose I should have guessed that she was already beginning to deepen and enrich him, bestow upon him that sense of "something to lose" that lies at the heart of all maturity.
"Yes I have," I said. I touched the brim of my hat. "Good evening, Miss March."
"Mr. Chase." She dipped her head slightly.
"Dora"s working at the Sentinel now," Billy told me. "We were there when the call came in." His eyes swept toward the house. "Looks like a goner." He pulled a notebook from his coat pocket and glanced at Dora. "Well, let"s look around."
I watched them as they made their way toward the house, snow swirling thickly, cloaking the ruin in a robe of white. Billy stopped to point something out to Dora, scribbling a note into his pad as he spoke. She listened to him with the greatest attention, then, at his signal, moved forward again.
"Who"s the woman with your brother?"
I turned and saw Hap Ferguson standing next to me. He was my boss, the district attorney of Jefferson County, a plump, gray-haired man nearing fifty, cheerful, sometimes bawdy, with a Highland flush to his cheeks.
"Dora March."
"Name rings a bell," Hap said.
"She was Ed Dillard"s housekeeper. You probably read her name in my report. She was living with him when he died last month."
Hap grinned slyly. "Lucky Ed."
I kept my eyes on Dora for a while. When I finally returned my attention to Hap, I saw that he was peering at me thoughtfully.
"You seem a little moonstruck, Cal."
I waved my hand, dismissing the comment. "I don"t get moonstruck."
"Already too old and world-weary for that, are you?"
"What"s on your mind, Hap?" I asked bluntly.
Instead of answering, he yanked something from his coat pocket. "This may not be the best moment, but take a look at this, will you? Her name"s Rachel. Rachel Ba.s.s. She"s a cousin of mine."
In the leaping firelight, the photograph showed a lanky woman with broad shoulders and a frank expression, her face the type I"d seen as a boy, usually on women-in-war posters, the nurse who braves the fire and shrapnel, bears the wounded soldier home.
"Rachel"s about your age," Hap said. "Her husband"s been dead a couple years now. She"s got a five-year-old named Sarah."
Rachel Ba.s.s wore a cheap dress dotted with flowers, the sort that hung on metal racks in general stores. Her hair fell just above her shoulders, full and wavy, parted in the middle. In the photo, she stood on the porch of a wood-framed house, a tin thermometer nailed to the post she leaned against. A white cloth dangled from her hand, and the ap.r.o.n she wore seemed slightly soiled. A little girl stood beside her, the right side of her face pressed against her mother"s left leg, one small hand clutching her stained ap.r.o.n. More than anything, Rachel Ba.s.s looked like a woman who"d put in a full day, cooked and cleaned and washed, explained to the grocer that she"d have the money by the end of the week. She needed rest, I thought, not a man like me.
"She taught English at Royston High School for a few years," Hap went on. "Now she rents rooms to keep things going."
I brushed the snow from the photograph and offered it back to him. "Not my type, Hap."
"And what might that be?"
I dared not tell him, since I knew that for all the blue stories he told at work, my weekend visits to a waterfront bordello in Royston would not be welcome news from a prosecutor in his employ.
"I guess I"ll know it when I see it. But it"s not her."
"h.e.l.l, I know she"s no spring chicken. But she"s still a handsome woman. And she"s got a pretty good education. Reads anything she can get her hands on. I figure you might like her." He faced the house, leaving the photograph still dangling from my fingers. "So just hold on to that, Cal. Give it some thought."
Before I could offer any further protest, he turned his attention to Carl Hendricks. "Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. His second wife died two months ago, you know. My G.o.d, what will he do now?" He shook his head at the mult.i.tude of misfortune that can befall a single life. "Well, let"s go over and extend our sympathies."
We walked over to where Carl Hendricks stood with his daughter. The heat from the fire had sufficiently warmed the air immediately around it so that Hendricks had let the blanket drop from his shoulders. It now lay wet and crumpled at his feet, while he stood in shirt-sleeves, one large hand gripping tightly to Molly"s shoulder.
"Terrible thing, Carl," Hap said, gazing at the fire. "Anything I can do?"
"Didn"t have no insurance on it," Hendricks muttered. "Couldn"t afford none." Hendricks seemed dazed by his misfortune, stricken and befuddled. I suspected that even in the best of times, Carl Hendricks was a man of starkly limited resources, the sort who forever finds himself pushed, battered, backed finally into a corner, his life like a bar brawl he didn"t start or know how to finish. "Sprung up in the kitchen," he muttered. "Spread all over." He snapped his fingers. "Just like that."
The house was little more than a scorched outline on a field of flame. Billy and Dora were walking back toward us.
"Fastest thing I ever saw, that fire," Hendricks said as they came up. He nodded to Billy, his eyes glancing briefly toward Dora, then skittering away. He pointed to the blanket that lay curled at his feet. "Tried to beat it out. Nearly caught fire myself. Seems like everything caught fire at once."
As for Molly, she"d been upstairs when it started, Hendricks told us. The fire had moved so swiftly, she"d very nearly gotten trapped. But at the last moment, she"d managed to open a window, crawl out onto the roof, then jump into a saving bank of snow.
I saw Dora"s eyes fix on the little girl. She started to touch her hair, then drew back and dropped her hands into the pockets of her coat.
"Everything I got." Hendricks"s fingers squeezed his daughter"s shoulder. "All caught fire at once."
With a groan, the roof gave way. A geyser of glowing cinders exploded into the air, mingled briefly with the falling snow, then mutely fell to earth. Molly glanced up at Dora. It seemed to me that their eyes locked, Dora"s suddenly agitated, as if she"d glimpsed something grave and alarming in Molly Hendricks"s pretty, young face. With a quick backward step, she turned and walked to an isolated area some twenty feet away.
It attracted me, the way she stood so silent and solitary while others milled around her, and so after a time I also drew out of the circle and headed toward her, all but following the very tracks she"d left in the snow.
"You"ll have to get used to seeing this sort of thing," I said as I neared her. "Since you"re working at the Sentinel now, I mean."
"Yes, I will."
"And worse," I added. "Port Alma"s a small community, of course. But even so, things happen. Fires like this one. Logging accidents. Drowning. We have a crime or two once in a while. We even had a ma.s.s murder about twenty years back. A whole family carved up. Man and his wife. A little girl."
Her eyes shot over to me, then swiftly away, her gaze now fixed on the smoldering timbers.
I decided to pursue a less disturbing subject. "You"re going to need a more substantial coat if you stay here in Port Alma."
"William said the same thing."
"I"ll bet Billy offered you his own coat," I said, lightly mocking my brother"s old-fashioned chivalry. "He"s a knight in shining armor."
Something in her face softened. "Yes, he is."
"Stray dogs. Stray cats. He was the one they were always following home," I added.
She looked at me quite frankly. "And what followed you home?"
I felt my answer like a subtle weight added to my soul. "Nothing followed me."
She faced the fire again, making no further comment, but in some sense I felt that she was still watching me. Judging me. My first and only impulse was to get away.
"Well, it doesn"t look like there"s much more I can do around here. So I"ll just say good night, Miss March."
I left her and made the rounds, told Hap and Billy I was leaving, offered my sympathies to Carl Hendricks, then walked to my car and got in. As I pulled away, I glanced back at the scene, struck by the glowing mound of embers and boiling gray smoke, the shadowy figures huddled among stripped and icy trees, silhouettes against the snow. If h.e.l.l were a wintry landscape, I thought, it would look like Maine. Then I caught sight of Dora again, standing alone, my brother now striding toward her, eager and responsive, as if he alone had heard her silent call.
Chapter Eight.
During the days following the Hendricks fire, as I pa.s.sed the Sentinel on my way to and from work, I sometimes took note of Dora as she sat at the little metal desk my brother had a.s.signed to her, but I had no occasion to speak with her again. She was usually bent over her desk, hard at work by all appearances, intent upon whatever paper lay before her. She never looked up, never noticed me, certainly never saw my eyes latch on to her as I pa.s.sed, linger briefly, drawn to her perhaps, but coolly, like an animal drinking at an icy stream.
A week after the fire Hap called me into his office.
"Your brother thinks there"s something fishy about that blaze at the Hendricks place. Has he mentioned anything to you about it?"
"No."
"I happened to be in the probate office yesterday afternoon, and William came up and started talking about it. I got the feeling he had a funny feeling about it."
"Funny feeling?"
"Like he thought maybe something was amiss, you know?"
"Did he say that?"
"Not in so many words, but I think you should go out there anyway, poke around a little, see if anything looks fishy."
"What am I looking for, Hap? The place burned to the ground."
"Just show the flag, that"s all I"m saying, Cal. Cover us. Anything comes up, we can say we"ve been looking into it."
It was the sort of political task I disliked but could not avoid, and as I drove out to the Hendricks house an hour later, I found myself mildly annoyed that it was Billy"s chance remark that made my trip necessary. I could not imagine where his notion that there was something "fishy" about the fire had come from. After all, I"d gotten there quite some time before he"d arrived, helped the other volunteers douse the shed behind the house. At no point during that time had I seen anything to make me doubt that the fire had begun and spread exactly as Carl Hendricks had described it.
I was still wondering where my brother"s sinister idea had come from when I pulled my car into the slushy driveway of what had only recently been Carl Hendricks"s home.
Then I knew.
She was standing with her back to the road, facing the charred rubble of the house. She turned when she heard the car, and I saw that her shoes were soiled and wet, as was the bottom of her coat. She held what appeared to be a charred piece of paper.
"Good morning," I called as I got out of the car.
She nodded as I approached, drew off her gla.s.ses with one hand, sank the paper into the pocket of her coat with the other.
"I didn"t expect to find you out here."
I noticed that her fingers were dotted with soot, took a handkerchief from my pocket and handed it to her.
She wiped her hands, then gave the handkerchief back to me. "Thank you."
The blackened skeleton of the small house was laced with melting snow. An acrid smell tainted the air.
"I hear my brother has some suspicions. He mentioned them to my boss. Hap Ferguson. The district attorney. I wonder if Billy can seriously believe that in times like these a man would burn down his own house." I took out a cheroot and lit it, dropped the match into the dirty snow at my feet. "An uninsured house, by the way."
Her gaze touched on the soggy blanket that lay half buried in the snow a few yards away. It was the one that had dropped from Hendricks"s shoulders the night of the fire. She said nothing.
"How"d you happen to get out here?" I asked her.
"William dropped me off. I told him I"d walk back."
"Well, I can take you back into town if you want. This "investigation" won"t take long."
With that I stepped away and headed over to the sodden rubble of Carl Hendricks"s house. While Dora waited, I walked among the charred timbers, kicking at them or prying among them with a stick. I even bent down from time to time, plucked something from the ruin, and sniffed it for gasoline or heating oil.
I wasn"t sure what I was looking for. Something out of place or stupidly left behind, a kerosene can in the scorched remains of what had once been a bedroom. I"d long ago discovered that a criminal mind was usually a dull one, woolly and unskilled, capable of quite comic idiocies. As a type, our local criminals were guileless, crippled by poor memory and limited concentration. They tripped themselves up more often than the authorities tripped them. If Carl Hendricks had set his house on fire, I had no doubt but that he"d probably left some sign of it.
But I found no indication of arson, nor any attempt to conceal it. The rubble was exactly that, heaps of burnt wood, naked mattress springs amid soggy piles of scorched bedding, a kitchen stove, blackened but otherwise intact, save for the collapsed pipe that lay in broken pieces around it.
I tossed my cigar into the snow and trudged back toward Dora. "Okay, we can head back to town now," I said when I reached her.
In the car, Dora sat quite still. But in that stillness I thought I could detect some fierce movement in her mind, a strange, inner darting, like a bird flitting right and left, forever alert and on guard.
About halfway back to the main road, I steered clear of a fallen branch, then made a hard right around the road"s final curve. Perhaps a hundred yards ahead, two figures lurched toward us. It wasn"t until I drew near that I recognized Carl Hendricks and his daughter.
He"d halted abruptly when he caught sight of the car and placed a restraining hand on the little girl"s shoulder. She stopped in her tracks, then waited as her father continued forward, a tattered wool scarf wrapped loosely around his mouth and nose, a knit cap pulled over his ears, his eyes leveled on us as if he were taking aim.
""Morning, Carl," I said as I pulled up beside him.
He jerked the scarf below his chin and tucked it there. His lips were blue and trembling, his cheeks shadowed with stubble. ""Morning."
"Where you headed?"
"To the shed." His head slumped forward, ma.s.sive as a stone. "Me and my girl"s living there. It"s got a wood stove in it."
"I could take you to it."
Hendricks looked past me to where Dora sat, staring straight ahead. "No," he said as he looked at me again. "I guess I"ll be on my way." He nodded once, then stepped back from the car and began to trudge down the road again, motioning Molly to follow along.
I pressed the accelerator. Molly had begun walking again, but she stopped as we drew near. Her eyes were fixed on Dora imploringly, reaching for her like two small hands.
Within an instant, I"d swept by, but in the rearview mirror I could see Carl Hendricks as he trudged down the road, ponderous, hunched. Molly trailed behind him, head down, leaving small gray footprints in the snow.
When I turned back to Dora, I saw, to my surprise, that she was deeply shaken, like a child who"d seen something terrible but knew no way to describe it.