Free Places in the Dark by Thomas H. Cook Page B

she’d given no explanation as to why she was leaving town. From the look on her face, he’d gotten the idea that something had happened, the sudden illness of a relative, perhaps, or some other distressing news that had abruptly called her away. He’d asked her where she was going. She’d replied only, “Away for a while,” so that Henry had fully expected her to return to Port Alma in a few days, had not in the least guessed that she was “on the run.” He’d dropped her off at the bus station at “somewhere around three” in the afternoon, he told Pritchart, and had then driven directly home.
    According to Sheila Beacham, who’d sold her the ticket, Dora had looked nervous and upset when she bought her ticket to Portland. She’d gone directly to her bus, then taken a seat at the very rear.
    After that, she had simply vanished.
    And so, during the next few days, I’d searched Dora’s house again and again, gone through closets, the small attic, even dug through the ashes in her fireplace and peered up its blackened chimney, looking everywhere for some sign of where she’d fled. I’d found only the battered anthology of English verse she’d left behind. The label inside read
Ex Libris, Lorenzo Clay, Carmel, California
, a clue, perhaps, to where she’d once been, but not to where she’d gone.
    “I know you want her caught fast, Cal,” Sheriff Pritchart said the afternoon he summoned me to his office.
    He’d found out that I was conducting my own investigation and wanted to stop me, he said, before I “got into trouble.”
    “It’s up to other people to find Dora March,” T.R. told me. “Not you, Cal. That’s not your job at all.”
    He leaned against the gun cabinet in his office, a row of rifles propped on their stocks behind the glass door. A steel chain was threaded through each trigger guard, then locked to an eyebolt in the wooden frame.
    “You understand?”
    When I gave no answer, he watched me silently, then said, “You look like hell, Cal.” He noticed me studying the lock on the gun case, the ravaged look in my eyes. “I wish William had just steered completely clear of Dora,” he added.
    An earlier judgment reared its head,
Death follows her.
    “But he just couldn’t keep away from her, I guess,” T.R. said wearily.
    “He loved her,” I told him in a matter-of-fact tone that gave no hint of the boiling wave I rode.
    “It cost him his life.”
    That seemed the most bitter of all conclusions, that Billy had died for love. I recalled the joy and peace that had come over him during the last hours of his life. It was as if he’d finally solved the great riddle of his existence, found in Dora the one key that unlocked him.
    “Some money too, I guess.”
    T.R. was referring to the embezzlement, paltry sums stolen from petty cash, fraudulent notes made in Dora’s hand.
    “He didn’t care about that,” I said. “William didn’t care that Dora was a thief?” T.R. shook his head. “He was just going to forget about that?”
    “He would have done anything for her,” I said quietly. “There was something about her that—” I stopped, recalling the touch of her hand.
    T.R. looked at me cautiously, like a hunter who’d just spotted bear prints in the snow. “Something about her that what?”
    “That made my brother want to live.”
    T.R. shook his head, again unwilling to be diverted by such notions, and returned to the reason he’d called me to his office. “I know you’ve been talking to people, Cal. Joe Fletcher. Art Brady. Others.”
    I could feel the noose tightening. T.R. would soon go the rounds, instruct the good citizens of Port Alma to keep their mouths shut if I should happen by, asking questions about Dora March.
    “What would you do if you found her?” he asked.
    I gave him the minimum, a shrug.
    “That’s not a good enough answer, Cal.”
    “It’s the only one I have, T.R.”
    “Well, before you burst through Dora’s door, you ought to give one