Part 2 (1/2)

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.”

But 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 n.o.body 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.

”That time of night, you'd expect someone to meet a woman alone,” Luther said. ”n.o.body did though.”

A rider stepped up to the counter, middle-aged, a ragged hat pulled low across his brow. He asked for a ticket to Rockport.

”Be right with you, Cal,” Luther told me, then went about the business of selling the man a ticket.

I stepped aside and waited.

A loudspeaker called the pa.s.sengers to board the Portland bus. People began getting up, gathering their bundles. Young and old, they heaved duffel bags or struggled with suitcases, trunks, battered cardboard boxes wrapped with twine. Only in the narrowest sense, it seemed to me, could they know where they were going.

”She came up to the window,” Luther said once he'd given the man his ticket and his change. ”Wanted to know where the nearest hotel was. 'Out the front,' I told her, like I always tell anybody that asks that question. 'Then turn left.'”

I watched as she drifted past the old red Coca-Cola machine, then beneath the station clock. The sound of her footsteps beat softly in my mind.

”Didn't say another word,” Luther added. ”Just headed for the door.”

A breeze rushed forward across the station's speckled linoleum floor, swept over her plain black shoes, then curled up the opposite wall to finger the tattered pages of an old drugstore calendar.

”Thick fog that night.” Luther shook his head. ”Doubt she could have seen the lights at the hotel. But she headed for it anyway.”

I saw her step resolutely into the fog, saw her as Luther had that first evening in Port Alma, a woman briefly glimpsed, then instantly enshrouded.

”Never saw her again,” Luther added.

Each time I closed my eyes, I saw her.

”Didn't make a lasting impression.”

For a moment she stood motionless at the curb. Then, without warning, she spun around to face me, her eyes flaring, p.r.o.nouncing their grim warning, Go back.

It was all I could do not to answer her aloud, I can't.

And so I followed Dora's route down Main Street to the Port Alma Hotel. A light snow had begun to fall. It reminded me of something my father had once said, that if life worked like the weather, we'd get some warning of the storm ahead. True enough, perhaps, but at the same time it struck me that my brother had wanted no such predictability. Billy had always preferred, no matter what the cost, a life of wonder or surprise. ”I'd rather each day hit me like a stone,” he'd once said. At that moment, I'd draped my arm over his shoulders, hugged him close, muttering ”William the Lion-Hearted,” and with those words felt the one sure thing I knew in life: that even if I lived alone forever, wifeless, childless, there would always be at least one person I truly loved.

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 pa.s.sed over again and again, abandoned at altars and in moonlit gardens, the one he wanted rus.h.i.+ng 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, s.h.i.+ny 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 acc.u.mulate: 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.h.i.+ning 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.”