Part 5 (1/2)

”As you know, as a legal doc.u.ment 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.

”Did she?” I asked. ”Take something from his house?”

”Yes,” Brady said. ”A little porcelain figure. Ed had scores of them. She took one of a little girl with long, blond hair.”

It rose into my mind exactly as I'd seen it, illuminated by a single candle. ”Naked. Sitting on a rock,” I said. ”With her legs drawn up.”

”So you've seen it?”

”Yes.”

”It wasn't much of anything. Just a little china figure. Cheap, not worth much. But that's the one she chose.”

It had rested on the bureau in her bedroom, and other than her clothes and the leather suitcase she'd packed them in, she'd taken nothing else from the cottage on the day she fled.

”She never asked for anything else?”

”Nothing,” Brady said. ”I always got the feeling that Dora didn't want very much from life.”

In my mind, I saw her on the bank of Fox Creek, bending over to dip her fingers in the swirling water, a strange delight in her eyes, small and fierce and frail, like something lifted on the tiniest wings.

”And I certainly never thought she was the sort of woman who'd take advantage of an old man.” Brady considered his next words carefully. ”I have some evidence of that.”

”Evidence of what?”

”That she cared for Ed. That it wasn't just some sort of act.” He leaned back in his chair. ”One evening, I dropped by Ed's house just after work. This was a few days before he died. He was sitting in the front parlor, in his wheelchair, dressed up, like he was going to church or a wedding. He even had a tie on. Looked handsome.” He'd chosen the wrong word, and corrected himself. ”Well, not handsome. You couldn't look handsome in Ed's condition. But he looked calm. Not mad at the world, the way he usually did.”

When he arrived, Brady told me, Dora had been seated on a chair beside Mr. Dillard, a book open in her lap.

”After a while, she went to the kitchen and brought out a cake she'd made. She'd cut Ed's piece into small squares.” He studied me closely, seemingly determined to prove his point. ”And she got down on her knees, Cal. She got down on her knees and fed cake to that pitiful old man.” He waited for the image to sink in, then added, ”She was good to Ed. That's my point, of course. Very good to him. Because she cared about him. Not to get something for herself. And she read to him hour upon hour.”

I remembered her in my study, her face in the firelight, the way her hands caressed the book she'd taken from the shelf, then later, in her cottage, the book I'd found open on the small table by the window, the stark lines she'd underscored.

Brady gave his final word on the subject. ”Dora was good to Ed, Cal. From the moment she started working for him until the night he died.”

The night he died.

I remembered that night well, the sound of a Christmas bell somewhere as I knocked at the door and waited, then a hand parting the white lace curtains, after that a woman's face, beautiful and still, her green eyes peering catlike from the darkened house.

Chapter Six.

Ed Dillard's house was set far back from Maple Street. It was the only one that bore no sign of the Christmas holidays, no candles in the windows, no gleaming tree, nor any obvious sign that the house was occupied at all.

Then I saw a woman in a second-floor window, her arms held stiffly at her sides so that she looked as if she'd been placed there, like one of those stone figures that the ancients used to guard the portals of their souls.

She'd come downstairs by the time I reached the door. When she parted the curtains, I saw only her face, white and luminous, a cameo pinned to black velvet. Then she opened the door and a slant of light fell over her, slicing her in two, casting her eyes in deep shadow but bathing everything else in a treacherous yellow light.

”Sheriff Pritchart said you called,” I explained. ”He's got a pretty bad cold, and his deputy's gone to Portland. So he asked me to come over.” I took off my hat. ”Cal Chase. I work in the district attorney's office.”

She stepped back. ”Please come in,” she said.

I had seen Dora before, on that morning as she pa.s.sed by Ollie's Barber Shop. But I'd never seen her close up. Now I noticed that she'd cut her hair short and without regard to style. I noticed other things as well. That her skirt fell to her ankles, her sleeves to her wrists, as if her body were a thing she sought utterly to conceal.

”Mr. Dillard is upstairs,” she said.

He lay in his bed, eyes closed, a blanket drawn over him and tucked just beneath his chin. The pillow his head rested upon looked newly fluffed, the case crisp and white. A water gla.s.s rested in a silver tray on a table beside his bed, along with a blue china cup, half filled with tea. A white candle burned fitfully in a crystal holder; a single red rose, fresh and impossibly fragrant, had been placed in the small vase that stood beside it.

I glanced at the rocking chair on the other side of the bed. A book lay upturned on its seat, a pair of gold-rimmed gla.s.ses beside it. The House of the Seven Gables. I'd read it in high school, remembered well how the old man had died, his eyes wide, frantic, glaring, his mouth spitting blood.

By all appearances Ed Dillard had died the way people wanted to, peacefully in his sleep. I doubted that he'd actually gone that way, of course. I'd had enough experience with death by then to know that people died like old cars, shaking and clattering, spewing fluids, gases. I suddenly remembered my mother as I'd found her in the cottage, alive but barely, sprawled across the floor, her nightgown sticky with sweat and urine. My old anger leaped up in me again, like a cat in wait. When I glanced toward Dora, I saw something move across her features, swift as a shadow. I felt that she'd seen the very image that had darted through my mind, had sensed how quickly grief turned to rage in me.

”Mr. Dillard seems to have gone peacefully,” I said as I pulled out my notebook. ”I just have to ask a few questions,” I explained.

She gave a quick nod.

”Were you with Mr. Dillard when he died?”

”Yes.”

”Do you remember about what time he pa.s.sed away?”

”Shortly after nine o'clock.”

”And he died right here? In his bed?”

”Yes.”

”Has anybody been in the room since then?”

”No.”

”Has he been moved?”

”I washed him and changed his clothes. Should I not have done that?”

”No, no, that's fine,” I a.s.sured her. ”Nothing to worry about.” I glanced at my notebook, writing nothing. ”Just for the record, what was your relations.h.i.+p to Mr. Dillard?”

”I was his housekeeper.”