Part 9 (1/2)

And yet, in some way, perhaps I should have sensed that the ground was already trembling beneath my brother's feet, should have seen at least that much in the look on my father's face as he and I sat in his front parlor three days later, playing our weekly game of chess.

”I spoke to William yesterday,” he told me, reaching for a p.a.w.n, then drawing back, taking a bishop instead. ”He just came by for a chat, but the subject turned somewhat serious.” My father was in his late seventies, and in old age, liked to think of himself as deeply sagacious, the sort of man a son would go to for advice, though he clearly understood that for any real guidance, Billy would certainly turn to his mother.

”So, what'd Billy have to say?” I asked idly, more intent upon plotting my strategy, hoping for checkmate within five moves.

He sat back, twined his fingers together. ”He was asking about children.”

”What was he saying about children?”

”Just general things,” my father answered. ”Having them. Raising them.” He placed his hands firmly on the armrests, a pose he a.s.sociated, I think, with statues of great men. ”He seemed extremely intense, Cal.”

I continued to study the board. ”Billy's always intense, Dad.”

”But what's got him suddenly thinking about children?”

”True love,” I answered with a cynical smile.

”That never did run smooth,” my father said.

I expected him to add some grave remark, a.s.sume the worldly tone he often took with me, convinced of how alike we were, he and I, how different from Billy and my mother, we the truly knowing ones, steeped in life's unflattering realities, they forever pursuing golden shards from the Holy Grail. But instead, he remained silent for a moment, then told a story I'd never heard before.

”It certainly didn't run smooth for your mother and me,” he began. He shook his head at the difficult life they'd lived together. ”Not even during the courts.h.i.+p.”

”That's supposed to be the best time, isn't it?” I asked, though with little actual interest, my attention on the board, where I had a knight in peril.

”Supposed to be,” my father replied. ”I guess it is for most couples.”

I reached for my queen. ”But not for you?”

”No, not for me. Your mother never made it easy.” He smiled softly. ”But she was such a jewel, Cal. No one else like her. No one in the world. I didn't want to let her go. But what could I do? From the way she acted, I couldn't see that she gave a d.a.m.n whether I came or went. So I finally told her that I couldn't go on with her the way it was. I said, 'Mary, I guess it has to come to an end with us.'”

I lowered the queen to the board.

”I used practically those very words,” my father went on. ”While we were walking along Fox Creek, not that far from where she went to live. I said, 'Mary, it's time for us to part.'”

”What'd she say?”

”Nothing,” my father answered. ”She just looked at me. Like I was a mannequin in a store. Finally, we walked over to my buggy and I drove her home. Neither one of us said anything all the way. When I pulled up to her house, I didn't even walk her to the door. I just said, 'Well, good-bye, Mary.' And she said, 'Good-bye, Walter,' and got out of the buggy. She said it almost cheerily. Like I was a cousin, or just someone who'd dropped by and taken her for a buggy ride. She walked straight to her house. Didn't so much as glance back at me.”

A terrible emptiness had swept over him after that, my father told me, a misery like none he'd ever known. ”You've never felt it, Cal,” he said a.s.suredly, equally convinced that I never would, certain that not even the sharpest arrow could pierce me as deeply as it had once unexpectedly pierced him. ”Mary was everything. And she was gone.”

Or so he'd thought. Until he came home from the Sentinel one afternoon, still heartsick, to find a note slipped beneath his door, folded into a white envelope that bore no name, no address.

”I thought it was one of those anonymous tips I got about once a year,” my father told me. ”Usually somebody informing on a local politician or shopkeeper.”

But it had been from her.

Four lines.

Before your love be all rescinded,

Or strikes the hour when we part,

Can you not break me till I'm mended?

Crack the will of my unwilling heart?

”There's nothing like loneliness, Cal,” my father said, ”to bring you to your knees.”

I knew then what he'd been getting at all along. ”Do you think Billy's that lonely, Dad?”

”Not anymore.” His eyes fell toward the queen I'd placed so perilously near his last remaining knight. ”Not anymore,” he repeated softly. ”Who is she, Cal?”

I told him her name and the few things I knew about her, but left out the fact that only a couple of days earlier I'd sent Jack Stout on a mission to find out more about Dora March. Even so, my father appeared quite satisfied by what he'd learned from me. He seemed eager to meet Dora, perhaps even half convinced that my mother had been right all along, that for such a one as Billy, there could be but one true love.

The next day I thought only infrequently of either my brother or Dora. There was plenty of work to do, sorting through the cases Hap had a.s.signed me, deciding what prosecutions should be brought, how they might best be conducted.

Night was closing in by the time I pushed aside my paperwork and left for home. Hap had long since departed, but others were afoot on the streets of Port Alma, mostly closing up their shops, heading home.

A sea fog had moved in an hour or so before, and the moon was little more than a smudged light behind a bank of clouds. The metal sign at Madison's General Store creaked in the breeze that swept in from the bay, and far away, a dog briefly sounded a lonely, hollow wail, then fell silent. Beyond that, nothing save the crunch of my boots on the hard-packed snow.

I headed past the grocery and the hotel, nodding to the neighbors I glimpsed through their lighted windows, then moved on along the edge of the town's small park, its wooden benches piled with snow. Through the haze, I could scarcely see the old wharves that rose on the other side of the park. Only the great revolving light at the top of MacAndrews Island made any dent in the fog, its white beam circling in from the sea, flas.h.i.+ng briefly on the great gray stones of the jetty, finally running along the slender cement lip of the seawall.

That was when I saw her, a woman standing at the far edge of the park, poised at the verge of the wall. She was facing the ocean, and in my brief glimpse of her before the light swept on again, she seemed to be waiting for something or someone to reach out from its vast depths.

I stopped and waited as the light made its slow circle. When it returned, I saw her once again. Then darkness swallowed her as the light moved on. I waited, watched, but when the light made its third circle, crawling along the seawall, she was gone. The place where she'd stood was empty, the park and the jetty both deserted, with nothing moving anywhere, nor any sound, save for the distant surge of the sea.

I started homeward again, tugging my collar up against the rising wind. I'd made it nearly to my car when I saw the woman emerge briskly from the shrouded alleyway that led from Main Street to the wharves. She swung swiftly to the right, like a creature on the run. She didn't see me, and in the fog I'm not sure I would ever have guessed who she was. For she seemed very nearly carved out of that same roiling density, her long coat blending with it perfectly, so that nothing impeded my sense of her having been formed out of the smoky cloud that surrounded her, save for the flicking tongue of my brother's dark red scarf.

Chapter Ten.

The telephone rang just as I stepped into my office the next morning.

It was Billy.

”There's something you need to know,” he said.

I was quite certain that this ”something” I needed to know had to do with Dora March. But I was wrong.