Part 26 (2/2)

Yes.

You didn't see him again until several hours later?

When I found him.

Already dead.

In my memory, I saw my brother's eyes peer into mine, heard his anguished question once again: Cal?

Cal? He was already dead when you found him?

Yes. Already dead.

I remembered that with my final answer, Hap's face had taken on a deep sympathy for what I'd been through, the deep, enduring nature of my loss.

The Shay house was little different from the few others I'd pa.s.sed on my way to it, a log mountain cabin with a roof of corrugated tin. A stone well stood near the middle of the yard, covered with a sheet of plywood, a wooden bucket dangling from a length of thick gray rope. To the left, there was a small stable and corral, both apparently empty, and a sagging storage shed. A battered saddle had been flung over one of the fence rails, along with a pair of reins and a bridle.

The air was crisp and clean, but I could feel only the heaviness of things, the weariness of my long search, all that had conspired to bring me so far from home.

I walked toward the house, then stopped as the door suddenly opened and a man stepped onto the porch. He wore a flannel s.h.i.+rt and dark blue pants. His boots were dusty but not caked with mud, and I could see where he'd sc.r.a.ped them against the steps before going inside. A long mane of gleaming white hair hung about his shoulders. It gave him an even more formidable and commanding look, like a patriarch in some Old Testament story.

”Can I help you, mister?” he said.

”My name's Chase.” Dora's face rose in my mind, cupped in my hands. ”I've come to see your daughter.”

”My daughter?” He looked at me sternly.

”Catherine,” I said. ”Catherine Shay.”

He remained silent, wary, one animal watching another approach his burrow. ”Catherine isn't seeing people,” he said.

”She'll see me,” I told him.

He stepped to the edge of the porch, tall, powerful, ready to do anything to protect his daughter. ”Why? Is Catherine expecting you?”

I couldn't be sure. Perhaps, even as she'd fled, Dora had known I would follow her, track her down. And so I said, ”I don't know. Maybe she is.”

”Why do you want to see her?” Shay asked.

How could I answer such a question? Instead, I relied on my usual device, put on my professional disguise. ”I'm from the district attorney's office,” I said.

Shay seemed suddenly deflated. He looked at me resignedly, as if he'd been expecting such a visit. I thought of Sheriff Vernon's remark: She's had some run-ins with the law.

”What did she do?” Shay asked. ”Did she steal something?”

I didn't answer, merely looked at him steadily.

”Whatever it is, I'll pay it,” he a.s.sured me. ”Every cent. I always have. You can ask anyone. I've always made good on whatever she did.” He stepped off the porch, coming toward me slowly, now oddly at my command, asking that I go gently on his daughter. ”She's not responsible, Mr. Chase. It started after what happened to her.” He fell silent, unwilling to go further, to describe once again a young girl crouched in the darkness, watching a beam of yellow light crawl toward her, the face that had peered at her from behind that light, then bent forward, knife in hand.

”Do you know what happened to her?” he asked.

”Yes.”

”Well, that's when it started,” Shay said. ”People react this way sometimes. That's what the doctors told me. Something happens to them and they start doing things they'd never done before. Bad things. Stealing and--”

”It's not about money,” I told him.

”What, then? What is it about?”

Suddenly all the weeks that had pa.s.sed since the moment of my brother's death vanished. I felt my foot press down upon the accelerator, heard the rhythmic sweep of the winds.h.i.+eld wipers, the mad beating of the rain as I raced toward Dora's house, so desperate and driven that everything seemed to blur around me, the town in which I had been born, the hills, the sea, all of it dissolving into an insubstantial haze, my only thought, on that last day, to get to Dora before Billy did, claim her for myself.

”What did Catherine do?” Shay asked.

Her cottage swung into view, and there it was, sitting in the flooded driveway, Billy's car, lashed by wind, leaves scattered across the roof and hood. He'd acted impulsively, as I realized instantly, unable to wait until the next day, or for the weather to clear, for Fox Creek and the perfect place to speak to her. He'd determined to win her then, at that very moment. I imagined him before her, making his case, so pure and n.o.ble at that moment in his life that he could hardly be rejected, a knight upon bent knee before his lady, awaiting the slow fall of her white handkerchief.

”What did Catherine do that you've come all this way?”

The door had creaked open as I'd stepped inside the cottage, a dim light was.h.i.+ng over everything, so that I'd seen nothing, heard only the rain pounding everywhere, and so had called her name, Dora.

”She ran away,” I told Shay. I saw her rus.h.i.+ng through the undergrowth, toward the road where Henry Mason would ultimately see her, drenched and trembling, offer her a lift, take her to the bus station in Port Alma.

Shay looked at me demandingly. ”What's this about?”

”A murder,” I said.

The gravity of the word seemed to strike him like a stone. ”A murder? Catherine couldn't have been involved in a murder.”

A blade glinted in my mind. My voice turned steely. ”Let her tell me that.”

He nodded firmly, with a father's faith that his daughter was free of guilt, couldn't possibly have done whatever she was charged with, love like a blindfold wrapped around the eyes. ”All right,” he said. ”I will.”

I followed him around the house to where I saw her sitting on a gray stone, facing the mountain lake that stretched before her, mirroring the sky.

”Catherine,” Shay called loudly as we moved toward her across a carpet of thick green gra.s.s.

She stirred, began to turn, her long, blond hair s.h.i.+mmering in the sunlight.

”She still has awful nightmares,” Shay told me as we closed in upon her. ”Not about the man though. Always about that girl. The one who held her down.”

I could see Catherine's face now, the quizzical look she offered me, the utter lack of recognition, staring at a man who walked beside her father, a man she'd never seen before.

”It's the green eyes she remembers,” Shay added. ”How dead they looked.”

I stopped, saw those eyes in the shadows of her cottage, then felt the knife slide between my own ribs, not my brother's.

”Sometimes I think it was that girl Catherine was running from more than she was running from Cash.”

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