Places in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

had come from Dora’s cottage near the bay, seen the bloody kitchen knife on the floorbeside 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 shining 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.”
    She’d signed the register but left the rest of the card blank. Her signature was quite small and oddly fractured, the name broken into fragments, like something smashed with a hammer, a script so different from any other I’d ever seen that when Henry Mason had looked up, shocked and amazed, asked his question,
Could it be Dora?
, my mind had instantly given an answer I could not bring myself to say,
Yes.
    “I offered to take her bag,” Preston said, “but shedidn’t want that. Looked real skittish. Like she thought I might do something to her.”
    “Do what?”
    “Maybe touch her in the wrong way, you know.
    Skittish like that.”
    I wondered if that thought had actually occurred to Preston. His wife, Mabel, had been dying for weeks by then, and terrible odors were said to come from the room where she lay. Maybe the sight of a young woman, fresh, beautiful, perhaps even vulnerable, had summoned something from its dank cave, Dora once again the object of a grim, relentless need.
    “Anyway, I kept my distance after that.” Preston added. “Didn’t say another word. Just gave her the key. She went up to Room Seventeen, and that was that.”
    I glanced toward the stairs. A woman was making her way up them. She was dressed in a dark blue coat, drab and inelegant. The hotel’s red plastic key holder dangled from her left hand.
    I turned back to Preston. “Did Dora come down again that evening?”
    “Not that I noticed,” Preston replied. “But Claire Pendergast might be able to help you. She was making up the rooms back then. And she’s nosy. It’s one of the reasons I let her go. Couldn’t keep her mouth shut about the guests, you know. She works at the shoe factory now.” He hit the plunger of a small chromed bell and Sammy Hokenberry stepped up. He was wearing a navy blue jacket, military style, with frayed gold epaulets. It was at least a size too big for him, so that Sammy looked like a battlefield scavenger, the jacket something he’d stripped off the corpse of a braver man.
    Preston handed him a package wrapped in plain brown paper. “Take this to Mr. Stimson.”
    Sammy took the package and sailed across the lobby to where Mr. Stimson sat playing checkers with himself, twisting the board around with each new move.
    “And nobody came to visit her that night?” I asked Preston.
    He shook his head. “Nobody could have gotten in without me knowing it.”
    “How about later? Did anyone ever come around asking for her?”
    “Just Ruth Potter. With that note she left. About the job she was offering. Someone to take