Places in the Dark Read Online Free PDF

care of Ed Dillard. You know about that, I guess.”
    I nodded, saw Dora’s fingers open the note, imagined what Ruth had written inside:
Elderly gentleman needs housekeeper. 210 Maple Lane.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Don’t know anything else about her,” Preston said.
    “Did she get any mail while she was here?”
    “Never noticed any. She just came and went, you know.” He shrugged. “I wish I had more to offer you, Cal.”
    I thanked him and walked out of the hotel, swung to the right and made my way to the bay. The sidewalk was slippery with snow, people grabbing anything they could find to steady themselves, the old ones locked in a dreadful fear of falling, children laughing heedlessly at the same icy peril. A cold front was sweeping down from Canada, bringing with it a blinding wall of white. Everything seemed to be waiting for it. The bay lay flat, like someone under fire. The seabirds hunkered down in their stone aeries. At the far end of the pier an old gull preened itself silently, raking its long beak across raised wings, while just below my feet cold water swirledat the wooden pylons with little gulping sounds, desperate and gasping, like a drowning child.
    I thought of all the times Billy and I had raced along this pier, then saw him lying faceup on the floor, the roses he’d brought her scattered all around him, their petals sticky with his blood. A wave of loathing swept over me, deep and pure, carried on her name, the way it had fallen, soft and needful, from my brother’s lips,
Dora.
    If the love he’d dreamed of came to me now, I thought, it would hit like water on a granite slab.
    T he great timbers of the north woods rose all around me as I drove along Bluefish Road. Several miles outside town, I passed the Hooverville that had sprung up near the rail lines and now spread almost to the road. It was a shantytown of clapboard structures, unsteady lean-tos plugged with cardboard and newspaper, roofs slapped together using scraps of rusty tin and jagged strips of discarded asphalt shingles. A thick smoke hung over it, dense and acrid, as if blown in from some vast pit that smoldered eternally at the heart of things. Lean, hungry men shambled beneath the smoke or gathered beside large metal drums, feeding slats into a crackling fire. They had the baffled look of the dispossessed, like people after a storm, shocked that such destruction could have swept down upon them so abruptly, taken them unawares, left them with nothing.
    I imagined Dora crouched among them, passing as a man, with soot on her face and dust in her hair, careful to keep herself apart, give no sense of her true identity, a figure fixed forever in a web of grim deceit.
    The shoe factory sat on a muddy lot scraped out of the surrounding hillside. A rutted gravel road curvedinto a parking lot where a few cars huddled together, rusty and dilapidated, like old mules in a broken-down corral. I recognized Claire Pendergast’s Ford from two years before, when I’d prosecuted her on a bad-check charge. She’d made restitution and apologized to all concerned, but I’d always expected her to do it again. Claire was like a lot of the people who’d recently drifted down to Port Alma from the hills, not so much malicious as simply unable to think things through.
    She didn’t seem apprehensive when I spotted her on the factory floor and motioned her over to me. She asked a fellow worker to take her place stamping shoe soles out of wide red sheets of rubber, then led me to the room where the workers took their breaks. It had whitewashed cinder-block walls and a cold cement floor. A few tables with spindly legs and wooden tops carved with initials were scattered here and there. In one corner, a battered tin coffeepot rested on a black potbellied stove, a broken wicker basket on an unpainted stool beside it. A hand-lettered sign had been taped to the wall above the basket:
We trust you. Coffee 5 Cents.
No pictures adorned the walls except for a