Places in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page B

photograph of the factory hung in a plastic frame, its original workers, grinning young men in flannel pants and checkered shirts, grinning girls in floral dresses. The date said October 17, 1922.
    “The Polasky sisters are still working here.” Claire pointed to two of the girls in the photograph, both with bobbed hair, smiling brightly at the camera, relieved to be employed. “Can you imagine that? Stuck in this crummy place for fifteen years.”
    “I’m trying to find Dora March,” I said.
    She dropped a nickel into the wicker basket and poured a cup of coffee. Black. “I guess Mr. Forbesmentioned me.” She took the coffee and led me to a table in the corner. “So, what’d he have to say?”
    “That you might remember Dora better than he did.”
    She sipped her coffee. Steam rose from it and fogged the bottom third of her glasses. “That’s possible,” she said. She yanked a pack of cigarettes from her blouse, thumped one out, seized it with her lips, then offered the pack to me.
    I shook my head.
    “You don’t say much, do you?” Claire asked. “Tall, silent type, I guess.” She took a long draw and eased back in her chair. “Well, that’s probably better. The ones that talk don’t end up saying much.”
    She was probably in her early forties but looked older. Her hair was brown with curling wisps of gray, her skin as parched and dry as the tobacco in her cigarette. Bony shoulders poked from her dress like sticks in a pillowcase.
    “When I went into her room, I noticed it right away,” she began. “At first I thought Preston must have given me the wrong room number, that no one had been in this one. Then I noticed that the chair was pulled up to the window. I always put the chair at the other side of the room. So I knew that whoever had stayed in the room that night had brought it over to the window.” She brushed a wrinkle from her dress, leaving two equally unsightly ones untouched. “That was the only thing she did, far as I could tell. Just move that one chair. Didn’t use the bed at all. The bedspread was just like I’d left it the day before. Tucked under the way I tuck it. So I knew the bed hadn’t been slept in and made up by whoever took the room. It just plain hadn’t been slept in. Pretty strange, don’t you think?”
    “Did you see anything in the room?” I asked. “Mail. A newspaper.”
    Claire used her little finger to scrape a speck of tobacco from the corner of her mouth. “It’s been over a year, Mr. Chase. Even if I’d seen something like that, I would have forgotten it by now.”
    “Anything at all.”
    She worked her mind a few seconds. I pictured it as a stamping machine, unoiled and poorly maintained, the cogs grinding slowly, producing very little.
    “Fact is,” she said finally, shaking her head. “Fact is, in that job, if you don’t find something disgusting in a room, you don’t much notice what you find.”
    “Did you ever talk to her?”
    “Twice, I think it was,” Claire answered. She took a hard drag on the cigarette. A patchy burst of smoke once more exploded from her lips. I could tell her mind had caught the groove, was now spinning more smoothly. “She come down the stairs and over to the desk. She says, ‘Should I pay now?’ You know, like a person who’d never stayed in a hotel before, didn’t know how the bill was paid, or when. I told her there was two ways to do it. Weekly or daily. A little was knocked off on the weekly, but you had to pay it in advance. I think she took the weekly, but I can’t be sure.”
    “And the second time?”
    “The second time was a day or two later,” Claire replied. “Preston wanted me to get some fresh eggs over at Madison’s. On the way, I passed the park and there she was, sitting on a bench. She had glasses on, reading the paper. She took them off when she saw me coming over to her.”
    I imagined Dora facing Main Street, the granite Revolutionary War Monument to her left, the old bandshell to