Evidence of Blood (9 page)

Kinley leaned forward slightly. “What did you take, Lois?”

Lois hesitated a moment. “I don’t want you snooping into Ray’s life,” she said. “I have good reasons for that, believe me. Just don’t do it. It won’t help Ray, and it certainly won’t help Serena.”

“What files, Lois?” Kinley demanded evenly. “I’m not doing this for the fun of it. If there’s no reason for me to stay in Sequoyah, believe me, I’ll be out of here tomorrow.”

She looked at him snidely. “Still too good for it, huh, Jack?”

Kinley said nothing.

“That’s what Ray thought, you know,” she added. “That you were too good for it.”

“Let’s just say, I’ll go as soon as I can,” Kinley told her.

Kinley’s last words seemed to assure rather than irritate her, and Kinley watched, astonished, as she calmly sat down in the large wooden rocker opposite the sofa.

“Look, Jack, Serena worshipped Ray,” she said. “Absolutely worshipped him. I don’t want anything to ruin the way she always thought about him.”

“She said they’d grown apart during the last month or so,” Kinley said. “That’s one of the things that’s bothering her.”

Lois nodded. “Yes, I know.”

“She needs to know why.”

Lois looked at him imploringly. “She can’t ever be allowed to know that, Jack.”

“Do you know why?”

“Yes, I do,” Lois answered. “It’s the same reason I want you to go home and let this whole thing drop.”

“What is it?”

“Serena’s precious, oh-so-perfect father was having a love affair, Jack,” Lois said. “It’s what brought on the divorce a few months ago. We never told Serena. Ray really insisted on that. He was willing to give up everything for that.” She shrugged. “Not that the marriage was ever such a great thing. It wasn’t. But I loved him. He was a complicated man. I always knew that. But considering the pickings around here, Ray was the best thing around.” She shook her head. “Anyway, when I found out he was dead, I came here and quickly snatched the files that might have had any reference to her, any letters, notes, anything.” She smiled sadly. “Ray was such a pack rat, I knew he’d keep anything she ever gave him, and that he’d probably file it under her name, so I took all the files that had her initials in them.”

“Which were?”

“Well, her full name is Sarah Dora Overton,” Lois said matter-of-factly. “So those were the files I took.”

“S, D and O,” Kinley repeated.

“That’s right,” Lois said. She smiled grimly. “But, as it turned out, there was nothing about her in any of them.
In the S file there was nothing but just old pictures of the town. Sequoyah, I mean. Ray fancied himself a sort of town historian, you know.”

Kinley nodded.

“And the O, that was just a bunch of newspaper clippings.”

“What about D?” Kinley asked.

Lois shrugged. “That one was empty.”

Kinley nodded. “So there was nothing about this woman in any of the files?”

“No.”

“So where is it?” Kinley asked. “The stuff about her?”

For a moment, Lois appeared off-balance, her own doubts rising, despite all her efforts to suppress them. Then her old resolve once again asserted itself, and her face grew very solemn. “I don’t know, Jack,” she began. “And I don’t want to know.” She glared at him determinedly. “It’s enough that they’re not here for Serena to find out about it all. And if you keep this up, this looking into Ray’s death, you’ll probably find out where his precious little love notes are, and when you do, Serena will find out about everything, too.” She leaned toward him, her face softening almost to a look of pleading. “Please, don’t do that, Jack,” she said. “Serena thinks her father was a perfect man. Let her think it.”

“Where does she live, Overton?”

Lois hesitated.

“It’s easy to find out, Lois,” Kinley told her.

Lois stared at him silently.

“Look, maybe she can put it all to rest,” Kinley told her. “Maybe she can tell me where everything is. It’s even possible that he’d gone down to the canyon to meet her. If she can clear a few things up, then I can do the same for Serena.”

Lois still appeared doubtful. “Would you be that careful?” she asked.

“I’m not here to destroy a father’s reputation,” Kinley said firmly. “Particularly Ray’s.”

“All right,” Lois said. “She doesn’t live in Sequoyah. She lives up on the mountain. At the end of that same road where the cemetery is, the one where Ray’s buried.”

Kinley recalled the previous night when he’d been at Ray’s grave, and his mind immediately did its miraculous trick of providing him with a fully detailed photograph. He saw the sweep of the cemetery with its crop of short, gray stones, then the wall of dark forest which lay beyond it, and somewhere deep within it, far in the distance, the small yellow light of a farmhouse near the mountain’s rim. “Near the edge,” he said. “She lives near the edge.”

Lois nodded. “In more ways than one,” she said.

The road narrowed after it passed the cemetery, curving sharply toward the mountain’s edge, the undergrowth closing in around the car so that the yellow beams of its headlights seemed to be moving down a long green funnel. The dusty light that filtered through the surrounding trees and brush narrowed as the woods thickened, then suddenly diffused as he neared the black rim of the mountain.

Even from a distance, he could see where the great granite precipice stretched out before him, the night air spilling over it like an ebony waterfall. At the very edge, the road swung abruptly to the left, and he found himself headed down a narrow path which skirted the rim for nearly half a mile. At its end, he saw the small farmhouse he’d glimpsed the night before, wood-framed and unpainted, with a small swing on its slumped front porch.

He brought the car to a halt, shut off the lights and sat motionlessly behind the wheel. If this was the place Ray had come for love, he had chosen it well. It was small and remote, a place where he need fear only the gossip of the birds.

He got out of the car and headed toward the house. He was only halfway to its front steps when a woman stepped out onto the porch.

“I’m Jack Kinley,” he said as he continued forward.

The woman had stopped before reaching the edge of the porch, her body in deep shadow.

“I’m looking for a woman named Sarah Dora Overton,” he added quickly.

“I’m Dora Overton,” the woman said. She stepped forward boldly, and the light from inside the house swept over her. She was very dark, her skin a color he would have called “Moorish” had he envisioned writing about her. Her hair was long, and he could see its reddish tint despite the subdued light.

He offered a quick, edgy smile. “You live quite a ways back.”

The woman nodded crisply. “Always have.”

It was a husky voice, but with a hard, unforgiving edge that reminded him instantly of other voices he’d heard in his work. Mildred Haskell’s, for example, soft, but with a stony undertone, a voice that had made terrible demands:
All right now, boy, turn over on your back
.

As he continued forward, she looked at him piercingly, with eyes that matched the voice, and which probed him openly, like fingertips.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Lois Tindall told me about you,” Kinley began, “and I …”

“Lois Tindall doesn’t know a thing about me,” Dora said sharply.

“Well, she knew you were seeing Ray,” Kinley said as gently as he could, removing any hint of judgment or accusation.

Dora stared at him coldly. “What difference does that make now?”

Kinley remained silent, concentrating on her eyes, black and merciless.

Dora took another step toward him, her whole body now in the light. “I didn’t lie to Ray,” she said firmly, “and I didn’t let him lie to me.”

“I don’t think he would have tried,” Kinley said.

He’d meant it as a compliment, but it hadn’t worked.

Instead, he could see her harden toward him.

“Ray’s dead,” she said flatly, closing the book on the matter.

Kinley remained in place. “I was Ray’s friend,” he said, giving the only credentials he thought she might respect.

“He talked about you sometimes,” she said. “He would write to you, but you never wrote back.”

“He told you that?”

Dora nodded slowly, her eyes growing less hostile. “Anyway, he’s gone.”

Kinley watched silently as she moved to the edge of the porch and leaned against one of its supporting posts. There was something in her presence that seemed too large for the small house. He had known other such presences, but it had always been a looming and gigantic malevolence which had dwarfed the basements, bedrooms and corridors they’d briefly occupied.

“He never mentioned you,” Kinley said. “But then, we hadn’t spoken very often in the last few weeks.”

“He was old-fashioned,” Dora said off-handedly, a casual relaying of information. “He kept things to himself.”

“Yes, he did,” Kinley said softly.

She shifted her eyes to the left and stared out over the edge of the mountain. “You never know for sure what’s going on in someone else.” She returned to Kinley. “Why did you come up here?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Lois doesn’t have to worry about anything,” Dora said. “Serena either. I’m not after anything Ray left behind.”

“I don’t think that’s a matter of concern,” Kinley said, his own words sounding formal to him, a lawyer’s standard line.

“What’s the trouble, then?”

“I guess Serena wants to know a little bit more about Ray,” Kinley said.

“Not from me,” Dora said determinedly. “Ray wanted it private, and that’s how it’s going to stay.”

Kinley looked at her intently. “I guess I want to know a little bit more about him, too.”

Dora thought a moment, as if trying to find exactly the right words. She only spoke when she’d found them. “I told Ray something, and he believed me. No one ever had believed me before.” She smiled, but edgily. “It was a new experience for me.”

“What did you tell him?”

“About my father,” Dora said. “I think that in the end, he wanted to know as much as I did.”

“Know what?”

The smiled opened slightly, as if against her will. “Ray used to say that there are two kinds of people, the ones who can sleep, and the ones who can’t.”

Kinley’s mind replayed its tape of his last meeting with Ray:
Do you sleep well, Kinley?

“Ray had problems sleeping, didn’t he?” he asked.

“Toward the end, I guess he did,” Dora said.

Kinley could feel his little notebook rustle slightly in his jacket pocket, as if it were a small animal rousing itself from sleep. “What was he looking for?”

She thought a moment, her eyes resting on him languidly. “I thought he might have told you.”

“Told me what?”

She shook her head slowly. “I trusted Ray. But I don’t know anything about you.” A thin smile crossed her lips as she continued to study him. “You learn a few things,” she said. “The lessons of the road, like Ray always said.” The smile vanished. “The rest is bullshit.”

He stared at her intently. “What was Ray doing in the canyon?” he asked again.

She glanced back into the house. “He liked it here,” she said, “but he never felt comfortable.”

Kinley shrugged. “It wasn’t home,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It never is.”

She studied him a moment, as if trying to get a grip on some remote element of his character. “Ray said you were smart,” she said. “He said you were a genius.”

Kinley said nothing.

She stepped over to the door and opened it. “You want to come in?”

For a moment, Kinley hesitated, his mind suddenly rushing through all those other moments of hesitation he had studied in his books: little Billy Flynn at Mildred Haskell’s smokehouse door; Wilma Jean Comstock at the edge of the woods; Kelly Pierce staring mutely toward the corridor’s unlighted end. All of them had finally shrugged away their initial apprehensions. Now all of them were dead. Colin Bright had said it best, his gray hair gleaming under the prison lights, “old in his cynicism,” as Kinley had later written, “but still youthful in his malice”:
In the end, they always think, “Not me.”

Kinley felt his foot rise to the bottom step, stop there. “It’s a little late,” he said. “Are you sure?”

Dora remained in place, the door open, a rectangle of light motionless behind it. “Up to you,” she said.

They think of the odds, and they say, “Not me.”

He grasped the rail and pulled himself forward slowly. “All right,” he said. “For a minute.”

She turned, and he followed her inside. The living room was small, its wooden floor covered here and there by a few hoop rugs. A wobbly floor lamp stood between two unmatching dark-blue chairs, but it was an old upright piano that dominated the room.

“My mama’s,” Dora said. “Ray said you could play.”

“A little.”

“Go ahead,” Dora said, almost as if daring him to prove it.

Kinley slid onto the stool and looked at the piece of sheet music that was already in place, then glanced back at Dora. “‘Someday My Prince Will Come,’” he said. “Is this a favorite?”