Read Online Places in the Dark by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online Page A

after work. This was a few days before he died. He was sitting in the front parlor, in his wheelchair, dressed up, like he was going to church or a wedding. He even had a tie on. Looked handsome.” He’d chosen the wrong word, and corrected himself. “Well, not handsome. You couldn’t look handsome in Ed’s condition. But he looked calm. Not mad at the world, the way he usually did.”
    When he arrived, Brady told me, Dora had been seated on a chair beside Mr. Dillard, a book open in her lap.
    “After a while, she went to the kitchen and brought out a cake she’d made. She’d cut Ed’s piece into small squares.” He studied me closely, seemingly determined to prove his point. “And she got down on her knees, Cal. She got down on her knees and fed cake to that pitiful old man.” He waited for the image to sink in, then added, “She was good to Ed. That’s my point, of course. Very good to him. Because she cared about him. Not to get something for herself. And she read to him hour upon hour.”
    I remembered her in my study, her face in the firelight, the way her hands caressed the book she’d taken from the shelf, then later, in her cottage, the book I’d found open on the small table by the window, the stark lines she’d underscored.
    Brady gave his final word on the subject. “Dora was good to Ed, Cal. From the moment she started working for him until the night he died.”
    The night he died.
    I remembered that night well, the sound of a Christmas bell somewhere as I knocked at the door and waited, then a hand parting the white lace curtains, after that a woman’s face, beautiful and still, her green eyes peering catlike from the darkened house.

Chapter Six
    E d Dillard’s house was set far back from Maple Street. It was the only one that bore no sign of the Christmas holidays, no candles in the windows, no gleaming tree, nor any obvious sign that the house was occupied at all.
    Then I saw a woman in a second-floor window, her arms held stiffly at her sides so that she looked as if she’d been placed there, like one of those stone figures that the ancients used to guard the portals of their souls.
    She’d come downstairs by the time I reached the door. When she parted the curtains, I saw only her face, white and luminous, a cameo pinned to black velvet. Then she opened the door and a slant of light fell over her, slicing her in two, casting her eyes in deep shadow but bathing everything else in a treacherous yellow light.
    “Sheriff Pritchart said you called,” I explained. “He’s got a pretty bad cold, and his deputy’s gone to Portland. So he asked me to come over.” I took off my hat. “Cal Chase. I work in the district attorney’s office.”
    She stepped back. “Please come in,” she said.
    I had seen Dora before, on that morning as she passed by Ollie’s Barber Shop. But I’d never seen her close up. Now I noticed that she’d cut her hair short and without regard to style. I noticed other things as well. That her skirt fell to her ankles, her sleeves to her wrists, as if her body were a thing she sought utterly to conceal.
    “Mr. Dillard is upstairs,” she said.
    He lay in his bed, eyes closed, a blanket drawn over him and tucked just beneath his chin. The pillow his head rested upon looked newly fluffed, the case crisp and white. A water glass rested in a silver tray on a table beside his bed, along with a blue china cup, half filled with tea. A white candle burned fitfully in a crystal holder; a single red rose, fresh and impossibly fragrant, had been placed in the small vase that stood beside it.
    I glanced at the rocking chair on the other side of the bed. A book lay upturned on its seat, a pair of gold-rimmed glasses beside it.
The House of the Seven Gables.
I’d read it in high school, remembered well how the old man had died, his eyes wide, frantic, glaring, his mouth spitting blood.
    By all appearances Ed Dillard had died the way people wanted to, peacefully in his sleep. I