Places in the Dark by Thomas H. Cook

it was my brother who brought Dora up that afternoon. In fact, he seemed more or less unable to think of anything else.
    “Dora said you met Carl Hendricks on the way back from his house this morning.”
    I nodded, forked a bite of meat loaf into my mouth. “We ran into him.”
    “What do you think, Cal? Could he have done it?”
    “I haven’t seen any evidence of any crime at all, Billy,” I said sternly. “In my profession, I need that. As a matter of fact, I think you’re supposed to require a little of it in yours too.”
    He looked at me as if I’d slapped his face. “What’s the matter, Cal?”
    I decided to be blunt. “Well, for one thing, because of you, of what you said to Hap, I got sent on a wild-goose chase this morning. Had to go out to Hendricks’s place, poke around like I had the foggiest notion of what I was looking for. And for all that, I didn’t find a damn thing to suggest that Carl Hendricks torched his house.” I shoved my plate aside. “Let me ask you something, Billy. Was it Dora March who put the idea in your head that there was something odd about the Hendricks fire?”
    He was clearly stricken by my question. Instead of answering it, however, he said, “Dora senses things, Cal.”
    “Senses things?”
    “Yes,” Billy said. “I think she … experienced something that made her—”
    “Wait,” I interrupted. “Just wait a second. First, what do you actually know about her? Details, I mean. Like, where she was living before she came to Port Alma?”
    “New York City,” Billy replied. “At a residence hall there. For women. As a matter of fact, I even know the address, Eighty-fifth and Broadway.”
    “What was she doing in New York?”
    “Like I said, living there.”
    He added nothing else, and so I suspected that he’d already pretty much exhausted his information.
    But rather than release him, I closed in. “Does she talk about her past?”
    “Not much.”
    “So as far as you know, she just popped up here in Port Alma?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why here, I wonder. I mean, it’s a long way from New York. And very different.”
    “Cal, what are you getting at?”
    “I’m trying to make a point.”
    “What point?”
    “Just that you don’t know much about her.”
    “What would I need to know?”
    “A lot before you start giving her … powers.”
    Billy grinned and leaned back in his seat. “That’s the difference between you and me, Cal.”
    I laughed. “You don’t
want
to know about her. That’s the real difference between you and me, Billy. You don’t want to know about her. You might find out she’s pretty ordinary. Probably just some shopgirl from Macy’s who climbed onto a northbound bus one afternoon, ended up here because her money ran out.”
    My brother’s expression turned grave. “Something happened to her, Cal.”
    I wasn’t buying it. “She was born. She lived. More than likely, that’s all that ever ‘happened’ to her.”
    “No.” Billy said it firmly. “Something happened to Dora.”
    “Something tragic, no doubt.”
    “Yes.”
    I’d had enough. “Why do you want to believe that something ‘tragic’ happened to Dora? Is it because it would make her different from other women? Why can’t you just face the fact that nobody’s really that different from anybody else? We’re just people. Plain. Ordinary. Nothing great about us. Nothing splendid. We come out of the dirt and we go back to it.”
    “I know you believe that,” Billy said. “Dad does too. But I don’t.” For the first time in his life, my brother regarded me with pity. “I don’t want to live like you, Cal. Spend my life like you.” He searched for the right words, then said them: “Like someone waiting for a change in the weather.”
    He’d never drawn the line more clearly, never delineated more precisely what distinguished us as brothers and as men. For me, the prospects of life, and certainly of love, would remain innately limited. Human life was lost