"You"re a lucky man," I added quickly, offering a broad smile. "A very lucky man."

Billy turned his gaze toward Dora, his expression now curiously altered.

It was a change Dora perceived instantly. She slowed, giving my brother time to adjust to her approach, clearly sensing what he most needed to regain was trust.

"h.e.l.lo, William," she said when she reached him.

He nodded, his eyes upon her with a fierce intensity, like someone trying to penetrate the nature of her disguise, where the real face ended, the illusion began.

"Your room is ready," she added. Then, very softly, "Welcome home."

She stayed with Billy for the next few hours, while my father and I remained downstairs, where we briefly busied ourselves with various ch.o.r.es, then retired to the small front room.

"Well, it"s good to have him home," my father said as he lowered himself into the old wooden rocker my brother had retrieved from our mother"s cottage on Fox Creek.

I leaned forward, lit the fire. "I talked to Dr. Goodwin before we left." The kindling began to crackle and burn, filling the room with a vaguely orange light. I watched it a moment, then turned my back to the flames. "He doesn"t know what to expect. From Billy, I mean."

"So he could stay this way?"

"Yes. Or he could get better overnight. There"s no way to tell."

My father rubbed his eyes softly. "Of all people," he said. "Of all people, William."

"He could recover quite soon," I added, now trying to put the best light on what Dr. Goodwin had told me. "I mean, there"s no real impairment. Of his intelligence."

"It"s not his intelligence I"m worried about," my father said.

"No." I took the metal poker from its stand and needlessly churned the fire. "We"ll just have to see what happens." I returned the poker to its stand, then took a seat. "He wants to go back to work as soon as possible."

"As soon as possible? What does that mean?"

"I really don"t know. I suppose that"s up to Billy to decide."

My father looked at me solemnly. "He shouldn"t rush things, Cal," he said. "The people at the Sentinel, they"ll be expecting the William they remember, the one who was so ... He"s not ready. We both know that."

"But what can we do about it?"

My father considered the question, then, without offering an answer, pulled himself to his feet. "I"ll sleep on it, Cal," he said. "I"m tired now."

I walked him to the door, followed him out onto the small wooden porch. The rain had stopped, the clouds parted, a brilliant moon glistened on the leaves.

"He"ll get better, Dad," I said. "He"ll be all right, believe me."

He shook his head. "Why is it always the ones who love life, Cal? Your mother. Now William. Why is it always the ones who love life that are taken? The ones who want so much from it, give so much to it?"

"They aren"t taken any more than others, Dad. It just seems that way."

He nodded slowly. "Seems that way, yes. Because they"re the ones we miss."

I sat down beside Billy"s fire, and let my eyes roam about. Despite my long familiarity with the general physical disarray in which my brother lived, I was still amazed by the sheer density of the clutter, the way he"d turned a s.p.a.cious room into a cramped one by stacking books and papers all about. He"d given strict orders that nothing be moved in his absence, and the hard edge of his tone as he"d said it had been the first sign that something had been dislodged from his character, the gentleness that had always seemed so inseparably a part of him. We had all obeyed him, of course, tidied up as much as we could without actually altering the chaos in any measurable degree.

It was a disorder that had often annoyed me in the past but which now I looked back on with an unmistakable longing. For it seemed part of a brother who was now disturbingly altered, and whose future I could no longer predict.

After a time, I picked up a book and began to read, though an hour later, when I heard Dora padding down the stairs, I could not have told anyone a single detail of what I"d actually read.

She stopped at the entrance to the room, the dying firelight reflected in the lenses of her gla.s.ses.

"William wants me to stay a little longer," she told me. "He wants me to read to him."

I gestured at the engulfing clutter, stacks of books and magazines, piles of newspapers. "Well, you"ve got plenty to choose from."

"He mentioned one book in particular," Dora said.

"Does he have a clue where in all this mess it might be?" I asked, surprised by the edginess in my tone.

"It"s at my house," Dora said. "He brought it over the day before the accident." She turned to leave. "I"ll be back in a few minutes."

"Let me get it for you," I said quickly. "It"ll make me feel useful. Besides, I need a walk."

"All right," Dora said. "It"s on the mantel."

It was the first week of September, a fall chill already in the air, and I found myself dreading the approach of winter, a dread I"d never experienced before. In the past, I"d always looked forward to its raw cold, the way it drove everyone else inside, left the s...o...b..und streets to me. But as I made my way toward Dora"s house that night, I found that I no longer welcomed the coming freeze. I"d even begun to see it as something I"d favored because of the isolation it had forced upon me, a wall of winter added to my other walls.

Dora"s house was completely dark save for the one lantern she"d left burning in the front room. The door was unlocked, as almost all doors remained in those days, and I could see the book my brother had asked for in the place she"d indicated, lying on the mantel. I picked it up, saw that it was one of his boyhood favorites, Two Years Before the Mast, the sort of youthful, romantic adventure tale he"d all his life preferred. It was a brand-new edition, and from the cracking sound of the spine as I opened it, I knew that Dora had yet to begin it.

Her own book lay on the chair beside the fireplace, an anthology of poetry she"d opened to Matthew Arnold. There, underscored in black ink, were Arnold"s most famous lines, the bleakest, as they had always seemed to me, in all the history of verse, a final, terrible admission made on the sh.o.r.es of Dover Beach, that in all the wide, wide world, there was neither faith, nor hope, nor cert.i.tude, nor any end to pain, and against whose black tide was set only the pledge of two people to be true to one another.

Suddenly, like a blow, I felt the whole structure of my long resistance to Dora collapse. It was the single most searing emotion I had ever felt, so powerful and shuddering that I knew it had come from the deepest, most needful and explosive part of me, a place that Dora March had entered and in which she would forever dwell. And I thought, This is what it is, then. This is what it is to be in love.

It was still raging through me when I returned to Billy"s house, a storm twisting through my mind, leaving all behind it in fearful disarray.

I could hear him talking quietly as I made my way up the stairs. He fell silent when I entered his room, his gaze leveled upon me oddly, as if he suspected that I"d lurked outside his door for some time, been secretly listening as he talked with Dora.

"I brought the book you wanted," I told him.

"Book? What book?"

I laid it on the foot of his bed. "Two Years Before the Mast."

He nodded but said nothing, so that I reflexively glanced toward Dora.

She sat beside his bed, her hair a wave of gold, her eyes soft but oddly penetrating behind the lenses of her gla.s.ses. For a moment, I could not draw my gaze away. When I did, I saw that Billy was watching me closely, squinting slightly, like someone struggling to bring a vaguely troubling image into focus.

I forced a light tone into my voice. "You went absolutely crazy when you read that book the first time," I reminded him.

He continued to peer at me quizzically.

"You wanted to go to sea that very day," I teased. "You must have been what? Ten?"

His eyes remained very still. I felt pinned down by their dark concentration, a small, wriggling thing.

"Well, I"ll leave you to your reading," I said to him. Then I looked at Dora, felt my earlier tumult surge again, pressed it down, said only, "Good night, Dora."

She nodded. "Good night, Cal."

Billy had begun to talk again by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, and for the next hour, as I sat in his study surrounded by his belongings. I heard his voice above me, speaking softly to her. The very intimacy of it worked like a steadily building charge in my blood.

It was nearly midnight when she came down the stairs again. I heard her footsteps, and darted quickly into the hallway.

She was standing at the front door, about to open it.

"You have a way with him," I said.

"He is very vulnerable right now."

"I know. I sometimes think that if he were to stumble, he"d break into a thousand pieces."

She drew her coat from the peg by the door. "He"s trying to put things together again. Sort things out."

"Things like me."

I was very near her now, could smell her hair, her skin, all but feel her breath on my face.

"I know it must be hard for you," she said. "The way William is."

"You"re very good with him, Dora. I hope he knows how lucky he is."

She seemed to catch the fire in my eyes, decided to ignore it. "He wants to visit his mother," she told me as she reached for her scarf.

"I don"t suppose he wants me to come along."

I felt her gaze as softly as if it were her hand upon my face. "He"ll come back to you, Cal."

I shook my head. "It"ll never be the same, Dora."

She drew the scarf around her throat. "Yes, it will. He has to find a way back into his life. Everyone does. After a tragedy." She turned toward the door, started to open it but stopped when I spoke.

"He once told me that something tragic happened to you."

She faced me. "Something tragic?"

"That you"d suffered some terrible..."

"Why would he think that?"

"Maybe he just wanted to," I answered. "Suffering lends an air of mystery, you know."

She looked at me uncomprehendingly. "What could be less mysterious than suffering, Cal?"

It was the saddest question I had ever heard. For once in my life, I had no ready answer.

"I guess it"s finding happiness that"s the real mystery," I said. "Finding love."

She opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

I followed behind her until she reached the stairs. "I hope you find it, Dora," I told her. "Love."

Her face was masked in darkness, impossible to read, leaving the meaning of her final words in terrible uncertainty.

I have.

Chapter Twenty.

Twelve Palms was a small, sweltering town, little more than a single street, surrounded by a limitless expanse of cactus and tumbleweed. A range of mountains loomed in the distance, dark and jagged, suspended in rippling waves of heat.

There was a general store and a small hotel, both wood-framed, a barbershop with a rusted metal sign, and at the very end of the town, a tumbledown corral attached to an abandoned barn. Old cars, limned in a fine white dust, were scattered about the main street, toys in a sandbox town.

Near the end of the street, a one-story adobe building stood on a lot that would have been entirely bare were it not for a few sprigs of parched gra.s.s and a dusty palm. A storm fence glimmered in the hard sunlight, erected no doubt because the building contained, according to the weathered sign that swung languidly from two rusty lengths of chain, both the sheriff"s office and the local jail.

The sheriff was slumped in a metal chair at the front of the building. He was a short, stocky man, with slick black hair, thinning at the top, and skin so brown and leathery, it looked as if he"d been hung out in the sun.

"I"m Calvin Chase," I said.

He took off his hat, hung it over one knee. "Charlie Vernon." His eyes flicked over my scarecrow frame and hollow eyes. "If you"re looking for work, I don"t have any. n.o.body does around here."

"I have work," I replied.

"Not one of them Okies, then?"

"I"m from Maine."

"Maine? I guess you"ve got a good reason to come so far."

"Yes, I do."

He returned the large, western-style hat to his head, then pushed it backward with a single finger. "So, Mr. Chase, what can I do for you?"

"I"m looking for a woman."

Vernon grinned. "Ain"t we all."

"I think she might know something about my brother"s death."