Evidence of Blood by Thomas H. Cook

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