Evidence of Blood by Thomas H. Cook Page A

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?”
    “Ray brought it,” Dora said, as she eased herself down in one of the blue chairs. “He liked it, but he always played it the wrong way.”
    “How do you want me to play it?”
    She shrugged. “Well, do you think anybody’s prince ever comes?”
    Kinley shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
    She smiled. “Then play it like that,” she said.
    He did. Slowly, haltingly, missing a note here and there, but with a long, disillusioned refrain that drifted out the door and over the edge of the mountain, disintegrating as it fell, so that not a single melancholy note of it ever reached the sleeping town below.
    When he was finished, he looked up from the keys, stared directly into her eyes, and fired his question once again. “What was Ray doing in the canyon? Did it have anything to