The Hour Before Dark Read online

  It was always cold in the smokehouse, no matter what the season.

  When I was very little, my siblings and I used the smokehouse as something of a hideaway to play games in; then, when it became the place of all punishment for us (spankings, lessons-to-be-learned-from-our-misdeeds, and the Time Out room), the place lost its enchantment. I mainly remembered it for being nasty and chilly, and for making me feel as if I were going to be trapped inside it forever and no one would ever come get me.

  Years later, my father put a deadbolt on it because he said that he found two summer people making out in it (I suspect now that they were doing more than making out). The smokehouse became mainly just another object of quaintness on our property, of equal interest as the duck pond and the old pump out back.

  3

  A reconstruction of the crime scene:

  The door battering, the flashlight on the wood slat floor, the way his body was positioned when he’d be found, and the approximate time of the electricity going out at the house.

  His shoe, in the thick mud.

  His hands, severed at the wrists.

  The blood, which had made the first policeman on the scene think that the floor and walls had been painted a messy red.

  Joe Grogan, the local police chief of the very small police force on the island, knew better.

  The smokehouse door was locked, always. There were no windows but the one in the door, and that was too small for anyone to fit through. It had not been broken or removed.

  My father had let himself into the smokehouse.

  He had unlocked the door.

  He may have even let the murderer in as well.

  4

  No one alive really knew what had happened in the smokehouse that night. All anyone knew, it turned out, was that something must have drawn him there.

  Here, the theories seemed to scatter to the winds: He knew whom he was going to meet, or he guided them there, or they jumped him, or ... well, it was pretty wild, the variety of theories. It might’ve been a stranger, or a group of thugs. Getting on and off the island would have been difficult.

  And the modus operandi of the killing? To imagine that one human being could inflict this on another seemed beyond the reach of all sanity. It had been a curved blade of some sort (none was found). Whoever had done this—in mid-November, when there was only one ferry a day out to the island—had somehow eluded authorities and gone off-island without anyone seeing them. How could that have happened?

  But the basics were that my father had left the house a bit earlier, with a parka on and a flashlight in his hand.

  Brooke had been reading in her bedroom, she told the police, and was rarely aware of her father’s comings and goings at night. The house was large. The floor plan, which twisted like a snake along the grounds, allowed for various ways of leaving and entering. One room opened on the other. There were no hallways—just one boxy room after another, upstairs and down.

  With the doors between the rooms closed, as they were, it was hard to hear one sound from the other end of the house. Even the dogs didn’t hear beyond one or two rooms, at best.

  Brooke had once gone a week without ever seeing her father, so completely independent was her life within the house where she’d been raised.

  I got the details later, but by then it had already been called the worst murder in the history of eastern Massachusetts. I’m fairly sure that wasn’t entirely true. There were other terrible murders—all the time, I suppose—but they’d been forgotten in the fickle memory of those who did the recording of recent history. The Brain Farts of the media.

  Surely, there were murders daily on the mainland, in the crack houses and alleyways that existed there, but those deaths were seen as somehow less interesting than my father’s—a war hero, a survivor of torture and deprivation, a family man who raised three children nearly by himself, cut down at the last by some psycho with a sharp blade on a resort island after the resorts had all closed for the winter. It was news, as they say. It would keep some young reporters in line for a promotion if they made enough of the murder.

  Sure, Burnley was no Martha’s Vineyard, no Nantucket— we had no celebrities to speak of, and the rich didn’t flock to the island as much as the wannabe rich did. But it still sounded cool, no doubt, to turn in a story to a newspaper editor that had in it the words: resort, island, murder, and war hero.

  It certainly was the worst murder that Burnley Island had ever known, and the worst to ever take place near Hawthorn, the house where I had grown up.

  “Life is full of casualties,” my father told me when I asked him why Granny had to die when I was young. He was one of those wonderful fathers who brought life’s lessons out of any situation. “We look away until we have no choice. Then we examine them, remember them, and look away again, as if we’re not meant to think too much about them, but to live. Just live and forget.”

  Brooke found my father dead in the smokehouse, but apparently could not look away.

  He had been dead since seven or eight the previous night.

  5

  The storm’s howling had kept her up most of the night.

  She had argued with Dad the day before. She had avoided him, which was fairly easy to do at Hawthorn. She was very sad about something, but told me that none of it mattered once Dad died.

  She said later: “I had the worst night of my life. Let’s leave it at that. I had a big fire going in the back bedroom, and even with that, the place was freezing. I could not get it warm enough. I went to take a hot bath, but that didn’t work. I just wanted to go to sleep. I couldn’t. Hadn’t eaten. It was the barometric pressure. It always does that to me when winter comes on. It plummets and my mood just goes. I feel like I want to bury myself alive or just lie in bed or walk through the rooms, back and forth all night, until the headache goes away. The dogs even stay away from me. They sense it. All I could think about was what was wrong with the world.”

  Brooke had slept late—’til two.

  She hadn’t even thought about where our father had gone. It was not unusual for him to be inspecting parts of the property or running his errands in town in the afternoon. She had made some eggs, toast, and coffee, but would not eat them because she said she had an upset stomach from the night before. She left a plate of eggs and toast out on the kitchen table, thinking that her father might be back at any moment from his errands and would want a snack.

  She thought it unusual that he had not already made a pot of coffee earlier in the day.

  Even so, he might’ve gone to have coffee at Croder-Sharp-Callahan, where he could talk women and weather with Percy Shaw and Reg Miller, both of whom spent their lives at that lunch counter having what Brooke called their Old Salt conversations. She had warned her father several times that if he hung out with them, he would grow old before his time and then no woman would have him.

  Brooke took the dogs out for a walk down to the woods.

  She guided them back up to the dirt road that ran from the back of the property up to the main road. She saw Paulette Doone and her husband, Ike, in their truck on the way to get groceries in the village. Paulette had mentioned that the lights were out in half the island because of the storm. “Won’t be back on ‘til six. Maybe eight,” Paulette said.

  “Maybe ten,” Ike said.

  Brooke had mentioned that her lights came back up sometime after midnight.

  The Doones lived in the Cape Cod house set back from the road. Paulette asked if the Captain (although my father had been anything but a captain, he was known as the Captain or Cap by the villagers since he’d been a boy) needed his favorite kind of candy from the store, or a prescription from Hempstead Apothecary (because she knew he’d had a bad cold all week). Brooke had asked if they could pick up some Halls Mentholyptus and maybe some kind of over-the-counter inhaler, something to help his sinuses. Brooke mentioned the barometric pressure and was generally furious that the cabin by the pond had flooded. Paulette mentioned Jesus and God
and being saved, which is something that she never seemed to tire of bringing up, no matter how rude Brooke got in return. Paulette felt that Brooke was agitated (as she informed the police chief when asked). Paulette even called her “heated” later to her husband, but Ike privately thought that Brooke had seemed radiant, as if she were in love, with a rosy complexion and bright eyes. Paulette had interpreted this as something bad, because she felt that Brooke was a dangerous woman to the married women on the island—and Paulette elbowed her husband whenever he glanced at their attractive neighbor for too long.

  Brooke told Paulette that she thought her father might be in the village, at the lunch counter talking storms and boats and the upcoming winter festivities in the village.

  “I wouldn’t mind a movie,” Brooke added.

  Paulette had glanced at Ike, and then nodded. “Sure, we can go by the video store. Any particular one?”

  Brooke had asked for one with Matt Damon or the Harry Potter movie if it was in. Paulette had blanched at the mention of “that movie that promotes witches” but felt that there might be an old-fashioned movie like The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur that Brooke might enjoy more.

  “If we see the Captain, we’ll drag him home,” Paulette had told her.

  “If you see him, tell him we’re having chili tonight,” Brooke had said. “Hormel’s. And corn bread if I can find any corn flour. Can you pick me up some in town? I might be out. Chili’s always better with corn bread. Or spoon bread. Something with corn. He wants shepherd’s pie, but I won’t make it three nights in a row. He can cook his own supper if he wants what he wants.”

  “Ike is like that, too,” Paulette said. Her burly and often-sullen husband gave a grunt at that. Paulette mentioned to Joe Grogan later on that Brooke had seemed preoccupied, as if speaking to them had been a disturbance for her.

  “I thought she was very sad. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days,” Paulette had mentioned, giving Joe Grogan something that was as close to the Evil Eye as he had ever in his life witnessed. “But you know, Joe, women like that. Well, they don’t sleep much. Do they? I’d say more, but I’m a Christian woman, and I don’t like to speak like that.”

  6

  Because our father often hiked the mile to the village and got rides home with neighbors or anyone he could talk into giving him a lift, this was just another ordinary day.

  Brooke had her own inner turmoil.

  She told others that she had been anxious and somewhat depressed. She talked to Dr. Connelly in the village a week earlier about perhaps getting a change in prescription for her sleeping medicine. “Are you depressed?” he’d asked.

  “Not depressed,” she said. “Just not quite feeling like myself.”

  He had asked her if she might want to see a therapist on the mainland—he knew a good one in Falmouth. She told him she’d consider it, but she didn’t think talking out her problems would be the answer.

  She fought the urge to be impatient with Mab and Madoc. They’d run off to the woods chasing squirrels or rabbits, and returned a long while later, covered head to foot with mud. She went and checked on the cabin—the damage to the roof was extensive. She made a mental note to talk to her father about just tearing it down before it turned into some kind of eyesore.

  The snow melted where the sun hit it. In the shade, the duck pond had a thin scum of ice on its surface that had not hardened.

  At four, she noticed that lightning had split one of the trees near the smokehouse. She said she had been standing in the greenhouse, with the windows steamed over, and feeling the warmth of the place.

  “I was looking at something—I thought it was mist coming in from the road. It was nearly beautiful. It was twilight— dark came early—and this romantic, soft mist just slowly poured along the road. Remember how Granny used to say you could see angels in the fog? I remembered her saying it, and I almost saw an angel in the mist,” she said of it. “And then, I noticed the half-fallen tree.”

  One of the hawthorns in particular, but also the young oak that had not quite grown to adulthood yet.

  Lightning, she assumed, had ripped across the trees. She was thankful there hadn’t been a fire.

  She went to see if there was any other damage.

  Her feet crunched in the glaze of snow that hadn’t quite melted in the shadow of the smokehouse.

  She saw his shoe, his brown Oxford, stuck in mud—now frozen, she found, as she tried to pull it out. She ended up leaving it where it was, mired.

  She glanced first up to the road, perhaps hoping that Paulette and Ike would still be there.

  Then to the fields and the pasture—and beyond it, the woods. Mab and Madoc were running down into the duck pond, splashing around.

  She glanced up at the sky with its overcast gloom.

  Then she went to the low door of the smokehouse and touched it. Something told her not to—she told me later that it was an electric shock of memory—of never liking the smokehouse since before she could remember. Of remembering my screams as Dad spanked me there, or of remembering Bruno crying there for no reason at all when he was six or seven, sobbing and telling her that the smokehouse gave him nightmares.

  When she touched the door, it moved a bit.

  She grasped the latched handle, expecting the deadbolt that had been applied years ago to keep it shut, and surprise, surprise, it opened outward.

  And that’s when she found him.

  (She told me later, “I wasn’t sure whether it was him or not for a second. It was something I’d never seen before in my life. It was as if something had exploded, but had been reconstructed again. Something about it was like a dream—or a nightmare—something I’d visited before. As if I’d had some premonition of this. And my brain just short circuited. It just seemed to fade, and I couldn’t think. I went somewhere else in my mind, I suppose. Somewhere safe.”) She sat and stared at him for hours before contacting anyone. I don’t want to even imagine how she could’ve sat there on the cold floor, blood everywhere.

  My father.

  And Brooke sat there in the icy stench of death.

  She called someone just after ten that night. Her older brother.

  Me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  I had a nightmare for all those years, and it repeated itself in a never-ending loop, now and again, at my most anxious times: In it, we played the Dark Game and could not stop.

  It was as if the Dark Game had kept playing in some compartment of our minds even as we each grew up.

  2

  Brooke left no message for me other than to say “Nemo” on my answering machine.

  My real name, Fergus, was redubbed Nemo in my early years when Brooke discovered Jules Verne—or at least the Disney version of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. She decided that because of my interest in sailing craft and my willingness to eat fried squid in a dare with Harry Withers, I must be kin to the infamous captain. Since I preferred Nemo to my real name, which just didn’t fit for me, I had taken it on while on the island. After I left Burnley, once in college, I reverted to Gus, a diminutive of Fergus that didn’t annoy me too much. But the islanders knew me as Nemo Raglan. As did my sister.

  “Nemo, Nemo,” she repeated.

  After saying it, she hung up.

  I listened to it twice, then erased it. I called her back. The phone rang several times. I heard the familiar clicks and that strange wind tunnel-like noise that I always heard whenever I called the island. Finally, the message machine picked up.

  “Brooke? It’s Nemo. Good to hear from you. What’s up? Call me back.”

  Later, I got a nervous call from my younger brother, Bruno.

  3

  “Brooke said she called you,” my brother said. “You’ve been out.”

  It was nearly one A.M. I was half-asleep. Beth, whom I’d been out with that night, lay beside me and turned over, clutching a pillow.

  “Hey. Who’s asleep. Bruno? That you?” I aske
d.

  Beth made some small noise that was part-snore and part-groan. I reached over and stroked her back lightly. She made my bed smell of roses and something murkily sexual, a musk, an odor of femaleness that I enjoyed. I loved her scent. I pulled the sheet up around her shoulders to keep her warm. I wanted to kiss her again, just on the back of the neck. She turned over, annoyed even in sleep.

  “Someone’s with you,” Bruno said, his voice not quite as Yankee as it had once been. It was gentler.

  “What’s up?” I repeated, annoyed that I could not cuddle up with Beth and drift to sleep. “I tried calling Brooke back, but there was no answer.”

  “You need to come home now. Tomorrow. A lot’s going on.”

  “Like?”

  “Dad’s dead.”

  We both were silent for what seemed like minutes.

  I gasped a word or two, meaningless. I felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. I leaned back on the pillows. I looked up at the shadows that the bedroom windows cast on the ceiling, with the curtains moving slowly back and forth from the slight draft. I closed my eyes and fought back a stupid anguished cry that wanted to come out of my body.

  “Call me tomorrow,” Bruno said. “We can talk then. Tonight’s bad. There’s more to it. Fly in tomorrow. I’ll pick you up in Boston.”

  Then he hung up. No more details. Bruno was like that. Sometimes he spoke in telegrams, as if he were being charged by the word.