The Hour Before Dark Read online

I called him back several times, but there was no answer.

  4

  I spent a sleepless night, made worse by not knowing how exactly my father had died.

  When I did close my eyes—for what felt like a few minutes—a dream came abruptly with the ferocity of a nightmare. I watched outside myself (in the dream) as twilight descended on Hawthorn. The trees seemed to list to the side as my consciousness broke through them. I saw three children, standing in a circle, holding hands. It was me as a little boy, my sister, and my brother. Walking slowly to the left and then the right in the summer grass. Then, with the swiftness and brute force that can accompany shifts in a dream, I stood in the darkness, somewhere, and heard my little brother Bruno say the words, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed.”

  In the dream, the phone began ringing, and I cried out, “Someone get the phone! The phone’s ringing! Get the phone!”

  Someone asked, “What are you afraid of?”

  I awoke. Covered in sweat. Breathing hard.

  I gave up on sleep for the night.

  It was maddening. I tried to call my brother back every few minutes until dawn. I left message after message. Finally his voice mail must have been full and stopped taking my messages. I could only stare at the walls. I went in the bathroom and curled up on the floor, just to feel its coldness and to be in a small space.

  For some reason, small, dark spaces often made me feel protected. I felt like a child. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to imagine my father’s face. I fought to pretend that somehow this wasn’t the whole story, that perhaps my father had a stroke and Bruno had gotten it wrong. Or perhaps he was in a coma—as much as that doesn’t sound better than death, it is. It would give me hope.

  I wanted to hope badly. I hadn’t seen my father in years, and I had loved him, but I had hoped that in a few months, I’d go back and see him and we’d have a good conversation and he’d tell me that I’d turned into a good man.

  It was never going to happen. Nothing worse than lying on a cold bathroom floor at four in the morning and looking at the bottom of the white wooden door and wishing that the world could somehow change, magically, to suit your own needs.

  I returned to bed, snuggling against Beth, as if I could just plow into her flesh and disappear, along with everything pounding in my head.

  Beth left well before sunrise, annoyed by my pacing and turning in bed.

  It was hard not to want her. She was one of those women who seemed to know that she was headed for great things in life. She had a great body and cute face to accompany her vision of the future, and even a first-rate mind. How could I not want her? She was a prize.

  I knew why she wouldn’t want me. I’d been laid off a few days earlier. I wasn’t headed, apparently, for great things in life. I could predict the most ordinary life ahead of me, and somehow, I knew I’d muddle through it. I burned for more, but in my twenty-eight years my only extraordinary contribution to the world was that I’d written a novel that apparently no one had read. Younger, I’d wanted to change the world. But by that morning, I was just hoping that I could rise above the usual storms of life and get through it.

  I suspect that I was looking for a woman to rescue me and make love the extra ingredient, and perhaps not even love, but some kind of great sex that passed for love in a city like Washington, D.C.

  I had lowered expectations for all that life had to offer.

  When we kissed goodbye, it was brief and forgettable. Our lips barely touched. I got the sad feeling one gets at the end of a misbegotten affair: as if it reminds us that we’re merely animals, enjoying mating for mysterious reasons in order to pass time until something else comes along.

  “My dad died last night,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. She kissed my cheek. “That’s terrible.” Silently, she telegraphed without moving her lips once: I need to get to the office.

  “I need to go up there," I said. "To the island."

  I didn’t expect her to say too much else at that point.

  It was over between us. I was the one feeling discarded. I was the revenge in life for all men who treated women badly—I was the lightning rod of the wrath of women whose loves had walked away from them. I didn’t really give a damn. I just wanted to pretend for a minute with her. And for her to play along. I wanted her to embrace me and emanate human warmth. To experience the smallest spark of sexual fire between us so that I’d feel that there was something else in the world other than the ice that had crept into my blood during the night.

  She looked at me as if worried for a minute that I might fall apart on her—and that she might have to deal with it, when all she wanted was to be out of my life.

  “Look,” she said. “You—”

  “No, it’s all right,” I said.

  “What I mean is, what you need isn’t here. So don’t feel bad about leaving.”

  “What do I need?” I asked, a somber puppy staring at her.

  “Something you left behind somewhere,” she said. “I don’t know what it is. I just know it’s not here. You’ll find it.” She kissed me on the forehead like I was a little boy. “You’re the kind who finds what he’s after.”

  She meant these as words of comfort, but something in her tone gave me a slight chill.

  It created a slim dread within me—as if I knew that something was scratching at my window in the middle of some endless twilight.

  As if her words echoed something I felt, but not something that was good within me. Something about the home I’d grown up in that had never felt right to me.

  And I was after whatever that bad thing might be.

  5

  I watched her dress, knowing it would be the last time.

  In my head, the words “Death and the Maiden.” My father’s voice. Sometimes his voice was in my head, in times of crisis. My imagining of his voice comforted me. His voice soothed the nicks and scars of life. In the years since I last saw him, last set foot in his house, I internalized him.

  What we do in life that determines who we are, we do alone.

  6

  I had already drunk a pot of coffee by eight thirty.

  I made reservations for a flight to Logan Airport, charging it on a credit card I should not have even had, let alone used. Somewhere in there, I called my father’s house more than ten times without an answer. I had a minor-league migraine by nine. Black circles under my eyes, a feeling of dry mouth and that wound-up tightness in my gut of caffeine overflow. Showered in less than five minutes, and dressed carelessly in whatever was not lying on the floor of the closet. Packing involved throwing everything in three suitcases. When that was done, it seemed I had left nothing of value in my apartment. I looked at the suitcases: None was huge. My life, in three suitcases.

  I finally got hold of my brother. “Hello?” I asked. “Bruno?”

  “Nemo, Nemo,” he said as if grasping the name for the first time. “So, can you get a flight?”

  “Cost me a fortune. You tell the airlines it’s an emergency, and they triple the charge. I get in at one.”

  “Okay. I’ll be at Logan.”

  “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  “Somebody killed him,” he said. “It’s terrible. Look, we can talk when I pick you up at the airport.”

  “Are you crazy? Someone killed him? What?”

  But Bruno had already hung up the phone.

  I imagined my dad’s face.

  Fury coursed through my blood.

  I wanted to destroy my father’s killer. A front-row seat to an execution. I wanted someone to hurt for what they’d done.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  On the plane, mid-flight, I closed my eyes.

  I felt numb, tired, and far older than I was.

  Soon, a mix of dream and memory came upon me. I was a boy, back on the island, again. It was dark, and I stood in dirt, my hands tied behind my back—some childhood game. Something pressed against my eyes, but in
the dark I couldn’t tell what it was. I heard someone tell me— was it my father?—that I needed to keep my hands to myself. I heard my sister, somewhere nearby, recite a nursery rhyme. I heard Bruno breathing—his four-year-old self with his slightly deviated septum breathing through his nostrils, like a light wind through creaky boards. I felt a strange comfort there, as if we were being held tight again by both our parents, snuggling against my mother’s bosom, or pressed against my father’s arms, falling down into sleep as if it were a cool, dark place.

  I opened my eyes, to the airplane, to the gray clouds outside the window.

  All I had ever wanted as a boy was to leave the island. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted as an adult. I had nothing but confusion in my life.

  Now this.

  2

  At Logan Airport, Bruno met me with anxiety on his brow in the form of lines I wouldn’t have thought a twenty-three-year-old would’ve had and dark circles beneath his eyes. Yet he had managed to pull himself together enough to brighten a bit when he saw me. He waved, and then came over to give me a shoulder squeeze. It passed for a hug between us.

  “How was the flight?”

  “Terrorist free,” I said.

  “That’s bad luck,” he said. “Saying things like that.”

  “How bad can it get?”

  “Pretty damn bad, you ask me,” he said. “You’re always trying to be funny.” Then he cracked a bit of a smile, shaking his head. “‘Terrorist free,’ he says.”

  “You gonna tell me some more about all this?” I asked. “Who did it? Who killed him?”

  “Nobody knows,” Bruno said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means nobody knows,” he said.

  3

  My younger brother, at twenty-three, was strapping and muscular without seeming affected—he had a dollop of physical grace, which was in direct conflict with the generally messy way he had been screwing up his life. He was a natural athlete, had been since he was six or seven and staged swimming races at the beach or impromptu soccer games in the pasture. He had only just slipped into his prime—no longer the scrawny kid, he had taken on the look of an island tourist—tanned, even at the outset of winter, sandy-blond hair; and that peculiar Yankee quality of having thin lips; and a slender, sharp nose; smallish eyes made larger by round spectacles that softened his sharp features; and basic handsomeness. I possessed none of these qualities. He and Brooke got the handsome and beautiful genes—my mother’s. They both had her coloring and her lankiness. People often looked at them as if detecting an attractive scent. I was more like my father, although tall. I was dark, and the only compelling feature to me (since women had mentioned it) were my blue eyes. Black Irish had somehow snuck into the Welsh gene pool of the Raglans.

  He was dressed as well as you could ask a recent college grad to be dressed—jeans, a scruffy old cotton shirt with a dominant coffee stain where his heart would be, and a brown leather jacket. And he still looked like the terse and generally quiet kid brother I used to regularly have to defend in elementary school from the bullies when he was still small and scrawny.

  I nearly hugged him, but he drew back.

  4

  He slipped on a pair of ill-fitting sunglasses and shook my hand, formally. He picked up one of my bags. “I’d say it’s great to see you, but under the circumstances ...” he said.

  “I was trying to call all night. Drove me nuts. What the hell?"

  “Brooke turned the phones off,” he said. “It was constant. A barrage.”

  “Jesus,” I said, stopping in the middle of the crowded ramp. “What exactly . . . what happened?”

  “Reporters. What a crappy job they got. Calling all tragedies and milking them,” he said. Avoiding my question. He didn’t want to veer to the topic of the murder. “It’s funny none of them called you. I mean, not even Grogan?”

  I shook my head slightly. Shrugged. “Nobody remembers I exist.”

  “Ha. Some remember.”

  “I’m sure they’ll get hold of me soon enough.”

  “Your old friend’s been asking about you.”

  “Which one?”

  He looked at me funny. Like I was fishing for something. “You think I’m going to say Pola.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I saw her on Monday,” Bruno said. He didn’t add: She asked about you. Perhaps Pola Croder, who had been my high school sweetheart, hadn’t thought about me in years. “She looks good. She’s a remarkable woman, I think.”

  “So who’s asking about me?”

  “Withers.”

  I shrugged. “He’s got my number.”

  “I know. He told me. He’s waiting for you to get here. He’s the only reporter we let in the house last night.”

  “He’s still there?”

  “No, he went home. I thought he was your old best friend.”

  “Yeah, I guess he is. Sorry,” I said. “I feel like crap. You look like crap. Must be hell out there. Burnley must be buzzing with this one.”

  “None of it means shit,” he said. His usual understatement. “Look, we’ve got a special boat—borrowed just for you. I brought an extra coat in the back. It’s pretty damn cold out there right now.”

  “I hate winter,” I said. “Dead trees. Dead everything. Dead dead dead.” Then I added, “Sorry, that was a weak attempt at humor.”

  Bruno made some noise in the back of his throat that was both muffled cough and disapproval. “Breaking the tension is good, I guess,” he said. “Me, I got Jumblies.”

  “Jumblies” was Raglan-speak for mixed-up feelings. Granny used the word, and after she died, I made up stories for my little sister and brother about creatures called Jumblies that hopped in peoples’ mouths and made them confused.

  I guess I had Jumblies in me at that moment, too.

  Ten minutes later, in the car, we drove onto the highway.

  5

  “Who did it?” I asked, as a blur of wintry Boston sped around us.

  “Like I know. They haven’t quite figured it out. Who does that... kind of thing? Psychos? Maniacs?”

  “God,” I said, covering my face with my hands. “I don’t even want to think of Dad like that. I can’t believe it. I just can’t. Brooke okay?”

  “Guess,” Bruno said. Then he added, “No, I mean. No. How can she be? I’m not okay. It was awful.”

  “You saw the body?”

  He glanced at me, sidelong. I felt some sort of repressed fury, as if he never wanted to think about seeing our father’s corpse again for as long as he lived.

  We didn’t talk until we were nearly to the coastline.

  I watched the speedometer, cringed when the back end of the little car slid on a patch of ice or rattled across a pothole, and just hoped we’d make it at all.

  “You wouldn’t believe last night,” Bruno said, finally.

  Then he told me.

  6

  Bruno had been with a buddy of his, having a beer at the local pub in the village, when Brooke called him on his cell phone.

  He ran out of the pub and down to the police station—a few blocks away. When he got there, he saw Brooke shivering, covered with a blanket. Her hair wet. It was the blood. She’d lain down in the blood, next to our father. She'd gone catatonic or something. She was covered with blood, only it looked brownish and not red at all (as he had expected). She didn’t recall the hours that had passed. Then she’d gotten up and left the smokehouse, dragging herself back inside, called me. Then she called Joe Grogan.

  Brooke had been screaming in the house afterward, just standing in the living room screaming. The Doones called over because they heard the noise, and Brooke picked up the phone but had hung it up again before saying anything. Paulette Doone called the police. Paulette had told them she thought she’d seen someone over by the smokehouse earlier, and with the screaming she heard later, she was afraid something awful had happened.

  By two or three in the morning, cops arrived, i
ncluding an investigative detective and her team.

  Helicopters came over from the Cape, bringing reporters, landing out at the Point as a helipad. Bruno had no idea that so many people would suddenly appear out of nowhere.

  Bruno was up most of the night, answering questions, sitting with Brooke, who began talking incoherently until she had exhausted herself and fallen asleep by five.

  Bruno managed two hours of sleep at that point, having been smart enough to unplug the phone and switch his cell phone off. The news vans were outside when he left to go to the mainland.

  His biggest fear was that Brooke would feel scared when he left, but she had told him that she was going to bed and would wear earplugs and maybe even take a pill to calm her nerves.

  7

  “And now, that’s what we’re coming back to,” he said. “I saw a report on the morning news about it. I was just waking up on the couch, and I flicked it on, and there we were. Well, there was the mention of it. It sounded almost interesting, the way they talked about it on the news. Seven in the morning, it already reached the Cape.”

  “What about the killer?” I asked.

  “No word.”

  “Brooke must be so upset. I’m glad you’ve been here.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Bruno said. “She’s really freaked. She walked around all last night, room to room, with a candle, like some kind of gothic heroine. She thinks that the killer’s waiting for her in the dark. We had men go through the house just to make sure no one was hiding. She’s paranoid.”

  “Can’t blame her.”

  “Maybe more than paranoid. She’s been doing funny things.”