The Hour Before Dark Page 7

  “I didn’t mean it as—” Bruno began, but shut up. “Sorry.”

  Brooke’s face smoothed out. Then to me: “Pola and her little boy came by. Just paying respects. It seems early for it. I didn’t run her off, but I have a hard time with the idea of people just popping over the day after this. Harry came by this morning, too, and it’s making me angry that everyone has to say something to me. As if it’s required.” The sorrow in her face nearly astonished me. She needed sleep badly. Sleep and peace. “Just make yourself at home. Your room should be okay. Mab and Madoc seem to like sleeping there some nights. If they bother you, just shut them out. Don’t put up with any crap from them. There’s a spot heater in the den you can have if it gets too cold. I’m not sleeping at night. Don’t bother me ‘til after seven tonight. I just want to sleep right now. As long as I can.” She whistled for her dogs, and they leapt nearly across the living room and ran to her.

  And then my sister went down through the living room, out the door that led to the dining room. I heard a series of doors open and shut as she went through twelve rooms, upstairs, to her own room, near the back of the house.

  “She’s was on edge before this,” Bruno said. “Either quiet or like a cyclone. She and Dad were fighting all week. Mainly about money.”

  10

  Within an hour of being home, I got a call from the local police chief.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1

  "Nemo?”

  “Joe,” I said. I had always known him as Joe rather than Officer Grogan. The island was like that. We had been tight-knit. Too tight. First thing I asked him, “You catch the killer yet?”

  A pause on the line.

  “First, I’m sorry for all this.” He said it in a low, quiet voice. It reminded me of my father a little, when he was trying to tell me something bad.

  “I just got in,” I said. But I wanted to just sink into a soft sadness and not deal with anything.

  “Well, I want you to know we’ve been scouring the island for this killer. Everyone is cooperating.”

  “Thank you,” I said, unsure how to respond. I still wasn’t certain how I was supposed to continue in life, thinking about this murder. I wonder if anyone who has been touched by a murder really knows how to react to it or to how people treat you afterward. It was as if you somehow came out of another dimension, as if you lost your pact with the rest of the human race, and then you were either a wounded victim or simply a foreigner in the land of normalcy.

  “We’ll need to ask you some questions, soon,” he said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Good. How’s Brooke?”

  “She seems to be ... well, holding up.”

  “Hang tough,” he said, before hanging up.

  I glanced at Bruno. Hung up the phone. “Grogan,” I said.

  “He’s calling too much,” Bruno said. “Means he doesn’t have anything. He really wants to talk to Brooke. I think he’s scared of her.”

  2

  The first week was a blur of reporters, who didn’t bother us as much as I thought they might, but generally were around if one of us left the house and actually ventured to the village. (I stayed home with Brooke unless a trip to town was absolutely necessary, and then I just went to buy eggs or coffee or milk at the QuickMart, where I knew no one.) The reporters from the mainland seemed a little scared of us—or were ashamed to have to circle around us. Brooke hated having her picture taken, so when she went outside, she always gave the photographers and cameramen the finger just to keep her picture out of the paper.

  Harry Withers, running the Burnley Gazette, was not among them, despite my brother’s promise that he had been camping out somewhere nearby. I guess I should add a word or two about Harry here. Harry Withers, my best friend when I was growing up, was a bit of a nut case. As a lad, he’d been into being a complete geek, which was cool in its own way—he read books on improving brain power, and he knew what NASA was working on, and he was completely convinced that Earth would eventually be contacted by aliens. He used to even try to hypnotize my brother, sister, and me as kids after seeing a guy on television make a bunch of people quack like a duck. He was the son of the owner of the Burnley Gazette, an island rag that tended toward gossip and tourist promotions and the odd story about how pennies were getting scarce on the island. When we had been kids, he was like my brother— more so than Bruno in some respects, because Harry and I were the same age, and got into nearly the same trouble. He slept over at Hawthorn a lot as a kid, too, so my family knew him well—his parents had troubles that I won’t get into here other than to say they were mismatched. His father died of emphysema when he was fourteen, and then he turned bad in a way that was destructive.

  I was nearly thankful that Harry hadn’t come by Hawthorn yet. I just didn’t want to see him if I could help it. Not with all the other crap going on. Not with the shroud of gloom and confusion that hung over the house.

  He did call once, though. He wouldn’t say much other than that we needed to get together soon, and that he knew “something about the smokehouse.”

  “You calling as a reporter or a friend?” I asked.

  “Both, I guess,” he said, and added, “But I’m a friend first.”

  “It’s hell here,” I whispered into the phone.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  A pause on the line.

  “I guess I can’t say anything pleasant in the face of this,” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “I’m just sorry it happened. The way I used to hang out over there with you, I always felt like one of the family.”

  “You were,” I said. “I know Dad considered you an honorary Raglan.”

  “sorry we’ve been out of touch.”

  “Feels like I just left the place yesterday,” I told him. “Like I just saw you the day before yesterday.”

  But despite the warmth of this last part of our conversation, I felt distant from Harry and distant from everyone I’d grown up with.

  I still wasn’t sure why I’d created that distance.

  3

  I didn’t see Harry that first week at all, but Joe Grogan came by Hawthorn more than once.

  He was the only policeman of note on the island in the winter. During high tourist season, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, this increased to ten, most of whom were at The Oaks rather than in Burnleyside. Joe and his gang of three were eager to take part in this most interesting of local crimes, even though the police from the mainland flocked, briefly, to Burnley once the story got out. Like seagulls to a trash heap.

  Joe Grogan had aged quite a bit—my guess was he was about forty-eight, but he looked a lot older with wrinkles and white hair and a general hangdog expression.

  He had the look of a man whose life had worn him down to the nub.

  “It goes like this,” he said. “First, we secured the area around the crime scene. Not difficult for this time of year, but you never know who will decide to tromp through there. We’re keeping the smokehouse locked up, though. Investigators have been going through, trying to examine everything they can.”

  Brooke turned cold, briefly. “How many men went through there?” she asked.

  “Six or seven. At the most.”

  “He would’ve hated that,” she said. “Tweezers out to pick up hair samples. Blotting blood trying to find evidence. I can’t imagine all the gory details.”

  “It’s procedure,” Joe said, glancing at me with a slightly bewildered expression. “Unfortunately, the weather hasn’t helped any of this. The police tape has blown away twice already, and between the snow falling and melting, I’m not sure we’re going to have much luck. Finding anything in the perimeter beyond the building, is, well...” He splayed his hands, a gesture of futility. “Pretty soon, we’ll just have some additional informal interviews with neighbors, and each of you, of course.”

  “Interviews?” Bruno asked. “That’s it?”

  “There’s a lead investigator, and she’s
got to find out if anyone saw anything. Anything at all.”

  “I don’t feel very safe,” Brooke said.

  “The killer—or killers—may well have already left the island,” Joe said. He took his time saving this—he was being careful with his words. He seemed to watch Brooke’s face equally carefully. “This person is on the move.”

  “He could have easily killed me,” Brooke said. “The doors weren’t locked. If he wanted something, he would’ve come and taken it. He just wanted to murder someone. That’s my guess. He’s some insane sociopath.”

  Joe seemed about to say something, but then held back.

  Bruno nodded gravely, looking at the tattered Persian rug on the floor instead of at our sister. “Brooke, it could even be someone here. Someone who lives here. Maybe someone who didn’t like Dad.”

  “Do you think so, Joe?” Brooke asked, fixing what I’d term a sharp and terrible look on Joe Grogan, as if he had failed her just by being there. “You think Carson did it? Or Ike Doone?” Her voice rose a bit. “Or me? Do you think I killed him and sat in his blood for hours, thinking about my hideous act?”

  When Bruno next spoke, his voice seemed small, like a child’s who has been scolded. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t.” Joe glanced at me, then at Bruno, but averted his gaze from my sister. He was overpowered by her. I had an inkling of why. They’d had an affair. I could smell it at ten paces. They had some broken chemistry between them. It was as if they were talking about one thing, but meaning another. It felt like it. Like they had too much intimacy. Joe and Brooke. The way they both seemed uncomfortable in each other’s presence. I didn’t know this for sure, but something about the chief of police sitting there in the chair. He sat in that chair before. He has been in Hawthorn more than a few times. Holding the cup of coffee in the saucer. Nearly relaxed, but a strange underlying tension. It all seemed too familiar. Brooke seemed too hostile toward him.

  “The investigators have gathered what evidence they could,” he said. “But it’s still too soon to not keep going over every detail.”

  “What about DNA?” I said, not really knowing what I asked.

  “Samples already went down to some labs in Connecticut. It may take some time to determine anything. But we’ll get whoever did this. Don’t worry.”

  “I feel unsafe,” Brooke said. Her eyes filled with glassy tears. She reached for a tissue in a dispenser near her elbow. Blew her nose.

  “Do you have any ideas?” I asked. “It takes a while to go on-and off-island. There’s the coast guard. How hard is it to—”

  Joe’s face turned grim as he cut me off. “Every cop from here to Boston is formulating theories. They’ll keep scraping for evidence they might’ve missed. Your father didn’t seem to have enemies. There haven’t been reports of strangers on the island since before the end of October. Even the logs on the ferry for the past three weeks—all accounted for. This is a tough one. We’ll crack it. Maybe if we’re lucky, the killer had his own boat and drowned during the storm.”

  As bloodthirsty as it may have seemed, I hoped in my heart that was true.

  Brooke wiped her eyes, then her nose, with the tissue. “You think it’s me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Joe Grogan said. “No one thinks that. It’s just... just the damnedest thing.” It must have been his favorite phrase.

  “I sat there, in that blood,” Brooke said. Then she covered her face with her hands. I went to her and sat on the edge of the large leather chair she was in. I stroked her back lightly.

  “I don’t want any of you tromping around by the smokehouse,” Joe said to me when I walked him to the front door. “And watch out for Ike Doone. I’ve caught him twice trying to get close to it, and he and that wife of his are all caught up with America’s Most Wanted, so I don’t want him grabbing souvenirs. Chase him off if you see him out there.”

  4

  The moment Joe’s car had pulled out of the driveway, Brooke went to the front window and stared out at the road. “Fuck!” she shouted.

  Bruno and I just sat and watched her.

  “She’s going through Hell,” I said.

  I really meant it. You grow up Catholic, and there’s some inkling that Hell is always right around the comer. It’s the place you accidentally step into when you least expect it. I asked my dad, when I was a kid, if he thought he was going to Heaven, and he told me no. He wouldn’t explain why, and it was the saddest thing he ever said about himself. I guessed, as I got older, that if you lived long enough, you spent time in Hell as you went through life.

  I figured we’d all just bought a little bit of real estate there, with this murder. We knew something about life that many people get to skim over in the papers or on the nightly news.

  Brooke had sat in Hell for hours, staring in its face.

  She had the right to her obscenities.

  5

  We could not have a funeral yet because my father’s body was needed for forensics evidence. It was unpleasant to contemplate. I had the idea of a funeral at St. Bart’s, with Father Ronnie, now nearly seventy, giving mass. Bruno shook his head to shush me up, but Brooke told me, “We had a falling out with Father Ronnie. Dad didn’t like him in the end. I didn’t like him. For a priest, he had no sense of Christian forgiveness. To him, I’m Jezebel or something. He called me a harlot once. I called him a drunk. We parted ways.” She said this last part with a bit of acid in her voice.

  “What’s that all about?” I asked. “He actually called you a harlot?”

  “You’ll hear about it soon enough,” she said. “Joe Grogan and I had a fling. Well, more than that. For nearly a year. Do not give me that Nemo look.”

  “‘Nemo look’?” I nearly laughed. It felt good to feel a little light.

  “That ‘I knew you were up to something’ look,” she said without a trace of humor. “Don’t judge me. I will not be judged by you or anyone. His wife has had affairs with men up at The Oaks every summer since they’ve been married. He needed a little happiness. I did, too. It ended badly. Dad was furious, but kept a lid on it. He felt I was ... I don’t know ... devaluing myself, I guess. He told me I’d never find a husband, and I guess I pissed him off by spitting back at him that I could find any husband I wanted, so long as the wife was away. Father Ronnie scolded Dad for allowing a woman like me to live in his house. Dad told him to fuck off. So, no absolution for us. We’re headed for limbo. Or worse.”

  “True,” I said. “I’m not sure you can ever come back from telling a priest to fuck off.”

  “He didn’t quite say it that way.”

  “It’s a relief to know we all won’t be excommunicated for your sins,” I said cheerily.

  “Always the funny one,” she said in a way that was not funny at all. It was the Yankee in her. “I never liked church. Sunday should be a day to sleep in. Ronnie’s mass went on too long. I could always smell whiskey on his breath in the confessional.”

  6

  When I was out piling up firewood that Carson McKinley brought (yes, he had a good delivery business with his truck, despite his predilection for sheep), I saw Joe Grogan’s police car up on the roadside.

  Joe stood over by the smokehouse, just on the edge of the last of the police tape that hadn’t quite blown away. He peered around it, as if he didn’t want to step into some sacred circle.

  I waved to him and called out. He glanced in my direction, then crouched down just outside the building. He picked at something with his fingers.

  There was a kind of silent barrier to winter on the island; he may have called out to me, but I didn’t hear it. The wind picked up.

  When I got over to him, he stood, a grim expression on his face.

  “I have to tell you, Nemo. And I hate doing it.”

  I remained stonily silent, my heart sinking a bit.

  “We got nothin’.”

  We shared a smoke, because it was cold and he had a pack on him, and then he said, “It keeps me up nights. Thinking about t
his. About how someone could do it and get away. How they could do it and not leave some print. Hair. Footprint in the blood. Some small thing. The blade was some kind of small scythe, best I can figure. Hasn’t been found. Nothing’s been found. All those mainland people are beginning to leave it alone. They don’t like this kind of thing. Where a suspect isn’t apprehended fast. They like to either close the book or move on. They’re gonna pin this on some guy who’s been killing people down in Jersey, but I don’t know how. There’s nothing here. You and I know Brooke didn’t do it. She’s no Lizzie Borden.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, and then looked at me as if I were not really there and he’d just been talking to himself all along.

  We both stood there awhile in the cold, a stack of chopped wood at my feet. The wind picked up.

  He said, “It’s the damnedest thing.”

  That was it. He walked back up to the roadside, dusk coming on.

  After he started his car, I took up the wood and went into the house to make a fire.

  PART TWO

  “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.”

  —Jonathan Swift

  CHAPTER NINE

  1

  The weather forecast storms. That’s pretty much all we got out there in the Atlantic in winter. Freezing cold, storms, snow, sleet, gray or even blackened skies. It had depressed me as a boy, but now it didn’t bother me much. I had a constant fire going in the living room fireplace, which made it all toasty when I wanted to sit and read or just dwell on things. I’d glance at the sky in the morning and try to predict when the snow would come, and by noon, if I’d been accurate, I would go outside just to feel the cleanness of it on my face.