The Hour Before Dark (13 page)

I had this sense, it was crawling around in my brain and body, as if I could detect her aura. Anger and madness. It pissed me off that it took me so long to fall asleep. I could picture nothing about her, but it was like a negative image behind my eyes when I closed them. It was all that ghost and haunting talk that Brooke had been going on about. It influenced me too much in the late night. It frightened me a little, as well, because it reminded me of the madness our father had told us that our mother possessed. I wondered if we each would go mad someday—some biological imperative, some little signal sent out from an obscured part of the brain. That we’d somehow begin to show signs of mental breakdown. I wondered if Brooke had already been experiencing this. I wondered if it was the reason we had ever played that awful game as children, where our minds seemed to work differently afterward.

I felt my inner life was unquiet. Restless. Constant thought, constant debating over family and my father’s death and what I sensed versus what I didn’t—my brain didn’t seem to stop at night at all. I tossed and turned, and wrapped myself in the comforter and blankets, and then threw them off the bed and rolled up in the top sheet.

I don’t know when sleep finally came, but soon after, I awoke to hear Brooke screaming.

Three bloodcurdling shrieks, the like of which I’d never heard before. I stumbled out of bed and called to her.

All the doors were closed, so I had to open the five doors that separated my room from Brooke’s—Bruno had come running as well.

As I went, I could see the first morning sunlight out the windows.

When we got to Brooke’s room, she was sound asleep in her bed.

On her dresser, at her bedside table, even on the windowsill: small votive candles, all nursing small flames.

Bruno and I stared at each other for a second. Bruno whispered, “That’s fucked.”

I figured he meant having heard the scream, or even the burning candles, but he pointed to the big window over her bed, the shades up, the curtains drawn back.

3

It was as if just seconds before we’d gotten there, Brooke had taken her finger and rubbed words across the condensation on her bedroom window, then had breathed heavily on it so they’d show up.

The words were written largely enough to be read from across the room: 

HERE COMES A CANDLE TO LIGHT YOU TO BED

1

All right, let me put it all down here: When we were little kids, we’d played that damned game as if it were real, and we broke the main rule about not playing it after dark.

We played it when we weren’t supposed to, and I suspected that it screwed with our heads, only I wasn’t sure how to talk about it. It had an accompanying dose of shame with it, and a decent bit of fear. (And it was fun.) It turned bad when we couldn’t stop playing it. When we’d sneak away, and put on the blindfolds and start going into the Dark Game.

Start going where it went.

Brooke had been most affected by the Dark Game, and by the Brain Fart.

She had been the one who had nearly died at the age of eight, afterward.

Her heart had nearly stopped, at least that’s what it had seemed like to me. I practically got hysterical and kept telling our father that she needed to go to a hospital, but he told me it wasn’t that bad.

“She’s had a fright,” he said. First he brought her temperature down with an ice bath. He made me his assistant, had me running all over the house for the thermometer, the ear drops, the nose drops, and the Vicks VapoRub to help her breathe better.

Dad kept her in warm blankets for two weeks after that, and spoon-fed her, and wouldn’t let her so much as go to the bathroom by herself until he was sure she was better.

After that, he took me by the hand down to the duck pond, and he told me that if I ever played the Dark Game again, he would make sure that I lived to regret it.

I lied to him and told him I never would play it again.

But my fingers were crossed, so it didn’t count. Or so I thought.

As I grew up, I lived to regret pretty much everything.

2

“Locks,” Brooke said. “I want new locks on every door.”

I stood in the doorway, having just come back from a hike with the dogs down through the woods. It was two in the afternoon—the earliest I had seen Brooke get up in a few days. “How many?”

“Seven,” she said. “For the outside doors. I want at least two for the inside.”

“All right,” I said.

“Deadbolts. All of them,” she said.

“Not for the inside,” I said.

“Inside and out,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just haven’t felt safe. We can call a locksmith if you want.”

“No, I can do it. Dad’s tools still around?”

She nodded and went to show me where the tool kit was—under our father’s desk in his den on the first floor. The desk was piled high with folders and papers. “He was doing some genealogical research,” she said.

I flipped through some of the papers, but have to admit that I began feeling very numb doing it. I felt as if I were picking over his bones.

“It’s the Raglans going back to before William the Conqueror,” she said with some wistfulness in her voice. “He spent too much time on it. But sometimes it was the only thing he did at night.”

I pulled the tool kit out—a large metal suitcase that my father had loved dearly. I crouched down and opened it.

“Seven deadbolts,” Brooke repeated, as she stood over me. “Might as well be the same key for all of them. Can you do that?”

I glanced up at her. “Sure. It’s just a key assembly.”

“Good,” she said.

“Why inside?”

“I don’t feel safe,” she said. “I want the doors to the upstairs hall to lock. Both ends of the hall.”

“That’s not practical. If there’s a fire and it’s locked and we can’t get the key...”

She thought a moment, and then lifted her hands as if weighing options. “Get enough keys so that they can be on the inside of each door.”

I murmured something that might’ve had the words “fire code” in them.

“Mumblespeak?” she asked.

“What?”

“You’re mumbling.”

“I’m just not sure if the fire department would like that. If someone needed to get out, during a fire, they might not have their key. And you have those candles going in your room at night.” I thought of the candles she kept burning in her room at night. There must have been at least ten or twelve of them. The last thing I wanted to worry about in Hawthorn was a fire.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind a deadbolt for my bedroom, but since it already locks from the inside, I’ll be fine with it. There’s a killer somewhere. I want to feel safe. I can’t sleep at night. Every little noise frightens me.” She said this as if it were obvious, even though I’d never really seen her be afraid of anything. “I wish we could get better locks for the windows. When I can, I want to replace them.”

“We can get an alarm system.”

“I already ordered one,” she said. “But it won’t be here for another week.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said.

“I don’t want anyone coming near us,” she said.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m just being sensible. We need to keep this place locked up. It’s not safe here anymore.”

“This morning, early, you cried out. You were asleep.”

“I was probably dreaming,” she said. As she passed me on her way out the door, she added, “Would you mind doing the locks today?”

“Fine,” I said. “Are you painting or cleaning something?” She glanced back at me from the doorway. “What?”

“I keep smelling turpentine.”

“Oh,” she said. “I paint sometimes. At night.”

3

“She paints?” I asked Bruno, stopping him during one of his great concertos at the piano that had been giving me a bit of a headache. I wasn’t about to complain. I figured if he was getting creative like that, it probably was healthy. It’s how he had released rage as a kid, and I knew he had built up a lot of it over the past several years. Just as it might be healthy that Brooke was painting again, as she had as a young child.

“Does anyone in this family ever ask a question directly to the person that it’s about?” he responded, with a somewhat bemused expression.

“God, I can tell you’ve been shrunk. That sounds like therapy-speak. Brooke’s too sensitive about her drawings,” I said. “Since she was little.”

“Well, yeah, she paints,” he said. “She set up the back of the greenhouse like a studio. She’s pretty good. Hey, you using the tub by Dad’s room?”

“No,” I said. “His stuff’s still in there. I feel weird about it. I’m using the downstairs shower.”

“Maybe Brooke’s using it. Something’s leaking downstairs. I thought it might be the caulking in the tub,” he said. “Check the ceiling in the dining room. There’s a water spot over toward the window. It grows by leaps and bounds. Daily.”

“Shit,” I said. “I bet the same pipes are in here that were there in 1895.”

“At least,” Bruno said. “I wish I knew a little about house maintenance. Other than from watching This Old House. I mainly just know how to tear walls down.”

“Hawthorn is the original This Old House,” I said. “Call a plumber.”

He shook his head, laughing. “‘Call a plumber,’ he says.” Then he pressed his fingers to the piano keys and began playing again.

4

While Brooke was asleep, early in the day, I walked back through the rooms to get to the very end of the house. The greenhouse door was open, and I went through it.

Past the empty pots and stacks of gardening tools, stood an easel that was low to the floor. On it a half-finished canvas. Brooke had been painting the woods out back, and using some kind of gray wash for a background that seemed to heighten the color of fire—for she painted a fire in the woods. It was not half bad.

Behind this, several jars of water full of thin paintbrushes, a can of turpentine, and small gray cloths. Crushed tubes of oil paints—nine or ten of them—lay beside the easel as well. Four or five canvases leaned against the glass wall beyond all this.

I crouched down and lifted one up.

It was medium-sized, and at first I wasn’t sure what it was of—three indistinct figures standing in what looked like a dimly lit room.

Then I realized the figures were us as children. Their faces were gray and unfinished, but there was no mistaking Bruno in his little red T-shirt, with his yellow hair, at the age of four. Brooke, with her hair straight and long; and me, scrawny and wearing my jeans that were torn at the knees. We held hands, standing in a circle.

It was the Dark Game. We were playing.

I was impressed with her memory—to have been able to paint these images, remembering the clothes we had worn at one time. Remembering how our bodies looked. Even if she couldn’t quite remember our faces then.

I set this canvas back down and reached for the one behind it. In this painting, it was our father’s face, but young. Younger than I could remember, so I assumed it might’ve been from an old photograph. He had a smile, and she had managed to capture a peculiar brightness in his eyes. Something was too flat about it, as if she hadn’t quite mastered perspective or even the interplay of light and dark. But it looked so much like him in its details. I pressed my thumb against my forehead to ward off a headache. I can’t believe he’s gone. I can’t believe it.

I set this one down, carefully, behind the first.

Then I pulled up the third canvas.

This one I found disturbing.

It was a painting of Brooke herself. At least, I believe it was Brooke.

She stood on the front porch of Hawthorn. She was naked. There was rain.

She had painted her breasts and stomach and thighs completely red, as if smeared with blood.

1

I put the canvases back in place.

I managed to spend the rest of the day, from morning ‘til night, putting deadbolts on each of the doors to the outside. The front door, back door, the door from the kitchen that went down to the brick walkway out to what had once been my mother’s garden, the door to the fenced-in area at the east side of the house, where the dogs could be let out to wrestle and gambol all day. And the door that came off the greenhouse, to the side and back of the house.

The doors to the front and back hallways seemed problematic to me. I really worried about the possibility of a fire. One had broken out once, many years before my birth, but had been contained to the kitchen and front room. I really wondered what would happen if there were a fire on the stairs, and we had two locked doors. So, instead of deadbolts, I put on ordinary locks such that each door could be unlocked without a key from the inside.

2

Several days in, I got a call from Joe Grogan, asking me to come in for a few more questions. I borrowed Brooke’s truck and went to the station at about three in the afternoon. Joe’s office was very much as it had been when I was a boy. I’d been hauled in once or twice when it was suspected I’d broken in with a gang of my friends to one of the summer people’s places. Not only had I never done this, but I had no gang of friends. Other than Harry Withers, and later Pola Croder, I hadn’t really made many close friends—let alone a gang.

I felt like a boy again, walking in there.

Joe was not alone. A woman of at least thirty, short-cropped red hair, looking severe and somewhat like a pigeon (gray clothes and a sort of beak for a nose), stood, leaning a bit against his desk.

“Nemo Raglan, this is Homicide Detective Raleigh.”

“From Hyannis,” she said, clipping her words as if small talk were an annoyance for her. She stepped toward me to shake my hand.

“She just needs to ask a few questions,” Joe said.

“Take a seat, Mr. Raglan,” the detective said. She had a stony look on her face. “I don’t want to waste your time. This will be brief.”

“Sounds good,” I said, feeling somewhat nervous.

“You arrived the day after the body was discovered,” she said.