The Hour Before Dark (18 page)

In my head, I begged God for understanding, as if He lived there or had access to my brain. Minutes later, I’d question the idea of God at all given this kind of murder. Then I’d wonder if the pagans were right—if it weren’t just a pantheon of spirits and forces and gods and goddesses all within minidomains, ruling sections of this chaotic universe, with Nature itself the ultimate deity. Or if there was no God at all, God or gods, just the lives of animals on a rocky planet, all scrambling to survive, some of us built with an outrageous and unending hope that there was something more that existed between the words “live” and “die.” Then I went back to God and the relationship between Heaven and mankind. I even had the gods of some ancient religion arguing with the God of Abraham. It got pretty silly the way my mind went. Suddenly, I was talking to my father in silence. I imagined him in Heaven, and then felt ridiculous for the fantasy. It was wishful thinking.

I had no idea what happened when life ended. All my Catholic upbringing had brought me was a sense that I wasn’t sure what to believe, for it all seemed like the wishes of men and women who didn’t want to face the unknowable without a comfortable ending in mind. The altar boy in me felt guilty for thinking that.

These were nights of headaches. I’d look out my window over the slope of the hills and imagine I’d see the smokehouse out to the east.

The pictures of my father’s final hours replayed in my head as if I’d been there, watching.

The battering of the door, the terrific storm; the way my father had heard some sound nearby; the dropping of the flashlight; and then, the shadow figure there, bringing the stinging blade into him.

Sawing.

3

All right, let me just get it all out of the way right now.

My father’s murder was a cosmic fornication—a murder beyond what most people ever have to bear. Or dream about.

Someone got him from behind with a sharp blade. A curved blade. Under the arm, over the shoulder, in the back. They may have severed his spinal cord so that he had to lay there and take it. Or that may have come moments later. He may have volunteered to let them do it—there were no marks of restraints on his wrists or ankles, nor were there signs of struggle. At best, the fallen flashlight might’ve indicated he’d been knocked down first and was unconscious for most of the procedure. One can only hope.

Then they went at him. Cutting parts of him. Slicing. Curved blade carefully going in, cutting tendons. Cutting muscle. You had to assume the killer did this to keep him from escaping—but, in fact, there was no sign that my father had tried to leave the smokehouse, or even fight back at his attacker.

The worst of it was that my father might have been conscious for most of it.

All right, the worst of it was that each of us, my brother, sister, and I, had to now live with this without denial and without illusion.

No Brain Fart was going to rescue us with a weeklong fever of forgetfulness.

I could not think of my father after that without imagining the bloody room and his eyes looking up at the curved blade about to come down on another part of his body, and wonder what that must have been like.

The unimaginable began to haunt me. With it, the nightmares came, during daily catnaps and whenever sleep found me.

I could not get one image out of my head.

His eyes, looking up, as a shiny crescent blade came down.

In the nightmare, I felt as if I could see the misty face he had seen before he died.

She had long golden hair, and thin lips, and warm almond eyes.

It was Brooke.

When I awoke from the nightmare, Brooke stood over my bed.

In one hand, she cupped a small glass saucer, within which was a white votive candle, its flame small and blue-yellow.

In her other hand, a knife.

1

“Brooke,” I whispered.

The room had early morning light filtering through the white curtains—a blue-purple haze on the walls.

I reached over to the bedside table to flick on the lamp, but my hand trembled. I found the switch and turned it on. The glare of the lamp seemed like a noon sun.

“Brooke,” I repeated.

“Nemo?” she said, in that same whispered delicacy with which she’d greeted me when I first arrived home. “It’s you?”

A breath or two exhaled, she glanced at the knife she held in her hand. It was just a steak knife from the kitchen. “I heard noises.”

She set the candle and knife on the table. Then she crouched down to pick up the small lamp that had turned over onto the floor. “I get scared at night,” she said. She sat down on the floor beside my bed. “Dad doesn’t have his guns anymore. The police took them. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me. I’m going crazy here. I thought I heard someone in the house. I thought...” She glanced around the room. “I thought this was another room. I didn’t think I was in your room.”

“No one else is in the house. You, me, and Bruno. The doors are locked. Remember? I put all the locks in. If you want to see in the dark, just use a flashlight,” I said, glancing at the candle. “You could trip on something and set it on fire. God, or stab yourself.” It was an exaggeration, I guess, but I was tired of her nightly wanderings, which were freaking me out completely.

She ignored my comments. “The dogs are always the first to notice. They whimpered a little while ago. I had to close their kennels up.”

“Probably they heard a possum outside.”

“They were frightened. Nothing frightens them much.”

“If you think someone might be here,” I said, feeling as wide awake as I’d ever felt, my heart still beating like a jack-hammer, “you might want to let the dogs roam.”

“I thought it might be my imagination,” she said, her voice still barely more than a whisper. Her face turned glum and a bit stony. “I’ve heard it since before... well, before it happened. I kept thinking that someone was walking just ahead of me.”

“It’s the night,” I said. I packed some pillows behind my back and sat up. The smell of the room came to me: It smelled like trash. I glanced at the small trash can by my old desk, wondering what I’d thrown in there. Banana peel? Half a sandwich? “I’ve stayed up ‘til all hours sometimes, and I start imagining all kinds of things.”

“I don’t think it’s that,” she said. Then her voice rose. “Do you know that every night when I’m up—late—something in the house has moved?”

“Moved?”

“Small things. Things that no one would really notice. I notice them because I notice everything in this house.”

“It could’ve been Bruno. Or me.”

“No,” she said. “Not things like that. Inconsequential things, things you wouldn’t even touch.”

“Like?”

“The thermostat. It goes up at night.”

“That’s Bruno,” I said. “I’m sure it is.”

“Even on the nights he’s not here? It’s up to ninety. But it’s freezing anyway. Someone moves the dial on it up, but it still gets cold. I feel cold when I get up to check it. I feel something,” she said. She leaned forward and brought her knees up just under her chin. As she put her arms around her knees, reminding me of a little girl, her sweater rolled back a bit. I tried to see marks from her bathtub mishap, but couldn’t make anything out. “Some nights, there are windows open. In Dad’s room, in the living room. I’ve checked to see if they’re locked at four A.M. But then, by six, they’re wide open.”

“We’ve got storm windows,” I said. “No one’s getting in or out that way.”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “The storm windows are still on the outside. No one broke in. No one left through a window. They just opened them. As if they wanted me to know they’re here.”

“It could be anything,” I said. I grinned. “Dad’s ghost.” A joke. I felt grim for mentioning it. I just wanted someone to lighten up—her or me.

“No,” she said, taking this suggestion far too seriously. “It happened before Dad was killed. It happened before Bruno came back. And the wardrobe, in Dad’s room. It was moved.”

“I can explain that,” I said. “Bruno and I—”

“I don’t mean recently,” she said sharply, her mood changing. There was anger beneath her words, as if I were suggesting that she had somehow made something of nothing, “in October. Late October. Dad thought I did it. But I didn’t. And then there were the noises.”

“Brooke,” I said. I reached out and tapped her knee lightly. “We’re all suffering here. You probably more than anyone. You and Dad were so close.”

“I think,” she said, looking at my hand after it had briefly touched her knee. “I think that the killer is in the house. And has been. You know how Hawthorn was built. You know how it has those spaces.”

“No one but a six-year-old could even get into those spaces,” I said. “Look, you’re stressed. It’s normal. You were in the war zone. You sat with him. You saw what happened. It’s normal that you’re on edge. But for your own sake, you need to start working on ways to handle the stress.”

I knew about the old, original structure of Hawthorn—how it had been one of those less-than-sturdy New England farmhouses that had little insulation and very little room at all. The present house, built in the nineteenth century, had engulfed it—the living room with its great fireplace and the two bedrooms beyond it were the only things left from it that showed. Otherwise, there was a hollow space behind the front stairs that had been part of the original “great room” and a one-foot-wide space between the old brick and the new insulation and the brick on the outside. It couldn’t be reconciled with the later design, so it left this kind of thin wind tunnel that ran along the side front quarter of the house. When we’d been very little, Brooke and Bruno had been able to squeeze through it for as far as they could go—no more than a few feet in. By the time Bruno was seven, he could no longer fit, and Brooke couldn’t fit by her ninth year.

“Someone could go through the walls,” Brooke said, looking at me with an unflinching gaze. She had completely ignored everything I’d just said. “Someone could if they wanted it badly enough.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The same someone I hear at night. I go from room to room, and I feel as if I can almost find him.”

“Him?”

Her eyes widened. “I know it sounds ridiculous. But either it’s a person or it’s not. Who could it be, Nemo? If it’s a ghost, what is it? Why is it here?”

“Want me to call Joe and have him bring some detectives through?”

“No,” she said. Her eyes teared up. She raised her hands to her face and squished her flesh around as if it were clay. “God, I feel like I’m going crazy. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“Maybe we need to talk to someone,” I said. “All of us. A shrink. Maybe we can go see Bruno’s. He thinks she’s God.”

“Not bloody likely,” she said, and then smiled through her sadness, for it was what our father had always said about psychiatrists. “It’s my mind. It’s unquiet. Do you know—” She stopped herself in midsentence. “No, nothing.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. Then, “The night he died, I thought I heard someone downstairs.”

I watched her. I had begun looking for signs of a break down. I really was worried that we had some kind of family insanity within us. Brooke, the contradiction: the sturdiest of us, also the most fragile.

“I didn’t tell Joe. I don’t think I should,” she said.

“Did you see someone?”

She closed her eyes and rested the palm of her hand on her forehead, applying pressure there. “I can’t seem to turn off my mind anymore, Nemo. I keep playing things back from that night again and again and again.”

This time, her sweater slid farther down her arm, and I saw, along her forearm, gauze wrapped with white tape.

I leaned forward and touched the edge of her arm. “What’s this?”

2

She looked up, then brought her arm down to her side.

Shrugged.

Tugged the arm of her sweater back down to her wrists.

“Accident. I fell asleep in the tub.” She fumbled with words, as if trying to string together the right ones to make sense. “I... broke some glass ... cut myself up ... a bit.”

“That’s it?”

She nodded.

“What really happened?”

She nearly smiled—a sad half grin. It was part of how we’d interacted as children. Brooke never liked telling the truth when she was little, so she’d make something up first to make you feel better about bad news. After she’d given some convoluted explanation for something, I’d ask her: What really happened?

“I don’t know if I was dreaming or not,” she said, her slight smile returning to a flat line. “Bruno convinced me that I was. That I fell asleep in the tub and was dreaming, but I’m not sure. It was the night... the night of the storm. The night he died. There were voices that seemed to come from downstairs. I only really heard one of them. But it somehow made me sleepy to hear it, and in the dream I thought we were children again, playing the game.”

Just hearing it made my brain go a little haywire—something within me rebelled at the idea of the game we’d played as children. I hated it, and was embarrassed by it. It was as if my mind squinted and cringed whenever the thought of the Dark Game arose.

“We were all playing it. You had the blindfold on, and Bruno was doing the counting, and I helped him with the reciting. And I was just there, somehow, not really in the Dark Game and not really outside it. I had glass in my hand. I was taking it and trying to cut at the rope around my wrists. But... but I wasn’t doing it right, and the ropes became bright red ribbons floating around in the air. Bruno started laughing. So did I, but you told me to stop it. Stop it! you shouted, the way you used to when I was doing something wrong.”

“Oh, Brooke,” I said, my heart sinking a bit I took her hand in mine. “Did you do this to yourself?’’

“I didn’t think I did,” she said, her voice pure confusion. She glanced over at the knife on the table, and then at me. “I didn’t want to kill myself. I really didn’t. I just... I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to be in the game again. But I felt like someone else was there. Someone else was with me. Inside me. Trying to get out.”