The Hour Before Dark (8 page)

Somehow, she still managed to radiate beauty. Some women have organic beauty—their bodies are formed as if meant to be  appreciated. This is simply nature, and no doubt many have had it who were undeserving. Some women have magical beauty—where their features aren’t symmetrical, or their face looks slightly off-beat, but they have an aura about them that creates beauty around them. My sister had a bit of both. She had the same beauty our mother had possessed, when I could remember our mother’s face. Brooke did whatever she could to hide her looks in sweaters and sweats and a general sloppiness. But it was still there: that touch of our mother.

7

First thing Brooke did was whisper so softly that I was afraid I wouldn’t hear her. “Do I look scared, Nemo?”

She had an air of the bittersweet about her—pale and rosy and golden at the same time, her lips bitten and her eyes lost. Botticelli hair falling around her woolen shoulders—the perfect result of the blending of my mother’s Northern European fairness and my father’s Welsh darkness. “Do I? I feel scared. But I don’t want them to see it. I don’t want the world to see it.” She pointed to the news van out on the road. “Goddamn buzzards,” she said, her voice rising to its normal tone. “Come on in, Nemo. Good you made it. Carson greet you?” Her New Englandese turned the perv’s name into “Cahsehn,” and I had to admit I liked hearing it. Carson was known for seducing island sheep and for masturbating from the front seat of his small pickup truck at the harbor as a kind of welcome wagon.

“Nope,” I said. “No miraculous vibrating truck.”

“Dad called it the ‘Burnley Hello,’ “ she said. “He said it just a week ago. Better than what most men do with those things, I suppose.” Then the bravado left her face, a sudden retreat. She whispered, “I don’t want them to see me upset. I feel like I’m being watched all the time.”

She clapped her hands, and the dogs went running back into the house ahead of us. A loud crash—Brooke swore a blue streak—and when we got to the kitchen, the dogs had already knocked over a small chair by the glass table. Brooke shouted, “Kennels!”

The dogs, finally obedient, ran to their respective, enormous wire crates that edged the living room.

In personality, Brooke was solidly Yankee in a way that neither Bruno nor I had remained. She had the strongest accent, which was vaguely masculine despite her petite softness. She was a category of woman who lived on Yankee islands, just as there was a category of men who did as well, who had thick hair that always needed cutting, and ruddy complexions from constant movement in the cold, a nearly downcast expression as she spoke, as if gravity were her only make-up; she used profanity the way insecure chefs used spices: as if no sentence were complete without at least a “fuck” or a “goddamn.” In this way, she was unlike any of us. She was as Yankee as the low stone walls that had surrounded Hawthorn for more than two centuries. She was like a weathervane on the roof, or the shingles themselves: part of the way things looked in New England, part of its charm, but also part of its expectation. Few on the island could out-island my sister. She had an old soul for the place, as if she were the reincarnation of my great-grandma Cery (pronounced Cherry) Raglan, a salty bitter woman of enormous bosom and the iron will of a mule.

As I held her for a moment, I smelled our mother’s scent—particularly the essence of lime—and for a moment, I was truly happy. Happy to be with my sister. Happy to be home again. Happy that at least the three of us would be here for the time being.

Even if for all the wrong reasons.

8

When I entered Hawthorn again, I felt enveloped in its plain New England arms, its brick and wood and white walls and smell of earth and coffee and winter spice.

Its length seemed less like a serpentine pattern and more like a series of Christmas boxes waiting to be opened.

Why had I hated this place so much?

Why had I left it behind and done everything I could to let work and life get in the way of coming back?

Now it was late in the game. My father, gone. I’d thought I’d have some time later in life to sort out our problems. Maybe in my forties. After I’d somehow established my own territory in the world. Sometime in the future, when he was older and softer and I was wiser and more understanding of my own nature. I had made a huge mistake by running away from my problems.

Despite the length of the house, it wasn’t that wide, nor were the ceilings high. It was built for Welshmen and women—my great-greats, none of whom were tall. It wasn’t until my father married my mother and produced two sons who had some Norwegian and German in them, that the house seemed smaller and less grand to my dad. He told me that no one should really be taller than five-foot-six anyway.

I could practically feel my father still alive in the entry-way—and yes, though my mother was long gone, I felt her there, too, and saw her in my sister’s face. I looked for the penknife notching in the doorframe—and there they were. The notch that was me at four, then at six, then at twelve; and Brooke and Bruno’s notches, as well, all of us lined up against the doorframe every few years to check our progress.

I went to hug my sister, and she whispered in my ear, “Good to see you again.”

My sister and brother and I had seen each other in the years I’d been gone—but not more than once or twice. I hadn’t seen her in nearly six years, though, and we’d been so close growing up, that I felt my eyes tearing up just to be there, in the house, with both her and Bruno. It was enough for the time being.

Brooke loved the island more than she loved life itself, and Hawthorn was the heart of her love. She had told me as a child that she wanted to grow up to either be a fisherman, or a fisherman’s wife, and she had danced along the edge of the shoreline on many summer twilights, stretching her arms up to the pink sky, while her friends gathered around a bonfire that had just been set for the night—but she was separate from them, a nature spirit on the island.

Some heaviness had come into her—not in terms of weight, but an aura, as if remaining on the island had tugged away at her vitality, her ability to dance on the shore or love the smell of the fishing boats as they came into the harbor.

I suspected that, whether she ever married or not, she would always remain in that house, always caring for it and tinkering with its upkeep, and making sure that someone remained to remember the Raglan history. It was as if the doors were not open for her.

9

Brooke went to flick on the kitchen light, and when her back was turned, Bruno whispered to me, “Sedatives.”

“Yes,” Brooke said, turning to face him. She shot him a poisonous look. It nearly scared me, because it didn’t seem like the soft gentleness I’d remembered her having. “You drink, and I get a pill now and then.”

“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.

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.”