The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  2

  Paulette Doone, from across the way, stopped by that night with what she called a “care package.” It consisted of a paperback Bible, a copy of a book called Give Your Troubles to the Lord and Watch Them Disappear, as well as raisin-oatmeal cookies, gingerbread men, and some apples she’d bought at one of the local markets. What she really wanted to do was snoop and pronounce some judgment on us.

  Paulette looked grim when I brought her into the house. She glanced left to right as if she were taking inventory. (“That’s a lovely vase,” she said, pointing. “And the piano. Your mother used to play it all the time. Is it still in tune?”) But when we got right down to it, she came over to tell me one thing and one thing only: that we needed to get to the Lord, and fast.

  “I want you to know that no one ever blamed you kids for the trouble you got up to,” she said. She patted my hand as we sat next to each other. She kept the grim expression— Bruno later called it a “death’s head rictus”—as she recounted her memories of our father. And then she said, “I thought I saw someone that day. Earlier. Might’ve been seven or so in the morning. It was a woman. She was walking in the fog.”

  I began to feel as grim as Paulette looked. “Did you tell Joe?”

  She nodded. “She scared me, that woman. She seemed out of place. She wasn’t from around here.” When she said this last part, I had a horrible feeling in my gut that I’d made a big mistake by returning home at all. She reminded me of what I truly had hated on the island: the bigotry and prejudice against anything “foreign,” and by foreign, this meant anyone who was not from the island in the first place. Anyone who had not lived there for two generations or more. “Wasn’t from around here” was a popular way of saying, “outsider.” Outsiders were considered somehow tainted, somehow worth less than insiders. The provincialism of the place was appalling. Worse, with Paulette, was the fact that she was rabidly religious and believed the Devil was everywhere and angels fought for our souls.

  And it was embodied for me, for that moment, in Paulette Doone, with her grimness and her fears and her made-up world of demons and angels.

  My contrary nature got the best of me.

  “It must be terrifying,” I said.

  Her eyes lit up as if she loved terror as much as she did the hint of scandal.

  “To live across from our home. To know that whoever did this ... this horrible thing ... might be somewhere nearby,” I said. I felt petty and mean, but something in her story of “wasn’t from around here” reminded me of why I’d set off stink bombs in her yard in the first place—she had shouted at me more than once that year that I was going to turn out just like my mother. My mother had been, after all, the ultimate island outsider. She quite literally was not from around there. She had the audacity to have married and carried children with the local hero, the prize, the man who had put Burnley Island on the map with his heroic deeds. And then she had run off like a scoundrel in the night, with a lover, no less, leaving the man broken and raising children alone.

  Paulette nodded as I spoke of the lingering terrors of living near the murder site. I felt like a rat for doing it to her—for scaring her more. But she’d come over to just say something bad about someone, and I was sick of her within five minutes.

  “I’ve stayed up the last two nights and wondered about it. I read mystery novels, and Ike says I’m always trying to solve crimes. I listen to the satellite radio—Ike has it in his garage— so I can hear what goes on off-island, what criminals are doing. And I don’t think this was out of the blue. I think your father was murdered a certain way... well, it was like a ritual, don’t you think? Do you believe in God?”

  That was it for me. She was going to try to save us. Using the opportunity of our father’s murder.

  “Get out of our house,” I said.

  3

  Sometime after the Revelation of Brooke as a Scarlet Woman, Bruno brought up the possibility of a memorial service.

  “Did Dad ever talk about how he’d want it?” I asked.

  She squinted at me, as if she didn’t quite believe I’d asked that. “He was only fifty-eight. He didn’t talk much about dying. I don’t think he anticipated this.” Her sarcasm nearly bit me. I had never been able to read her moods.

  “I guess he wanted to be buried down in the old cemetery," she said, as if I needed reminding. “Among all the Raglans. All of us should be buried there.”

  “Granny was buried in Falmouth,” I reminded her.

  “She was only a Raglan by marriage,” my sister said. “That was her sister’s doing. Dad wanted her here, but he didn’t like to stand up to the aunts from that part of the family. They were harpies.” Then she nearly brightened. “There must be a way to get in touch with Mom. I know there is. I wrote six months ago to the address I found in Dad’s file cabinets, but I got it back unopened. Someone else lives there now. There’s got to be a way to find her.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? How many years has it been?” Brooke asked. “She’s our mother. She may be married and living on a coffee plantation or something, I don’t care. I want to find her. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I want her to know,” Brooke said. “And I want that door to be open for her.”

  “If she won’t find us,” I said, “I’m not sure we can find her.”

  4

  Brooke once turned on the TV, only to be faced with the six o’clock news out of Boston. It had a mention of the trial of some priest, and how some vandals had destroyed some of the trees on Boston Common, and a mention of Dad’s murder and the suspicion that it might be a serial killer who had been responsible for the death of a New Jersey couple from the previous summer.

  “Joe said they’d do that,” I told Brooke. “That the detectives would link it to other murders. He doesn’t think it’s true.”

  She didn’t reply, but when I looked over at her, her hands covered her face as if she were weeping, but she made no sound.

  5

  Bruno used music as anger therapy.

  Even as a kid, he had played the piano like it was his angst expeller.

  He tried to play our mother’s piano in the living room, but all I heard was a flat tinkling of the keys, as if he could not remember a single composition from the three years of piano lessons he had taken.

  He could not even muster Moonlight Sonata, which was a tune he had banged out for a solid year, it had seemed, when he had been twelve and seemed to show signs of musical prodigy.

  6

  Me, I drowned the noise in my mind with Sam Adams Ale with Bruno down at the local pub.

  Bruno had become far too familiar with brands of beer (he could distinguish between Alsatian and French and German with his eyes closed; he knew the brewing techniques of Rolling Rock and Coors and how they differed from an upstate New York beer of which he was fond called Genesee). During one of these bouts of beer, Bruno said to me, “I saw something spooky last night.”

  “It was Brooke. She’s walking all night. Even the dogs won’t get up for her.”

  “Oh yeah, I noticed. Those pills she takes don’t seem to help her sleep much.” He waited a beat and took a sip of beer.

  “No, it was outside my window,” he said. “It was someone outside my window.”

  I shrugged, grabbing the pitcher and pouring out a bit of’ Guinness into my glass mug. “Brooke.”

  “On the second floor,” he said. “Jesus, do you ever listen? I saw someone outside, like they were in the oak tree.”

  7

  Some hours of the day, I found myself glancing out at the smokehouse. Thinking of the cops. Of Joe Grogan. Of damnedest things. Of my father.

  His last moments.

  8

  The smokehouse was surrounded with dead yellow stalks of weed and grass poking through the snow and what seemed like a never-ending mist, as if a translucent veil of white-gray covered the world.

  It had been both a playhouse and the
place of punishment for me as a child. My father had been stern when something truly bad had happened. I tended to be the troublemaker. I think he wept sometimes when he drew off his belt to spank me there. He had been punished horribly as a child (so horribly I did not even understand the stories he used to tell me about a whipping post and a riding crop or a cat o’ nine tails that my grandfather hung over the inside of the front door when my father had been a boy).

  My own punishments had never lasted long—usually one or two whacks on the butt, and then I had to sit on the dirty floor of that smelly place for an hour and think about what I had done.

  My father was afraid I would become a delinquent, as his oldest brother had, and end badly. He worried, I’m guessing, that he was more lenient than his own father and that I might turn out to be a terrible human being.

  He believed that there was bad blood in the family from the Irish and Scot sides, some kind of madness and bullheadedness, and that it had landed in his brother, and might have entered me at conception as well.

  He may have been right, since I seemed to always get in trouble or have unexplainable mishaps happen around me that seemed to only point in my direction.

  It had all been centered around the smokehouse, those punishments I got as a kid.

  And the games we used to play as well.

  I circled around the building and adjusted the strip of police tape, even though I knew it was futile.

  The wind would blow the tape away again.

  Didn’t matter. The investigators had found nothing. There was nothing to find. Only Brooke’s prints and her hair, and my father.

  The smokehouse seemed consecrated now.

  Consecrated by my father’s blood.

  9

  One time, I was trying to clear out the gutters of the house, since they’d been neglected since the fall and were full of leaves and muck. I saw Ike Doone out by the smokehouse, and I could not get down the ladder fast enough to go chase him off.

  Other curiosity seekers drove by, slowing on the road as they got near the crime scene.

  10

  At night, after I’d been drinking with Bruno, I’d lay in bed and look at the ceiling believing that the world was somehow an unfair and tragic proposition, and life was a joke.

  One night, I dreamed my father and I were out in a boat together.

  11

  The dream: It was a dinghy, and the sea was calm as a mirror. In the sky, an enormous silver crescent moon, but it was barely dark yet.

  My father was turned with his back to me. He had on the tan baseball cap that he’d often wear when he went fishing. He had no shirt on—his back was bare and pale white. He had a fishing line out in the water. When I looked in the bottom of the boat, near my bare feet, it seemed alive with wriggling fat eels and freshwater trout, their tails flipping as they tried to get out of the boat.

  He turned to face me, and his eyes were no longer there, but blood poured from the empty holes.

  Seagulls flew in the sky above, crying out, and somehow I knew they had taken his eyes.

  Then his eyes were intact, and he got that jolly twinkle in them like he did whenever he was about to tell a funny story. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Just close your eyes. Don’t touch anything.”

  I glanced down at the eels in the boat. “Them?”

  “Just stay still here. Keep your eyes closed. Don’t lean. No talking. Ignore the noise,” he said. “Listen to what I’m about to say. Listen very carefully. Each word I say is important. Each word is like a key to a door. I want you to imagine a small red light, so small you can barely see it. Everything about it is completely pitch dark, but the light is red like a tiny, tiny fire. I want you to follow me with that fire, follow me as I take you somewhere else.”

  I watched an eel with a mouth like a python as it devoured one of the fish. I nodded, not wanting to say anything to him.

  When I looked up again, the moon had grown larger, as if our boat had moved closer to it. My father hooked a long pike with a wood handle and a sharp barbed tip into one of the eels and was holding it over the boat. The eel wriggled in slow motion against the crescent moon. The moon seemed to have barbed tips, also, and for some reason looked like it was made out of metal.

  One of the seagulls shrieked louder than the rest, and its cry seemed to grow with the echoes of it.

  “She went away,” my father said, returning his gaze to the ever-growing moon as the seagull’s shriek became a scream. “But someday, she’ll be back”

  “Pola?” I asked.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1

  I awoke and, strangely, felt calm from the dream.

  As if my mind was somehow giving me permission to say goodbye to him. As if, despite the savagery of the crime, he was all right, somewhere, on some glassy sea, fishing.

  The only part of the dream that disturbed me was somehow knowing my father knew I was still in love with Pola.

  As I always did whenever I had a strange dream that seemed significant to me, I got up and got a spiral notebook I’d had for years and wrote down the details I could remember in it: Moon, fishing, eels and trout, fingernail crescent moon, seagulls, eyes missing, eyes returned to normal, tan baseball cap, calm water. Pola.

  2

  For the first time in daylight, I went to the village.

  The village was only about a half-mile walk from the eastern edge of Hawthorn. The day was overcast and the woods to the south sent a piney scent up to me as I trudged through the crunchy bits of snow. It had snowed off and on since I arrived, but generally melted by late afternoon down to a manageable slush. I could’ve borrowed Brooke’s truck, but she was sleeping and had the keys somewhere in her room. I didn’t want to disturb her.

  The road to town was slick and wet, and I enjoyed the freshness of the day as I went. Part of me wanted to jog the whole way in, to feel my lungs working, but instead, I opted for a lit cigarette out the side of my mouth. My self-destruction would be slow and take as long as cigarettes could take.

  Everything about Burnleyside was unappealing in winter.

  It seemed Main Street had no color after summer—the peeling paint of the white clapboard two-stories all ran together in a jumble of storefronts and thin slivers of small Cape houses. The locals called it the Shambles—the way the stores seemed to pile on top and over each other on Main Street. It always seemed overcrowded in summer, and like a mess of poor architectural planning in the winter. The Oaks, up island, was more picturesque owing to the money poured into the houses and few convenience stores at the end of the island. In the summer, there was a Baskin-Robbins there, and even a McDonald’s, all of which closed down for the winter as of October 20th. On Main Street in Burnleyside, I saw MontiLee Stormer with her swanky new hairdo. “Just like a movie star,” she said, and at first I wanted to smirk and chuckle at the provincialism of Burnleyside, but when I looked twice at her, it did give her a glamorous look. MontiLee was the woman who women kept their husbands away from because she seemed to be catnip for the men in the village, even if she had never strayed from her own husband. She had the look of a woman who might stray, and no matter how she protested, there were those who thought she’d spent her life in alliances. MontiLee quizzed me about what it had been like living in the South (as she thought of Washington, D.C.) and asked if the senators and congressmen were as corrupt as they seemed. She talked politics a bit—first national, wondering what the president was up to and why he didn’t respond to the letters she’d sent him about what she considered were the growing concerns of the nation. Then she switched to local news.

  “I know I shouldn’t be mentioning this,” she said. “But any news?”

  “On?”

  “The murder" she whispered, and glanced about the street as if others might hear her. As if it were a big secret. “We’re absolutely terrified to go out at night.”

  “They think it’s a killer from the mainland. Who’s back on the mainland,” I said, fairly sure that it was
a lie. I had to admit it: “I really don’t know. I don’t even understand what the cops are doing about it.”

  “I watch all the Discovery Channel shows on forensics, and it’s fascinating. How they can even see how blood sprays a certain way, and—” but she must’ve seen the look of revulsion in my face, because she stopped. “Our hearts go out to you, dear,” she said, and placed a hand on my chest, right above where my heart would be. For just a second, I thought she might be flirting with me, which was less annoying than uncalled for. I will grant that it gave me a tingle, partly because MontiLee was so attractive; I was not immune to her charms. “And you know,” she said, keeping her voice low, “You look like you’re holding up.”

  “Thanks. Ah ...” I said, fumbling with words. The only thing I could think to say was Joe Grogan’s “It’s the damnedest thing.”

  “I keep meaning to come by and pay my respects,” she said, next touching my wrist, lightly. “But with Christmas coming up, and the business—well, my time is never my own.”

  After we did the small talk of small towns, MontiLee turned away. She sashayed to the other side of the street, heading toward her really office. The row of shop fronts seemed dead now. Christmas lights were strung up, blinking even in daylight. At the end of Main Street, the small memorial park, with the one great fir tree, lit up.