The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  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.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  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 steppe
d 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.

  “Yes.”

  “Your sister called you the previous night. Do you recall precisely when?”

  “No. It was sometime before midnight. I was out that night with a friend.”

  “Does your answering machine log the time?”

  I shrugged. “Yes. But I erased the tape. I always do. Once... I’ve heard the messages.”

  “But you can guess that at the earliest, she might’ve called when?”

  “Well, she told me she called around nine.”

  “But she might’ve called earlier.”

  “I hadn’t been home since morning. I went to work, then went out after work.”

  “You left Burnley when you were eighteen?”

  I glanced at Joe. Then back at the investigator. “Yes.”

  I glanced at Joe again. “Is this something I need a lawyer for?”

  Raleigh smiled. “Let me tell you, we’re having a tough time with this one, Mr. Raglan. For various reasons. It would be helpful if we could at least learn more about your father’s relationship within his own family.”

  “Well, it was a good one. I was a bad kid, basically. I don’t know why. There was just something here that made me want to get away. I hated this village, and this island. I felt stuck. I was also stupid. I just wanted to get away, so I did. I haven’t been that close to my sister or brother or father since then. Well, ‘til now.”

  “Did you know about your sister’s mental state?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Detective,” Grogan said.

  She continued. “She’d been depressed. Neighbors mentioned to us that she sometimes wandered at night—since late November. She was seen once out on the road in front of the house, completely naked. Your brother mentioned finding her in such a state, sleepwalking. She’s even contemplated suicide.”

  “Brooke? I don’t believe that.” I stood up, pushing the chair back. “I’m sorry, Joe, but it sounds like you’re looking to scapegoat Brooke.”

  “She told us,” Raleigh said. “She didn’t hide it. She showed us scars on her aims. Have you seen them?”

  3

  “It wasn’t exactly a suicide attempt,” Bruno snapped when I told him. “She said that she’d been asleep. She’d been taking a bath, and she has the little plastic pillow that floats—in the tub—and she fell asleep. She almost drowned. But it wasn’t an attempted suicide.”

  “I don’t think it was about the bathtub,” I told him.

  We were at yet another of our favorite watering holes in the village that night, having one beer too many. “This investigator said there were scars. On her arms.”

  “It was the upstairs bathroom,” Bruno said, testiness in his voice. “With the sliding glass door for the shower. Dad’s.

  When she woke up, she panicked, coming up from the water, and smashed it. She cut her arms a bit, but nothing much. Nothing deep. It freaked her out. She was embarrassed. She said she tracked blood into her room and had to wash it all up that night.”

  “Were you there?”

  “No. But I know Brooke. If she’d tried to kill herself, she’d have done the job right.”

  4

  Out of curiosity, I went upstairs and down the long hallway of rooms to my sister’s bathroom one morning when she was sound asleep. The glass doors to the bathtub were gone, although the frame around them remained.

  It definitely broke. I left it at that.

  For the time being.

  I grew restless. I began to feel as if Hawthorn had become a prison. We certainly were too incestuous, too much in each other’s business, too much on top of each other’s lives. I felt like hopping the first ferry off the island, just to be away from both of them: Bruno and Brooke, brother and sister.

  And that house.

  And that smokehouse with its residue of murder.

  At twilight, I took a walk into the village, wrapped in a big overcoat and gloves and hat—feeling as if I just wanted to freeze a little, just feel the cleanness of air and the freshness of the sea breeze.

  5

  As I walked along the road, snow fell so lightly that it was barely perceptible at first.

  By the time I reached the village, it was pitch black with very little moon shining through the overhang of clouds. The streetlamps of Main Street were well lit, but the block I strolled along was completely empty. Half the shops were boarded up for the winter; the other half, on the north side of the street, were open. A few had just closed for the night.

  I stood for a few minutes and watched the faint beginning of snow spin downward, and I watched some of the shopkeepers lock up their stores.

  Croder-Sharp-Callahan was still open.

  It was a longish building with Victorian flourishes along its rooftop and a wraparound porch. It probably had begun its life in the village as a great spread of a house. When the store had taken over, it had worked hard to retain that charm of the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as had many of the shops on Main Street. The lights were on inside, and I could see the rows of food and household supplies.

  And then I saw her there. Through the slightly blurry window of the store.

  Pola Croder.

  It was as if I were not standing across the street, with a car or two passing between me and the store. It was as if I were right there, next to her, looking at her.

  She stood behind the old lunch counter, an apron wrapped around her broad and lovely hips, her blond hair pulled back. She had gained a little weight since high school, but I had to admit, it looked damn good on her and gave curves to her formerly angular body.

  Work up the nerve, you mouse, I told myself. I wished I could’ve downed a beer just to give myself that warm, false courage of hops and foam. You’ve spent your life running from her. You have to make it right. Somehow. You have to let her close the door on you. Again.

  6

  I went into Croder-Sharp-Callahan, its front door practically slapping me on the ass as I stepped over its threshold.

  Inside, the lights were bright and flat. I saw a few faces I recognized. You can’t grow up in a town that small and not know everyone. Even if you move away for several years, you come back and you still know everyone. Truth is, time truly does stop there and only begins again upon your return. “Neem,” they said, and I said “Hey” to each of them and they said “Hey” back, and then we all got down to the business of ordering what might be the worst Chinese food on the planet, but the only kind available on the island.

  “Pola,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure if she would ever look my way.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1

  In her teens, her hair had been white-blond, and she had glossy red lipstick and let cigarettes hang out of her mouth as if she wanted a guy to flick them out and kiss her. She was the closest thing to glamorous we had in Burnleyside.

  Pola. That name came from her Russian father, but it had been an unfortunate one in our childhood. We had called her Pola Bear on the playground, and because she had the usual amount of baby fat straight up until her teen years, this nickname no doubt hurt.

  All right, I had never called her Pola Bear. I was an outcast even then, and I felt a great deal of sympathy for anyone who was bullied or called names. The fact that we all had funny names (with the exception of the few Bills, Daves, Annes, and Debbies among us) didn’t seem to stop any of the kids from picking out someone to ridicule for name alone. As Nemo, I was often called “Feebo” (you figure out how it got from one to the other, and you will have discovered the secret of childhood cruelty).

  But there was Pola, at Croder-
Sharp-Callahan. She was no longer the pointy-chinned little weirdo from childhood, the girl with a dirty face and a dirty dress. By high school, I had found her completely irresistible, and we’d fallen in love fast and stayed that way until about the end of my senior year. I had adored every inch of her, the smell of her, the brain of her, the laugh of her.

  She finally turned and said her “Hey,” and took my order of chicken chow mein and egg drop soup. I wasn’t sure if she recognized me at all. My heart seemed to beat too fast. I felt my throat dry up a bit, but soothed it with some warm tea.

  Seeing her again, I will admit, I felt that lust hunger that wasn’t as awful as I suspect women think it is.

  I wanted to hold her, and kiss her, and somehow be with her again.

  I figured it would never happen.

  I felt five times the loser for even wanting it.

  2

  The chicken chow mein was as smooth as ever, and the soup, though tepid, satisfied. It was difficult to even notice the taste because Pola was nearby. I kept glancing at her, out of the corners of my eyes. Had she recognized me at all while I slurped at the cup? While I wiped at my chin? Pola didn’t seemed to have noticed me beyond the way she might notice any other local entering the place. Certainly others said their “heys” with more marked enthusiasm, and with questions about my travels to the outer edges of the universe. Here’s what I can recall of Pola, standing behind the counter with her smudge-stained white apron, her breasts so noticeable as to be an entirely separate creature parasitically attached to her chest, her hair shiny in the fluorescent lights that hummed above us: She was a beauty, and not just on the small-town Burnley Island scale, but she would’ve been a beauty anywhere, and it was not her bra size, or the blondness, but it was her eyes and her rather direct use of them when happy, sad, annoyed, or disturbed.