The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  “All six hundred?”

  He shrugged. “Fewer this year. The McWhorters and the Carrs moved. When the propane delivery changed, the entire McHenry clan had to move back to Providence, and then one of the Women Whom God Forgot died. Sarah Hatchet was ninety-six. So we now have approximately, five hundred seventy-two. But then, you’re back, and Bruno. Five hundred seventy-four.”

  I looked at him as if I had never known him. We’d had some bad stuff between us in the past. We’d had some good stuff as well. I had never been sure how much I really trusted Harry. “What do you want from me?”

  He looked at me innocently enough. Like a puppy that just got slapped on the nose. “‘Want’?”

  “Yep. Want. You and I don’t speak for just about a decade, and now you want something. I can tell. I can sense it.”

  He chuckled. “Jesus, Nemo. You haven’t changed much."

  “Probably not.” He was right. I really hadn’t changed much in those intervening years. All my wounds were fairly fresh, at least now that I was back on the island: Maybe worse because of the murder.

  “Okay, let me cut to the chase,” he said. “I want to be a big-time reporter. I want to be on CNN someday. Or network news. I’m nearly thirty and on an island nobody cares about, writing up local gossip. I want something more. It’s not an industry that wants middle-aged men joining it. It’s an industry where you work up when you’re young. And I’m not gonna get there from Burnley Island and a winter circulation of under a thousand—most of whom use the six-page newspaper to line their birdcages and paper train their puppies and wipe their asses—writing the occasional odd story about the octogenarian great-great grandmother who still knits sweaters from yaks that gets picked up by the AP wire because suddenly yaks are a hot topic.”

  Had to laugh at that last string of images.

  “So you want a big murder story.”

  “Listen, I got a big murder story,” he said. “But it’s not enough. I need to solve a big murder story. I need to solve it. And I need whatever information I can get.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You want to go in. The smokehouse.”

  “You got it,” he said.

  4

  Harry went over the particulars of the murder. “There were no prints at all. No footprints. No handprints. No weapon found. There was enough blood there—pardon me, Nemo, I know this is hard to have to hear,” he said. “But prints would’ve been made. One person or three or four. Someone. But the strangest part of all was what your father did.”

  I waited for whatever this was.

  “He let it happen. He was alive for at least an hour. He was cut in places on his body, strategically, as if to keep him alive for the longest time, but he seems to have just lain down and let them slice off parts of his body after that,” Harry said. “It wasn’t just a murder. It was a surgical procedure.”

  5

  “You haven’t been over to it since it happened, have you?” Harry asked. He pointed again to the smokehouse with the stick.

  “It’s still off-limits,” I sad. “They might need to—”

  He cut me off. “They went over that place for days. They didn’t find a single fingerprint or footprint or anything other than your father’s own prints. They came up with nothing. One of the top forensics experts in Boston came out for three days trying to collect something. It has them all baffled. You think you’re going to get justice from anyone? Impossible. They can’t come up with a case. The state attorney’s gonna have to figure out where to point the finger, and each one of you has an alibi, except for Brooke, and no one thinks a woman of five-foot-four, even as sturdily built as Brooke, could do this and not leave a trace of herself behind. She took a direct route into that smokehouse and sat down on that bloody floor and went catatonic or something for a few hours before calling anyone. Only her prints show up, and they’re known to have come long after the murder took place because of the way the blood had congealed. She is the only possible suspect, but they really don’t think it’s her, unless she went Lizzie Borden on his ass. And it would be nearly impossible for her to do it without some others helping, who again, would have left some trace of themselves in that room. It was a mess. No one who did that would’ve gotten out. Grogan told someone that your father might’ve even laid down and done it to himself. He drew a diagram of how it might’ve been done. But what I want to know is, how’d your dad chop his own head off?”

  It was more than I was ready for. I nearly dropped into the wet ground and covered my face. I wanted to block out the images forming in my head.

  To his credit, Harry crouched down beside me and wrapped an arm around my back. “I’m sorry, Nemo.”

  “Got a cigarette?”

  “No. And you should quit,” he said. “My dad died of emphysema. It’s nasty. Smoked a pack a day and thought it wasn’t much. Dead by fifty-three.”

  “My dad died by being chopped up, dead by fifty-eight,” I said. The gallows humor was upon me. I really wanted a cigarette, but had left my pack in my other coat’s pocket.

  6

  “Here’s the thing,” he said. “Brooke might’ve helped him do it. That’s the only theory I’ve heard bandied about that might work. Brooke might’ve been in cahoots with your father on killing him.”

  “And you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

  “Completely.”

  “If my sister were to help my father kill himself, there are easier ways. There’s drowning in the pond. Smothering with a pillow. Gun at the back of the head,” I said. More gallows humor. I couldn’t help it. If you’ve ever gotten to such a point of confusion that it was almost as if you couldn’t see out from your own eyes, then you know how I felt as I sat there on the ground.

  “I know, and that’s what Grogan told me, too, just about. But at some point—now, or a month from now, or a year from now, they may go after her. Unless someone figures this out. You know how the cops figured out the Manson murders?”

  I shook my head.

  “Right. They didn’t. The reporters figured it out. Because investigators are looking at the small picture. But sometimes, it’s the big obvious picture that spits in your face. I don’t believe Brooke did it. I think a few people murdered your father. I have no idea what motive is involved. I have no idea who they are or where they went. But I think between the two of us, we can go in there and see if there’s something the detectives missed. How many years has it been since Jon-Benet Ramsey was killed? Well, there’s no actual suspect yet. No one can bring charges. This could be like that. But my fear is that Brooke is going to be the easy target, even if she’s the wrong one. And yes, she’ll be proven innocent, but that won’t matter once she goes to court. It’s a nasty system when it drags in a scapegoat. I don’t want it to. I want it to drag in the killers. I want to be the guy to piece stuff together.”

  “You know what? I feel guilty for saying this, but I just want Dad to be buried and this to go away.”

  “Of course,” he said. “But it won’t go away. Not many murders out this way.”

  “I know.” I sighed. “It’s the worst in New England history. Or something."

  “It’s not that,” he said. “There’ve been others that might be worse. A family was killed down on Outerbridge Island a couple of years back. They caught the boys involved, eventually. When Stonehaven, down in Connecticut, had that big mass murder back in the—what? Well, years ago, that was pretty damn bad. There’ve been murders all over the place. I think the Borden murders in Fall River still have the tide of the bloodiest unsolved murders. But this one... well, it’s ours. Burnley’s. You know about your dad’s business?”

  I nodded. “If what you’re asking is about his finances, yeah, I knew.”

  “He was a gambler. Not that he ever went down to Foxwoods or Atlantic City. I mean, he played the odds with his business instead of going the safe route. And money disappeared. Not a lot at any one time. Five hundred here, a thousand there. But if you look at the books, it comes t
o about 75,000 bucks over a twenty-year period. It wasn’t in his bank account. Brooke doesn’t have it,” Harry said. “There’s a lot of money unaccounted for. So maybe money was a motive. Maybe he had an old debt. Maybe it was a war buddy. Maybe it was your mom.”

  When he said this, I caught my breath. “As if she gave a damn. She’d have more money than God from my grandmother’s will.”

  “She was disinherited,” Harry said.

  “Fuck,” I said. “I feel like bones are being picked over.”

  “The estate never contacted her, she never contacted them. The detectives have been trying to locate her, too.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my mother,” I said, snorting. “Unless she came all the way up from Brazil to kill him and then take off again.”

  “When it comes to murder, you never know who it might be,” Harry said. “Come on, let’s go to the smokehouse.”

  7

  Harry handed me the key. “I got it from Joe. He and his guys are so stymied, he gave me his blessing.”

  I looked at the key, which I had never seen in my childhood. My father had kept it around his neck. What in God’s name for?

  I looked up at Harry. “Okay.”

  I unlocked the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  1

  To enter the smokehouse, we both had to lean forward, stooping a bit. The doorway was low, and the ceiling was not much higher. I felt a strange warmth, and half expected to remember all the hiding and the punishing and the secrecy that the smokehouse had been in my childhood, but not one bit of it came back to me. It seemed like an alien place. It would’ve seemed ordinary, but for the forensics work that had been done there.

  2

  In the smokehouse. Bloodstains. Chalk, fading. Fragrant, almost March-like smell of seedlings and freshly turned earth mixed with the coppery tang in the air and the smell of dead animal. Dead man. Dead father.

  “Why do you think he came out here?” Harry asked.

  “No idea. I really don’t know.”

  “It’s almost a ritual,” Harry said. “He was laid out spread-eagle.” He spread his arms and legs wide. “No ropes, no tethers. They suspect he was lifted up at one point, but then laid back down. Whoever did it let him go slowly. The major cuts didn’t happen until near the end. Whoever did this wanted him alive for most of it. Whoever did this, he didn’t fight them.”

  3

  I caught my breath and held it. Then, exhaled. “I feel like a little kid scared of the dark.”

  “You used to play that game in here,” Harry said.

  “Yep.”

  “I never understood it. I always wondered what was going on because when I tried to play it, I just didn’t see what you saw.”

  “It was just imagination,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Like any other kid’s make-believe game. You close your eyes and you start making a journey in your mind.”

  “Is that what you’re interested in?” I asked. “The Dark Game?”

  “Not really. But it happened here. Your father’s murder. You played the game here, and you all had some strange stories to tell back then.”

  “We did?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Done everything I could to not remember. And then some. I just seem to remember creating a fantasy world.”

  “An escape hatch,” Harry said, “That’s what your dad called it. I heard him yelling at you one time because he found some rags we’d used as blindfolds. And he told you not to keep using an escape hatch, that it was only for truly bad times.”

  I looked up and around the walls. Harry shone his flashlight into the corners of the stone walls.

  “Awful,” I whispered through gritted teeth.

  The blood had begun to turn brown on the stone. The ceiling of the smokehouse was too dark to see. Harry’s flashlight spun around; he went to the walls and carefully looked at things that I had no desire to see, let alone know about. I just caught a glimpse of the markings on the floor where my father’s body had been found, a jigsaw puzzle of a body, cut in several places. I got the feeling that someone else was there, in some dark recess of the place. I began to feel the small hairs on my arms stand up. I felt the way I would’ve waking up from a nightmare that had seemed all too real.

  The temperature inside the smokehouse dropped several degrees, and I felt something on my earlobe, as if an insect were crawling along it, tickling.

  I felt light-headed, and the room seemed to spin. I tried saying something to Harry—I think I’m fainting, I wanted to say, but words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.

  “Holy shit!” Harry gasped as he turned toward me, and I felt the beam of the flashlight on my face like an exploded sun—it blinded me for an instant, and when my vision returned, I felt as if I were looking out from someone else’s eyes.

  4

  The world seemed to fall in on itself, in to a black hole of darkness as a wave of nausea went through me and my knees buckled. I knew I would fall, or was in the process of falling, but suddenly, it all went dark.

  5

  When I woke up, I was outside, looking up into the empty sky, feeling a coldness at the back of my neck and the worst headache of my life pressing against my skull.

  “Nemo?” Harry asked. He crouched beside me; I felt his arm under the back of my neck, supporting me.

  I tried to speak, but my mouth felt dry and raw, and I could feel the beginnings of a sore throat.

  Harry’s face was white. He had scratches all along his cheeks. His lower lip was cut and bloody, and he had the purplish beginnings of a black left eye. “Jesus H. Christ, Nemo, what in God’s name was that all about?”

  I coughed out, “I don’t know.” Felt like razor blades in my throat.

  “Is that you in there, or do I need to hit you again?” Harry asked.

  I felt pressure from his arm across my neck.

  He was afraid I was going to lunge at him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  1

  “You nearly beat the crap out of me,” Harry said. His face bore thin red marking around the eyes and nose. He sweated profusely. “I thought it was a seizure. At first. It was like trying to help a grizzly.”

  “Sorry,” I said, feeling awkward apologizing for something that I wasn’t even sure had come from me. “I can’t believe it.”

  2

  I felt as if something had been torn out of me against my will. I felt raped in some awful way.

  Cold and torn and used by something that had pressed its way into my body.

  It was a feeling of insanity.

  Was I going crazy? Was this a sign? Was it stress?

  I tried to remember the stories that my father had told of Granny and how she’d had her spells when she’d start talking to people who weren’t there; or when my grandfather had tried to set a fire in the gas oven and nearly blown up Hawthorn altogether but for the quick thinking on my father’s part.

  But those were old-age diseases—those were dementias that came after seventy.

  They weren’t this.

  Part of me genuinely could not believe it.

  Part of me even harbored a damning hope that Harry had made it up and would tell me in a moment that it was a big joke. That he’d scraped up his own face, punched himself with the back of the flashlight, and was having a good one at my expense so soon after my father’s murder.

  “Let’s get back to the house,” he said, easing up on my neck and chest. He stood up and offered me his hand. “I don’t know what the hell just happened, but you look like you should lie down on something other than mud.”

  3

  Once I felt well enough to stand, I decided that I wasn’t going to go back to the house.

  Not just yet.

  I had grown a bit worried about Brooke’s nocturnal rambling through the rooms of the house, and I didn’t want to add yet another disturbance to her life if I could help it.

  Harry offered to drive
me to his digs in the village—he’d inherited both the Burnley Gazette office and the house in which it existed. He had a big fat Jeep Grand Cherokee that was about seven years old and seemed like it had the crap kicked out of it in dents and nicks—the roof itself had a dent that made it seem as if an elephant had fallen on it. “I got it cheap. One of the rich guys got in a wreck up island two summers ago,” he told me. Then he laughed. “Christ, I can’t believe I’m talking about this car. All I’m thinking about is what just happened.”

  4

  When we got to his office, the first thing he did was get a bottle of aged Scotch from the middle file drawer by his desk.

  “None for me,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Okay. Okay. Maybe just a little.”

  “It’s for me, Christ almighty,” he said. He filled a tumbler with the brown liquid and drank half of it back before coming up for air. Then he filled a mug about half full and brought it over to me.

  The warm fire of the Scotch was a nice antidote to the ice I’d been feeling in my flesh.

  “How bad was it?” I asked.

  He pointed to the scratches on his face and around his throat. A dark bruise on his wrist where I’d apparently tried to tear his arm off. “And you tried to bite me,” he said. “You practically knocked the wind out of me, Nemo. I’m not sure how, but you did.”