Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  "I haven't taken one since the day after Dad was killed."

  I closed my eyes, trying to figure out how this all could be. How could I have seen the same thing Brooke had seen: the glass of the greenhouse moving. "What about the painting?" I asked Brooke.

  "I didn't paint it," she insisted.

  "You did," I said. "It's the same as the others. And it's exactly what the dream was. The one you told me about."

  "Let's not get into this again. Maybe we didn't see anything on the glass."

  "Wait," I said. "You saw something on the glass?"

  "You did, too," she said.

  "No, I saw it move—like it was rippling or I don't know that's not what it was like it was like it was blurring or something."

  "I saw a woman's face," she said.

  5

  "Bruno's right. I'm exhausted," she added. "I've been up all night. It was a hallucination. You didn't see it?"

  "I saw movement on the glass,"

  "Could've been clouds overhead," Bruno said. "It's foggy. In the greenhouse, it makes the walls look different."

  "Who was it you saw in the glass?" I kept my gaze on my sister.

  "Just a woman," Brooke said.

  I watched her face—my beautiful, smart sister. The stress of what had happened had no doubt scrambled her mind a bit. Who wouldn't be a little shaken, a little traumatized, by finding her father dead, butchered? Bathed in blood. How could she not? How could she sleep? How could she function? That she could even speak to us about any of this was a bit of a miracle in and of itself.

  "You need rest," I said. "We all do. And I think it's time we get some professional help."

  "No shrinks," she said sharply.

  "Then Dr. Connelly. Just a check up. We can all use one." I turned to Bruno for support.

  "Sure," Bruno said.

  "I guess I should talk to someone," Brooke said finally, a note of defeat in her voice. "And I can't exactly go to Father Ronnie anymore for counsel."

  "Not since Dad told him to fuck off," Bruno said.

  6

  Bruno insisted on going to the greenhouse immediately after Brooke went back up to bed.

  "I saw it, Bruno," I said. "The wall." I went over to the panes of glass and touched lightly against one of them. Tapped it. "It was as if it were made out of gel or something and just moved."

  "How many hours of sleep did you get?"

  "Five."

  "You need to go back to bed, too," he said.

  7

  I went back to bed and woke up around one in the afternoon. The greenhouse seemed just as it had before. I sat in it, sipping my coffee, for a good half hour, wondering if I'd get that sensation again. The glass turning to rippling water. But it didn't. Wide awake, with the day well under way, I realized that perhaps I had, after all, been half asleep when Brooke and I had gone there at daybreak. Bruno, I figured, had been at least partially right. There had been a light fog that didn't burn off 'til three, and that might've accounted for at least some of what I'd seen—accompanied by my lack of sleep and my sister's rage. I went looking for the picture again, but it was gone. I assumed Brooke had taken it and put it somewhere else. I called Dr. Connelly's office and tried to schedule my sister in—even though it was a week or so 'til Christmas, his assistant knew, as the current local tragic celebrities, we might be able to cut in line. Called Pola, and wanted love to take me away from my fears about my sister.

  8

  And I thought about my father. He was never away from my mind. I thought about his face. His hands. His way of speaking that was a gentle twist of Yankee islander.

  And I wondered why I had never really gotten along with him.

  9

  Got a strange phone call late one night. About two a.m.

  When I picked it up, it was Paulette Doone. "You demons," she said. "You did it. You did it."

  Then she hung up on me. I fell back to sleep, not really knowing what had possessed her.

  In the morning I got a call from Joe, and he told me Ike Doone had shot himself in some cockamamie illegal hunting accident going after some wild turkeys he'd flushed out, and Paulette had begun telling everyone in the village, almost immediately, that the "Raglan curse" was upon them and that the devil was all around our house.

  Ike was not dead, just had a helluva wound on his left thigh.

  "Try and ignore this kind of stuff," Joe said.

  10

  Pola and I went to dinner, for long walks—but my mind was too much on a murder and on my family.

  Then, just before the weekend, Harry Withers found me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  1

  The day was sunny and bright, and even though another snow had fallen recently, it felt warmer outside with the yellow sun and clear blue sky. When the winter's gray as in New England, you've got to get outdoors on those days that the sun finally shines.

  On a dog's ass.

  Stepping out the door, I was greeted with the bounding leaps and nips at my elbows of Madoc, the greyhound that seemed more like a skinny horse than a dog. He followed me a ways, and then, after a quarter mile or so, ran back for the house and his companion, Mab, who was barking down by the duck pond.

  I wanted to enjoy a good walk on a lone country road.

  Just as I was setting off, Harry Withers showed up.

  2

  Harry was impossibly dressed in a broad-brimmed hat and a duster jacket, and his square glasses, and a flop of thick brown hair nearly over his eyes. I laughed when I saw him.

  "You look like the sheriff of Sagebrush," I said.

  "I know, I know," Harry said. "Ridiculous, isn't it? I thought I looked like an Italian prelate."

  "You found me."

  "I gave you a little time," he said, somewhat sheepishly. "I heard you were in the pubs with Bruno, but I didn't come looking. Out of respect."

  "Thanks," I said.

  "Want to walk a bit?"

  3

  He hadn't changed much in the years since I'd been gone. He looked as if he were eighteen still, but with a bit of a paunch. His eyes had the kind of brightness to them that only someone who loves his life seems to have. His crooked smile was disarming, but painful for me to remember. It was some kind of muscle problem that he'd had since an accident when he was a baby.

  He smiled at the worst times—always had.

  His smile was some kind of permanent scar on his face. Happy or sad, he smiled. He told me he couldn't help it. "They believe," he said, referring to the police, "that the killer must have escaped right after the murder." He paused and added, "Is this going to upset you, hearing about it?"

  "Not as much as it should."

  He went off the road and bent down in the snow, practically squatting. He drew up a longish thick branch that had come down in the storm, broke off the weak branches from it, and said, "Instant walking stick." He took it with him and used it as a pointer.

  "Over there, from the woods. That's what they think. Then, from there, to the harbor. Their own boat."

  "Could be," I said.

  Harry's smile intensified. Then it dropped to a straight line on his face. "I don't think so. In fact, it's basically not possible, but try telling that to Joe Grogan. First, I doubt one man did this. I suspect there were a few. And second, getting off the island during a Nor'easter is suicide. If they got in a boat that night, particularly some little motorboat, they'd have been lucky if they made it to the Vineyard. They're still here."

  "Interesting," I said.

  Harry pointed at the smokehouse, which lay back toward the house itself. He seemed about to say something, but stopped himself. Then he held the stick parallel to the ground and pressed it down. "They probably didn't tell you about the footprints."

  "The killer's?"

  "They've kept things quiet. Joe Grogan's seen to that. All the mainlander investigators have combed and questioned and pretty much turned over every rock. They even hauled Carson's butt in for questioning, and the poor guy
could only weep and tell them that he thought he saw a demon that night. They almost took him away. If Joe hadn't stepped in, Carson McKinley would probably be in some state hospital in Boston getting drugged up every time he thought of sheep. Everyone on the island is scared."

  "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 to about 75,000 buc
ks 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.