The Hour Before Dark (2 page)

Twilight outside. Rain began hitting the window.

He shot the flashlight beam around the ceiling. He glanced down along the rough stone walk.

He might have heard what would be a clash of metal, like a knife being sharpened on stone.

He heard some noise—perhaps someone behind him?

The first slice came down on his shoulder.

He dropped the flashlight.

The next slice caught him on the back of the leg. Something stung the place between his shoulder blades. A cold blade thrust into his back.

After an hour, the flashlight’s beam grew feeble.

He was not yet dead.

The door to the small stone structure swung back and forth, and then closed again.

It grew dark outside, from descending night and the storm. Branches of the old hawthorn trees scraped the roof as rain battered down. Lightning flashed across the gently sloping hills and rocky pastures, followed by a rolling boom of thunder.

The storm, which had begun off the coast farther south and had ridden up into New England on the jet stream, howled and screamed and groaned through the night.

The lights went out at the farmhouse that stood less than a mile away as the rain turned to sleet and then snow with the falling temperature.

The first snow of the year swept through on the heels of the storm. It frosted the fields and woods.

There was something about the New England woods, and in particular, this island off the Atlantic coast, off Massachusetts, that created a very real isolation within the beauty of a winter storm.

The first snow, a dusting across pine and oak, with the last stalks of balding pasture thrust up through glittering whiteness.

A pastoral moment: farmhouse in the distance, the stone smokehouse, the swirls of fine snow, the smell of wood-fire in the air from chimneys near and far, and the night, as it descended.

5

This is the story of my family.

Call me Nemo, for that was the name my sister saddled me with when I was a kid. It stuck. Other things stuck from childhood, as well—including the Brain Fart.

The Brain Fart was a week in the memories of my brother, sister and me that had just disappeared without warning. We imagined it, after a while, as an enormous gassy cloud that had shot out of our ears and floated like mist somewhere above the island before drifting off to sea. By the time I’d turned twenty-eight, that Brain Fart seemed to hover in the air again. None of us knew what had caused the Brain Fart. It had seemed spontaneous, although a certain amount of fever had accompanied it. We had lost a week, which, for children like us, seemed like an entire season.

I suspected even then that the week of the Brain Fart was important. In the end, I guess it was.

But the beginning was my father, and how he had walked into the smokehouse and set in motion a mystery that drew me back to the island in the first place.

And how my sister, Brooke, had found him.

1

“What we do in life that determines who we are, we do alone,” my father told me when I was much younger and had done something that was no doubt terrible. I can’t recall what it was I’d done, but his words had been engraved in my brain since then.

He also was a great proponent of the phrase “Even one person can make a difference in the world. Even the smallest among us.”

He was one of those fathers who had these kinds of chats with his children.

2

The current smokehouse was built sometime before 1850. It had once been used for smoking fish and meat for my great-great-greats. There had been another smokehouse on the same spot before 1845, but the story was that it had burned down, for it was made of wood. The stones were local, quarried at what was, for most of the twentieth century, a rocky area and a pit full of water, out among the pines just two miles to the north of the property. The newer stone smokehouse had remained intact for more than 150 years. In his lifetime, my father only once had to replace the roof, long before I was born, after a hurricane had hit the island. It had a dirt floor when we’d been children. At some point, my father had set down oak planks, then put another set of pine planks over these as a kind of floor. He’d used pegs and nails to connect the boards, but it had been a very rough, uncouth floor that had warped a bit over the years.

It was always cold in the smokehouse, no matter what the season.

When I was very little, my siblings and I used the smokehouse as something of a hideaway to play games in; then, when it became the place of all punishment for us (spankings, lessons-to-be-learned-from-our-misdeeds, and the Time Out room), the place lost its enchantment. I mainly remembered it for being nasty and chilly, and for making me feel as if I were going to be trapped inside it forever and no one would ever come get me.

Years later, my father put a deadbolt on it because he said that he found two summer people making out in it (I suspect now that they were doing more than making out). The smokehouse became mainly just another object of quaintness on our property, of equal interest as the duck pond and the old pump out back.

3

A reconstruction of the crime scene:

The door battering, the flashlight on the wood slat floor, the way his body was positioned when he’d be found, and the approximate time of the electricity going out at the house.

His shoe, in the thick mud.

His hands, severed at the wrists.

The blood, which had made the first policeman on the scene think that the floor and walls had been painted a messy red.

Joe Grogan, the local police chief of the very small police force on the island, knew better.

The smokehouse door was locked, always. There were no windows but the one in the door, and that was too small for anyone to fit through. It had not been broken or removed.

My father had let himself into the smokehouse.

He had unlocked the door.

He may have even let the murderer in as well.

4

No one alive really knew what had happened in the smokehouse that night. All anyone knew, it turned out, was that something must have drawn him there.

Here, the theories seemed to scatter to the winds: He knew whom he was going to meet, or he guided them there, or they jumped him, or ... well, it was pretty wild, the variety of theories. It might’ve been a stranger, or a group of thugs. Getting on and off the island would have been difficult.

And the modus operandi of the killing? To imagine that one human being could inflict this on another seemed beyond the reach of all sanity. It had been a curved blade of some sort (none was found). Whoever had done this—in mid-November, when there was only one ferry a day out to the island—had somehow eluded authorities and gone off-island without anyone seeing them. How could that have happened?

But the basics were that my father had left the house a bit earlier, with a parka on and a flashlight in his hand.

Brooke had been reading in her bedroom, she told the police, and was rarely aware of her father’s comings and goings at night. The house was large. The floor plan, which twisted like a snake along the grounds, allowed for various ways of leaving and entering. One room opened on the other. There were no hallways—just one boxy room after another, upstairs and down.

With the doors between the rooms closed, as they were, it was hard to hear one sound from the other end of the house. Even the dogs didn’t hear beyond one or two rooms, at best.

Brooke had once gone a week without ever seeing her father, so completely independent was her life within the house where she’d been raised.

I got the details later, but by then it had already been called the worst murder in the history of eastern Massachusetts. I’m fairly sure that wasn’t entirely true. There were other terrible murders—all the time, I suppose—but they’d been forgotten in the fickle memory of those who did the recording of recent history. The Brain Farts of the media.

Surely, there were murders daily on the mainland, in the crack houses and alleyways that existed there, but those deaths were seen as somehow less interesting than my father’s—a war hero, a survivor of torture and deprivation, a family man who raised three children nearly by himself, cut down at the last by some psycho with a sharp blade on a resort island after the resorts had all closed for the winter. It was news, as they say. It would keep some young reporters in line for a promotion if they made enough of the murder.

Sure, Burnley was no Martha’s Vineyard, no Nantucket— we had no celebrities to speak of, and the rich didn’t flock to the island as much as the wannabe rich did. But it still sounded cool, no doubt, to turn in a story to a newspaper editor that had in it the words: resort, island, murder, and war hero.

It certainly was the worst murder that Burnley Island had ever known, and the worst to ever take place near Hawthorn, the house where I had grown up.

“Life is full of casualties,” my father told me when I asked him why Granny had to die when I was young. He was one of those wonderful fathers who brought life’s lessons out of any situation. “We look away until we have no choice. Then we examine them, remember them, and look away again, as if we’re not meant to think too much about them, but to live. Just live and forget.”

Brooke found my father dead in the smokehouse, but apparently could not look away.

He had been dead since seven or eight the previous night.

5

The storm’s howling had kept her up most of the night.

She had argued with Dad the day before. She had avoided him, which was fairly easy to do at Hawthorn. She was very sad about something, but told me that none of it mattered once Dad died.

She said later: “I had the worst night of my life. Let’s leave it at that. I had a big fire going in the back bedroom, and even with that, the place was freezing. I could not get it warm enough. I went to take a hot bath, but that didn’t work. I just wanted to go to sleep. I couldn’t. Hadn’t eaten. It was the barometric pressure. It always does that to me when winter comes on. It plummets and my mood just goes. I feel like I want to bury myself alive or just lie in bed or walk through the rooms, back and forth all night, until the headache goes away. The dogs even stay away from me. They sense it. All I could think about was what was wrong with the world.”

Brooke had slept late—’til two.

She hadn’t even thought about where our father had gone. It was not unusual for him to be inspecting parts of the property or running his errands in town in the afternoon. She had made some eggs, toast, and coffee, but would not eat them because she said she had an upset stomach from the night before. She left a plate of eggs and toast out on the kitchen table, thinking that her father might be back at any moment from his errands and would want a snack.

She thought it unusual that he had not already made a pot of coffee earlier in the day.

Even so, he might’ve gone to have coffee at Croder-Sharp-Callahan, where he could talk women and weather with Percy Shaw and Reg Miller, both of whom spent their lives at that lunch counter having what Brooke called their Old Salt conversations. She had warned her father several times that if he hung out with them, he would grow old before his time and then no woman would have him.

Brooke took the dogs out for a walk down to the woods.

She guided them back up to the dirt road that ran from the back of the property up to the main road. She saw Paulette Doone and her husband, Ike, in their truck on the way to get groceries in the village. Paulette had mentioned that the lights were out in half the island because of the storm. “Won’t be back on ‘til six. Maybe eight,” Paulette said.

“Maybe ten,” Ike said.

Brooke had mentioned that her lights came back up sometime after midnight.

The Doones lived in the Cape Cod house set back from the road. Paulette asked if the Captain (although my father had been anything but a captain, he was known as the Captain or Cap by the villagers since he’d been a boy) needed his favorite kind of candy from the store, or a prescription from Hempstead Apothecary (because she knew he’d had a bad cold all week). Brooke had asked if they could pick up some Halls Mentholyptus and maybe some kind of over-the-counter inhaler, something to help his sinuses. Brooke mentioned the barometric pressure and was generally furious that the cabin by the pond had flooded. Paulette mentioned Jesus and God and being saved, which is something that she never seemed to tire of bringing up, no matter how rude Brooke got in return. Paulette felt that Brooke was agitated (as she informed the police chief when asked). Paulette even called her “heated” later to her husband, but Ike privately thought that Brooke had seemed radiant, as if she were in love, with a rosy complexion and bright eyes. Paulette had interpreted this as something bad, because she felt that Brooke was a dangerous woman to the married women on the island—and Paulette elbowed her husband whenever he glanced at their attractive neighbor for too long.

Brooke told Paulette that she thought her father might be in the village, at the lunch counter talking storms and boats and the upcoming winter festivities in the village.

“I wouldn’t mind a movie,” Brooke added.

Paulette had glanced at Ike, and then nodded. “Sure, we can go by the video store. Any particular one?”

Brooke had asked for one with Matt Damon or the Harry Potter movie if it was in. Paulette had blanched at the mention of “that movie that promotes witches” but felt that there might be an old-fashioned movie like The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur that Brooke might enjoy more.

“If we see the Captain, we’ll drag him home,” Paulette had told her.

“If you see him, tell him we’re having chili tonight,” Brooke had said. “Hormel’s. And corn bread if I can find any corn flour. Can you pick me up some in town? I might be out. Chili’s always better with corn bread. Or spoon bread. Something with corn. He wants shepherd’s pie, but I won’t make it three nights in a row. He can cook his own supper if he wants what he wants.”