The Hour Before Dark (27 page)

I said the only thing that came to my mind. “Where’s Zack?”

I wiped my eyes, for they stung. And then, with Pola’s help, I got up.

“Zack?” Pola glanced around. “Zack?”

Her son stood at the entrance to the smokehouse.

Zack looked back at us.

“I thought I saw something,” he said, but then bounded back over to us.

I still felt shaky, and somehow coated with shame, as if the haywire nature of my brain was its own kind of humiliation. I might be losing my mind, the way that Brooke felt she had been losing hers. I might be suffering some nasty post-traumatic bullshit that would require years of medical attention.

But I felt sane. If you can feel sane, and still feel the sputtering of the circuits of your brain, then I knew I was sane.

3

“Why would I see my mother?” I asked.

I sat on the living room sofa and watched as Zack swung a poker around the logs in the fireplace. Pola struck a match and lit the fire, then came back to sit with me.

“You’ve been through too much,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I want to get Harry out here again.” I reached for the phone. “You might want to go home.”

“Why?”

“I just feel weird about it. I don’t want you to worry about anything, and Harry is...” I held up the phone and began tapping out Harry’s number.

“I’m staying here,” Pola said. “If you and Harry want to go out there again, you’re free to. You’re crazy to want to, if it affects you this much. But Zack and I can just stay here by the fire.”

“We can’t go home now,” Zack said, pointing to the window. “It’s snowing again.”

It was an understatement on Zack’s part: Outside the window, the storm clouds were growing, and what came down was less snow than sleet.

Harry picked up the phone on his end, and I said, “Harry, can you come out here? Now?”

4

After I got off the phone with Harry, I went to go wake up Brooke. Pola offered to come with me, but I asked her to stay in the living room. I had a feeling, something I didn’t like having to admit, and it was simply that I didn’t want Pola and her son to know about the Dark Game or about what I feared might be all of us cracking up in the wake of our father’s death.

I jogged up the front staircase. Unlocking the door to the first room upstairs (locked, just as I had warned Brooke away from doing), I opened it upon a mess. The room I entered, the room that we’d thought of as the sun room, looked like a whirlwind had gone through it. A chair and table had been turned upside down, and papers were scattered all over the floor. As I went from room to room, it was as if someone had been on a tirade, tossing pillows and papers and kicking over trash and pulling drawers completely out of the dressers.

Brooke was not in her bed, but the sheet was half torn off. All the votive candles were left sitting on their shelves, upright, still lit. There were some on the floor.

I called out to Brooke, to Bruno, but got no response.

Then I thought I heard a woman crying. Was it in my head? Was it in the house? It was the most pitiable sound.

I ran in its direction, regardless. Doors opened and closed, and I felt as if I were running through rooms in someone else’s memory, for I saw flashes—moments of my father in a room as he had been when I was a child, or of Bruno as a little boy sitting in his red wagon in the rumpus room, or my mother, writing letters at her desk—it was as if my memories were jumping out at me. Close ‘em off. Close ‘em off.

I found Brooke in the greenhouse, sitting on the cold floor, surrounded by her paintings.

5

“The dogs are gone,” she said, looking up at me. “They ran off. They haven’t come back. Bruno’s after them, but I think they’re gone for good. I let them out, but they won’t come back.”

I stood over her, glancing out through the green glass to the snowy fields and woods. “They run sometimes. Don’t worry.”

“No,” she said. “They’ve been gone all night.”

As she told me of her efforts to find them, nearly freezing to death as she went through the woods with a flashlight, calling for them, I looked at the canvases that were spread out around her.

Each of painting was of our father, dead, bleeding, looking up at someone.

6

I put Brooke to bed, wrapping her in quilts and comforters to still her chattering.

There was condensation on her window, but no words finger-painted there.

Outside, snow mixed with sleet continued felling.

Then I went to my own room.

My typewriter was on the floor by my bed, as if someone picked it up off my desk and dropped it there.

I retrieved it from the floor, and when I did, I noticed the papers just under the bed. I reached for them, drawing them out.

Someone had been typing.

YOU CAN’T KEEP ME TRAPPED HERE. I AM GOING TO DESTROY YOU.

PLAY THE GAME FOR ME.

PLAY IT.

PLAY IT OR SHE WILL DIE.

JUST LIKE HE DID.

1

Bruno arrived, having chased the greyhounds all the way to the other side of the woods. “Something spooked them last night, I guess,” he said, dragging them in, all of them soaked from the outdoors. We got towels, dried off the dogs, and put them in their kennels.

Then he told me what he’d discovered.

2

While I’d been at Pola’s house, Bruno and his boyfriend had been tearing apart the ceiling of the dining room. It had begun to bow and bend a bit, heavy with drippy plumbing from a leak Bruno hadn’t been able to identify, although he had assumed it was from our father’s bathroom. He had already caulked the tub and tiles upstairs, but the water damage had increased in the ceiling below it.

He had a stepladder set up, and Cary passed him tools while he pulled at the ceiling. It burst all over him as he sat at the top of the ladder.

Mosquitoes and tiny gnat like flies swarmed down from the damp open hole that was left behind. He was amazed that mosquitoes could be living in the gaps in the ceiling and walls in the dead of winter. “But the water was warm, so I guess they just kept breeding,” he said.

3

He led the three of us into the dining room and pointed to a suitcase on the rug, by the table. “I already opened it, but maybe you should take a look.”

I got down on the floor and turned the suitcase on its side. Popped it open.

As I did this, Bruno said, “He must’ve put it in there when he put in the new tub upstairs.”

“A long time ago,” I said.

Inside the suitcase, wrapped in plastic and old newspapers, was more money.

4

“Wow!” Zack said. “You’re rich!”

Pola drew him back from bounding forward to pick up some of it. “What’s all that from?”

“It’s like there’s another house underneath this one,” Bruno said. “Dad’s buried treasure.”

“Look at all this,” I said. I unwrapped the plastic off one pile of bills. “Did you count it?”

“Barely touched it. I crapped out and then had to go hunting those dogs down. For all I know...” But he didn’t finish the thought.

“Hell, Bruno, it looks like ten—maybe twelve thousand dollars here.”

We spent an hour counting it. Some of it was in neat stacks, others had been thrown loosely into the plastic wrap and newsprint. Zack helped out by counting the stray bills that had fallen loose. “Fifteen thousand,” I said when I’d finished the final count.

Bruno looked tense.

“Fifteen thousand,” I repeated.

“Well, now we know where he stashed it,” Bruno said.

5

Bruno began pacing after that. “He hid stuff in the house. He did it. He did the repair on the tub. Shit, he did a repair on the front stairs. What do you bet there’s something behind there?”

“The crawlspace?” I asked.

6

I tried to talk him out of it, but Bruno got a crowbar and a drill. I followed behind him, trying to reason with him, then shouted at him to stop, but by the time I grabbed him by the shoulder, he had already smashed the crowbar into the wall behind the front staircase, leaving a huge hole in the thin wall.

He opened up the wall, and reached into the dark opening.

But there was nothing, just the empty space that ran along the front quarter of the house, behind the stairs.

“I bet I can squeeze back there,” he said.

“I can do it!” Zack volunteered, leaping up, raising his hand as if he were in school.

“You’re too big,” Pola said.

“I can do it,” Zack said.

“Nobody is going in there,” I said.

“Remember how he kept repairing things?” Bruno asked. “How he’d always be working on something—the pipes, the walls. What if he put money back there? What if there’s more?”

“That’s crazy.”

“No, it’s not,” Bruno said. “He never trusted the bank. He never liked anyone knowing what he made. He and Brooke used to fight about the store because he never kept up with the books.”

In a moment of silence, Zack whispered in awe: “I bet there’s pirate treasure back there.”

I stared at the wall by the staircase, and the raw tear he’d just made in it. “Don’t do it! This is crazy!”

“Let’s find out,” he said, without waiting for any approval from me. He smashed the crowbar into the drywall. It went through. “He had a hand-axe somewhere. He always kept it. Go find it.”

“You’re going to destroy the house, “ I said.

Bruno’s face looked as if it burned with fever. “I think this house is sick. I think it needs some destroying.”

7

When he’d opened the wall up with an axe, a crowbar, and some reckless hammering, we saw what we both wished we had never had to see.

It was our mother’s suitcase.

Her red dress.

Her beige shoes. The ones she wore often. The ones that she left the house in.

Even her rosary and a small statue of the Virgin Mary that she had taken with her.

To Brazil.

Not to Brazil at all.

The only foreign country we knew was Hawthorn itself.

1

By the time Harry showed up, I had asked Pola to take Zack home—it would not be the kind of day I’d anticipated. The only problem was, roads had worsened, Harry said even his SUV had been skidding on the road, and the only reasonable way to get back was to walk. I sat down with Pola in the den.

“Here’s the thing,” I told her. “There’s something wrong with us. Maybe it’s some kind of stress from the murder. Maybe it’s something inside me. Inside Brooke, too. But I don’t understand it. And my fear is that there might be ... well, some kind of danger here. I have to be sensitive to Brooke’s feelings in this, but I think she may be cracking up under all the pressure. And I may be also.”

“Let’s all go,” she said. She took my hand in hers. “Let’s all of us just go. We can walk to town. We can walk in the snow. It might take half an hour at the most. You don’t need to be here.” She didn’t say it with any serious gaze in her eyes; she sounded perfectly practical.

And it was true, we didn’t need to be there; I didn’t need to be at Hawthorn.

But I could not leave my sister there in that condition.

Nor could I ignore something that had been building since I’d arrived.

I had felt the pull of the Dark Game.

I had left the island to avoid its pull. To get away from what was bad inside me.

But the hallucination of my mother—she had seemed like flesh and blood—she had seemed there.

The words from the typewriter.

Brooke’s paintings.

Pola looked at me as clear-eyed as I had ever seen anyone. “Do you know that you did this to me when we were young? That you shut me out of your life even then? That you closed ranks with your brother and sister and father as if I didn’t matter?”

I didn’t detect anger in her voice.

Just the truth.

The absolute truth.

“I know.”

She offered a weak smile. “Do what you need to do. We’re going to stay here. By the fire. But if I’m going to be part of your life again, I don’t want to be shut out. Ever.”

2

Pola and Zack remained in the house; we let Brooke sleep. Harry, Bruno, and I went to the smokehouse.

3

We skipped the blindfolds. Bruno and I faced each other. Closed our eyes. Harry, with his small recorder out, sat on the wood-slat floor.

I have to admit, I began laughing at first, and then Bruno did as well, as we took each other’s hands.

“Want me to hypnotize you? Would that make it easier?” Harry asked.

I opened my eyes and looked at Bruno, who kept his eyes closed. “I think we need the blindfolds.”

“All right, then,” Harry said. He took his jacket off, then his shirt, and drew his undershirt over his head. He ripped it up into a few strips, passed them to each of us, and then put his shirt and jacket back on.

“I just feel silly,” Bruno said, looking at the rag in his hand. “Feel silly, then,” Harry told him. “Did you feel silly when we were kids and you did this?”

“No,” he said. “It was serious then.”

“It’s serious now,” Harry said. “Do you want to know how serious? Let me play something for you.” He held up the digital recorder. “Nemo, in my office. I put you under.”

“And nothing happened,” I said.

“I lied,” he said. “You did say things. Only I didn’t want to face them. But I need to know if what you told me when you were under is going to come to pass.”

He pressed the play button of the recorder.

My voice.

“Harry Withers, you’re going to die. Soon. You don’t want to make it happen. Not again. You don’t want to. You will die. Slowly. Painfully.”

Clicked it off.

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s bullshit. Maybe not. You used to predict things when you were under,” Harry said. “You knew that my father would die of emphysema. You knew other things. This doesn’t seem silly to me. I want to know everything that you know.”