The Hour Before Dark (4 page)

I finally got hold of my brother. “Hello?” I asked. “Bruno?”

“Nemo, Nemo,” he said as if grasping the name for the first time. “So, can you get a flight?”

“Cost me a fortune. You tell the airlines it’s an emergency, and they triple the charge. I get in at one.”

“Okay. I’ll be at Logan.”

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“Somebody killed him,” he said. “It’s terrible. Look, we can talk when I pick you up at the airport.”

“Are you crazy? Someone killed him? What?”

But Bruno had already hung up the phone.

I imagined my dad’s face.

Fury coursed through my blood.

I wanted to destroy my father’s killer. A front-row seat to an execution. I wanted someone to hurt for what they’d done.

1

On the plane, mid-flight, I closed my eyes.

I felt numb, tired, and far older than I was.

Soon, a mix of dream and memory came upon me. I was a boy, back on the island, again. It was dark, and I stood in dirt, my hands tied behind my back—some childhood game. Something pressed against my eyes, but in the dark I couldn’t tell what it was. I heard someone tell me— was it my father?—that I needed to keep my hands to myself. I heard my sister, somewhere nearby, recite a nursery rhyme. I heard Bruno breathing—his four-year-old self with his slightly deviated septum breathing through his nostrils, like a light wind through creaky boards. I felt a strange comfort there, as if we were being held tight again by both our parents, snuggling against my mother’s bosom, or pressed against my father’s arms, falling down into sleep as if it were a cool, dark place.

I opened my eyes, to the airplane, to the gray clouds outside the window.

All I had ever wanted as a boy was to leave the island. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted as an adult. I had nothing but confusion in my life.

Now this.

2

At Logan Airport, Bruno met me with anxiety on his brow in the form of lines I wouldn’t have thought a twenty-three-year-old would’ve had and dark circles beneath his eyes. Yet he had managed to pull himself together enough to brighten a bit when he saw me. He waved, and then came over to give me a shoulder squeeze. It passed for a hug between us.

“How was the flight?”

“Terrorist free,” I said.

“That’s bad luck,” he said. “Saying things like that.”

“How bad can it get?”

“Pretty damn bad, you ask me,” he said. “You’re always trying to be funny.” Then he cracked a bit of a smile, shaking his head. “‘Terrorist free,’ he says.”

“You gonna tell me some more about all this?” I asked. “Who did it? Who killed him?”

“Nobody knows,” Bruno said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means nobody knows,” he said.

3

My younger brother, at twenty-three, was strapping and muscular without seeming affected—he had a dollop of physical grace, which was in direct conflict with the generally messy way he had been screwing up his life. He was a natural athlete, had been since he was six or seven and staged swimming races at the beach or impromptu soccer games in the pasture. He had only just slipped into his prime—no longer the scrawny kid, he had taken on the look of an island tourist—tanned, even at the outset of winter, sandy-blond hair; and that peculiar Yankee quality of having thin lips; and a slender, sharp nose; smallish eyes made larger by round spectacles that softened his sharp features; and basic handsomeness. I possessed none of these qualities. He and Brooke got the handsome and beautiful genes—my mother’s. They both had her coloring and her lankiness. People often looked at them as if detecting an attractive scent. I was more like my father, although tall. I was dark, and the only compelling feature to me (since women had mentioned it) were my blue eyes. Black Irish had somehow snuck into the Welsh gene pool of the Raglans.

He was dressed as well as you could ask a recent college grad to be dressed—jeans, a scruffy old cotton shirt with a dominant coffee stain where his heart would be, and a brown leather jacket. And he still looked like the terse and generally quiet kid brother I used to regularly have to defend in elementary school from the bullies when he was still small and scrawny.

I nearly hugged him, but he drew back. 

4

He slipped on a pair of ill-fitting sunglasses and shook my hand, formally. He picked up one of my bags. “I’d say it’s great to see you, but under the circumstances ...” he said.

“I was trying to call all night. Drove me nuts. What the hell?"

“Brooke turned the phones off,” he said. “It was constant. A barrage.”

“Jesus,” I said, stopping in the middle of the crowded ramp. “What exactly . . . what happened?”

“Reporters. What a crappy job they got. Calling all tragedies and milking them,” he said. Avoiding my question. He didn’t want to veer to the topic of the murder. “It’s funny none of them called you. I mean, not even Grogan?”

I shook my head slightly. Shrugged. “Nobody remembers I exist.”

“Ha. Some remember.”

“I’m sure they’ll get hold of me soon enough.”

“Your old friend’s been asking about you.”

“Which one?”

He looked at me funny. Like I was fishing for something. “You think I’m going to say Pola.”

“No,” I said.

“I saw her on Monday,” Bruno said. He didn’t add: She asked about you. Perhaps Pola Croder, who had been my high school sweetheart, hadn’t thought about me in years. “She looks good. She’s a remarkable woman, I think.”

“So who’s asking about me?”

“Withers.”

I shrugged. “He’s got my number.”

“I know. He told me. He’s waiting for you to get here. He’s the only reporter we let in the house last night.”

“He’s still there?”

“No, he went home. I thought he was your old best friend.”

“Yeah, I guess he is. Sorry,” I said. “I feel like crap. You look like crap. Must be hell out there. Burnley must be buzzing with this one.”

“None of it means shit,” he said. His usual understatement. “Look, we’ve got a special boat—borrowed just for you. I brought an extra coat in the back. It’s pretty damn cold out there right now.”

“I hate winter,” I said. “Dead trees. Dead everything. Dead dead dead.” Then I added, “Sorry, that was a weak attempt at humor.”

Bruno made some noise in the back of his throat that was both muffled cough and disapproval. “Breaking the tension is good, I guess,” he said. “Me, I got Jumblies.”

“Jumblies” was Raglan-speak for mixed-up feelings. Granny used the word, and after she died, I made up stories for my little sister and brother about creatures called Jumblies that hopped in peoples’ mouths and made them confused.

I guess I had Jumblies in me at that moment, too.

Ten minutes later, in the car, we drove onto the highway.

5

“Who did it?” I asked, as a blur of wintry Boston sped around us.

“Like I know. They haven’t quite figured it out. Who does that... kind of thing? Psychos? Maniacs?”

“God,” I said, covering my face with my hands. “I don’t even want to think of Dad like that. I can’t believe it. I just can’t. Brooke okay?”

“Guess,” Bruno said. Then he added, “No, I mean. No. How can she be? I’m not okay. It was awful.”

“You saw the body?”

He glanced at me, sidelong. I felt some sort of repressed fury, as if he never wanted to think about seeing our father’s corpse again for as long as he lived.

We didn’t talk until we were nearly to the coastline.

I watched the speedometer, cringed when the back end of the little car slid on a patch of ice or rattled across a pothole, and just hoped we’d make it at all.

“You wouldn’t believe last night,” Bruno said, finally.

Then he told me.

6

Bruno had been with a buddy of his, having a beer at the local pub in the village, when Brooke called him on his cell phone.

He ran out of the pub and down to the police station—a few blocks away. When he got there, he saw Brooke shivering, covered with a blanket. Her hair wet. It was the blood. She’d lain down in the blood, next to our father. She'd gone catatonic or something. She was covered with blood, only it looked brownish and not red at all (as he had expected). She didn’t recall the hours that had passed. Then she’d gotten up and left the smokehouse, dragging herself back inside, called me. Then she  called Joe Grogan.

Brooke had been screaming in the house afterward, just standing in the living room screaming. The Doones called over because they heard the noise, and Brooke picked up the phone but had hung it up again before saying anything. Paulette Doone  called the police. Paulette had told them she thought she’d seen someone over by the smokehouse earlier, and with the screaming she heard later, she was afraid something awful had happened.

By two or three in the morning,  cops arrived, including an investigative detective and her team.

Helicopters came over from the Cape, bringing reporters, landing out at the Point as a helipad. Bruno had no idea that so many people would suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Bruno was up most of the night, answering questions, sitting with Brooke, who began talking incoherently until she had exhausted herself and fallen asleep by five.

Bruno managed two hours of sleep at that point, having been smart enough to unplug the phone and switch his cell phone off. The news vans were outside when he left to go to the mainland.

His biggest fear was that Brooke would feel scared when he left, but she had told him that she was going to bed and would wear earplugs and maybe even take a pill to calm her nerves.

7

“And now, that’s what we’re coming back to,” he said. “I saw a report on the morning news about it. I was just waking up on the couch, and I flicked it on, and there we were. Well, there was the mention of it. It sounded almost interesting, the way they talked about it on the news. Seven in the morning, it already reached the Cape.”

“What about the killer?” I asked.

“No word.”

“Brooke must be so upset. I’m glad you’ve been here.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bruno said. “She’s really freaked. She walked around all last night, room to room, with a candle, like some kind of gothic heroine. She thinks that the killer’s waiting for her in the dark. We had men go through the house just to make sure no one was hiding. She’s paranoid.”

“Can’t blame her.”

“Maybe more than paranoid. She’s been doing funny things.”

“How funny?”

He breathed hard through his nose. It was a technique he’d had as a kid when he didn’t want to talk about something. Then, “I found her out in the rain four nights ago. Nearly freezing rain. She was completely naked. She . . . didn’t recognize me. And she did some things.” He blushed. “Well, she was sleepwalking, I think. But it really bothered me. She was . . . Okay, look, she was sort of playing with herself.”

I took a deep breath. “God.” My mind went blank at the thought. I didn’t want to imagine my sister like that.

“I know. But she wasn’t herself. She was asleep the whole time. It shocked the hell out of me. I had a friend with me, and we got her into the house, wrapped her up, and she just slept on the sofa that night in front of the fire. I don’t even think she remembers it. I didn’t tell Dad, but by then Dad and I weren’t exactly talking to each other.”

“Hoo boy,” I said. “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Bruno said.

We let that subject cool a bit with some much-needed silence.

“They search the house?” I asked finally.

He nodded. “One of the off-island cops told me that he’d never seen such a wacky house—the way the rooms are laid out. The way you can’t hear anything from the back of the house to the front. The front door doesn’t even lock right. They scoured the woods in back. Who knows? Who would’ve thought this would’ve happened there? I mean, Boston or New York, sure. Or even the Cape. But way the hell out on the island?”

“I still can’t believe this,” I said.

“Me, neither. Grogan said he thinks the killer already left. Brooke was driving me nuts all night long. She kept talking about hearing things, and that made me freak out even more. It’s a mess. She’s a mess.”

“As well she should be,” I said. “You must be exhausted.”

“Maybe it’s adrenaline,” Bruno said, “but I couldn’t fall asleep right now if you paid me. My head keeps replaying what he must’ve gone through. His last moments. Nightmares. Brooke’s not helping. She’s convinced herself that she saw a ghost.”

1

“Blood. All over,” Bruno said, accepting an offered cigarette. He reached into his pocket and drew out a lighter. Flicked it up, lit his cigarette, and then passed it back to me. “You don’t want to hear it.”

“Yeah. I do.”

“No,” he said. “You don’t.”

We arrived at the dock down at Buzzard’s Bay sooner than I’d expected.

Across the water, our destination.

So distant it was invisible.

2

The sky turned a bit dark for noon, even for Massachusetts in November, and this heralded more snow. Deeper snow, perhaps. I didn’t love snow. If I could’ve, I would’ve lived in Aruba or even Hell rather than in the snowy climes.

The sky smelled of that peculiar freshness of a change of weather. From cold to frigid.

Bruno parked the car in the long-term area. “I'll pick my car up when I take you back to the airport.”

“I may not go home for a bit,” I said, unsure about any future that existed for me beyond the moment.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I sort of hope so, since I’m going to be here ‘til at least... well, ‘til at least I figure out what next.”

“It looks like Pompeii out there,” I said.

"You're crazy." My brother nearly grinned.

Snowflakes had just begun falling from a gray wash of sky. A handful, as if they were white petals of a flower falling at the end of summer. The grayness had overtaken the morning. It was a thick sea mist. You could not even distinguish the sea—it all looked like a wall of ash, and the horizon line barely divided water from sky.