The Hour Before Dark Douglas Clegg

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CHAPTER TWO

"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 those kinds of chats with his children.

The current smokehouse was built sometime before 1850. It consisted of one room with a fairly low roof-five feet high

for most of it, and just under six feet at its center-that had once been used for smoking fish and meat for my great-great-greats. There had been another smokehouse on the same spot before 1835, 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

properly, of equal interest as the duck pond and the old pump out back.

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.

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 22

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 midNovember, 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 crackhouses and dens of vice 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.

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 Mentho-lyptus 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 26

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 BenHur 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."

"Ike is like that, too," Paulette said. Her burly and 27

often sullen husband gave a grunt at that. Paulette mentioned to Joe Grogan later on that Brooke had seemed preoccupied, as if speaking to them had been a disturbance for her.

"I thought she was very sad. She looked like she hadn't slept in days,"

Paulette had mentioned, giving Joe Grogan something that was as close to the Evil Eye as he had ever in his life witnessed. "But you know, Joe, women like that. Well, they don't sleep much. Do they? I'd say more, but I'm a Christian woman, and I don't like to speak like that."

Because our father often hiked the mile to the village and got rides home with neighbors or anyone he could talk into giving him a lift, this was just another ordinary day.

Brooke had her own inner turmoil.

She told others that she had been anxious and somewhat depressed. She talked to Dr. Connelly in the village a week earlier about perhaps getting a change in prescription for her sleeping medicine. "Are you depressed?" he'd asked.

"Not depressed," she said. "Just not quite feeling like myself."

He had asked her if she might want to see a therapist on the mainland-he knew a good one in Falmouth. She told him she'd consider it, but she didn't think talking out her problems would be the answer.

She fought the urge to be impatient with Mab and Madoc. They'd run off to the woods chasing squirrels or rabbits, and returned a long while later, covered head to foot with mud. She went and checked on the cabin-the damage to the roof

was extensive. She made a mental note to talk to her father about just tearing it down before it turned into some kind of eyesore.

The snow melted where the sun hit it. In the shade, the duck pond had a thin scum of ice on its surface that had not hardened.

At four, she noticed that one of the trees near the smokehouse had been split in two by lightning. She said she had been standing in the greenhouse, with the windows steamed over, and feeling the warmth of the place.

"I was looking at something-I thought it was mist coming in from the road. It was nearly beautiful. It was twilight- dark came early-and this romantic, soft mist just slowly poured along the road. Remember how Granny used to say you could see angels in the fog? I remembered her saying it, and I almost saw an angel in the mist," she said of it. "And then, I noticed the half-fallen tree."

One of the hawthorns in particular, but also the young oak that had not quite grown to adulthood yet.

Lightning, she assumed, had ripped across the trees. She was thankful there hadn't been a fire.

She went to see if there was any other damage.

Her feet crunched in the glaze of snow that hadn't quite melted in the shadow of the smokehouse.

She saw his shoe, his brown Oxford, stuck in mud-now frozen, she found, as she tried to pull it out. She ended up leaving it where it was, mired.

She glanced first up to the road, perhaps hoping that Paulette and Ike would still be there.

Then to the fields and the pasture-and beyond it, the woods. Mab and Madoc were running down into the duck pond, splashing around.

She glanced up at the sky with its overcast gloom.

Then she went to the low door of the smokehouse and touched it.

Something told her not to-she told me later that it was an electric shock of memory-of never liking the smokehouse since before she could remember. Of remembering my screams as Dad spanked me there, or of remembering Bruno crying there for no reason at all when he was six or seven, sobbing and telling her that the smokehouse gave him nightmares.

When she touched the door, it moved a bit.

She grasped the latched handle, expecting the deadbolt that had been applied years ago to keep it shut, and surprise, surprise, it opened outward.

And that's when she found him.

(She told me later, "I wasn't sure whether it was him or not for a second. It was something I'd never seen before in my life. It was as if something had exploded, but had been reconstructed again. Something about it was like a dream-or a nightmare-something I'd visited before.

As if I'd had some premonition of this. And my brain just short circuited. It just seemed to fade, and I couldn't think. I went somewhere else in my mind, I suppose. Somewhere safe.") She sat and stared at him for hours before contacting anyone. I don't want to even imagine how she could've sat there on the cold floor, blood everywhere.

And Brooke sat there in the icy stench of death. She called someone just after ten that night. Her older brother. Me.

I had a nightmare for all those years, and it repeated itself in a never-ending loop, now and again, at my most anxious times: In it, we played the Dark Game and could not stop. It was as if the Dark Game had kept playing in some compartment of our minds even as we each grew up.

Brooke left no message for me other than to say "Nemo" on my answering machine.

It was a name I hadn't heard since I was about fourteen or fifteen. Even then, it was mocking.

My real name, Fergus, was redubbed Nemo in my ninth year when Brooke discovered Jules Verne-or at least the

Disney version of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

She decided that because of my interest in sailing craft and my willingness to eat fried squid in a dare with Harry Widiers, I must be kin to the infamous captain. Since I preferred Nemo to my real name, which just didn't fit for me, I had taken it on while on the island.

After I left Burnley, once in college, I reverted to Gus, a diminutive of Fergus that didn't annoy me too much. But the islanders knew me as Nemo Raglan. As did my sister. "Nemo, Nemo," she repeated.

After saying it, she hung up.

I listened to it twice, then erased it. I called her back. The phone rang several times. I heard the familiar clicks and that strange wind tunnel-like noise that I always heard whenever I called the island.

Finally, the message machine picked up.

"Brooke? It's Nemo. Good to hear from you. What's up? Call me back."

Later, I got a nervous call from my younger brother, Bruno.

"Brooke said she called you," my brother said. "You've been out."

It was nearly one a.m. I was half-asleep. Beth, whom I'd been out with that night, lay beside me and turned over, clutching a pillow.

" 'Lo? Who's-asleep. Bruno? That you?" I asked.

Beth made some small noise that was part-snore and part-groan. I reached over and stroked her back lightly. She made my bed smell of lavender and something murkily sexual, a

musk, an odor of femaleness that I enjoyed. I loved her scent. I pulled the sheet up around her shoulders to keep her warm. I wanted to kiss her again, just on the back of the neck. She turned over, annoyed even in sleep.

"Someone's with you," Bruno said, his voice not quite as Yankee as it had once been. It was gentler.

"What's up?" I repeated, annoyed that I could not cuddle up with Beth and drift to sleep. "I tried calling Brooke back, but there was no answer."

"You need to come home now. Tomorrow. A lot's going on."

"Like?"

"Dad's dead."

We both were silent for what seemed like minutes.

I gasped a word or two, meaningless. I felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. I leaned back on the pillows. I looked up at the shadows that the bedroom windows cast on the ceiling, with the curtains moving slowly back and forth from the slight draft. I closed my eyes and fought back a stupid anguished cry that wanted to come out of my body.

"Call me tomorrow," Bruno said. "We can talk then. Tonight's bad.

There's more to it. Fly in tomorrow. I'll pick you up in Boston."

Then he hung up. No more details. Bruno was like that. Sometimes he spoke in telegrams, as if he were being charged by the word.

I called him back several times, but there was no answer.

I spent a sleepless night, made worse by not knowing how exactly my father had died. When I did close my eyes-for

what felt like a few minutes-a dream came abruptly with the ferocity of a nightmare. I watched outside myself (in the dream) as twilight descended on Hawthorn. The trees seemed to list to the side as my consciousness broke through them. I saw three children, standing in a circle, holding hands. It was me as a little boy, my sister, and my brother. Walking slowly to the left and then the right in the summer grass. Then, with the swiftness and brute force that can accompany shifts in a dream, I stood in the darkness, somewhere, and I heard my little brother Bruno say the words, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed."

In the dream, the phone began ringing, and I let go (for I held my brother's small hand in my left, and my sister's in my right) and cried out, "Someone get the phone! The phone's ringing! Get the phone!"

Someone asked, "What are you afraid of?"

Then I awoke. Covered in sweat. Breathing hard.

I gave up on sleep for the night.

It was maddening. I tried to call my brother back every few minutes until dawn. I left message after message. Finally his answering system must have been full and stopped taking my messages. I could only stare at the walls. I went in the bathroom and curled up on the floor, just to feel its coldness and to be in a small space. For some reason, small, dark spaces often made me feel protected. I felt like a child. I didn't want to think. I didn't want to imagine my father's face. I fought to pretend that somehow this wasn't the whole story, that perhaps my father had a stroke and Bruno had gotten it wrong. Or perhaps he was in a coma-as much as that doesn't sound

better than death, it is. It would give me hope. I wanted to hope badly.

I hadn't seen my father in years, and I had loved him, but I had hoped that in a few months, I'd go back and see him and we'd have a good conversation and he'd tell me that I'd turned into a good man.

It was never going to happen. Nothing worse than lying on a cold bathroom floor at four in the morning and looking at the bottom of the white wooden door and wishing that the world could somehow change, magically, to suit your own needs.

I returned to bed, snuggling against Beth, as if I could just plow into her flesh and disappear, along with everything pounding in my head.

Beth left well before sunrise, annoyed by my pacing and turning in bed.

It was hard not to want her. She was one of those women who seemed to know that she was headed for great things in life, and she had a great body and cute face to accompany her vision of the future, and even a first-rate mind in many ways-how could I not want her? She was a prize.

I knew well why she wouldn't want me. I'd been laid off a few days earlier. I wasn't headed, apparently, for great things in life. I could predict the most ordinary life ahead of me, and somehow, I knew I'd muddle through it. I burned for more, but in my twenty-eight years my only extraordinary contribution to the world was that I'd written a novel that apparently no one had read. Younger, I'd wanted to change the world. But by that morning, I was just hoping that I could rise above the usual storms of life and get through it.

I suspect that I was looking for a woman to rescue me and 36

make love the extra ingredient, and perhaps not even love, but some kind of great sex that passed for love in a city like Washington, D.C.

I had lowered expectations for all that life had to offer.

When we kissed goodbye, it was brief and forgettable. Our lips barely touched. I got the sad feeling one gets at the end of a misbegotten affair: as if it reminds us that we're merely animals, enjoying mating for mysterious reasons in order to pass time until something else comes along.

"My dad died last night," I said.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. She kissed my cheek. "That's terrible."

Silently, she telegraphed without moving her lips once: I need to get to the office.

"I need to go up there. I guess. I'm going to need to go up for a while," I said. I didn't expect her to say too much else at that point.

It was over between us. I was the one feeling discarded. I was the revenge in life for all men who treated women badly-I was the lightning rod of the wrath of women whose loves had walked away from them. I didn't really give a damn. I just wanted to pretend for a minute with her. And for her to play along. I wanted her to embrace me and emanate human warmth. To experience the smallest spark of sexual fire between us so that I'd feel that there was something else in the world other than the ice that had crept into my blood during the night.

She looked at me as if she were worried for a minute that I might fall apart on her-and that she might have to deal with it, when all she wanted was to be out of my life.

"Look," she said. "You-"

"No, it's all right," I said.

"What I mean is, what you need isn't here. So don't feel bad about leaving."

"What do I need?" I asked, a somber puppy staring at her.

"Something you left behind somewhere," she said. "I don't know what it is. I just know it's not here. You'll find it." She kissed me on the forehead like I was a little boy. "You're the kind who finds what he's after."

She meant these as words of comfort, but something in her tone gave me a slight chill. It created a slim dread within me-as if I knew that something was scratching at my window in the middle of some endless twilight. As if her words echoed something I felt, but not something that was good within me. Something about the home I'd grown up in that had never felt right to me.

And I was after it. I would find what it was.

I watched her dress, knowing it would be the last time. In my head, the words "Death and the Maiden." My father's voice. Sometimes his voice was in my head, in times of crisis. My imagining of his voice comforted me.

His voice soothed the nicks and scars of life. In the years since I last saw him, last set foot in his house, I had internalized him.

What we do in life that determines who we are, we do alone.

I had already drunk a pot of coffee by eight thirty.

I made reservations for a flight to Logan Airport, charging 38

it on a credit card I should not have even had let alone used. Somewhere in there, I called my father's house more than ten times without an answer. I had a minor-league migraine by nine a.m. Black circles under my eyes, a feeling of drymoudi and that wound-up tightness in my gut of caffeine overflow. Showered in less than five minutes, and dressed carelessly in whatever was not lying on the floor of the closet. Packing involved me throwing everything in three suitcases, and when that was done, it seemed I had left nothing of value in my apartment. I looked at the suitcases: None was huge. My life, in three suitcases.

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.

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.

On the plane, midflight, I closed my eyes as I sat in my seat near the window.

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, 40

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.

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, although it felt like an obligation fulfilled.

"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.

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. I noticed then that his eyes were as bloodshot as mine, and there was a surface tension to his expression.

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."

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

"Jesus," I said, stopping in the middle of the crowded ramp at Logan Airport. "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 43

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 cell phone 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.

"Who do they think 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. Christ, he was red. He was red. It was that bad. I wouldn't have known it was him. If Brooke hadn't told me."

"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 again 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.

Then he told me.

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 and just gone catatonic or something. She was covered with blood, only he said 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 had called Joe Grogan.

There were already unfamiliar faces at Grogan's office-it was just about midnight, and cops had begun arriving. Some of the neighbors were there, as well. Brooke had been screaming in the house afterward, just standing in the living room screaming. The Doones had called over because they heard the noise, and Brooke picked up the phone but had hung it up again before saying anything. Paulette Doone then 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 a.m., other cops had 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 46

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.

"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 a.m., 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 47

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."

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