PART TWO

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"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." -Jonathan Swift 103

The weather forecast storms. That's pretty much all we got out there in the Atlantic in winter. Freezing cold, storms, snow, sleet, gray or even blackened skies. It had depressed me as a boy, but now it didn't bother me much. I had a constant fire going in the living room fireplace, which made it all toasty when I wanted to sit and read or just dwell on things. I'd glance at the sky in the morning and try to predict when the snow would come, and by noon, if I'd been accurate, I would go outside just to feel the cleanness of it on my face.

Paulette Doone, from across the way, stopped by that night with what she called a "care package." It consisted of a 104

paperback Bible, a copy of a book called Give Your Troubles to the Lord and Watch Them Disappear, as well as raisin-oatmeal cookies, gingerbread men, and some apples she'd bought at one of the local markets. What she really wanted to do was snoop and pronounce some judgment on us.

Paulette looked grim when I brought her into the house. She glanced left to right as if she were taking inventory. ("That's a lovely vase," she said, pointing. "And the piano. Your mother used to play it all the time. Is it still in tune?") But when we got right down to it, she came over to tell me one thing and one thing only: that we needed to get to the Lord, and fast.

"I want you to know that no one ever blamed you kids for the trouble you got up to," she said. She patted my hand as we sat next to each other.

She kept the grim expression- Bruno later called it a "death's head rictus"-as she recounted her memories of our father. And then she said,

"I thought I saw someone that day. Earlier. Might've been seven or so in the morning. It was a woman. She was walking in the fog."

I began to feel as grim as Paulette looked. "Did you tell Joe?"

She nodded. "She scared me, that woman. She seemed out of place. She wasn't from around here." When she said this last part, I had a horrible feeling in my gut that I'd made a big mistake by returning home at all.

She reminded me of what I truly had hated on the island: the bigotry and prejudice against anything "foreign," and by foreign, this meant anyone who was not from the island in the first place. Anyone who had not lived there for two generations or more. "Wasn't from around here" was a popular way of saying, "outsider."

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Outsiders were considered somehow tainted, somehow worth les than insiders. The provincialism of the place was appalling. Worse, with Paulette, was the fact that she was rabidly religious and believed the Devil was everywhere and angels fought for our souls.

And it was embodied for me, for that moment, in Paulette Doone, with her grimness and her fears and her made-up world of demons and angels.

My contrary nature got the best of me.

"It must be terrifying," I said.

Her eyes lit up as if she loved terror as much as she did the hint of scandal.

"To live across from our home. To know that whoever did this ... this horrible thing ... might be somewhere nearby," I said. I felt petty and mean, but something in her story "wasn't from around here" reminded me of why I'd set off stink bombs in her yard in the first place-she had shouted at me more than once that year that I was going to turn out just like my mother. My mother had been, after all, the ultimate island outsider. She quite literally was not from around there. She had the audacity to have married and carried children with the local hero, the prize, the man who had put Burnley Island on the map with his heroic deeds. And then she had run off like a scoundrel in the night, with a lover, no less, leaving the man broken and raising children alone.

Paulette nodded as I spoke of the lingering terrors of living near the murder site. I felt like a rat for doing it to her-for scaring her more.

But she'd come over to just say somethin bad about someone, and I was sick of her within five minutes.

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?I've stayed up the last two nights and wondered about it. I read mystery novels, and Ike says I'm always trying to solve crimes. I listen to the satellite radio-Ike has it in his garage- so I can hear what goes on off-island, what criminals are doing. And I don't think this was out of the blue. I think your father was murdered a certain way ... well, it was like a ritual, don't you think? Do you believe in God?"

That was it for me. She was going to try to save us. Using the opportunity of our father's murder.

"Get out of our house," I said.

Sometime after the Revelation of Brooke as a Scarlet Woman, Bruno brought up the possibility of a memorial service.

"Did Dad ever talk about how he'd want it?" I asked.

She squinted at me, as if she didn't quite believe I'd asked that. "He was only fifty-eight. He didn't talk much about dying. I don't think he anticipated this." Her sarcasm nearly bit me. I had never been able to read her moods.

"I guess he wanted to be buried down in the old cemetery," she said, as if I needed reminding. "Among all the Raglans. All of us should be buried there."

"Granny was buried in Falmouth," I reminded her.

"She was only a Raglan by marriage," my sister said. "That was her sister's doing. Dad wanted her here, but he didn't like to stand up to the aunts from that part of the family. They were harpies." Then she nearly brightened. "There must be a way to get in touch with Mom. I know there is. I wrote six

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months ago to the address I found in Dad's file cabinets, but I got it back unopened. Someone else lives there now. There's got to be a way to find her."

"Why?"

"Why not? How many years has it been?" Brooke asked. "She's our mother.

She may be married and living on a coffee plantation or something, I don't care. I want to find her. Don't you?"

"I don't know," I said.

"I want her to know," Brooke said. "And I want that door to be open for her."

"If she won't find us," I said, "I'm not sure we can find her."

Brooke once turned on the TV, only to be faced with the six o'clock news out of Boston. It had a mention of the trial of some priest, and how some vandals had destroyed some of the trees on Boston Common, and a mention of Dad's murder and the suspicion that it might be a serial killer who had been responsible for the death of a New Jersey couple from the previous summer.

"Joe said they'd do that," I told Brooke. "That the detectives would link it to other murders. He doesn't think it's true."

She didn't reply, but when I looked over at her, her hand covered her face as if she were weeping, but she made no sound.

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Bruno used music as anger therapy.

Even as a kid, he had played the piano like it was his angst expeller.

He tried to play our mother's piano in the living room, but all I heard was a flat tinkling of the keys, as if he could not remember a single composition from the three years of piano lessons he had taken.

He could not even muster Moonlight Sonata, which was a tune he had banged out for a solid year, it had seemed, when he had been twelve and seemed to show signs of musical prodigy.

Me, I drowned the noise in my mind with Sam Adams Ale with Bruno down at the local pub.

Bruno had become far too familiar with brands of beer (he could distinguish between Alsatian and French and German with his eyes closed; he knew the brewing techniques of Rolling Rock and Coors and how they differed from an upstate New York beer of which he was fond called Genesee). During one of these bouts of beering, Bruno said to me, "I saw something spooky last night."

"It was Brooke. She's walking all night. Even the dogs won't get up for her."

"Oh yeah, I noticed. Those pills she takes don't seem to help her sleep much." He waited a beat and took a sip of beer.

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"No, it was outside my window," he said. "It was someone outside my window."

I shrugged, grabbing the pitcher and pouring out a bit of Guiness into my glass mug. "Brooke."

"On the second floor," he said. "Jesus, do you ever listen?

I saw someone outside, like they were in the oak tree."

Some hours of the day, I found myself glancing out at the smokehouse.

Thinking of the cops. Of Joe Grogan. Of damnedest things. Of my father.

His last moments.

The smokehouse was surrounded with dead yellow stalks of weed and grass poking through the snow and what seemed like a never-ending mist, as if a translucent veil of white-gn covered the world.

It had been both a playhouse and the place of punishment for me as a child. My father had been stern when something truly bad had happened. I tended to be the troublemaker, think he wept sometimes when he drew off his belt to spank me there. He had been punished horribly as a child (so horribly I did not even understand the stories he used to tell about a whipping post and a riding crop or a cat o' nine tail that my grandfather hung over the inside of the front door when my father had been a boy).

My own punishments had never lasted long-usually 110

one or two whacks on the butt, and then I had to sit on the dirty floor of that smelly place for an hour and think about what I had done.

My father was afraid I would become a delinquent, as his oldest brother had, and end badly. He worried, I'm guessing, that he was more lenient than his own father and that I might turn out to be a terrible human being.

He believed that there was bad blood in the family from the Irish and Scot sides, some kind of madness and bullheadedness, and that it had landed in his brother, and might have entered me at conception as well.

He may have been right, since I seemed to always get in trouble or have unexplainable mishaps happen around me that seemed to only point in my direction.

It had all been centered around the smokehouse, those punishments I got as a kid.

And the games we used to play as well.

I circled around the building and adjusted the strip of police tape, even though I knew it was futile.

The wind would blow the tape away again.

Didn't matter. The investigators had found nothing. There was nothing to find. Only Brooke's prints and her hair, and my father.

The smokehouse seemed consecrated now.

Consecrated by my father's blood.

One time, I was trying to clear out the gutters of the house, since they'd been neglected since the fall and were full of 111

leaves and muck. I saw Ike Doone out by the smokehouse, and I could not get down the ladder fast enough to go chase him off.

Other curiosity seekers drove by, slowing on the road as they got near the crime scene.

At night, after I'd been drinking with Bruno, I'd lay in bed and look at the ceiling believing that the world was somehow an unfair and tragic proposition, and life was a joke.

One night, I dreamed my father and I were out in a boat together.

The dream: It was a dinghy, and the sea was calm as a mirror. In the sky, an enormous silver crescent moon, but it was barely dark yet.

My father was turned with his back to me. He had on the tan baseball cap that he often wore when he went fishing. He had no shirt on-his back was bare and pale white. He had a fishing line out in the water. When I looked in the bottom of the boat, near my bare feet, it seemed alive with wriggling fat eels and freshwater trout, their tails flipping as they tried to get out of the boat.

He turned to face me, and his eyes were no longer there, but blood poured from the empty holes.

Seagulls flew in the sky above, crying out, and somehow I knew they had taken his eyes.

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Then his eyes were intact, and he got that jolly twinkle in them like he did whenever he was about to tell a funny story. "Don't be afraid," he said. "Just close your eyes. Don't touch anything."

I glanced down at the eels in the boat. "Them?"

"Just stay still here. Keep your eyes closed. Don't lean. No talking.

Ignore the noise," he said. "Listen to what I'm about to say. Listen very carefully. Each word I say is important. Each word is like a key to a door. I want you to imagine a small red light, so small you can barely see it. Everything about it is completely pitch dark, but the light is red like a tiny, tiny fire. I want you to follow me with that fire, follow me as I take you somewhere else."

I watched an eel with a mouth like a python as it devoured one of the fish. I nodded, not wanting to say anything to him.

When I looked up again, the moon had grown larger, as if our boat had moved closer to it. My father hooked a long pike with a wood handle and a sharp barbed tip into one of the eels and was holding it over the boat. The eel wriggled in slow motion against the crescent moon. The moon seemed to have barbed tips, also, and for some reason looked like it was made out of metal.

One of the seagulls shrieked louder than the rest, and its cry seemed to grow with the echoes of it.

"She went away," my father said, returning his gaze to the ever-growing moon as the seagull's shriek became a scream. "But someday, she'll be back."

"Pola?" I asked.

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I awoke and, strangely, felt calm from the dream. As if my mind was somehow giving me permission to say goodbye to him. As if, despite the savagery of the crime, he was all right, somewhere, on some glassy sea, fishing.

The only part of the dream that disturbed me was somehow knowing my father knew I was still in love with Pola.

As I always did whenever I had a strange dream that seemed significant to me, I got up and got a spiral notebook I'd had for years and wrote down the details I could remember in it:

Moon, fishing, eel and trout, fingernail crescent moon, seagulls, eyes missing, eyes returned to normal, tan baseball cap, calm water. Pola.

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For the first time in daylight, I went to the village.

The village was only about a half-mile walk from the eastern edge of Hawthorn. The day was overcast and the woods to the south sent a piney scent up to me as I trudged through the crunchy bits of snow. It had snowed off and on since I arrived, but generally melted by late afternoon down to a manageable slush. I could've borrowed Brooke's truck, but she was sleeping and had the keys somewhere in her room. I didn't want to disturb her.

The road to town was slick and wet, and I enjoyed the freshness of the day as I went. Part of me wanted to jog the whole way in, to feel my lungs working, but instead, I opted for a lit cigarette out the side of my mouth. My self-destruction would be slow and take as long as cigarettes could take.

Everything about Burnleyside was unappealing in winter.

It seemed Main Street had no color after summer-the peeling paint of the white clapboard two-stories all ran together in a jumble of storefronts and thin slivers of small Cape houses. The locals called it the Shambles-the way the stores seemed to pile on top and over each other on Main Street. It always seemed overcrowded in summer, and like a mess of poor architectural planning in the winter. The Oaks, up island, was more picturesque owing to the money poured into the houses and few convenience stores at the end of the island. In the summer, there was a Baskin-Robbins there, and even a McDonald's, all of which closed down for the winter as of October 20th. On Main Street in Burnleyside, I saw MontiLee

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Stormer with her swanky new hairdo. "Just like Julia Roberts," she said, and at first I wanted to smirk and chuckle at the provincialism of Burnleyside, but when I looked twice at her, it did give her an ingenue sort of look. MontiLee was the woman who women kept their husbands away from because she seemed to be catnip for the men in the village, even if she had never strayed from her own husband. She had the look of a woman who might stray, and no matter how she protested, there were those who thought she'd spent her life in dalliances. MontiLee quizzed me about what it had been like living in the South (as she thought of Washington, D.C.) and asked if the senators and congressmen were as corrupt as they seemed. She talked politics a bit-first national, wondering what the president was up to and why he didn't respond to the letters she'd sent him about what she considered were the growing concerns of the nation.

Then she switched to local news.

"I know I shouldn't be mentioning this," she said. "But any news?"

"On?"

"The murder," she whispered, and glanced about the street as if others might hear her. As if it were a big secret. "We're absolutely terrified to go out at night."

"They think it's a killer from the mainland. Who's back on the mainland," I said, fairly sure that it was a lie. I had to admit it: "I really don't know. I don't even understand what the cops are doing about it."

"I watch all the Discovery Channel shows on forensics, and it's fascinating. How they can even see how blood sprays a certain way, and-"

but she must've seen the look of

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revulsion in my face, because she stopped. "Our hearts go out to you, dear," she said, and placed a hand on my chest, right above where my heart would be. For just a second, I thought she might be flirting with me, which was less annoying than uncalled for. I will grant that it gave me a tingle, partly because MontiLee was so attractive; I was not immune to her charms. "And you know," she said, keeping her voice low, "You look like you're holding up."

"Thanks. Ah..." I said, fumbling with words. The only thing I could think to say was Joe Grogan's "It's the damnedest thing."

"I keep meaning to come by and pay my respects," she said, next touching my wrist, lightly. "But with Christmas coming up, and the business-well, my time is never my own."

After we did the small talk of small towns, MontiLee turned away. She sashayed to the other side of the street, heading toward her realty office. The row of shopfronts seemed dead now. Christmas lights were strung up, blinking even in daylight. At the end of Main Street, the small memorial park, with the one great fir tree, lit up.

Christmas was around the corner.

The year was nearly over.

I stood there, watching her go, remembering all those things I ought not to have shoved from my brain: a woman's touch. It made me think of another woman. The woman I just could not forget. Pola Croder.

All women I found attractive had made me think of Pola. I was beginning to suspect that even Beth, back in Washington,

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knew that my interest in her might've had something to do with her vague resemblance to Pola. No wonder she had distanced herself from me so easily; I had not been much of a prospect.

I walked by Croder-Sharp-Callahan, and casually looked through the glass, but could not bring myself to go inside. I wanted to see Pola, but I did not know what I would say to her if I saw her. My pulse quickened a bit, thinking of her, and I knew I was doomed: to replay the goodness and richness of a high school romance in my head until the end of my days.

Still, she had come by the house after my father's death.

She still cared, and I still cared, and I kept hoping that one of my father's famous quotes, stolen no doubt from others, would be true: that the universe rewards belief.

I still believed that love couldn't die. Down in my toes I believed it.

Even with the bad things in life, even with murder and sorrow, I believed that love just couldn't die if it was real between two people.

And I knew I was a doomed fool to believe it.

After picking up some eggs and bread at the local grocer's, where, thankfully, no one talked to me, I went by the old store my father had run.

The storefront was smaller than I'd remembered. The closed for the holidays sign was in the window, and when I peered through the windows, it looked as if nothing had changed since I'd been eighteen.

Back home an hour or so later, I caught Bruno peeling back some old wallpaper in the dining room that was never used.

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"Look at this," he said. "Three layers of wallpaper under here. This must've been Great-Grandma Raglan's pattern." He pointed out a dulled rose pattern. "About 1905," he said. "Or 1904. Boston. I'm willing to bet it cost a pretty penny then."

"Brooke's gonna shit when she sees you tearing at the wallpaper," I said.

"It's amazing how old this house is. Think of all the things. Our rooms have been painted over so much," he said. "I scratched at my bedroom door and-get this-it's really made of glass."

"Glass? It's wood."

"No," he chuckled. "People have been painting over it so much, the center of that door is a thick oval of glass. And it's etched. I bet there are little treasures around here like that. I had no idea. Good for the Antiques Roadshow."

"If it ever comes to Burnley."

"It comes to Boston, I think," he said. "You never know what's around here. Last night I was going through the shelves at the back of my old closet, and I found a small pantry behind it."

"Full of treasures?"

"No," he said. "Nothing, really. A couple of little ceramic salt and pepper shakers and a naked doll with its head cracked. Probably Granny's."

Bruno apparently had taken to picking at parts of the house-looking through cabinets, finding the old secret staircase-a narrow child-sized staircase that led from the laundry room-through a cabinet door-down to one of the kitchen cabinets on the first floor. As kids, we used to play hide and seek in it, and our father would raise unholy hell when we 119

leapt out of the kitchen cabinet while he was cooking supper. Bruno found several items that had been missing for years: his old teddy bear, a dustmop after a nineteen-year disappearance; he also discovered that there was a way to reach between the walls in his old bedroom, by way of removing a thin board in his closet.

He found his old sketchbook there, which he had forgotten that he'd hidden away at twelve and kept private from the rest of us. He showed some of them to me. They were scenes from the Ice Queen stories-and how the goblins ended up torturing the Queen eternally for her crimes. The Ice Queen was poorly drawn, but could be identified by the crescent moon in her hand and her hair, which was straw-yellow and flowing. It was pretty vivid stuff for a little kid, and I suspect that Bruno had been getting some of his frustrations out on paper. "You made up the stories," he reminded me. "I was just using crayons to illustrate your books."

"Only you never showed me," I said.

"I'm showing you now. I'm not the artist that Brooke is. But I tried."

"It's pretty violent," I said, ever the observer.

"So were the stories. I wonder why we liked them so much," he said, flipping through the sketchbook. "Dad would've had a fit if he'd seen these. He'd think there was something wrong with me."

"There is something wrong with you," I said, grinning. "You're a Raglan."

"We were a pretty creative bunch."

"Not a lot to do in the winter."

"Remember the words we made up?"

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I nodded. "Jumblies."

"Gran made that one up. I mean like the Greasels."

"The result of Weasel and Groundhog mating," I said with some authority.

"And the Eyestopper."

"Oh, yeah," he said. "That was a bad one. The evil poison that turns children blind when they see the sun."

"And the goblinfire," he said. "Look." He showed me a page in the sketchbook of a boy who might've been me, but with pointed elf ears, and a blackness of night all around him. In the middle of the blackness was a smudge of fiery yellow and orange.

We looked through some more of the sketches, pointing out what we remembered. The little ogre-girl who gobbled up people who said no to her; the boy whose skin was made out of bubblegum and blew up in a big pink bubble when he wanted to fly.

The most unusual one had me, Bruno, and Brooke all standing in a row with our mouths open in screams, and the tops of our heads were exploding.

Underneath this, Bruno had written in purple crayon: BRAIN FARTS!!!

And then there was the picture that was of us playing the Dark Game.

I barely glanced at it.

In a circle, holding hands.

Three children.

Bruno, Brooke, Nemo.

Blindfolds over their eyes.

"I wasn't much of an artist," Bruno said, and quickly closed his sketchbook.

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I awoke the next morning, with Bruno standing over my bed. He had on what looked like long underwear. Something about the way he looked, his hair all scruffy in his face, and something of an excited expression on his face, reminded me of him as a kid. "Get up! Nemo, you gotta see this!"

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After I'd rolled onto the floor, sleepily trying to find my bathrobe, Bruno dragged me from room to room until we came to my father's bedroom.

It was exactly as I remembered it: the king-sized bed with my grandmother's quilt thrown over it and one goose down pillow at the head.

A small black-and-white television on a metal stand by the window.

A lamp by the bed, with a small round table beneath it, on which my father kept the TV guide and his nail clippers. Above the bed, a photo of him and my mother on their wedding day.

"Look at this, look," Bruno said. He opened the doors to the wardrobe, the very one we had all squeezed into as

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children. It had wide doors, and when he drew them back, they revealed my father's clothes, hanging. Bruno parted these. There was no back to the wardrobe. It was open and went to the wall. The wallpaper had been scraped back around a hole about four feet tall.

"What the hell?"

"Yeah and it gets better," Bruno said. He crouched down, stepping into the wardrobe, and withdrew a stack of papers and magazines. "Haven't completely gone through these, but want to see what Dad was up to in here all by his lonesome?"

He passed me the magazine on the top.

Slaves of Lust was the title. On the cover, a not-so-beautiful model with large, sloppy breasts covered from head to foot in rubber, only her face showing through a zipper. Others in the pile included: Master and Harem, Love Torture, and Punish the Naughty Lady.

"He was an S&M porn hound," Bruno said.

I didn't expect my father not to have a private sex life that involved his hand (this somehow kept him purer for all of us, who had hoped he'd remain true to our mother, a fantasy in its own way for kids whose mothers have run off), but when Bruno dumped the magazines on the bed, they were plainly the kinds of pornography I'd never seen before. I mean, I'd watched porn in college when someone had videotapes, and I'd flipped through the odd Penthouse and the other assorted girlie magazines.

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But they'd seemed tame in comparison to what my dad had been stashing away.

The kind that made me flinch a little and not think well of people who were pornographers. (Porn is a funny thing. When you see the mainstream pornography, what Granny used to call "marriage manuals," it all seems full of happy, willing participants. There's an element to human beauty and fantasy in it. But when you see this kind, it looks as ugly as anything that is human can look. Call me puritan. But watching people being whipped or tied up wasn't my idea of eroticism. Not to say it's not someone else's. To each his or her own. Obviously, it was my dad's idea of a turn on. Call me prude, but the last thing I wanted to find was my dad's porn stash.)

"You think it was 'cause Granddad used to beat him?" Bruno asked.

"What?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. If a guy is into this, doesn't that just mean he had a lot of punishment as a lad and it became eroticized? I've known a few guys who liked this kind of stuff, and they all seemed to have this whole discipline thing going on. Granddad had that bullwhip or whatever that he kept above the door. It must've had some effect on Dad."

"You're talking about Dad. Christ. Gives me the willies."

"Yeah. I guess it's freaky. Who knew?"

"Let's just throw it out," I said.

"It's not the porn that I care about," Bruno said. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hole, groaning a bit where he scraped his back. He back-crawled

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out, and brought with him a stack of letters. "Lots of this stuff. I put some in my room, too. Look," he said. "All this stuff. And two thousand cash." He pointed to the dresser. I went over to it, and touched the top of what turned out to be three stacks of hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in baggies, and bound with rubber bands.

"His bank account?"

"Mad money," Bruno said. "And these, too."

He came over to me, and passed me the letters he'd found.

At first, I thought they were letters from my mother to him. Love letters from when they were young.

I picked one of them up. Turned it over.

Dear Mia,

Please come back to us. The children miss you more than you can imagine, and I am going crazy "without you. I didn't know loneliness until you left. Please fulfill my greatest wish, that you love me again, that you love your children again. Nemo is nearly fourteen, and is going to be a man soon. But he needs his mother. He doesn't always make correct judgments, and I'm just not good at understanding why he's different than I was as a boy. But you were so good with him. Brookie is as beautiful as you, and as bright. You must see her. And Bruno still cries for you at night, even though he barely remembers what you look like.

Please come home, Mia. Please. I love you and I wish 127

that night had never happened between us. I will always love you and always keep a light on at Hawthorn for you. If you ever think for a moment that I have lost all love for you, or that I hate you, know in your heart that you are mistaken. You are the only one for me. You are the love of my life. You are my only light.

I beg of you, on my knees, and to God, and to everything holy and sacred in the world: Come home and be a mother to your children, and if you feel even an ounce of kindness and pity for me, come home. Come home and take care of them, be their mother, hold them close. I am so sorry for what I did to you.

Love always, Gordie

The letters were dusty and written on various kinds of paper- parchment, typing paper, notepad paper, as well as elegant stationery. The envelopes, from which my father had torn the letters before stacking them all together, had a single address on them: a house in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My mother's name: Mia Raglan.

It gave me a lonely feeling to read through them, between the porn, like a parade of the sacred and the profane.

I went and sat on his bed, and then lay back and put my head on the pillow.

I read letter after letter.

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We ended up tossing the porn in the garbage without telling Brooke, since she was a bit judgmental about anything to do with pictures of naked women.

But the letters I passed to Brooke.

We also gave her the money that was found, although Bruno really wanted to keep some of it (he had debts, he said, and I told him I had bigger debts, but it still should be for Brooke since there were bills to pay at home).

On the sofa in the living room, while Bruno played something on the piano that sounded vaguely like a classical lullaby, Brooke flipped through the letters the way she might look over legal documents-with a kind of spirited disinterest. "He wrote these all the time."

"He didn't send them," I said. "I don't know why."

"He may have. They might've been returned. He said that some came back undeliverable."

"Look at the dates," I said.

She glanced at the top right-hand corners of some of the letters. "Every week," she said, nodding. "That makes sense. He always went to the post office on Monday morning. Sometimes there was nothing to mail, and he still went. I saw him writing to her once. He told me he did it because he had to keep the faith."

"He really loved her."

"I suppose he did," she said. "I was never sure of it. I'd guess he was angry at her. For leaving. I always wondered if they really loved each other at any time. He told me she had

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menial breakdowns more than once. Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't just a caretaker for her. But I guess he still wanted her to come home. All these letters. Sent back. She must've hated all of us."

I didn't jump on her comment, which seemed cold. It had been a rough time for all of us.

Bruno, playing the piano, stopped. He said, "He never sent them. Check the envelopes again."

Brooke held up one of the envelopes. "Oh. We missed it." She passed it to me. "Bruno's right. No postmark. He must've just written these and held on to them."

"Poor guy," I said.

Bruno turned around on the piano bench. "He used to hit her," he said, that Brunoesque anger rising in his voice as if he could go from "calm"

to "storm" in seconds flat.

"He did not," I said.

"Sure he did. I saw him. She came and got me. I was maybe three. I just remember he hit her. He was yelling at her, and he hit her, and I was there, and she picked me up and took me up to her room. She snuggled up to me in the bed, crying. He tore her dress, and he made her cry, and he hit her. It's a vivid memory. That's the first time I remember not liking him at all."

"You might be remembering wrong," Brooke said. "You always remember things a little twisted and negative."

"Not damn likely," Bruno said.

"From the age of three?" Brooke let out a mocking laugh "Even if he hit her-and I still don't believe it-maybe it was just once. And a bad time."

"You believe that?" Bruno asked. "You think it's okay for 130

a guy to hit his wife under any circumstances, Brooke? You think he took us out to that smokehouse and used the belt on us, and he didn't use it on her at some point?"

"We were kids," she said, her own piss-and-vinegar rising. "He was spanking us. It's not the same."

"I watched him spank Nemo one time," Bruno said. "I stood in the corner of that freezing cold place, and I saw blood on Nemo's rear end. He wasn't just spanking us."

"Shut up," Brooke said. "Just shut up. He's dead now. Let it go. Jesus, you'd think he never did anything for you. You'd think because he spanked us a couple of times-"

"It wasn't just spanking," Bruno said, disgust rising in his voice.

"Spanking a kid is different. What I saw him do to Nemo was whip him."

As he said the words, I tried to remember a time when I felt as if my father had whipped me, but I could not. It was a great blank spot for me. I remembered hating the place of punishment and Dad's anger, but I could not for the life of me ever really remember feeling that he'd gone overboard.

Bruno turned back around and began banging something out on that upright piano that sounded like nothing but noise at first.

Brooke shot me a glance that seemed to be full of curiosity.

Then we recognized the tune-it was Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.

We had all heard it as little children, from our mother's music box.

The cloud that hung low, the mystery and depression and trauma we'd all sustained from this shocking murder of our

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father, remained, but as the days rolled out I began to realize that we were all that was left of us. We still could remake ourselves, grow back together a bit, get along. My heart felt a bit heavy with the knowledge that somewhere out there, my father's killer was wandering free. I didn't trust the universe enough to think they'd get him anytime soon.

Bruno confided in me that there wasn't much money left; perhaps ten thousand dollars after some debts Dad had accrued, plus the two thousand Bruno had found upstairs Twelve thousand sounded like a lot to the two of us, but we knew that it wasn't much of a savings. Brooke would need it for her own life as much as Bruno and I wanted to paw at it ourselves. Brooke had to run the business and Hawthorn. I didn't really want Hawthorn, and neither did Bruno. We saw our futures off-island.

"What kind of debts? He was cheap."

Bruno shrugged. "He spent money like anyone else. There's some company in New York he'd buy books or something from." He shook his head. "Maybe that was the porn. Who knows? I found receipts for other stuff."

"But the business," I said. "It was running okay?"

The business was the store my dad had in the village, the one that Brooke ran. A small sundries store, it was a direct competitor for the larger Croder-Sharp-Callahan Store, which always turned a profit.

Apparently, my dad's store had been losing money. It ran itself, it paid Brooke's meager salary

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which allowed Hawthorn to keep up appearances, but it didn't run into profit, even during the abundant summertime.

"I guess you didn't know some money was missing," Bruno said.

"Grogan told me something about money problems. But I didn't think it was anything other than Dad having no financial sense."

Bruno snorted. "Well, it was his life. And his money. I guess given that he always did things his way, it's fine, right?" He had challenge in his eyes, but I was not up for an argument over Dad's corpse.

"Maybe it's time we sold off some of Hawthorn," I suggested. "Not the house. I mean, maybe the woods, or over by the creek. There's a lot of unused acreage. It's worth something. We could keep five acres around the house and sell the rest."

"Brooke wouldn't let it happen," Bruno said.

I glanced at him with some curiosity. "You need money, don't you?"

"I don't give a damn about the money," he said. "I just give a damn about what Brooke's gonna need now. She's stuck here."

"Well, when things are better, we'll all sit down and figure this out,"

I said. "If Brooke needs money to stay here, we'll figure it out. She's closing the store for a couple of weeks. I like the idea of helping her out a little. I just wish I weren't the official fuck-up that I am."

"I'm officially the fuck-up," Bruno said. "I'm the one who hated Dad.

I'm the one who thinks bad about everything. I

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drink too much. Just right now. I think I need to stop drinking."

"No, no," I said. "We both drink too much. Actually, I watched you. You had three beers last night. To some people that's barely drinking."

"To others, it's alcoholism," he said.

"I wasn't fond of Dad either," I admitted. "I can't for the life of me figure out why. He wasn't mean to me. I insist: I'm the family fuck-up."

"Nope," Bruno said. "I'm the family fuck-up. Nemo, you don't even want to know."

I shook my head, enjoying this. "You're in the minor leagues. I'm the major league fuck-up. Who else got run out of town at eighteen? Who else can't hold a job for a year at a time? Who else-"

"You wrote a book."

It was true. I'd written a fantasy novel a few years previous. It was published. No one bought or read it. It had been my dream to be a writer, but by twenty-eight that dream had eroded.

"Lots of fuck-ups write books," I said. "Libraries are full of the evidence. You're the athlete with the good grades and the charm who everyone loves. You can play the piano. I lose a girlfriend every time I say I like her. I lose a job when they discover how incompetent I am."

"Okay," Bruno sighed. "I've got a trump card. I'm gay.'

I sat there in silence. The word hadn't quite registered. Bruno? Gay? My little brother? "Wow. Wow. Bruno. Wow! That's news to me."

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"Yeah," he said. "To you. Dad knew. That's why he didn't love having me staying in the house. Dad was a homophobe. You know what? I think he hated me, too. Since I was born. He told me he thought I was doing it to get back at him for something. Don't tell Paulette Doone. She'll do an exorcism." Then he added, "You shocked?"

"You knew he was gay?" I asked Brooke as soon as we had a minute alone.

She was pulling clothes out of the dryer, while trying to keep the two dogs from getting into the laundry room.

"Of course," she said. "Here, help fold."

"Not good at this," I said, as she passed me some warm towels.

"Folding? Or getting used to having a gay brother?"

"Folding. I don't care that he's gay."

"Yes, you do," she said. "I knew it when he was twelve. He told me when he was sixteen."

"Told you?"

"What, you were around for him to talk to?" she asked, and it stopped me cold. "He wanted to tell you, but apparently you didn't want to stay on the phone with him long enough to talk about it. Bruno has a lot of anger about Dad, and I think some of it is directed at you. He assumed, from some comment you made to him once, that you'd be like Dad about it."

"I would not ever-damn it," I said. "Damn it." She was right. I vaguely remembered a long phone call, very late at

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night, when Bruno had been sad over something that had happened-I assume he had broken up with a girl in college-and he never quite got to the point. But it had been mostly me, not wanting him to get to the point.

Not really even listening the one time Bruno had seemed to open up to me as an adult. I had never been there for him at all, past the age of twelve. Even then, I was too preoccupied with my girlfriend and buddies and getting up to no good. Bruno must've felt a little lost not having someone to talk to about it. I felt terrible. GUILT rose up within me. I had been an awful older brother.

"Oh," Brooke said. She waited a beat before speaking again. "He has a boyfriend. Cary Conklin. Try not to be too shocked."

"This family will never cease to amaze me," I said. "Good for him."

She dropped the sheets she'd bunched up in a pile on the floor. She squeezed my arm. "I'm glad you're home, even under the circumstances.

You should stay a little longer this time."

"Yeah," I said. And meant it. "It always amazes me what I don't know about stuff around here. Do you realize that none of us really knows each other?"

"You mean, you don't know us very well anymore," she said.

"Busted," I said, nodding.

"What drove you from this house?" she asked, as if it were the weightiest question in the universe.

I didn't even need to think about it. "I always felt something was rotten here," I said. "And I never knew why. But 136

maybe I was just so messed up then. It's like it was a different life, not the one I have now."

"It's because Mom left," she said. "Dad always said that. He said you took off because you'd been abandoned more than any of us. He said you cried and cried the night she left and begged her to stay, and then you blamed him."

I tried to remember this, but none of it came. "I guess I buried it all."

"I did that, too," she said. "Bruno seems to be the only one who doesn't bury stuff. He just throws it all out there on the wall. Sometimes too much."

"I know so little about Bruno," I said. "Is there anything about you I need to know?"

She gave me a curious stare, as if she were about to surprise me with something. "Nothing you don't already know," she said. "I gave up on love this fall. That kind of love-the kind that's about two souls binding together. And so on. It seems a little empty to even think about it after what happened, the whole idea of dating. It seems trivial.

Anything I want to do seems trivial. After that." That's what she'd called our father's murder. She swore she could not even remember sitting in the smokehouse with his body, or what it looked like, or how she felt. It had been that bad of a shock. All she could say was "after what happened," "after that," or simply, "after." I wondered how many years needed to go by before all of us would somehow get better from this. "I refuse to go out on any more dates with local men until I know that they're not just here because they have no place else to go."

"That's what I feel like. I have no place else to go," I said.

"You always have Hawthorn. By the rights of the firstborn, 137

the house is probably yours." She said this seriously, as if she believed it.

"Spoken like someone who doesn't give a damn.? Well, it's yours. It has been since we were kids."

"I'm not sure I love it anymore," she said. "Not like I did then.

Sometimes it's like a prison. It's like a place with too many doors. And none of them lead outside. Even before. Sometimes it's like a splinter inside me that won't come out. Someone said something to me a while ago that's been bugging me. Someone said that he thought we were too incestuous."

"You and Dad?"

She shot me a look that was half-grimace and half mocking. "God, no. All of us. He told me that I'd never find a mate because I was too caught up in this family. Which is ridiculous, isn't it? We're a half-assed family now. Mom's gone, Dad's dead. Bruno hated Dad. I think he doesn't like me too much anymore. You both have lives elsewhere. How can we be incestuous?"

"Who said it?"

"Joe Grogan," she said. "But do you think we are? This whole Raglan thing? How we keep too separate from everyone here? How Dad didn't like our friends, and how we had those games we all played and kept other kids away? Was it unhealthy?"

"We played with Harry when we were lads."

"I meant in general," she said, somewhat testily.

"What's bothering you?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said.

"Joe said that just to hurt you."

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"You know what?" she said. "I think all three of us aren't meant to be happy. Maybe we were too close here. I always felt like I was betraying him to have a life outside Hawthorn. I felt like if I did, it would be like Mom leaving, or you or Bruno taking off. Can I ask you something?

Something I don't want to be judged on?"

"Of course."

"Do you believe in ghosts?"

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Before I could answer, Brooke jumped in with, "Not ghosts as in dead people. I mean, the idea of someone haunting someone. The idea that inside a person, there can be another person."

"You mean, psychologically?"

"Maybe. That might be it. It's Dad I'm thinking of. He always told me that someone haunted him. He didn't start talking about it 'til last year, when we were fighting. He started drinking again, and we ... well, we got into it. Yelling at each other. I'm not proud of it, but it happened. And he told me that he thought he was losing his mind because he felt like someone was haunting him. Do you think there are such things as hauntings?"

"No."

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"I think I do," she said. "I think I believe there's one here. I think Dad was haunted. And I think I am, too."

That night, as I lay in bed, I had the disturbing feeling that there was a woman in the room.

Standing near my bed.

Please don't let it be Brooke naked, sleepwalking, her fingers running all over her body.

I opened my eyes in the dark, expecting to see Brooke, but no one was there.

Yet each time I closed my eyes, I had the distinct impression: a woman.

Not a figure, and not a man. If I opened my eyes, she would be gone.

Once I closed them again, she'd still be there, a phantom.

And not only standing there, but angry.

I had this sense, it was crawling around in my brain and body, as if I could detect her aura. Anger and madness. It pissed me off that it took me so long to fall asleep. I could picture nothing about her, but it was like a negative image behind my eyes when I closed them. It was all that ghost and haunting talk that Brooke had been going on about. It influenced me too much in the late night. It frightened me a little, as well, because it reminded me of the madness our father had told us that our mother possessed. I wondered if we each would go mad someday-some biological imperative, some little signal sent out from an obscured part of the brain. That

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we'd somehow begin to show signs of mental breakdown. I wondered if Brooke had already been experiencing this. I wondered if it was the reason we had ever played that awful game as children, where our minds seemed to work differently afterward.

I felt my inner life was unquiet. Restless. Constant thought, constant debating over family and my father's death and what I sensed versus what I didn't-my brain didn't seem to stop at night at all. I tossed and turned, and wrapped myself in the comforter and blankets, and then threw them off the bed and rolled up in the top sheet.

I don't know when sleep finally came, but soon after, I awoke to hear Brooke screaming.

Three bloodcurdling shrieks, the like of which I'd never heard before. I stumbled out of bed and called to her.

All the doors were closed, so I had to open the five doors that separated my room from Brooke's-Bruno had come running as well.

As I went, I could see the first morning sunlight out the windows.

When we got to Brooke's room, she was sound asleep in her bed.

On her dresser, at her bedside table, even on the windowsill: small votive candles, all nursing small flames.

Bruno and I stared at each other for a second. Bruno whispered, "That's jucfeed."

I figured he meant having heard the scream, or even the burning candles, but he pointed to the big window over her bed, the shades up, the curtains drawn back.

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3

It was as if just seconds before we'd gotten there, Brooke had taken her finger and rubbed words across the condensation on her bedroom window, then had breathed heavily on it so they'd show up.

The words were written largely enough to be read from across the room: HERE COMES A CANDLE TO LIGHT YOU TO BED

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All right, let me put it all down here: When we were little kids, we'd played that damned game as if it were real, and we broke the main rule about not playing it after dark.

We played it when we weren't supposed to, and I suspected that it screwed with our heads, only I wasn't sure how to talk about it. It had an accompanying dose of shame with it, and a decent bit of fear. (And it was fun.)

It turned bad when we couldn't stop playing it. When we'd sneak away, and put on the blindfolds and start going into the Dark Game.

Start going where it went.

Brooke had been most affected by the Dark Game, and by the Brain Fart.

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She had been the one who had nearly died at the age of eight, afterward.

Her heart had nearly stopped, at least that's what it had seemed like to me. I practically got hysterical and kept telling our father that she needed to go to a hospital, but he told me it wasn't that bad.

"She's had a fright," he said. First he brought her temperature down with an ice bath. He made me his assistant, and he had me running all over the house for the thermometer, the ear drops, the nose drops, and the Vicks VapoRub to help her breathe better.

Dad kept her in warm blankets for two weeks after that, and spoon-fed her, and wouldn't let her so much as go to the bathroom by herself until he was sure she was better.

After that, he took me by the hand down to the duck pond, and he told me that if I ever played the Dark Game again, he would make sure that I lived to regret it.

I lied to him and told him I never would play it again.

But my fingers were crossed, so it didn't count. Or so I thought.

As I grew up, I lived to regret pretty much everything.

"Locks," Brooke said. "I want new locks on every door."

I stood in the doorway, having just come back from a hike with the dogs down through the woods. It was two in the afternoon-the earliest I had seen Brooke get up in a few days. "How many?"

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"Seven," she said. "For the outside doors. I want at least two for the inside."

"All right," I said.

"Deadbolts. All of them," she said.

"Not for the inside," I said.

"Inside and out," she said. "I'm sorry. I just haven't felt safe. We can call a locksmith if you want."

"No, I can do it. Dad's tools still around?"

She nodded and went to show me where the tool kit was-under our father's desk in his den on the first floor. The desk was piled high with folders and papers. "He was doing some genealogical research," she said.

I flipped through some of the papers, but have to admit that I began feeling very numb doing it. I felt as if I were picking over his bones.

"It's the Raglans going back to before William the Conqueror," she said with some wistfulness in her voice. "He spent too much time on it. But sometimes it was the only thing he did at night."

I pulled the tool kit out-a large metal suitcase that my father had loved dearly. I crouched down and opened it.

"Seven deadbolts," Brooke repeated, as she stood over me. "Might as well be the same key for all of them. Can you do that?"

I glanced up at her. "Sure. It's just a key assembly."

"Good," she said.

"Why inside?"

"I don't feel safe," she said. "I want the doors to the upstairs hall to lock. Both ends of the hall."

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"That's not practical. If there's a fire and it's locked and we can't get the key ..."

She thought a moment, and then lifted her hands as if weighing options.

"Get enough keys so that they can be on the inside of each door."

I murmured something that might've had the words "fire code" in them.

"Mumblespeak?" she asked.

"What?"

"You're mumbling."

"I'm just not sure if the fire department would like that. If someone needed to get out, during a fire, they might not have their key. And you have those candles going in your room at night." I thought of the candles she kept burning in her room at night. There must have been at least ten or twelve of them. The last thing I wanted to worry about in Hawthorn was a fire.

"I don't care," she said. "I wouldn't mind a deadbolt for my bedroom, but since it already locks from the inside, I'll be fine with it.

There's a killer somewhere. I want to feel safe. I can't sleep at night.

Every little noise frightens me." She said this as if it were obvious, even though I'd never really seen her be afraid of anything. "I wish we could get better locks for the windows. When I can, I want to replace them."

"We can get an alarm system."

"I already ordered one," she said. "But it won't be here for another week."

"I don't blame you," I said.

"I don't want anyone coming near us," she said.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

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"I'm just being sensible. We need to keep this place locked up. It's not safe here anymore."

"This morning, early, you cried out. You were asleep."

"I was probably dreaming," she said. As she passed me on her way out the door, she added, "Would you mind doing the locks today?"

"Fine," I said. "Are you painting or cleaning something?"

She glanced back at me from the doorway. "What?"

"I keep smelling turpentine."

"Oh," she said. "I paint sometimes. At night."

"She paints?" I asked Bruno, stopping him during one of his great concertos at the piano that had been giving me a bit of a headache. I wasn't about to complain. I figured if he was getting creative like that, it probably was healthy. It's how he had released rage as a kid, and I knew he had built up a lot of it over the past several years. Just as it might be healthy that Brooke was painting again, as she had as a young child.

"Does anyone in this family ever ask a question directly to the person that it's about?" he responded, with a somewhat bemused expression.

"God, I can tell you've been shrunk. That sounds like therapy-speak.

Brooke's too sensitive about her drawings," I said. "Since she was little."

"Well, yeah, she paints," he said. "She set up the back of the greenhouse like a studio. She's pretty good. Hey, you using the tub by Dad's room?"

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"No," I said. "His stuff's still in there. I feel weird about it. I'm using the downstairs shower."

"Maybe Brooke's using it. Something's leaking downstairs. I thought it might be the caulking in the tub," he said. "Check the ceiling in the dining room. There's a water spot over toward the window. It grows by leaps and bounds. Daily."

"Shit," I said. "I bet the same pipes are in here that were there in 1895."

"At least," Bruno said. "I wish I knew a little about house maintenance.

Other than from watching This Old House. I mainly just know how to tear walls down."

"Hawthorn is the original This Old House," I said. "Call a plumber."

He shook his head, laughing. " 'Call a plumber,' he says."

Then he pressed his fingers to the piano keys and began playing again.

While Brooke was asleep, early in the day, I walked back through the rooms to get to the very end of the house. The greenhouse door was open, and I went through it.

Past the empty pots and stacks of gardening tools, stood an easel that was low to the floor. On it a half-finished canvas. Brooke had been painting the woods out back, and using some kind of gray wash for a background that seemed to heighten the color of fire-for she painted a fire in the woods. It was not half bad.

Behind this, several jars of water full of thin paintbrushes, a can of turpentine, and small gray cloths. Crushed tubes of 149

oil paints-nine or ten of them-lay beside the easel as well. Four or five canvases leaned against the glass wall beyond all this.

I crouched down and lifted one up.

It was medium-sized, and at first I wasn't sure what it was of-three indistinct figures standing in what looked like a dimly lit room.

Then I realized the figures were us as children. Their faces were gray and unfinished, but there was no mistaking Bruno in his little red T-shirt, with his yellow hair, at the age of four. Brooke, with her hair straight and long; and me, scrawny and wearing my jeans that were torn at the knees. We held hands, standing in a circle.

It was the Dark Game. We were playing.

I was impressed with her memory-to have been able to paint these images, remembering the clothes we had worn at one time. Remembering how our bodies looked. Even if she couldn't quite remember our faces then.

I set this canvas back down and reached for the one behind it.

In this painting, it was our father's face, but young. Younger than I could remember, so I assumed it might've been from an old photograph. He had a smile, and she had managed to capture a peculiar brightness in his eyes. Something was too flat about it, as if she hadn't quite mastered perspective or even the interplay of light and dark. But it looked so much like him in its details. I pressed my thumb against my forehead to ward off a headache. I can't believe he's gone. I can't believe it.

I set this one down, carefully, behind the first.

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Then I pulled up the third canvas.

This one I found disturbing.

It was a painting of Brooke herself. At least, I believe it was Brooke.

She stood on the front porch of Hawthorn. She was naked. There was rain.

She had painted her breasts and stomach and thighs completely red, as if smeared with blood.

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I put the canvases back in place. I managed to spend the rest of the day, from morning 'til night, putting deadbolts on each of the doors to the outside. The front door, back door, the door from the kitchen that went down to the brick walkway out to what had once been my mother's garden, the door to the fenced-in area at the east side of the house, where the dogs could be let out to wrestle and gambol all day. And the door that came off the greenhouse, to the side and back of the house.

The doors to the front and back hallways seemed problematic to me. I really worried about the possibility of a fire. One had broken out once, many years before my birth, but had been contained to the kitchen and front room. I really wondered what would happen if there were a fire on the stairs,

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and we had two locked doors. So, instead of deadbolts, I put on ordinary locks such that each door could be unlocked without a key from the inside.

Several days in, I got a call from Joe Grogan, asking me to come in for a few more questions. I borrowed Brooke's truck and went to the station at about three in the afternoon. Joe's office was very much as it had been when I was a boy. I'd been hauled in once or twice when it was suspected I'd broken in with a gang of my friends to one of the summer people's places. Not only had I never done this, but I had no gang of friends. Other than Harry Withers, and later Pola Croder, I hadn't really made many close friends-let alone a gang.

I felt like a boy again, walking in there.

Joe was not alone. A woman of at least thirty, short cropped red hair, looking severe and somewhat like a pigeon (gray clothes and a sort of beak for a nose), stood, leaning a bit against his desk.

"Nemo Raglan, this is Homicide Detective Raleigh."

"From Hyannis," she said, clipping her words as if small talk were an annoyance for her. She stepped toward me to shake my hand.

"She just needs to ask a few questions," Joe said.

"Take a seat, Mr. Raglan," the detective said. She had a stony look on her face. "I don't want to waste your time. This will be brief."

"Sounds good," I said, feeling somewhat nervous.

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"You arrived the day after the body was discovered," she said.

"Yes."

"Your sister called you the previous night. Do you recall precisely when?"

"No. It was sometime before midnight. I was out that night with a friend."

"Does your answering machine log the time?"

I shrugged. "Yes. But I erased the tape. I always do. Once ... I've heard the messages."

"But you can guess that at the earliest, she might've called when?"

"Well, she told me she called around nine."

"But she might've called earlier."

"I hadn't been home since morning. I went to work, then went out after work."

"You left Burnley when you were eighteen?"

I glanced at Joe. Then back at the investigator. "Yes."

I glanced at Joe again. "Is this something I need a lawyer for?"

Raleigh smiled. "Let me tell you, we're having a tough time with this one, Mr. Raglan. For various reasons. It would be helpful if we could at least learn more about your father's relationship within his own family."

"Well, it was a good one. I was a bad kid, basically. I don't know why.

There was just something here that made me want to get away. I hated this village, and this island. I felt stuck. I was also stupid. I just wanted to get away, so I did. I haven't been that close to my sister or brother or father since then. Well, 'til now."

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"Did you know about your sister's mental state?" she asked.

"What?"

"Detective," Grogan said.

She continued. "She'd been depressed. Neighbors mentioned to us that she sometimes wandered at night-since late November. She was seen once out on the road in front of the house, completely naked. Your brother mentioned finding her in such a state, sleepwalking. She's even contemplated suicide."

"Brooke? I don't believe that." I stood up, pushing the chair back. "I'm sorry, Joe, but it sounds like you're looking to scapegoat Brooke."

"She told us," Raleigh said. "She didn't hide it. She showed us scars on her arms. Have you seen them?"

"It wasn't exactly a suicide attempt," Bruno snapped when I told him.

"She said that she'd fallen asleep. She'd been taking a bath, and she has the little plastic pillow that floats-in the tub-and she fell asleep. She almost drowned. But it wasn't an attempted suicide."

"I don't think it was about the bathtub," I told him.

We were at yet another of our favorite watering holes in the village that night, having one beer too many. "This investigator said there were scars. On her arms."

"It was the upstairs bathroom," Bruno said, testiness in his voice.

"With the sliding glass door for the shower. Dad's.

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When she woke up, she panicked, coming up from the water, and smashed it. She cut her arms a bit, but nothing much. Nothing deep. It freaked her out. She was embarrassed. She said she tracked blood into her room and had to wash it all up that night."

"Were you there?"

"No. But I know Brooke. If she'd tried to kill herself, she'd have done the job right."

Out of curiosity, I went upstairs and down the long hallway of rooms to my sister's bathroom one morning when she was sound asleep. The glass doors to the bathtub were gone, although the frame around them remained.

It definitely broke. I left it at that.

For the time being.

I grew restless. I began to feel as if Hawthorn had become a prison. We certainly were too incestuous, too much in each other's business, too much on top of each other's lives. I felt like hopping the first ferry off the island, just to be away from both of them: Bruno and Brooke, brother and sister.

And that house.

And that smokehouse with its residue of murder.

At twilight, I took a walk into the village, wrapped in a big overcoat and gloves and hat-feeling as if I just wanted to freeze a little, just feel the cleanness of air and the freshness of the sea breeze.

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As I walked along the road, snow fell so lightly that it was barely perceptible at first.

By the time I reached the village, it was pitch black with very little moon shining through the overhang of clouds. The streetlamps of Main Street were well lit, but the block I strolled along was completely empty. Half the shops were boarded up for the winter; the other half, on the north side of the street, were open. A few had just closed for the night.

I stood for a few minutes and watched the faint beginnings of snow spin downward, and I watched some of the shopkeepers lock up their stores.

Croder-Sharp-Callahan was still open.

It was a longish building with Victorian flourishes along its rooftop and a wraparound porch. It probably had begun its life in the village as a great spread of a house. When the store had taken over, it had worked hard to retain that charm of the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as had many of the shops on Main Street. The lights were on inside, and I could see the rows of food and household supplies.

And then I saw her there. Through the slightly blurry window of the store.

Pola Croder.

It was as if I were not standing across the street, with a car or two passing between me and the store. It was as if I were right there, next to her, looking at her.

She stood behind the old lunch counter, an apron wrapped around her broad and lovely hips, her blond hair

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pulled back. She had gained a little weight since high school, but I had to admit, it looked damn good on her and gave curves to her formerly angular body.

Work up the nerve, you mouse, I told myself. I wished I could've downed a beer just to give myself that warm, false courage of hops and foam.

You've spent your life running from her. You have to make it right.

Somehow. You have to at least let her close the door on you. Again.

I went into Croder-Sharp-Callahan, its front door practically slapping me on the ass as I stepped over its threshold.

Inside, the lights were bright and flat. I saw a few faces I recognized.

You can't grow up in a town that small and not know everyone. Even if you move away for several years, you come back and you still know everyone. Truth is, time truly does stop there and only begins again upon your return. "Neem," they said, and I said "Hey" to each of them and they said "Hey" back, and then we all got down to the business of ordering what might be the worst Chinese food on the planet, but the only kind available on the island.

"Pola," I said.

I wasn't sure if she would ever look my way.

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In her teens, her hair had been white-blond, and she had glossy red lipstick and let cigarettes hang out of her mouth as if she wanted a guy to flick them out and kiss her. She was the closest thing to glamorous we had in Burnleyside.

Pola. That name came from her Russian father, but it had been an unfortunate one in our childhood. We had called her Pola Bear on the playground, and because she had the usual amount of baby fat straight up until her teen years, this nickname no doubt hurt.

All right, I had never called her Pola Bear. I was an outcast even then, and I felt a great deal of sympathy for anyone who was bullied or called names. The fact that we all had funny names (with the exception of the few Bills, Daves, Annes, and Debbies among us) didn't seem to stop any of the kids from

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picking out someone to ridicule for name alone. As Nemo, I was often called "Feebo" (you figure out how it got from one to the other, and you will have discovered the secret of childhood cruelty).

But there was Pola, at Croder-Sharp-Callahan. She was no longer the pointy-chinned little weirdo from childhood, the girl with a dirty face and a dirty dress. By high school, I had found her completely irresistible, and we'd fallen in love fast and stayed that way until about the end of my senior year. I had adored every inch of her, the smell of her, the brain of her, the laugh of her.

She finally turned and said her "Hey," and took my order of chicken chow mein and egg drop soup. I wasn't sure if she recognized me at all. My heart seemed to beat too fast. I felt my throat dry up a bit, but soothed it with some warm tea.

Seeing her again, I will admit, I felt that lust hunger that wasn't as awful as I suspect women think it is.

I wanted to hold her, and kiss her, and somehow be with her again.

I figured it would never happen.

I felt five times the loser for even wanting it.

The chicken chow mein was as smooth as ever, and the soup, though tepid, satisfied. It was difficult to even notice the taste because Pola was nearby. I kept glancing at her, out of the corners of my eyes. Had she recognized me at all while I slurped at the cup? While I wiped at my chin? Pola didn't seemed to have noticed me beyond the way she might notice any other local entering the place. Certainly others said their 161

"heys" with more marked enthusiasm, and with questions about my travels to the outer edges of the universe. Here's what I can recall of Pola, standing behind the counter with her smudge-stained white apron, her breasts so noticeable as to be an entirely separate creature parasitically attached to her chest, her hair shiny in the fluorescent lights that hummed above us: She was a beauty, and not just on the small-town Burnley Island scale, but she would've been a beauty anywhere, and it was not her bra size, or the blondness, but it was her eyes and her rather direct use of them when happy, sad, annoyed, or disturbed.

She looked as if she had lived her life once with some recklessness, and now relived it with wisdom and understanding and a certain amount of unpleasant resignation.

And so, there was I; there was Pola; and between us, a metal counter, an apron, and my understanding that there would be no time to again make out beneath the school bleachers, or to dance beneath icy moonlight on the edge of a clear and frozen lake while my father's car idled at the roadside, nor would there be another second of stealing a kiss and feeling like a thief. Whether it came at thirty, or at forty, or at fifty, it didn't matter. I had already begun to long for what was past and what could not be grasped again.

And then the little miracle began.

She came over to me and drew a chair back across the table.

"It's terrible what happened," she said. "Your father was a good man."

"Yeah," I said. I wanted to say: I tried to call. But that sounded so lame. I wanted to say: I've thought about you for the past ten years. I just wasn't sure what that really meant.

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Instead, we got to talking families and pasts and presents, but always with some kind of unanswered question about where love goes. How does it ever really change? You can tell me that when you were truly in love with someone, and it ended, that you no longer love that person, but I won't be the one to believe you. Anyone I had ever loved-in my heart, not just in my flesh or in my mind, I still loved. They had remained with me in some way that was maddeningly difficult to pinpoint.

Pola seemed to have set her expression in stone: neither smile nor flatline, her lips were slightly parted as if she were about to whistle.

Then, "Well, it's good to see you here, anyway. You should come around and meet my son."

"Ah." That was all I said. Mention of her son reminded me of all the reasons I'd left Burnley Island behind. She and I were in love. I was in love with her. She was in love, but not with me. She had fooled me for a time into believing she adored me. But she had already moved on-she was pregnant at eighteen, and she told me, tears in her eyes, that it was another boy, a few years older. She was going to marry him. She wept on my sleeve, and I held her on a long summer's night. She had kept saying to me how right it was that we should break up, that she wanted to stay her whole life on the island, that she loved it there, and that I was going to get out in the world and would've hated her more for trying to keep me there. The whole time she'd told me this, when we were both eighteen, I had hated her. Hated her in the only way that a lover could.

It seemed careless of her-to me- that I should give her the purity of my love and be willing to dedicate my life to her, and she had just trampled on that by

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deciding on a more suitable guy. And I felt myself turn cold. Even at eighteen. Bitter and cold, and I never wanted to see her again.

She had turned on me, and I had been too immature to handle it. I had run, and used any excuse I could to go.

But now, seeing her, it brought back everything. The pop songs and the cliches were all correct: Love is a stranger. Love is a battlefield.

Love is a four-letter word. Love is a miracle.

But I added a new cliche to the mix when I was eighteen: Love is a prison, and the only way out is to open the door yourself, and walk away.

I glanced at her hand. I just stared at that sucker, and I wanted to touch it. I wanted to hold her hand. To listen to her for a while. I could not get the idea out of my mind that we should be in each other's arms, pressing together, melting against each other.

We talked old times, and laughed, and hesitated a little. She shut the store down, and I told her I'd walk her home.

Just as I had done as a teenager.

Outside, the snow continued.

The snow swirled and shivered as it fell beneath the streetlamps.

Pola would not look at me as we walked along Main Street with all its yellow and blue and red holiday lights strung along the stores. She still wore the large white apron, and it spread across her hips, tied tight around the back, accentuating her

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curves; her hair was pulled back severely, and an impish part of me wanted to pull at the bands holding it up and let it fall down around her shoulders.

She stopped. As if she could read my mind. The snow moved around her face as she stood beneath the lamplight at the end of the street. Her eyes seemed radiant to me. "Sometimes the past is stupid," she said.

"Would you do things differently if you could go back?"

I nodded. "Pretty much everything."

She gave me a knowing look. "Well, me, too."

Her brief words, me, too, confused me.

I felt something I'd never quite experienced. It was like a small voice in my head that said: You can spend your whole life not telling the truth about who you are inside. Life is easier that way.

Or you can just fess up right now. Bisk it. Throw it out there.

Live up to it.

"I never stopped caring about you," I said, and I felt my face go red, and for perhaps the first time in a long time I felt it down to my toes.

I felt my being. I felt as if this was the first time I'd ever stood up for myself in anything.

I expected her to laugh in my face, and I was willing to take it.

The look of astonishment that crossed her face soon turned into a slowly building smile and a damp sparkle to her eyes-a light glaze of tears.

She wiped at the tears. "Don't say that."

"I know it may not matter now," I said. "I don't care. You may not care for me in the same way. I don't care." Joe 165

Grogan's phrase came to me again, seeming completely accurate: It's the damnedest thing.

"Do you know I had to fight myself just to let you go?" she asked.

"What?"

She offered up a sad half-smile. "You would've died if you'd stayed here. You were too in love with me. And I was too immature. And I'd cheated on you, with my body and heart, and I did it because I knew you needed to leave. I couldn't fight my parents then. I couldn't fight anyone. And I let you go. I just let the best thing in my life go. I let it go for some stupid sense of what my parents wanted. And what everyone wanted except for me. And I didn't want you stuck here, with me."

A chill went through me when she said it. Something seemed to smash against my innards, and for a minute I thought I would be sick.

Jumblies, indeed. But that feeling quickly passed as I stood there in the barest moment that seemed to be an hour. I stood and looked into her face, and something within me fought against what I was feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was an awful feeling of fluttering and slight dizziness, as if she'd caught me off-guard and had tripped me up.

Then she said, "If you knew that someone intentionally lied to you so that you would have a better life, even if that lie was the worst thing in the world, how would you feel?"

I thought for a moment and said, "If I understood the reason, it wouldn't bother me. A lot of people lie for no good reason. If the reason's good, it's understandable."

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She closed her eyes, opened them again, and looked at me as if she had just said a prayer.

"It's the stupid past," I said. "Just like you said. Don't let it hurt you now. I'm here. I don't care about any of it. I'm here right now."

I was about to say something more, but I decided not to talk at all. I wanted to kiss her tears away. I leaned forward and kissed her eyelids, and then her nose, and then without even realizing where this might lead, my lips were over hers, and she opened her mouth gently. Her breath was sweet and felt like home as I inhaled it. I wrapped my arms around her, and drew her to me. Part of me was afraid she might pull away, but she embraced me before I had locked my arms behind her back.

"This is crazy," she murmured. She pressed her face against mine, and then under my chin, and then against my cheek.

"I know, I know," I said. I resumed kissing her as much as a woman could be kissed beneath a streetlamp. I reached up and drew out the twist of cloth that held up her hair, and it cascaded around her shoulders, and she opened her coat so I could put my arms inside it for warmth as I held her.

"We can't do this here," she whispered.

"The store," I said, glancing back at the darkness of Croder-Sharp-Callahan. "The lunch counter."

She laughed, looking up at me to see if I were teasing her. "You're serious?"

"like when we first made love," I said, and my throat caught on those words: made love. It was the first time in my adult life I had ever said them. I had said all the other words

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that seemed more true in the past; I had used the profanity and the blunt language and the clinical talk, but not those words that had seemed both precious and mysterious.

"This is mad," she whispered, but her body betrayed a passionate urgency, and we held each other's hands like kids again and ran through the fresh snow, back to Croder-Sharp-Callahan.

Once inside, she locked the door behind us.

She kept the lights off, and we stumbled into stools and chairs and around the cash register. Somehow, our clothes fell away, although there was a good deal of tugging and unsnapping and unbuttoning and unzipping and boots that took a while to come off. I felt just as I had at seventeen, the fumbling numbskullery of a boy in love without a brain in his head, the explosion of the senses as we rolled together, and tasted and felt and burned against each other.

Somehow, from there, we went up to the empty apartment above the store, through the back stairs, half-dressed, the snow still spinning gently downward, giggling and passionate and me in my boxers and socks, bounding up the steps after her as she wrapped herself in her coat, but with nothing else underneath.

The apartment was one room, with a bathroom and a small kitchenette by the window. The window had a tattered and yellowed shade drawn down. An overhead light flickered. A mattress lay back against one wall. "It's clean, don't worry," she said. "We use it for naps at work."

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I didn't care if it was dirty or newly washed. I leapt onto the mattress, and she came tumbling down on top of me.

I felt an energy within me, a renewal of forces stronger than personality or sustainable life. Something more than what I had been before that night. I wanted to give her so much, everything I had, every ounce of love and care and physical pleasure; I wanted to mold myself against her and her against me until you couldn't tell one from the other.

Afterward, I didn't even crave a cigarette.

"I've been wasting my life," I said, my lips against her hair, holding the scent of her for just a moment longer.

"You have not," Pola said.

"I have," I insisted. "I've wasted these years. I let go of my family.

Of you. We could've been building a life together."

"You'd have been bored here. With me. It wasn't right, not then."

"I guess we had separate paths for a while," I said. And I knew it.

Sorrow had held its sway over me for too long. The sorrow was not just my father's murder. It was a sorrow that had somehow crept its way into my soul and had burrowed there. It all seemed ridiculous now, in the arms of the woman I loved, on the island I had abandoned for no good or genuine reason.

"Maybe this was the way it was meant to be," she whispered, lazily and sweetly.

I held her longer than I had ever before held a woman in my arms. I felt her heartbeat against my chest. That peculiar

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and unfamiliar feeling of being bound to another human being in a way that breaks down all barriers and intimate territories. We made love with the energy of first-timers, and the sloppiness, too. She laughed when I tried to hold her in a way that made her leg cramp; and I began laughing when she took me inside her, not from silliness, but from a joy I hadn't even known could exist between two people, between a man and a woman in a secret of love that had been protected over several years. It was as if I had unlocked doors within me. She smiled afterward and told me that when we were in the throes of it, she enjoyed my laughter. "You sounded like the old Nemo. The one I fell in love with when we were children. The one who had joy." She kissed my lips, then my cheek, and neck. "Are you back, Nemo?" She looked into my eyes as if someone might be hiding somewhere in them.

Without realizing it, I had held my breath as she spoke. I had held on to a breath as if I were holding on to the years. I let out a sigh, the likes of which had not passed through my lungs or throat in all my life.

"Yeah," I said, like some idiot, a gust of my breath escaping and taking with it a great burden. "Yes. I am back."

Outside the window, the wind howled, the beginnings of a storm, perhaps, but I didn't care. I felt safe, for once in my life. I felt safe with Pola.

I lay there with her, looking at the window, the snow, and for a brief second, I thought I saw a woman's face at the window.

I sat up, startled.

But it was gone.

It's in your mind.

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"What is it?" Pola asked, looking from my face, back to the window. "Nemo?"

"Nothing," I said, settling back into the mattress with her, arms around her again.

"I want you to forgive me," I said a bit later.

"For what?"

"What I did to you back then."

"I didn't blame you," she said. "Like I don't need forgiveness myself."

"How I ever deserved even knowing someone like you ..."

She held a finger to my lips. "Don't make me out to be a saint."

"But I was the one-"

"Don't. Leave the past where it belongs. All the bad things are in the past. We were barely more than children then."

"I don't even wanna talk," I said. "My dad used to tell me that the sun shines on a dog's ass now and again. And I just want to bask in the sunshine a little."

We kissed again, and lay there until we both knew it was time for her to go pick up her son at her ex-husband's. I didn't want to leave her side at all, but we parted, regardless. I told her that we'd have lunch the next day.

The separation of old lovers who discover a new love between them has got to be the most agonizing. You know what it's like, you know how much you want the other person, but you also know that things can get in the way of love. How I wished that two people in love could always be together, every

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minute, every hour, and never grow bored or tired or distracted-or worse, out of love by the familiarity of love. These were the crazy abstractions I thought about on my walk back to Hawthorn, down the snowy road at sometime after ten p.m. And that's when I saw Carson McKinley in his truck, parked alongside the darkened storefronts, but beneath the red and blue of Christmas lights, masturbating.

Truth was, I didn't know if he was choking the chicken, but the truck vibrated, and I saw his sweaty face in the truck, so I assumed he was performing his favorite public pastime.

I never begrudged Carson his compulsion. Many a man has dreamt of doing just what Carson did in broad daylight or beneath the streetlamps, but few have the balls to follow through. As long as he was in his truck, the island sheep and horses were safe.

As I walked by the truck, I averted my gaze. The last thing I wanted to see after being with Pola, was a fifty-four-year-old with a beard and eyes like a crazed moron jacking off. But as I passed, he called out my name.

Now, with anyone else, I would've ordinarily turned to see who wanted to get my attention. But this was Carson McKinley.

"Hey, Nemo!" he called out again, his shout echoing slightly because of the cold and snow and emptiness of the street.

I turned. He looked out at me with his trollish face, half in darkness.

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"Storm's comin'," he said.

"What?"

"I saw her. Storm's comin'."

The truck continued to vibrate.

Perhaps Carson McKinley might've somehow spied on Pola and me as we had our marathon of sex. I felt a disgust for all mankind. The memory of seeing my dad's porn collection didn't help. Women were right, most of the time we were dogs and pigs, and perhaps not even as good as anything that walked on four legs. Sure, there were men who did great things in the world, but in the ordinary things, we were completely the lowest of lows. Even my father, I thought-even Gordie Raglan, war hero, survivor of prison camps, who led the other prisoners to safety at great odds.

Even his life came down to a stash of porn stuffed in the walls.

I didn't want life to be just this. Finding Pola again, not knowing if I could even feel that innocent love you get to feel as a kid, seemed like a miracle in need of protection. I stood there for a moment, judge and jury of Carson McKinley, who seemed the prototype of all that was dysfunctional of my gender. It was my puritan blood rising, I guess. Who was I to judge anyone else? I felt bad for Carson. I asked him if he was okay.

"She's a bad storm comin' down on us," he said. The truck began to bounce up and down. I turned away. He shouted after me, "SHE'S COMIN'!

OH LORDY, SHE'S A-COMIN'!" This was followed by what I can only assume were orgasmic moans of McKinley pleasure.

"Merry Christmas to you, too," I said.

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As I approached Hawthorn, feeling weary and frozen and in need of sleep like a drunk in need of the last drop from a bottle, I saw a light on in Brooke's room toward the back of the house. You're up. You're always up.

You need more life. You need more than Hawthorn, Brooke. You need to open some doors.

Bruno's light was off, but this didn't mean much. I wasn't even sure if Bruno was in his bedroom asleep or across town with his boyfriend. Well, good for him. At least he's got love. Hang on to it, Bruno, for as long as you can. It's a small miracle that needs protection. I didn't protect my miracle when I was a teenager, and I lost some years. Luckily, Pola protected it. Luckily, Pola loved me, too. So, Bruno, just make sure it's love and then hang on for dear life.

I dropped onto my bed, and only then realized that I had left my boxer shorts in the apartment above Croder-Sharp-Callahan.

That night, I awoke to Brooke walking through my room at some ungodly hour. Unfortunately, I had that now-expected impression that it wasn't Brooke. I sat up and flicked on the light.

No one was there at all.

Both doors to my bedroom were shut.

The next morning, I discovered that Carson's fertility rite had indeed brought a storm.

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We were buried under snow, not the most unusual occurrence for the island in December. By the time I'd trudged downstairs to the kitchen to the smell of a rich dark roast of coffee, Bruno and his boyfriend had already dug out most of the driveway. Not that it mattered: The village plow, also known as Johnny Sullivan, had yet to reach Hawthorn. There'd be no driving that day.

Cary and Bruno started a snowball fight out front. As I watched them from the kitchen window, it reminded me of us all as kids. How we played all over the fields, how the winters were rich with ice skating on the pond or snow forts along the hill.

Afterward, the smell of coffee and a kind of rosy glow seemed to permeate the house. I think it was just the way I felt-I had this hope again, this sense that I'd come home for a reason that was good. Not just because of my father's murder, but because I still had to find out if there was love for me in the world-the only woman I had ever really loved. Bruno noticed and commented that I looked a bit more chipper than usual; he asked where I'd left Dad's tool kit, and then added, "You look the way I feel."

A bit later, I called up Pola. "You hanging in there?"

"Yep," she said. "Me and Zack are making hot cocoa. Want to come over?"

"If I can walk a mile or two in the snow."

"Johnny'll be out soon."

"Well, then I definitely want some cocoa. With marshmallows."

"We have a fire going. Zack and I are gonna go to Seabird Hill and sled down it in a bit."

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"You sure we're okay?"

"Nemo?"

"I mean, last night was ..."

"I know," she said softly. "I wish we could've stayed together all night."

"Me, too."

"Why didn't we?"

"Don't want to spring it on Zack too quickly," I said. "How do you think he'll feel about ... about this?"

"I don't know," she said. "Well, he's begging to go out and play. Come by when you get out from under it."

She hung up.

Part of me felt the phantom of girlfriends past in the hangup. I felt the Jumblies in my stomach. Would this work out? Were we just trying to recapture a past that couldn't last? It was still all euphoria for me.

All the goofy and no-good thoughts that run through you when you realize that love looms. I thought of every woman I had ever felt close with, how I had wanted to see if love was there within each relationship. But it hadn't been. Only Pola. It was crazy. Things like high school sweethearts weren't supposed to work out.

I spent the day either on the phone with Pola (the road didn't get plowed until nine o'clock that night), or going over my dad's papers. I found a notebook of his, and recognized his tiny scrawl that was so hard to read. My dad had kept track of everything that happened in his life, particularly in terms of the house. Here's one bit of it: Stairway, back of house. Need repair on bannister. Call lumberyard. Call Bill. Make appointment with vet for Mab.

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Bruno's baseball practice. 9 am Sat. Take cooler. Brooke at 11, swim team.

Cheerios, milk, sugar, eggs, wheat bread, chicken breasts, case of Coke, case of Diet Coke, case of root beer. No Oreos for Bruno.

It made me laugh to flip through the spiral notebooks he kept, the closest thing to a diary he'd ever had. It reminded me more of him, of his way of organizing his life, than if he'd kept a more detailed record of his every whim and mood. I laughed, and then wept a little thinking about life's unfairness, that I'd never made things right with my father, that some insane person had murdered him and now there was nothing I could do to reach my father and tell him all the things you want to tell the dead.

As I sat there, I began to wonder about the past month's records. I flipped through the notebooks, but for the one marked that year, there were no strange entries at all.

I guess I wanted to believe that my father had noticed something. Had seen anything.

But again, my head ached, my stomach tightened, and I thought of him, lying in his own blood, sliced, someone standing over him with a curved blade in her hand.

Her.

I thought it: Her.

Why her? I closed my eyes. The sense of a woman.

Not Brooke.

Another woman.

As if the house itself had a woman hidden in it somewhere.

Hiding.

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That night, it must've been about three or four a.m., I awoke, sensing a presence in the room.

My heart began beating too fast, and I could taste something sour and dry in my throat. I wanted to get up, get some water, or at least flick on a light. But a half-sleepy fear kept me on the bed, trying not to move. What was it? I glanced to the bookshelf and the small desk by the window.

Then I saw her.

For a moment, I had a terrible feeling I didn't know who it was. I felt my heart beating within my chest, and a strange shushing sound that was like a pulse within me. I held my breath as if afraid that she would know I was awake and saw her.

For that slice of a moment, a terrible dread overtook me.

I had the sure feeling-the absolute conviction-that if there were such things as ghosts, this was one of them.

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She stood near the white curtain of the window, the moon shining in her hair. I could not tell if she was looking out the window or looking from the window to me, for she was nearly all shadow.

It's Brooke, I thought. My heart still jackhammering. I felt clammy and cold, and didn't want to think this could be anything irrational. It has to be Brooke.

I was about to say something, but I didn't want to startle her. Brooke went from room to room at night, after all. Perhaps she had just stopped for a minute to look out across the woods, and think of our father.

The sensation of dread returned. Somehow, I felt that this was not Brooke at all. This was someone else. I only thought 179

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It was Brooke because it was a woman in the house, and Brooke was the only candidate. I began to believe (as you only can in those terrible early morning hours when the dark has not yet vanished) that this truly was a ghost. I felt like a child again, with a belief in anything that came my way.

It took courage for me to reach over and flick on the bedside lamp. When I did, and the light flashed up in the room, it was Brooke. That nighttime imagination always did its worst with me.

She stood there, facing the window, her back to me, the reflection of her face in the mirror. She looked just like my mother at that moment.

Just like her.

She wore one of her stretched-out sweaters and gray sweatpants, her hair long and stringy as if she hadn't washed it for a few days.

"Brooke?"

She didn't respond.

"You okay?"

"I don't know what he wanted from me, not ever," she said, slowly, and in such a way that it gave me a chill. I realized a few seconds later that what scared me about her was that her voice didn't seem right. It seemed almost like Brooke's voice, but different.

"You probably should go to bed now," I said.

"He never loved me. Not the way he should have. Why couldn't he let me go? Why can't I leave? I don't understand any of this," she said. "That son of a bitch."

"Don't think about it now," I said.

"It's terrible what this island can do to you," she said, and she turned to look at me, but her eyes were nearly closed. For 181

the barest second, she didn't look like herself at all. Was she sleepwalking? Her voice was calm and even, but something in her tone kept me on edge. "Not just him, but everyone. If you're an outsider, you're always one. Others knew, I think. They guessed. But no one stood up to him. Nobody protected me. Nobody wanted to know what was really happening. Not any of you. This place is a prison."

Then she went out through the doorway to the west, through the bathroom that adjoined my room with my father's old room. She closed the door behind her as she went on, presumably to the next room.

I left the lights on and could not sleep the rest of the night. I grabbed a book off the shelf called The House on the Strand, one of my favorites from my teen years, and sank back into a world of time travel and intrigue.

Nightmares grew within my head when I finally fell asleep at night, or in the early morning. Sometimes I got up in the middle of the night, just to avoid the bad dream. I'd go out and get a cord of pine from the pile just outside the front porch and make a fire in the living room and try to read, or flip TV channels in search of something to take my mind off the idea of sleep.

But I'd fall asleep eventually.

In my nightmares, I saw her. She wore blood as a gown. She had hair like a raven and skin as pale as snow. It was the Snow Queen. The Banshee.

The Queen of Hell.

And I'd created her when I was a kid.

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Soon enough, the regional news shows stopped running anything about the story of the murder, nor was it showing up in the papers, outside of the Burnley Gazette. Other tragedies and terrors took over the news in the world. Other families suffered and found reporters at their door; other good men and women were cut down by vicious killers; and my world sank back into a low throbbing pain at the back of my head.

I was beginning to feel trapped, but I had nowhere else to go. Oddly enough, I never asked Brooke about the details of our father's death, nor did I read the papers or watch the news. And none of us answered the phone.

"Writing any more books?" Brooke asked one evening. "I read Igdarizilia.

Or whatever it's called. If it had been about something, it would've been a classic. But it was good."

"lgdras.il."

"Oh. Dad used to call it 'Godzilla.' I liked it. You needed more sex in it and maybe some more battles. That whole elf subplot bogged it down, and the names? You picked all the wrong Celtic names. Too hard to pronounce. You know it's rough when you need a glossary just to pronounce the names. Maybe you should write about real things this time," she said. Then she added, "I didn't like how you just threw all the dirty laundry in there."

"Huh?"

"Well, I don't doubt that the little nymph was me. You could've at least made her a little less slutty." She laughed, 183

but with a bit of an edge. "Dad was in there. And Bruno. I'm surprised you didn't include the greyhounds."

I ignored her comments. It seemed to be a universal truth that the family of the writer never really wanted to appreciate the writing. "Dad didn't read it, did he?"

"Don't feel bad, he never read novels. I told him what was in it. He was proud. He said he didn't like the father character too much, but I told him it had nothing to do with him. You might not have wanted to make the father the ogre who tortures elves and abducts the Queen of Hell."

"It's fiction, Brooke. Fantasy. There's no reality about it."

"People want to read about real things, even in fantasy," she said. She thought a moment and her eyes became slits, as if she'd just been seized with some vague moment of genius. "You really should think about writing for children. The stuff you wrote when we were kids was good. I can still remember some of it." She meant everything she said to be kind and generous. I wasn't ever going to take offense at anything Brooke said, or anything Bruno might say. I didn't want to lose this bond we were creating in the wake of tragedy over something petty like my silly book.

I decided I needed to write again.

In my old room, I found some of my early stories, when I had just begun to learn to write.

I had dreamed of being a writer since I was nine years old. My father had gotten me a typewriter back in the days when 184

it was the most advanced writing tool beyond a pen and paper. It was a secondhand beast from Croder-Sharp-Callahan general store, one that had sat on the shelf for nearly my entire life at that point. It was a thick, clunky Royal whose existence had begun sometime before even my father was born. But it served its purpose, and I learned to hunt and peck, for I'd had a bad year that year-it was the year my mother had left us, and this seemed to hit me hardest. My father asked me to write stories if it would help me, and I began writing them.

They were, at first, one-pagers, but soon I became adept at just writing and writing with no end in sight. I suspect I was obsessed with whatever story had gotten into my head. I wrote fantasies and stories of terror and happy stories of children who had wonderful mothers who hugged them and told them how important they were. In some respects, my ambition was never to be published, but to bring onto the page the nearly perfect, if dictatorial world of my imagination: the three headed monsters, the perfect mother, and magical island, the boy who could fly-all the ways I wanted the world to be. In my mind, as a kid, I imagined all kinds of fantastic ways of living-of brushing the tops of trees with my feet as I flew, not like Peter Pan, but like a starling. Or animals that would speak to me in the stories. Or the kids I wanted to have like me, who did indeed enjoy my company. There were faraway lands based far too much on Hugh Lofting's Dr. Doolittle and Tolkien's Middle Earth, and creatures out of Edith Hamilton's books on mythology, which I began reading at eleven. Once I discovered Herman Hesse's Demian, I was done for; moving on to other covert reading (for none of these books were pressed upon me in school), I went to George Orwell and 185

H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley-and I was writing stories that mirrored my reading the whole way through. Writing stories- purely for myself, for I never showed these to anyone-was to not express myself, but to purge some of my imagination, get it out of my head, where it swirled and blocked me from living as a child. Brought it out into another dimension. There were times when I felt there were a thousand doors in my head, and I needed to open all of them to find the one important door. The one important key that would open it.

And whatever was behind that door would somehow illuminate what I didn't understand about my life.

In the meantime, I had to open those thousand doors and see what wonderful and dreadful beasts existed there, waiting for me.

I found the one story that probably meant the most to me from childhood.

It was a complete rip-off of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen, mixed with the Greek myth of Persephone. In the Andersen story, the Snow Queen's magic mirror is broken, and a shard of glass gets in Kay's heart. He is Gerda's brother, and he becomes a very bad boy from this.

The myth of Persephone is the story of the daughter of Demeter's abduction into the Underworld by the king of that realm. I even noticed shades of Namia and Alice in Wonderland in there. The story was called

"The Ice Queen's Revenge." I suspect I called it this not because of the obvious derivation from Andersen's "Snow Queen," but because it was a little joke with Bruno. At four, when he wanted ice cream, it sounded like "ice queen," so I just made up the stories. At first, when I read some of them to him, he got scared, and stopped asking for "ice queen"

at all.

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Here is a bit of it, with typos and misspellings intact. I was ten at the time:

CHAPTER FIVE: THE ICE QUEEN RISES!

I SHALL COME FOR THE CHILDREN! the Ice Queen, the Queen of FROZEN CREAMY

HELL, said, and she wrapped

herself in the furs of bears and lions, and she had her Oomos, those filthy goblins of the Underland whose breath is so foul that people think its farts from a dead cow and whose hands are so grimey that they spread disease wherever they go, carry her to her Slay, made entirely of diamonds cut from the fingers of new brides.

The Slay glowed and shined like

millions of stars, and the Ice Queen, called by some Imyrmia, sat in it with her trusty demon servant, Chamelea, the lizard-faced and hog-bellied. The Slay was pulled by twin dragons, tortured in the Castle Fragonard that lies above the Lake of Glass and Fire at the very heart of Underland. The dragons were once kind-hearted beasts, but Imyrmia, in anger over their father's not wanting them to be

slaves of her Relm, took them to her basement and turned them into zombi dragons doing only her bidding . She used bobbed wire to beat them onward as

they flew up up up from the deep diamond and ruby caves of Underland.

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When the Slay came all the way up into Earth,

lightning tore at the ground, opening it up for Imyrmia's Slay. Blasts of fire and BELCHES OF FOUL

STENCH! blew up like a fart from an oger's butt. Even the twin dragons hated the smell and coughed fire as they rose into a blackened sky, their tails twisting and smashing trees down as they went and setting entire forests ablaze with their coughs.

All the land knew of the Ice Queen's arrival, for they had known her many years before. Once upon a time, she was the Maiden of Snow, and she brought the dancing elves and fairys of winter across the land.

She had made everyone have fun, and children through the entire world could skate and ski and have snowball fights and make snow angels and snow people and never go to school when the Maiden of Snow was there.

But then, she got picked up by the FEARFUL AND MIGHTY

ruler of Underland, a monster so dirty his skin was crawling with germs. His hair was home to thousands of cities of lice. His skin seemed alive with red mites. When he walked, his feet never touched

ground, for rats and centipedes lifted the souls of his feet up on their backs and did the walking for him like roller skates. He is known as Dogrun the Merciless. He wanted the Maiden of Snow in his king-dom because it was too hot and he needed better weather. Underland was on fire most of the time. People there breathed the foulest stenches and drank

polluted water from the Twin Lakes of Rhea (which 188

were called Dya and Gonna, sisters enchanted and turned into lakes of brown lava full of wastes and chemical spills and oil spills.) Dogrun the Merciless needed a bride. So he grabbed the Maiden of Snow, Imyrmia, and she screamed, but she had to go into Underland with him. He forced her to marry him, and the heat of Underland melted her heart for him.

But she herself made Dogrun's heart turn cold, and he could not be married to her anymore. She had turned Evil, and she ended up imprisoning him on the Dark Isle of Lost Devils, a place where those demons went who no longer had Evil Believers in the world above them. Dogrun was chained and kept inside a prison that had a high fence, painted all over with magical cymbals that clanged and smashed at him when he tried to escape. He lived out the rest of his eternal life there, eating the rats beneath his feet, the red mites on his body, and the lice in his hair.

And the Ice Queen ruled all in Underland.

And now, she was after the elf-children who knew her secrets.

They lived on Earth, and their names were Fear-

ling, Burnt, and River.

Of course this was somehow about putting my little brother and sister and me inside the story-they were the only ones I read them to. Since Bruno's real name was Byrne, Burnt was

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close enough; and Brooke might be a "river," and my much hated real name, Fergus, was close to Fearling in some way.

We'd have read it in secret, finding a room in the house where Dad would not find us. There was a wardrobe in his bedroom, and it was just large enough for the three of us to fit in. I had a flashlight, and I'd read to them. We pretended that we were somehow entering C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe right there, and Bruno, until he was six, would not venture to the back of the wardrobe even when we dared him for fear that another world opened up there.

The legends of Imyrmia, the Ice Queen, grew over the years, and she somehow transformed in my story to an even more powerful monster called, simply, Banshee, as I had begun discovering the Celtic myths when I was twelve, and felt that the Ice Queen needed a transformation and a new name. Both Bruno and Brooke still looked forward to the stories, and although we were all a bit taller and could just fit in the wardrobe without touching each other-with the occasional gas leak from Bruno, who seemed to delight in this-we'd climb in when I had finished writing another three- or five-page opus, and I'd have the best audience a writer could ever have.

As Banshee, the Ice Queen had changed. She was no longer the frosty beauty with blue skin and white hair. She had become more monstrous, denied the beauty creams and ointments and sorcery of Underland, which kept her eternally young and insanely beautiful. Banshee came out at twilight, surrounded by flies and mosquitoes, her heralds. She was ghoulish, and her skin was torn and leathered and dried against her bones. She had razors for teeth and fingers that 190

scraped flesh, and she took the form of anyone she chose, anyone trusted, but as dark approached, she could not hide her true form, and when night fell, all was revealed. Alone with her hapless victim, she showed her true form.

In the Banshee stories, she became trapped on Earth, unable to go to her Dark Kingdom, and she wanted more than anything the souls of the three elves who had exiled her from her world.

Scared the shit out of Bruno when he was about six. I told him that Banshee was coming for him if he stepped out of bed after the light went out. This accounted for his bedwetting, and yes, I feel ashamed that I put the thought in his mind. I tried to take it back, but once you've told a kid that kind of thing, it never completely erases from his memory.

I read through some of the stories, all of them bad, all of them somehow making me happy about my childhood again. My father had once had the ambition to be a writer, in his youth. He told me that he seemed to only be able to write the truth of things, and no one wanted to hear the truth. He'd hold up a novel from my bookshelf (Treasure Island, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Danny Dunn and the Antigravity Paint) and he'd say, "It's people who write lies like these who get published. Nobody wants the truth. They want lies spoon-fed to them." All right, he had a bit of the tyrant in him-perhaps all heroes do-and had never been able to read or enjoy fiction to save his life. I attributed this, again, to both a stern upbringing (his own father, the grandfather I

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never knew, disciplined with whips to the back, actual whips, in the smokehouse, the place of punishment), and to his two years in prison camps during his war. He nearly seemed vulnerable at those moments, when he was at his worst. I forgave him anything when I was a kid because I was so grateful that he hadn't left us as our mother had.

But those books on my shelf! To me they were worlds to explore. These were the seeds of my desire to write fiction, but I didn't think I'd ever be able to do it as an adult. Still, when I was twenty-five my first novel, a fantasy called Igdrasil, was published. (For those of you who don't know, Igdrasil is the Tree of All Existence in myth. My novel did it a disservice.) I could not make a living from writing, but I found that fantasy was what I could write best-high fantasy as it's called. And so this gave me the illusion that I could be a writer, but in fact, I had not been able to write another story or novel since selling that one.

It was a mental and physical constipation, my adult life to that point.

It was as if I genuinely was not meant to live outside of the island where I'd grown up-the world was too much. I needed the smallness of Burnley Island. The narrowness of the minds, the quietness of the winters, the serenity of the separation from the mainland.

Even Carson McKinley, spanking the monkey in his truck at the harbor.

But my dreams of happiness and writing fiction and loving life, all had been there, at home, waiting for me.

Sitting in my old bedroom, I pulled out that ancient typewriter-a Royal that had no business working, let alone with

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a ribbon of ink still in it that managed to smudge the odd "a" and "r."

THIS IS THE LAST STORY ABOUT BANSHEE

Now, before I tell you what I wrote, I have to tell you that whenever I write anything, I have to first write a page or two about things that are occupying my mind. It's a way of sweeping out the cobwebs, I guess, and is my version of therapy. I'm not sure if I believe in writer's block, but I do believe in general Brain Block, just as I believed in Brain Farts. Writing out the tangle from inside me seemed to get the creative juices going.

So I wrote:

My father is dead. Someone murdered him.

Who?

WHO?

Brooke is losing her mind. Bruno is picking apart the house. Brooke is painting. Bruno is playing the piano again. And here I am, writing.

It's as if we're just picking up where we left off years ago.

Brooke walks at night. Bruno has a boyfriend. I still love Pola. We have none of us figured out love right. Maybe Bruno has. Not me. Not Brooke.

Our lives in shambles. Dad must have been the glue.

Falling apart.

The Banshee is loose. The Banshee has taken us over.

At night, she watches us.

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When I'd finished typing this sentence, I looked at it. I had no idea what it meant. Did I mean that Brooke watches us? The Banshee? Was this the beginning of a story, or was I still trying to clear my mind a bit?

I wasn't even sure.

I typed:

At night she watches us, waiting.

Again, no idea what this meant, but it might be the beginning of a story I could write. It intrigued me. Then:

Dad was murdered. At night. Not at night. Before night.

He wasn't killed at night. He was only found at night. Killed earlier.

Body cut. Torn. Sadistic.

Who? Who? WHO?

It was the hour before dark.

The magic hour.

Why in God's name would someone want to kill my father? War. His men?

The enemy? His enemies? A psycho?

The Banshee?

I stopped, scratching my head, annoyed with the futility of this exercise.

I set the typewriter down at the foot of my bed.

Sometime around midnight, I was back in my bedroom again, exhausted from helping clear some of the debris that had piled 194

up in rooms-Bruno and I made a go of sorting Dad's papers, and going through unopened boxes in the two rooms he had used for storage.

There was that old typewriter, just waiting for me to write a bit more.

I sat on the bed and plopped it on my lap.

Someone had used it.

Someone had typed beneath what I'd already pounded out: Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemens.

I am here.

I am here.

I am here.

I am here.

And I never left you.

Play it.

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The next morning, I told Bruno I knew he'd been the one to play with my typewriter, but he denied it.

But here's the thing: It's the kind of prank Bruno used to pull when he was a kid.

Sometimes I'd type part of a story out, and he'd type in two or three words after my last one (usually: stupid storie or Nemo lovs Pola Bear).

I didn't really believe it was him.

But I didn't want to believe that it might be something else.

That it might be Brooke, her mind wandering too much.

Her breakdown on its way.

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Sometimes I could hear Brooke crying through the walls.

I worried a bit about what seemed to be a logical and terrible depression descending on all of us in the house, but most especially her. This made me sadder because she had somehow been a partner for my father-not incestuously, but in terms of being there at Hawthorn, living in the house, handling the financial matters, making sure that the roofer arrived on time, or that the pond got drained in the spring, and that nothing rusted, or that everything that broke got fixed. I suspected some part of her had wanted to be free of this life, but she must have felt guilt for the way her freedom had come. He was more of her life than he was of mine or Bruno's. Her loss was greater to some extent, and the fact that she had discovered the body made it an even greater burden.

We didn't get together to talk about Dad and how wonderful he was-yet.

We saved our moans and cries and gnashing of teeth for the privacy of our rooms.

There had always been a barrier between me and my sister and my brother, and I was never sure where it had come from. We had gotten along famously when young, and had managed to share fairly equally among us.

Despite my mother's taking off so wildly, I looked back on a lot of childhood as joyous, and some of it as full of hard lessons learned, but never with a sense that it was anything but the right childhood for me.

When one of us was sick, the others would gather 'round the bedside and read aloud from books or bring soup and tales of the outside world. Yet, a barrier grew up between us, as if

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there were some unspoken crime we'd witnessed, or as if each of us had a disturbance within that seemed to intensify the more we were all three together. So we kept our mourning to ourselves and didn't share grief much.

When I thought of my father, how he was wrenched from us, alone in my old room, in my too-small bed, I cried, also. I tried writing a few more pages on the Royal, but it was as pointless as the first page I'd attempted.

In my head, I begged God for understanding, as if He lived there or had access to my brain. Minutes later, I'd question the idea of God at all given this kind of murder. Then I'd wonder if the pagans were right-if it weren't just a pantheon of spirits and forces and gods and goddesses all within minidomains, ruling sections of this chaotic universe, with Nature itself the ultimate deity. Or if there was no God at all, God or gods, just the lives of animals on a rocky planet, all scrambling to survive, some of us built with an outrageous and unending hope that there was something more that existed between the words "live" and

"die." Then I went back to God and the relationship between Heaven and mankind. I even had the gods of some ancient religion arguing with the God of Abraham. It got pretty silly the way my mind went. Suddenly, I was talking to my father in silence. I imagined him in Heaven, and then felt ridiculous for the fantasy. It was wishful thinking. I had no idea what happened when life ended. All my Catholic upbringing had brought me was a sense that I wasn't sure what to believe, for it all seemed like the wishes of men and women who didn't want to face the unknowable without a comfortable ending in mind. The altar boy in me felt guilty for thinking that.

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These were nights of headaches. I'd look out my window over the slope of the hills and imagine I'd see the smokehouse out to the east.

The pictures of my father's final hours replayed in my head as if I'd been there, watching.

The battering of the door; the terrific storm; the way my father had heard some sound nearby; the dropping of the flashlight; and then, the shadow figure there, bringing the stinging blade into him.

Sawing.

All right, let me just get it all out of the way right now.

My father's murder was a cosmic fornication-a murder beyond what most people ever have to bear. Or dream about.

Someone got him from behind with a sharp blade. A curved blade. Under the arm, over the shoulder, in the back. They may have severed his spinal cord so that he had to lay there and take it. Or that may have come moments later. He may have volunteered to let them do it-there were no marks of restraints on his wrists or ankles, nor were there signs of struggle. At best, the fallen flashlight might've indicated he'd been knocked down first and was unconscious for most of the procedure. One can only hope.

Then they went at him. Cutting parts of him. Slicing. Curved blade carefully going in, cutting tendons. Cutting muscle. You had to assume the killer did this to keep him from escaping-but, in fact, there was no sign that my father had

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tried to leave the smokehouse, or even fight back at his attacker.

The worst of it was that my father might have been conscious for most of it.

All right, the worst of it was that each of us, my brother, sister, and I, had to now live with this without denial and without illusion.

No Brain Fart was going to rescue us with a weeklong fever of forgetfulness.

I could not think of my father after that without imagining the bloody room and his eyes looking up at the curved blade about to come down on another part of his body, and wonder what that must have been like.

The unimaginable began to haunt me. With it, the nightmares came, during daily catnaps and whenever sleep found me.

I could not get one image out of my head.

His eyes, looking up, as a shiny crescent blade came down.

In the nightmare, I felt as if I could see the misty face he had seen before he died.

She had long golden hair, and thin lips, and warm almond eyes.

It was Brooke.

When I awoke from the nightmare, Brooke stood over my bed.

In one hand, she cupped a small glass saucer, within which was a white votive candle, its flame small and blue-yellow.

In her other hand, a knife.

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Brooke," I whispered. The room had early morning light filtering through the white curtains-a blue-purple haze on the walls.

I reached over to the bedside table to flick on the lamp, but my hand trembled. I found the switch and turned it on. The glare of the lamp seemed like a noon sun.

"Brooke," I repeated.

"Nemo?" she said, in that same whispered delicacy with which she'd greeted me when I first arrived home. "It's you?"

A breath or two exhaled, she glanced at the knife she held in her hand.

It was just a steak knife from the kitchen. "I heard noises."

She set the candle and knife on the table. Then she crouched down to pick up the small lamp that had turned

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over onto the floor. "I get scared at night," she said. She sat down on the floor beside my bed. "Dad doesn't have his guns anymore. The police took them. I don't know why. Don't ask me. Don't ask me. I'm going crazy here. I thought I heard someone in the house. I thought..." She glanced around the room. "I thought this was another room. I didn't think I was in your room."

"No one else is in the house. You, me, and Bruno. The doors are locked.

Remember? I put all the locks in. If you want to see in the dark, just use a flashlight," I said, glancing at the candle. "You could trip on something and set it on fire. God, or stab yourself." It was an exaggeration, I guess, but I was tired of her nightly wanderings, which were freaking me out completely.

She ignored my comments. "The dogs are always the first to notice. They whimpered a little while ago. I had to close their kennels up."

"Probably they heard a possum outside."

"They were frightened. Nothing frightens them much."

"If you think someone might be here," I said, feeling as wide awake as I'd ever felt, my heart still beating like a jackhammer, "you might want to let the dogs roam."

"I thought it might be my imagination," she said, her voice still barely more than a whisper. Her face turned glum and a bit stony. "I've heard it since before ... well, before it happened. I kept thinking that someone was walking just ahead of me."

"It's the night," I said. I packed some pillows behind my back and sat up. The smell of the room came to me: It smelled 203

like trash. I glanced at the small trash can by my old desk, wondering what I'd thrown in there. Banana peel? Half a sandwich? "I've stayed up

'til all hours sometimes, and I start imagining all kinds of things."

"I don't think it's that," she said. Then her voice rose. "Do you know that every night when I'm up-late-something in the house has moved?"

"Moved?"

"Small things. Things that no one would really notice. I notice them because I notice everything in this house."

"It could've been Bruno. Or me."

"No," she said. "Not things like that. Inconsequential things, things you wouldn't even touch."

"Like?"

"The thermostat. It goes up at night."

"That's Bruno," I said. "I'm sure it is."

"Even on the nights he's not here? It's up to ninety. But it's freezing anyway. Someone moves the dial on it up, but it still gets cold. I feel cold when I get up to check it. I feel something," she said. She leaned forward and brought her knees up just under her chin. As she put her arms around her knees, reminding me of a little girl, her sweater rolled back a bit. I tried to see marks from her bathtub mishap, but couldn't make anything out. "Some nights, there are windows open. In Dad's room.

In the living room. I've checked to see if they're locked at four a.m.

But then, by six, they're wide open."

"We've got storm windows," I said. "No one's getting in or out that way."

"That's the thing," she said. "The storm windows are still on the outside. No one broke in. No one left through a 204

window. They just opened them. As if they wanted me to know they're here."

"It could be anything," I said. I grinned. "Dad's ghost." A joke. I felt grim for mentioning it. I just wanted someone to lighten up-her or me.

"No," she said, taking this suggestion far too seriously. "It happened before Dad was killed. It happened before Bruno came back. And the wardrobe. In Dad's room. It was moved."

"I can explain that," I said. "Bruno and I-"

"I don't mean recently," she said sharply, her mood changing. There was anger beneath her words, as if I were suggesting that she had somehow made something of nothing. "In October. Late October. Dad thought I did it. But I didn't. And then there were the noises."

"Brooke," I said. I reached out and tapped her knee lightly. "We're all suffering here. You probably more than anyone. You and Dad were so close."

"I think," she said, looking at my hand after it had briefly touched her knee. "I think that the killer is in the house. And has been. You know how Hawthorn was built. You know how it has those spaces."

"No one but a six-year-old could even get into those spaces," I said.

"Look, you're stressed. It's normal. You were in the war zone. You sat with him. You saw what happened. It's normal that you're on edge. But for your own sake, you need to start working on ways to handle the stress."

I knew about the old, original structure of Hawthorn- how it had been one of those less-than-sturdy New England farmhouses that had little insulation and very little room at all. The present house, built in the nineteenth century, had

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engulfed it-the living room with its great fireplace and the two bedrooms beyond it were the only things left from it that showed.

Otherwise, there was a hollow space behind the front stairs that had been part of the original "great room" and a one-foot-wide space between the old brick and the new insulation and the brick on the outside. It couldn't be reconciled with the later design, so it left this kind of thin wind tunnel that ran along the side front quarter of the house.

When we'd been very little, Brooke and Bruno had been able to squeeze through it for as far as they could go-no more than a few feet in. By the time Bruno was seven, he could no longer fit, and Brooke couldn't fit by her ninth year.

"Someone could go through the walls," Brooke said, looking at me with an unflinching gaze. She had completely ignored everything I'd just said.

"Someone could if they wanted it badly enough."

"Who?" I asked.

"The same someone I hear at night. I go from room to room, and I feel as if I can almost find him."

"Him?"

Her eyes widened. "I know it sounds ridiculous. But either it's a person or it's not. Who could it be, Nemo? If it's a ghost, what is it? Why is it here?"

"Want me to call Joe and have him bring some detectives through?"

"No," she said. Her eyes teared up. She raised her hands to her face and squished her flesh around as if it were clay. "God, I feel like I'm going crazy. Do you think I'm crazy?"

"Maybe we need to talk to someone," I said. "All of us. A shrink. Maybe we can go see Bruno's. He thinks she's God."

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"Not bloody likely," she said, and then smiled through her sadness, for it was what our father had always said about psychiatrists. "It's my mind. It's unquiet. Do you know-" She stopped herself in midsentence.

"No, nothing."

"What?"

"Nothing," she said. Then, "The night he died, I thought I heard someone downstairs."

I watched her. I had begun looking for signs of a breakdown. I really was worried that we had some kind of family insanity within us. Brooke, the contradiction: the most sturdy of us, also the most fragile.

"I didn't tell Joe. I don't think I should," she said.

"Did you see someone?"

She closed her eyes and rested the palm of her hand on her forehead, applying pressure there. "I can't seem to turn off my mind anymore, Nemo. I keep playing things back from that night again and again and again."

This time, her sweater slid farther down her arm, and I saw, along her forearm, gauze wrapped with white tape.

I leaned forward and touched the edge of her arm. "What's this?"

She looked up, then brought her arm down to her side.

Shrugged.

Tugged the arm of her sweater back down to her wrists.

"Accident. I fell asleep in the tub." She fumbled with words, as if trying to string together the right ones to make sense. "I... broke some glass ... cut myself up ... a bit."

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"That's it?"

She nodded.

"What really happened?"

She nearly smiled-a sad half grin. It was part of how we'd interacted as children. Brooke never liked telling the truth when she was little, so she'd make something up first to make you feel better about bad news.

After she'd given some convoluted explanation for something, I'd ask her: What really happened?

"I don't know if I was dreaming or not," she said, her slight smile returning to a flat line. "Bruno convinced me that I was. That I fell asleep in the tub and was dreaming, but I'm not sure. It was the night... the night of the storm. The night he died. There were voices that seemed to come from downstairs. I only really heard one of them.

But it somehow made me sleepy to hear it, and in the dream I thought we were children again, playing the game."

Just hearing it made my brain go a little haywire-something within me rebelled at the idea of the game we'd played as children. I hated it, and was embarrassed by it. It was as if my mind squinted and cringed whenever the thought of the Dark Game arose.

"We were all playing it. You had the blindfold on, and Bruno was doing the counting, and I helped him with the reciting. And I was just there, somehow, not really in the Dark Game and not really outside it. I had glass in my hand. I was taking it and trying to cut at the rope around my wrists. But ... but I wasn't doing it right, and the ropes became bright red ribbons floating around in the air. Bruno started laughing.

So did I, but you told me to stop it. Stop it! you shouted, the 208

way you used to when I was doing something wrong."

"Oh, Brooke," I said, my heart sinking a bit. I took her hand in mine.

"Did you do this to yourself?"

"I didn't think I did," she said, her voice pure confusion. She glanced over at the knife on the table, and then at me. "I didn't want to kill myself. I really really didn't. I just ... I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to be in the game again. But I felt like someone else was there.

Someone else was with me. Inside me. Trying to get out."

Her face became all screwed up, wrinkling as if she were years older. "I woke up, not in the bathtub at all. I stood on the front porch. I didn't have anything on. Not a stitch. It was freezing. The storm that night-terrible. I was just ... just ... just standing there, with the door open. Rain coming down. Howling wind. Horrible night. The last thing I remembered before this was I had been in the tub. Somehow, I had gotten out of the tub when I was asleep, and walked through the rooms, down the stairs, and outside. That night. My arms were all torn up from the glass. Blood. Not as much as you'd think. The piece of glass was in my hand. I went back inside. I went back upstairs to the bathroom. When I turned on the light, I saw the glass on the floor. The water in the tub was all pink with blood. Only, something else was there."

"In the bathroom?" I asked, sitting up, drawing back a bit, crossing my legs in front of me. I almost didn't want to know what was there in her dream.

"In the tub. In all that pink, foamy water."

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"What was it?"

She closed her eyes, her eyebrows pressing downward as if trying to force the memory from her mind. "It was me," she said. "I watched myself. I was dying. Blood was coming out of my arms flowing in gentle red ribbons. And then ..."

I held my breath a moment. Denial was how I'd been raised. Deny anything even close to a bad mental state. Deny that life exerted any pressure on anyone. The voice of my father: "I was in the camps, and if I could survive that without cracking up, then anyone can survive anything if they just control their mind better."

But Brooke had been falling apart, even before our father's murder, even before sitting in his blood for hours.

And neither Bruno nor I had done anything to help her.

Bruno had found her wandering, naked, in the night.

I had seen her paintings.

Her mental state was a wreck, but we were ill-equipped to understand it.

"I was in the tub. All along I was in the tub," she said. "Looking up at what seemed like steam. But it wasn't steam. I thought for a second that it was the dream-me evaporating. In front of my eyes," she said. "I watched it for a minute as it went-it was just steam. The whole thing had been a dream. But ... remember in the Dark Game? How we could go inside and outside ourselves?"

"Do I," I whispered, wishing that she had not mentioned it, wishing that Bruno had not mentioned it recently, wishing

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that I could forget we ever had played it. The source of her disturbed state.

The source of all our disturbances.

"It was like that," she said. "Just like it. Only, Nemo, there was something else. Someone else was there. It was like I had released someone from inside me, when I cut myself. It was as if I had never been alone before, and now I was-something had gotten out of me. It was just like the Dark Game. It was as if by bleeding, wanting to die-I did want to die-someone else came out of me. Like they'd been waiting a long time. Ever since we used to play it. Like they were waiting for me to open myself up and let them out."

Our father had taught the Dark Game to us.

Then, when we had been screaming in the smokehouse, he'd ended it.

He told us that he never wanted to catch us playing it again. He told us that when the game got to be too much, we should hit a wall and that it could get dangerous. "The mind is fragile, and you shouldn't play it so easily. It comes too easily for you. I shouldn't have taught it to you.

I thought you were strong enough."

But the game wasn't so easy to give up, either.

Sometimes, we still played it-in the wardrobe or in one of our bedrooms.

We stopped at some point-I think when I was about thirteen or so, I had stopped playing it completely. Something changed-perhaps puberty had eliminated the need for the drug of the game.

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Or perhaps we had hit the wall in the game.

He told us that he had fine-tuned the Dark Game when he was a prisoner of war. It helped him escape where they had imprisoned him when he was a young man during a war that I knew very little about. He told us that you could make your mind do things if you isolated it and if you directed it. He said that when he was in solitary confinement, the game allowed him to forget the pain in his legs and shoulders, and he could travel outside of the well they'd left him in for a week or two-that he could stand on the ground and travel among them-all in his mind. "The human imagination has never been fully tested. It never will be. But I could swear that during those times, particularly in the hole, I could hear their conversation and wander about freely among them."

He told us not to play after dark because the game could ruin your mind if you let it. "Play it during the hour before dark, no matter what hour it is, it works best then, when the world is settling and your mind is calm," he had said.

"What happens at night?" I asked him.

"When I did it at night, it got hold of me," he said. "I couldn't get out of it on my own. Only when I hit that wall would I get thrown back into my waking consciousness, and it might be days before that happened.

I'd be nearly starved, and so thirsty even my captors wondered at it.

And my men ..." He shook his head sadly. "They thought I was dead sometimes. In it. Sometimes it seemed as if I were dead."

We always thought he'd told us these stories to terrify us into not playing the Dark Game too much. After all, if it were such a deadly game, why even teach it to us? Why even train us to play it?

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But the boredom of Hawthorn in the winter was too much. The cable might go out or the electricity, or our friends could not tromp from the village out to our place for a winter's day of games.

He used the Dark Game once for something that at the time made sense, but now seemed wrong: when Granny died. Brooke was inconsolable-she sobbed and screeched as if she would never be happy again. I was also bleating my tears out, for despite her harshness at times, I had loved the old woman who had read us stories and told us about Wales and Scotland as if she had been raised there herself.

So, our father, apparently at the end of his rope, had taken us into the smokehouse. We had thought it was to punish us for wailing so much, but he sat us down, and guided us through the Dark Game as a way to see Granny again. I barely remember it, other than feeling much better-closing my eyes on a summer afternoon in the cool smokehouse, feeling the bites of mosquitoes on my arms, and then moving in the dark of my self-imposed blindness into a different afternoon, and seeing Granny there, holding her hand out to Brooke and me, and the sweet, gentle voice of our father guiding us.

The Dark Game was simple: You closed your eyes, or you blindfolded yourself if you couldn't keep your eyes closed. One person, who put on his blindfold last, had to count to ten, and then began reciting a nursery rhyme.

It was a very particular nursery rhyme-our father's own Granny (my great-grandmother) had taught it to him, as she had been taught it as a child. He told me that the origins of the Dark Game went back further than even his two years in the prison camps. "It goes back before words were written

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down, and it's the rhythm of the rhyme that counts, not the words. The words just can be said. The rhythm gets inside you. My Granny told me that the Dark Game was used in dark times-when horrible things happened to people, and those who survived those things needed rest from it all.

I took the Dark Game to the prison camps with me and modified it. I used what I learned there. It helps us escape in hard times. But it's not a toy. It is not to be abused."

The rhyme itself had to do with churches in England and a game that children once played while they recited it. It was a common enough nursery rhyme-I'd heard it since growing up. So it was not unique to the Dark Game. It simply was a way for the reciter to help the mind relax.

It began:

"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens.

You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martins.

When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I am rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.

When will that be? say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know, says the great bell at Bowe."

And it ended:

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed-

And here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

Then the reciter shut his eyes and began to guide the others-and we'd go in our minds where our guide took us, with no resistance. At some point, you'd be telling what you saw in your mind, over and over again, until you began really seeing the others there as well, with you. Where you went, what you were doing. You tried to rise outside of your body and just float there and watch yourself. Our father had told 214

us it was a survival technique-and that it would help us understand how our minds worked. Looking back, I can understand now that we were probably too young to play the Game-because our imaginations were already strong as it was. But our father played it with us when we were all a little too rambunctious and bored at the same time, and the winter blizzards had come down on the island.

In the winter, we played the Dark Game a lot, and it was fairly innocent for a while. We could travel through time or to other countries or to places we made up. We could even see our mother-we would travel to where we thought we could find her. When she lived with us, we would travel to the store or to the kitchen and pretend we were near her. After she abandoned us, we pretended to travel to Brazil, to a beautiful home in the mountains.

But the last time we played it, something went wrong.

It was a flight of fantasy for us. It was our family secret- we didn't let other kids in on the Dark Game. I told Harry about it, but that was about it. Harry had been sad about his father's illness, and I wanted to help him escape. He was the only person who I believe knew about it outside of the three of us and our father.

At some point, something broke about the game, and we all just stopped playing it.

"You painted something about your dream," I told her. She shook her head. "What do you mean?" "In the greenhouse," I said. "I saw your painting. The one

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of the dream you just told me. You, standing at the front door in the rain."

"I didn't paint any dreams," she said. "And who gave you permission to snoop?"

"You left them out. In the open."

"I did not," Brooke said.

We got into the kind of argument over this (whether or not she'd left her paintings out to be seen) that we'd had as kids. It almost felt good to spar a bit, and finally it ended as all our challenges had: We had to go downstairs to check it out for ourselves.

Brooke went ahead of me, key in hand.

Against my wishes, she had locked the upstairs hall door. She stood in front of me and turned the key in the lock, without apologizing for this lapse in judgment.

Then, down the backstairs in what we'd always called the sewing room (even though no one had ever sewn in it since Granny with her quilts and embroidery), through another set of doors until we came to the closest thing that could be called a hallway (five feet in length), and the door to the greenhouse.

Brooke went in, nearly as interested in the canvases as I had been. The one on the easel, and the one of our father she acknowledged.

But when she reached back to lift the third canvas, she nearly dropped it. "Shit!" she cried out. The dogs, upstairs in her bedroom, began barking at some noise. "Shit! Nemo! Is this a joke?" She turned to me, holding up the canvas.

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I saw the same painting I'd observed previously: a woman who looked very much like my sister, naked, her skin painted red, standing on the front porch of our house during a storm.

"It's your dream," I said, confused. "See? There you are on the porch."

"Did you do this?" she asked, and I heard tears and not a small amount of rage in her voice. "Did you bring this out?"

"No," I said.

"You did! You came back to do this kind of prank, the kinds of... of things you used to do. God, I thought you grew up! I guess I was wrong!"

she spat, her rage like a gathering storm. Then she took the painting and held it up to my face as if she were going to hit me with it.

"Look at it. Look at it," she said. "Did you do this?"

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I tried to focus on the canvas, but I couldn't. It was too close to my face.

"Brooke," I said, my voice rising, "look, what are you so mad about?

It's your dream. You painted it. You."

I grabbed it from her hands, and when I did, I saw a kind of uncalled-for fury on her face. I took the canvas and set it down at my side. "What the hell is going on?"

"I want to know who's been getting into my paints and painting this kind of... obscene ..."

"Brooke, it's you," I said. "It's the same kind of figures you did here." I pointed to the one on the easel, of the faceless children.

"It's not me!" she screamed. "I am not the one who painted that!" She pointed to the painting at my side. "How could I have? Christ, Nemo. How could I have? I did not do it!" Her shouts grew, and I had the strange feeling that something was vibrating nearby-something was shaking-I looked at her hands, clenched at her sides, trembling as she cried out.

And then, a sound as if a bomb exploded nearby.

The glass of the greenhouse seemed to bend slightly-I was overly tired, so I couldn't tell if this was right-but it was as if the glass of the wall behind Brooke rippled like water with something moving through it-something that moved snakelike along the surface of glass.

"Calm down, Brooke," I said. "Calm down, it's all right. It's all right."

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"I am not losing my mind! I did not imagine this! This is a trick-you're trying to make me think I'm losing it, but I'm not!" she shouted.

"Brooke," I reached out and took her trembling fist, and held it in my hands. "It's all right. It's all right. Try and relax." I kept my eyes on the glass, for it continued its S-shaped ripples, and Brooke seemed to notice it as well-she looked up to the ceiling, the curved glass of it moving like a canopy in the breeze-just floating up slightly, and then resting back down again.

"I am ... not ... losing ..." she said, and then went quiet.

She nearly fell, trembling into my arms. She was hot with fever as I held her, briefly. "Oh my God, did you see it, too?" she asked.

"I'm not sure," I said, but inside I knew this was a lie. "Yes. Yes. I saw it."

Her voice was a whisper. "Sometimes I see it at night. Something is in here. Something's in the house with us."

"We're stressed," I said. I let her go, and she wiped her hands across her face and smoothed out her hair.

"It's not just stress," she said. "Dear God, Nemo, I thought I was losing it. I've thought so since October. But you saw it?" Tears of what might have been relief-or even gratitude- flooded her eyes and streamed down her face.

I went to wake up Bruno. I got a bit of a shock going into his room-he lay there, the quilt pulled back, his naked back with 220

a yin-yang tattoo near his lower spine. Next to him, slightly overlapping leg upon leg, snoring away, was Cary Conklin, the guy who had brought me over in the boat. Bruno's boyfriend.

I didn't really think to react-I had only just gotten used to Bruno being gay, so seeing his boyfriend in his old bed- far too small for the two of them, so they were draped over each other-made me feel a bit the way the three bears must've felt upon finding Goldilocks. I didn't want to wake Cary, so I tapped Bruno on his left foot. After a few taps, he snarfled awake and glanced back at me.

"Hey, Nemo."

"Bruno," I said. "Sorry to, um, wake you up so early. But something's up."

"Up as in 'important'?"

I nodded.

He sighed. "Okay," he whispered. "I'll be down in a few."

"You notice anything strange here?" I asked as soon as he bounded down the stairs, wearing a long T-shirt and red boxers. He had a harsh look in his eyes, as if he were furious for being dragged out of bed so early.

"Strange?" he asked.

"Things missing?"

Bruno shook his head.

"We were in the greenhouse a little while ago," I said, glancing at Brooke. "Something weird happened."

"Like?"

"Like the glass moved."

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"Moved? Broke?"

"No," I said. "It was like ..."

"like quicksilver," Brooke said.

"What's quicksilver?"

"Like liquid," I said.

Bruno squinted and looked at Brooke. "You've been up all night." Then at me. "You don't exactly look all there, either."

"We saw it, tired or not," I said.

"Did you ask her?" Bruno turned to me.

"Ask me what?" Brooke raised an eyebrow at me.

"No," I replied. Then to her, "You walk up and down the house all night long."

"I know," she said.

"Why?" Bruno chirped.

"Why do you think? Our father was murdered. I can't sleep."

"No," Bruno said. He pointed a finger at her. "You were doing it before Dad died."

"No I wasn't."

Bruno half-grinned. "Come on. I saw you. I'd wake up and see you in my room. Just walking."

"I'm telling you," she said. She shot a glance at me. "I wasn't."

"You sure?"

"I don't lie," she said.

Bruno let out what I can only describe as a repressed breath, through his nostrils.

"I don't," she repeated.

"So the bathtub story is accurate," he said. "You fell asleep. You weren't trying to-"

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"God!" Brooke closed her eyes. "God, I'm going to have a headache."

"Doesn't matter," I said to him. "I was there, too. I saw it. It was this rippling ... thing."

"What time?"

I shrugged. "Six, maybe."

"Well," he said, spreading his hands out as if this solved everything.

"No sleep, the light barely up outside. And you-" he nodded to Brooke.

"Miss Xanax."

"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.

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

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"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.

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 224

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

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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?"

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 229

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

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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,

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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.

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 232

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."

"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 said. "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.

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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.

"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

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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."

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"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 bucks 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, 236

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."

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.

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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.

In the smokehouse. Bloodstains. Chalk, fading. Fragrant, almost March-like smell of seedlings and freshly turned earth 238

mixed with the coppery tang in the air and the smell of dead animal.

Dead man. Dead father.

"Why do you think he came out here?" Harry asked.

"No idea. I really don't know."

"It's almost a ritual," Harry said. "He was laid out spread-eagle." He spread his arms and legs wide. "No ropes, no tethers. They suspect he was lifted up at one point, but then laid back down. Whoever did it let him go slowly. The major cuts didn't happen until near the end. Whoever did this wanted him alive for most of it. Whoever did this, he didn't fight them."

I caught my breath and held it. Then exhaled. "I feel like a little kid scared of the dark."

"You used to play that game in here," Harry said.

"Yep."

"I never understood it. I always wondered what was going on because when I tried to play it, I just didn't see what you saw."

"It was just imagination," I said.

"Sure," he said. "Like any other kid's make-believe game. You close your eyes and you start making a journey in your mind."

"Is that what you're interested in?" I asked. "The Dark Game?"

"Not really. But it happened here. Your father's murder. You played the game here, and you all had some strange stories to tell back then."

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"We did?"

"You don't remember?"

"Done everything I could to not remember. And then some. I just seem to remember creating a fantasy world."

"An escape hatch," Harry said. "That's what your dad called it. I heard him yelling at you one time because he found some rags we'd used as blindfolds. And he told you not to keep using an escape hatch, that it was only for truly bad times."

I looked up and around the walls. Harry shone his flashlight into the corners of the stone walls.

"Awful," I whispered through gritted teeth.

The blood had begun to turn brown on the stone. The ceiling of the smokehouse was too dark to see. Harry's flashlight spun around; he went to the walls and carefully looked at things that I had no desire to see, let alone know about. I just caught a glimpse of the markings on the floor where my father's body had been found, a jigsaw puzzle of a body, cut in several places. I got the feeling that someone else was there, in some dark recess of the place. I began to feel the small hairs on my arms stand up. I felt the way I would've waking up from a nightmare that had seemed all too real.

The temperature inside the smokehouse dropped several degrees, and I felt something on my earlobe, as if an insect were crawling along it, tickling.

I felt light-headed, and the room seemed to spin. I tried saying something to Harry-I think I'm fainting, I wanted to say, but words wouldn't come out of my mouth.

"Holy shit!" Harry gasped as he turned toward me, and I felt the beam of the flashlight on my face like an exploded

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sun-it blinded me for an instant, and when my vision returned, I felt as if I were looking out from someone else's eyes.

The world seemed to collapse in on itself, in to a black hole of darkness as a wave of nausea went through me and my knees buckled. I knew I would fall, or was in the process of falling, but suddenly, it all went dark.

When I woke up, I was outside, looking up into the empty sky, feeling a coldness at the back of my neck and the worst headache of my life pressing against my skull.

"Nemo?" Harry asked. He crouched beside me; I felt his arm under the back of my neck, supporting me.

I tried to speak, but my mouth felt dry and raw, and I could feel the beginnings of a sore throat.

Harry's face was white. He had scratches all along his cheeks. His lower lip was cut and bloody, and he had the purplish beginnings of a black left eye. "Jesus H. Christ, Nemo, what in God's name was that all about?"

I coughed out, "I don't know." Felt like razor blades in my throat.

"Is that you in there, or do I need to hit you again?" Harry asked.

I felt pressure from his arm across my neck.

He was afraid I was going to lunge at him.

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