Read Online The Hour Before Dark by Douglas Clegg - Free Book Online Page A

much confidence. I meant it. If they didn’t, I’d make it the quest of my life to hunt down the madman.
    I would not stop until the guy was caught.
    When we got to the docks, Bruno walked ahead of me, lugging one of my suitcases, while I had the other two. We loaded the back of Brooke’s truck and headed out onto the road away from the sea.
    The sky, slate gray; the woods, like broomsticks; the air, salt, snow, and that memory-scent of winters past.

     
    3

     
    Bruno turned down Goose Creek Road with its overhang of gloomy trees.
    In the distance, I saw the beginning of the woods that would guide the narrowest of roads up to the house where I’d been born and raised, and where Raglans had lived ever since they’d been in America. We turned up Dunstable Road, and Hawthorn came into view just over the ridge. There were police cars along the road, and three news vans from the television studios, nearly blocking the driveway. We passed the smokehouse to the left, and I didn’t want to look at it, but I couldn’t help myself. It was surrounded by what looked like a makeshift wire fence, with orange police tape up around it.
    “Christ,” I said.
    “Feeling some Jumblies?”
    “Definitely,” I said.
    “Can I tell you something?”
    “Of course.”
    “I’ve never really told anyone this, it makes me feel guilty. Right now. Promise not to hold it against me?”
    “Okay.”
    “I hated him,” Bruno said. “I hated Dad. He didn’t like me much either. But I hated him. He drove our mother away. He drove you away. As far as I’m concerned...” Then he stopped himself. A bit more evenly, he added, “It’s terrible this happened. I feel this awful guilt. As if it’s my fault.”
    I wasn’t sure how to reply to this. “Bruno,” I said, and thought, what the hell do I tell him? It’s okay to hate the guy who was just butchered? It’s okay to hate the guy who raised and clothed and fed you? That yes, he drove me away, when in fact I did a damn good job of just driving myself away? That he could not have driven our mother away any faster than she had run herself, out the door with her red dress and her suitcase and all the money she took, and the secret lover she had when she should’ve kept her love for her young children and her devoted husband? Bruno had, within him, a little of what we all felt—an undercurrent of anger, directed at our father, but really meant for our mother, who had left us when we were nearly too young to remember. Somehow, we had all blamed the one who had remained behind to some extent.
    Now that he’d been murdered, guilt followed these feelings.
    “Don’t tell Brooke,” he said. “Promise me. She idolized him. She’d hate me. Now, I guess, more than ever.”
    “All right,” I said. It was our family sickness, I guess: Don’t tell someone else in the family haw you really feel. Hide it Bury it. Make it go away. It had been ingrained in us from an early age. Its origins were as hard to pin down as the fog that surrounded Hawthorn for half the year: Who had made us feel that way? Was it something within ourselves? Some organic sense of burying, the way dogs bury bones?
    Part of me felt like lashing out at him for being so cold-hearted as to talk like this within two days of our father’s death. Part of me wanted to understand him as I never had before.
    And I hated to admit it, but part of me agreed with Bruno. I couldn’t understand it—why had I disliked my father so much? Had I blamed him for things? Had I made him too responsible for the confusion I so often felt?
    He had been rough on us, that was the bottom line. And we had rebelled.
    That big GUILT I generally felt was going into hyperdrive in me.
    I was not looking forward to any aspect of this homecoming.

     

    4

     
    The old house, on the outside, was still haggard-looking, as it had been ten years before. It was a grandfather of a house. It had even turned a bit gray in the intervening years.
    Slowly maneuvering