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

around the vans and cars, Bruno turned down the drive. The gate was closed, of course. I got out of the car, feeling the blast of icy air again, and ran to open it.
    Bruno drove through, and I shut the gate to the driveway again. I glanced up at the road. There were people in jackets and trench coats up on the roadside, watching.

     
    5

     
    “Brooke,” I said, when my sister met me at the front door. I did everything I could not to imagine her naked in a storm, her fingers reaching down below her flat belly. I regretted that Bruno had ever told me that story.
    Too late to move out of the way, I was jumped by her two enormous greyhounds, Mab and Madoc, and I went backward onto the porch. A pain in my butt told me I’d landed on part of the flagstone walk. Dog licks covered my face. Despite the pain, I began laughing and shoving the dogs away.
    Brooke stood over me, doing her best to pull the dogs back by their collars, but they were out of control.
    Then she offered me her hand, helping me up.

     
    6

     
    My sister Brooke: an unkempt beauty.
    Her hair, darker than I’d remembered it, hung down and around her shoulders, somehow framing her face so that her eyes seemed owl-like. She wore no make-up, looked as if she had just rolled out of bed. She wore a stretched-out gray wool sweater that came down to the ends of her fingers and fell nearly to her knees, baggy khakis. Barefoot on the porch. Oddly, there was the smell of turpentine about her—I noticed what might’ve been paint on her sleeve. Had she been painting something?
    Somehow, she still managed to radiate beauty. Some women have organic beauty—their bodies are formed as if meant to be  appreciated. This is simply nature, and no doubt many have had it who were undeserving. Some women have magical beauty—where their features aren’t symmetrical, or their face looks slightly off-beat, but they have an aura about them that creates beauty around them. My sister had a bit of both. She had the same beauty our mother had possessed, when I could remember our mother’s face. Brooke did whatever she could to hide her looks in sweaters and sweats and a general sloppiness. But it was still there: that touch of our mother.

     
    7

     
    First thing Brooke did was whisper so softly that I was afraid I wouldn’t hear her. “Do I look scared, Nemo?”
    She had an air of the bittersweet about her—pale and rosy and golden at the same time, her lips bitten and her eyes lost. Botticelli hair falling around her woolen shoulders—the perfect result of the blending of my mother’s Northern European fairness and my father’s Welsh darkness. “Do I? I feel scared. But I don’t want them to see it. I don’t want the world to see it.” She pointed to the news van out on the road. “Goddamn buzzards,” she said, her voice rising to its normal tone. “Come on in, Nemo. Good you made it. Carson greet you?” Her New Englandese turned the perv’s name into “Cahsehn,” and I had to admit I liked hearing it. Carson was known for seducing island sheep and for masturbating from the front seat of his small pickup truck at the harbor as a kind of welcome wagon.
    “Nope,” I said. “No miraculous vibrating truck.”
    “Dad called it the ‘Burnley Hello,’ “ she said. “He said it just a week ago. Better than what most men do with those things, I suppose.” Then the bravado left her face, a sudden retreat. She whispered, “I don’t want them to see me upset. I feel like I’m being watched all the time.”
    She clapped her hands, and the dogs went running back into the house ahead of us. A loud crash—Brooke swore a blue streak—and when we got to the kitchen, the dogs had already knocked over a small chair by the glass table. Brooke shouted, “Kennels!”
    The dogs, finally obedient, ran to their respective, enormous wire crates that edged the living room.
    In personality, Brooke was solidly Yankee in a way that neither Bruno nor I had remained. She had the