The Hour Before Dark by Douglas Clegg Page B

confessional.”

     
    6
     
    When I was out piling up firewood that Carson McKinley brought (yes, he had a good delivery business with his truck, despite his predilection for sheep), I saw Joe Grogan’s police car up on the roadside.
    Joe stood over by the smokehouse, just on the edge of the last of the police tape that hadn’t quite blown away. He peered around it, as if he didn’t want to step into some sacred circle.
    I waved to him and called out. He glanced in my direction, then crouched down just outside the building. He picked at something with his fingers.
    There was a kind of silent barrier to winter on the island; he may have called out to me, but I didn’t hear it. The wind picked up.
    When I got over to him, he stood, a grim expression on his face.
    “I have to tell you, Nemo. And I hate doing it.”
    I remained stonily silent, my heart sinking a bit.
    “We got nothin’.”
    We shared a smoke, because it was cold and he had a pack on him, and then he said, “It keeps me up nights. Thinking about this. About how someone could do it and get away. How they could do it and not leave some print. Hair. Footprint in the blood. Some small thing. The blade was some kind of small scythe, best I can figure. Hasn’t been found. Nothing’s been found. All those mainland people are beginning to leave it alone. They don’t like this kind of thing. Where a suspect isn’t apprehended fast. They like to either close the book or move on. They’re gonna pin this on some guy who’s been killing people down in Jersey, but I don’t know how. There’s nothing here. You and I know Brooke didn’t do it. She’s no Lizzie Borden.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, and then looked at me as if I were not really there and he’d just been talking to himself all along.
    We both stood there awhile in the cold, a stack of chopped wood at my feet. The wind picked up.
    He said, “It’s the damnedest thing.”
    That was it. He walked back up to the roadside, dusk coming on.
    After he started his car, I took up the wood and went into the house to make a fire.

     

PART TWO
     
    “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.”
    —Jonathan Swift

     

CHAPTER NINE
     
     
    1
     
    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.

     
    2
     
    Paulette Doone, from across the way, stopped by that night with what she called a “care package.” It consisted of a 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