The Hour Before Dark Read Free

To imagine that one human being could inflict this on another seemed beyond the reach of all sanity. It had been a curved blade of some sort (none was found). Whoever had done this—in mid-November, when there was only one ferry a day out to the island—had somehow eluded authorities and gone off-island without anyone seeing them. How could that have happened?
    But the basics were that my father had left the house a bit earlier, with a parka on and a flashlight in his hand.
    Brooke had been reading in her bedroom, she told the police, and was rarely aware of her father’s comings and goings at night. The house was large. The floor plan, which twisted like a snake along the grounds, allowed for various ways of leaving and entering. One room opened on the other. There were no hallways—just one boxy room after another, upstairs and down.
    With the doors between the rooms closed, as they were, it was hard to hear one sound from the other end of the house. Even the dogs didn’t hear beyond one or two rooms, at best.
    Brooke had once gone a week without ever seeing her father, so completely independent was her life within the house where she’d been raised.
    I got the details later, but by then it had already been called the worst murder in the history of eastern Massachusetts. I’m fairly sure that wasn’t entirely true. There were other terrible murders—all the time, I suppose—but they’d been forgotten in the fickle memory of those who did the recording of recent history. The Brain Farts of the media.
    Surely, there were murders daily on the mainland, in the crack houses and alleyways that existed there, but those deaths were seen as somehow less interesting than my father’s—a war hero, a survivor of torture and deprivation, a family man who raised three children nearly by himself, cut down at the last by some psycho with a sharp blade on a resort island after the resorts had all closed for the winter. It was news, as they say. It would keep some young reporters in line for a promotion if they made enough of the murder.
    Sure, Burnley was no Martha’s Vineyard, no Nantucket— we had no celebrities to speak of, and the rich didn’t flock to the island as much as the wannabe rich did. But it still sounded cool, no doubt, to turn in a story to a newspaper editor that had in it the words: resort, island, murder, and war hero.
    It certainly was the worst murder that Burnley Island had ever known, and the worst to ever take place near Hawthorn, the house where I had grown up.
    “Life is full of casualties,” my father told me when I asked him why Granny had to die when I was young. He was one of those wonderful fathers who brought life’s lessons out of any situation. “We look away until we have no choice. Then we examine them, remember them, and look away again, as if we’re not meant to think too much about them, but to live. Just live and forget.”
    Brooke found my father dead in the smokehouse, but apparently could not look away.
    He had been dead since seven or eight the previous night.

     
    5
     
    The storm’s howling had kept her up most of the night.
    She had argued with Dad the day before. She had avoided him, which was fairly easy to do at Hawthorn. She was very sad about something, but told me that none of it mattered once Dad died.
    She said later: “I had the worst night of my life. Let’s leave it at that. I had a big fire going in the back bedroom, and even with that, the place was freezing. I could not get it warm enough. I went to take a hot bath, but that didn’t work. I just wanted to go to sleep. I couldn’t. Hadn’t eaten. It was the barometric pressure. It always does that to me when winter comes on. It plummets and my mood just goes. I feel like I want to bury myself alive or just lie in bed or walk through the rooms, back and forth all night, until the headache goes away. The dogs even stay away from me. They sense it. All I could think about was what was wrong with the