The Hour Before Dark Read Free Page B

later on that Brooke had seemed preoccupied, as if speaking to them had been a disturbance for her.
    “I thought she was very sad. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days,” Paulette had mentioned, giving Joe Grogan something that was as close to the Evil Eye as he had ever in his life witnessed. “But you know, Joe, women like that. Well, they don’t sleep much. Do they? I’d say more, but I’m a Christian woman, and I don’t like to speak like that.”

     
    6
     
    Because our father often hiked the mile to the village and got rides home with neighbors or anyone he could talk into giving him a lift, this was just another ordinary day.
    Brooke had her own inner turmoil.
    She told others that she had been anxious and somewhat depressed. She talked to Dr. Connelly in the village a week earlier about perhaps getting a change in prescription for her sleeping medicine. “Are you depressed?” he’d asked.
    “Not depressed,” she said. “Just not quite feeling like myself.”
    He had asked her if she might want to see a therapist on the mainland—he knew a good one in Falmouth. She told him she’d consider it, but she didn’t think talking out her problems would be the answer.
    She fought the urge to be impatient with Mab and Madoc. They’d run off to the woods chasing squirrels or rabbits, and returned a long while later, covered head to foot with mud. She went and checked on the cabin—the damage to the roof was extensive. She made a mental note to talk to her father about just tearing it down before it turned into some kind of eyesore.
    The snow melted where the sun hit it. In the shade, the duck pond had a thin scum of ice on its surface that had not hardened.
    At four, she noticed that lightning had split one of the trees near the smokehouse. She said she had been standing in the greenhouse, with the windows steamed over, and feeling the warmth of the place.
    “I was looking at something—I thought it was mist coming in from the road. It was nearly beautiful. It was twilight— dark came early—and this romantic, soft mist just slowly poured along the road. Remember how Granny used to say you could see angels in the fog? I remembered her saying it, and I almost saw an angel in the mist,” she said of it. “And then, I noticed the half-fallen tree.”
    One of the hawthorns in particular, but also the young oak that had not quite grown to adulthood yet.
    Lightning, she assumed, had ripped across the trees. She was thankful there hadn’t been a fire.
    She went to see if there was any other damage.
    Her feet crunched in the glaze of snow that hadn’t quite melted in the shadow of the smokehouse.
    She saw his shoe, his brown Oxford, stuck in mud—now frozen, she found, as she tried to pull it out. She ended up leaving it where it was, mired.
    She glanced first up to the road, perhaps hoping that Paulette and Ike would still be there.
    Then to the fields and the pasture—and beyond it, the woods. Mab and Madoc were running down into the duck pond, splashing around.
    She glanced up at the sky with its overcast gloom.
    Then she went to the low door of the smokehouse and touched it. Something told her not to—she told me later that it was an electric shock of memory—of never liking the smokehouse since before she could remember. Of remembering my screams as Dad spanked me there, or of remembering Bruno crying there for no reason at all when he was six or seven, sobbing and telling her that the smokehouse gave him nightmares.
    When she touched the door, it moved a bit.
    She grasped the latched handle, expecting the deadbolt that had been applied years ago to keep it shut, and surprise, surprise, it opened outward.
    And that’s when she found him.
    (She told me later, “I wasn’t sure whether it was him or not for a second. It was something I’d never seen before in my life. It was as if something had exploded, but had been reconstructed again. Something about it was like a dream—or a