Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  All this to begin to tell you: Our father was both loved and hated within his own family, he was a hero to the world and to each of us, even though he had his dark periods.

  When my father died—was killed—none of it mattered.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1

  I couldn't get the images out of my mind:

  My father was butchered.

  Sliced up.

  In pieces.

  2

  "Man, I'm angry," Bruno said. "Sucker punched. Dazed. That's how I've felt since finding out. I was just talking to him the other day. And now " This was the most open I'd ever heard my brother be. He never talked about his inner life or feelings that I knew of. He was a mystery to my sister and me in that respect. "Brooke's had the worst of it. She's been depressed this fall. I don't know why. I know she hasn't been sleeping right since before this. Now, who knows?" He said this with an appealing meekness, as if he needed something from me. Some reassurance about the good in the world.

  I did something I've never done before, but I suppose you don't do what you're not used to doing until a nasty tragedy has stomped you and your family. I reached over and hugged him to my side. Like the little brother he was to me. He put his head on my shoulder and cried for a little bit. I felt like we were little boys again, after having a bully at school say something mean to him about our mom running off, or about his glasses, or how he couldn't play softball as well as the others.

  "They'll get whoever did it," I said, without 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 how 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 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 makeup, 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 strongest accent, which was vaguely masculine despite her petite softness. She was a category of woman who lived on Yankee islands, just as there was a category of men who did as well, who had thick hair that always needed cutting, and ruddy complexions from constant movement in the cold, a nearly downcast expression as she spoke, as if gravity were her only makeup; she used profanity the way insecure chefs used spices, as if no sentence were complete without at least a "fuck" or a "goddamn." In this way, she was unlike any of us. She was as Yankee as the low stone walls that had surrounded Hawthorn for more than two centuries. She was like a weathervane on the roof, or the shingles themselves; part of the way things looked in New England, part of its charm, but also part of its expectation. Few on the island could out-island my sister. She had an old soul for the place, as if she were the reincarnation of my great-grandma Cery (pronounced Cherry) Raglan, a salty bitter woman of enormous bosom and the iron will of a mule.

  As I held her for a moment, I smelled our mother's scent—particularly the essence of lime—and for a moment, I was truly happy. Happy to be with my sister. Happy to be home again. Happy that at least the three of us would be here for the time being.

  Even if for all the wrong reasons.

  8

  When I entered Hawthorn again, I felt enveloped in its plain New England arms, its brick and wood and white walls and smell of earth and coffee and winter spice.

  Its length seemed less like a serpentine pattern and more like a series of Christmas boxes waiting to be opened.

  Why had I hated this place so much?

  Why had I left it behind and done everything I could to let work and life get in the way of coming back?

  Now it was late in the game. My father, gone. I'd thought I'd have some time later in life to sort out our problems. Maybe in my forties. After I'd somehow established my own territory in the world. Sometime in the future, when he was older and softer and I was wiser and more understanding of my own nature. I had made a huge mistake by running away from my problems.

  Despite the length of the house, it wasn't that wide, nor were the ceilings high. It was built for Welshmen and women—my great-greats, none of whom were tall. It wasn't until my father married my mother and produced two sons who had some Norwegian and German in them, that the house seemed smaller and less grand to my dad. He told me that no one should really be taller than five-foot-six anyway.

  I could practically feel my father still alive in the entryway—and yes, though my mother was long gone, I felt her there, too, and saw her in my sister's face. I looked for the penknife notching in the door frame—and there they were. The notch that was me at four, then at six, then at twelve; and Brooke and Bruno's notches, as well, all of us lined up against the door frame every few years to check our progress.

  I went to hug my sister, and she whispered in my ear, "Good to see you again."

  My sister and brother and I had seen each other in the years I'd been gone—but not more than once or twice. I hadn't seen her in nearly six years, though, and we'd been so close growing up, that I felt my eyes tearing up just to be there, in the house, with both her and Bruno. It was enough for the time being.

  Brooke loved the island more than she loved life itself, and Hawthorn was the heart of her love. She had told me as a child that she wanted to grow up to either be a fisherman, or a fisherman's wife, and she had danced along the edge of the shoreline on many summer twilights, stretching her arms up to the pink sky, while her friends gathered around a bonfire that had just been set for the night—but she was separate from them, a nature spirit on the island.

  Some heaviness had come into her—not in terms of weight, but an aura, as if remaining on the island had tugged away at her vitality, her ability to dance on the shore or love the smell of the fishing boats as they came into the harbor.

  I suspected that, whether she ever married or not, she would always remain in that house, always caring for it and tinkering with its upkeep, and making sure that someone remained to remember the Raglan history. It was as if the doors were not open for her.

  9

  Brooke went to flick on the kitchen light, and when her back was turned, Bruno whispered to me, "Sedatives."

  "Yes," Brooke said, turning to face him. She shot him a poisonous look. It nearly scared me, because it didn't seem like the soft gentleness I'd remembered her having. "You drink, and I get a pill now and then."

  "I didn't mean it as—" Bruno began, but shut up. "Sorry."

  Brooke's face smoothed out. Then to me: "Pola and her little boy came by. Just paying respects. It seems early for it. I didn't run her off, but I have a hard time with the idea of people just popping over the day after this. Harry came by this morning, too, and it's making me angry that everyone has to say something to me. As if it's required." The sorrow in her face nearly astonished me. She needed sleep badly. Sleep and peace. "Just make yourself at home. Your room should be okay. Mab and Madoc seem to like sleeping there some nights. If they bother you, just shut them out. Don't put up with any crap from them. There's a spot heater in the den you can have if it gets too cold. I'm not sleeping at night. Don't bother me 'til after seven tonight. I just want to sleep right now. As long as I can." She whistled for her dogs, and they leapt nearly across the living room and ran to her.

  And then my sister went down through the living room, out the door that led to the dining room. I heard a series of doors open and shut as she went through twelve rooms, upstairs, to her own room, near the back of the house.

  "She was on edge before this," Bruno said. "Either quiet or like a cyclone. She and Dad were fighting all week. Mainly about money."

  10

  Within an hour of being home, I got a call from the local police chief.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1

  "Nemo?"

  "Joe," I said. I had always known him as Joe rather than Officer Grogan. The island was like that. We had been tight-knit. Too tight. First thing I asked him, "You catch the killer yet?"

  A pause on the line.

  "First, I'm sorry for all this." He said it in a low, quiet voice. It reminded me of my father a little, when he was trying to tell me something bad.

  "I just got in," I said. But I wanted to just sink into a soft sadness and not deal with anything.

  "Well, I want you to know we've been scouring the island for this killer. Everyone is cooperating."

  "Thank you," I said, unsure how to respond. I still wasn't certain how I was supposed to continue in life, thinking about this murder. I wonder if anyone who has been touched by a murder really knows how to react to it or to how people treat you afterward. It was as if you somehow came out of another dimension, as if you lost your pact with the rest of the human race, and then you were either a wounded victim or simply a foreigner in the land of normalcy.

  "We'll need to ask you some questions, soon," he said.
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br />   "Of course," I said.

  "Good. How's Brooke?"

  "She seems to be well, holding up."

  "Hang tough," he said, before hanging up.

  I glanced at Bruno. Hung up the phone. "Grogan," I said.

  "He's calling too much," Bruno said. "Means he doesn't have anything. He really wants to talk to Brooke. I think he's scared of her."

  2

  The first week was a blur of reporters, who didn't bother us as much as I thought they might, but generally were around if one of us left the house and actually ventured to the village. (I stayed home with Brooke unless a trip to town was absolutely necessary, and then I just went to buy eggs or coffee or milk at the QuickMart, where I knew no one.) The reporters from the mainland seemed a little scared of us—or were ashamed to have to circle around us. Brooke hated having her picture taken, so when she went outside, she always gave the photographers and cameramen the finger just to keep her picture out of the paper.

  Harry Withers, running the Burnley Gazette, was not among them, despite my brother's promise that he had been camping out somewhere nearby. I guess I should add a word or two about Harry here. Harry Withers, my best friend when I was growing up, was a bit of a nutcase. As a lad, he'd been into being a complete geek, which was cool in its own way—he read books on improving brain power, and he knew what NASA was working on, and he was completely convinced that Earth would eventually be contacted by aliens. He used to even try to hypnotize my brother, sister, and me as kids after seeing a guy on television make a bunch of people quack like a duck. He was the son of the owner of the Burnley Gazette, an island rag that tended toward gossip and tourist promotions and the odd story about how pennies were getting scarce on the island. When we had been kids, he was like my brother—more so than Bruno in some respects, because Harry and I were the same age, and got into nearly the same trouble. He slept over at Hawthorn a lot as a kid, too, so my family knew him well—his parents had troubles that I won't get into here other than to say they were mismatched. His father died of emphysema when he was fourteen, and then he turned bad in a way that was destructive.