Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  I was nearly thankful that Harry hadn't come by Hawthorn yet. I just didn't want to see him if I could help it. Not with all the other crap going on. Not with the shroud of gloom and confusion that hung over the house.

  He did call once, though. He wouldn't say much other than that we needed to get together soon, and that he knew "something about the smokehouse."

  "You calling as a reporter or a friend?" I asked.

  "Both, I guess," he said, and added, "But I'm a friend first."

  "It's hell here," I whispered into the phone.

  "Yeah," he said.

  A pause on the line.

  "I guess I can't say anything pleasant in the face of this," he said.

  "Nope."

  "I'm just sorry it happened. The way I used to hang out over there with you, I always felt like one of the family."

  "You were," I said. "I know Dad considered you an honorary Raglan."

  "Sorry we've been out of touch."

  "Feels like I just left the place yesterday," I told him. "Like I just saw you the day before yesterday."

  But despite the warmth of this last part of our conversation, I felt distant from Harry and distant from everyone I'd grown up with.

  I still wasn't sure why I'd created that distance.

  3

  I didn't see Harry that first week at all, but Joe Grogan came by Hawthorn more than once.

  He was the only policeman of note on the island in the winter. During high tourist season, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, this increased to ten, most of whom were at The Oaks rather than in Burnleyside. Joe and his gang of three were eager to take part in this most interesting of local crimes, even though the police from the mainland flocked, briefly, to Burnley once the story got out. Like seagulls to a trash heap.

  Joe Grogan had aged quite a bit—my guess was he was about forty-eight, but he looked a lot older with wrinkles and white hair and a general hangdog expression.

  He had the look of a man whose life had worn him down to the nub.

  "It goes like this," he said. "First, we secured the area around the crime scene. Not difficult for this time of year, but you never know who will decide to tromp through there. We're keeping the smokehouse locked up, though. Investigators have been going through, trying to examine everything they can."

  Brooke turned cold, briefly. "How many men went through there?" she asked.

  "Six or seven. At the most."

  "He would've hated that," she said. "Tweezers out to pick up hair samples. Blotting blood trying to find evidence. I can't imagine all the gory details."

  "It's procedure," Joe said, glancing at me with a slightly bewildered expression. "Unfortunately, the weather hasn't helped any of this. The police tape has blown away twice already, and between the snow falling and melting, I'm not sure we're going to have much luck. Finding anything in the perimeter beyond the building, is, well " He splayed his hands, a gesture of futility. "Pretty soon, we'll just have some additional informal interviews with neighbors, and each of you, of course."

  "Interviews?" Bruno asked. "That's it?"

  "There's a lead investigator, and she's got to find out if anyone saw anything. Anything at all."

  "I don't feel very safe," Brooke said.

  "The killer—or killers—may well have already left the island," Joe said. He took his time saying this—he was being careful with his words. He seemed to watch Brooke's face equally carefully. "This person is on the move."

  "He could have easily killed me," Brooke said. "The doors weren't locked. If he wanted something, he would've come and taken it. He just wanted to murder someone. That's my guess. He's some insane sociopath."

  Joe seemed about to say something, but then held back.

  Bruno nodded gravely, looking at the tattered Persian rug on the floor instead of at our sister. "Brooke, it could even be someone here. Someone who lives here. Maybe someone who didn't like Dad."

  "Do you think so, Joe?" Brooke asked, fixing what I'd term a sharp and terrible look on Joe Grogan, as if he had failed her just by being there. "You think Carson did it? Or Ike Doone?" Her voice rose a bit. "Or me? Do you think I killed him and sat in his blood for hours, thinking about my hideous act?"

  When Bruno next spoke, his voice seemed small, like a child's who has been scolded. "I didn't mean that. I didn't." Joe glanced at me, then at Bruno, but averted his gaze from my sister. He was overpowered by her. I had an inkling of why. They'd had an affair. I could smell it at ten paces. They had some broken chemistry between them. It was as if they were talking about one thing, but meaning another. It felt like it. Like they had too much intimacy. Joe and Brooke. The way they both seemed uncomfortable in each other's presence. I didn't know this for sure, but something about the chief of police sitting there in the chair. He sat in that chair before. He has been in Hawthorn more than a few times. Holding the cup of coffee in the saucer. Nearly relaxed, but a strange underlying tension. It all seemed too familiar. Brooke seemed too hostile toward him.

  "The investigators have gathered what evidence they could," he said. "But it's still too soon to not keep going over every detail."

  "What about DNA?" I said, not really knowing what I asked.

  "Samples already went down to some labs in Connecticut. It may take some time to determine anything. But we'll get whoever did this. Don't worry."

  "I feel unsafe," Brooke said. Her eyes filled with glassy tears. She reached for a tissue in a dispenser near her elbow. Blew her nose.

  "Do you have any ideas?" I asked. "It takes a while to go on-and off-island. There's the coast guard. How hard is it to—"

  Joe's face turned grim as he cut me off. "Every cop from here to Boston is formulating theories. They'll keep scraping for evidence they might've missed. Your father didn't seem to have enemies. There haven't been reports of strangers on the island since before the end of October. Even the logs on the ferry for the past three weeks—all accounted for. This is a tough one. We'll crack it. Maybe if we're lucky, the killer had his own boat and drowned during the storm."

  As bloodthirsty as it may have seemed, I hoped in my heart that was true.

  Brooke wiped her eyes, then her nose, with the tissue. "You think it's me."

  "Don't be ridiculous," Joe Grogan said. "No one thinks that. It's just just the damnedest thing." It must have been his favorite phrase.

  "I sat there, in that blood," Brooke said. Then she covered her face with her hands. I went to her and sat on the edge of the large leather chair she was in. I stroked her back lightly.

  "I don't want any of you tromping around by the smokehouse," Joe said to me when I walked him to the front door. "And watch out for Ike Doone. I've caught him twice trying to get close to it, and he and that wife of his are all caught up with America's Most Wanted, so I don't want him grabbing souvenirs. Chase him off if you see him out there."

  4

  The moment Joe's car had pulled out of the driveway, Brooke went to the front window and stared out at the road. "Fuck!" she shouted.

  Bruno and I just sat and watched her.

  "She's going through hell," I said.

  I really meant it. You grow up Catholic, and there's some inkling that hell is always right around the corner. It's the place you accidentally step into when you least expect it. I asked my dad, when I was a kid, if he thought he was going to heaven, and he told me no. He wouldn't explain why, and it was the saddest thing he ever said about himself. I guessed, as I got older, that if you lived long enough, you spent time in hell as you went through life.

  I figured we'd all just bought a little bit of real estate there, with this murder. We knew something about life that many people get to skim over in the papers or on the nightly news.

  Brooke had sat in hell for hours, staring in its face.

  She had the right to her obscenities.

  5

  We could not have a funeral yet because my father's body was needed for forensics evidence. It was unpleasant to contemplate. I had t
he idea of a funeral at St. Bart's, with Father Ronnie, now nearly seventy, giving mass. Bruno shook his head to shush me up, but Brooke told me, "We had a falling out with Father Ronnie. Dad didn't like him in the end. I didn't like him. For a priest, he had no sense of Christian forgiveness. To him, I'm Jezebel or something. He called me a harlot once. I called him a drunk. We parted ways." She said this last part with a bit of acid in her voice.

  "What's that all about?" I asked. "He actually called you a harlot?"

  "You'll hear about it soon enough," she said. "Joe Grogan and I had a fling. Well, more than that. For nearly a year. Do not give me that Nemo look."

  " Nemo look'?" I nearly laughed. It felt good to feel a little light.

  "That I knew you were up to something' look," she said without a trace of humor. "Don't judge me. I will not be judged by you or anyone. His wife has had affairs with men up at The Oaks every summer since they've been married. He needed a little happiness. I did, too. It ended badly. Dad was furious, but kept a lid on it. He felt I was I don't know devaluing myself, I guess. He told me I'd never find a husband, and I guess I pissed him off by spitting back at him that I could find any husband I wanted, so long as the wife was away. Father Ronnie scolded Dad for allowing a woman like me to live in his house. Dad told him to fuck off. So, no absolution for us. We're headed for limbo. Or worse."

  "True," I said. "I'm not sure you can ever come back from telling a priest to fuck off."

  "He didn't quite say it that way."

  "It's a relief to know we all won't be excommunicated for your sins," I said cheerily.

  "Always the funny one," she said in a way that was not funny at all. It was the Yankee in her. "I never liked church. Sunday should be a day to sleep in. Ronnie's mass went on too long. I could always smell whiskey on his breath in the 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 in the fog."

  I began to feel as grim as Paulette looked. "Did you tell Joe?"

  She nodded. "She scared me, that woman. She seemed out of place. She wasn't from around here." When she said this last part, I had a horrible feeling in my gut that I'd made a big mistake by returning home at all. She reminded me of what I truly had hated on the island: the bigotry and prejudice against anything "foreign," and by foreign, this meant anyone who was not from the island in the first place. Anyone who had not lived there for two generations or more. "Wasn't from around here" was a popular way of saying, "outsider." Outsiders were considered somehow tainted, somehow worth less than insiders. The provincialism of the place was appalling. Worse, with Paulette, was the fact that she was rabidly religious and believed the devil was everywhere and angels fought for our souls.

  And it was embodied for me, for that moment, in Paulette Doone, with her grimness and her fears and her made-up world of demons and angels.

  My contrary nature got the best of me.

  "It must be terrifying," I said.

  Her eyes lit up as if she loved terror as much as she did the hint of scandal.

  "To live across from our home. To know that whoever did this this horrible thing might be somewhere nearby," I said. I felt petty and mean, but something in her story of "wasn't from around here" reminded me of why I'd set off stink bombs in her yard in the first place—she had shouted at me more than once that year that I was going to turn out just like my mother. My mother had been, after all, the ultimate island outsider. She quite literally was not from around there. She had the audacity to have married and carried children with the local hero, the prize, the man who had put Burnley Island on the map with his heroic deeds. And then she had run off like a scoundrel in the night, with a lover, no less, leaving the man broken and raising children alone.

  Paulette nodded as I spoke of the lingering terrors of living near the murder site. I felt like a rat for doing it to her—for scaring her more. But she'd come over to just say something bad about someone, and I was sick of her within five minutes.

  "I've stayed up the last two nights and wondered about it. I read mystery novels, and Ike says I'm always trying to solve crimes. I listen to the satellite radio—Ike has it in his garage—so I can hear what goes on off-island, what criminals are doing. And I don't think this was out of the blue. I think your fa
ther was murdered a certain way well, it was like a ritual, don't you think? Do you believe in God?"

  That was it for me. She was going to try to save us. Using the opportunity of our father's murder.

  "Get out of our house," I said.

  3

  Sometime after the Revelation of Brooke as a Scarlet Woman, Bruno brought up the possibility of a memorial service.

  "Did Dad ever talk about how he'd want it?" I asked.

  She squinted at me, as if she didn't quite believe I'd asked that. "He was only fifty-eight. He didn't talk much about dying. I don't think he anticipated this." Her sarcasm nearly bit me. I had never been able to read her moods.

  "I guess he wanted to be buried down in the old cemetery," she said, as if I needed reminding. "Among all the Raglans. All of us should be buried there."