The Hour Before Dark by Douglas Clegg

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 father 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.”
    “Granny was buried in Falmouth,” I reminded her.
    “She was only a Raglan by marriage,” my sister said. “That was her sister’s doing. Dad wanted her here, but he didn’t like to stand up to the aunts from that part of the family. They were harpies.” Then she nearly brightened. “There must be a way to get in touch with Mom. I know there is. I wrote six months ago to the address I found in Dad’s file cabinets, but I got it back unopened. Someone else lives there now. There’s got to be a way to find her.”
    “Why?”
    “Why not? How many years has it been?” Brooke