The Hour Before Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

four-year-old self with his slightly deviated septum breathing through his nostrils, like a light wind through creaky boards. I felt a strange comfort there, as if we were being held tight again by both our parents, snuggling against my mother’s bosom, or pressed against my father’s arms, falling down into sleep as if it were a cool, dark place.
    I opened my eyes, to the airplane, to the gray clouds outside the window.
    All I had ever wanted as a boy was to leave the island. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted as an adult. I had nothing but confusion in my life.
    Now this.

    2
     
    At Logan Airport, Bruno met me with anxiety on his brow in the form of lines I wouldn’t have thought a twenty-three-year-old would’ve had and dark circles beneath his eyes. Yet he had managed to pull himself together enough to brighten a bit when he saw me. He waved, and then came over to give me a shoulder squeeze. It passed for a hug between us.
    “How was the flight?”
    “Terrorist free,” I said.
    “That’s bad luck,” he said. “Saying things like that.”
    “How bad can it get?”
    “Pretty damn bad, you ask me,” he said. “You’re always trying to be funny.” Then he cracked a bit of a smile, shaking his head. “‘Terrorist free,’ he says.”
    “You gonna tell me some more about all this?” I asked. “Who did it? Who killed him?”
    “Nobody knows,” Bruno said.
    “What the hell does that mean?”
    “It means nobody knows,” he said.

    3
     
    My younger brother, at twenty-three, was strapping and muscular without seeming affected—he had a dollop of physical grace, which was in direct conflict with the generally messy way he had been screwing up his life. He was a natural athlete, had been since he was six or seven and staged swimming races at the beach or impromptu soccer games in the pasture. He had only just slipped into his prime—no longer the scrawny kid, he had taken on the look of an island tourist—tanned, even at the outset of winter, sandy-blond hair; and that peculiar Yankee quality of having thin lips; and a slender, sharp nose; smallish eyes made larger by round spectacles that softened his sharp features; and basic handsomeness. I possessed none of these qualities. He and Brooke got the handsome and beautiful genes—my mother’s. They both had her coloring and her lankiness. People often looked at them as if detecting an attractive scent. I was more like my father, although tall. I was dark, and the only compelling feature to me (since women had mentioned it) were my blue eyes. Black Irish had somehow snuck into the Welsh gene pool of the Raglans.
    He was dressed as well as you could ask a recent college grad to be dressed—jeans, a scruffy old cotton shirt with a dominant coffee stain where his heart would be, and a brown leather jacket. And he still looked like the terse and generally quiet kid brother I used to regularly have to defend in elementary school from the bullies when he was still small and scrawny.
    I nearly hugged him, but he drew back. 

    4
     
    He slipped on a pair of ill-fitting sunglasses and shook my hand, formally. He picked up one of my bags. “I’d say it’s great to see you, but under the circumstances ...” he said.
    “I was trying to call all night. Drove me nuts. What the hell?"
    “Brooke turned the phones off,” he said. “It was constant. A barrage.”
    “Jesus,” I said, stopping in the middle of the crowded ramp. “What exactly . . . what happened?”
    “Reporters. What a crappy job they got. Calling all tragedies and milking them,” he said. Avoiding my question. He didn’t want to veer to the topic of the murder. “It’s funny none of them called you. I mean, not even Grogan?”
    I shook my head slightly. Shrugged. “Nobody remembers I exist.”
    “Ha. Some remember.”
    “I’m sure they’ll get hold of me soon enough.”
    “Your old friend’s been asking about you.”
    “Which one?”
    He looked at me funny. Like I was fishing for