A Room Full of Night Read online

  A ROOM FULL

  OF NIGHT

  A

  ROOM

  FULL

  OF

  NIGHT

  A THRILLER

  TR KENNETH

  Copyright © 2019 by TR Kenneth

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-322-9

  Cover Design by Christian Fuenfhausen

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing

  Sarasota, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For Tommy and Johnnie—with love always and forever

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELEVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FOURTY

  CHAPTER FOURTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FOURTY-TWO

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER FOURTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FOURTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FOURTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FOURTY-SIX

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER FOURTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FOURTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FOURTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  PART SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A ROOM FULL

  OF NIGHT

  PART ONE

  If you set a horse’s tail on fire, he will take the fire with him when he runs.

  ROBERT RUTHVEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  WUTTKE, WISCONSIN

  PRESENT DAY

  HE WAS A determined gimp.

  Stag Maguire possessed a hitch in his walk, even in the massive Sorel snow boots he used to plod through the rubble of ice on the curb. Past midnight, the sidewalks mirrored with black ice, he traversed his way toward Gerde’s Biergarten as if headed toward the Holy Grail instead of a forlorn drinking establishment that had in truth died years ago. All around him, the wind hammered off Lake Michigan, whomping whatever wasn’t battened down. It sent tiny ice shards into his stinging eyes. Like micro-knives, the ice and wind shredded the tattered highway-stripe yellow banner in front of Gerde’s.

  Going Out Of Businesss, it said, the misspelling a spit on an already-cold corpse.

  He should have been home, nursing his bad leg with whiskey. It was reasonable and sane that he should shrug and tell himself that he had problems, too. That there was no need to get involved in people’s crap. Others were nothing but an inconvenience. They were all a pain in the ass, and he’d not been rewarded well for his concern. Ever.

  But, above all, Stag Maguire was an unreasonable man.

  He should have stayed home. Stayed home and reenacted the family tradition by slipping a needle in his arm and sink into sweet oblivion. It was insanity to continue this life of few rewards. By all that was holy, he should have just jawed the end of a revolver long ago.

  But no.

  Instead, he trudged onward. Because his friend was in peril. Because the night was dark and treacherous, and he was an unreasonable man.

  Against the screaming current, he arrived at the huge Black Forest doors of Gerde’s. A sheriff’s notice to keep out had been stapled over the seam where the two doors met, but the notice was ripped now. The entrance had been breached. The two halves tenuously flapped in the ferocious wind.

  “God dammit, Harry,” he said under his breath.

  He clutched the door handle and crashed into the establishment with all the grace of a bear tearing through a dumpster.

  The interior was lit with one sad light bulb. It haloed a figure; overweight and lumped over the bar like a lonely, forlorn toad. In front of him were a dozen opened bottles of beer, none of which particularly grabbed his attention. Looking down on the whole tableau was a humorless, smoke-dimmed portrait of a man in clichéd Bavarian attire who sported a ridiculous wooly orange beard.

  Stag broke the thick rime of ice that coated his balaclava. It made a magical noise of tinkling glass.

  In the darkness, it was more like the notes of a music box in a horror film.

  The fat man did not look up, and Stag caught the eyes of the portrait. They stared at him, those eyes. They were the kind that followed the viewer wherever he stood in the room. It took talent to make eyes like that, but the artist’s work was undone by the ridiculous clothes and beard. Stag pulled off his balaclava. Shaking the ice from his hair, he got a good look at the painting now. It was strange how the world was in those eyes: two-dimensional, deepset. And like the world, they were too close together, and too cold to care.

  “Harry.” Stag’s expression worked up the permanent knot of tension between his eyebrows. It was his usual stance now. To view everything as phantasmagoria.

  Dragging up a bar stool, Stag sat down next to him and silently commiserated for a long moment.

  Finally, in the sole acknowledgement that he was no longer alone, Harry said in a drunken voice, “How the hell did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. You worked like a dog.”

  “I ran the numbers. I had the same number of customers that my dad had in his day. And my grandfather’s. They both made it. How come I couldn’t?”

  Stag put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll start again.” The words sounded limped dick, even to him.

  Both men settled back into the silence, each staring ahead to a dark, imaginary horizon.

  “Why?” Harry said miserably.

  “Ah, the why,” Stag said.

  “The numbers should have worked. I should have been able to make a go of it. Now Julie’s divorcing me and taking
the kids. I’ve got nothing.”

  “I don’t know how to answer the why.”

  “All I ever wanted was to run this lousy place. Like my father and his father and his father. Now, fuck!”

  Stag didn’t say anything at first. He just looked at him, concern tight on his face. He finally said, “The elusive why. I mean, what-the-fuck? WHY? It’s endless.”

  Harry slid him a gimlet-eyed glance.

  “It haunts me.” Stag released a sigh. “The eternal why.”

  “I used to think the facts would add up. But the facts,” Harry said, slightly slurring his s, “they don’t add up.” He turned to Stag. “You’re the journalist. Look at my books and tell me why.”

  Stag knew even as a journalist, the why left nothing but a constant craving for more facts. Until you found yourself in a spider web of facts, sometimes none of it making any more sense than it did at the beginning.

  “People want absolutes. It’s not always about absolutes. Sometimes it’s about night and fog.”

  Harry pondered this while the shrill scream of the wind fled across the roof. Finally, he said, “You know what my father always told me? He’d say, ‘When the wolf comes to the door, feed it. Or it will feed on you.’”

  Stag commiserated. The only thing he could think to do was let Harry get it off his chest. Even if he made no sense.

  “That was the problem, see? I didn’t feed the wolf. I didn’t feed the blood-sucking wolf, and now look.” Harry gestured around in grief, finishing off one of the many half-empty beers in front of him. “My great-grandfather started this place. It’s been here since 1934. I’m the fourth generation of Gerdes and I lost it—I fucking lost it. Because I didn’t feed the wolf.” Harry looked like he either wanted to break the beer bottle or burst into tears.

  Stag didn’t know what to say. Gerde’s had been around a long time. He remembered the long nights of drunkenly dancing around the subject of whether Gerde’s had been sympathetic to the National Socialist cause in the thirties. Shit, there’d been long nights ruminating over the portrait alone. The rumor was that the painting had hung in the Berghof and had been given to Gerde’s by a marauding G.I. Joe after the war.

  But drunken speculation didn’t make things true. And crying when you were fucked, didn’t unfuck yourself. The wolf metaphor escaped him, but if the money added up then and didn’t today, the business was going under. Facts could be cruel foes.

  “This is all I ever wanted. To run the family biz and be happy with Julie and the kids. So why?”

  “There’s chaos even in math,” Stag said. “And ‘therein lies the rub.’”

  “A plus B equals C. Why’d that work then but not now?”

  Stag twisted his mouth in something like a grimace. He toyed with one of the half-empty beer bottles, and took a sip. It was warm and flat, but he didn’t care. “I don’t think I ever told you this, but, you know, I had a really good childhood. Really. That probably surprises you.”

  Harry looked at him suspiciously.

  Stag shrugged it off. “I mean, yeah, I had no dad—but I never really cared. You don’t miss what you never had. And I had the nicest mom in the world. Nothing ever scared her, nothing ever made her angry. I always believed she loved me a lot. She was always gentle, always patient. Always smiling.”

  He took the beer and downed it. “I lost her when I was thirteen, and I wanted to know why. If she loved me so much, why did she do it? But the fact was she loved that needle more.” He released a deep breath. “That’s when I knew I wanted to become a journalist. I wanted to know why. And you know what?”

  Harry shook his head.

  “I still don’t know fucking why.”

  Both men grunted their agreement like two prisoners greeting the noose. The only rational response was to say, Hello, old friend.

  Harry began peeling off the label to his beer. “Here we are. Broken.” He reached for a fresh bottle. “Both of us.”

  “The hell.” It was all Stag could think of to say.

  The men continued their vanishing point stares. Then Harry said, “I should just burn this place around me. Fuck the sheriff and his spoils. Just burn it and let it take me down too. I got nothing.”

  “No, you’ve been with me through all my wars, and there was one thing you learned in a war: You never leave a brother behind.” Stag tightened his hand on Harry’s meaty shoulder. “C’mon, brother, let’s get out of here.”

  Harry raised his bleary, drunken gaze to the portrait on the wall. “Hear that, man? They’re coming to take it all away—to take you away. I got nothing left—”

  Stag took the beer bottle out of Harry’s grasp. “You can crash at my place—your shit’s back there anyway since Julie left. No point in staying here another minute.”

  “I don’t think I can leave. This is my home. I’ve been living here one way or another all my life.”

  “Time to get a new life. C’mon. You can do it.” Stag gave him an encouraging slap on the back.

  “I’m not your real brother. Fuck, I wish I was. You’re the brains. The journalist. Of course, I’m not.” Harry waved his hand at the portrait. “No, these are my people.”

  “Hell, losing this place hurts me, too.” Stag looked over the bar made of substantial blackened oak. “I proposed to Holly here. Right here at the bar by the portrait.”

  “You never told me.”

  “Yep. I brought out the ring and got down on one knee—the whole works.”

  “Who’d have thought you were a romantic?”

  Stag snorted a laugh. “Too bad Holly didn’t think so.”

  “You mean she turned you down?” For a second, Harry snapped out of his misery.

  “One of my all-time stellar moments. She didn’t want to marry a broke writer. I mean, who-the-fuck would?”

  “Really? She turned you down?”

  Stag gave a quirk of his mouth. “Yeah, well, I’m not a quitter. It took another five months and sore knees, but she finally accepted.”

  “How’d you convince her?”

  “Right time, right circumstances. Her father had died and she was undone by it, in free fall. I told her I would take care of her for the rest of her life.” Stag nodded. Then he nodded again, as if to reassure himself. “And she damned straight knew I would keep proposing. She was the only answer to why.”

  Harry absorbed this new information. Then he said, “We’re almost brothers, aren’t we?” He looked at Stag with a drunk’s newfound sentimentality. “I got your back. You know it, man.”

  “Goddamn right. If it hadn’t been for you convincing your parents to take me in, I’d have been ass-raped in foster care at thirteen. We’re better than brothers. Brothers by choice.” Stag stood. “C’mon. That’s what I’m here for. Let’s go.”

  Harry slowly conceded the barstool. His eyes were red from unshed tears. He was drunk and dazed. He looked around, while Stag grabbed the parkas.

  “My people … my people …” Harry’s voice descended into misery again. “Fuck the sheriff! I’m taking my people with me—” Harry clambered onto a bar stool and reached over the bar. He put his hands on either side of the portrait’s frame.

  “You’re supposed to leave everything—”

  “I’ve spent my whole life with this fucker. I’m not leaving him now.” Harry forcibly ripped the picture off the wall. A clean rectangle was left behind it, where it had hung for decades in the smoke-filled bar.

  Stag shrugged. “Okay, it’s a shitty painting. The sheriff won’t miss it. Let’s go.”

  Harry pulled the portrait from his chest and gazed at it. “Yeah, it is a shitty painting. And you know why? The guy doesn’t match. From his outfit he should be all friendly and doing the chicken dance, but instead, he looks kinda … kinda … well, kinda scary.”

  “Frankly, he looks like a bastard. Always has.”

  Harry clutched the portrait to him again, stumbling. “Yeah, but we go way back.”

  “Who is he anyway?” Stag as
ked, shrugging into his parka.

  “Don’t know—everybody always called him ‘Our Reini’.”

  “‘Our Reini’? You’re right. He doesn’t match. With that name he should be doing the chicken dance.”

  “What am I gonna do?” Harry whispered in misery, staring down at the painted face.

  “You’re going to come home with me and sleep it off. Then tomorrow you’ll start again.” Stag grabbed him by the shoulders. Painting and all, he plowed him toward the door.

  “I can’t do it.” The beer and the stress had caught up to Harry, and the belligerent was coming out.

  “I’m not going to let that sheriff arrest you.” Stag used even more force to keep the momentum toward the door.

  “Fuck that cock-sucking sheriff!” Harry stood still, rebelling. “Let him try to make me leave—”

  “You do not want to be the local kook on FOX News.”

  “Still. Fuck ’em. I should burn the place down. Burn it right down to the ground. Take a stand. Be a man!”

  “Be a man some other way,” Stag said, urging him along with his balled-up parka.

  “That’s what I’m gonna do—burn it to the ground!”

  “Do not do that.” Stag struggled with him as Harry tried to turn back to the bar.

  “Who’ll have the last laugh then!” Harry wrestled with the parka, the painting, and Stag’s grasp. “I’ll make FOX News all right!”

  “Harry, you’re the only family I’ve got. I can’t let you burn this place. Not even if I have to cold-cock you and drag you out of here.”

  “I’m gonna do it—I’m gonna make my stand!”

  “You are not!” Stag shoved him against the wall, his fist in Harry’s face.

  They struggled with each other until something dreamy and white floated down beside them, detaching itself from the lining of the portrait. As if watching a falling angel, both men stopped and stared as the long strip of white silk slid to the floor and came to a halt.

  “What—” Harry loosened his grip on Stag.

  “It must’ve been stuck in the back of the painting.” Stag shoved Harry away and picked it up. “There’s writing on it.”

  “Does it tell us who the guy is in the painting?”