The Inn Read online

  I decided to make Siobhan’s potatoes that afternoon, and as I was peeling them at the sink and looking out the window at the winter trees, Angelica stood chattering to me in the doorway. I give myself too much time to prepare dinner, which never helps, but it also means I’m a captive audience for Angelica, who starts drinking at around three, after she’s finished her writing for the day.

  Now she held a glass of white wine against her breast and watched with disdain as I reduced the potatoes to twisted slivers in my anxiety to get all the spots out of them.

  “You hear some authors, particularly those in the academic sphere, talk about editorial intervention as compromising the author’s voice,” Angelica said. “No one wanders into a gallery and starts editing a Rembrandt. But the other side of the argument is how a writer evaluates her work without the subjectivity an editor brings to it.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I rinsed a potato and added it to the pile. I have found that if I keep saying things like “Mmm-hmm” and “How interesting” and “That’s a compelling argument,” Angelica will eventually wander away, having decided I agree with everything she says.

  “For me, there’s a dichotomy between the editor as censor and the editor as co-contributor.”

  Dr. Richard Simeon, who lives on the third floor, wandered into the kitchen and set a brass doorknob on the counter beside the sink.

  “Jeez,” I said.

  “Yes, came off right in my hand.”

  “I’ll give it to Nick.” I put the doorknob in my pocket. “He’s good with locks and handles and things. Are you able to get in and out of the room?”

  “The knob is from the inside of the door, so I’ll not shut it unless I want to be trapped inside.” He hung his walking stick on his arm. “Not that it would make much difference to anyone if I was, I suppose.”

  The doctor wandered away again. I thought about his words, how sad they sounded. The old man spent much of his time in his room, which was crowded with books and papers spilling from shelves and the desktop. Angelica kept talking as though the doctor had never come into the room.

  “Because ownership of the creative product is such a tenuous thing, you see. It’s a highly politicized territory.”

  “Uh-huh. How so?” I asked, not interested in the answer. A hand reached into the basket of potatoes beside me and plucked one out. Susan Solie gave me a friendly smile.

  “Sorry to interrupt.” She glanced at Angelica. “Bill, could I speak to you for a moment? I’m having an issue with my room.”

  Angelica gave the sigh of the unheard and unappreciated artiste and walked off. Susan took a small knife from the drawer and started peeling beside me.

  “That creaky shutter still giving you trouble?” I asked.

  “No.” She laughed. “I just didn’t want your ears to fall off.”

  “Oh, right. Thanks. I only have three pairs left after these.”

  “Speaking of body parts, is that a doorknob in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

  I blushed and put the doorknob on the windowsill. I like Susan, but she makes me nervous. I’m well aware that she could use her Bureau contacts to find out what Malone and I did in Boston that got us fired. She’d hinted that morning that she knew, and she seemed like the type to check on those sorts of things, not only for her own peace of mind but to ensure Effie’s safety. I didn’t know all the details, but I sensed that Susan had brought Effie with her to the house so she could keep an eye on that mysterious, scarred woman. I sometimes saw the two of them in the forest or on the beach, Susan talking about what were apparently grave and troubling things as Effie bent her head and listened. I didn’t know if Effie was an undercover operative or a witness in need of protection or what, but I felt like Susan would have vetted me and probably everyone else in the house.

  We peeled together in silence for a while.

  “So what did you find out on your little mission today?” she asked.

  “Oh.” I sighed. “I might have a lead on a regular user of the same stuff that Minnow had. I might be able to use him to find the distributor. I think we’re dealing with fentanyl.”

  “I think you are too,” she said. She peeled the vegetables like a machine, slipping three perfect potatoes into the bowl for every misshapen one of mine. “I did a little digging around on your behalf,” she went on. “The Bureau tried to intercept a big shipment of fentanyl headed for Boston six months ago and got a decoy instead of the real batch. From what the informant says, there might have been up to a hundred pounds of the stuff, and the Bureau thinks it’s all heading north. They’ve had concentrations of fentanyl deaths in Lynn, Manchester, and Beverly.”

  “This stuff must be pretty bad if the Bureau is interested in it.”

  “It’s serious. Fentanyl is seventy-five times stronger than morphine. One of its analogs is carfentanil. That’s a thousand times stronger. They use it to tranquilize elephants.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I tranquilized an elephant myself,” I said.

  Susan snorted.

  “I do remember when the big drug causing everyone panic was cocaine, though.”

  “Me too.” She smiled. “My parents were terrified.”

  “So people are actually dealing this stuff on the street?” I turned to her. “To kids?”

  “They’re dealing it to whoever will take it,” Susan said. “But kids make good customers because they spread information via social media about where to get it and how good it is.”

  “This is making all the weed I smoked in high school sound pretty tame.”

  “It was.” She gave me another wry smile.

  “Why do people need it when there’s heroin? Isn’t heroin enough?”

  “Well, see, that’s the problem. After a while, it’s not.” She shrugged. “If you’ve been a heroin addict for a decent length of time, it doesn’t get you high anymore and you have to hit just to stay well. Fentanyl gives you that high again, and once you build up a tolerance to that, there’s carfentanil.”

  “And what’s after that?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

  “A body bag,” she said. “And the dealers don’t mind. In places where it’s really bad, like Baltimore, a few overdose deaths around a particular block just tells the addicts where the good stuff is. The stuff that hasn’t been cut up with baby formula or laundry detergent.”

  “Is this what you did in the Bureau?” I asked. “Drug trafficking?”

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” she said. Her smile was broad; she was someone who wasn’t afraid to enjoy her own humor. Siobhan had been like that. Susan’s wet fingers touched mine as we both reached for the same potato, and the collar of my shirt was suddenly hot and tight. “My job wasn’t so glamorous. I didn’t do anything that would get my picture in the paper.”

  “All the more intriguing,” I said. “International woman of mystery shying from the camera behind aviator sunglasses. Anti-terrorist secret agent.”

  “Hardly.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Whatever you were involved in, it must have been hardcore stuff,” I said. “Effie’s no pencil pusher, and from what I can tell, she’s your responsibility. Is she Bureau too or is she just someone you encountered in your job? Maybe she’s a spy. Maybe her name’s not Effie at all. Maybe those are her initials, F. E.”

  “Cut it out.” She looked mildly alarmed for an instant. “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you and these deadbeat dealers. I want to help you, Bill. I believe in what you’re doing. These people don’t belong in Gloucester.”

  I finished peeling the last potato and looked out the window. Marni was wandering on the beach beyond the trees, her cigarette trailing smoke from her fingers into the wind, her eyes on the pale yellow sky wedged between the clouds and the sea.

  “They don’t belong anywhere,” I told her.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SLEEP WAS ALMOST impossible. When I dozed for a few minutes, I dreamed about littl
e girls eating elephant tranquilizers and immediately snapped awake.

  I left my basement bedroom and went up to the kitchen, where I found Sheriff Spears in front of the refrigerator, his belly illuminated by the interior light. He turned and smiled at me, a jar of pickles, a package of ham, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of mayonnaise hugged to his chest. I try not to look into the fridge too often. There’s a bottle of champagne in there that Siobhan and I had been saving for our anniversary, now a permanent fixture on the bottom shelf.

  “Heading out on the night shift?” I asked the big man.

  “No, I just got back. Full day of it. Jeez, I’m starved.”

  I noticed a blue bruise on his fleshy brow as he dumped the ingredients on the counter and started putting together an enormous sandwich.

  “Looks like you brought the fight to crime-fighting today,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t believe it.” He slathered a half-inch layer of mayonnaise on the bread. “We’ve got a bag snatcher in town. I was out all day in an unmarked unit trying to spot the guy. Finally I see him make off with an old lady’s handbag outside the barbershop on Burnham Street. I called it in and pursued, lost the guy in the Oak Grove Cemetery.”

  I sat at the table and listened as Clay pressed the tall sandwich flat with his huge hand, Godzilla squashing a tower of apartments. He took a couple of glasses down from the cupboard, poured a bourbon in one and a shot of pickle juice from the jar in the other.

  “So after a while, I find the guy again near Riverside Avenue. But I’m so excited I’ve finally got him, I accidentally jump the curb with the unit. I go through a fence and a flower bed and knock over a big statue that’s standing in this woman’s front yard. I get out to chase the snatcher but I’m not in uniform, so the lady thinks I’m just some asshole who crashed on her lawn and is trying to run away. She comes out and smacks me in the face with a dictionary.”

  “A dictionary?” I pursed my lips so I wouldn’t laugh.

  “She must have been doing the crossword or something.” Clay sighed. “Anyway, another unit caught the guy down on the docks an hour later. The troops let me return the bag to the old lady, you know, which was nice. But when I hand it to her, she says it isn’t her bag. The guy must have snatched another bag after I lost him. Get this—the old lady calls me an idiot.”

  “You’re not an idiot, Clay,” I said. “You’re a fine and dedicated officer of the law.”

  “Well, I try my best.” He sighed again, took a bite of his sandwich. “This afternoon was crazy. I’ve got a missing person. I mean a real-deal, genuine missing person. I don’t think I’ve had one in … well, years.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Guy named D’Aundre Newgate. Moved here from Boston about four months ago. Had a fight with his girlfriend this morning—she dumped their little girl on him and ran off in a huff. She comes back a few hours later, and the child’s at home but Newgate is nowhere to be seen.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “I don’t even know where to start with something like that.” Clay looked stressed. He watched me for a moment, thinking. “Look, Bill. I don’t know how to say this, but if you … I mean, you’re someone who gets around town a bit …”

  “If I can assist in any way, you’d like me to?” I asked. When I entered the kitchen I’d thought of giving Clay the gun I’d confiscated from the boy named Squid. But his distress and confusion at the missing-person case on his hands made me change my mind. I decided not to share my concerns about drugs in the town.

  “I can’t ask you to assist.” Clay struggled to find the words. “Not without officially deputizing you. And I have men of my own, you know. It’s just … well, in Boston, you got big-city experience. That’s why some people around here ask you to do things, I suppose. You know how to handle big-city problems. Sometimes the badge is a blessing, and sometimes it’s a hindrance. You’ll work faster than me, not having to report on everything, and maybe if someone needs to have his head put in a vise, you’d be able to do that.”

  The head-in-a-vise comment caught me off guard and I laughed. Clay seemed so gentle on the outside, but I sometimes wondered if a darker, harder man lived beneath the squishy, flabby exterior of the sheriff. A man who wouldn’t mind using pain as a tool. I’d watched Clay snarling at the television during a Red Sox game once and I’d been shocked at the malice in his voice and on his face.

  “I’ll be your eyes and ears, Clay,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  Clay smiled, satisfied. He washed a bite of the sandwich down with the bourbon and pickle-juice chaser, noticing as I grimaced. “You want me to make you a pickle-back?”

  “Thanks, no.”

  “You sure? They’re good.”

  I never like to be the Debbie Downer in a room, so I relented. Clay poured me a pickle-back and I gulped down the salty, sour combination.

  “Geesh!” I swallowed hard.

  “Good?”

  “I don’t know if that’s the word.”

  “It’s ninety percent amazing,” he said proudly. “Ten percent terrible.”

  “Like most things in life, I guess.” I squinted.

  “Well, congratulations,” he said. “You’re a true local now.”

  “I’ve been here two and a half years. I was already a local.”

  “A few more of those pickle-backs and you could run for mayor,” Clay said. He fished something out of his jacket pocket. “While you’re here, can I give you this? It fell off this morning. I guess I don’t know my own strength.”

  He put a brass doorknob on the table between us.

  “Just what I need,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The boards beneath us shuddered as someone hopped up the back stairs of the house and then burst through the door. Effie. She stopped at the sight of us, pointed at my face, and made a sign I recognized: her hand above her head, indicating a tall person.

  Nick.

  She put her index finger out, thumb extended, her eyes wide with alarm. I recognized that sign too.

  Gun.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I LEFT CLAY to guard the house and followed Effie into the night. The sea beyond the trees was illuminated by a nearly full moon, but she led me into the forest where she must have seen Nick disappear, the pine needles silencing our footsteps. In the blackness, we stood together, holding our breath, listening. Somewhere, an owl moaned and took flight, startled by our presence.

  I took Effie’s bony wrist and led her to a slice of light between the trees.

  “What did you see?” I asked. “Is he hurt?”

  She put both hands up, fingers out like pistols aligned. A rifle. She ducked her head and I made out her features becoming pinched, the eyes narrowed and mouth hard.

  Nick was stalking someone out here with a gun.

  I felt the air leave my lungs in a heavy rush. A collection of horrible possibilities flashed before me: Nick hunting down and shooting someone out here, Effie or a stranger or himself. My thoughts tumbled into one another. Nick coming to himself, realizing what he had done, what the trauma of his past had bred in him. A distressed, tormented beast pushed down too long. I had to find my friend. I called his name, and my voice seemed closed in by the dark, hardly reaching.

  Nick was suddenly upon us, a hot, heavy presence. I could feel he had been running; his sweat-slick hand brushed mine. I grabbed him, tried to draw him to me, but his body was hard, tensed with energy.

  “Nick!” I said. “What the hell is going on? Are you okay?”

  “I’m glad you’re here, Cap.” He dragged me into a crouch, seeming to miss Effie’s presence altogether. “I tracked the target from the northeast. We’ve got him pinned in a dead end between the cliffs.”

  He pointed. There was, of course, no dead end to speak of, no cliffs anywhere near where Nick was pointing. Beyond where his finger stabbed into the dark, there was more pine forest, the distant road, the curve of uninhabited beach. The rifle was slung over his shoulder, the barrel p
ointing up toward the sky. My heart ached as I realized he was not with me. His eyes were blind to the trees around us, to the night.

  “Nick,” I said. “It’s me. It’s Bill. We’re home. There’s no one out here—”

  Effie’s approach to Nick’s fantasy wasn’t as calm and collected as mine. She grabbed the rifle, underestimating his whip-fast reflexes in his heightened state of fear. Nick reached out and shoved Effie away like she was a child, sending her sprawling on her back.

  “Nick, buddy,” I said, grabbing at his sweat-soaked shirt. “Look at me. Listen—”

  He held up the gun, aimed into the distance. I braced for a shot, my hands against my ears, my stomach dropping as I imagined who he might be targeting out there in the wild. Instead of firing, though, he shouldered the gun and ran off. Effie, who’d struck her head on the back of a rock, touched her scalp and checked her hand for blood in the light. We ran after Nick, now only a shadow among thousands of shadows, dissolving in the dark ahead of us. Branches whipped at my arms and face. All my senses were waiting for that terrible sound—the gunshot in the night.

  Please, please, please, I prayed to whoever might be listening. Bring my friend back safely.

  In my search for Nick, I lost Effie briefly. I saw her silhouette against the sea and followed.

  We stopped short on the smooth gray stones before the sand. Nick was waist-deep in the water, standing rigid, his hands on the gun and his back to us. I approached, not completely certain it was him, his unnatural stillness making him seem like a man-shaped tree standing sentinel in the glassy water.

  “Nick?” I called. He didn’t move. I sighed, exasperated, and walked into the water.

  Cold needles pierced my calves, thighs, buttocks, crotch. The icy water crawled into my boots and around my feet. I could feel the edges of my bones grinding together in the painful cold as I waded out. I huffed and tried to steel myself against the freezing water, but my upper half was shaking furiously by the time I reached him. Nick wasn’t shivering. His eyes were fixed on the black hump of Milk Island on the horizon. I could see what fueled his delusion that he was in the desert. The featureless surface of the ocean interrupted only by the island could easily have been a desert cast in eerie blue light.