The Inn Read online

  “I lost him,” he whispered.

  “Nick, please.” I stuffed my hands helplessly into my armpits. “We’re going to get hypothermia if we stand here too long. Look at me. It’s me. It’s Bill. You’re home in Gloucester.”

  “Living the Dream.” He looked at me. “Devil Nightmare.”

  “What?”

  “Devil Nightmare. That’s the name of their unit. The six. Living the Dream was a code. An anagram. A warning. They’re at the back of the convoy. They positioned themselves back there so they could block us in. We pursued and cornered one of them. Now he’s out there.” Nick gestured to the horizon. “In the desert.”

  “Nick—”

  “He’ll come back,” he said. “He warned us because he wants to come in. Cross over. Give us intel on the traitors.” He hefted the enormous weapon in his hands, scanned the horizon with the scope. I watched his wide eyes in the moonlight. His skin was covered in goose bumps while his body struggled against the chill. I had to get him out of the water. I saw Effie at the edge of the sand. She snapped her fingers to get my attention, then saluted, clicking the heels of her boots together. I didn’t get what she meant. She pointed at me and did the gesture again. I understood.

  I turned to Nick. “You’ve done a good job, soldier.” I hesitated, trying to see if I was getting through. “You’ve, um, identified the target and now we’ll pass it on to command. I’m ordering you to terminate this operation for the night. Give me, uh … surrender your weapon and return to camp.”

  “Cap.” Nick nodded, lowering the weapon. He slammed the slide open, ejected the round from the chamber, and popped the magazine. He handed the gun to me and walked back toward the shore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WE FOLLOWED NICK toward the house. I could see that the light in Marni’s room was on. Clay was waiting for us in the doorway, his face creased with concern, his big eyes under his heavy brows trying to analyze Nick.

  “You all right, soldier boy?” he asked as Nick approached. I knew from past experience Nick would be exhausted after his little dance along the edge of reality. The last time this sort of thing happened, Nick had convinced himself that he could hear gunshots in the distance and tried to mark down their frequency in a notebook with a series of strokes and dashes. He’d kept up his surveillance of the distant gunshots for an hour, sweating and recording furiously, then he crashed and slept for fourteen hours. I’d never tried to get Nick out of his delusions before by pretending to be a part of them. I grabbed Nick in the back doorway and wrapped my arms around him. It was like hugging a sleepwalker. Though he was barely with me, I needed to know he was safe, to slap his hard shoulders.

  “Buddy,” I said. “Jesus. You can’t go scaring us like that. You really can’t.”

  “Hmm?” Nick patted my back halfheartedly. “What did you say? What time is it?”

  “It’s bedtime,” I said.

  “Right. Yeah. I knew that.”

  Clay, Effie, and I watched as Nick walked away, leaving wet footprints in his wake and muttering to himself.

  “Got room in your gun safe?” I asked Clay. Effie handed him the rifle. He took the big black weapon by the barrel with reverence, hefted the stock in his hand to check out the sight.

  “Jesus. What’s the guy hunting?” Clay asked. “Moose?”

  “Shadows,” I said. “He was off on one of his trips into the past again.”

  “You know, I think you should talk to Doc about him.”

  It was a good idea. I knew Dr. Simeon kept odd hours. I changed in my basement bedroom and headed up there, but when I got to his room there was no light under the door. On the way back downstairs I passed Marni’s room and heard her clattering away at her laptop. I rapped on the door and walked in to find her in the lotus position on her fluffy pink desk chair, her fingers racing over the keys.

  “What do you want, Freezy? I’ve got five conversations going on here,” she said.

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” I said. “I’m just here to practice my scales.” I picked up her violin, put it under my chin, scraped the bow across the strings, and made a sound like a rusty belt sander running across concrete. She sighed and shut the laptop, took the instrument from me. I lay on her bed.

  “What’ll it be tonight, sir?”

  “‘Flight of the Bumblebee.’”

  She laughed in that open-mouthed kid-like way she rarely did, a beautiful habit she was losing as she grew up. It made me smile. She played “Orange Blossom Special” because she knew I liked it. When she finished, I watched her fiddling with the strings, my head propped up on my elbow.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey what?”

  “I think I was a real dick about the memorial thing.”

  “Is this an apology? Oh my God. I love apologies,” she said.

  “It is an apology,” I said. “You’re right when you say I should stop pushing my feelings about Siobhan down. I should talk about her more and let you talk about her more. I’m not trying to build some kind of cone of silence here.”

  Marni came and lay on the bed beside me. We looked at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars she had stuck to the ceiling, impossible constellations of unicorns and butterflies. Marni’s fingernails were freshly painted purple, but she’d already started picking the polish off. We heard a thump in the next room. We both looked instinctively at the wall beside us.

  “We gotta talk about a room change,” she said. “Neddy Ives gives me the creeps.”

  “He’s all right. In fact, as a houseguest he’s great. He doesn’t complain. Doesn’t make a mess.”

  “What kind of person lives in one room all the time?” Marni frowned at me. “He must be crazy. And then there’s the ghost on the stairs.”

  “There’s a ghost on the stairs?” I asked. “This is news to me.”

  “Someone runs up and down in the middle of the night,” Marni said. “I heard it a few nights ago, waited until I heard whoever it was coming up to the second floor, and threw open the door. Guess what? No one there.”

  “Well, that’s done it,” I said. “I’m never sleeping again.”

  “Me either,” she said. “At least the weirdo next door is only creepy during the daylight hours.”

  “Siobhan thought he belonged here.” I shrugged. “If he was good enough for her, he’s good enough for us.”

  “Siobhan would have taken in Charles Manson,” Marni said. “Everybody was good enough for her.”

  We watched the stars in silence for a while.

  “I feel lost without Siobhan,” Marni said. “She was so smart. She always knew exactly what to do. She always had a plan. Didn’t matter what problem I had, I’d come to her with it and she’d say, ‘Let’s make a plan,’ and by the time we were done talking, everything was fine.”

  “What do you feel lost about?” I said. “Maybe I can help. I should help. You shouldn’t have to feel like you’re in this on your own. I can’t replace Siobhan, but I can maybe be … I don’t know. A better version of myself. Someone you can bring your problems to.”

  Marni said nothing for a long time, tracing the stars with her eyes.

  “There’s nobody around who I want to be like,” she said eventually. “There’s no blueprint for what I’m supposed to be doing. No map. Siobhan was pretty cool, so I thought, I’ll just try to be like her. But she’s gone, so now it’s like, who do I follow? Who am I supposed to be?”

  I knew Marni didn’t mean it, but her words hurt me. The kid in my care didn’t respect me enough to use me as a guide, a role model. But why should she? I’d spent the last two years hiding from my problems, running from grief, failing to make plans or see anything through. Well, all that was going to change. I didn’t tell her this, but I decided she was going to see a whole different side of me from then on. It was time to man up and show the kid she could rely on me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A CRISP, COLD morning. Frost on the windows and on the lawn at the back of the hous
e. I leaned against the door frame of the shower in the third-floor bathroom, Angelica behind me. Effie was looking down the shower drain with a flashlight, her nose inches from the tiles.

  “It’s the men,” Angelica announced, her arms folded defiantly. “They’re very hairy, and it’s coarse hair. I’m the only woman who uses this shower and my hair is fine and light. Almost silken. I’ll bet you get to the bottom of the blockage in that drain and find it’s men’s hair. That or soap slivers. They’re notorious for beginning a new soap too early and letting the sliver slither down the drain.”

  “Sliver slither,” I said. “Very alliterative of you, Ange.”

  “I try,” she said without irony, shrugging.

  “You know, I’m happy to do the gross stuff,” I told Effie. She waved me off without looking up and began poking experimentally down the hole with the end of a plunger. The women in the Inn didn’t mind attacking the less-than-desirable jobs, but it made me feel bad to let them do it. Maybe that was sexist. When Siobhan arrived at the house, she’d tackled the stained and rust-marked toilets first, not allowing me to take the job from her. I’d suggested we replace the toilets on every floor, but it was her mission to get them stark white with what she had. She’d gone at the second-floor toilet with every available cleanser, scrubbing with wire brushes and industrial sponges. Finally she decided that she needed to block the toilet and make a chemical soak. She sloshed all the ingredients into the bowl and walked away, but she had accidentally created some kind of spectacular reaction that caused the chemicals to expand, bubble, and flow out of the bowl and across the room. The toilet tiles on the second floor were white as snow, and there was a large white patch on the red carpet. The toilet itself still had rust stains.

  Effie started plunging the shower drain, her whole body jerking up and down, two hands on the stick.

  “There’s something metaphorically wonderful about a blocked drain,” Angelica said.

  “Oh?” I said, trying to prepare my mind for what was to come.

  Angelica, her finger on her chin, mused, “We cleanse our physical selves and the waste goes into a hole at our feet. A portal to a destination we don’t know or care about. It’s a penetrative act. Our waste goes into the earth. And then at some point, the earth decides it can take no more and it rejects us, and we must reflect on ourselves, on consent, on the fact that bodily secrets cannot simply be washed away. It’s almost spiritual. A daily baptism ritual interrupted by the protest of the raped earth.”

  Effie stopped plunging and looked up and over her shoulder at Angelica. Then she widened her eyes at me and returned to her task.

  “Perhaps I’ll recount this experience in my current work in progress. The chapter could be called ‘The Shower Drain: Baptism, Penetration, Earthly Desire.’” Angelica looked at me for my opinion. I nodded and tried to look impressed.

  Effie examined the shower drain again with the flashlight. She made a small noise, like a raspy laugh, and plunged her gloved hand down into the hole up to her elbow. Angelica and I watched, fascinated.

  Effie brought up a brown, wet, slippery lump and set it on the tiles beside her.

  The lump unfurled, shook itself off, and began cleaning its ears with its tiny pink hands. Angelica took one look at the rat in the shower, gave a strangled scream, shoved past me, and ran out the door.

  “How does a rat fit into the shower-baptism-penetration metaphor?” I asked Effie. She picked up the rat by the nape of its neck; the creature hung from her fingers, its pink belly dripping with shower water. She looked at the rat, then at me, then she rolled her eyes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE STRESS HIT me like a hangover, stripping all the joy from the morning-shower-rat experience. I stood at the edge of the boatyard smoking my first cigarette in more than a decade, my eyes aching and my stomach rolling. Nick, as usual after an episode, had little recollection of his adventures the previous evening. He’d been cheerful and upbeat when he’d dragged me out of bed before dawn and shown me an address for Rick Craft that Susan had reluctantly tracked down. I knew that Susan was regularly up before sunrise. On my way to the bathroom one morning, I’d seen her setting out for a run along the beach, wearing some black skintight ensemble with gloves to guard against the biting wind. I’d imagined her back when she was a routine-crazy FBI recruit getting sweaty on the tracks around Quantico before class.

  Nick did a quick lap of the graveyard of vessels beyond the wire and then appeared from between a disemboweled crab boat lying on its side and a stack of rotting wooden dinghies marked with the wet footprints of enormous gray gulls.

  “I’ve got them.” Nick pointed. “They’re toward the back.”

  “Why is Craft’s mail coming here? Don’t tell me he owns this boatyard,” I said.

  “No, but whoever does seems like a gifted entrepreneur. You’ll see what I mean. Come on.”

  I followed. Amid the dead and dying repossessed boats lying in the gravel and mud or propped up on wooden frames, signs of life were present. A bag of garbage lay outside the carcass of a partially burned houseboat. A T-shirt hung from the porthole of a tugboat to dry in the morning sunshine. People were living in the carcasses of the old vessels, probably paying someone cash for the privilege. It wasn’t a bad business model—the boats were useless scraps left over from a tourist and fishing trade on the downward slope. The residents here were most likely junkies and criminals who cut the landlord in on whatever mischief they cooked up to survive.

  I stepped over electrical cables running between Craft’s boat and two others, all of them sharing power leached from God knows where. We climbed a wooden ladder to the deck of the old dry-docked crab boat, startling a seagull that had been wandering among the rusted cages picking at sundried pieces of bait.

  The wheelhouse was full of bags of rotting garbage and discarded clothes; pigeons nested on the sprawling control board before the windows. We were drawn forward by the sound of rhythmic moaning. I followed Nick down the narrow stairs into a small room that smelled of the sleeping bodies there. Two men I recognized from the Greenfish were lying on their sides on narrow couches. Beer bottles were everywhere; my boot crunched a syringe on the rough carpet. The moaning was coming from a television screen bolted to the ceiling with wires hanging down to a DVD player balanced on a pile of old magazines. A porn film had been playing and was now stuck on the menu, the moaning a looped clip of a woman using a candle in a manner contrary to its intended purpose.

  A woman was lying on her side under a small table. Rick Craft, apparently asleep, was sitting on the floor with his back against a wall, a blanket around his shoulders like a big, stained coat.

  “The children,” I whispered to Nick. “The ones who died. They weren’t living here, were they?” He shrugged. I looked at the woman on the floor. Her greasy hair fell across her brow, and as I bent to get a better look, I noticed white foam at the corner of her mouth. I put two fingers on the side of her neck. Her pulse was faint.

  “Hey, asshole.” Nick put a boot into Craft’s side. “Rise and shine.”

  Craft opened his eyes and looked at Nick, then scratched at the sores on his badly shaved neck. Nick dragged the waking man to his feet and then slammed him against a wall as if he were banging an old television set to get the picture to clear.

  “What—what the fuck do you want?” Rick seized Nick’s arms, his eyes wide now. “I ain’t seen the guy! He was never here!”

  “You don’t even know who I’m looking for,” Nick snapped. I went to the table by the sleeping men and found exactly what I’d expected—two colored capsules. One was the yellow smiley identical to the one I had confiscated from Winley Minnow; the other was bright red, the face frowning.

  “Where are these coming from?” I showed Craft the capsules. He took a moment to focus, then tried to pry Nick’s hands off him.

  “You’re those fucks who were at the bar with Mayburn,” Craft snarled.

  “We weren’t with Mayburn,” I
said. “We just find you as repulsive as he does.”

  “The man asked you a question.” Nick gave Craft a shake so hard that his oversize head jiggled on his scrawny neck. “You the one who’s been handing those pills out to schoolkids?”

  “Fuck off!” Craft yelled. I glanced at the men on the couches, but they were down for the count. “You’re not cops. I’m not giving you shit. Get out of my house! Get your hands off me! Get—”

  I took Craft from Nick and pushed him down the narrow hall out of the sailors’ mess. I knew what I was looking for, having sensed its presence by the faint reek in the room. The toilet was at the head of the boat, beyond the upper freezer hold. I marched Craft through reeking water to the toilet cubicle and kicked open the door. Exactly as I’d expected—the junkies had no plumbing, so they’d simply pretended that they had. Craft saw what I planned to do and braced himself in the tiny doorway before I could force his head into the bowl heaped inches high with human waste.

  “Oh God, no.” He twisted in my hands. “No, no, no.”

  “You and your pals need a cleanup crew to come through here,” I said. “A man’s home is supposed to be his castle, isn’t it?” I realized I was biting into Craft’s flesh with my fingers.

  “Let me go!”

  I tried to force Craft into the cubicle, putting all my weight behind him, my hand on the back of his neck. I got him bent above the pile of feces. The smell was eye-watering.

  “Tell me where those pills came from.”

  “No!”

  “Tell me where they came from or you’ll be picking shit out of your nostrils for the next year and a half.”