Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

Someone shouted something, interrupting a brief by his man Turner that he’d hardly been listening to, and when Cline looked up, he saw a furious late-middle-aged white woman leaving her table and coming over to their booth. One of the locals, he assumed, judging by the stretched neck of her Walmart T-shirt, the bottle dye job, the eighties ice-blue eye shadow. Cline sipped his wine, steeling himself.

“You.” The woman pointed across the table at him, ignoring Russ, Turner, and Bones. “I know who you are.”

The woman was spitting as she talked. Cline glanced at the table from whence she’d come and saw the remains of battered-shrimp cocktails, wilted salads. A beer-bellied man cowering in embarrassment and a toddler in a filthy high chair smearing itself and everything within reach with ketchup.

“My daughter goes to your people for oxy,” the woman said. “She’s twenty-one. Kaylen Druly. Do you know her? I bet you don’t know any of their names. Her wrists are like this. Like this!” Cline watched the woman make a circle with her fingers about the circumference of a golf ball. “I haven’t seen or heard from my daughter in two weeks . I’m raising her son because of you. Did you know that? I’m sixty-three years old!”

Russ and Bones were out of the booth, pushing the woman and swearing, but she struggled with them, knocked Cline’s glass of sauvignon blanc into his lap. Cold rushed over his shirt, his thighs; the chilled wine reached into his jock and sent icy fingers around his balls. Cline stood, dabbing at the fabric. He had a huge stain, like he had pissed his pants. A couple of waiters entered the fray. People were leaning out of their booths, pointing, whispering.

“They brought their poison into this town!” the woman howled.

It was a good performance. The crowded restaurant fell silent. Cline knew the story; the girl had probably started with oxycodone prescribed by her doctor for some mild injury. Whiplash from a fender-bender. Muscle spasms from lifting the kid wrong. The girl would be one of the skeletons Cline never saw, the ones who met his boys in beat-up houses on the outskirts of town or in cars in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. The oxy would have led to heroin. The heroin would have led to fentanyl—the gray death. Cline smiled. Maybe he’d be on to Portland sooner than he’d thought.

The men returned to their seats as the waiters pushed, prodded, and cajoled the angry woman and her family out. Cline didn’t need to say it, but he looked his boys in the eyes anyway as he refilled his glass from the bottle on the table.

“Druly,” he said. “Write it down.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THERE ARE DUTIES at the Inn that are mine alone, no matter how desperately I’d like to delegate them, so I headed back to take care of them. I wanted to follow Craft to his house and give him a parenting lesson with my fists, but I knew I needed time to think, to cool down, or I’d get myself arrested and lose whatever leads I had on the smiley-face pills. On my way back, I dropped Nick in town and stopped to watch the waves crashing off Norman’s Woe, a rock reef visible from the shore. I’m not the world’s most imaginative guy, but now and again, back when I was mourning my lost job and trying to connect with Gloucester, I would go and look at the reef at low tide and think about the ships scuttled there in the night, the sickening grind of the hull, the panic and sorrow of the crew. Gloucester is proud of its shipping history, and for me, looking out at the rocks and imagining the brutal, tenuous lives of the fishermen was a sort of memorial. Sometimes the tourist boat Adventuress would come sailing by to add weight to my fantasies, the gaff-rigged schooner slicing through waves toward the harbor as travelers aboard took pictures with their phones.

I got back to the Inn and checked on a few overnight guests—a guy in a suit who seemed to have driven a long way from somewhere and a couple of young lovebirds—all the time thinking about voices calling for help in the stormy night and the reassuring light of shore.

One of my permanent residents, Neddy Ives, lives in a room on the third floor. He actually lives there on a permanent basis, seemingly never leaving the room, which is the only one that has an attached en suite bathroom with a shower and toilet. None of the residents, including me, have ever seen Neddy. Siobhan described him as a tall, quiet man in his fifties who wouldn’t meet her gaze and who paid his rent into our bank account via a legal firm in Boston called Benkely and Marsh. My theory is that Ned is an ex-inmate most comfortable existing in one room, but I don’t know for sure. That afternoon I warmed up the frozen dinner Neddy likes and set it outside his door, then I took away the trash he’d left secured in a little bag on the doorknob. After that I started dinner for the crew, a task that heaped more dread onto the already sizable pile sitting like rocks in my stomach.

I’m the world’s worst cook. That’s not an exaggeration. There are people who burn stuff, undercook stuff, always turn out watery or misshapen or weird-tasting food. I do all of those things. My fare is burned on the outside, raw on the inside, and the residents of the Inn frequently have to guess what I was trying to make and what the ingredients are. My culinary failures are not for lack of trying. I follow recipes, both the published ones in heavy, sauce-splattered books and the almost indecipherable scrawled ones Siobhan left on the backs of envelopes and receipts.

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.”