Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

“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.

“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.”