Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

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 house. 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.