Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

At the end of the table, Marni stood up. She was the resident wayward teenager, Siobhan’s second cousin who’d been sentenced to the house for having constant screaming matches with her mother and running away multiple times. As I sat in my chair watching her prepare to speak, I felt a twinge of guilt. Since I’d lost my wife, Marni had been my responsibility, and like I’d done with everything else, I let her slip. She’d gotten a couple of piercings on her face recently, and there was a little pink heart on her left cheekbone that I wasn’t convinced she drew on every day with lip liner despite what she’d told me. She was fifteen. Tattoos, piercings, and the attitude to go with them. She smoothed out a crumpled piece of paper extracted with some difficulty from the pocket of her jeans. A little speech. I rubbed my temples.

“Now, listen,” Marni said, wagging a finger with chipped black nail polish at me. “We know you said you didn’t want anything like this, Bill. But we’ve all got something to say about Siobhan, and we think you should hear it. The first year, nobody did anything, you know? It’s kind of like we ignored it. And that just makes me totally sad.”

“So get on with it, then.” I gave a dismissive wave. My best friend in the house, Nick Jones, elbowed me in the ribs. Nick and I pull each other into line whenever we can, but it’s not always easy. I like the muscle-bound black man because he’s ex-army and has hundreds of horror stories from his time in the Middle East that are so hideous, they pulverize my own trauma like a sledgehammer smashes a walnut.

“Give it a rest, man,” Nick said.

“You give it a rest.” I took a croissant from the plate in front of me and tossed it at him. He caught it against his chest and started eating it.

“The thing I miss most about Siobhan,” Marni told the gathering, “is her terrible taste in music.”

Everybody nodded in agreement; some people laughed. I clasped my hands so tight, my knuckles cracked, and I searched the sky for planes.

“Siobhan was a great cook, and she used to play music in the kitchen,” Marni said, looking at her paper for guidance. “You couldn’t get from the back of the house to the stairs without her grabbing you and making you dance around the kitchen with her. It was so embarrassing. She filled the house with these lame love ballads. Whitney. Bonnie. Celine. Really ancient, weird stuff.”

“Ancient?” I scoffed. I leaned in toward Nick. “The prime of Celine Dion’s career was the mid-nineties.”

“Shut it,” he whispered.

“I liked the way Siobhan sang Bonnie Tyler with her arm out and her face all crumpled up, using her wooden spoon like a microphone,” Marni said. “I know all the words to those songs because of Siobhan, and even though they suck, I’ll never forget them. I miss her so bad. I’ve already got a mom, but Siobhan was, like, my better mom.”

Everybody looked to me to see what I thought of Marni’s tribute. I folded my arms and sighed.

The second person to stand was Sheriff Clayton Spears. He too had a piece of paper with a prepared speech. For a moment, I appreciated the amount of planning that had gone into this breakfast memorial for my wife that I’d been railroaded into attending. The table was cluttered with yellow paper plates and yellow napkins, and someone had filled several glasses with yellow flowers. Her favorite color.

Clay was in uniform, likely because he’d just worked an overnight shift. His enormous belly sagged so low in front, it hid his gun belt.

“You all know, uh, that I came to the house because my marriage broke down.” Clay’s chin wobbled with emotion. “It’s not easy to be a proud man when your wife runs off with someone else. Because of my position as the head of law enforcement in Gloucester, the whole town knows my story.”

Sheriff Spears’s wife hadn’t run off with just anyone. She’d left him for a young male model who had been staying with some friends in the apartment next door to theirs for a single weekend. It had taken him all of two days to convince Mrs. Spears to dump her life with the sheriff, pack a bag, and jump in the car with him and a crew of beautiful nineteen-year-old men. She hadn’t been seen since.

“Siobhan stayed up with me many nights, listening to me talk through my breakup,” Clay said. “She was the best listener. She was endlessly encouraging. We would sit out here in the garden eating slices of pepperoni pizza and looking at the stars and … and she just made me feel like … you all know I’m no George Clooney. But Siobhan told me that I deserved love and that I was a great man, and I believed her.”

Clay sat down quickly, perhaps attempting to get his butt planted before he burst into tears, and the plastic lawn chair beneath him creaked in a concerning way.

I noticed a car drive up to the house and stop with a spray of gravel.

“My name is Angelica Grace Thomas-Lowell.” The third speaker had risen from her chair. Angelica had lived in the house for more than two years, but for some reason she always introduced herself with her full name. “I’m a vegan. Activist. Provocateur. Bestselling author.”

The car at the front of the house was a welcome distraction. I leaned to the side in my chair to see around Angelica, but her thin, veiny arms were in the way. The paper she held looked like a full page of typed notes.

“‘I’d like to announce firstly my sincere appreciation for Siobhan’s constant willingness to act as a confidential sounding board for my ideas,’” Angelica read. “‘The creative process isn’t always straightforward. It’s fluid, magnetic, sometimes chaotic. Though Siobhan’s reading history was firmly located in trash novels, I found her somewhat naive critiques of my works in progress—those few I entrusted to her—refreshing.’”

Nick suddenly stood up beside me. I looked over and saw a woman running from the house toward the gathering. Not a plane crash, gas-leak explosion, or ferocious bear, but something . I stood with him.

I recognized the woman from town. Ellie Minnow. She grabbed Nick by his scar-covered arm.

“Nick, Bill, you’ve gotta help me. It’s Winley.”

“What is it?” Nick asked. “What’s happened?”

“We’ll help.” I grabbed my phone from the table. “Whatever it is, we’ll help.”

Marni was already pouting. I brushed her shoulder in consolation as I passed. “Sorry, everyone, duty calls. Feel free to continue on without us.”

CHAPTER FIVE

I DROVE, NICK in the seat beside me, Ellie in the back. The gravel road to the Inn became the forest-lined road into town, curving around the marina jam-packed with bright, glossy cruisers and crab boats weeping rust. Nick was giving me the side-eye.

“What?”

“The crew were trying to do a nice thing for you, Cap,” he said.

Nick calls me “Cap,” short for Captain . It’s not a habit from his army days but a carefully chosen term that I take seriously. Everybody needs a captain in life—a guiding force, a confidant, a rock, an anchor when tumultuous winds blow in. Siobhan had been my captain. Nick had picked me as his when he first moved in, but I had disappointed him ever since. The expression I saw on his face now hurt me, the way remembering how Siobhan danced and sang and listened and laughed hurt. Like a kick to the chest.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked Nick. “I told them I didn’t want a memorial.”

“Those people back there, they loved her too, you know,” Nick said. “You don’t get to be the only person who misses Siobhan.”

“Well, they can go miss her in their way, and I’ll miss her in mine,” I said. “I don’t like circle jerks.”