Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

I lifted some of the trash off the boy’s desk and found a small yellow capsule with a smiley face printed on it. I turned the pill in my fingers, shook it, heard powder shift inside.

Nick appeared at the bedroom door and started picking shards of glass out of his palms like they were cactus needles. “What do you think?” he asked. “Crack?”

“PCP, maybe,” I said. “If it was crack, he’d be walking around town knocking over fire hydrants. Angel dust makes you burrow. Explains his aversion to going to school. He’s been living in his little nest in here where he feels safe.”

I showed him the capsule. He took it and looked at it.

“Did he say where he got it?” I asked.

“He says he got it at school,” Nick said, giving the capsule back to me. “A kid on a bike gave it to him for free. I don’t know how true that is. He thinks some doctors are about to abduct him in a van. Here.” He gave me a small piece of paper with a number scrawled on it.

“What’s this?”

“Don’t know.” Nick shrugged. “I asked him where the drugs came from and he told me about the kid on the bike and handed me that. I checked his phone. He dialed this number this morning at about eight.”

“Let’s chase it down,” I said. “I was looking for something to do with my day.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

WE DROVE BACK to the house on the edge of the water, both of us silent, thoughtful. Hilly, seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts, sticks out like a thumb into the cold and unforgiving North Atlantic; it’s a place of windswept stone beaches and pretty winter trees. The town swells in tourist season, but it doesn’t have the pull of Manchester-by-the-Sea, with its glossy storefronts full of work by local artists, or Salem, with its rich, dark history. Roughness comes to Gloucester in hockey season, when Bruins fans pressed too tight into bars built hundreds of years ago get emotional and take the fight from the screen to the beer-soaked boards. It’s not a drug-dealer town. It’s not a PCP-and-teenage-violence town. Nick and I didn’t say it, but we knew that what we’d just seen didn’t belong here.

As I pulled up to the house, I winced for the thousandth time at its condition. The Inn on the edge of the water was old and battered and needed work. Siobhan had been excited about redecorating it, constantly coming home with fabric samples and carpet swatches and those little color cards you get from the paint shop. Even though Siobhan lived here only a few months, she’d left her warm, gentle touch on the place. She’d painted the kitchen a sky blue and filled it with hanging ferns and she’d replaced the back-splash herself, swearing like a sailor and cursing the world, apparently a requirement when she performed any manual labor. When she slipped into the shower with me in the evenings, I’d pick lumps of grout and paint out of her hair, and she’d tell me about her plans for the loft, her major project. That was going to be our place, our sanctuary. She wanted to put a skylight in and open the nailed-shut windows so we could hear the lapping of the waves on the sand as we fell asleep at night.

I hadn’t been up to the loft since she died. I lived in the basement and refused almost all maintenance requests from long- and short-term guests who stayed at the house. The plants in the kitchen were overgrown, the plumbing was shot, and the boards on the back porch creaked like an ancient pirate ship.

When we arrived, the house handywoman, Effie Johnson, was crouched by the basement window, sanding and scraping, preparing to paint the house exterior—something I’d forbidden. About twice a week Effie confronted me with a can of paint Siobhan left behind, sunflower yellow, and tapped it sternly with her finger, making a tok-tok-tok sound on the lid.

“Nope,” I always told her. “Not this week.”

I let Effie do some things. She mows the lawns, chops firewood, cleans, repairs broken furniture, and keeps the possums out of the basement in exchange for her rent. She does a good job, but the main reason I like her is that someone tried to kill her once, slashing her throat from ear to ear and making mincemeat of her voice box, so she can’t talk at all and thus can’t ask me about my grief, how I’m coping, whether I’d like to share my feelings about my dead wife.

When Nick and I approached, Effie looked up at us, then picked up the paint can from beside her, which she must have had waiting in case I came around. She rapped her knuckles on the lid.

“Maybe next week,” I said. “You seen Clay?”

She made a sleeping motion with her hands under her cheek. Then she gestured at the cuts and grazes Nick and I had acquired in the tango with Winley Minnow, questioning.

“Just a bit of good old-fashioned kid wrangling.” Nick made fighting fists and slow-punched Effie in the ribs until she pushed him off. We told Effie about the situation and she tugged on an earlobe, thinking.

She made a typewriter motion and pointed to the house, and I nodded.

“What is that?” Nick asked. “Piano?”

“Typewriter.” I started walking. “She means we should go ask Susan.”

“When are you gonna learn proper sign language?” Nick asked Effie. Effie raised her middle finger over her shoulder and went back to work.

I don’t know what brought Susan Solie and Effie Johnson to the house or what their history together is. They came not long after Siobhan was killed and asked for cheap permanent rooms, and I knew right away they were not what they seemed. The jagged scar across the beautiful black woman’s throat was enough to tell me she had a past, and I’d glimpsed her in her room doing chin-ups on a steel bar she’d erected near the windows; the bed was made impossibly tight, with razor-sharp hospital corners, and the shelves were completely bare of possessions. Susan was ex-FBI and didn’t mind admitting it. She explained that she had moved into town after taking early retirement. She’d shrugged when I’d asked about her friend Effie and her mildly psychopathic living habits.

Nick and I trudged into the dining room, where Susan was working on her laptop, writing articles for the local rag. I pushed the laptop closed and Susan gave an exaggerated sigh as Nick sat down beside her.

“We need you,” I said.

“What are you two bozos up to now?” she asked, picking up a mug of coffee and sipping it while she looked us over. “I’m on deadline here.”

“Deadline?” Nick flipped Susan’s blond ponytail. “What happens if you miss the cutoff? The crab wranglers of Gloucester won’t have their weather report this week? Oh, wait, you’ve got a big scoop—yarn-store sale this Saturday, twenty percent off crochet hooks.”

Susan gave Nick a withering look. Next to her computer was a sheet of paper she’d been using to design the newspaper’s weekly crossword.

“Four across, five letters. The clue is ‘intelligent,’” I read. “Susan, that’s a bit narcissistic, don’t you think?”

“Ah, yes.” She wrote the letters of her name in the boxes with a pencil. “I knew I was onto something there. Now state your purpose or leave me be. I’m actually being productive. You might try it some time.”

“Clay’s sleeping off the night shift and there’s a rumor someone’s moving in on local high-schoolers with free samples of candy,” I said. “You heard anything like that?”

“No.” Susan’s smile disappeared. “Jesus. Here? In Gloucester?”

“Yeah, here,” I said. “Yarn-store central.”

We told her about Winley, and I put the capsule I’d found in the kid’s bedroom on the dining-room table between us. Susan examined the pill, then took the paper with the phone number from me and turned the laptop away from Nick. As I’d hoped she would, she used whatever mysterious connection she still had with the Bureau to find the number.