The Inn(35)

In the hallway, Clay stopped me. “I need to talk to you,” he said. Effie left us together, and the big man turned his hat in his hands. “I know what you’re going to do.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE





I PUSHED THE door to the living room closed behind me. Clay looked exhausted in the light from the stairwell. In the tight space I could smell him; he’d spent forty-eight hours pounding the pavement, running down useless leads.

“I don’t know what you think my plan is,” I said, “because I haven’t fully formed it yet.”

“That’s why I want you to listen to me now.” Clay pointed a finger at my chest. “I know what kind of man you are, Bill. After what happened in Boston—”

“What do you mean, you know what kind of man I am?” I squared my shoulders and looked at my friend. Clay sighed. He had probably heard a version of what had happened to me in Boston from other cops. That version probably had all the major details correct, and I knew, even before he went on, what he was going to say.

“You’re a man who wants justice whether it’s inside or outside the law,” Clay said. He filled his chest with air and immediately seemed inches taller. “Well, I love the law. It’s why I do my job. I think it’s … it’s beautiful. And yes, sometimes it actually prevents people from getting what you think they probably deserve. But that’s the system. It’s all part of something bigger. And it’s my job to protect it. I don’t care if I have to find somewhere else to live. I’ll make you uphold the law if I have to.”

“You said you wanted me to put people’s heads in vises if I felt the need. Those were your words.”

“Maybe in Boston it’s literal, but up here, it’s a figure of speech,” Clay said.

“Mitchell Cline deserves to be dragged from the back of a crab boat,” I said. “The law and the beautiful system isn’t going to give us that.”

“I know.” He put his hands up. “But it’ll give us something if we’re patient and careful enough.”

“I don’t have any patience right now.” I waved my hand. “Marni is dead. She’s dead. Do you understand that? Do you feel it yet?”

“Of course I do. You’re upset,” he said. His voice was gravelly with emotion. “I am too. Everyone is. She was our little baby in the house, like Ange said. It’s too quiet without her.” The silence, like a fog, fell around us. Clay looked toward the stairs as though he thought he’d see her rushing down the steps to the front door. “But don’t let the anger drive you to do something stupid.”

“Whatever I do, it won’t be stupid,” I said. I turned to go, but his voice followed me.

“Don’t stray outside the lines again, Bill,” he said. “You know what happened last time.”





CHAPTER FORTY





SQUID WAS SCARED of Dogtown.

It wasn’t often that he acknowledged his fear. Living and working with Mitchell Cline had burned his nerves down to nothing, so terror was something abstract. He had enough difficulty just feeling the regular everyday emotions, and fear was an effort. Maybe the numbness had started earlier than Cline, under his father’s fists or in the rattling cell-blocks of juvie. Squid didn’t know. He hadn’t been forced to see a shrink in a long time, and anyway, he always lied to them.

But on his bike, pedaling through the dark woods of Dogtown, he felt the old familiar tingle of something like fear. The forest north of Gloucester was so dense, the morning light barely penetrated it. There were legends about this place, stories he’d heard from the locals of witches and ghosts and shit. There were weird rocks carved with words that appeared from between the trees like messages from someplace else, somewhere scary. He passed one that said USE YOUR HEAD, the letters green with moss. It made him think of the Druly woman, the sick, wet sound of the saw going through her spinal column as Turner heaved the tool back and forth. He swallowed hard, tried to shake off the feeling that someone was watching him as he rode. When Squid told Cline he didn’t want to do the drop-offs out here anymore, the man had laughed and increased the number of people on his route.

Squid looked over his shoulder at the winding road. Nothing.

In the distance he spied safety. The double-wide trailer that served as a makeshift bar in the evenings sat nestled in the trees. Squid had passed this place a couple of days earlier in the car with Cline and the others, everyone in the vehicle silent with the weight of their dark mission. Vermonte, the bar owner, would be pissed they’d dumped the Druly woman’s body out here, would probably bitch about it. But Squid wouldn’t pass on the dissent to Cline. Cline’s people looked out for one another, didn’t snitch. They all knew the man’s mood could turn on a dime.

Squid looked back, thinking he’d heard a car. Nothing again. His chest felt tight. There’d been what felt like a rock lodged in his throat since Cline had come to him the morning before and asked him to text Marni, a girl he’d known from school. The rock had grown as the ambulances and squad cars arrived at the house and people left the party and fled into the woods and surrounding streets. As he did with his fear, Squid pushed thoughts of Marni down. They would go away eventually. Nerves frayed. Emotions burned. There was no such thing as witches and no room in his life for guilt. He was a soldier who’d done what he’d been directed to do.