The Inn(4)

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.”

“You prefer individual jerks?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re a lone wolf who’s lost his mate.” Nick rolled his eyes. “Your heart is broken and it can’t be mended, and now you’re cursed to wander the earth alone.”

“I kind of wish I were alone right now,” I said, nodding. I looked in the rearview mirror at Mrs. Minnow and changed the subject like a practiced master. “What’s Winley done this time, Mrs. Minnow?”

Gloucester is a small town. When Siobhan and I moved into the area, the story started circulating that I was ex–Boston PD, that I’d been sacked and was bitter about it. I hadn’t done anything to quash that rumor, taking up residence at the back of the lobster shack on the waterfront most afternoons, downing JD shots and refusing to answer questions about it. A couple of months after Siobhan got the Inn up and running, people began coming to me with issues they didn’t trust Sheriff Spears to handle. They wanted me to talk to the angry neighbor about his aggressive dog. To hustle the scary homeless guy camped out near the pier a little farther down the road. Find the punks who had spray-painted graffiti on an old woman’s fence and rattle their skulls a bit.

In truth, being the unofficial town muscle was far more satisfying than running the Inn. Riding around with Nick beside me, I could pretend I was back in the city before my terrible fall. I could imagine sometimes that Nick was Malone, the version of my old friend before he’d betrayed me and morphed before my very eyes into a liar and a schemer. Little jobs like this took me into the past that I never stopped thinking about, a time before I lost everything.