The Inn(6)
“I’m so tired of this.” Derek looked up at me. A hopeless father.
“This is a regular thing?”
“We knew he’d been smoking weed. But it’s never been this bad.”
“I’ve got news for you, Derek,” I said. “This ain’t weed.”
I returned to the kitchen, saw Nick trying to talk Winley out of his mumblings about scientists and doctors. I went to the kid’s room and looked in. Curtains drawn, clothes on the floor two feet deep, an unmade bed, and a strange damp feeling to everything. Typical teenage bedroom except for the burn marks on the cluttered desk under the window and the scraps of aluminum foil and cigarette lighters. There were cans of beans lined up on the windowsill and empty ones stacked in the bin by the door.
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.