The Inn(70)

His voice was closer to hers now, inches away from Nick and me, on the other side of the window. I heard a whimper, and Nick flinched at the sound of it, his eyes distant and wide.

“Someone’s giving me a problem,” Cline said. “I don’t know what he’s going to try to do next. I want you and the kids out of the house.”

“But—”

“But?” Cline snapped. Another clatter, a cry of pain. “But what, Teri?”

Nick had heard enough. He tried to rise but I dragged him down.

“Nothing and no one is going to take me away from those boys,” Cline said. “Until I’ve tied up all the loose ends, you pack your shit and get out of here. I’ll call you with the hotel reservation.”

I heard his footsteps on the floorboards. The boys calling to him from the stairs. Cline’s wife, or ex-wife, started crying from the kitchen beyond where Nick and I hid.

“Do we go inside and help her?” Nick whispered. I thought for a moment, listening to the little boys going to their mother, asking her what was wrong. The helpless confusion of tiny children living in the shadow of a monster.

“There’s a way we can help her,” I told Nick. “And it’s the same way we help ourselves.”





CHAPTER NINETY-SIX





SUSAN KNEW WHAT I had decided to do. She stood with me in the kitchen looking worriedly over my work as I massacred some vegetables and then laid them out on a tray, spice-rubbed a shoulder of pork. A day had passed since Nick and I stood idly by while Cline made his ex-wife squeal in terror. The sound of her frightened voice had kept me up all night, Susan tossing and turning as I failed to settle down. Before dawn I’d crept to my basement bed, knowing I’d need her, at least, sharp and ready to be my ally against the man who had come unwelcome into our lives.

In the end, I decided that I had to finish Cline. One way or another, I had to remove him like a cancer from his ex-wife’s life, from my neighborhood. I had to release the choke hold he had on the addicts and hurting people of Gloucester and make sure that what happened to Marni didn’t happen to anyone ever again.

“Is there something a bit strange about preparing dinner for everyone when we’re about to do … ” She paused, shaking her head. “What we’re about to do?”

“I’m finding a weird comfort in it,” I said, wiping my hands on a dish towel. I tried to explain to her and myself that, somehow, knowing the people in my house were fed, even with my subpar culinary offerings, gave me some consolation. “It’s a job. I have to do it. We’ve got a couple renting the front room tonight. But I’m also doing it because it’s a relief, and I think we’d better grab hold of whatever relief we can get right now.”

She seemed to take the suggestion literally and put her arms around me. There was an exhilarating rush that shuddered through my body every time she touched me and also a warm, familiar sensation that I knew came from the feel of Siobhan in my arms not so long ago, the smoothness of her cheek against mine.

“We might never come back here,” she said. I gripped her shoulders. “Do you get that? We might put this dinner on and leave here and it might be the last time we walk out the door.”

I thought about Siobhan and the dinner she’d been coming home with, the last time she would walk out the door already having occurred without my knowledge. I hadn’t said goodbye properly. But even if I’d had the chance, I reminded myself, there’d have been an impossible amount of things to say.

“I don’t mean to be morbid.” She laughed, pulling away from me and wiping a tear from her eye. “It’s just been a while since I was in the thick of it. A couple of years writing about circus hamsters and yarn sales will do that to you. Make you realize that there are things at risk, important possibilities you might be about to destroy.”

She gestured to me as she said that. I wondered if I was one of those “important possibilities.” She was certainly one of mine. As I’d lain awake the night before, I’d watched her sleeping and known just how deeply I’d fallen for her already, how difficult it would be to climb back out of my desire for her. I was indeed risking Susan in my plan. I was risking everyone I cared about.

“But we have to do something,” I said, finishing my thought for her.

Doc Simeon came through the kitchen door and stood near us, frowning. I knew from the paleness in his cheeks and the tremble in his old hands that he’d done what I’d asked of him.

“Did he buy it?” I said.

“I think so,” the doctor replied. “I think we’re on.”





CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN





SQUID SAT IN the passenger seat next to me looking slightly disheveled, thinner than I’d last seen him, with bags under his bloodshot eyes; he looked like a cat who’d escaped into the wild and been found after a couple of weeks of hard living. Nick had left him in the care of his cousins and aunt in Augusta, but the boy hadn’t wanted to endanger his family and he’d wandered out into the night. Nick told me he’d found the boy hanging out with a menacing bunch of people in the parking lot behind a popular bar. He reeked of cigarettes and sweat.

Doc and Susan sat in the back seat, silent, as we followed Nick and Malone on the highway down to Boston.