had allowed him to ingratiate himself with the survivors of Galileo. It had allowed him to become one with the denizens of the message boards. So, during the game, what behavior, if anything, was out of the ordinary? This was a challenge. He had just met these gentlemen. Who was he to say what was ordinary and what was unusual?
He needed assistance, and certainly not from the authorities. Where was it that Lester said he was staying? At a lighthouse? Yes. Nolan Worth ran it as a B and B. If Lester couldn’t help him, perhaps Nolan could.
Grover drove east through the wild birth pangs of a late-autumn rainstorm. The lighthouse, the storm—all the requisite Gothic ingredients for the end of his mystery.
28
“Mother of Christ,” mumbled Nolan Worth. He’d just banged his thumbnail with his hammer. Again. He was attempting to hang a mural that Halley bought at a charity auction. She wanted it above the front desk. But that’s where he had his genuine Saginaw M1 carbine rifle on display. He bought that rifle at a flea market when he was fourteen years old. He bought it with his own allowance money and he prized it above all his possessions.
Halley told him he could keep it under the desk, out of sight. If someone tried to rob the place, they would be in for a surprise. She said it with a wink and then returned to her sewing. She knew she didn’t need to say any more. He would do what she wanted. In the end, he always did.
Standing on a stepladder he’d built himself, on the second floor of the lighthouse he’d renovated himself, he gripped that hammer in his hand so tightly that he was convinced the wooden handle would split open. These days, he was rarely without his hammer. He even snuck it under his pillow one night. Just as he’d drifted off to sleep, it fell behind the bed with a loud clunk. Halley slept right through it. He reached behind the mattress and picked it up. When Halley slept, her lips were curled in a perpetual frown. He imagined driving the claw end of the hammer down and shattering that frown into a million pieces.
He sucked on his throbbing thumb and took another look at the nail in the wall. He’d had to go to the hardware store and buy heavy-duty nails that would support his wife’s mural (which must have been painted on some special canvas that was interwoven with steel). The nail’s head was almost as wide, and nearly as dense, as the male end of his trusty hammer. And this was just the first nail. He had two more to put up to properly support a mural of this size and weight…not to mention ugliness. It was folk art, which to Nolan Worth was just some salesman’s phrase for marketing childish doodles to rich wives. Halley’s expensive mural, for example, was ostensibly an oil painting of a lighthouse by the sea, only the lighthouse curved like a ripe banana and the sea was the color of snot.
Oh, what improvements he could make to the painting with his hammer…but who was he kidding? He was never going to actually harm anyone or anything. He was just a geriatric Walter Mitty living in a world of pipe dreams. He would for the rest of his pathetic life be nothing but a—
Bzzzt!
That was the front door. Were they expecting guests?
“Are we expecting guests?” he called out to Halley. Lester Stuart and his granddaughter were upstairs in their rooms. Rafe Stuart already had a key. He was certain there were no reservations scheduled, not for this time of year. That had been one of the reasons he and Halley had been so eager to take Rafe and Sophie in. They enjoyed the company. “Halley, are you expecting anyone?”
Bzzzt!
With a sigh, Nolan dismounted the stepladder and descended the spiral staircase to the ground floor. The ratatatat of raindrops echoed and abounded throughout the stairwell. Millions of watery nails, mused Nolan, shooting down from the sky. He put on his innkeeper face and opened the front door.
The man who stood there at the threshold was sopping wet and pale. His puffy black coat appeared to be at least two sizes too big for his slim frame, but maybe that was the fashion these days. Nolan never understood fashion. The man was in his late thirties, maybe, but possessed such alertness and wisdom in his eyes that Nolan