The Inn - James Patterson Page 0,7
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.
“Just a bit of good old-fashioned kid wrangling.” Nick made fighting fists and slow-punched Effie in the ribs until she pushed him off. We told Effie about the situation and she tugged on an earlobe, thinking.
She made a typewriter motion and pointed to the house, and I nodded.
“What is that?” Nick asked. “Piano?”
“Typewriter.” I started walking. “She means we should go ask Susan.”
“When are you gonna learn proper sign language?” Nick asked Effie. Effie raised her middle finger over her shoulder and went back to work.
I don’t know what brought Susan Solie and Effie Johnson to the house or what their history together is. They came not long after Siobhan was killed and asked for cheap permanent rooms, and I knew right away they were not what they seemed. The jagged scar across the beautiful black woman’s throat was enough to tell me she had a past, and I’d glimpsed her in her room doing