CHAPTER THIRTY
ANGELICA STOPPED ME as I tried to make my way into the house, putting a hand out like a traffic guard.
“We have a problem.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said, sighing.
“Come with me,” she said. We walked through the house to the porch, where Effie, her back to me, was sitting cross-legged on the edge. Angelica and I came around in front of Effie, and I saw she was eating a large chocolate chip cookie. On her left knee, a plump brown rat sat on its haunches, a small shard of cookie in its hands. It was turning the cookie crumb around and around, nibbling the edges as it went.
“This is happening.” Angelica pointed sharply at the rat on Effie’s knee. The little animal didn’t flinch, and neither did Effie.
“Effie is eating a cookie with a friend,” I noted.
“That thing is not a friend!” Angelica threw her hands in the air. “It’s a parasite-riddled, flea-bitten rodent!”
Effie and I looked at the rat. It sniffed the air between nibbles of the cookie shard, its tiny pink nose twitching.
“To be fair,” I told Effie, “this is a pet-free household.”
Effie froze at my words, shocked. She put down her cookie and gestured to the rat, then she pointed to herself and shrugged dramatically. After that she spread her hands to indicate the porch, the house, the forest.
“He’s not your pet, you’re saying,” I surmised. “He goes where he wants.”
Effie picked up her cookie again.
“This is ridiculous,” Angelica said. “The house has always had rats. I understand. We live in the woods. It’s bound to be a problem. But Effie, it’s your job as the groundskeeper to keep them outside the house.”
Effie stared at Angelica, munching her cookie, totally unrattled by her tirade. The rat finished its treat and started cleaning its ears.
“If it bites one of us, it could give us rabies!” Angelica cried.
“Perhaps we could have the rat seen by a veterinarian?” I suggested. “Given a little flea bath, maybe?”
“You can’t be serious. This is beyond belief!” Angelica cried. “Rats are not pets! They’re vermin!”
“Is it likely to bite anyone?” I asked Effie. “I mean, it’s something to consider. Why is it so tame?”
Effie shrugged again. She made a chopping motion at her neck, which was quite startling, given the huge scar running across her throat. She used her thumb and forefinger to indicate a small amount, an inch, and then tapped her forehead.
“Die … almost … when you almost die, you … go crazy?”
Effie nodded. Pointed to her chest, tapped her forehead, tapped the rat’s head.
“You’re crazy. The rat’s crazy,” I translated.
Effie nodded, winked at me. Angelica gave a growl of frustration and stormed away. I sat beside Effie and looked at the rat. I reached slowly toward it with my index finger, and the creature took my finger in its small pink hands, gave my fingernail a gentle, experimental nibble, then turned back to cleaning its ears, apparently having decided that I was inedible. I gave the little rat a stroke on the head. Effie was watching me, smiling.
“I guess we can make one exception to the no-pets rule,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
SUSAN FOUND ME in the kitchen picking dried sauce off one of Siobhan’s old recipe cards. She must have sensed my desperation, because she came and put a hand on my shoulder, then took the card from my hand.
“You look stressed,” she said.
“Siobhan used to make this lasagna,” I said. “It was Marn’s favorite. I’m going to make it tonight, try to cheer the kid up a bit.”
“I thought I saw Marni leaving just before.” Susan pointed to the back door.
“Oh. She might have gone for a walk. She’ll definitely be here for dinner. We’re going to have a talk. Decide some things about her future.” I took the card and frowned at it. “I’m trying to get my head out of the sand and take some responsibility for that kid. She needs guidance.” I found my phone and sent Marni a quick text asking where she was.
“Well, this recipe’s not much to go on.” Susan laughed. “It just lists ingredients. There are no amounts.”
“Siobhan was a bit of a creative chef.” I sighed.
“Let me help.” Susan took a big chef’s knife from the block on the counter. “I may be old-school Bureau but that doesn’t mean I’m not creative.”
She took an onion from the basket on the counter and started peeling it. I hesitated by her side, paralyzed with guilt.
“You know,” she said, “you can ask for help around here. I know you’ve got Effie doing the chores, but I’ve been feeling like there’s stuff I could be doing. Things I’m good at.” She was turning the onion into tiny, impossibly perfect squares with the speed and precision of a machine.
“Well, it’s not your responsibility.” I looked away. “I mean, you’re just a resident.”
“Just a resident.” She rolled her eyes. “If you think we’re all just residents here, you’ve lost your mind.”
I poured us a couple of glasses of wine and turned the radio on. The sun had set, leaving a stripe of purple light on the ocean. I caught my reflection in the window above the sink and I realized that even with the horror of what Clay had told me that evening and despite the way my skin burned over Cline’s words and my heart sank with thoughts of Siobhan and how Marni needed her, I was smiling. Smiling with an unfamiliar but welcome sense of hope.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Susan said suddenly. She put the knife down, reached into her pocket, and brought out a brass doorknob. I took it and sighed.
“You too? Why are they all giving up at once?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed. “Maybe the ghost on the stairs is doing it.”
“You’ve heard the ghost on the stairs as well, huh?”
“Yeah.” She went back to her work. “You probably can’t hear it down in your scary basement. Seriously, Bill, you ought to move up to the loft. That room is so pretty. I can’t understand why you keep it locked up.”
“I can’t understand why you won’t tell me what’s going on with you and Effie,” I said. “What the hell happened to her? Who tried to kill her? Is she here under your protection?”
“Whoa!” Susan put down the knife, held her hands up. “That was a swift right-angle in the conversation.”
She was right. I’d leaped at her, pushing about things I knew she didn’t want to talk about in response to her hitting on something I didn’t want to talk about. The loft had been Siobhan’s dream place. Sometimes I’d catch her looking out the cracked window at the sea, her shadow stretched on the floor. Our bedroom. Our safe place.
“I was just thinking about Effie.” I cleared my throat. “She’s got a little pet now.”
“The rat. I saw.” Susan nodded. “Look, Effie and I met through the Bureau, yes. Something terrible happened to her, yes. We’re both here, and we’d like to keep that discreet, yes. But that’s as far as I’ll go on that, Bill.”
I took up my knife.
“Siobhan wanted us to take the loft,” I said. “And I’m not ready to be up there without her. That’s as far as I’ll go on that.”
There was tension in the kitchen. We both worked on our separate chopping blocks, waiting for it to melt away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
HE WAITED UNTIL she was in that golden haze, tipsy but not taken, swaying to the music and smiling at boys who wouldn’t know what to do with her even if they got her in their grasp. And yes, it was only boys who surrounded her, some of them frat douchebags who couldn’t carry on a conversation with her without looking down her top or letting their eyes rove over other girls, others local dropouts hunting for easy prey they could take to the woods behind the house. Cline, resting his arms on the second-floor banister, watched her come up the stairs, a confident smile on his face.
Self-assurance. She’d probably never seen it before. She was
drawn to his stylish clothes, his superior gaze, the expensive wine in his hand. He could see her recognizing him from that afternoon, when he’d been surrounded by men he owned and commanded. She probably wondered if this guy was the king of the castle. Of course he was.
“Nice place,” she said, trying to be casual. “What’s the party for?”
He shrugged and walked over to her. “When a man’s successful, he ought to celebrate it every now and then.”
He could tell that his words tickled something inside her, stroked her in that exact right spot, piqued her interest. Success wasn’t something that rolled around here in waves. She was looking for it, the key to the door that led out of her small-town world, the path to the kinds of things she saw in movies. Big houses, lavish parties, trips to New York, yachts. Dreamland on the horizon. Cline had her pegged. She was probably washing dishes in a café around here somewhere, scraping fried food off plates for minimum wage. Cleaning toilets. Daddy was absent—one of the crab wranglers who left and returned in the dark—and she’d promised herself a long time ago she wouldn’t end up with someone like him. Cline watched the pink lights dancing in her eyes.
“You want a little tour?” he asked, sliding his hand down her arm and curling his fingers around hers. He saw goose bumps rise on her neck.
“Sure.”
“We’ll start with the VIP room.” He smiled.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE SMELL OF the food and the sound of the music brought people into the kitchen. Nothing I’d ever cooked before had smelled this good, but Susan had helped, and she had the chef’s wisdom. She knew the onion went into the pot before the carrots and the meat needed to be browned before the wine was added.
Nick came into the kitchen and lifted pot lids and smelled and stirred things and raised his eyebrows at the sight of me drinking wine and cooking and bopping around the little space with a woman who was not my wife. I ignored him.
Soon Effie was there tapping her wrist, demanding to know when this glorious-looking feast would be ready, and I shooed the two of them, which left room for Doc Simeon to come wandering in. He was carrying his ivory-handled walking stick and had a book under his arm that was so thick, it threatened to capsize the guy like a small, fat tugboat. I tilted my head to look at the title. The Science of Flight in Apoidea, whatever that was.
“I’ve been meaning to come up and talk to you,” I told him as he watched Susan spreading garlic butter on thick slices of bread.
“Yes, I see you’ve hired a professional chef.” He went to the pot of meat sauce and scooped out a taste for himself. “Will this mean a rent increase?”
“It’s just lasagna.” Susan rolled her eyes. “Everybody’s acting like Nigella Lawson is in the house.”
“Have you tasted this guy’s oatmeal?” Doc pointed his walking stick at me. “How on earth does one miscalculate the preparation of oatmeal?”
“My culinary miscalculations aside,” I said, “I want to send Nick your way.”
“Ah, yes.” The doctor nodded. “I’ve heard about his night-time adventures. Bill, I spent fifty years as a general practitioner. That’s half a century, you know. The temptation was always there to branch out, to follow my proclivities into other, more prestigious rooms. The operating room. The psychiatrist’s consultation room. But you know, I was never happier than when I had a small office and it was just the patient, his sore throat, and me.”
“I think you might be underselling yourself, Doc,” I said.
The doctor turned to go and then turned back. He beckoned me to the small alcove off the kitchen and stood there, apparently debating with himself about something. In the closeness of the space I realized, not for the first time, how small he was.
“Look.” He hung his walking cane over his arm and fiddled with the book. “I know what’s going on with you and this … this local drug-lord character. I think you should consider backing off.”
“Backing off?” I stood straighter.
“I’ve dealt with addicts in my time,” he said. “I remember when heroin hit. People walked around looking like skeletons, like zombies, their teeth and hair falling out. You’d think that when a person woke up in the morning and saw a living corpse reflected in the bathroom mirror, that would be enough to make him stop. But these people can’t stop. There’s no rationality to it. The body starts to need it to function.”
“I’ve seen that sort of thing too.” I shrugged. “I was a street cop for nearly twenty years. I’ve seen my fair share of junkies.”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that if you get rid of Cline, you’ll leave maybe hundreds of people lost in very dark, turbulent seas,” he said. “We’re lucky. We have a rehabilitation center in Gloucester, which is more than I can say for much of New England. But they’ll get overloaded. People will be turned away. They’ll get desperate. They’ll rob the local pharmacies, try to cook the stuff themselves, start hunting one another for what little supply is left.”
“It sounds like you’re trying to tell me not to go after this guy at all,” I said.
The doctor sighed, took the heavy book from under his arm, and held it in his hands.
“This is not like you,” I told him. “I’ve been in your room, Doc. I’ve seen all those certificates on your wall. Last Christmas, every second letter through the slot was a card for you from some old patient. You’re not the guy who says ‘Live and let live’ for scumbags like Cline.”
“I just want you to consider the fact that there are thousands of guys like Cline out there,” Doc said. “It won’t make any difference if you bring this guy down.”
“It’ll make a difference to me,” I said.
The doc shrugged and wandered off, still holding the enormous book in his hands. I checked my watch, wondering where Marni was. She hadn’t answered my last text, so I sent another. Susan had taken the sauce off the heat and was laying sheets of lasagna in a baking tray. I went to her and dared, in the warmth of the wine and the strange new calm the doctor’s words had brought down on me, to reach out and touch her arm.
“Thanks for this,” I said. “Marni’s going to love it, wherever the hell she is.”
“I’m sure she’s on the way.” Susan put her hand on mine. “She’ll be back before you set the table. You’ll see.”
I picked up a handful of cutlery and a stack of napkins.
The gunshots started just as I opened the dining-room door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE BULLETS TORE through the room, punching holes in the weatherboard exterior, ripping and splintering the walls and shattering the windows. I dropped to the floor with no idea where the shots were coming from. A cabinet beside me seemed to explode, peppering the table with shards of glass. In the chaos, I saw Angelica at the end of the dining-room table holding a thick pile of papers that disappeared in a cloud of white from under her hands.
The drive-by shooting took only seconds; the house was blasted with noise and destruction for less than a minute before the car outside skidded on the gravel and sped away. But it felt like much longer as I cowered on the floor, my face in the carpet, listening to the screams of my friends.
Their voices rose at once, a confused wailing.
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Help!”
“What happened?”
“Is everyone all right?”
Susan burst through the door beside me and ran through the room to the front of the house. I followed. The car was gone. We grabbed at each other; her nails bit into my arms and shoulders.
“Are you—”
“Are you okay? I’m okay!”
“I’m okay.” Susan ran her hands over herself, gripped her hair. “Jesus!”
Nick and Effie were bent over Angelica on the floor. The author was clutching her upper arm as blood ran between her fingers. Pieces of her exploded manuscript marked with slashes of a red pen were in her hair. Susan dashed to the medicine cabinet. Doc Simeon hadn’t decided the coast was clear yet and rema
ined under the table, his eyes huge and his mouth downturned.
“How bad is it?” I went to Angelica.
“I’ve been shot,” she said, her voice more wonder than surprise. “Can anyone believe it? Someone shot me. Someone shot me! In my own home!”
I heard a groaning on the porch and ran out there to find Vinny slumped sideways in his wheelchair. A bullet had shattered the hub of the left wheel, collapsing the wheelchair to one side. I grabbed the ancient gangster under the arms and lifted him onto the bench on the porch.
“Motherfuckers!” he howled, shoving me off as I set him on the bench. “You know, I came here hoping I’d been shot at from a moving vehicle for the last fucking time, Robinson.”
“I’m sorry,” I said for some reason.
“All those guys inside okay?”
“Angelica got hit in the arm.” I couldn’t catch my breath. I saw the blood on him, fell to my knees, and lifted his thin, useless leg. “Looks like you got one too.”
Vinny pulled his tattered trouser leg tight, revealing two bullet holes. “Fuck!”
The fury was descending on me fast, falling on me like a red-hot cloak, tightening around my neck. I found myself grinding my teeth and staring helplessly at the road between the trees, daring them to return. “You see anything, Vinny? You see the car?”
“Black Escalade,” Vinny and I said at the same time.
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