“ You just washed up on these shores. I got here not too long after you were born,” Barber said. Sure as hell, he didn’t talk as if he’d lived in Maine his whole life. Ayuh might never have crossed his lips. He went on, “You will have to bear in mind that this isn’t exactly our high season.”
“No, huh?” Rob did his best to sound like a dry martini. That was the best way to deal with his father. He suspected it was the right approach with this guy, too.
Dick Barber smiled fractionally. “Not so you’d notice. But we will do our best to accommodate you-assuming the snow lets up sooner or later. If it doesn’t, well, welcome to Guilford.”
He did remind Rob of Dad, enough to make him ask, “Were you ever a cop before you got the, uh, Mansion Inn?”
“A cop? No.” Barber shook his head. “But I did spend twelve years in the Navy. Maybe that’s what you’re noticing.”
“I bet it is,” Rob said. “My father was in the Navy.”
“And he’s a police officer now?”
“That’s right.”
Charlie broke in: “Did H. P. Lovecraft ever visit this place?”
“He’s in the tower.” Barber pointed up to it. Bob and his bandmates all goggled at him. That small smile came and went again. The older man condescended to explain: “In paperback. I’ve got a few shelves of books for guests who stay up there.”
“Dibs!” Rob said before any of the other Californians could beat him to the punch.
“You do need to know the tower has no plumbing fixtures,” Dick Barber said. “Those are off the room below. You should probably be on good terms with whoever’s staying down there.”
“Me.” Did Justin sound pleased or just resigned? What he added didn’t tell Rob much on that score: “We’ve been putting up with each other for a long time.”
“So have Biff and I,” Charlie said. “Is there another room on that floor?”
“There is, right across the hall from the one below the tower,” Barber said. “If you need anything, holler and bribe the help. They’re my grandchildren, and they can use the cash.”
Rob started to laugh. Then he realized tlder man meant it. This was an… interesting place all kinds of ways. He wondered if the tab would be similarly… interesting. How much more bad news could the band’s plastic stand? Considering the rates places in Bar Harbor gouged out of customers, he couldn’t begin to guess what Barber would charge. Figuring it was better to know what they were getting into before they got in too deep, he took a deep breath and asked the obvious question.
“You can stay on the house for a while,” Barber answered. “We don’t cook for you unless you bring in the food. Unless you pay off the laundry fairy, you won’t get clean linen-but I already told you that, didn’t I? You’re not costing us much. Technically, we’ve been closed since Labor Day. That’s when the season ends here, pretty much. But it’s okay. You don’t want to be sleeping in your cars in this delightful weather.”
“For nothing?” Rob could hardly believe his ears. “Are you sure, man?”
Justin’s look told him he was an idiot for checking a gift horse’s teeth. Rob didn’t need the look. He’d already realized that for himself. Now he’d given Barber another chance to shaft them.
“I said it. I meant it,” Barber replied. “I usually mean what I say. These days, that means I’m hideously out of place in about ninety-eight percent of the country. In Guilford, I fit in fine. That’s one of the reasons I like it here.”
Dad would fit here, too, Rob thought. His father sure didn’t fit in L.A., no matter how long he’d lived there. L.A. turned the lie into an art form.
But that was beside the point. “Thank you very much, Mr. Barber,” Rob said. His bandmates chorused agreement.
“You’re welcome-and I’m Dick. You may as well get used to it,” the innkeeper said.
“You talked about bringing food in,” Biff said. “Where do we get it to bring in?”
“We’ve got a little grocery and a meat market. Supermarket’s in Dover-Foxcroft, ten, fifteen minutes east. Closest place to buy a meal is Calvin’s Kitchen, down on Water Street. They make a decent breakfast and a halfway decent burger. They do dinner, too, but I wouldn’t. A couple of blocks farther west, there’s a Subway,” Barber said. Rob found himself nodding. If there was going to be anything in a little place like this in Maine, odds were it’d be a Subway. Dick Barber added, “There’s a Rite Aid close to the Subway, too. You can find almost anything there-maybe not the exact style or brand you want, but you can.”
“Yup.” Rob nodded. If you spent a lot of time on the road, that was one of the things you learned. Drugstores weren’t always deep, but they were very wide.
“Anyway, if you’re looking for something that isn’t a breakfast joint or Subway, try Dover-Foxcroft,” Barber said. “There you’ve got the Golden Arches. Not exactly an improvement on Subway, but not the same, anyhow. And there’s a Chinese place. Cantonese, but it’s sort of half Hong Kong and half Maine, if you know what I mean.”
“Sounds like that Mexican place we ate at in… where the hell was it?” Justin looked to Rob.
Rob couldn’t remember. He’d eaten in too many Mexican places in too many towns. But Charlie said, “I know the one you mean. Wasn’t that Madison?”
“Madison!” Rob echoed. Once Charlie put a finger on it, it came back to him, too. “It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what you’d call Mexican, eierehat cheese was so Wisconsin-oh my God!”
They brought their gear out of the SUVs and into the Trebor Mansion Inn. There was a family area, which seemed overrun by cats, and a guest area not much warmer than the snowstorm outside. Barber hadn’t been kidding when he said they weren’t looking for business this time of year. “You’ve got radiators in your rooms,” he told them. “They’ll warm things up-eventually. And you’ve got plenty of blankets. Genuine wool, too. We haven’t sheared any acrylics or skinned any naugas.”
The tower room had a trapdoor and a ladder you could pull up after you. “This is awesome!” Rob exclaimed when he saw the arrangements. “When I was twelve years old, you never would have got me out of here.”
“Well, maybe when you had to take a leak.” Justin was more pragmatic.
If you weren’t twelve years old, the tower wasn’t perfect. You couldn’t stand up straight in it, except right in the middle. The bed wasn’t exactly a bed: it was a mattress and box spring on the floor. If you were six-one like Rob, your feet hung out over the trapdoor space when you lay down on it.
But there was plenty to read. The shelves set into the wall over the mattress held history books, mysteries, bestsellers from about the time Rob was born, and some science fiction. He always checked out the books when he walked into a furniture store or a restaurant that used them as part of the decor; he’d got the habit from his father. Now he had his own odd assortment.
Justin grabbed a fat book about tank battles on the Russian front in World War II. “This should either keep me awake all night or knock me out better than Valium,” he said.
“Which would you rather?” Rob asked. He had a panoramic view up here. At the moment, he had a view of snow swirling this way, that way, and now and then the other way, too. Through it, he could dimly make out the back sides of some of the buildings on Water Street. That tall stack… Did it belong to the water mill?
Closer was snow-covered ground with pines of assorted sizes sticking up out of it at random. Something prowled across it: another Maine Coon. The critter peered up into one of the pines. A red squirrel stared down at it, bushy tail lashing as the squirrel chewed out the cat from a safe distance.
Justin answered him, but he was so busy watching the little drama outside that he had to ask the lead singer to repeat himself. With a snooty sniff, Justin did: “I said it probably doesn’t matter much one way or the other. It sure looks like we aren’t going anywhere for a while.”
“Winter in lovely, charming Guilford, Maine? A new reality show, coming soon to a cabl
e network near you! The other title is Say Hello to the New Ice Age.”
“Hello, new Ice Age,” Justin said obediently.
Rob laughed. Then he looked out at the blowing snow again. “I was just kidding,” he said.
“Oh, sure,” Justin agreed. “But was God?”
“Well, the blame’s gotta stick to somebody. Why not to Him?” Rob answered. Justin said not a word. Outside, the snow kept falling.
XIX
The computer in Colin’s study had a twenty-five-inch monitor-a good size, even these days. All the same, he had trouble taking in the scale of the photoshe flash drive Kelly stuck into one of his USB ports. “I see red and black. Could be just about anything. Maybe a volcano, or maybe a bunch of shots from somebody’s colonoscopy.”
Kelly gave him a severe look. “Back when we first met in Yellowstone, you said the country didn’t get its enemas there. It got’em in Providence.”
He kissed her. “Migawd-you were listening to me! I’m not used to that any more. Nobody who’s raised children is.”
She laughed. He only wished he were joking. One of these days, she might find out for herself. That was part of the reason he’d asked her down to L.A. Not all of it, but part. She said, “You’re looking down at Yellowstone-for all I know, the part of it where the West Thumb used to be-from about forty thousand feet. No telephoto, no zoom. This is pretty much what I saw when I looked out the Learjet’s window.”
“You were dumb to go.”
“I knew you’d say that.” Her look got more severe. She was an adult. She expected to be treated as one. Colin only sighed. He couldn’t do anything about it, especially after the fact.
He studied the picture again. “So it’s… miles from one side here to the other?” He thought about it for a little while and whistled softly. “That’s-something, isn’t it? Reminds me of the spaceprobe photos from… which moon of Jupiter is it that looks like a sausage-and-anchovy pizza?”
“Io.” Kelly dropped severity and laughed again. “It does look like a pizza, doesn’t it? You come out with the strangest stuff sometimes, but you’re right about that.”
“Wish I could take credit for it, but I read it somewhere,” Colin replied. “And speaking of coming out with strange stuff-” He stopped, muttering to himself. This wasn’t how he’d wanted to do things, dammit. Open mouth, jam in foot. The story of my life, he thought.
“Why? What other strange stuff was on your mind?” Kelly asked.
He sent her a sharp look, but couldn’t read the one she gave back. That he couldn’t read it threw gasoline on his ever-active suspicions. Did she already know, or at least have suspicions of her own? They’d been going together for two and a half years now. Probably something wrong with her if she didn’t have suspicions by now. Or maybe something was wrong with him for not getting to this point a hell of a lot sooner.
Only one way to find out. He took a deep breath. Even so, it was a good thing they were sitting side by side, because when he asked, “D’you want to marry me, Kelly?” she couldn’t have heard him if she’d been on the far side of the room.
“Sure,” she said. He blinked. He’d been expecting and hoping for yes and braced against no. Anything but one of those or the other screwed up his mental IFF for a few seconds.
Then he processed the meaning in the unexpected response. “Is that anything like yes?” he said, wanting to leave no possible doubt.
“Sure,” she said again, this time with mischief in her voice.
“You!” He pulled a small velvet box out of the trouser pocket where his keys usually lived. “Well, since it is kind of like yes, you may want to have a look at this, too.”
Kelly opened the box; the spring hinge clicked when she did. Even the compact fluorescent in the ceiling fixture was plenty to make the diamonds in the ring sparkle. Her eidened. “Ooh!” she said softly. “Pretty!”
“Try it on,” Colin urged.
“Okay.” She slipped it onto her finger. Then she smiled. “I like the way it looks. And it fits, too. I won’t need to get it sized or anything. How did you do that?”
“I hired a guy who used to work for the KGB, back when there was a KGB and a USSR and a bunch of other initials running around loose. These days, he smuggles blintzes and borscht in from Brooklyn. He went through your credit-card records and your cell-phone bills till he found your ring size in there. And he only needed to start working on it a year and a half before I met you.”
He spoke with such assurance, he might have been convincing a jury that no one else could possibly have pulled off this home-invasion robbery. “When you talk like that, I start believing you, no matter how much BS you come out with,” Kelly said. “It’s a good thing I love you, or you’d really be in trouble.”
“It’s a good thing you love me, or I’d really be in trouble,” Colin echoed. By his tone, he meant something different with the same words. He went on, “Good thing I love you, too. Darn good thing-best thing that’s happened to me since I don’t know when.”
“I like that.” Kelly nodded. “And if we both say it the same way thirty years from now, we’ll have done something right.”
“Here’s hoping,” Colin said. He’d thought the same thing, or close enough, when he said I do with Louise. And they did, and then they didn’t: not thirty years’ worth, anyhow. “I would drink to that here, but I’d rather go out to dinner and do it there. How does Miyamoto sound?”
“Too funky for words,” Kelly answered; he’d taken her there before. “Let’s go,” she added, pulling the flash drive out of the computer. Then she spread her fingers, the way women do when they flash a new ring. The diamonds did some more flashing of their own.
Miyamoto was a San Atanasio institution of sorts. Despite the Japanese name, it was a Polynesian place, one of the last survivors of what had been a common breed of restaurant in Southern California around the time Colin was born. It had Easter Island heads and tiki torches out front. The appetizers featured things like rumaki and foil-wrapped chicken, things you just didn’t see in other places any more. The surf-and-turf was lobster and teriyaki steak. The waitresses wore leis. The bartender made rum drinks you normally wouldn’t find anywhere this side of Honolulu.
“Two scorpions,” Colin told the waitress as they sat down in their bamboo-framed booth.
“Hey! What am I gonna drink?” Kelly said. Colin probably gaped. The waitress cracked up-she hadn’t heard that one before, and it caught her by surprise.
“One scorpion for each of us,” Colin said carefully. Still chuckling, the gal in the lei went back to pass along the order.
Colin wondered how many times he’d come here with Louise over the years. A lot, but he liked the place too much to cede it to her after they broke up. He’d never seen her here since. That might have been coincidence. Or maybe Teo was too organic to want to pollute his system with the high-cholesterol goodies Miyamoto dished out. More for me if he is, Coin thought. Less happily, he’d also come back once since the split to investigate a robbery.
The waitress brought back a couple of scorpions, each almost big enough to swim in. They spelled er k with a u here. Even they wouldn’t serve you more than two zombies. That made sense, because you weren’t just drunk after two of those. You were fucking embalmed.
“Are you ready to order yet?” she asked. She scribbled what they wanted and went away again.
Before the food came, the owner wandered over to say hello. Stan Miyamoto was short and stocky. He was about Colin’s age; his son had graduated from San Atanasio High in Vanessa’s class. “I want to say one more time what a good cop you are.” He was talking more to Kelly than to Colin. “The way you caught those guys who held us up, the way you sent them to prison-”
“Part of the job.” Colin didn’t want to tell Miyamoto the only way the crooks could have been dumber was to wear BUST ME! signs. To change the subject, he went on, “Stan, this is my fi-ancee, Kelly Birnbaum.”
The owner, of course, had come
over to say hello when Colin visited with Louise, too. You never would have guessed by his smile. “Congratulations! You are a lucky lady, Ms. Birnbaum.”
“I think so. I hope so,” Kelly said.
Miyamoto turned back to Colin. “So you celebrate tonight, do you?”
“We sure do,” he agreed.
“And you choose to do it here? Dinner on the house!”
It was kindly meant. Colin knew that. Back when he was starting out, he would have thanked Stan and enjoyed it. But the world had changed. For better? For worse? For different, anyhow.
“Stan, I can’t,” he said. “I’d like to, but I just can’t. Too darn many regulations about police officers and gratuities. You’re gonna have to take my money whether you like it or not.” Now there was a sentence you didn’t get to trot out every day.
“I am not doing this for Lieutenant Ferguson,” the owner said stiffly. “I am doing this for Colin Ferguson, who is my friend. I hope he is my friend.”
“I hope so, too. But if you want to put your friend’s behind in a sling, you’ll feed him a free dinner. The city council and the accountants would land on me like a ton of bricks.”
“They should get in an uproar about things that need uproar. Heaven knows there are enough of them in this town.” By the way Stan Miyamoto said it, he could think of three or four himself. But he didn’t try to insist any more. Shaking his head, he went back to the kitchens.
Quietly, Kelly said, “I bet a lot of cops would have taken him up on that. I bet they would have got away with it, too.”
“I bet you’re right.” Colin shrugged. “If it doesn’t bother them, it doesn’t, that’s all. It bothers me. If I keep my nose clean all the time, I never need to worry about remembering which lies I told to which people. And if I don’t give an inch, I don’t have to worry about giving a mile, either.”
“Makes sense to me.” She quirked an eyebrow at him, though. “If I get a ticket, I guess you won’t fix it for me.”
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