Page 2 of The Murder Inn

“Angelica! Angelica!” Susan barked. “We have five minutes to get this done! If Bill’s not dressed and on the road by—”

Effie had wrestled back the iron from Angelica. I looked over at Nick again. The muscular Black man continued dialing the unresponsive number. In the reflection, I saw that the contact’s name was Dorrich.

Whoever Dorrich was, there was only one reason for Nick to be calling him every fifteen seconds: because Nick was desperate. During the years that Nick had resided at the inn, I’d learned that his desperation preceded his fear, and after the fear stage it was just a hop, skip, and a jump before my friend was either wading into the freezing waters of the bay chasing ghosts, hunting perfect strangers with guns, or rambling on with stories about people coming to get him. I needed to break the cycle, find out who Dorrich was and why getting in touch with him seemed to be Nick’s only priority. And that wasn’t going to happen if Nick stayed at the inn with his demons while I went to Boston.

I reached over and tapped the table near his hands. Nick was startled by the noise, the movement. Too startled.

“Hey,” I said when I had his attention. “Why don’t you come with me?”

“Where?”

“The funeral,” I said. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

“It’ll befun?” Nick raised a thick eyebrow.

“Not the ceremony. The reception. The after-party.”

Nick looked unconvinced.

“You ever been to a cop funeral?” I asked. “We go all out. The bigger and better the cop, the larger the send-off. And these aren’t just any cops. They’re Boston cops. BostonIrish.I promise you: you’ve never been this drunk in your life.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to just bring friends along to a thing like that,” Nick said and went back to his phone. His voice was casual, but his eyes were dancing over the screen, his big hands trembly.

“I’ll tell them you’re my emotional support animal. Like the dogs people take on planes.”

Nick gave a half-smile. I was winning. Slowly, carefully. I pressed on.

“We’ll stand at the back,” I said. “Or you hang out at a bar down the road while we get the boring part of the day done, then meet me after.”

“Man, you ain’t going anywhere.” Nick nodded at the three women still scuffling at the end of the table. “Except a hospital, maybe. You’ll be sittin’ in the waiting room an hour from now while Angelica gets a CT scan after Effie beats her brains in with that iron.”

“Effie or Susan.” I nodded in agreement, watching the veinin Susan’s temple starting to tick. “I know better than to argue with Susan when she’s got something in her hands she could strangle me with.”

“As you should.”

The doorbell rang. I spied another resident of the inn, Clay Spears, standing at the hallway mirror, adjusting the tie on his sheriff’s uniform.

“Clay, can you get that?” I called.

“Yeah, Bill,” Clay called back.

I got up and tugged my unpressed shirt off the ironing board and whipped it over my shoulders. The women gave a unified gasp of horror and outrage.

“It’s fine, really,” I said. “I’ll keep my jacket on.”

Over the sound of their protests, I walked past Nick and grabbed a handful of his huge biceps before he could dial the mystery number again.

“You’re coming to Boston,” I told him, pulling him up. “That’s an order.”

CHAPTER TWO

SHERIFF CLAYTON SPEARS was having one of those mornings, directly following one of those nights. The previous evening had been spent in Manchester-by-the-Sea, wining and dining a woman he’d met on an online dating app. Though she’d kissed him on the cheek and let her fingers trail across the back of his thick, hairy hand before she slid into the cab he’d hailed her, he’d awakened this morning to the inevitable “It’s not you, it’s me” text. Clay was well-acquainted with that text. The one that cited her hesitation at leaping back into the romance game after a long and serious relationship, her feeling that he was a nice guy but that they just didn’t “click,” her need to “listen to her heart” or “find out who she really was” before “getting serious” with a man again. He’d known just by the length of it what the text was going to say. It sat like an angry green block of rejection on his screen, waiting for him to wake in his little room on the first floor.

Now he looked at all 280 pounds of himself in the hall mirror—his wild sandy hair, his crooked nameplate and lopsided tie—and tried to access some deep reserve of courage and energy so that he could go out on duty in Gloucester. The town’s head lawman was a brave man. A confident man. Someone who shrugged off the fact that he was too fat, that his laugh was too loud, that he bored his dates into a stupor talking about the Red Sox, that everybody in town knew his ex-wife had left him for a male model she’d known for a total of forty-eight hours. Clay pushed his shoulders back, looked into his own eyes, and tried to be that man.

The doorbell rang. Bill called for him to get it.

Clay pulled open the door and saw the love of his life standing there on the stoop.

---