Chapter One

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 2022

MY BEST FRIEND was going to hurt someone.

I sat at the dining room table and watched Nick Jones out of the corner of my eye. He tapped the screen of his phone again, redialing a number that hadn’t connected once across the seven calls he’d made to it in the previous two minutes. Nick didn’t know it, but I could see his phone screen in the reflection in a framed picture sitting on the bookshelf behind him. I did a lot of that; watching my buddy carefully. The traumatized army veteran, one of the residents of the inn I owned by the seaside, was on the ropes again with his schizophrenia. It was typically up to me to throw in the towel for him. I knew that the moment was coming. It was usually heralded by a single thought, the instinct pushing to the forefront of my mind—that Nick was going to hurt someone. A stranger; himself; me.

Maybe another resident of the inn.

That would be the worst-case scenario. I could take a hit, and I knew Nick could too, but the people who resided with us in the ramshackle house by the water were our family. They’d saved the both of us—Nick after he returned from war, and me after I lost my wife to a road accident shortly after we moved to this place.

Buying the inn had been Siobhan’s idea, and I’d reluctantly gone along with it after losing my job as a detective in the Boston PD five years ago. While I’d been sulking over my termination, she’d handled the purchase and set-up of our New England bed-and-breakfast.

“It’ll be great, Bill,” she’d told me. “I’ve found the perfect fixer-upper.”

I was unconvinced but let Siobhan’s enthusiasm pull me along. She’d always had a knack for seeing potential.

The Inn by the Sea was a simple construction: its weatherboard exterior, recently painted sunflower-yellow, did little to shut out the freezing Gloucester winters, and its mismatched steel and wood bones, rambling with poorly thought-out extensions and adjustments, creaked as the people inside it moved. But it was those people and their stories that give the house a heartbeat. We had a collection of mystery men and women among our permanent residents: gangsters, law enforcers, runaways, and ex-criminals. You couldn’t put those kinds of souls together without creating fireworks, but for every dangerous spark there was also a good helping of warm glow.

At night the inn hummed and thrummed with people coming and going, whispering in the kitchen, singing in the shower, yelling across the halls. By day it practically vibrated as people jogged down the stairs, screamed at the television in the living room, drank wine and danced on one of the large porches. Short-term guests bustled in and out, battering the walls with suitcases, and occasionally the house pattered with little feet or thumped with the bedroom activities of lovers on cheap getaways.

It was my job as innkeeper to make sure that none of the darkness that swirled and twirled through the pasts and presents of our guests here threatened what we had: a big, beautiful, crazy home. And whatever was troubling Nick was gathering energy like a storm cloud around the guy’s head.

I needed to do something about it soon because I was headed out the door for an old colleague’s funeral. Needham was only about an hour’s drive away, but I’d booked a hotel for the night. I didn’t want to leave Nick alone at the inn in his present state.

My careful monitoring of my friend was interrupted by a rise in volume in the argument carrying on at the end of the table.

“Bill?” Susan Solie called over to me.

I’d been lucky enough to call Susan, a gorgeous blond former FBI agent, my girlfriend these last couple of years. But she was currently in a standoff between Effie Johnson, the inn’s unofficial handywoman, and fellow resident Angelica Grace Thomas-Lowell—internationally bestselling novelist, vegan, activist, humanitarian.

Susan had a hand on the ironing board that was acting as a bench dividing me from her and the other two inn residents. “If you don’t step in here, Bill, you’re never going to get your shirt ironed. You’re going to end up at the funeral in a sweatshirt. Or bare-chested.”

“Now that would be awkward,” I quipped. “There’s a rule about that, I think. Don’t wear white to a wedding. Don’t go half-naked to a funeral.”

“Bill.”

“Hey, I tried to avoid this altogether.” I held my hands up. “I tried to iron the shirt myself. Before I knew what was happening, ironing experts pounced from outta nowhere like ninjas. I was overcome.”

The three experts in question each had a seemingly unmovable stance regarding the correct way to remove wrinkles. Angelica had command of the stark white dress shirt I’d selected for the funeral and was pinning it to the ironing board with her hand. Effie held the iron, but Susan had the iron’s cord and was refusing to plug it into the wall socket. The shirt-ironing turf war between the three women had been carrying on for ten minutes now and no one had made or lost a square inch of ground.

“I only offered my opinion because you were beginning with the collar,” Susan said, turning her slim gold watch around and around on her wrist, something she does when agitated. “And that’s not where you start. Not even close.”

“Please just let me explain my position,” Angelica said. She tried unsuccessfully to swipe the iron from Effie. “I understand, Effie, you have some mysterious military or government or guerilla warfare–type experience that makes you think you know how best to iron a shirt. And I understand, Susan, that you have good intentions. But the fact is simply that this is not a uniform shirt. It’s a man’s dress shirt, and thus one must consider the garment’s stylistic nuances in preparing it for wear.”

“Oh Jesus,” I sighed.

Effie, mute from a near-decapitation sustained in the aforementioned mysterious personal history, slapped her free hand over her eyes in dismay.

“As research for my third novel,” Angelica said as she yanked the iron from Effie’s other hand while she was blinded, “I spent six months living in Powai serving as a house manager for a high-ranking minister in India’s parliament.”

Angelica waited for everyone to be impressed. We weren’t.

“It was my duty,” she carried on, regardless. “One of my many entrusted duties, to ensure that the minister’s substantial collection of house staff, including the staff who ironed and pressed his clothes, respected the—”

“Angelica, I’m not plugging this iron in until you—” Susan began.

“Respected the deeply nuanced traditions of fabric care established during India’s long and rich history of—”

“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 be fun?” 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. Boston Irish. 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 vein in 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.”