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.

She was a brunette beauty, bathed in that icy New England morning light that seemed to only want to dance upon natural, unspoiled things. Forest floors and ocean cliffs. She had girl-next-door freckles and doe eyes (which would have been exactly what Clay would have written that he was partial to in his online dating profile, had he been so bold).

And she wasn’t alone. Out of the corner of his eye, Clay also spotted for a fleeting moment a small blond boy about five years old at the woman’s side. Both woman and child held backpacks; she held hers by the strap, and the boy clutched his blue backpack against his chest.

Clay choked on a greeting and simply stood there clutching the doorframe in one clumsy mitt and his belt buckle in the other and looking at the beautiful woman and her child.

The woman took in the sight of Clay in his uniform and her mouth dropped open like a mailbox door.

“Oh,” she said. “Um. I think we must have the wrong place.”

Clay realized his mouth was open. He slammed it shut with an audible clack of his molars.

“You don’t,” he said. The pair in the doorway paused, confused.

“But we—”

“The Inn by the Sea.” Clay pointed to the awning overhanging the porch, where there might have been a sign if Bill had ever bothered to have one made. “This is it. You must be guests.”

“We are.” The little boy grinned. “Are you the cops?”

“Ah, well, I—sort of—” Clay stammered. “I’m sort of a cop. The sheriff’s department does a lot of the same, uh. Our jurisdiction is—anyway, hello! Welcome!”

“Hello,” the woman said. “I’m April and this is Joe.”

April stuck out her hand. Clay’s brain spasmed and he reached for the backpack in her other hand, for some reason. There was a midair fumbling. April dropped the backpack, and Clay caught her hands suddenly and harshly like a kid trapping a firefly. His joy at feeling her skin against his clashed violently with horror at the bungled handshake. He pumped her hands twice and let them go. He chanced a wave at the kid.

“We have a room booked here? I think?” April said, as though the entire encounter thus far had left her believing nothing was certain in the world anymore.

“You do,” Clay said, stepping back. “I mean. I don’t know if you do. I haven’t looked at the book. I just heard the bell and answered the, uh, the door.”

He turned away, grimaced.

Stop talking!his mind screamed.

“I don’t run this place, I just. You know. I just live here—have been living here—for some time, but it’s temporary,” Clay said. He looked into the dining room where it seemed a dozen people had been only seconds earlier. He found no one. Clay’s voice boomed down the hall in the other direction. “Bill! Nick! Someone? Anyone?”

April and Joe waited in the hall with their backpacks, watching him mess up the simplest of all tasks. Something he had done a bunch of times: welcoming short-term guests into the inn.

“I’m hungry,” Joe announced.

“Just wait, baby,” April said and ran a hand over Joe’s close-cropped hair. Clay noticed for the first time how tired they both looked. He grabbed up the ledger sitting on the hall table and saw her name written in Bill’s handwriting. Leeler, April. Plus kid. 3 days. Pay cash on arrival. Room 3.

“OK, I’ve got this. I’ve got this.” Clay snatched the bags from the mother and son. “Follow me. Room three. It’s right this way.”

“Hooray!” The boy skipped after him.

“Thank you so much,” April said.

Clay saw them to one of the two rooms Bill kept for overnight guests. It was the sunnier of the two rooms, which made Clay wonder if light simply followed April Leeler everywhere, if wherever she went she would touch people with that golden warmth. The little boy swirled the dust motes caught in that sunlight with his hands while his mother immediately went to the window and tried to open it. Clay thought about that. About how April’s first concern in the room seemed to be how she could escape it. Or open another portal out of it. Something fluttered in his cop brain, the deeply embedded intuition that had served him so well on the job. But he didn’t have time to pursue the thought before the little boy was tugging on his sleeve.

“I’m hungry,” Joe repeated. “Do you have pancakes here? I need pancakes.”

“Young man, you are a child after my own heart,” Clay said. “I need pancakes is on my family crest.”

“What’s a family crest?”

“Let me show you to the kitchen,” Clay said. “I’d rustle you up something myself but I’m headed out the door to serve and protect. But anything in the fridge is up for grabs. I’m sure we’ve got fixings for—”

“We’re fine,” April interrupted. She laid her hand on the little boy’s shoulder and scooped him back against her legs. “We just want to keep to ourselves. We’ve come a long way and we’re tired.”

Clay’s mind flickered again.

Something is wrong here,he thought.

He said his goodbyes and promised himself that he would find out what it was.