Chapter Seventy-Eight

EFFIE AND I got a bug into us in the weeks following that dark night at the house. We infected each other with the idea that we could expunge what had happened to us and our household by cleaning and repairing, so that was what we did. While Effie sanded, filled, and painted over bullet holes, I scrubbed blood from the walls and floorboards, hired a dumpster, and loaded it up with ruined rugs and carpet. On the day that Susan was due to return home from the hospital, I was putting fresh sheets on our bed in the warm light of morning, the sea beyond the round window making the slapping sounds of small foamy waves and the gulls crying happily.

As I breezed past, I spotted Effie through that little window. She was loading a slab of wood onto the rails of her circular saw, her hand flicking expertly as she marked the length for cutting with a pencil and steel ruler. She had commandeered a section of the lawn beyond the porch as her workshop, the grass around her powdered with sawdust and timber offcuts.

I went down from the attic and along the second-floor hall, going from room to room. Susan had been tired and sore when I saw her last, and I knew she would probably just want to go straight to our bed, but I wanted everything to be as perfect as it could be anyway. The new door to Neddy Ives’s room was slightly ajar and still damp from a fresh coat of paint, so I pushed it open gently to slip into the empty room.

Over the days since I’d entered Neddy’s room on that fateful night, I had returned a bunch of times to take in the investigation he was obviously conducting—into a crime he had been convicted of: his wife’s murder. From what I could tell, he’d pled guilty and served almost the entirety of his thirty-year sentence, getting 10 percent knocked off for good behavior.

Spencer Edward Ives, convicted killer, had a couple days more to spend in the local hospital, having developed complications with the bullet wound to his stomach. I dusted his room and stood there under the corkboard for a while, looking at the articles, photographs, and sticky notes he’d assembled. It was tempting, so tempting, to dig into what was here, to use the opportunity while my most mysterious tenant wasn’t around to discover more about who he was and what had brought him here. That he had spent twenty-seven years incarcerated for his wife’s brutal murder explained why he felt so comfortable living in this tiny space, choosing to exist with only the walls as company. What wasn’t explained was why he’d made this place a shrine to his obsession with his own case. I shook my head, forcing myself to look away from the wall of snippets, and left the room.

From the window of Nick’s room, the door to which had also been left ajar, I could see the troubled veteran returning from the woods. He was shambling slowly and awkwardly on crutches and yet was as drenched in sweat as he used to be when returning from a five-mile run.

No amount of new-paint smell, sawdust, or air freshener had been able to rid the house of the dark cloud following Nick Jones around. His Twitter post confessing to his part in covering up the massacre in Afghanistan had garnered national attention. He had stirred up urgent activity in a variety of online groups from QAnon to AboutFace, and every major news outlet had covered the story. I’d sat with him in his hospital room, expecting at any moment for the disgraced veteran to be hauled off by military police or CIA officials or someone, anyone, for interrogation about the incident. Men in suits did come, and they spoke to him alone, and when they left, my friend seemed even sadder and angrier than he’d been when I stepped out of the room.

I found out why soon enough. The US Army released a statement the following day discrediting Nick’s story about what happened at the farmhouse in Afghanistan. Rick Master had stepped forward to act as the army’s calm, collected, and thoroughly rehearsed witness, claiming that the official military account of the 2010 incident was true. Dorrich, Master, Breecher, and Jones had been fired upon by rebels and had responded within the parameters of their training, and while the killing of civilians was always unfortunate, in this instance it could not be avoided.

The CIA, in a joint statement, said any claims Nick Jones made about ghost money were untrue and likely inspired by his known schizophrenia. Roger Dorrich’s death was ruled a suicide, and Karli Breecher’s end in the woods near my inn was put down to an accident.

I watched Nick limp on his crutches from the edge of the woods to the firepit area and ease himself down on one of the benches there. Though I’d tried to broach the subject with him a couple of times since his release from the hospital, he’d not wanted to talk about his next steps in trying to be accountable for what he had done, if any. I assumed that the millions of fragments of singed American dollars that I was still finding scattered around the woods near the inn, and along the nearby beach, comprised all of the money in the duffel bag he’d used to blow up Karli Breecher. If Nick had saved any of it, or given any of it to another source, he wasn’t telling me about it. I dusted Nick’s room briefly too before moving on.

When I pushed open the door of Vinny’s room, I found Angelica there. I was unsurprised, since the author, raconteur, vegan, activist, and grieving sort-of-girlfriend had been spending a lot of time in the deceased gangster’s room. She didn’t notice me as I entered, and I dusted the room silently, glancing up now and then to watch her poring over old photographs she was drawing, one at a time, from a shoebox sitting on the edge of the desk. No one had come to the house to claim Vinny’s things, so she’d had unfettered access to his meager possessions, and seemed to be working on something on her laptop as she carefully examined each image. I knew that when Angelica wasn’t working on whatever she was doing with the photographs, she was putting together a memorial for Vinny. I’d heard her making calls to florists and undertakers. But asking her what we as a household could do to help, or whether we’d be invited, only made her walk off in silence.

Though my inn was empty of short-term guests, and though those who lived there now included the survivors of gunshot wounds, hostage scenarios, public shamings, and brutal beatings, no character seemed to have taken the events of those dark days as hard as the man I found sitting in the dining room. Sheriff Clayton Spears was settled at the end of the table, idly tapping the side of a steaming mug of coffee with his palm, his huge back to the door through which I entered. Unlike the physical wounds of my other friends, Clay’s heart seemed unhealable. I’d begun worrying about him when I learned that he had taken a leave of absence, and I noticed him wearing the same T-shirt and jeans around the house for days on end. As I entered the dining room now, he didn’t move, his eyes transfixed on the dust motes swirling in the beams of light entering through the French doors.

“My fiancée’s coming home today,” I announced cheerfully, dropping my dusting cloth on the table and taking a seat to Clay’s right. “You know the one. Susan. The blond babe with the mind like a diamond. You might remember her as my girlfriend, but she’s my fiancée now. That’s because I asked her to marry me and she said yes.”

Clay lifted his weary eyes to me. I grinned back. My insistence on using the word “fiancée” upwards of five hundred times a day was driving everyone in the household nuts.

“You know who I’m referring to?” I pressed.

“Bill, please,” Clay sighed.

“Hey, I was thinking we could get out of here later. You, me, and Nick maybe,” I said and gestured to the doors. “Go down the pier with a couple of cold ones. I hear the yellowtail are biting.”

“Maybe,” Clay conceded.

“All right, it’s settled. We’re going. After my fiancée gets back.”

Clay looked like he wanted to smack me. I heard a car approaching the house. I was determined to get a half-smile out of the sheriff before I went to see who it was.

“You think you’ll be all right on a public pier, dressed like that?” I pointed at his T-shirt. “Or should you go in disguise? We don’t want the paparazzi bothering us.”

Clay’s single-handed solving of the kidnapping of Zoe Savage from Omaha, Nebraska, had almost eclipsed Nick’s revelations on the internet. Footage of the little girl running into her exhausted parents’ arms had become so familiar to me in the days I sat by Susan’s hospital bed that I could have sketched the heartwarming scene from memory. Clayton Spears was being hailed as a hero from coast to coast, yet the attention only seemed to push the already shy sheriff further into his shell. I’d fielded a couple of phone calls from the Savages, and plenty from the media, but my friend had never accepted any of those calls and hadn’t touched an enormous fruit-and-wine basket that arrived for him and landed in the inn’s kitchen.

Giving up on injecting any cheer into Clay, I went to the windows and looked out, spying a good-looking young woman exiting a blue rental car at the end of the porch. I intercepted her at the front door, feeling weirdly flushed at the sight of her standing there straightening her crinkled business shirt and trousers. Auburn curls fell from a ponytail down the back of her neck, and she clicked a stainless-steel pen nervously as she glanced past me into the foyer.

“Hello,” she said and flashed a set of perfect white teeth. “My name is Katie O’Leary. I was wondering if I could speak to Sheriff Clayton Spears?”