The Murder Inn

by James Patterson, Candice Fox

Genres: Thrillers; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

Looking for a fun weekend getaway?  You're in the wrong place.

The doors of the Inn at Gloucester are always open to anyone running from trouble or hiding from life.  Its owner, former Boston police detective Bill Robinson, welcomes them with no questions asked.

 Until two strangers arrive for a temporary stay and a longtime resident starts looking over his shoulders.  There’s another newcomer in town who puts the Inn under surveillance. 
     
When the surveillance turns into a series of attacks. Robinson launches an all-out fight to defend his town, his chosen family, and his home.

Release date: March 12, 2024

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

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.”

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.

NORMAN DRIVER STOOD leaning against the steel fencing surrounding a building site. He could remember a time when the sight of a law enforcement officer’s car pulling up anywhere near him would make the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Yet now he felt barely a rise in interest as a deputy sheriff’s squad car pulled over to the curb, the officer eyeing him for a moment before popping the door.

Driver had spent most of his twenties feeling the cold hand of Lady Disaster on his shoulder whenever an officer stepped into a diner he was sitting in, or when a police squad car stopped beside him at a traffic light. Pushing sixty now, he simply smiled and nodded.

The jangling of equipment on the officer’s belt was lost in the sounds coming from behind Driver. The ripping and tearing of sheets of cladding, the slam of hammers and buzz of saws. Driver lit a cigarette and tried to get a measure of the man. There wasn’t much to go by. Tall, streak of Hispanic, all muscle, in a tight-fitting uniform. Driver knew some of the Gloucester cops. This guy wasn’t on his radar.

“What’s the trouble, officer?” Driver asked.

“You tell me,” the guy said. “Got a noise complaint. Resident nearby tells me you and your crew have been starting work early the past two days, making all that racket. Fifteen minutes to eight, or worse.”

“No kiddin’?” Driver said. He gave another smile and exhaled smoke politely over his shoulder. “I’m surprised the response isn’t bigger. But maybe there’s a chopper overhead that I don’t know about.” He glanced skyward. The joke paid off. The sheriff cracked a grin.

“You can’t start making serious noise around here until at least 8 a.m.” The deputy shrugged. “Sleepy seaside town. You know how it is.”

“I know how it is.”

“You guys new in town?” The officer eyed the nearest truck, the red lettering on the side. DRIVER CONSTRUCTION SERVICES.

“Relatively,” Driver said. “Whose shut-eye were we disturbing? I’ll make sure to send over a fruit basket or something.”

“You know I can’t tell you a thing like that.”

“Just trying to be neighborly.”

Driver watched the deputy sheriff step off the curb, saw him glance up at the house across the street. Driver followed his gaze over there and saw a lace curtain fall back into place. A mean quiver wanted to start in his lip, so he shoved his cigarette back in his mouth.

“Try to keep to the allowed times,” the deputy said. He returned to the squad car and raised his hand in a wave. As the officer grabbed the door handle, Driver thought he was home free. Then the officer paused and came back, his face pinched with an afterthought.

“The resident also said she’d seen workmen on the site at night,” the officer said and cocked his head, curious. Driver hid his taut upper lip behind his knuckles.

“That’s a strange accusation,” Driver said. “Pretty tough to do this gig by flashlight. And silently.”

“That’s just what I was thinking,” the deputy said. “So what would your guys be doing here at night?”

“Beats me. Maybe that neighbor needs to get her eyes checked.”

“What’s all this about, anyway?” The officer leaned around Driver to look at the site.

“We’re removing the cladding from this old house. Replacing it with pine weatherboard. Suits the scenery better,” Driver said.

The two men took in the view of the little house, its exposed sides, with its dark hardwood framing and pink insulation foam, dusty with age. On the ground by the porch, guys in white suits and masks were folding shattered pieces of fiberboard into large sheets of black plastic. They watched as one of the men ripped a strip of duct tape from a roll and began sealing the package of fiberboard shards tightly at the seams.

“What’s with all the protective equipment?” The deputy smirked. “They look like they’re handling radioactive waste.”

“It’s not radioactive, but it’s nasty,” Driver said. “Asbestos. You know much about it?”

“Nah, man. My dad was a cop. I played with guns as a kid, not hammers.”

“Well, you don’t want to know much about this stuff,” Driver said and drew on his cigarette. “It’s an old building material from the fifties. Pretty popular because it was cheap. Lot of houses around here were wrapped in it, top to bottom, inside and out. It’s not a problem if it stays intact. But maybe you scratch it. Bump it. Drill into it without knowing it’s there. Maybe some gets torn down and scattered everywhere in a storm. Before you know it, the fibers get into your lungs and start eating their way through you like worms in an apple.”

“Jeez.” The officer took a step back from the fence. “I think I’ve seen those late-night ads about it. Meso… Meso—”

“Mesothelioma,” Driver said.

“Right.”

“Yeah. A single breath of it could be all it takes,” Driver said. “Anyway. You can go in and talk to some of the boys if you want. Have a look around. See for yourself that there’s no funny business going on here, day or night.”

“No thanks.” The deputy held his hands up, gave Driver a friendly tip of his hat. “Really. I appreciate the offer.”

“I bet.” Driver shared a sarcastic smile. The two men parted. Driver even waved as the guy pulled away from the curb.

The smile twisted as that evil feeling snagged his upper lip like a fishhook. The house across the street was still now, silent. Driver stubbed out his cigarette and headed across the road.

NICK WAS GRIPPING the seat belt with both hands, eyes fixed on the highway ahead of us, one long leg jangling up and down as I drove. He was wearing a powder-blue dress shirt he’d pulled from his closet immaculately ironed, and I figured it had probably been that way for months. The guy was all about control. Order. Process. Above the collar I could see his jugular vein, taut and thrumming.

“So what’s going on?” I asked.

“Huh?” He looked at me, unseeing, still captive to his thoughts.

“Who’s Dorrich?”

Nick gave a quick laugh, but there was no humor in it.

“Man, you are like some all-seeing eye,” he said. “I knew there was something hinky about this.” He sighed. “There is no funeral, is there? You’re taking me back to the shrink. I really am your emotional support dog, only you’ve tricked me into a ride to the vet when you promised me the park.”

“There really is a funeral, Nick. Old boss of mine, Mark Bulger. He retired. Kicked the bucket. I didn’t like the guy but I liked his wife, Shauna. She used to bring this amazing homemade soda bread with raisins into the station sometimes. That stuff could make grown men weep.”

“How do you know about Dorrich?”

“I’m the innkeeper. Nothing gets by me.”

“That right?”

“Yeah. And you’re lucky that’s true,” I said. “Because you seem to me like you’re about to run off with the ghosts of your past again. So I’m your friend, and I’m here, and I’m asking you to talk to me. Tell me what’s making you want to do that.”

“I’m fine, Cap.” Nick sometimes called me Cap, for Captain. He considered me a guiding and commanding force in his life, and had for some time.

“Come on. Just give it to me. Who’s Dorrich? Why do you need to get a hold of him so bad?”

The forest scrolled past us, undulating hills of leafless winter trees. Nick’s gaze was fixed on the horizon.

“Is Dorrich real?” I asked.

“Yes, he’s real,” Nick snapped. I let it go. We both knew Nick’s schizophrenia had caused him to come up with imaginary people before, or to assign imaginary intentions to people. But there was no need to rub it in his face. “He was my staff sergeant on my second deployment.”

“OK, so why isn’t he answering your calls?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you talked to him since you came home?”

“We check in now and then,” Nick said. He tapped his phone against his knee. “You know. Say hi.”

I let the silence build in the car. When Nick didn’t break it, I did.

“You’re not giving me the full picture here.”

“I know,” Nick said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s bad,” Nick said. I looked over and he met my eyes properly for the first time that morning, and what I saw in them was something dark and desperate. Something only barely contained. “It’s bad, OK? Worse than you could imagine.”

“It can’t be,” I said. “Because I know you, OK? I was a Boston cop for twenty years, for God’s sake. I’ve seen some stuff. And you? You’re not like that.”

Nick said nothing. He was listening to my speech, his jaw locked.

“So whatever it is, whatever you and this Dorrich g. . .