The Inn (3 page)

T
he arthritis in Zeke's knees and hips burned like a thousand wasps stinging him all at once. Each step up the narrow stairs to the attic was agony. He couldn't do this much longer.

It was time to turn this job over to someone else.

And who better than young Mr. Jack?

Zeke lifted the old rusted iron key from the ring he carried on his belt, the one that had been jangling against his side all the way up the stairs. He slipped it into the keyhole on the door.

How many times had he done this particular job? Impossible to count. It seemed all his life. But it wasn't all his life. There had been a time before Zeke had come to this house, though he could hardly remember that life now, when his life had seemed full of promise. But that was a long, long time ago. Half a century Zeke had been tending to this place. And for almost half of that time, he'd been making this trip up to the attic, twice a day.

He turned the key in the lock.

Downstairs, Mr. Jack and his pretty wife were settling in, unpacking, freshening up. Oh, they had such plans. They were going to clean the place up. Modernize it. The woman spoke of getting something called “wireless internetting,” whatever that was.

A little smile played across Zeke's lips.

They could plan all they wanted. They'd soon learn it wasn't they who made decisions about the house.

He opened the door.

He listened.

He heard the sound then in the dark, cobwebby room.

The panting.

Zeke stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

A
nnabel stood gazing out of her window into the cold bare limbs of the trees that surrounded the house. They looked like some sort of petrified aboriginal humans, frozen in the midst of some terrible cataclysm, staring up at the Blue Boy Inn with their arms outstretched to the sky.

“Lots of possibilities, don't you think, sweetheart?”

Jack had come into the bedroom behind her.

“I think if we knock this wall down here,” he was saying, “we can open up the room to include the bathroom in a sort of master suite. That way we don't have to mingle with the guests in the hallway when we first get up in the morning.”

Annabel didn't say anything. She just kept staring out into the trees.

“What do you say, baby cakes? Isn't that a good idea? You're the one with the artistic eye.”

She turned around to face him. “I think it's a splendid idea,” she said, trying to smile. “But I thought you wanted to respect tradition.”

“I do, sweetheart, but you know I was mostly saying that just to placate Gran.” Jack smiled broadly, his cheeks indenting with dimples, and he took her in his arms. “This has been her home for a long, long time. I didn't want her to think that we were going to start pulling it down around her.”

“It needs a lot of work, Jack,” Annabel told him. “Much more than I thought. So many walls and floorboards need to be replaced. The plumbing and electricity needs to be updated.”

“I know, babe. One step at a time.”

She shuddered and closed her eyes. She imagined she was at Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and the sound of honking taxicabs and police sirens filled her ears. It made her feel better, at least for a few moments.

She gently slipped out of her husband's embrace. “If I'm going to do this, I'll need your support, you know.”

“You have it!”

“Are you sure?”

She looked at him. Jack's big blue eyes seemed filled with sincerity and purpose. They'd been madly in love once, five years earlier, when they'd met at a party and spontaneously married eleven days later, with no friends or family in attendance, just a justice of the peace and Jack's high school ring as a wedding band. Since then, some of the impulsivity of their union had faded, and Annabel's crises over the past year had severely strained their marriage. She didn't blame Jack for having a fling with Rachel Riley, one of her colleagues at
Orbit
. It had been just a one-night thing, when Annabel was locked away and Jack was lonely. He'd confessed to Annabel when she got out, apologizing profusely. She'd forgiven him. It was understandable.

But she could barely stomach looking at Rachel Riley, with her ridiculously blond hair and big boobs. She'd been Annabel's friend. Supposedly.

But in every other way, Jack had stuck by her. After the affair with Rachel, he had become even more devoted to making sure Annabel got better. So many other men might have walked away, but Jack didn't. Even during the period when she was coming home from fashion shoots strung out on coke, screaming and ranting and craving more blow, Jack had put up with her. He had calmed her down. He had brought her down from the high without letting her crash. When the time came for rehab, Jack had been right there, lending Annabel support and encouragement. Even as his own dreams of success had withered away, he hadn't given up on Annabel's.

Jack had thought he was on the fast track to the big time. In those heady first months after their hasty marriage, they'd imagined themselves the Next Big Power Couple. How excited he had been when a big publishing house bought the novel he'd been laboring over since college. It was a deep, involved story of a young man and his search for meaning in a world that was increasingly impersonal and commercial. Annabel thought that was ironic, given that Jack was always saying what he wanted most from his book was a contract for a Hollywood blockbuster so they'd get rich, rich, rich. When that hadn't happened—after much advance publicity, the reviewers had called the book “tedious” and “pretentious”—Jack had been devastated.

And it was just at that moment that Annabel's career had started its dizzying ascent. Her eventual crash was even more spectacular than Jack's.

Now here they both were, in the middle of the woods, miles and miles from civilization, in a place called the Blue Boy Inn.

Where Tommy Tricky lives
, Annabel thought.

She smiled over at Jack.

“I didn't mean to doubt you,” she said. “I know you support me. I couldn't have gotten through everything without you.”

Jack beamed, leaned over toward her, and kissed her on the forehead.

“I'll see you downstairs, hon,” he said. “You really ought to try Gran's rabbit stew. I know you don't want to eat bunnies, but, really, it's out of this world.”

“I'll pass on it for now,” she told him.

He winked at her and bounded out of the room.

Annabel looked around. How small the room was. So square and the ceilings were so low. The whole place smelled like old, wet wood. And rabbit stew. Annabel shivered.

She would never last here.

But she had to. There was nowhere else.

No other choice.

She would make the best of it. She would redesign this place. It was theirs, after all. The old woman was signing over the property to them. After that, they could do what they liked. Annabel needed a project. She could do this. She could bring in carpenters and painters and electricians. She still had some contacts over at the HG television network. Maybe she ought to pitch them a reality show set in the woods of western Massachusetts, as a former New York socialite tries to remake an old house....

And her life.

No, Annabel didn't want cameras around for that.

She looked out the window again, at the gnarled branches so close to the house.
It's like they're trying to suffocate us
, Annabel thought.

When was the last time she and Jack had made love?

The thought struck Annabel suddenly and unexpectedly. She paused. She couldn't remember. Yes, wait, now she could. It had been three weeks ago. Right after he'd gotten the call from his grandmother. Jack had been so excited by the idea. He'd started kissing Annabel all over the face. “This is it, sweet cakes!” he had shouted. “The answer to our doldrums! Our new path! Our way out of the city! We're going to be huge successes there. Just you wait and see!”

The fact that Annabel hadn't wanted to leave the city was immaterial. She had been bulldozed by Jack's enthusiasm. And by his amorous advances. His big hands had suddenly been all over her. She hadn't wanted to make love that day, but Jack had insisted. Annabel had given in, and then, while he was inside her, she had started to cry, wanting to enjoy it, wanting to love sex the way she used to—wanting to love
Jack
the way she used to. How much Annabel wanted to love everything in her life the way she once had in days gone by—before the drugs and the breakdown and the humiliation.

“Baby doll,” Jack had said, looking down at her, red-faced and puffing. “Why are you crying?”

She had replied that the tears came from her orgasm. That had been a lie.

That was also the last time they made love.

He might want to, tonight
, she thought to herself.
To celebrate our first night here.

Annabel dreaded the prospect. Not that she wanted to withhold sex from Jack. In fact, she wanted very much to make love to him, to feel his arms around her, to feel happy and content in his embrace the way she used to. She
craved
that feeling.

But she knew she couldn't feel that way. Not here. Not in this house.

A whiff of the rabbit stew reached her nostrils again, and nearly made her vomit. It smelled sickeningly sweet, like a dead mouse rotting under the stove.

This is never going to work
, she thought to herself.

“Annabel, you have got to believe in yourself,” her mother always used to tell her. “You're such a timid little kitten. You need to believe you can do whatever you put your mind to doing.”

That had always been a challenge for Annabel. Even when she'd been on top of the world, New York's latest fashion and design darling, she'd doubted herself. It was why she had turned to coke and booze. She'd needed to feel confident—and she felt confident when she was high. But when she came down, she was right back to feeling unsure and timid again, so she had searched out more white powder to sniff up her nose. It had been a vicious cycle. No wonder she had burned out so quickly.

But she had to believe in herself now. She had to make this venture work.

She smiled as she looked at herself in the mirror. She tied her chestnut-colored hair back in a ponytail. Her big brown eyes disclosed her lack of sleep these past several weeks. Her face was a little fuller now than it had been during the worst of her addiction, but she could still stand to put on a few pounds. She wore no makeup. She reached into her purse and pulled out a lipstick, rubbing a very light pink on her lips.

“You can do this,” she told her reflection.

Right away, she doubted her own words.

In rehab, they had tried pumping her with self-confidence, cheering her on. There had been therapists and psychologists whose jobs had been merely to instill in Annabel a sense that she mattered, that she was powerful. They were successful enough that she had been able to leave, to return home to Jack, to be able to handle the cravings when they came, and to finally feel free of them. Annabel didn't want coke anymore. She wanted something else, however, though that was harder to identify. Happiness, she supposed, but that felt like asking for too much.

She had an image then, as she gazed at herself in the mirror, of her mother's body hanging behind her.

She didn't jump. She saw it sometimes. Just like the day she had come in from school, aged sixteen, and found her mother hanging in the dining room.

The same mother who had told Annabel to believe in herself.

Annabel closed her eyes, opened them again, and the image was gone. That was the way it worked.

But now she spied something else behind her in the mirror.

Something that moved.

Annabel spun around. There was nothing there. Whatever she had seen was small, close to the floor, maybe a cat or a dog, moving quickly through the small, shadowy space between the bed and the dresser.

A squirrel?
Annabel asked herself.

She took a step toward the spot where she had detected the motion. Had whatever it was gone under the bed?

“I wouldn't be surprised if this place is infested with vermin,” Annabel said out loud, wondering whether she ought to stoop down and peer under the bed herself or go get Jack. She was a city girl, after all. In Central Park, she'd always been afraid of the squirrels.

“Believe in yourself, Annabel,” she told herself, and laughed.

She knelt down on the old, warped wooden floorboards. She lifted the bedspread and peered under the box spring.

Nothing. Just clumps of dust.

Annabel sighed.

She must have imagined she saw something. It must have been just the shadow of a tree branch moving outside. The day was becoming breezy, after all.

Annabel stood back up.

She looked over toward the door.

And there, grinning malevolently up at her, was the tiny blue figure of Tommy Tricky, gnashing his long, sharp, blue teeth.

Z
eke heard the woman's scream as he was locking the door to the attic. He hurried down the steps as best he could, his arthritic joints screaming at him, and made his way to Annabel's room.

He hadn't expected it to start this soon.

The caretaker found the new mistress of the house standing up against the wall in the corridor, her face the color of flour, and her body shuddering as if she was having a seizure. Zeke reached out a hand to steady her.

“Miss Annabel,” the old man said. “What's wrong?”

“I saw something,” she managed to say.

“What did you see?”

“A boy. A little man.”

Zeke narrowed his rheumy eyes at her. “There's no little boys here.”

“I saw him,” Annabel said, still trembling.

“What was he doing?”

“Smiling.” She burst into tears and covered her face with her hands. “Teeth. His teeth!”

“A little boy smiled at you?”

Zeke kept his eyes trained on Annabel.

“Tell me exactly what you saw,” he said.

But she was too overcome now. She just sobbed into her hands.

“What's going on?” came the voice of Mr. Jack, heading down the hallway toward them. He seemed more annoyed to be pulled away from his rabbit stew than concerned about his wife.

“Miss Annabel said she saw a little boy,” Zeke told him,

“A little boy?”

“Oh, Jack,” she said, and threw herself into his arms. “I saw him. The blue boy . . .”

“The blue boy?” her husband asked.

“You mean, the boy from our sign out front?” Zeke asked.

“And then he disappeared!” The color had returned to Annabel's face. Now she was all red and purple from crying. “He ran down the hall and somehow just disappeared.. . .”

“Annabel,” Jack said, stroking her hair, “sweetheart, you had a hallucination. . . .”

She looked up at him. Zeke saw them exchange a glance that carried some meaning. Apparently, this pretty young lady had had hallucinations before.

That could prove convenient.

“It's okay,” Mr. Jack told Zeke. “My wife has a vivid imagination sometimes.”

“Imagination is good for the soul,” the caretaker replied, “but not when it scares you half to death.”

“She'll be okay, now, won't you, baby cakes?” Jack asked, gently moving Annabel back into their room. He shot Zeke a glance. “Tell Gran I'll be back down in a minute.”

“Yessir, Mr. Jack.”

The old man shuffled down the hall back toward the kitchen.

Cordelia was waiting for him. Her intense blue eyes seemed to burn holes in her pale face. Her gnarled hands were opening and closing.

“What has happened?” she asked, in that voice that seemed so much younger than the face from which it came.

“She saw a little boy,” Zeke told her.

“A little boy?”

“A little blue boy,” the caretaker added.

Cordelia turned away. “I wish he hadn't brought her,” she said.

“You can't expect a man to leave his wife behind.”

She turned her eyes back to him. “Why not? My husband did. My son left poor Jack.”

“That's what happens here,” Zeke said, rather matter-of-factly.

Cordelia sat back down at the table. “By the way,” she said. “You'll need to prepare one of the rooms.” She paused. “We've got guests arriving.”