“Is Captain Herrick okay?” the first old lady said.
“He’s a little seasick this morning, but he’s doing just fine, ma’am. No worries, we’ll get you back to your Chevy Nova in no time. I hope you liked the breakfast.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “But, Dear?”
“Please, Mrs. Johnson, call me Rosie.”
“I only wish you would serve some tea at breakfast. All that chocolate makes me feel bloaty.”
I faked a smile. “Yes, Mrs. Johnson. Thank you for the suggestion. I will certainly keep that in mind.”
Back on the pier in downtown Dark Haven, I wished my elderly guests safe travels, reminded them to post a positive review the next time they went to the library to use the internet, and then I climbed aboard again.
The fog was thick with the stink of rotten fish. Captain Herrick was sitting on the coaming, nothing but a shadow in the gloom. As I got closer, he was picking his teeth with a fishbone and rubbing the back of his head. Had he been younger and not so hard-headed, his skull would have been flat from passing out on the deck so often.
“I’ll give you one more night,” I said.
“For what?”
“This partnership. If I even smell any mouthwash on you, I’m dissolving this business relationship. You made me haul that luggage all by myself last night.”
“And it shows. You’re gettin some sweet guns,” he said.
“I don’t want guns,” I snapped. “Do we have an agreement or not?”
“No, we don’t got no agreement. I do my things my way, and you do things your way. You ain’t my boss, you’re my partner. That was the deal.”
“Now that the town passed an ordinance against cave tours, you’d be lying dead in a gutter if I hadn’t given you this job.”
Captain Herrick flicked the fishbone at my chest. “And you’d be renting rooms to brown recluses. Who else you gonna work with?” he said. He turned around and motioned to all the dark, amorphous shapes in the fog. The roughnecks were hosing off their boats and loading the morning’s bait and lobster traps. “These workin class folks are too busy buggin to partner up with the likes of you, a conniving, controlling wench. Like you said, cave tours are now illegal, so all of them roughnecks are back to doin what they do best: buggin. The only reason you even got a partner is cuz I’m too hungover each mornin to head back out there and haul my pots.”
I shoved my hands into my butt pockets to keep myself from pushing him overboard.
“You want a sober lobsterman or a drunken tour guide? Your choice,” he said.
“I’ve got plans,” I said, thinking of Peter Hardgrave. “I don’t need you.”
“Yes you do.”
I gritted my teeth. “This is my business. I’ll give you ONE more chance. This afternoon, I want you at my dock at five o’clock, sharp. Four guests have already booked us for the night.”
“Aye, aye cap’n,” he said and saluted me with the middle finger.
I turned on my heels, climbed off the boat, and tromped for the street. I couldn’t hang around and argue with him any longer or else I’d risk my sanity and get a parking ticket.
Captain Herrick was irredeemably annoying. But he had a point. All the other lobster boat captains were too busy being actual captains to work with me. I couldn’t wait around for one of them to retire and work for practically nothing.
To cover my bases, I would have to look into the Peter Hardgrave situation.
When I got to my Honda, a used car I had picked up after giving my pickup to Eldritch after sales picked up, there was a nice slip of paper tucked under my driver’s side wiper.
I picked it up.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
I checked my watch. It was three minutes past nine a.m.
I glanced up and down the street, but there wasn’t a meter maid in sight, only old Charlie Margin, the hunchbacked paralegal who worked at my foster father’s firm. He was standing in the doorway to the law office.
I ripped the ticket off the windshield and unfolded it. But it wasn’t a ticket. Instead, it was an old receipt, the numbers faded, the name of the vendor too light to read.
On its back, in precisely printed letters, it read:
Fair is foul and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
When I looked up, Charlie Margin was gone.
5
After buying groceries and toiletries, I headed back to the inn. I spent the day doing laundry, cleaning up the rooms, making beds, scrubbing the bathroom.
Come five o’clock, I sat at the kitchen table and watched the harbor. The fog hadn’t lifted and my backyard looked like someone had draped gauze over the window.
The Moaning Lisa was nowhere to be seen.
I felt like an old-time whaling spouse. If the roof had a widow’s walk, I’d pace it until Captain Herrick’s ship arrived. More than a broken heart, the consequences of his absence were actually pretty dire; if he didn’t arrive, I wouldn’t have any guests. And if I didn’t have any guests, the day’s groceries would spoil. But worse than that, I will have wasted my whole afternoon getting ready. Money can be replaced, but not time.
I had entrusted Herrick with way too much responsibility. I had given him way too much influence over my business.
It was time to make a change.
I stared at the digits on my phone. “C’mon, you lousy good-for-nothing drunk.”
Finally, near the end of my dock, a hard shape broke the gloom. I checked my phone. He was fifteen minutes late.
I fixed my hair, tried to bury my anger, and put on a great big smile and went down to the dock to greet my guests.
Captain Herrick had parted his hair and he looked suspiciously like a ventriloquist dummy. He hammed it up and pointed at
