“Dear guests, I present your formidable host, Rosie Casket.”
The tourists clapped. I faked a smile and bowed.
“Sorry for the delay, Miss Casket. They wanted to take pictures of the lighthouse in the fog. It’s quite majestic this evening, don’t you agree?”
I grunted. “We’ll talk later.”
“No problem, boss.”
But as always, later never came. By the time I helped everyone to their rooms for the night, Captain Herrick had passed out on the deck of his boat.
I had no interest in shaking him awake and arguing with a drunken dummy. I’d have to put off firing him until another day.
Come Wednesday morning, forty-eight hours after submitting my information to the state, I escorted my guests down to the dock, shot Captain Herrick a glare, and then returned to the inn and dressed in my nunniest turtleneck. I checked the oil in my brand-new used Honda and left a note on the door that said, Be Back Before Noon.
Rather than ask Eldritch to look after the place—the old man still had the circadian rhythms of a vampire—I decided that closing the inn for a few hours was the best approach, even at the risk of missing the one or two leaf peepers who might stop on the side of the road to take selfies pretending to prick their fingers on the Victorian spires. I trusted Eldritch with my life, but not with the dishes or the laundry.
My Honda rode more smoothly than that old Apache ever did. As I drove through downtown Dark Haven, dawn splitting between the shops on Main Street, I glanced at the Gold Bug Tavern, the bar where Peter Hardgrave lost his liquor license.
The Tudor revival building had been shuttered for months now, a bulldozer waiting in the lot. According to my foster father, as soon as the town secured the permits for demolition, some twenty-year-old construction worker would drive a crane and a wrecking ball down Main Street and take a swing at the tavern’s century-old shutters. Losing the building was a shame, The Dark Haven Register reported. The hangout was an anchor on the street and a unique piece of Dark Haven’s history—not to mention the building where I grew up.
I cracked my passenger window for a little fresh air and the note on my passenger seat whipped up against the glass and danced a jig on the wind.
I glanced at the fluttering receipt.
Fair is foul and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Obviously, the lines had been taken from the first act of Macbeth, the part where the three Weïrd Sisters—pronounced wayward—anticipate Macbeth’s arrival after the “hurly-burly’s” done. After the thane’s arrival, they predict he will become the king.
Even though my specialty was American literature and I was about as far from a bard-freak as I was from a professional rugby player, I could see no significance in the words other than the obvious. The harbor had stunk of fish that morning and it was foggy.
Big deal.
I dismissed the note as a stupid joke, one probably conceived of and written by one of the lawyers in my foster father’s firm, one of the pranksters who was privy to the two previous literary clues that had upended my life. I should have been thankful that the leg-puller hadn’t left a fart joke on my windshield—although the bit about the filthy air might suffice.
As to the presence of Charlie Margin, the hunchback paralegal I had seen standing in the doorway, I assumed that since he was the firm’s gopher and all-around whipping boy, the prankster had made him do the firm’s dirty work.
Our mutual kidnapping and subsequent synchronized swim with death in the cave beneath Taylor’s Bluff may have made some of the lawyers believe we were family now and could trade barbs like old siblings, but leaving a note from the bard was not in good humor.
Pathetic, really. Anyone who wants to demonstrate literary might knows better than to quote one of the most quoted lines of all time.
If you want to be clever, you need to be obscure.
This prankster would stand out like a new bookstore in the middle of Main Street.
At the end of the road, I pulled onto the highway. The note caught a wind and whipped into the back seat. Good riddance. Besides, I had more pressing matters on my mind.
I hadn’t seen Peter Hardgrave since he took the witness stand at his trial. If his war-mongering tattoos were any indication, he was not a man whom you wanted to cross, not in a dark alley, nor in dark woods.
Could I really go into business with a man like that?
When I finally pulled up to the guard’s booth outside of Thomaston, the pink horizon behind the fences had succumbed to the pressure of an oppressively gray morning. I had read somewhere that because our primitive rods and cones limited our vision to ten million different colors, our eyes rendered any color we couldn’t process as a shade of gray. If that were true, then the reformed optimist in me dared to imagine that a big, invisible rainbow was sitting right behind the razor wire. It was a lot better than the alternative, an anvil of heavy clouds and fiery brimstone.
I pressed a button and my window rolled itself down. Power windows were downright luxurious compared to the Apache. The downside was that the Honda sat much lower than the pickup and I had to strain my neck to see the guard, a balding behemoth who seemed determined to consume enough calories to fill the empty space in his booth. He was the same guard whom I had seen in my two previous visits to the prison.
Upon seeing me, he put down a box of donuts, licked his fingers, and turned on a swivel stool away from his computer. The timing of his shifts was uncanny—either that or he was the only man working at the prison who was qualified to sit on his
