Salt in the Wound (Merritt Harbor #1)

Chapter 1

The Reading

Three weeks dead, and Eddie Vann was still telling the town what to eat.

The specials board hung by the pass where it always hung, Eddie's block capitals gone chalky and soft at the edges.

HADDOCK. CHOWDER. brEAD PUDDING IF DEE FEELS LIKE IT.

Rory had wiped that board down maybe four thousand times in nineteen years — new date, new soup, Eddie leaning over his shoulder to correct the spelling of scallop like it was a personal failing.

He hadn't touched it in three weeks. Couldn't. Every morning he thought, today, and every morning he found something else that needed scrubbing instead.

This morning it was the flat-top. He'd been at it since four, scraper working the same square foot of steel long after the carbon was gone, because the alternative was standing still, and standing still in Eddie's kitchen at four in the morning was not a thing Rory could currently do.

"You're gonna wear a hole in it." Dee came through the swinging door backward, coffee urn hugged to her chest like a baby, and set it on the counter with the particular grunt she'd been making for thirty years. "Then we'll have two things that don't work. The grill and you."

"Grill works fine."

"Mm." She said it the way she said everything she didn't agree with, which was most of what Rory said.

She was already tying her apron, already reaching for the mugs, the whole opening routine folded into her hands so deep she could do it asleep and probably had.

"Wyatt's out front. Been out front twenty minutes.

Says he's not coming in till you feed him, so. "

"Tell him we're closed."

"It's six-forty. We open at six."

"Tell him we're closed to him."

Dee gave him a look over the top of her glasses.

It was a look with a lot of history in it — she'd been giving Rory versions of it since he was fifteen and mouthy and half-feral, back when Eddie first dragged him off the town dock and stuck a knife in his hand and told him he could either learn to break down a fish or he could keep breaking windows, his choice.

She'd fed him grilled cheese for a week before she'd trusted him with anything sharp.

She wasn't going to stop looking at him like that now just because the man who'd hired them both was in the ground.

"He's your friend," she said. "And he's worried about you. Both of which you're gonna have to survive."

Rory scraped the grill.

The screen door slapped — that flat, particular crack it had made since before Rory was born, wood on wood, the sound of somebody arriving whether you wanted them or not — and Wyatt Boudreau came in on a gust of cold harbor air that smelled like diesel and low tide.

He was still in his harbormaster's fleece, radio clipped to the collar, and he looked like a man who'd rehearsed something on the walk over and already knew it wasn't going to go the way he'd rehearsed it.

"You look like hell," Wyatt said, sitting.

"You want coffee or you want to keep talking."

"Both are on the table." Wyatt accepted the mug Dee slid him without looking, the two of them a machine that had run ten thousand mornings. He wrapped both hands around it. Didn't drink. "Marsh called me."

Rory set the scraper down.

He knew a lot of Marshes. The harbor was lousy with them — there was a Marsh who ran the co-op fuel dock and a Marsh who'd sold him a truck with a cracked block and a Marsh who'd been dead longer than Rory'd been alive and still had a mooring named after him.

But there was only one Marsh who called Wyatt at six in the morning about Rory, and that was Alan Marsh, Attorney-at-Law, whose office was the second floor over the pharmacy and whose handwriting was on every deed and will and boundary dispute in Merritt Harbor going back forty years.

"Reading's today," Rory said. It wasn't a question. He'd known it was coming. He'd been not-thinking about it with the same discipline he'd been not-touching the board.

"Ten o'clock. He wanted me to make sure you'd be there." Wyatt finally drank, grimaced, set the mug down. "Which — obviously you'll be there, it's your—" He stopped. Started again. "He said bring someone. If you wanted."

"Why would I bring someone."

Wyatt and Dee did a thing then. It was fast and they both denied doing it every time, but they had a whole silent language, the two of them, and right now it was saying something Rory didn't like. A look passed. Dee found something to do with the mugs.

"No reason," Wyatt said, which meant there was a reason, and the reason was standing in the room with all of them and none of them was going to name it, because to name it you'd have to say Eddie's dead out loud in Eddie's kitchen, and nobody in this building had managed that yet, three weeks in.

Rory picked the scraper back up.

It's mine, he thought, and the thought had the shape of a thing he'd been leaning against so long he'd stopped noticing it held him up.

He gave me the knife. He gave me the recipes.

He gave me the four a.m. and the ledgers and the — he gave me all of it, for nineteen years, one piece at a time.

Ten o'clock is a formality. Marsh reads some paper, I sign some paper, and then I put the CLOSED sign in the window for one afternoon, the first afternoon this place has closed in nineteen years, and I go up the stairs and I sit in Eddie's chair and I let myself—

"Rory." Dee's hand on his wrist. Warm, dry, papery. She'd taken the scraper without him noticing. "The grill's clean, honey. It's been clean."

By seven the place had its usual bones in it.

Old Pruitt at the end of the counter with his decaf and his week-old paper.

The two guys off the Marguerite who came in reeking of bait and tipped in exact change.

A booth of contractors arguing about the bridge job.

The green vinyl seats sighed under them the way they always had, cracked in the same places, patched in the same places with the same silver tape Eddie had sworn every spring he'd finally replace and never did.

Rory worked the line and let the orders come and did not look at the board.

He was good at this. That was the thing nobody outside a kitchen understood — that grief and a breakfast rush ran on the same fuel, motion, and if you kept moving you could go whole minutes, sometimes a full ticket, without the other thing catching you.

Two over easy, home fries, wheat. Haddock sandwich, no slaw.

His hands knew the whole vocabulary. His hands could grieve and cook at the same time, which was more than his head could manage.

"So it's yours now, huh."

Pruitt, of course. Pruitt had been saying the quiet part out loud since the Carter administration. He'd folded his paper and was watching Rory over it with the frank, unembarrassed nosiness of a man who'd earned it by being eighty-one.

"Eat your eggs, Walt," Dee said, refilling him without being asked.

"I'm just saying. Nineteen years." Pruitt pointed his fork at the kitchen, at the whole operation.

"Man builds a thing, does right by it. Stands to reason.

" He nodded, satisfied with his own reasoning, the reasoning of the entire harbor, the reasoning Rory had let himself lean on for three weeks because everyone said it and everyone believed it and it fit.

"Eddie'd want it to go to the one who stayed. That's how it oughta work."

That's how it oughta work. Rory plated the haddock.

Rang the bell. Didn't answer, because it was ten past seven and the reading was at ten, and there was a version of the next three hours where he got to keep believing Walt Pruitt was right.

He wanted those hours. He wanted them the way you want to stay asleep inside a good dream you already know is a dream.

"Order up," he said.

Under the register the ledger sat where it always sat, and Rory knew what was in it because he'd been the one keeping it since Eddie's eyes went.

He knew the diner cleared money in July and August and bled it the other ten months.

He knew what the fuel cost and the linens cost and what they still owed the fish guy.

He knew, if he was honest, that the only reason a development company would offer real money for a struggling harbor diner was that they didn't want the diner at all.

They wanted the ground it stood on. The view. The deep water off the dock.

He knew all of it. He'd just never had to say it to anybody, because it had only ever been his to carry.

He wiped his hands. Checked the clock. Nine-forty.

"Dee. Watch the line. I got a thing."

"I know what you got," she said, and there was so much in it, so much she wasn't going to make him hear, that he had to leave fast — out the back, past the walk-in and the dry storage and the narrow stairs up to the apartment he hadn't slept in since the funeral, out into the alley where the gulls were already working the dumpster and the whole cold bright morning was waiting to change his life.

***

Marsh's office smelled like old paper and the pharmacy below it, cough drops and printer toner.

Rory sat in the good chair, the leather one, because Marsh had waved him into it, and he kept his cap in his hands and turned it by the brim and tried not to look at the framed nautical charts on the walls because they were the kind of thing Eddie would've had an opinion about.