Frankie Cash pressed the keycard against the lock, and it clicked, the door opening on its own. She fumbled for a light switch and flicked it on.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. The room was huge and luxurious, with a sitting room and a bedroom beyond, plate glass windows looking northward into the dark mountains. The sitting room had a kiva fireplace in one corner with an antlered elk skull mounted above it, a fire already built and burning brightly. Pine floors were spread with Navajo rugs, and the walls of the room were like a log cabin, made from hand-adzed logs chinked with mortar. A scroll-pattern crystal chandelier hung from the wood-beamed ceiling. As she looked around, she thought how the room did not make for good optics for a detective on assignment, but it was too late to change, and she was too tired to do anything about it.
Cash groaned and collapsed into the nearest cowhide chair, sinking down into it and leaning back. It was five o’clock in the morning, and she’d been up twenty-four hours straight. She was tired and wanted to get into bed, but her mind was going a mile a minute, and there was no way she could sleep until she’d wound down a bit.
As she sprawled in the chair, her eye strayed to the far wall, which was decorated with an old bamboo fly rod and a creel. It reminded her of her father, a police captain in Portland, who spent every free minute fishing, talking about fishing, and thinking about fishing. He’d taken her fishing as a kid many times, always full of hope that she could be converted. But she’d hated it. Fishing was all about the process, of being present in the moment, about the light reflecting off the riffles and the sound of the stream and the scent of pine needles and fresh water. Cash was too goal oriented. When she didn’t catch a fish in ten minutes, she would get annoyed and start lashing the water, getting her fly snagged on brush, pulling too hard and breaking the leader, much to her father’s dismay as she ruined pool after pool.
Her dad had retired from the force at sixty-five, looking forward to many long years of fishing—and was dead in six months of pancreatic cancer, cheated by life. At least he hadn’t lived long enough to see the shit rain come down on her three years later, from his beloved Portland CID. Her mother was still in Westbrook, outside Portland, playing bridge and attending the bean suppers at the grange, seemingly invincible, leading a full life and in good health … so far. Not bad at all for eighty. Cash didn’t want to think about what was going to happen when her mother went into the inevitable decline, with her only daughter two thousand miles away.
She groaned again. Maine. It seemed so far away now, the memories softening and dissolving around the edges. She dreamed about it all the time, but each time in the dream, Portland was a little different, changed, a little more foreign. In many of her dreams, she was lost in the back streets of Portland and couldn’t find her way home. Or she was in a boat lost on a rough sea, the compass spinning wildly, dark as night, Portland Head Light blinking in the distance through the lashing rain, but she couldn’t reach it, couldn’t reach the safety of the harbor.
The alarm from her phone cut the air, and she almost fell out of the chair in surprise, morning sun suddenly streaming in the window. For a moment, she was in a panic, wondering where she was. She turned off the cell phone alarm—it was seven a.m. She’d fallen asleep in her clothes sitting in the chair, and now she was stiff and looked like shit.
She eased up from the chair, her back aching from sleeping in an awkward position. She shuffled into the bathroom, a palace of marble and nickel and porcelain, with little soaps and bottles of shampoo and conditioner and creams all lined up.
Looking at herself in the mirror, she frowned, brushed her hair and her teeth, splashed some icy water in her face, and gave it a couple of hard slaps to bring up the color. And then she hunted around for coffee. Coffee. And there it was, a gleaming espresso machine as intricate as a miniature nuclear power plant. How wonderful. She fired it up and made two doubles and tossed them down, one after the other.
Another few slaps, a tug on her suit, and she was ready to go.