The Sense of Reckoning by Matty Dalrymple Page A

slightly inebriated, although Garrick couldn’t recall ever encountering a drunk spirit before. Garrick thought back to the young man he had first met at Lynam’s Point so many years ago—doggedly working to keep the hotel afloat, old beyond his years with responsibility. But during the off-seasons when the hotel was closed and his only responsibility was to keep it from falling down over the winter, Loring Lynam had had a reputation as a hard drinker. And in the last few years of his life, it wasn’t only during off-season that he had overindulged. When they had found his body, there had been an empty bottle of bourbon in the room.
    It appeared that Loring was once again in a storytelling mood.
    “So now you know how much Dad loved his mother.”
    “Yes,” said Garrick cautiously.
    “What did he say?” asked Ellen.
    “Ellen, please don’t be a distraction,” Garrick said to her and turned back to Loring.
    “It’s probably helpful for you to know how Dad felt about his father.”
    “Helpful to whom?” glowered Garrick.
    “Oh, I’m sure you’ll be able to pick up some gems of wisdom from the story,” said Loring. He stood, with that slight over-carefulness of the drunk, and walked to the window overlooking the lawn. “I never had the pleasure of meeting my grandfather—he had a heart attack on a dock in Bernard where he had gone to buy lobsters back when the dining room was open. Forty-nine years old. Forty-nine’s a bad age for the Lynam men. Or maybe I should say fifty’s a bad age for the Lynam men, since we never get to see it. Anyhow, from some of the stories Dad told—and Dad did love to tell stories—it sounds like Granddad was no treat to live with ...”

Chapter 14
    1936
    Chip lay in bed, thinking over the day, savoring his triumph with the tea tray. That the hotel would be his someday—he had never thought about that before. It had always been his playground, the hotel itself with its odd nooks and crannies to hide in, the grounds with the pine woods to explore, Lynam Narrows with its trove of interesting pebbles. But if he had to take care of it himself—it might be possible, with his mother’s help.
    He tossed restlessly as a new thought struck him. If the hotel was his, that would mean it would no longer be his father’s. Chip turned that thought over in his mind.  
    He could just barely remember a time—before all his parents’ talk was about where they would find the money to pay for this or that—when his father would laugh and smile. He could remember days when his father would take him—Chip had been just a baby then—down to the water to watch the boats, or throw him in the air so that he would shriek with delight.
    Then things had gotten bad—Chip knew from listening to his parents talk when they thought he wasn’t around. They talked about the Crash of ’29—it was after that that the rooms started to go empty, even in high season. (Chip wondered what could have crashed that would have kept people away from his parents’ hotel—maybe a train crash that frightened people traveling from faraway places like New York City and Philadelphia? He figured if it had involved a boat, it would have been called the Wreck of ’29.) At first, a few locals had occasionally stopped by to eat in the practically empty dining room, but then his parents had had to close the dining room when they couldn’t afford to pay the cook. One season they hadn’t opened at all—Chip had been too little to remember it himself, but he had once or twice heard his father refer to it in the same strained tones he used to discuss “bank balance” or “room occupancy.”
    Just the year before, Chip had more than once woken up in the middle of the night in his bedroom on the top floor of the hotel and, unable to go back to sleep, had gone to his parents’ room across the hall to find it empty. He knew that if he went looking for them he would find them, as he had one night, huddled over the