Kingfisher (3 page)

Jayne called in another bar order, then saw Carrie's little pile of experiments and crossed the kitchen to grab one. Carrie watched her eyes, lined and shadowed with black and purple, widen, then close. For a moment, her young, cynical face grew ethereal.

“Eggplant,” she breathed. “Everyone is so afraid of it. I adore it. I color my hair eggplant. I wear eggplant. I inhale eggplant. Make more.”

Marjorie and Bek began to argue about something. Carrie heard snatches of it whenever they passed each other.

“It was,” Bek said.

“Couldn't have been,” Marjorie answered adamantly. “No way. Not here.”

“Was.”

Marjorie called for the dessert tray. Carrie added another of her experiments to the slices of pound cake, pots of dark chocolate mousse, strawberry tarts. Marjorie looked dubious. “Nobody here eats pears for dessert.”

“Not even poached with vanilla and black peppercorns, and drizzled with warm salted caramel and grated lemon peel?”

“Try some ice cream on it.”

Carrie grinned. “I'll eat it if it comes back.”

The dessert tray returned without it.

“It was her,” Bek insisted to Marjorie as he came in under a precarious load of dirty plates. “She ate Carrie's pear.”

“No way,” Marjorie said tersely. “Must have been a tourist.”

“I worked for him for five days, once. I know it's her.”

“Only five days?” Carrie echoed, replenishing the dessert tray. “Five days where?” Then she asked, “Who?”

“Got another pear?” Bek asked.

“No,” Ella said quickly from the grill. “I want the other half of that.”

“She ate the croquettes, too. Even the eggplant ones.”

“Who are you talking about?” Carrie asked again, pulling the soup pots to back burners to wait for supper.

“Sage Stillwater.”

In the sudden, odd silence, Ella slapped her spatula down on a burger and pushed it flat until it hissed. For the first time, Carrie saw her angry.

“What on earth would Stillwater's wife be doing here?” Marjorie demanded of Bek.

“Spying,” Ella answered succinctly. They stared at her; she added darkly, “There's something here Stillwater wants. Maybe a cook, maybe a server. Maybe just a taste of something he hasn't thought up himself. In a week, you'll find Carrie's croquettes on his menu.”

“I really doubt it was her,” Marjorie said soothingly, though she sounded unconvinced. Carrie had never met Stillwater, but she knew enough about him to doubt that the owner of the classiest restaurant in Chimera Bay would ask his wife to eat in a place that offered fried-chicken nibbles for lunch.

Ella, still upset, brooded at the burger, flipped it to reveal the blackened underside, and upended it into the trash.

“I've known Stillwater on the prowl before,” she said, reaching for fresh meat. “I've seen what he can do when he wants something.”

Carrie felt her arms prickle into goose bumps, despite the heat in the kitchen. “What did he do that time? And why,” she added puzzledly, “didn't he come himself?”

Ella started to answer, then closed her mouth and shook her head at some unspeakable, unholy tangle of memory. “It's complicated,” she said grimly, and left it there, in the place where every other inexplicable event at the inn ended up.

Carrie stayed late to help Ella clean the kitchen after supper; they lingered in the weird, soothing rhythms of the dishwashers, eating crab bisque and Ella's olive and black pepper biscuits at the kitchen counter. It was late when Carrie drove
home, but as she climbed out of the truck, she heard Merle still chanting. She couldn't see him. The only light in the slough came from the moon, and from the little flashlight on her keychain. She paused beside the truck, wondering if she should check on him. His voice sounded hale, if a little hoarse, and he seemed to be moving away from her, deeper into the wood. She went indoors, crawled into bed instead.

Her father's voice, or the memory of it, drifted in and out of her dreams until she wove it into a rich night-language that almost made sense, that almost made her see what it was conjuring.

Then the moon set, and the wild chanting stopped.

S
omewhere south of Cape Mistbegotten, a sign in one of the little towns along the coast highway caused the traveling Pierce Oliver to veer impulsively off the road.

ALL YOU CAN EAT FRIDAY NITE
FISH FRY
the sign said. His sudden, overwhelming hunger drove the car to a halt beneath it.

He got out. It took a moment to find the door, hidden within a makeshift tunnel beneath scaffolding that went up and up, higher than he would have expected from such ramshackle beginnings. Part of a turret, a cone of white, jutted incongruously from behind a plywood wall covering the face of the building. There were no windows in sight. The sign was scrawled in chalk on a large board hooked to the scaffolding. It clattered and swung in the gusty wind blowing in from the west, or from the south, or from anywhere, according to the tipsy weather vane on top of the turret, which squealed crankily as it spun.

Odors wafted through the door as Pierce pulled it open. He smelled citrus, garlic, onions, and felt his empty stomach flop like a fish out of water. The vast cavern beyond the door was shadowy; he stood blinking, aware of a bar at his right, stretching off into the dimness, ghostly glasses floating upside down above it, a body or two on the stools, the dull gleam of amber and silver and gold from the bottles lined behind it. Other things were scattered among them: weird paintings, masks, street signs, totems that had drifted into the place through the years and clung. A mobile of porcelain Fools' heads hanging from the gloom above the bar swung slowly, glint-eyed and grinning, as though his entrance and the wind that pushed in behind him had disturbed them.

“Hello?” he called. He couldn't remember when he had last eaten. That morning? The evening before? Time blurred in his head like the light and shadow blurred in this twilight place where, in the depths of the cavern, near the ceiling, a star blazed suddenly with light.

“Up here,” a voice said briskly from above. “What can I do you for?”

“I saw your All-You-Can-Eat sign?”

“Ah. Dinner will be along anytime now as soon as my brother gets the crab traps in. Crab cakes tonight—your lucky night. You can wait in the restaurant through that door, or in here.”

Pierce's eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom, threaded here and there by golden, dusty tendrils of light of no perceptible origin. The size of the place shifted by greater lengths and depths. He blinked again. A ladder stood in a muddle of tables, chairs, stools, worn couches, odd,
mismatched pieces of furniture. Above the ladder, an immense crystal chandelier depended: a lovely ice flower with a hundred petals. That, he realized, explained the star. The speaker stood near the top of the ladder with a cloth in his hand, polishing the prisms.

A voice from one of the barstools near Pierce rumbled, “Join me?”

Pierce felt eyes, glanced around to meet them. “Thanks.”

The man had long, shaggy, dark hair, a wolf's pale eyes, beads in one ear and braided into his forelocks. For a second Pierce, light-headed with travel, saw the full face of the wolf, taking him in through its long, lean muzzle as well while it regarded him without discernible human expression. Then the man was back, beginning to smile, gesturing with one broad, capable hand at the barstool next to him.

Pierce sat. The stranger pushed a bowl of assorted pretzels, chips, and nuts over to him. “Tye'll be down in a moment to take your order. Passing through?”

Pierce, his mouth full, nodded and swallowed. “From the north coast. Cape Mistbegotten.”

The man sipped beer, musing. “Isn't that where the sorceress lives?”

Pierce's fingers drummed on the mahogany; he wished suddenly, urgently, for a beer. “She retired. She's running a restaurant now.” He felt the wolf's eyes, alert, waiting. He added reluctantly, “She's my mother.”

“No shit.”

He shook his head. “Nope. She spends her time trying to grow weird heirloom vegetables for the only decent restaurant on the cape.”

He heard rhythmic descending steps. “Which would make you Heloise Oliver's son Pierce,” the bartender said, reaching the floor. “I'll be a cockeyed halibut. Have one on the house.”

“How—” Pierce began, then stopped, not wanting to know. She was his past, what he had left, like the perpetual mists and the big, silent house up the twisty coastal road. How could she have found her way into this bar with him?

“What'll you have?”

He consulted the chalkboard dangling, by no visible means, above the draft handles. “I'll try a Goat's Breath Dark.”

“Excellent choice. You look like her. That red hair. Those eyes.”

Pierce nodded briefly, wondering how they knew her. He didn't ask. He didn't need to know; he was on his way south, and he would keep going until the voice of the ocean changed from a roar to the siren song of Severluna. The bartender, a tall, burly man with lank hair the color of duck fluff and a pair of square, dark-rimmed glasses on his nose, set a beer in front of Pierce. He drank deeply, came up for air, and found the mild eyes behind the glasses studying him.

“I'm Tye Fisher,” he said. “My brother Hal owns this place. He and your mother are related in a roundabout fashion; they know each other in the way that big families do. You need a place to stay, we can open one of the rooms for you.” Pierce felt his expression change, lock into place. Tye added quickly, “Stay the night, I mean. The old hotel hasn't been officially open for decades.”

“Hotel.” He swiveled on the stool, trying to find it. Remnants surfaced in the shadows: a huge stone fireplace at the far end of the room, what might be stairs inset to one side
of it, the kind that fanned out over the floor, then did a slow curve upward and out of sight.

“We're trying to get at least part of it back in business. We've been trying for years. Soon as you get one leak fixed, another starts, then the wind picks up, slats go flying into the bay, and the windows cloud up. You know how it goes.” He nodded toward the chandelier. “This used to be the old reception hall. Through those doors there along the inner wall was the sitting room, even bigger than this one. The restaurant's in there now. Kingfisher Grill.”

Pierce glanced behind him, then turned back to his beer, not wanting to know, wanting to make himself clear from the start. “I'm just passing through,” he said. “On my way south. I want to find a job cooking in Severluna.”

“You any good?”

Pierce smiled. “I don't know. My mother taught me a few things. I'm hoping to learn on the job in a restaurant on the beach. Someplace like my mother's, simple, fresh, and local, only down where it's warm, and nobody has to wear socks.”

Tye grunted. He pulled a square of wood and a knife from under the bar, then, as if he had a little orchard down there as well, an orange and a couple of limes. He began to slice them. “We could use a cook. Ella—that's our mother—she's been running the kitchen since the Grill opened, and she needs to slow down a little. If you meet anyone down there who wants a job up here. Or if you don't find the right beach.”

Pierce took another swallow. “I'll keep that in mind.” He put his glass down, met Tye's easy expression, whatever was in his eyes hidden behind a blur of light over his lenses. “I could use a room, thanks. Just for the night. I have my stuff
in the car. It steered itself into your parking lot when I saw the sign.”

“Fine.” Tye scraped wedges of orange and lime into their condiment dishes, then plucked a lemon from the mysterious garden under the bar. “Fine, then. We'll see what we can do for you.”

The front door opened, banged shut. The wolf man beside Pierce breathed a sudden exclamation into his glass, then huddled around it, head bowed, shoulders hunched. Brisk footsteps across the floorboards came to an abrupt halt.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Amazing,” the man murmured, “how much weight those two innocent words can carry.”

There was a swift, indrawn breath, held for a moment in which nobody, not even the placid bartender, moved. Then came a gusty, exasperated sigh, and the footsteps marched on, to Pierce's ears sharp with pointed recrimination. He risked a glance, saw a slight, straight-backed young woman, her dark hair in an impeccable French braid, disappear through the swinging doors between rooms.

The bartender cocked his glasses at the wolf man, who said glumly, “I was supposed to take her mother to lunch. She was in town visiting friends. It was all too much for me. Name's Teague, by the way,” he added to Pierce. “Merle Teague. That dark wind that just blew through is my beloved offspring Carrie.”

Pierce frowned. “I know your name. I don't know why.”

“Do I owe you money?”

Pierce shook his head puzzledly. The front door rattled and smacked open, in the same moment that the double doors
flew open, and Carrie Teague reappeared, under Pierce's fascinated gaze, a bit like a bird popping out of a cuckoo clock.

“Ella says Hal's at the dock,” she announced tersely, and waited in strained, forbearing abeyance, for a response.

The two men who had just entered nodded to Tye and tacked away from the bar. One was young, the other not so, both comely, with gold beards and hair neatly trimmed, lean, lanky bodies that wore their jeans and work shirts with casual elegance. Father and son, Pierce guessed, and felt a sharp, unexpected pang of envy.

“We'll help him,” the older said, and they followed Carrie back through the swinging doors. Pierce found himself watching their empty flapping, waiting for what would happen next. He turned quickly, picked up his glass again.

“Shouldn't be long now,” Tye told him, whittling thin curls of lemon peel off the pith. “Ella and Carrie will have those crabs boiled up in no time. Ella makes the sweetest crab cakes you ever ate, and Carrie does a mixed pepper aioli that's just this side of heaven and that side of everlasting fire.”

Pierce felt his stomach roil again and whine. “Can't wait,” he breathed, and Tye grinned. He put his knife down, made a few indiscernible passes under the bar, and came up with a bowl of hot, salted popcorn.

More people came in while Pierce ate it. Some disappeared into the restaurant; others lingered at the bar or carried their drinks to the couches and chairs. Tye poured another beer for Pierce without asking; Pierce drank it without caring. The road was untwisting behind him, the gray sky becoming less desolate. Some kind of young minister or priest with a backward collar came in; he and Merle started an amiable
argument about what sounded like cannibalism. Smells melted between the swinging doors, floated through the room, disrupting conversations, making people forget what they were saying to stare mutely, expectantly at the doors.

They opened finally. Pierce, hoping for supper at last, turned eagerly. It was Carrie again, dodging swiftly through the crowd toward the bar.

Merle seemed to sense her; this time he looked toward her, waiting. The priest watched silently as well. She said nothing to Merle, just handed him an old-fashioned brass key that looked big enough to open a cemetery gate. Perhaps feeling Pierce's curious gaze on her, she gave him a brief, wide-eyed stare back, revealing pale eyes like her father's. A fairy tale impression of her stern, graceful face—skin as white, lips as red as—clung to memory as she whisked herself away.

Merle rose, too, nodding to Pierce. “Just another minute or two. You're that close.”

He followed his daughter; the man with the backward collar followed him. Pierce turned to try for Tye's beleaguered attention and found the cold, foaming beer already in front of him.

After what seemed the slow march of time toward forever, both swinging doors opened wide and stayed open, held by the gold-haired father and son, standing like sentinels flanking the man who entered.

People rose, murmuring, greeting him, raising their mugs and wineglasses in salute. He was very tall, broad-boned, lean, and muscular, a warrior in frayed jeans and a faded flannel shirt. His white-gold hair hung thick and wild to his shoulders; an ivory mustache like a pair of ram's horns curled
down the sides of his mouth. He held a gnarled staff in one hand, a carved, polished hiker's stick he used as a cane. He needed it, Pierce saw. Though he smiled broadly as he entered, the lines on his face tightened slightly at every other step as pain bled through him and into the shifting, halting staff.

The young man whose collar announced he was holy followed, carrying a gaff the length of a spear. The metal pirate's hook at the end of it glistened oddly with a sheen of red, as though it had tangled with something closer to human than fish. Merle came after him, holding a huge oval platter with the biggest salmon on it Pierce had ever seen. The platter, an ornate, old-fashioned piece with bumps and ruffles and flutings all over it, looked as though it were made of pure gold. The knife laid across the edge of the platter beside the fish riveted his attention. The blade was crafted of hand-hammered metal with a sandwich of polished ash fitted along the length of the metal handle. Long, broad, and sweetly curved to its point, the blade would rock with a satisfying heft in the hand, finely mincing anything it was fed with its thin, wicked edge: elephant garlic, delicate chives, hazelnuts, words.

I want that, he thought, and found Merle's eyes on him across the room as though he had heard.

Carrie, oven mitts on both hands, followed her father, carrying a cauldron etched all over with an endless, dreamlike tangle of circles and knots. The cauldron filled the room with the smell of seafood seasoned in brine and aged sherry and mysterious spices from some land so exotic it hadn't yet appeared on a map. Even she was smiling a little, her ivory skin flushed in the steam.

Under the chandelier, which was still all cold stars and
no visible light, Hal stopped. Everyone stopped. No one spoke. Candles burning on the bar tables, small lamps along the walls shed a misty, golden glow over Hal's white-gold head, the oak in his hand, the bleeding gaff, the salmon and the blade, the silver cauldron. Pierce watched, wondering. Then time flickered; past and present seamed together in the moment; what was old became new, and new became more ancient than he could imagine.