Kingfisher (4 page)

I know this, he thought, then: But what is it?

“Welcome,” Hal said, “to the Kingfisher Bar and Grill. We have an inexhaustible feast of crab cakes, shrimp, scallops, halibut, salmon, oysters, clams, all you can eat and any way you like them. Come into the restaurant or stay here and eat as you please. Just let us know what we can do for you.”

The odd procession broke apart; the gathering in the room and in the restaurant itself, visible now beyond the open doors, dissolved into jovial chaos. The restaurant tables, Formica-topped rounds with a single plastic flower in a bud vase on each, began to fill. A gray-haired woman, a skinny young man in black, a gum-chewing girl with purple hair, moved among them, taking orders. Pierce looked around for the gaff, the platter, the knife, Hal with his staff. They all seemed to have vanished.

What was that? he wondered. What was that about?

“Something you need?” Tye asked, unexpectedly in front of him despite the crowd around the bar. He lingered as Pierce gazed at him mutely, wondering at his attention amid the clamor. “Anything?”

Pierce shook his head abruptly. He was on his way south. No mysteriously crippled fisher, no amount of goodwill and
fellowship, no hints of lost glory would strand him there with the Formica tables and the chandelier that didn't work anymore. “I'm fine,” he said. “Thanks.” He raised the beer with an appreciative smile, and Tye moved away.

The girl with the purple hair came soon after to take his order. He sat there at the bar and ate the seafood stew, trying to identify its tantalizing backwashes of seasoning, then the crab cakes with their outrageous sweet-fiery sauce, and, when he could positively eat no more, a few bites of deep-fried salmon, which seemed a disgraceful end for such a noble fish until he tasted it.

“God,” he said reverently, and Tye, rattling a martini shaker, smiled.

“Nope. Carrie.”

He found himself with yet another beer in his hand and smiling mistily at the memory of the meal. The room around him was quieting. Most of the diners had left; there were rumbles and clangs of cleanup from the invisible kitchen. The homely tables within the next room had been tidied, set for the next day. Through the swinging doors, propped open now, Pierce could see the ghost of the hotel in the high, shadowed ceiling too far above the modest restaurant area, and the hint, behind three makeshift walls around the tables, of the long, wide, empty husk of the older room enclosing them.

Someone loomed into his dreamy stupor. He started, found the disquieting Carrie in front of him, holding sheets and a towel now instead of a cauldron.

“My dad told Ella you're staying the night,” she said briskly. “She asked me to take you upstairs.” She raised her chin slightly, catching Tye's eye. “Number three okay?”

“Far as I know, nothing leaks in there.”

“How much do I owe—?”

Tye shook his head. “Don't worry about it. We'll settle up in the morning.”

“Thanks.” He drained his glass and stood up. Nothing fell over; the floor didn't rise to meet him. He laughed a little. “I lost track of how long I've been sitting here.”

“You're not the first,” Tye answered. “Sweet dreams.”

Carrie led him to the far side of the room, where the old reception desk with slots behind it for mail and keys emerged bulkily out of the shadows. She had begun to climb the stairs when he remembered his manners.

“Here. Let me carry that stuff.”

“I've got it, thanks.”

He trailed after her around the elegant curve, trying not to gaze at the taut figure on the step above, sure she would read his mind and dump the linens on his head. He thought of food instead.

“That salmon was unbelievable. How— What did you do to it?”

“The salmon?” She sounded incredulous.

“Yeah. I would never in a million years have let it anywhere near a deep fryer. My mother would have fired me. But you—”

“You're asking me about the salmon?”

“Well. Yes.”

She flashed him one of her wide-eyed glances, a bewildering mix of amazement and exasperation. She made a noise indicating something major wrong with his head, and opened the door at the top of the stairs.

“Ella, Hal, and Tye all sleep on this floor; you won't be alone up here.” She dropped her armload on a tapestry-covered chair and flicked on a lamp. “Bathroom's in there. Don't worry. It's not a chamber pot, and there is hot water.”

“What did I say?” he asked softly, genuinely wanting to know. To his surprise her expression became complex, bittersweet, and strangely sad. Should I ask you to stay? he wondered. She turned away quickly, whipped a sheet open across the bed.

“Nothing. You said nothing.” She shifted around the bed, tugging the corners tight without looking at him. “There are so many things nobody will answer when I ask. I thought you might—they might answer you. If you had asked.”

“Asked what?”

Her lips pinched again; she only said, “Go down and get your things while I finish this.”

When he came back, she was gone.

He woke sometime in the dark of the night, chasing down a fading dream in which something he wanted very badly kept eluding him, no matter how fast he moved, how desperate his desire. He was covered with sweat, as though he truly had been running. It took him a few groggy moments to remember where he was. When he finally did, he fell back into sleep as into some soundless, bottomless nothing.

He woke with a start in a pool of light from the unshaded window. He saw blue water, a paler blue sky, the sun burning away the last of a morning fog. He groped for his watch. The lovely room caught his attention first: the rich, dark wainscoting, the pale rose walls, the high ceiling and fine moldings of an earlier era. Light, airy, full of morning, it
drew him upright to walk down the shaft of sunshine, peer at the bay and wonder, as he saw the fishers already out, how long the world had gone on without him as he slept.

He showered, dressed, and packed quickly. He heard no sounds in any of the rooms around him. Everyone was up, he guessed, and he hoped the restaurant might still be serving breakfast. When he went downstairs, he found the bar empty. He dropped his bag on a velveteen couch and went to push at the swinging doors. They refused to budge. He found the sliding bolts holding them fast, pulled them out of the floor and looked into the restaurant.

He heard nothing from the kitchen: not a voice, not a clatter of pot or plate, not a sizzle.

He turned after a moment, slid the bolts back into place, and listened. Not a floorboard creaked; not a door opened or closed. Maybe they were outside on the water, or running errands, shopping. The bar had been cleaned, everything tidied, put away, shut up. He wandered aimlessly a moment, waiting for Tye to appear, present him with a bill.

A gleam in the shadows near the reception desk caught his eye, drew him over to look at it more closely, for something to do while he waited. A tall, wide glass cabinet stood between the desk and the massive fieldstone fireplace. Its curved door was made of intricate diamonds of beveled glass framed with thin brass rods; its latch and hinges were a bygone age's fantasy of brass, curved, etched, scrolled. Inside the cabinet he saw the gaff, the gold platter, the cauldron.

He gazed at them. Again they teased at him, eluded him when he tried to make sense of them. He turned finally, beginning to feel the oppressive weight of the silence, the
emptiness around him. He wondered if he had partied with ghosts.

He saw the knife then, lying on the desk, along with the brass key. He stopped, holding his breath. The knife hadn't made it into the cabinet with the other oddities. He picked it up, weighed it in his hold, turned it in what light he could catch from the high windows to study the hammered silver, the blade and haft shaped of a single piece of metal. It fit his hold like a friend's handclasp, its fine edge, under his thumb, keen, dangerous, and ready for anything.

He felt his throat dry. He wanted it. He would take it. He set it down on the desk noiselessly, as though someone might hear the faint slide of metal and come to its rescue. He had never stolen anything in his life. He would not steal this, he told himself swiftly. He would pay for it. He pulled out his wallet, rummaged recklessly through his cash, wondering how much his room, all the beers he had drunk, the amazing supper he had eaten, and the knife would cost him. How much it had all been worth.

He pulled out a credit card finally, tossed it on the desk. They would find it there beside the cabinet key, and know who had taken the knife. Let it cost whatever they wanted.

He crossed the room swiftly, hid the knife in his bag under a shirt. Then he left as quickly, closing the bar door quietly behind him. There was no one in the parking lot, nothing but the little Metro, like the last boat left at the dock.

As he pulled out, he thought he heard a shout. He sped up and out onto the highway. The place was empty, after all, no one left to call him back. Everyone who knew his name was gone.

C
arrie, wakened early the next morning by a cacophony of crows saluting the sun, listened, before she opened her eyes, to the quality of silence within the walls. The old farmhouse, with its plain pastel paint, its ancient linoleum, and flaking sills, had its own familiar language of creaks and rattles. It seemed strangely still that morning, as though it, too, listened. No random snores, no running water, no comments from floorboards or door hinges. No Merle, she thought, and opened her eyes.

She was used to that. Her father was a random occurrence, like most of the weather around Chimera Bay. A squall, some sunshine, hail, a rainbow, one followed another in a perpetual guessing game. Merle might be asleep in his bed when she woke; he might be just coming through the door to fall into bed. He might be on a log, or up a tree, or sitting in the truck having a beer for breakfast with one of
the nameless forest-dwellers who carried everything they owned in a leaf-and-lawn bag. More surprising, he might be getting out of the truck with a bag of groceries. Sometimes, he was simply nowhere at all, where he'd been since the Friday Nite before.

Carrie showered and dressed for work, then wandered outside, chewing on a piece of toast. There was no Merle on the horizon. The noisy choir of crows had disappeared as well, leaving the landscape to a single moon-white egret, standing motionless in six inches of silvery flow. Beside the stream, and staring as raptly at some flowering skunk cabbage, was Zed Cluny in his pajamas.

He raised his head and saw her as she started toward him. He had moved into Proffit Slough the previous year, renting a tiny cabin that stood on a knoll above the stream. Carrie had found him chatting amiably with Merle one morning; the fact that Merle was sitting on Zed's cabin roof at the time didn't seem to bother either one of them. Carrie went over to claim her father and got a pleasing eyeful of Zed. He and Carrie had worn a trail through the grasses between them, much like the rest of the wildlife in the slough.

He watched her from the other side of the narrow stream that was a vein in the vast tracery of water constantly pushed and pulled, rising and lowering in the tidal flow. He had a sweet face that hadn't yet hardened into itself, straight white-gold hair that he trimmed into a lank bowl on his head, dark caramel eyes that had grown patient, far-sighted with his meanderings through the world.

“I just saw a baby salmon go by,” he told her. “I think. Smelt?”

“Smolt. You working this morning?”

“In a couple of hours. Thought I'd get my camera, try for a shot. What are you doing up so early?”

He had so many odd jobs, Carrie couldn't keep track of his schedule: afternoon at the Food Co-op, driving an elderly woman around on her errands a couple of times a week, morning lifeguard duty at the city pool, night shifts at the ancient Pharaoh Theater. Years of swimming had given him a broad pair of shoulders and muscular legs which, at the moment, were hidden by flannel penguins waddling all over them.

“The crows woke me up,” she answered. “Then I couldn't go back to sleep; the house was too quiet. My father finally stopped chanting, and now he's vanished.”

He chuckled. “Yeah. I heard some of that, last night when I got home after the midnight show. What was he—”

“Haven't a clue. He never tells me anything. Or he does, but he never makes sense. He's probably asleep under a tree.”

“Maybe he's got a girlfriend.”

“My dad?” she said, surprised at the notion. “I suppose maybe. But it's hard to imagine who.”

“That's because he's your dad.”

Somehow, at the thought, they were both moving toward the weathered plank Zed had laid across the stream. He reached it first, balancing easily on his bare feet. Carrie was there at the bridge's end to gather armfuls of frayed flannel, muscle, warm skin, to inhale the familiar scents of dreams and soap and sweat on the penguin pajamas.

“Come inside?” his lips said against her hair.

“I told Ella I'd come in early to help her hull strawberries and bake shortcakes.” Reluctantly, she peeled herself away
from him. “I should go,” she told his eyes, which were heavy, full of her now instead of salmon and skunk cabbage.

“Tonight?” he said. “Wait. What's today?”

“Saturday. I'll be home late.”

“So will I—nine to two again at the theater. Wait for me here when you get off work? If tomorrow's Sunday, I won't have anything until noon, when I drive Mrs. Pettigrew to church and walk the Hound of the Baskervilles until she gets out. What about breakfast at the beach? Coffee and hard-boiled eggs, and I smoked some tuna—”

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “Yes. I want it now.” Her feet backed another step, moving against the tide, it felt. “See you tonight.”

She realized much later, as the dinner crowd shifted from the grill to the bar, that it would be one of those nights. Knight nights, she called them: the slow, informal gathering through the evening of the men closest to Hal Fisher. Ian Steward, Jarvis Day, Curt and Gabe Sloan, Josh Ward, Father Kirk from St. Benedict, and Reverend Gusset from Trinity Lutheran, Hal's brother Tye, and Merle made up the steadfast, reliable core of the group. Others, less familiar, wandered in from the mountain towns, or from the wilds along the rivers and lakes, the farthest reaches of the sloughs. Carrie couldn't name all of the knights, but she recognized them by the fierce, mute loyalty and respect she saw in their eyes as one by one they went to greet Hal first, and only then, turned to the bar and the stalwart Tye behind it. They even occupied the single round table at the place, overflowing around it, chairs pulled up two or three deep, always Hal with Merle at one side of him, and the vacant chair on his other where no one ever sat.

Of course, Carrie had asked Ella about that. Ella's lips had thinned until they vanished; she couldn't have pushed a word past them if she had wanted to. She just shook her head and disappeared so far into a pot after a scorched spot that Carrie thought she would fall into it.

She had asked Gabe Sloan, Curt's tall, golden-haired son, who with his father held the restaurant doors open for the Fish Fry procession. But he didn't know the why of the empty chair beside Hal Fisher either.

“My dad says it's all connected,” he had told her. “Hal Fisher getting hurt, the hotel failing, Lilith Fisher going to live in the tower suite, the quarrel between them, even the Friday Nite Fry—it's all part of the same story. But the ones who know the story won't talk about it, and those who don't won't ask for fear of causing pain.”

Merle knew, Carrie guessed. But he only said, when she asked him, “It's like an evil spell cast over the place. When the right person comes through the door and asks, the spell will be broken. That's what I know.”

It wasn't all he knew, she thought grumpily. But it was all he would say.

The knights of the forests, the mudflats, and the waters were still sitting around the table when she finally finished late that evening, cleaning the kitchen and setting up for Sunday brunch. The men leaned back precariously into one another on their chair legs; they balanced scuffed boots on knees, and held their drinks as they talked, winding down now, a rumble of male voices tweaking the thread of some endless story, eliciting a deep roll of laughter that tapered slowly into silence as the men reminisced, privately, dreamily, until it seemed
they must have come to the end of the evening, then someone else spoke, plucked a thread, and the thunder reverberated through the circle again. A middle-aged couple sat in the shadowy edges of the room talking quietly; another nonknight sat at the bar, staring into his drink and ignoring the group. But no Merle. His chair was oddly empty that night.

Carrie sank wearily onto a raddled velveteen couch left over from the gilded age and parked now against the wall near the restaurant doors. Tye gave her a smile and poured her the cold, dark, molasses-edged beer she liked. In the sprawling circle of men, she saw Gabe's sleek, trimmed head turn. He got up a moment later, took the beer from Tye, and brought it to Carrie.

“Here you are,” he said, handing it to her, and sat, while his eyes went back to the company he had left. “How'd it go tonight?”

“Thanks,” she said, yawning. “I had to do some serving; Marjorie missed lunch. I made thirty-six dollars in tips. That's going into the creel.”

He grunted, shifting as though a broken spring under the ancient velveteen had bit him. He didn't like the idea of the creel full of Carrie's escape money any more than Carrie liked the idea of accidentally falling in love with him and spending the rest of her life in Chimera Bay. So they kept their distance from one another, though Carrie sensed sometimes that he was simply waiting for her to come to her senses and realize where she belonged.

She added, to take his mind off the creel, “Ella rolled cheese biscuits for dinner. So I took the dough scraps, wrapped them around chopped green apple and boiled
shrimp with some grated ginger and a spritz of lemon juice, and baked them.”

“Weird.”

“They all got eaten. Did my dad come in tonight?”

“I'm not sure. I got here late. You can ask; they're almost done.”

“How can you tell? What do you talk about?”

He shrugged. “What comes up,” he said finally, “out of the deep.”

She looked at him silently; his eyes, back on the group now, were intent and burning with the mystery that Hal Fisher carried around with him. “Fish stories,” she said, and his eyes came back to her, earnest, unsmiling.

“Sort of. Not exactly, but in a way.”

She swallowed more beer, added restively, tired of hints, riddles without answers, “If you see my father, will you tell him I'm looking for him? I'm going home. It's been a long day.”

“Sure,” Gabe said, his attention on her now that she was going to leave him. He rose as she did, watched her silently as she took the glass to the bar. She waved to him, and he nodded, still not moving; she felt his gaze until she closed the screen door behind her and stepped into the parking lot.

A shadow shifted beside the pickup as she crossed to the driver's side. She stopped, more startled than frightened; nothing much ever happened in Chimera Bay. The shadow stepped forward, let the light from the streetlamp fall on its face.

She didn't recognize him, but he knew her.

“Carrie. I'm Todd Stillwater.”

He was, she thought incredulously, the most beautiful
man she had ever seen. If a Greek statue of an athlete had landed in the Kingfisher parking lot, alive, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, he would have looked just like this, complete with the wonderful straight nose, the mobile, curling lips, the wide-set, guileless eyes. Even his voice was perfect, deeper and more tempered than she would have expected from his youthful, open expression.

She was staring, she realized, frozen and mute. She opened her mouth; a bat squeaked out, by the sound of it.

He smiled a little, reassuringly, though the charming little frown, like the most careful chip of the sculptor's chisel between his brows, remained.

“I startled you. I'm sorry. I usually don't skulk around scaring people in parking lots. I just drove over on the off chance you'd still be here. I closed earlier this evening.”

He paused, waiting. She cleared her throat. “Yes,” she managed. “I'm Carrie Teague.”

“My wife Sage dropped into this place a couple of times recently. She likes the way you cook. Your ideas. We wondered if you'd like to come and work for me.” She opened her mouth again; nothing came out this time. He added, “I run my own kitchen; Sage helps me. She also bartends, sets tables, serves, cleans up after—”

“Oh,” Carrie breathed, enlightened. “You want me to set tables.”

“No. Sage doesn't mind doing all that. But it's too much for her to have kitchen duties as well. So I've been looking for someone else to cook with me. I'm asking you. If you can bear to leave this place. I can pay you very, very well.” He smiled again. “I think you'd be worth it.”

She felt something break loose in her chest or her brain, float slowly aloft like a hot-air balloon ascending from earth into warm, endless blue. “I don't—” She pulled in a breath dizzily. “I don't know what to say. Except thank you. I could never afford to eat in your restaurant. But I've heard your cooking is—well, unlike anything else around here. Magical. I think that's the word I heard when I started paying attention. My experiments—my little bites—they're just for fun. Mostly I fry fish. Make clam chowder. French fries for lunch and garlic mashed for dinner.”

“Yes,” he agreed, waiting patiently, she realized, while she dithered, tried to talk him out of what he wanted. Why, she wondered, didn't she just say okay, then shut up and dream how fat that creel would get and how fast?

Then she saw Ella's face, tight with anger at the thought of Stillwater, her spatula pressing down on a spitting round of burger until it seared.

As though he read her mind, he said swiftly, “Think about it. I can be patient. You know where to find me.”

He gave her another sweet smile, opened a big, graceful hand in farewell.

A door opened, slapped shut behind her; she jumped.

“Carrie!” her father called sharply. She turned, her own hand still raised. Merle stepped out from behind the scaffolding, scanned the parking lot, looking as though he were scenting it, tense and watchful, like some four-legged beast with its hackles raised.

“What?” she wondered bewilderedly. Now what? Nobody ever explained anything, so how exactly was she to know? She glanced behind her; Stillwater had already gone. “Where
have you been?” she asked Merle, but he didn't explain that either.

“Who was that?” he demanded.

“You sound exactly like someone's father,” she said irritably.

“Well, I am.”