Portents

by Kelley Armstrong

  She pressed her fingers to her temples. “My head hurts. I liked my world better when things like underground castles resided only in books and movies.”

  “Liar.”

  He reached for her hand, hooking her fingers in a squeeze . . . and then trying to snag the last oat bar. She beat him, scooping it up and waving it in front of him.

  “I win,” she said. “As always. You might as well just concede—”

  He snatched the cookie from her fingers.

  “Damn,” she said.

  He broke the oatcake and gave her half. “Now e-mail Gabriel the details. It’s almost time for dinner.”

  Jeanne lived just outside town, maybe a mile walk from the inn, so that’s what they did—walked.

  “I’ll warn you it’s not a big fancy meal,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t expect that,” Ricky said. “If I invited someone at the last minute, I’d have to get takeout.”

  “We can do better than that. Laurel’s made a pot of chowder and lobster rolls. Hope that’s all right.”

  “That is awesome.”

  “She said it would be, but I fussed. In my day, you’d never serve a guest lobster. That was poor-folk food. I’d hide my lobster rolls at school so the other kids wouldn’t see them while I dreamed of peanut butter or bologna.”

  “I dreamed of peanut butter, too,” Ricky said. “But that’s because our school was a nut-free zone. I snuck PB&J once. Thought I got away with something. My dad found out and gave me proper hell.”

  “Good,” Jeanne said. “One of my grandbabies has that allergy, and some parents at her school try to argue kids should be allowed to bring it. I won’t keep it in my house. So you’re stuck with lobster.”

  “Fine by me.”

  Liv

  For dinner, we had piping hot chowder stuffed with seafood. Freshly baked rolls with chilled lobster and homemade mayo. Iced tea. Coleslaw. All served in the backyard, surrounded by forest.

  As wonderful as the meal was, the conversation was even better. We talked about fae folklore from around the world and how it related to both local Gaelic and Mi'kmaq lore.

  The concept of fae as “little people” fascinates me. Older lore is often closer to the truth—that fae are roughly human size. I suppose at one time, with so much of the world unexplored, it was easy to believe full-size humanoid creatures inhabited forests and lakes. As that wilderness dwindled, it must have seemed more likely that the reason we didn’t see them was their size. Fairies became tiny beings that slipped past unnoticed. The truth, of course, is that when their territory dwindled, the fae responded the same way humans do to invading cultures: they disappeared by staying in plain sight. Instead of inhabiting forests and lakes, they adopted human glamours and lived among us.

  The meal stretched on into dessert. Porkpies. Which were neither pies nor pork, but tarts made with dates and brown-sugar icing. As I ate my second one, I steered conversation toward the swimming hole.

  “Hildy says it’s cursed?” I said.

  Laurel made a face. “It was the site of a few historical drownings, not surprising given the depth. We had a geologist here on vacation who took an interest, thinking it might be glacial. He dropped a sinker and determined it’s at least fifty feet deep, which is incredible given the circumference.”

  “At least fifty feet,” Jeanne said. “But he never properly measured it. Care to tell them why, Laurel?”

  Her granddaughter made that face again.

  Jeanne crossed her arms. “Go on. Tell the nice people why it hasn’t been properly measured.”

  “Because he didn’t have proper equipment, and he wasn’t going to come all the way back here—”

  “No, that’s the excuse he gave. After he came tearing out of that forest like the devil himself was on his heels”—she looked at us—“he said he saw a face in the water. A woman’s face. He thought it was a drowning victim, but when he reached in? She reached back. She grabbed his wrist.”

  “Kids playing tricks,” Laurel said.

  “What kids? Even you wouldn’t go up there when you were little. No one goes near that hole. We all know better. It’s a passage to the next world.”

  “A fairy hole?” I asked.

  When Laurel looked over, I said, “We were on Kellys Mountain, at the fairy hole there. The cave at the water’s edge. I heard a little of the lore. It wasn’t something I was familiar with.”

  “Glooscap’s Cave,” Jeanne said.

  Laurel nodded. “It’s also known as the Fairy Hole and, yes, it’s believed to be a passage to the spirit world. The afterlife. The Otherworld. Whatever you care to call it. The locals think that our swimming hole is the same thing in landlocked form.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “I think folklore is absolutely fascinating as a window into the human psyche. Cross-cultural similarities prove that. We all fear the same things, and we invent remarkably similar stories to deal with those fears.”

  “Yes,” Jeanne said drily. “Apparently explaining similar experiences by speculating on another evolutionary branch of humans is ridiculous. Somehow it makes far more sense to say that our brains are predisposed to come up with the same explanation despite being oceans apart and from vastly different cultures.”

  “I never said believing in the little people is ridiculous, Gran.”

  “The implication is there. As is the one that suggests you are the educated new generation, forced to deal with the superstitions and stories of us ignorant old folk. You aren’t the only one who went off and got her degree.”

  “I’m sorry, Gran. And now we’ve made our guests terribly uncomfortable.”

  “Nah,” Ricky said. “I have the same issue with my grandmother. Except I’m the one who believes in ghosts, and she’s the one who says that’s poppycock. Direct quote, by the way. Poppycock. But she does believe in fairies. Fairies are real; ghosts can’t be. Go figure. But yeah, getting back on topic, could the swimming hole be haunted? You mentioned something about drownings? Did the stories start with them?”

  “In a way,” Laurel said as she reached for her tea. When she knocked a spoon from the table, I thought, Company’s coming.

  She reached to pick it up. I tensed, and she smiled and said, “I should leave it there to avoid a disappointment, right?”

  “Sorry. My brain is overstuffed with omens, courtesy of my mother. Go ahead and pick it up.”

  She took another instead, saying, “I might not believe, but I still hedge my bets. So, the stories about the swimming hole . . . They date back to the first immigrants, which is interesting, as timelines go. Often what you see is immigrants assimilating and restructuring the stories of the original inhabitants.”

  “Assimilating and restructuring?” Jeanne said. “Ah, yes, that’s what Mikey Wallace should have been charged with when he stole those cars, repainted them and filed off the serial numbers. Assimilating and restructuring.”

  “I know Laurel’s trying to put it politely,” Ricky said. “But it is usually people taking local legends, completely reworking them and then passing them off as their own.”

  “True,” Laurel said. “But hasn’t that always been the way with folklore and myth? It’s like urban legends. You’re passing on stories that have been related to you as truth. If you two tell someone else about the fairy cave at Kellys Mountain—having never heard the Mi’kmaq’s Glooscap version—are you appropriating our story? Are you even being irresponsible for passing along a charming folktale without investigating the roots first?” She shook her head. “I think we’ve got bigger issues of appropriation to worry about.”

  “Bigger issues, yes,” Jeanne said. “Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about this one. But the question was about the drownings. Laurel’s right. The legends only started after the first immigrants arrived. Scottish, mainly. They hadn’t even broken sod before they started circulating stories about the swimming hole, which our people had swum in for generations. That made the whites loo
k like proper fools, saying it was haunted . . . until some of our people also reported strange goings on there. Whispers and voices. Glimpses of a figure under the water. Swimmers having their feet grabbed. The sound of bells.”

  My chin jerked up.

  “Liv heard bells,” Ricky said. “Tinkling ones.”

  “That’s what they said, too. Some people stayed away. Others, mostly the young ones, were drawn to it. Kids can’t resist a spooky place. Then came the drownings.”

  “There was one confirmed drowning,” Laurel said. “Two disappearances—people who dove and never came up. Together with the rest, that was enough for people to start steering clear.”

  “Even tourists who’ve never heard the stories,” Jeanne said, “they sense wrong about the place.”

  “A psychic No Trespassing sign,” I said. “We definitely got that vibe. But all this started after the first immigrants—”

  A distant knock sounded.

  “Well,” Jeanne said, “either the little people don’t like us talking about them or there’s someone at the door.” She called, “We’re out back.”

  A young woman appeared—about Laurel’s age and thin, with light brown hair braided back. Dark circles underscored reddened eyes. I didn’t need an omen to tell me who this was, and Laurel’s murmured curse confirmed my suspicion.

  Laurel rose. “Hey, Krista. We were just having tea and dessert. Let me go get you a cup. Take my seat.”

  Laurel headed for the house. The young woman—Krista—stayed standing.

  “This is Krista,” Jeanne said. “She works at the inn where you’re staying. You won’t see her there, though. She’s taking some time off.” Which was a discreet way of confirming this was the mother of the missing baby.

  Krista looked at Ricky. “You’re a private investigator.”

  “Uh, no. Sorry.” His gaze cut to me, too briefly for her to notice.

  “Mr. Bates overheard you in the tavern,” Krista said. “He said it was the blond couple with the motorcycle. You were talking about investigating.”

  “That’d be me,” I said. “I wouldn’t say I’m a PI, though. I don’t have my license yet. I work for a lawyer and just started a month ago. My first job out of college. Sorry, second job. First was waitressing.”

  Nope, not a real investigator. At all. Which means I can’t help you. Sorry.

  Krista didn’t return my smile. She just stood there, stone-faced, waiting for me to finish. I’d seen that expression many times, on Gabriel’s face. I knew what it portended, and sweat broke out along my hairline.

  “We don’t have any private investigators,” Krista said. “Not here. Not anywhere near here.”

  “But we have the police,” Jeanne said. “Who are—”

  “Useless,” Krista said. “Less than useless. They act like I put Maggie down and forgot where I left her, and she’ll come back when she’s ready. She’s a three-month-old baby. Who disappeared from her crib in the middle of the night. Maybe that happens a lot wherever you guys are from, but it doesn’t happen here.”

  “It doesn’t happen anywhere,” Laurel said as she brought out the teacup and plate. “That’s why the police are investigating. They really are, Krista.”

  “By questioning me? My mom? Owen? We didn’t take her, but we’re the ones they keep asking.”

  Which meant the police really were doing their job. Babies don’t disappear from their beds. Kidnapping like that is so rare that the police had moved straight to the far more common scenario—a tragedy that her family was covering by pretending she’d been snatched in the night.

  “I want to hire you,” Krista said.

  “These people are on vacation, child,” Jeanne said. “They are going to feel terrible telling you no, but they can’t stay. They have jobs waiting at home.”

  “A few hours,” she said. “That’s all I can afford and all I want.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. “The going rate for a private investigator is about fifty dollars an hour. I’ll double that as vacation-rate pay. I have four hundred.”

  Laurel winced. “Krista, I know—”

  “No, you don’t.” Krista turned to the other girl, her voice still calm. “I’m sorry, Laurel, but you don’t. I hear what people are saying. That maybe it’s for the best. I didn’t want to get pregnant. I didn’t want a baby. Totally true. But then I had Maggie. I want her. Whatever it takes, I want my daughter back.”

  “Of course you do, child,” Jeanne said. “We know how much you loved that baby, and we’re all trying to figure out what happened. But hiring this young lady—”

  “—is what I want.” Krista held out the money. “Just do whatever you can in four hours. I don’t expect you to find her. I just want a clue, a lead. Something.”

  Yes, I wanted to help this girl. But I didn’t want to give her hope because that’s almost certainly how this would end. Hope and disappointment. Yet Ricky had heard a baby in the forest. That was a possibility we could check easily, and it’d be wrong to ignore it.

  “Tell me how it happened,” I said.

  Liv

  I couldn’t have scripted a better “stolen by fairies” story than the one Krista told us. It was almost too perfect, which worried me. I looked at this young woman, so obviously grief-stricken, and I didn’t want to think she might have had anything to do with her baby’s disappearance. It would seem she didn’t, if she wanted to hire me. But that’s actually a common ploy. What better way to say, “I didn’t do it” than to hire an investigator or offer a reward? A nineteen-year-old hardly seemed likely to come up with such a scheme, but I’d been misled too often lately to trust my gut.

  As Krista said, baby Maggie was only three months old. Too young to even roll herself over. Krista put her down at eight o’clock after a feeding and a bedtime story. Maggie fussed a bit, but Krista had a fifteen-minute rule—she wouldn’t check until Maggie fussed longer than that. She hadn’t.

  Her next feeding had been scheduled for eleven. When Krista went in before bed, Maggie’s room seemed stuffy, and Krista cracked open a window. Maggie was soundly asleep, so following her pediatrician’s advice, Krista didn’t wake her and just set the alarm for a one o’clock feeding. The alarm went off. Krista went in and found the window wide open and the baby gone, along with her blankets.

  A perfect fairy-napping tale, right down to the open window. Also a perfect baby-napping story. If you had to imagine how a child might disappear from her home, this would be it. Too perfect meant suspicious, which meant, like the police, I had to take a closer look at the family.

  Krista Lyons. Nineteen years old. A single mother, living at home with her single mother. I suppose that’s why people whispered it might not be such a bad thing if Maggie disappeared. Thoughtless and cruel words, but maybe, to them, the baby’s disappearance was the best solution to a cycle of teen motherhood. It didn’t help that Krista appeared to have broken from that cycle already. She’d gone to community college right out of high school and had been studying to be a lab tech.

  Last summer, she came home to work at the inn and had a fling with a guy she’d known in high school. Nothing serious—it seemed as if she’d hooked up with Owen Parr precisely because it wouldn’t amount to anything serious. He was a decent guy, part of the crowd she’d hung around with, now working at his dad’s garage. They’d used protection—she assured me of that. When she learned of the pregnancy, she considered terminating it but decided—along with her mother and Owen’s family—to have the baby, keep it and stay home for a year before returning to school.

  “I am going back to school,” she said. “That’s always been the plan. Mom will move to Sydney with me in the fall and look after Maggie. We’ve been making it work. All of us. I didn’t plan to get pregnant, but when I did, I made my choice. As soon as I had Maggie, I knew it was the right one. If it hadn’t been, I’d have given her to Owen’s family. They’d said they’d take her. I could still do that, which is why there’d be no r
eason for me to do whatever the police think I’ve done.”

  The situation reminded me of Ricky’s own birth. An accidental pregnancy between two mature young adults who made carefully considered choices with the support of their family. As with Ricky’s parents, Krista and Owen’s romantic relationship hadn’t lasted, but the co-parenting one had. Owen’s family helped out financially and took the baby two or three days a week.

  I didn’t take Krista’s money. I told her I hadn’t decided whether there was anything I could do, and I’d check in tomorrow. Once she’d left Jeanne’s place, I said, “That’s Krista’s version. I need an unbiased second opinion. I’m not going to ask you guys for it. That isn’t fair. Who in town might give me another viewpoint? Maybe someone who agrees with the direction the police are looking—at the possibility something happened to Maggie, either intentionally or accidentally.”

  “You won’t find anyone voting intentional,” Laurel said. “Krista and Owen grew up here. No one has a bad thing to say about either of them. In a town this size, if you’ve got something to hide, you’d better move away. We all know who drinks too much, who knocks their kids around, who goes to church on Sunday with their fingers crossed. No one says any of that about the Lyons or the Parrs.”

  “You said no one would vote intentional. Accidental, though?”

  “We’ve all thought it. Who wouldn’t? Sure, there are people who think a passing tourist stole her. Or fairies did. Or aliens. But most of us know that kidnapping is almost as improbable as fairies and aliens. This isn’t one of those cases you hear about where young parents mistreat or neglect a baby to death. Maggie was fine. Happy and healthy. But accidents happen. Babies get dropped. Or suffocate from a toy left in a crib. Could that have happened, and Krista freaked out and made up the kidnapping story? Maybe. She’d regret it right away, but by then the damage would be done, and if she told the truth, people would think she killed her daughter and lied to cover it up.”