Siobhan’s eyebrows rose. “Now you have to tell me.”
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Start at the beginning. Where did you go last night if you weren’t going back to the city?”
“I was going back. But the car broke down in the middle of nowhere and then . . .”
Lizzie went on to relate what had happened, from the arrival of the bogans through to her meeting with Walker, the tall man with the deer’s head that wasn’t a mask. She paused only when the waitress came by to take her order, finishing up before the arrival of her coffee and toast.
“Well, say something,” she said when she was done and Siobhan just sat there across the table from her.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You think I’m nuts.”
“No. I think you think all of that happened. But . . .”
“It couldn’t possibly have,” Lizzie finished for her when her cousin’s voice trailed off.
“Well, it does sound like one of Pappy’s fairy tales.”
Lizzie nodded. Their grandfather knew hundreds of them. When she and Siobhan were small, they would sit by his knee and listen to him for hours. And even later, when they’d outgrown the stories and were learning tunes from him, he’d find a way to bring stories of his wee folk—who weren’t all that “wee” most of the time—into the origins of some of the tunes he taught them.
“Could you have fallen asleep in the car?” Siobhan asked.
“And dreamed it all?”
Her cousin nodded.
“I suppose. Only how did I get back? It was totally dead until Grey fixed it.”
“Unless you woke up half-asleep and gave it another try, and this time it did start.”
“I suppose. But the battery was completely drained because the alternator’s shot. Even if I could have gotten it started, it would have died on me again.”
“Unless the alternator’s not the problem. Where did you leave the car?”
“At that garage he recommended.”
Lizzie sighed. She’d mechanically added sugar and cream to her coffee while they were talking and had a sip of it now. Like everything else in the cafe, it was absolutely wonderful.
“I hate feeling like this,” she added.
“If you were just dreaming,” Siobhan told her, “you’re not crazy. I’ve had tons of dreams that seemed so real, even after I woke up.”
Lizzie nodded. She’d had them herself. Like buying some great new album only to find when she woke that it didn’t even exist.
“I guess I need to go to the garage,” she said, “and see what’s happening with my car.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Thanks. Just let me finish this.”
“So where are the boys?” Lizzie asked later, after they’d fetched their jackets from the room.
They were walking along Sweetwater’s main street, making for the garage on the edge of the village where Lizzie had left her car last night. There were no sidewalks, but there wasn’t much traffic. Lizzie had heard that there was a good farmer’s market on the other side of the village, so maybe that was where you’d find whatever traffic congestion a place this size got.
“Probably still sleeping,” Siobhan said. “Were you here when that Liam fellow pulled out a tin whistle, or had you already gone?”
“No, I was here. He was good.”
“And he must know a thousand tunes. The three of them were still going at it when I went to bed.”
“Did Con hit on you?”
Siobhan laughed. “Hardly. He’s only got eyes for cute punky fiddlers who dress all in black.”
“I’ve got red shoes and socks on,” Lizzie told her.
“Hence the punky.”
“I thought that was my hair.”
Siobhan eyed Lizzie’s mix of bright red and black hair.
“No, that’s just fun,” she said. She waited a moment, then asked, “So you don’t fancy him even a little?”
“I’d fancy him a lot if we weren’t in the same band. But that’s a rule I won’t break again. It’s just gets too damn messy.”
“And I agree with you. Though, if it was true love, I’d throw the rule book away.”
Lizzie laughed. “I think it’s more hormonal love.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Nothing at all,” Lizzie agreed. “Unless you’re in the same band.”
They reached the garage then, and both stopped to take it in. Lizzie’s heart sank. It looked much worse in the daylight than it had last night. All the metal signage was fighting off an intrusion of rust, the windows were almost impenetrable from their thick coating of dust, and the building was in desperate need of a paint job. There were stacks of old tires to one side of the garage bay door and machine parts heaped in unruly piles wherever you turned. The field beyond the tires was littered with junked cars. Old gas pumps, rusting and disused, stood amidst clusters of dead weeds that had pushed up through the concrete all last summer before they’d died in the fall.
“You left your car here?” Siobhan asked.
“Not another word,” Lizzie told her.
There was no one in the office, and considering the state of the room, Lizzie didn’t blame anybody for staying out of it. There was dust everywhere and the counter was covered with tools and old engine parts. On the wall behind the counter, a bikini-clad Miss March regarded them coyly from a wrench company’s calendar. But they could hear a radio playing country music in the bay and when they went inside, there was a man with his head under the hood of Lizzie’s car. He stepped back and smiled at them, a slightly overweight man in his fifties, wearing grease-stained bib overalls with a T-shirt that had once been white underneath it.
“How do,” he said. “This your car?”
Lizzie nodded. “Do you know what’s wrong with it?”
“Alternator’s shot—just like you said in your note.”
Lizzie gave her cousin a knowing look.
“Can you fix it?” she asked.
“Sure can, missy. I can get a new one in from Tyson for this afternoon. But if you’re not in a hurry, I could get you a used one from the junkyard—cost you maybe half the price of a new one. Trouble is, your car wouldn’t be ready until . . . let’s see. I guess late Monday morning.”
“That’s okay. We’re playing at the Custom House, and we weren’t planning to leave until then anyway.”
“You the fiddlers?”
Lizzie nodded.
“I heard tell you put on a good show. Maybe I’ll drag Joe out to see you’s tonight.”
That would make this one Tommy, Lizzie thought, if the sign outside was still up to date.
“I could put you on the guest list,” she said.
“That’s right neighbourly of you. My name’s Tommy and my partner’s Joe.”
“I’m Lizzie and this is my cousin Siobhan.”
Tommy wiped his hands on his overalls, but after giving them a critical scrutiny, he shook his head.
“Pardon my rudeness,” he said, “but I got too much grease on my hands to shake.”
“That’s okay. Thanks, Tommy. I guess we’ll see you tonight.”
He nodded, then called after them as they were about to step outside.
“What made you have your car towed here?” he asked.
“Towed?” Lizzie said.
“Well, you sure weren’t driving it, condition that alternator’s in.”
“Oh, right.”
“I’m only asking ‘cause most folks—’specially from the city—would take it to one of the other garages in town. They’ve got all them fancy computers, tell you what’s wrong and what to do.”
“This fellow named Grey recommended you,” Lizzie said. “He’s the one that, ah, got my car here.”
“You’re a friend of Grey’s?”
Lizzie shook her head. “I wouldn’t say friend. He was just nice enough to help me out last night.”
But Tommy didn�
��t seem to hear her.
“You being a friend of Grey’s,” he said, “I’ll have your car ready for you this afternoon—no charge.”
“But—”
“I won’t argue about it,” Tommy told her, “and that’s a solid fact, missy. I’m right pleased to do a favour for any friend of Grey’s.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to. You come on back this afternoon, and I’ll have that car of yours purring like a kitten.”
“I really don’t need it that fast.”
But, “We’ll see you tonight at your show,” he said and turned away.
Lizzie looked at her cousin. Siobhan looked as confused as Lizzie felt, but she didn’t say anything. She only took Lizzie’s arm and led her away from the garage. But Lizzie couldn’t let it go.
“Did you hear that?” she asked. “He knows this Grey fellow. He said the car wouldn’t run with the alternator being like it was.”
“I heard.”
“Jaysus.”
Siobhan nodded. “Yeah, it’s a kicker all right. Looks like you weren’t dreaming.”
“But . . . that’s impossible, right?”
Siobhan didn’t have an answer for her.
Sweetwater got its start as a mill town at the turn of the last century when Thomas Fairburn built the area’s first grain mill. The old stone mill stood where the Ashbless River fell into the Kickaha on its own endless journey down from the mountains to what was now Newford and the lake shore upon which the city was built. In recent times, the mill had become a high-class hotel and conference center, part of the ongoing transformation of the whole village into a tourist haven.
The most successful refurbishing had taken place along the stretch of Main Street where it ran closest to the Kickaha River. Although there were a few holdouts—scruffy country cousins like the old general store and a few residential properties that were yet to become commercial—most of the buildings sported a new tourist-friendly look: folksy wood fronts on the stores, old-fashioned hand-painted signs, shop windows full of souvenirs and crafts.
The Custom House was somewhere in between. Its stucco walls boasted a new paint job, and Cindy’s Cafe had an outdoor patio for use in the summer, but inside the hotel, the guest rooms were as they’d been for thirty years and the bar room was still more of a roadhouse. Its regular patrons didn’t care, neither the locals who came by for a drink after work nor the hipper crowd that showed up in the evenings for entertainment. The bar room of the Custom House provided an eclectic mix of live music that rivaled any big city venue.
The building stood on Main Street with a view of the Kickaha River, and only the railroad tracks and a thin strip of lawn separated the street from the water. Stairs led down to a wooden dock with a couple of benches on it. From the dock, one could sit and look out on the river and the foothills of the mountains that began their northward climb from the far shore.
When they got back to the hotel, Lizzie and Siobhan took the stairs down and sat on one of the benches, neither of them ready quite yet to go inside the hotel and have to interact with other people. Siobhan was still quiet and Lizzie couldn’t really blame her. She’d actually experienced the whole weird business last night, and she could hardly get her head around it herself. And now there was this new mystery of Tommy being so deferential to Grey.
“What am I going to do?” she said when they’d been sitting there for awhile.
Siobhan shook her head. “I don’t know, Lizzie. Maybe you should just get your car this afternoon and hope it all goes away.”
Lizzie gave a slow nod. She sure didn’t want to run into those bogans again. And Grey hadn’t exactly been friendly. But Walker had. And then there was the whole mystery, the adventure of it all. The idea that this whole other world existed, side by side to this one, only hidden from it unless you happened to stray or were drawn into it.
“I don’t think I can forget about it,” she said.
“I’m still trying to understand it myself,” Siobhan told her. “It’s so unbelievable.”
“But you heard what Tommy said about the alternator and Grey.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe it happened,” Siobhan said. “Not anymore, because obviously something did. But I’m still having trouble getting my head around it. I mean, from what you were telling me, there could be little fairy people all around us right now, and we’d never know.”
Lizzie shivered. “Don’t say that.”
“But there could, couldn’t there?”
Lizzie turned on the bench and studied the steep slope of the river bank on either side of them. The rushes and weeds were tall and brown, but thinned enough by the winter snows that a person couldn’t easily hide in them. But when she thought of how the bogans, not to mention Grey and Walker, were able to just appear and disappear, stepping to and from this between place Grey had mentioned . . .
“I guess,” she said.
“You said the deer man—”
“Walker.”
Siobhan nodded. “You said he told you if you called his name, he’d come, didn’t you?”
Lizzie saw where she was going.
“I couldn’t do that,” she said.
“But then we’d know for sure. And maybe he could explain what you’re supposed to do.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to do anything. Grey told me the same thing you did a few moments ago: I should just forget about it and get on with my life.”
“But Walker said the bogans might come looking for you.”
Lizzie hated being reminded of that, but she nodded.
“And I have to admit,” Siobhan went on, “I’d really like to actually . . . you know . . . meet this guy.” She gave Lizzie a thin smile. “If ‘guy’ is even the proper term.”
“Except I got the feeling,” Lizzie said, “that his offer to come to me when I called him seemed to imply that I should only do it if I was in danger.”
“From the bogans.”
“I guess. You’d have to have seen him, but Walker didn’t strike me as the sort of person you’d bother with anything frivolous. It was like . . . I don’t know.” She gave a nervous laugh. “Like meeting a saint.”
Siobhan smiled. “Oh, if your mother could hear that, you’d lose all the points you gained when we named the band the Knotted Cord.”
Lizzie’s mother, a devout Catholic, had been somewhat mollified by the band’s name, because she certainly wasn’t happy about her daughter becoming a professional musician. Lizzie and Siobhan had originally chosen the name because “The Knotted Cord,” also known as “Junior Crehan’s” after its composer, was a favourite tune of theirs. It was Lizzie’s mother who’d pointed out that the knotted cord represented rosary beads, dating back to a time in Ireland when people too poor to afford them would make a set of their own out of string or rope.
“But you know what I mean,” Lizzie said. “When you meet someone . . . not exactly holy, but very spiritual.”
“Like the Dalai Lama.”
“I suppose. But I’ve never met him.”
“Neither have I,” Siobhan said. “But I can imagine what it’d be like meeting him.”
Before Lizzie could respond, they were hailed from the top of the stairs.
“There you are!”
They turned to see Andy waving down at them. A moment later he was joined by Con.
“The boys are awake,” Siobhan said. “Let the revels begin.”
Lizzie laughed and they got up.
“This fairy business . . . ,” Lizzie began as they mounted the stairs.
“Is just between us,” Siobhan assured her.
“We’ve been looking all over for you,” Andy said when they got to the top.
“When did you get back?” Con asked Lizzie.
She shrugged. “Last night. I changed my mind and turned around about halfway home.”
“You missed some grand music,” Andy said. “Your man Liam McNamara—oh, he knows some bril
liant tunes.”
“I heard a bit before I left last night,” Lizzie said.
Con fell in step with her as they crossed back to the hotel.
“So, what made you change your mind?” he asked.
“I decided I’d miss my cousin too much,” she told him, smiling at the hopeful look in his eyes.
Oh, he was a handsome bugger, no question. Maybe she should kick him out of the band so that they could start seeing each other.
Geordie
Whenever I didn’t stay at the mall after a revel—especially when Galfreya had specifically asked me to—I ended up carrying this pang of regret throughout the day. A kind of yearning that I could feel, but couldn’t quite define. Today was no different. She was in the back of my mind when I fell asleep, just behind my concern about the conversation I’d had with Hazel. Those thoughts absorbed me until I recalled that mysterious snatch of fiddle music I’d heard in the mall’s parking lot.
I slept deeply for a few hours, then woke suddenly to a feeling I couldn’t name.
Loss, I realized after a few moments.
I felt as though I’d lost something, but I didn’t know what.
It wasn’t until hours later, after I’d fallen asleep again and finally gotten up in the midafternoon to start my day, that I realized what it was: I felt no specific yearning to go back to the mall. To play music with the fairies. To be with Galfreya.
The need was noticeable only by its absence.
I grabbed a shower and shaved, then went through the pile of clothes lying on the foot of the Murphy bed, looking for something clean to wear. I had to do a laundry soon, no question, but it could wait until tomorrow or Monday. Right now I needed coffee and something to eat, and there was nothing in the apartment.
I got myself a take-out coffee and a muffin from the neighbourhood coffee shop to see me through, then caught the subway to my brother Christy’s place. I didn’t have to hope he’d have coffee on. Christy was addicted to the stuff, the same as me. He always had coffee on.
Coming in the door to his building, I met his girlfriend Saskia on her way out. She smiled and gave me a hug. It’s funny, I’m not much of a one for physical displays of affection, but it was different with Saskia—and not because she’s so attractive. If whoever it was that started the whole dumb blonde thing had met her, they’d have picked on brunettes or redheads instead. She was pretty and smart, a published poet with a social conscience and a huge heart. And somehow, when she hugged you, she didn’t seem to invade your personal space. She just confirmed your connections to the world around you. Or at least she did for me.
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