Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The glimpse of the earlier inn vanished in a turn as the road wound down into town. Now the inn was peeling paint, shuttered windows, walls hidden under scaffolding, its proud turrets piebald where slats had blown off. Carrie parked in front, where lawns stretching the entire length of the inn had vanished under tar and gravel. She recognized the half dozen cars already there, the usual bar dwellers.

  She found her way under the plyboard tunnels beneath the scaffolding to the front door of the restaurant and let herself in. No one was there yet but Ella; Carrie came early to help her prep. Walking through the kitchen doors, she blinked at the morning light streaming in from the back wall of windows overlooking the bay. Around her in the kitchen, things burped, bubbled, steamed. She smelled oil, rosemary, yeast. For a moment she thought she was alone among the cupboards and counters, the wheeled chopping blocks, the stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers, everything that still could, in the mix of antique and modern, making noises at once like an orchestra tuning up.

  Then she saw the tiny woman with her head in one of the refrigerators, rummaging through the shelves. She straightened abruptly and turned, her arms full of eggs, two kinds of cheese, mustard, pickle relish. She smiled at Carrie. Her hair was a mass of white curls, her face pale and seamed like a piece of old diner crockery, the only color in it her periwinkle eyes. The corner of the egg box slid. Salad dressings and sauces, Carrie guessed, and went to help her.

  “Thanks, Hon.”

  “Do you want me to make them?”

  “No. I want you to start on the crab bisque. But take the note up first.”

  She was, everyone swore, Hal and Tye’s mother. Carrie didn’t believe it. Nobody could be that old and move the way Ella did, everywhere at once, it seemed, even during the most chaotic of All-You-Can-Eat Nites. And she was elfin; how could she have come out with those tall, big-boned sons, themselves at least half the age of the inn? Whoever and however old she was, she knew everything about everything, though she could be half a heaping tablespoon short of explaining, even, for instance, the why of the note Carrie picked up off the countertop to take upstairs.

  She went the quickest way, through the back door of the kitchen, down a battered wooden walkway to the only staircase, of the four built to give guests access from every floor to the grounds, that didn’t threaten to pitch her back down through a rotting tread. Lilith Fisher lived in one of the turret suites that once overlooked the lovely gardens and the yachts at the docks. Now it overlooked a weedy lawn and a couple of fishing boats. She was said to be writing a book about the history, the celebrities, the gossip surrounding the inn during its glory. Carrie had never seen her actually working at the big desk cluttered with books, papers, and old photos in the turret. Hal, it seemed to her, was the one doing the writing: every morning a note, elegantly hand-penned in real ink on heavy, deckle-edged paper tucked into a matching envelope with his wife’s name on it, asking her to join him that evening for dinner.

  Lilith opened the door when Carrie knocked, then flowed away, scarf ends, sleeves, trouser hems fluttering as she said into her cell phone, “No. No! Really? He really did that?” She reached the far wall and flowed back, seeing Carrie this time, tossing her a preoccupied smile. “I can’t believe it. After all you did to protect him.”

  Like Hal, Lilith was long-boned, tall, still willowy despite her ivory-white hair. She wore it coiled on top of her head, an untidy cinnamon bun held in place by a couple of colored pencils. Her eyes, behind half-moon glasses, were big, sunken, luminous, the creamy green the sea sometimes turned during a nasty storm.

  Carrie held out the note. Lilith took it on an ebb turn and surged again. “No. Yes. I will.” Carrie backed a step toward the door; Lilith whirled abruptly, midroom, swirled back to her. “Of course, Heloise. The mourning doves. They can watch for him from my turret.”

  She dropped the phone in a pocket and finally stood still. “Thank you, Carrie.” She opened the envelope; her eyes flicked over the note, then at Carrie again, some memory surfacing in them as frigid as an iceberg in a northern sea. “Please tell Ella that I will take my dinner alone tonight.”

  And that was that for the lovely, old-fashioned note.

  “Okay,” Carrie said, confused as always, wanting to ask why? What did he? Couldn’t they at least talk about it over dinner even though that might mean a few broken plates? Lilith’s eyes flashed at her again, this time without the chill, reading her expression, Carrie guessed, or maybe, in some nebulous way, her thoughts.

  Lilith pushed her glasses up toward the cinnamon bun, worked a pencil back into place. She turned, gazed down at the bay through the turret’s curved windows, where Hal and his brother Tye, tiny figures in a small, rocking boat, sank lines into the shipping channel to see what they could lure up from the deep.

  “We have no more plates to throw,” Carrie heard her murmur. “We broke them all long ago.”

  “What?” Carrie’s voice came out in a whisper.

  Lilith dropped her glasses back down onto her nose and peered more closely at the boat. “Ask Ella to send Hal’s jeans up with my dinner. I’ll mend that back pocket. How’s your father this morning?”

  Carrie, staring incredulously at the tiny nail-paring-sized blur that was Hal’s jeans, answered absently, “He was lying on his back in a broken rowboat talking to a crow about fearsome porpentines.”

  “Really? He said porpentines?”

  “He did. Dead sober.”

  “And the pickup? Did you get the brakes fixed?”

  Carrie nodded, sighing. “I had to use some of my creel money, though.”

  A smile flickered through Lilith’s delicately lined face. “Works for me,” she said. “The less you squirrel away in that old creel, the longer you’ll stay with us.”

  But I need to leave, Carrie cried silently, her whole body tense with desperation, and Lilith nodded.

  “I know.”

  Carrie went back down an inner stairway that took her through the great dining room behind the reception hall. It was an empty, silent, beautiful place in which the backwash of the past, layers of memory, had accumulated. Huge windows overlooked the water, each framed with stained-glass panels depicting wild waves, cormorants and albatrosses, the frolicking whales and mermaids of the deep. The old glass was bubbled and wavery; passing boats and birds grew distorted in it. Sometimes, Carrie glimpsed odd things in the shipping channel through those windows: small ships with rounded hulls and too many sails, or leaner vessels with ribbed sails raked at an angle that might have crossed over from exotic seas where fish flew and whales had horns like unicorns just to visit Chimera Bay. The round mahogany and rosewood tables still filled the room, circled by their chairs. Waiting, maybe, for the doors to open at last, the guests in their glittering evening clothes to enter and feast. But the silver sconces and candelabra had grown black with age; the fireplace, its mantel carved from a single slab of myrtle wood, had been cold for decades.

  In the kitchen, she gave Ella Lilith’s message and got to work on the bisque.

  Bek and Marjorie came in at eleven to serve. Purple-haired Jayne brought in a couple of lunch orders from the bar while they were putting on their aprons. After that, things got hectic. Ella worked the grill, flipping burgers, tuna melts, fillets of salmon and halibut; Carrie kept an eye on the two pots of soup—crab bisque and chicken-veg—while she lowered into bubbling oil anything that could possibly be deep-fried. At odd moments, between orders, she experimented. She fried croquettes of chopped salmon, sour cream, onions rolled into a web of uncooked hash browns. She added one or two to a plate, flagged them with toothpicks, beside the usual skewer of orange slice and pickled crab apple. They were pretty much successful; only the toothpicks came back. Her deep-fried minced eggplant, green olive, and feta croquettes mostly came back with a set of tooth marks at one end. The implacable Marjorie, who had worked in restaurants for a quarter of a century,
eased her plump body and her tray like a dancer through the kitchen, nibbling Carrie’s experiments as she passed. Angular Bek, who wore nothing but black and was waiting on tables while he made up his mind what to do with his life, always looked on the verge of dropping his tray as he tossed a croquette in his mouth. Somehow, his sharp elbows avoided the soup pots and doorposts; he threatened but never achieved a head-on collision with the hanging copper pans.

  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.

  3

  Somewhere 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.

  Pier
ce 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.