Deep Betrayal

chapter 32

COYOTE



The Pettits’ house was a two-story farmhouse close to the lake. Calder wouldn’t go to the door, but he got out of the car and listened from the woods. I’d been here only once before—the night Calder attacked Jack—and it looked different in the daylight. I found the door, but I was too short to look through the three small square panes at the top. On the other side of the glass, the lights were off, although I could hear that the TV was on. I looked for a doorbell but, finding none, knocked several times. The sound was low and heavy against the solid oak door. No one came, and I knocked again. I was about to leave when the panes vibrated with approaching steps.

The door opened slowly, and Mr. Pettit peered out. “If you’re here to cause trouble …”

“Mr. Pettit? It’s me, Lily Hancock.”

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. Come on in, Lily. I’m afraid Gabrielle’s not here and Jack, well … who knows where he is these days.”

“I don’t want to bother you, but I was wondering if you knew a … a coyote.” The question sounded more ridiculous out of my mouth than it did in my head.

“Are you talking about Everett Coyote?”

“Oh!” This whole time I’d been picturing an animal. This wasn’t going to be as embarrassing as I thought.

“He’s my dentist. Let me go look in the kitchen. I think he has an ad in the phone book. I’ll be right back.”

I’d never been inside the Pettits’ house before. Dark brown shag carpeting led from the front door down a long hallway. The TV blared from a room on the left.

“Your dad told me about your Minneapolis friend,” called Mr. Pettit from the kitchen. “I hope he’s okay.”

“Yeah, he’s okay. You saw my dad?”

“Ran into him at the IGA. He was in a really good mood.”

“Oh.” I was already clinging to Calder’s Maighdean Mara theory by a thinning thread. A happy merman meant one of two things, and since Dad hadn’t been spending any time with Mom, that didn’t bode well for my exercise in denial.

While Mr. Pettit fumbled in drawers in the kitchen, I wandered farther down the hallway, pulled by the childhood pictures of Gabby and Jack hanging on the wall, an eight-by-ten glossy marking each year of school. Gabby’s room was just past the last frame, judging by the band posters and pile of clothes on the bed.

A second door was opened a crack. I peeked in. A blanket hung heavily over the window, making it seem more cave than bedroom. The light from the hallway raced in—breaking across the walls, exposing a floor-to-ceiling collage of Jack’s artwork. I slid my hand along the wall inside the doorway, searching for a light switch. I flipped on the light and drew in a sharp breath.

It was like being underwater. A blue light flooded the room. Seconds later, a lava lamp sent a pulsing pattern of bubbles across the ceiling. Pictures of mermaids, some beautiful, others terrifying, plastered the walls. He’d drawn some images on full sheets of paper, others cut out precisely along their exquisite shapes. Charcoal drawings, oil paintings, sculpted pieces that reached toward the center of the room.

I walked in, holding my breath. On a bookshelf beside the bed, a battered sketchbook lay open. I flipped through its pages. Every single drawing was of Pavati, her blue-sequined tail unmistakable. Her lavender eyes stared out from the paper as if she could leap at me as soon as I turned my back. Page after page. Until I got to the back cover and found something I would have never expected.

There, Jack had stashed at least two dozen letters, all sent from a P.O. box in New Orleans. The postmarks indicated weekly letters through last fall, but then they tapered off. There were six weeks between the last two. Pavati had sent her final letter just two weeks before my family arrived. I pulled it from its envelope.

Jack,

Don’t send any more letters like the last one. Get a grip or you’ll ruin everything.

P

Oh, poor Jack.

“I see you’ve found my son’s room,” Mr. Pettit said.

I jumped and slammed the sketchbook shut. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s a nightmare,” he said. “Ever since his friends all left for college he’s gotten stranger and stranger. I keep telling him he’s got talent. He should pursue this art thing if that’s what he wants to do. So what if he’s a year behind now? People go to college later in life all the time these days. But there’s no talking to him.”

Mr. Pettit handed me a torn piece of paper. “Here’s Dr. Coyote’s address and phone number. Are your teeth bothering you?”

“Something like that.”

I found Calder pacing in the woods beyond the car, pitching pinecones against the trunk of a tree. When he saw me coming, he lobbed one over my head and reached for the piece of paper I handed to him. He read it quickly, nodded, and said, “Let’s roll.”


The sign read DR. EVERETT COYOTE—THE GENTLE DENTIST. It seemed like an oxymoron to me. Calder pushed open the door and a string of bells announced us to the receptionist. Calder walked quickly into the office and put both hands on her counter, leaning toward her with a wide smile.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

“No,” Calder said. “We were hoping to speak to the dentist.”

“Oh, well, you’d have to have an appointment to do that.”

“It’s important,” Calder said, and I felt the temperature tick up a degree or two.

The receptionist’s eyes widened and her cheeks flushed scarlet. “Well, I suppose I could go see.…”

A man in a white lab coat came into the lobby through another door. His gray hair stood off his head like a puffy dandelion gone to seed. He pushed the last third of a sandwich into his mouth and picked up a magazine from the coffee table.

“Dr. Coyote?” I asked.

“Hmmm? I’m sorry.” His words came out garbled. “I was just finishing my lunch. I didn’t know I had another appointment so soon. Let me clean up and we can get started.”

“I’m not here about my teeth,” I said.

“Well, honey, I’m sorry, that’s all we do here,” he said, and there was a twinkle in his eye. “I can’t help you with much else.”

“Actually … we thought maybe we could talk to you about Maighdean Mara?” Calder asked. He leaned in and focused his eyes on the doctor’s.

Dr. Coyote’s caterpillar-like eyebrows shot up; then he chuckled and diverted his eyes. He wiped his hands on his wide-wale corduroys and glanced at his receptionist. “Why don’t you kids come on back. We can meet in private.” Calder and I exchanged looks as the dentist led us to a small office decorated in pastel dentist chic. Two chairs sat opposite the desk, and Calder and I fell into them.

Always blunt, Calder cut to the chase. “We’re told you know something about her, the legend, I mean.”

“Some might call me a bit of an expert,” said Dr. Coyote. “I come from a long line of devotees.”

His gaze settled on my pendant. “Who sent you?”

“My aunt suggested you might know where to find her.”

Dr. Coyote looked me hard in the eyes, then got up and went to a bookcase behind his desk. Most of the books had the same ADA label on the spine, but up high, in the top right corner, were some smaller, older books, with cracked and broken bindings.

“You’ll like this,” he said, pulling one down and opening it up to a page marked with a red satin ribbon. “It’s a children’s book. Easily overlooked, but still useful for the basics, and even more if you read a little deeper.” He opened the book and turned it around so we could see the pictures: charcoal drawings of a beautifully fearsome creature taming a storm.

“See here, that’s Maighdean Mara,” said Dr. Coyote, pointing as if we could have missed her. “Her mother was Talamh, ‘The Earth,’ and her father was Gailleann, ‘The Tempest.’

“She also had a brother named Dóiteán, which means ‘blaze.’ They were fire and water, and they hated each other. One day they got in a terrible fight and Maighdean Mara ran far away. She came west and found the cave behind Copper Falls.”

Calder took my hand, fumbling with my fingers.

“Back in the day, my grandfather always told me that Maighdean Mara was the ancestor of … the others.”

“The others?” I asked.

“The others. Those creatures who are part woman, part animal.” He discreetly stole another glance at my pendant and caught my eye for just a second before looking away. “Excuse me, but shouldn’t you know all this already?”

“I heard these legends go back to the Great Flood,” I said, ignoring his question. “As in Noah’s ark.”

“What I’ve told you is ancient legend. But she has been seen as recently as the late eighteen hundreds. After World War I, there was even a paper written, analyzing the scientific evidence and suggesting Maighdean Mara was still living, deep within the lake.” Dr. Coyote smiled and pulled another book off the shelf. “It’s all in here. You read it.”

“Some boys from Cornucopia suggested she was a monster,” I said.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no. She’s a great benefactor.”

“But that could change, right?” I asked. “If people stopped paying attention to her, she could, like, retaliate?”

My question seemed to make Dr. Coyote uncomfortable. He frowned at his desk and closed the book without answering.

“Dr. Coyote,” Calder said, “if someone were to look for her, where would you recommend he go?”

Dr. Coyote flipped open the second book to a page with a nautical chart of the lake. “Here,” he said, marking a spot between Isle Royale and Thunder Bay with his finger. He wrote down the coordinates on a piece of scrap paper, slid them to Calder and said, “That would be my first stop.”

Dr. Coyote narrowed his eyes. “If you do go looking …” He got up and opened a drawer, pulling out a linen bag that bulged at its seams. He untied the string and dumped a pile of Indian Head pennies on the table, many tinged green with patina. They rang out as they knocked together. “My grandfather gave me this bag when I graduated from dental school. They were his father’s before that. He said to give some of them to Maighdean Mara every year to thank her for my good fortune.”

“And did you?” I asked.

“I was young. I was embarrassed by an old man’s foolishness.” He scooped the pennies back into the bag and handed it to me. “When you get there, give her these for me. They’re long overdue.”

“We couldn’t take those. You should offer them yourself,” I said.

“I’m sixty-three years old, and I’ve lived here my whole life.” He pressed the bag of copper coins into my palm and folded my fingers around it. “If I haven’t got myself up there by now, I never will. I leave this in your capable hands.”

He lightly brushed one finger against my pendant, then looked me directly in the eye so I’d know it wasn’t an accident. He said, “I’m sure she has no interest in me now that I’m an old man, but if you think of it, say hi to Nadia for me.”