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.
4
Carrie, 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.”