He chuckled. “Yeah. I heard some of that, last night when I got home
after the midnight show. What was he—”
“Haven’t a clue. He never tells me anything. Or he does, but he never makes
sense. He’s probably asleep under a tree.”
“Maybe he’s got a girlfriend.”
“My dad?” she said, surprised at the notion. “I suppose maybe. But it’s
hard to imagine who.”
“That’s because he’s your dad.”
Somehow, at the thought, they were both moving toward the weathered plank Zed
had laid across the stream. He reached it first, balancing easily on his bare
feet. Carrie was there at the bridge’s end to gather armfuls of frayed
flannel, muscle, warm skin, to inhale the familiar scents of dreams and soap
and sweat on the penguin pajamas.
“Come inside?” his lips said against her hair.
“I told Ella I’d come in early to help her hull strawberries and bake
shortcakes.” Reluctantly, she peeled herself away from him. “I should go,”
she told his eyes, which were heavy, full of her now instead of salmon and
skunk cabbage.
“Tonight?” he said. “Wait. What’s today?”
“Saturday. I’ll be home late.”
“So will I—nine to two again at the theater. Wait for me here when you get
off work? If tomorrow’s Sunday, I won’t have anything until noon, when I
drive Mrs. Pettigrew to church and walk the Hound of the Baskervilles until
she gets out. What about breakfast at the beach? Coffee and hard-boiled eggs,
and I smoked some tuna—”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “Yes. I want it now.” Her feet backed another
step, moving against the tide, it felt. “See you tonight.”
She realized much later, as the dinner crowd shifted from the grill to the
bar, that it would be one of those nights. Knight nights, she called them: the
slow, informal gathering through the evening of the men closest to Hal Fisher.
Ian Steward, Jarvis Day, Curt and Gabe Sloan, Josh Ward, Father Kirk from St.
Benedict, and Reverend Gusset from Trinity Lutheran, Hal’s brother Tye, and
Merle made up the steadfast, reliable core of the group. Others, less
familiar, wandered in from the mountain towns, or from the wilds along the
rivers and lakes, the farthest reaches of the sloughs. Carrie couldn’t name
all of the knights, but she recognized them by the fierce, mute loyalty and
respect she saw in their eyes as one by one they went to greet Hal first, and
only then, turned to the bar and the stalwart Tye behind it. They even
occupied the single round table at the place, overflowing around it, chairs
pulled up two or three deep, always Hal with Merle at one side of him, and the
vacant chair on his other where no one ever sat.
Of course, Carrie had asked Ella about that. Ella’s lips had thinned until
they vanished; she couldn’t have pushed a word past them if she had wanted
to. She just shook her head and disappeared so far into a pot after a scorched
spot that Carrie thought she would fall into it.
She had asked Gabe Sloan, Curt’s tall, golden-haired son, who with his father
held the restaurant doors open for the Fish Fry procession. But he didn’t
know the why of the empty chair beside Hal Fisher either.
“My dad says it’s all connected,” he had told her. “Hal Fisher getting
hurt, the hotel failing, Lilith Fisher going to live in the tower suite, the
quarrel between them, even the Friday Nite Fry—it’s all part of the same
story. But the ones who know the story won’t talk about it, and those who don
’t won’t ask for fear of causing pain.”
Merle knew, Carrie guessed. But he only said, when she asked him, “It’s like
an evil spell cast over the place. When the right person comes through the
door and asks, the spell will be broken. That’s what I know.”
It wasn’t all he knew, she thought grumpily. But it was all he would say.
The knights of the forests, the mudflats, and the waters were still sitting
around the table when she finally finished late that evening, cleaning the
kitchen and setting up for Sunday brunch. The men leaned back precariously
into one another on their chair legs; they balanced scuffed boots on knees,
and held their drinks as they talked, winding down now, a rumble of male
voices tweaking the thread of some endless story, eliciting a deep roll of
laughter that tapered slowly into silence as the men reminisced, privately,
dreamily, until it seemed they must have come to the end of the evening, then
someone else spoke, plucked a thread, and the thunder reverberated through the
circle again. A middle-aged couple sat in the shadowy edges of the room
talking quietly; another nonknight sat at the bar, staring into his drink and
ignoring the group. But no Merle. His chair was oddly empty that night.