Chimera Bay, the tow-truck driver told him an hour later. They had the
best parts and service department within a hundred miles any direction. And if
it couldn’t be fixed, the town had more car dealerships. Pierce climbed
glumly into the truck, watched his past reel backward along the road until it
came to a halt again at the place he had just left.
He spent a couple more hours waiting to hear the verdict, then walked up the
highway to the nearest motel. He was closer to the busy south end of town than
to the Kingfisher Inn; with luck he could skulk around unnoticed until the car
was fixed. He saw several bars, a fish market, a wine market, a supermarket, a
bookstore, a shoe store, one each of every kind of fast-food restaurant. He
wandered among the streets as evening fell, looking into windows, reading
menus, hoping nobody he had met the previous night would chance along and
remember him. He glimpsed, inside the lobby of an old theater, the huge,
golden body, the kohl-rimmed eyes of an ancient ruler upon his throne,
welcoming moviegoers with a placid, perpetual smile. On a side street, he came
across an elegant little restaurant tucked into what had been a bank building.
The round tables wore black cloths; red cut-crystal vases on them held a
single small white calla lily. Stillwater’s, the restaurant door said in
simple lettering. No menu was posted.
“Excuse me,” someone said behind him as he looked curiously through the door
’s tinted window.
He turned. A woman stood on the sidewalk, smiling at him. He knew her. He did
not. He lingered on the top of the steps in front of the door, trying to place
her in his past, those eyes, that smile. He recognized her face finally from
one of the few ungloomy things in the house on Cape Mistbegotten: a lovely
painting from some romantic era of a medieval maiden welcoming her knight home
from his travels. She had that same generous mouth, the same abundantly
flowing champagne hair, those same widely spaced, heavy-lidded gray-green eyes
that seemed to carry light from a sun already gone for the day.
“Oh,” he said, feeling his transfixed bones galvanized into motion. “Sorry.
I’m in your way. Sorry.”
She laughed a little, a lovely sound that he imagined a rill would make, or a
warbler. “That’s okay.” She opened the door, then paused, looking down at
him now. “Do you want to come in? We start serving a little later than most,
but the bar is open.”
I just wrecked my car, he told her silently. I left my credit card smoldering
in last night’s bar. I’ll probably have to ask my mother to sell the
painting of you so I can pay my motel bill. No way should I follow you into
this place.
“Sure,” he said dazedly, and followed her in.
“I’m Sage Stillwater,” she said, as she seated him on one of the four
leather-cushioned stools at the tiny bar.
“Pierce Oliver,” he said, taking the piece of paper she handed him without
seeing it, still caught in the wonder of watching a painting move, change
expression, talk. He made an effort. “Do you own the place?”
“My husband does. I do some cooking. I also serve food, clear the tables, mop
the floors, and tend bar. If you’d like a drink.”
He shook his head, changed his mind, changed it again. “I don’t know,” he
said finally as she smiled. “Will you have one with me?”
She considered that, her head bent slightly, long, rippling hair falling like
a veil behind her lovely profile. “Let me just see what Todd needs.”
She moved among the tables toward curtains hanging over what might have been
the bank-vault doorway, doorless now, but still heavily framed with steel set
into the gray and white marble walls. He watched her mindlessly, her long
limbs in black skirt and gray silk shirt moving quietly, gracefully. She
disappeared. He straightened, feeling as though he had been for a few timeless
moments utterly bewitched. He noticed the paper in his hand, laid it on the
bar. No one came in while he waited. He felt oddly alone though he thought he
heard the rise and fall of voices from far away, maybe from the street. Or
maybe it was only the incoherent sound of distant traffic. The café curtains,
black like the tablecloths and shadowing the lower half of the broad windows,
gave him a view of the bay at the end of the street, the water gull-gray with
the coming twilight and absolutely still.
He heard footsteps. But they were outside, he realized, on the sidewalk. He
looked around, wanting a drink now. His eyes fell on the paper lying on the
marble bar. It wasn’t so much a menu, he saw as he scanned it, as a
manifesto. Something that seemed utterly pretentious, absurd, amid the prosaic
diners, car lots, chain motels of Chimera Bay.
Eat, it pretty much commanded, what I give you. I’ll tell you what it will
cost you when I decide the meal is over.
His cell phone rang.
He jumped wildly. “Mom,” he breathed, hunched over the phone as though he
were in church. “I can’t talk now.”
“What in the world were you thinking?”
“What?”
“When you stole that knife?”