“Well.” He scratched his head and smiled a little; above him tree
boughs swayed and spoke in a wind from the sea. “That happens, sometimes,
around the shrine. On the odd occasion—rare, mind you—that the forest senses
it might need some help. Go down and try your car again,” he added, as Pierce
and Leith stared wordlessly at him. “It may have cured itself by now.”
When they reached the bottom of the hill, the limo engine was gently idling,
and the tow truck from which Val had emerged was on its way back down the
mountain.
16
Carrie sat with Zed in his narrow bed, sharing a bottle of wine and the events
of their long days. It was past midnight. Zed had come home from the Pharaoh
Theater; Carrie had stayed late with Ella, scrubbing the hoary kitchen floors.
Around them, the small cabin was a shadowy mix of candlelight and camp
lantern. Thrown together as a duck blind, remodeled into a rental with the
world’s tiniest kitchen, it still smelled of damp logs, and occasionally
sprouted a mushroom. A potbellied stove, one broken leg on a brick, exuded the
scent of damp ash. There was an actual braided rug on the splintery floor.
Outside, the night itself was soundless, no weather and a sky so clear the
lace of streams through the long grasses ran with moonlight instead of water.
The slough made its own noises: hooting, rustling, grunting, and peeping.
Distant car engines mingled with the constant musings of the sea. Carrie’s
ears sorted through every noise, pricked for the sound of Merle’s voice.
“What is he, anyway?” she wondered. “Magic?”
“Merle?”
“I always thought he was just demented. My mother always said so. But no
matter how crazy you want to be, you can’t turn yourself into a wolf without
knowing something more than most. Where did he learn it?”
“There’s magic around.”
“Not in Chimera Bay.”
“There’s Merle,” Zed said. “There’s the Friday Nite ritual. There’s
mystery in that old hotel.”
She poured herself more wine, took a hefty swallow. “There’s Stillwater.”
Zed looked at her silently, quizzically; in that moment, she made up her mind
about what she had been pondering since the afternoon she had walked into
Stillwater’s restaurant to talk to him and got a glimpse of something in his
face too old to be still alive and human at the same time. Eat, he had said.
“And I did,” she said hollowly.
“What?”
She stirred, getting her thoughts in order, what to tell, what not to so that
he wouldn’t worry. “I told you that Stillwater wants me to work for him.”
“Yeah.”
“So when I went to talk to him about it—just to talk—he offered me samples
of his cooking. Little, complicated layers of color and texture, so wonderful
to look at, you don’t want to eat it, and at the same time, you imagine how
much more wonderful all those colors could taste, all at once in your mouth.
Like a sweet explosion of fireworks, like edible music. So I ate.” She
reached for her glass, took a sip to reassure herself that she still had taste
buds. “That beautiful little piece of art, food jewelry—it tasted like
nothing. Mist. Not even sea mist. That has a bite of salt in it. Just cloud.
Just. Nothing.” She drank again. “So of course I ate another. And another,
since whatever was wrong must have been in me, not in those perfect Stillwater
bites. He must have known. I kept eating, trying to taste, and he just kept
smiling. He has the most wonderful—”
“You keep saying.”
“Anyway, I think I ate everything in sight. Or I would have, except that his
wife came in with her arms full of groceries, and we got up to help her. She
seemed nice. Friendly. Really beautiful, of course; you’d expect that, since
she’s married to a Greek myth—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“When I left them, I still wanted more. More little beautiful bites of
nothing.”
“So are you going to work for him?”
“Yes. I have to. He’s the only piece of the mystery around the Kingfisher
Inn that will talk to me.”
Zed shifted closer to her, put his arm around her. “Be careful,” he pleaded.
She nodded, whittling another half inch off the scant distance left between
them, then another, after she put her glass on the floor and let the hollow in
the old mattress cant them together.
“I intend to,” she said somberly. “I don’t know what he is, I don’t know
what my father’s afraid of, I don’t know what Ella hates, and I have no idea
if I’m capable of figuring out all the whys of everything. I can’t imagine
why Stillwater cooks like that. Or why my father can turn into a wolf. I need
to stop thinking like me and start thinking like them.”