“For an answer.”
He’d been out all night, she guessed, as often happened on tranquil spring
nights. He watched the reflection of the moon in the slough streams, or
swapped tales with some transient beside a fire in the backwoods. Fish
stories, hunting stories, war stories: Carrie had overheard some of those
earnest, drunken conversations, when neither listened to the other, and
whatever events they spoke of seemed to have happened in different countries,
maybe even in different millennia.
“I have to go to work, Dad. You sure you don’t want a hand up?”
Merle murmured something inaudible. Then he said more clearly, “I’m working.
”
Carrie glanced at the sky, saw a flock of geese in a ragged V flying the wrong
direction for spring. “You’d be more comfortable out of here.”
“I can see better down here.”
“How about that cup of coffee?”
“You’d shudder, your blood would roar, your hair would stiffen tendril by
tendril like quills upon the fretful porpentine if you could see, if you could
see.”
Carrie gave up. “Okay. I guess that would be no.”
Her father’s eyes lost their vacant passion; he smiled at her again.
“No, thanks.”
“Don’t forget that Mom’s in town for the night. She wants to meet you for
lunch. Call her?”
“I won’t forget,” he promised.
“You have a good day, Dad.” She hesitated. “You won’t forget, but will you
do it?”
“Whatever you say, Sweet.”
“I have got to get out of Chimera Bay,” she said fiercely to the saint
dangling on the rearview mirror of the pickup. Her father had found the
medallion on his rambles, hung it in the truck because it protected travelers.
How her father, who shied like a vampire at the shadow of a church spire in
his path, knew one saint from another, Carrie hadn’t a clue.
She and the truck rattled across the old farmers’ road, then up the steep,
rocky, rutted grade that joined a paved road at the top of the hill. In the
mirror, before she turned, she could see the north end of the slough, the
distant estuary waters broadening between the low, coastal hills to meet the
tide. The paved road wound for a few miles along the crest of the hills before
it dipped down to follow the sea, where it flowed around the headlands and
into Chimera Bay.
The Kingfisher Inn stood at the edge of the broad bay, looking out over the
deep shipping channel and the calm waters beyond it that ebbed twice a day
into shallows and mudflats. From the highest curve, Carrie could see all of
the inn at once, the huge central building with the two round turrets at its
back corners, and the wide, graceful, four-storied wings that once overlooked
lawn, rose gardens, and the docks where guests who sailed in on their yachts
would tie up for the night.
It had all been a wonder: so the old photos, letters, and yellowed reviews,
framed and hanging behind glass along the walls, told her. And what had
happened to it all? Something had happened. She was uncertain what; everything
had changed before she was born. For all the vagueness in everyone’s eyes
when she asked, the good fortune might have vanished a century before. Not
even her father could come up with a coherent explanation, and he had been
there, she knew, beside the much younger Hal Fisher in a tuxedo under the
blazing chandelier, his golden hair clipped, his mustache wild and thick,
bracketing his confident smile, lord of all he surveyed, including Merle at
his elbow, wearing a dress suit, of all things, and looking, in the old sepia
photo, oddly watchful, as though from very far away he saw the something
coming.
The glimpse of the earlier inn vanished in a turn as the road wound down into
town. Now the inn was peeling paint, shuttered windows, walls hidden under
scaffolding, its proud turrets piebald where slats had blown off. Carrie
parked in front, where lawns stretching the entire length of the inn had
vanished under tar and gravel. She recognized the half dozen cars already
there, the usual bar dwellers.