A smile flickered through Lilith’s delicately lined face. “Works for
me,” she said. “The less you squirrel away in that old creel, the longer you
’ll stay with us.”
But I need to leave, Carrie cried silently, her whole body tense with
desperation, and Lilith nodded.
“I know.”
Carrie went back down an inner stairway that took her through the great dining
room behind the reception hall. It was an empty, silent, beautiful place in
which the backwash of the past, layers of memory, had accumulated. Huge
windows overlooked the water, each framed with stained-glass panels depicting
wild waves, cormorants and albatrosses, the frolicking whales and mermaids of
the deep. The old glass was bubbled and wavery; passing boats and birds grew
distorted in it. Sometimes, Carrie glimpsed odd things in the shipping channel
through those windows: small ships with rounded hulls and too many sails, or
leaner vessels with ribbed sails raked at an angle that might have crossed
over from exotic seas where fish flew and whales had horns like unicorns just
to visit Chimera Bay. The round mahogany and rosewood tables still filled the
room, circled by their chairs. Waiting, maybe, for the doors to open at last,
the guests in their glittering evening clothes to enter and feast. But the
silver sconces and candelabra had grown black with age; the fireplace, its
mantel carved from a single slab of myrtle wood, had been cold for decades.
In the kitchen, she gave Ella Lilith’s message and got to work on the bisque.
Bek and Marjorie came in at eleven to serve. Purple-haired Jayne brought in a
couple of lunch orders from the bar while they were putting on their aprons.
After that, things got hectic. Ella worked the grill, flipping burgers, tuna
melts, fillets of salmon and halibut; Carrie kept an eye on the two pots of
soup—crab bisque and chicken-veg—while she lowered into bubbling oil
anything that could possibly be deep-fried. At odd moments, between orders,
she experimented. She fried croquettes of chopped salmon, sour cream, onions
rolled into a web of uncooked hash browns. She added one or two to a plate,
flagged them with toothpicks, beside the usual skewer of orange slice and
pickled crab apple. They were pretty much successful; only the toothpicks came
back. Her deep-fried minced eggplant, green olive, and feta croquettes mostly
came back with a set of tooth marks at one end. The implacable Marjorie, who
had worked in restaurants for a quarter of a century, eased her plump body and
her tray like a dancer through the kitchen, nibbling Carrie’s experiments as
she passed. Angular Bek, who wore nothing but black and was waiting on tables
while he made up his mind what to do with his life, always looked on the verge
of dropping his tray as he tossed a croquette in his mouth. Somehow, his sharp
elbows avoided the soup pots and doorposts; he threatened but never achieved a
head-on collision with the hanging copper pans.
Jayne called in another bar order, then saw Carrie’s little pile of
experiments and crossed the kitchen to grab one. Carrie watched her eyes,
lined and shadowed with black and purple, widen, then close. For a moment, her
young, cynical face grew ethereal.
“Eggplant,” she breathed. “Everyone is so afraid of it. I adore it. I color
my hair eggplant. I wear eggplant. I inhale eggplant. Make more.”
Marjorie and Bek began to argue about something. Carrie heard snatches of it
whenever they passed each other.
“It was,” Bek said.
“Couldn’t have been,” Marjorie answered adamantly. “No way. Not here.”
“Was.”
Marjorie called for the dessert tray. Carrie added another of her experiments
to the slices of pound cake, pots of dark chocolate mousse, strawberry tarts.
Marjorie looked dubious. “Nobody here eats pears for dessert.”
“Not even poached with vanilla and black peppercorns, and drizzled with warm
salted caramel and grated lemon peel?”
“Try some ice cream on it.”
Carrie grinned. “I’ll eat it if it comes back.”
The dessert tray returned without it.
“It was her,” Bek insisted to Marjorie as he came in under a precarious load
of dirty plates. “She ate Carrie’s pear.”
“No way,” Marjorie said tersely. “Must have been a tourist.”
“I worked for him for five days, once. I know it’s her.”
“Only five days?” Carrie echoed, replenishing the dessert tray. “Five days
where?” Then she asked, “Who?”
“Got another pear?” Bek asked.
“No,” Ella said quickly from the grill. “I want the other half of that.”
“She ate the croquettes, too. Even the eggplant ones.”
“Who are you talking about?” Carrie asked again, pulling the soup pots to
back burners to wait for supper.
“Sage Stillwater.”
In the sudden, odd silence, Ella slapped her spatula down on a burger and
pushed it flat until it hissed. For the first time, Carrie saw her angry.