Kingfisher(14)
“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.
Carrie sank wearily onto a raddled velveteen couch left over from the gilded age and parked now against the wall near the restaurant doors. Tye gave her a smile and poured her the cold, dark, molasses-edged beer she liked. In the sprawling circle of men, she saw Gabe’s sleek, trimmed head turn. He got up a moment later, took the beer from Tye, and brought it to Carrie.
“Here you are,” he said, handing it to her, and sat, while his eyes went back to the company he had left. “How’d it go tonight?”
“Thanks,” she said, yawning. “I had to do some serving; Marjorie missed lunch. I made thirty-six dollars in tips. That’s going into the creel.”
He grunted, shifting as though a broken spring under the ancient velveteen had bit him. He didn’t like the idea of the creel full of Carrie’s escape money any more than Carrie liked the idea of accidentally falling in love with him and spending the rest of her life in Chimera Bay. So they kept their distance from one another, though Carrie sensed sometimes that he was simply waiting for her to come to her senses and realize where she belonged.
She added, to take his mind off the creel, “Ella rolled cheese biscuits for dinner. So I took the dough scraps, wrapped them around chopped green apple and boiled shrimp with some grated ginger and a spritz of lemon juice, and baked them.”
“Weird.”
“They all got eaten. Did my dad come in tonight?”
“I’m not sure. I got here late. You can ask; they’re almost done.”
“How can you tell? What do you talk about?”
He shrugged. “What comes up,” he said finally, “out of the deep.”
She looked at him silently; his eyes, back on the group now, were intent and burning with the mystery that Hal Fisher carried around with him. “Fish stories,” she said, and his eyes came back to her, earnest, unsmiling.
“Sort of. Not exactly, but in a way.”
She swallowed more beer, added restively, tired of hints, riddles without answers, “If you see my father, will you tell him I’m looking for him? I’m going home. It’s been a long day.”