Kingfisher(20)

Zed himself appeared finally, walking carefully, tentatively through the old parlor, around piles of clothes, scattered papers, yawning chests and cases, their contents strewn across the floorboards like tidal debris after a tempest.

She blinked at it, startled at the scale of her devastation.

“He won’t let me talk to him,” she explained tightly. “He won’t let me ask. So I’m looking for clues.”

“Find anything?” he inquired with caution.

“No.”

He thought a moment. “Maybe I could ask? He talks to me now and then. I think he likes me. I’ll buy the wolf a beer and tell him you’re—ah—worried?”

She sighed. “Tell him I miss him, and I don’t understand a word he’s not saying.” She stared at the hillock of photos she had pulled out of the box, saw herself, gap-toothed and curly-haired, laughing up at her father. “I’m missing something,” she said slowly, frowning at the past.

“What?”

“Something. I’m not seeing it. Something’s under my nose . . .” She looked up at Zed again, saw his patient, mystified expression. She got to her feet finally. “Do you want some coffee? I think I made some. Maybe I didn’t.”

He smiled, shook his head. “I can help you with this later. If you can tell me what you’re looking for. I’m working at the co-op this morning. You?”

“Prep and lunch.”

“I’ll come to the Kingfisher after work; maybe I’ll run into Merle.”

“Good luck with that,” she said grimly.

She took a question along with Hal Fisher’s daily note to the one other person she knew who could read minds, and whose behavior was also generally incomprehensible.

“My father turned into a wolf a couple of nights ago and howled at me,” she told Lilith as she handed over the note. “Did you know he could do that?”

Lilith stood stock-still in front of her writing desk, staring at Carrie through the half lenses balanced on the end of her nose.

“Why did he do that?” she asked slowly. “What did you say to him? You’re not leaving us, are you?”

Carrie swallowed what felt like a spoonful of dust. “You did know,” she whispered.

Lilith looked at the envelope in her hand, fanned her face with it. “Well. Not that exactly. I’ve never seen him do that. But—”

“But you’re not surprised.” Her voice shook. “What exactly is he?”

“Ask him.”

Carrie flung up her hands. “How? He won’t let me. Nobody answers questions around here! Nobody!”

Lilith tried; Carrie saw the impulse in her eyes. But when she opened her mouth, nothing came out. She closed her mouth, and a floodtide of pain, sorrow, hopelessness broke across her face, deepening the fine lines on it and leaving a sheen of unshed tears in her eyes.

Carrie put the back of her hand against her mouth, her own eyes filling. “I’m sorry,” she breathed, without knowing for what. “I’m sorry.”

“Carrie.” Lilith paused, swallowed. “Whatever you said—whatever you did—to make Merle shape the wolf, listen to him. Listen to that howling. He’s trying—”

“I know. I know. But I don’t know why.” She blinked back tears, added, her voice a harsh husk of itself, “I don’t understand wolf.”

“You understand fear. You understand beware.”

“But of what?” she asked helplessly, and was unsurprised when Lilith did not answer.

She saw Zed alone at the bar when she went through the swinging doors. She caught a glimpse of Merle later, when she was about to leave, alone again in the late-afternoon crowd, his pale eyes intent, unblinking, on her face. She blinked, surprised, and he was gone again, like shadow melting into shadow.

He was talking to her, she realized then; he had her attention; he was telling her something.

What?

He didn’t have much, she thought, for a man who had lived in the same house at least since Carrie was born. Where were the elegant suits he had worn in the old photographs of the Kingfisher Inn during its shining years? Where were the silk ties, the expensive shoes? Locked away somewhere in the past, she guessed, in the ghost of the old inn. What he bothered to keep in drawers was frayed, worn. There was no word to express the state of his socks. She did find a few things her mother had given him in the years when she still liked him: beads for his hair, a gold earring, a piece of butter-colored amber on a leather tie.

All signs of his previous life he had left elsewhere; only the Merle that Carrie thought she knew lived in that house with her.

But I don’t really know you at all, she told him, and kept looking.

She found the photo in a cardboard box of papers shoved into a corner of his bedroom closet. It was buried under old check stubs and statements from the years when he actually kept a bank account, tax forms from when he actually had jobs, outdated receipts that should have been tossed long ago. A handful of photos lay at the bottom: herself as a toddler on Merle’s shoulders, her parents in their wedding finery, her mother, very young, with long, wild hair and feathers hanging from her earlobes; she was standing beside one of the winding tidal streams, lifting her skirt above her muddy boots as she watched the water.

The final photo startled her: Hal Fisher and Merle in all their glory, both in tuxes beneath the enormous chandelier with every light in it ablaze, and the reception room around them filled with women in heels and dark lipstick, men in suits and ties with jeweled pins. Hal and Merle were both smiling. It might have been opening night at the Kingfisher Inn as they welcomed the first guests. Behind them, a chef stood at the open doors of the huge dining hall, all its tables bright with cutlery, glassware, candles, and vases full of roses from the old gardens. The chef wore an old-fashioned cream-puff hat, black stovepipe pants; he, too, was smiling. Carrie, studying his smile, felt her skin constrict. She peered more closely at him. The warm, wide-set eyes, the Greek athlete’s profile looked oddly, disturbingly familiar.