Kingfisher(55)

“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.”

“How?”

She looked at him silently, studying the sweet, caramel brown of his eyes, while she contemplated mysteries going back farther than she did, back under the magnificent chandelier in the days when every prism flamed with light. “Stillwater lies even with his cooking; my father refuses to tell the truth. Where? Where does that story begin?” She turned her head, held Zed’s eyes. “I will fry fish for Ella,” she told him fiercely. “I will eat Stillwater’s not-cooking, I will learn wolf and howl back at my father if that’s the only way I can talk to him. I want to understand this story if that’s the last thing I do. If nobody’s talking, I’ll find a new way of listening. If nobody’s talking, then nobody can say no.”

She went to work for Todd Stillwater during her hours off at the Kingfisher: lunches on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and dinner on Wednesdays. She did not so much as whisper to a soup pot or tell a fork in Ella’s kitchen that she was cooking for Stillwater. She kept the word “water” out of her head when she took Hal’s daily note up to Lilith. She avoided even looking out the window at the bay. Chowder, she thought. Butter, cream, clams. Onion cheddar biscuits. Endless sizzling fries. The sudden flick of storm-green glances Lilith sent her way hinted that she suspected something. But for once in her life, Carrie was doing the not-talking, as though her life depended on it. She babbled randomly instead, about Zed, about the aging pickup truck, about the old fruit trees and vines the early farmers had left behind still alive and blossoming again. When Lilith pressed her about Merle, she drew upon old memories: he had left her a seashell, laundry, a wild lily in a beer bottle; she had heard him singing deep in the woods at midnight.

Except when she glimpsed him brooding at her in the Kingfisher bar, she had no idea what he was doing, or thinking, or where, or in what shape, he slept. He knew what she had done. She knew he knew. Neither one of them was talking.

The first of the questing knights came at the beginning of a Friday Nite Fish Fry. Carrie walked out of the kitchen holding the huge cauldron full of steaming oyster stew with tiny crackers buttered and broiled to a crisp floating like gold coins on top of it. She heard their voices break the traditional silence, the worship of smells, before she saw them. She glanced across the room toward the sound, found a cluster of noisy, muscular, handsome men, all of them dressed in black. They were laughing, she realized incredulously; they were joking about the peculiar backwater ceremony going on in the dilapidated old inn.

Hal did not waste a glance at them. He simply stopped, leaning on his staff, gazing ahead. The line behind him, Father Kirk with the bloodstained gaff, Merle carrying the salmon on the gold platter, Carrie, all stopped. The diners gathered for supper stood silently in their places, waiting. Through the swinging doors that Curt Sloan and his son Gabe held open, Carrie heard not a whisper, a step, a clatter from inside the kitchen.

The laughter thinned, died away. Carrie recognized the uniforms then, the little heraldic shields embroidered on their jackets. One of the young men looked at Tye, behind the bar.

Tye said before the knight could speak, “Bar’s closed.”

“Private party,” another man murmured, and asked Tye, “Could you tell us—”

“Try Stillwater’s,” Tye said without compunction, and stood unblinking, hands flat on the bar, until the young men finally drifted toward the door and out.