Kingfisher(8)

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.

“What on earth would Stillwater’s wife be doing here?” Marjorie demanded of Bek.

“Spying,” Ella answered succinctly. They stared at her; she added darkly, “There’s something here Stillwater wants. Maybe a cook, maybe a server. Maybe just a taste of something he hasn’t thought up himself. In a week, you’ll find Carrie’s croquettes on his menu.”

“I really doubt it was her,” Marjorie said soothingly, though she sounded unconvinced. Carrie had never met Stillwater, but she knew enough about him to doubt that the owner of the classiest restaurant in Chimera Bay would ask his wife to eat in a place that offered fried-chicken nibbles for lunch.

Ella, still upset, brooded at the burger, flipped it to reveal the blackened underside, and upended it into the trash.

“I’ve known Stillwater on the prowl before,” she said, reaching for fresh meat. “I’ve seen what he can do when he wants something.”

Carrie felt her arms prickle into goose bumps, despite the heat in the kitchen. “What did he do that time? And why,” she added puzzledly, “didn’t he come himself?”

Ella started to answer, then closed her mouth and shook her head at some unspeakable, unholy tangle of memory. “It’s complicated,” she said grimly, and left it there, in the place where every other inexplicable event at the inn ended up.

Carrie stayed late to help Ella clean the kitchen after supper; they lingered in the weird, soothing rhythms of the dishwashers, eating crab bisque and Ella’s olive and black pepper biscuits at the kitchen counter. It was late when Carrie drove home, but as she climbed out of the truck, she heard Merle still chanting. She couldn’t see him. The only light in the slough came from the moon, and from the little flashlight on her keychain. She paused beside the truck, wondering if she should check on him. His voice sounded hale, if a little hoarse, and he seemed to be moving away from her, deeper into the wood. She went indoors, crawled into bed instead.