EIGHT
Caroline Baker had reddish-brownish-golden hair, in the color formerly known as “dishwater blonde” or, if someone was feeling particularly generous, “strawberry blonde.” She didn’t like to mess with it, and so she usually twisted it into a knot at the top of her head and secured it with whatever stick-like material was close at hand: quite often a pencil or a chopstick.
Caroline had a raspy voice, full of squeaks and rough spots, and when she sang, she belted out the song as if her life depended on it, which, in a way, it did. Singing was her answer to living in this dark, rainy country, producing roughly the same results for her that meditation or antidepressants did for other people. It did seem, though, that the effects of her singing on said other people were not quite the same as those she experienced herself.
For her, the singing was calming, similar to the feeling one could get from inhaling large quantities of marijuana, which you could now buy locally, at the marijuana store, and pay taxes on, just like liquor. Occasionally she did that, but more often than not she just started singing. Somehow it managed to chase away her blues or fears or lonelies or too-much-of-this-particular-boyfriend, or pretty much any negative emotion that snaked its way up into her brain. “I Am the Walrus” could fix just about anything, and you didn’t have to have actual cash, which they did require at the marijuana store. Caroline was fifty years old, and to survive on this island, she worked whatever job was currently available, except for babysitting. Absolutely a “no” on anything to do with kids. They moved fast and they smelled funny, and she was certain even the marijuana dispensary did not have anything strong enough to allow her to deal with children, no matter how much THC they managed to produce with modern growing methods.
So she filled in at the Drift Inn, whenever the regular waitress or bartender was out of town or if there was some big wedding reception. She fished for salmon with Rusty Grable, whom she called “Rusty Gable” behind his back, since it was obvious that what was upstairs in that man’s head was not in perfect working order. She chopped firewood, painted houses, inside and out, rewired old cabins, and could tape-and-texture a wall better than anyone in Copper Cove. The trouble was that most of those activities had limited lucrative value in the dark damp of winter.
Her favorite work, the thing she came back to again and again, was throwing pots out of stoneware clay, creating wild teapots and vases and coffee cups, pieces that quite often spouted a creature coming up out of the lid or the handle or the base, something half orca and half raven. The tourists loved them.
In the Pacific Northwest in the wintertime, it made more sense to be a glassblower, which required fire to do the work. Glassblowers could at least manage to stay warm. But there’s no accounting for life’s passions, and playing in the mud seemed to be Caroline’s. So she sat at her wheel, her hands wet with clay, the woodstove in the corner of her studio chugging away, trying to keep her from freezing solid while handling this wet, muddy mess. The current piece of pottery had her on a Dusty Springfield kick, and she was belting out the words to “I Only Want to Be With You.”
She had just finished moving the new piece to a shelf to dry when she turned and saw Alexandra Turner standing outside the studio, staring at the pottery pieces in the window. She appeared to be nibbling on a chocolate croissant.
Caroline smiled and strode to the door, yanking it open before she had completely finished the last chorus. “I see you’ve managed to find the back alley of Copper Cove. We’re off the beaten path back here. In the projects.”
Alex looked at the pastry in her hand. “I followed my nose. Sure hadn’t smelled anything like this before now.”
“Yeah, Brewed Awakenings. Our local coffee and pastry guru. You’ve discovered the key to surviving life in the drippy northwest.”
“What’s that?”
“Coffee and baked goods. The whole Seattle area is known for how well we do those two things. We get downright snobbish about it. Probably no one could live here in this weather without coffee and baked goods.” Caroline ran her messy hands on her apron. “Starbucks began in Seattle, you know.”
“Well, it definitely made my morning brighter. Is this you?” Alex asked, indicating the pottery in the window and eyeing the smock Caroline wore, streaked with clay and muck. A wood sign hung over the pieces in the window, painted in bright purple. MUDD PUPPIES.
“Yep, that’s me. Mudd puppy extraordinaire. Come in. I’ll show you around.”
Alex stepped through the door into the room, roughly fourteen feet square.
Caroline pointed to the woodstove. “Over there is the heating system. Kitchen,” she said, pointing to a small three-foot countertop, sporting a tiny sink and an electric teapot. “Work area,” indicating her pottery wheel. “Display,” she finished, holding her arm out to the window that Alex had been admiring. “My bedroom is in the back.” She pointed to a beaded curtain at the back of the room.
Alex smiled. “Nice. It’s got a great feel in here.”
“I can’t believe you’re still here,” Caroline said just as Alex popped in the last bite of her pastry. “That makes what, a week? That you’ve been working for Maggie?”
“Not quite. We had Christmas yesterday, so officially, I have now worked two days.”
“That’s pretty close to a world record, working for Maggie. She runs through interns like some people burn through firewood. Last summer, she had one girl from U Dub who went to lunch on her first day and never came back.”
Alex murmured, “U Dub?”
“University of Washington. No one around here says u double u. Ridiculous waste of syllables.”
Alex smiled weakly. “Well, I’m glad to hear it isn’t just me. I was beginning to think that I had become completely stupid and inept since leaving New Mexico.”
Caroline shook her head. “Naw. That’s pretty much Maggie’s assessment of everyone.”
Alex stood still, looking at the newly thrown pieces on a shelf. Her face fell, her shoulders slumped, like a puppet with slack strings.
“It’s tough, huh? All this gray and rain and darkness?” Caroline started washing her hands. “You got here at the worst time of year, you know. Worst weather. Short days, long nights. Wet, wet, wet. This is the darkest time, around the solstice. That alone is a big enough adjustment, and then add in that you work for Mad Maggie.”
Alex nodded. “Yeah.”
Caroline finished cleaning the mud off her hands and arms and hung her apron on a hook. “When I got here, ten years ago, all I could do was sleep.”
Alex looked at her.
“Dark and rainy. About seven hours of daylight. If that’s what you can call this,” Caroline said, tipping her head toward the gray skies outside the window. “And then my boyfriend, the one I’d moved up here with, that dirty double-crossing no-good son of a sailor, ran off with some woman he met at Strait Up.”
“Strait Up?”
Carolyn lifted her nose and indicated a building out on the main street. “The bar-slash-distillery. After that, I really wanted to sleep.”
Caroline stared out the window a moment, and then sighed and turned to Alex.
“You’ll adjust. Although even the old-timers sleep more in the wintertime. Coffee, baked goods, sleeping. It’s a wonder we don’t all weigh nine hundred pounds by the time summer gets here.”
Alex smiled and wiped her fingers on her jeans.
Caroline looked around, out to the alley, and then leaned in a little and lowered her voice. “I don’t tell this to very many people, but . . .” She leaned back, stretching to make sure there was no one in the back. “Sometimes I go sit with the spinsters.”
“The spinsters?”
“It’s this small group of people who get together and spin or knit. Shoot the bull. Mostly a bunch of old ladies. They call themselves the spinsters.” Caroline looked Alex in the eye. “But don’t tell anybody. I don’t want to ruin my sullied reputation.”
Alex laughed.
Caroline pulled on a jacket and a knit cap. “What do you say? Want to give it a try?”
“Now?” Alex felt prickles of ice crawling on her skin. She began to shake her head. “Ah . . . I don’t know, Caroline. I really don’t feel up to socializing.”
Caroline took her by the elbow and steered Alex toward the door. “It helps, believe me. To get out a little bit, talk to other human beings. I can’t imagine how I would survive without those spinster people. Come on. I’ll introduce you.”
Caroline steered her to a house on the water side of Main Street, near the end of the block. It was three stories high, a beautiful old Victorian. When Alex had walked past it in the daylight, it gave off an aura of sad and neglected. On this gray, rainy afternoon, the house looked different. Lit from within, lamplight fell through the windows and onto the soggy green grass outside. Somehow those lights made it seem more like a refuge from the weather.
“Nice house,” Alex muttered.
“This is the old Hadley place. The city owns it now. Different groups rent it for meetings, and art fairs, and such.” Caroline opened the door.
They went through an arched doorway, framed by elaborate woodwork from another century, and entered a parlor. There was a fire burning in the fireplace, and several people sat in chairs in a small semicircle around it. Windows curved in an arc along one wall, looking out on the gray waters of Haro Strait.
“Hey, everybody,” Caroline called out. “Got a new victim for your little fiber web. Fresh blood.”
A man stood by the fireplace. He was tall and solid, with white hair that stood in short spikes and bright blue glasses that brought out the blue of his eyes.
Caroline started with him. “This is David Hill. Spinster extraordinaire.”
David held out his hand. “She thinks she’s funny. I am not a spinster. I’ve been partnered up for quite some time. But I am a spinner. Nice to meet you . . .” He raised his eyebrows, waiting for a name.
“Alex. Alex Turner.” She shook his hand.
“Younger than our average spinster,” David said. “Demographically, this place is ninety-nine percent retirees. You know the joke about Copper Cove, don’t you?”
Alex shook her head.
“Copper Cove is the place where people come to die,” he continued. “I think the average age here is, like, eighty-seven or something.”
Alex let her breath out slowly. “I don’t think I’m quite ready to die yet.”
“No. Me, neither. Do you spin? Or knit?” he asked, retaking his seat nearby and picking up a pile of knitting, needles carefully rubber-banded together.
Alex shook her head.
“Well, we’ll teach you. You’ll love it,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“The words of a true pusher,” Caroline cautioned. “Careful, Alex. Knitting is a gateway drug. Starts with one pair of knitting needles and one ball of yarn. And before you know it, you have three spinning wheels and two weaving looms, and you can’t find a place to eat your dinner, because every available surface in your house is covered with fiber.”
“Surely you jest, Caroline?” David made a face.
“And then you die, and your next of kin comes in and throws all that yarn in the trash, not realizing that their inheritance is all wrapped up in the thousands of dollars’ worth of hand-dyed merino and cashmere that they think looks like cat barf.”
Alex laughed.
“You laugh now. Just wait. Goodbye to sanity. Pretty soon you’ll be sniffing out every yarn shop in the Pacific Northwest, just like a true addict in need of a fix.”
“She’s right about that.” A dark-haired beauty stopped her spinning wheel and held her hand out to Alex. “Aditi Bannerjee. Nice to meet you, Alex. It is addictive. But also very . . . calming. Kind of like meditation.”
“Aditi is a software engineer for Boeing. She lives in Seattle and only comes up when she has a few days off. We see her three or four times a year.”
“My parents retired here, so I come up when I can. I need this spinning drug, let me tell you. That commute on I-5 is awful. Spinning brings me back to earth. Makes me human again,” Aditi continued. “Very Zen.”
Alex turned to the next person in the circle and inhaled sharply. It was the white-haired woman she had seen a few times now, walking by the cemetery. The one Caroline had described as the village witch.
“This is Emmie Porter,” Caroline continued.
Emmie dipped her head toward Alex. “Hello.” She met Alex’s eye for just a moment, and then bent her head to watch the fibers running smoothly between her thumb and finger and onto the spinning wheel in front of her.
“And this is Grace,” Caroline finished. “Grace Wheeler has a little sheep and alpaca farm just outside of town.”
“Nice to meet you, Alex,” Grace said quietly. Grace was another slender, gray-haired beauty. She sat next to Emmie in the back corner of the room, and the two of them looked like they could be sisters.
Alex took a seat at the edge of the circle and watched all the busy hands around her.
Caroline kept up her running commentary. “David runs the newspaper. The Strait Scoop. Strait as in Haro Strait, not the straight and narrow.”
“Well, if it were the Straight g-h-t Scoop, I couldn’t be the editor, now, could I? Never been straight a day in my life.”
Caroline leaned forward, as if she were divulging a state secret. “Every issue ends with, ‘And that’s the news from Copper Cove. Where all the women are single, all the men are gay or alcoholic, and all the dead still walk the streets.’”
Alex stared at Caroline.
“As if I would ever print that,” David said. “There are one or two married women around here. And I always do my best to print the truth.” He picked up his knitting needles, and then stopped and turned to Caroline, examining her latest hairdo. “Caroline, is that a piece of driftwood in your hair?”
Caroline turned slightly, showing off the messy bun of hair, wrapped through with a small stick. “You like it? It’s not easy to find driftwood that has just the right size and curvature to it.”
“When did you pick that up?”
“This morning.”
“So it’s not yet dry?” David asked.
Caroline gave him a very stern look. “This is the Pacific Northwest. How strict is your definition of dry?”
David exhaled heavily and began knitting. “Well, you smell like a dead sturgeon, so if you’re in the market for a boyfriend this year, I’d lose the hair ornament.”
Caroline made a face. Her eyes dropped to the basket of knitting David held in his lap. “Why don’t you take your mossy green balls and go sit somewhere else?”
“Ahhh!” David gasped dramatically as he leaned away from her. He straightened his shoulders and held the basket a little closer to Caroline’s line of sight. “I’ll have you know that these balls are a blend of silk and kid mohair, hand-dyed in a lovely shade called emerald sea.” He held his head high.
Caroline stared at him, a perfect straight face. “That is far more than I need to know about your balls, Mr. Hill.”
Caroline turned to Alex. “David is a one-man machine at the newspaper—writes and prints and distributes. But he’s also the one who does all the ghost tours around here. The encyclopedia of haunted houses in Copper Cove.”
“Doesn’t seem quite right, does it?” Aditi laughed. “That we should get all our news from the same guy who sells ghost stories for a living.”
In the back corner, Grace spoke softly. “So where are you from, Alex? What brings you to Copper Cove?”
Alex turned to look at Grace. “I’m up here to do a little work for Maggie Edwards.”
Grace raised her eyes from her spinning, but she did not look at Alex. Instead, she directed her gaze to Emmie Porter, sitting next to her. Emmie did not look up; she seemed completely absorbed in her spinning. Grace turned back to Alex, her gaze coming to rest on the faded colors around Alex’s eye.
Alex felt the unspoken que
stion, and she turned away, back toward David Hill. “Is it true? That all the houses are haunted?”
“Well, that would depend on your definition of truth,” David said, throwing a pointed look in Caroline’s direction. “Just like the definition of dry. Never an absolute, in my experience.” He paused a moment. “Truth is . . . fluid. The story changes depending on who is telling it, don’t you think?”
He sat back and began knitting again, his eyes on the wool in his hands. “Two things that keep this town alive, pardon my pun. Orcas and ghosts. Orcas bring in the tourists by the droves in the summer, and scientists, too. And ghosts keep the businesses afloat after the orcas move out. Around Halloween, we get all the paranormal fans. The folks who want to spend the night in a haunted hotel, or stay up all night looking for blips on electromagnetic meters. And when it’s not pouring down rain, I take groups of people on a walking ghost tour of the town, tell them about all the ghostly activity.”
“What kinds of ghostly activity?” Alex asked, her voice quiet, barely audible over the musical sound of the spinning wheels.
David lowered his knitting needles and met her eyes. “Do you believe in ghosts, Alex?”
The dead had never been a part of her life, not until quite recently, and until David asked, she had not ever considered the question. She wasn’t sure she really wanted to find out. “I don’t know. I’ve never really had an encounter, I guess.”
“Well if you stick around here long enough, you will.” David dropped his gaze and began knitting again. “The little bookshop? Moby Dickens? Next to the bakery?”
Alex shook her head. She hadn’t noticed that yet.
“Lots of people ask about the shop cat. The one sleeping in the back room, or sometimes on a shelf, sometimes in one of the chairs. Kids want to know if they can play with it. One lady said she was highly allergic, but that one wasn’t making her sneeze, for some reason.” David sat back and raised his eyebrows dramatically. Then he leaned forward, his voice low. “Because there is no shop cat. Not one that’s alive at this moment, anyway.”
The Music of the Deep: A Novel Page 7
