A handsome young waiter pushed through the crowd. “Hey, Jayce. Can I get you anything?”
Her eyes slanted away, coy. “Maybe.” She cocked her finger, and he drew closer. “Who works here lunches on Wednesdays?”
“Me. Sal. Why?”
She glanced at me.
“Do you remember Mike Gallin, the bookstore owner, having lunch here with Steve Woodley?” I asked.
“The councilman?” he shook his head. “I didn’t serve them. Want me to ask Sal?”
“Yes, please,” Jayce said.
Dazed, he wandered off.
“That was a little mean,” I said.
“Just some harmless flirting.”
“I meant the magic.”
“What’s the harm?” Her expression sobered, and she leaned toward me. “He’s one of Toeller’s boy toys.”
“Really?” I blinked and looked toward his departing back. But he’d already vanished into the crowd. Toeller liked younger men. Lots of younger men, though she always kept them on the right side of legal.
“I’ve seen them here together and at other places too.”
I twisted my necklace, adjusting my Saint Michael’s charm. “Can we trust him?”
“To tell us if Mike and Steve were here for lunch? I think so.”
The waiter returned with a harried looking waitress, Sal. Her smile was weary, but I knew her from the bookstore. Cookbooks and feng shui. A tattoo of an om symbol decorated the inside of one wrist.
“Hi, Lenore,” she said. “You wanted to know about the Wednesday before last?”
“Was Mike here with anyone?”
She shook her head. “No. It was a quiet lunch. I would have remembered him.” Lightly, she touched my arm. “I’m truly sorry about what happened.”
“Thanks.”
Someone shouted for beer, and she and the other waiter hurried off.
Brayden returned and set two mugs of beer on the table. “It’s a disaster at the bar. I don’t want to face that again anytime soon.”
I rose. “You can have your chair back.”
A man bumped into me, his energy aggressive, his stained t-shirt reeking of cigarettes. My neck corded.
“Please, Lenore,” Brayden said, “stay.”
If I didn’t get out soon, I’d scream. “It’s okay, I was leaving anyway. Thanks, Jayce.”
She frowned. “Sure.”
I pressed through the crowd, emerging onto the sidewalk and gasping in the cool night air. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees since I’d gone inside, the way it can in the mountains.
I hurried to the next restaurant on my list. The owner said he hadn’t seen Mike in there for weeks. The next restaurant was also a bust. I found people who’d worked there that Wednesday, but no one remembered Mike.
The last restaurant on my list, Alchemy, was the farthest from the bookstore and the least likely place for Mike to go to. But if he’d come here, that might explain why he’d returned late from lunch.
I checked my watch. It was after nine o’clock, and Alchemy’s patio tables were emptying.
I walked inside the Spanish-tiled entry. The restaurant was chic, modern, with a tiled fireplace inside and one on the patio.
The hostess, Jenny, looked up from her stand and smiled. “Hi, Lenore. Can I help you?”
“Mike might have been here two Wednesdays ago, the day before he died. I think he might have left a book here,” I lied.
She shook her head. “You can check the lost and found, but I don’t remember seeing a book inside it.”
“Actually, I’m not even sure if Mike was here that day.”
“He was,” she said. “I sat him and Steve Woodley at that table over there.” She nodded to an empty table by the bar. A ceiling fan spiraled above it.
“You remember them?” I asked, giddy with my success.
“How could I forget? He died the next day. I’m so sorry for your loss, Lenore. Have you heard anything about the funeral?”
“Not yet.” Unable to meet her gaze, I stared at my hands. “Do you remember anything about that lunch? Was he in a good mood? Bad mood?”
“They seemed okay when they arrived,” she said, her voice uncertain.
“But when they left?”
“I think they’d been arguing. I couldn’t really hear them. They kept their voices low, but they were intense, you know?”
“Who was their waiter?” I asked.
“Jim.” She motioned to a tall, wiry waiter in black slacks and a white shirt leaning on the bar.
“Is it okay if I...?” I canted my head toward the bar.
“Sure. And let me know when you hear about the funeral, will you?”
“I will, thanks.” I made my way through the tables to the marble-topped bar.
Jim drummed his long fingers on it, watching the bartender mix a drink.
“Hi, Jim.”
He turned and smiled, his shock of dark hair falling across his right eye. “Lenore. How’s it going?”
“It’s going. I heard you waited on Mike and Steve Woodley two Wednesdays ago, the day before Mike died.”
His mouth pulled down. “Yeah, my condolences. Mike was a good guy.”
“I’m trying to retrace his steps that day,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask why.
He didn’t. “Oh?”
“Did anything unusual happen while they were here?”
“Unusual?” He tossed his head. His hair shifted, then fell back into place over his eye. “They seemed kind of tense, and that was weird.”
My pulse quickened. “Tense how?”
“They seemed to be arguing, but I was trying not to listen.”
“Did you hear anything?” I asked, leaning closer.
“Woodley was saying something about the importance of maintaining the status quo. Mike didn’t seem to like it.”
“That’s it?” I asked, disappointed. That could have been about anything. “Anything else?”
“Sorry. Why do you ask?”
“I guess I just want to know what happened to him. There’s a book that’s missing,” I said, spinning out the lie, though I wasn’t sure why I bothered. “I thought maybe it had landed here.”
“I didn’t find anything at his table. If I had, I would have returned it.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Pensive, I wandered outside. The same ghost horse and carriage rattled down the street. Oblivious, a tourist couple walked into its path. The carriage ran through them, and the woman shivered. Her companion draped his sports coat over her shoulders.
I was as oblivious as the tourist couple, and my so-called investigation had left me with more questions than answers.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sunday morning, a fire burned at the top of the valley. I awoke, my eyes dry and hot. The people of Doyle took mental inventories. Which of their precious belongings could they throw into their cars should the wind shift, and the fire turn towards our town?
By the afternoon, the acrid scent of burning pine and brush had thickened. From my perch behind the cash register, I glanced up from my mystery novel and looked out the bookshop window.
An SUV loaded with kayaks drove past. The fire was driving the wiser tourists away. But I couldn’t leave, and so I took shallow breaths, tasting smoke and burnt sap and anxiety.
Two people wandered the bookstore’s aisles, one a regular, one a tourist. By my elbow, the radio crackled. We all had our radios on, waiting for word on the blaze. But I suspected Toeller would keep Doyle safe. No fire had touched Doyle yet.
On impulse, I picked up the phone and called Karin’s boyfriend, Nick.
“Hey, Lenore,” his voice rumbled, warm, over the line. “What’s up? Has the wind shifted?”
I smiled. Lenore had picked a good one with Nick. “No. We haven’t gotten an evacuation order. You?”
“Nothing here, but I’ve got my go-bag packed.”
“Quick question. Have you been special ordering books from Mike
?”
There was a pause. “Yeah. I thought learning more about local history could help with our problem.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?” Maybe I was overreacting, but had he been trying to hide something?
“You were never around when I called. He was great - even found some books that are out of circulation.”
“Did you find anything worthwhile?” But he couldn’t have. If he had, Karin would have told us. But I was desperate for good news.
“We’re not sure. Look, I’m not far from you. I was just headed into town to check on Karin. Why don’t I stop by the bookshop, and we can talk?”
My two customers were still pondering their reading choices, and I didn’t envision a wild surge of shoppers. “Sure. Stop by.”
“See you soon.” He hung up.
I tidied the counter, checked email, glanced at the door, the clock, rubbed my stinging eyes. My regular bought a sci-fi novel. The tourist wandered out.
Finally, Nick strode into the bookstore. Tall, tanned and athletic, his blue t-shirt stretched across his muscular chest. He wore khaki slacks and hiking boots, and I wondered if they were his evacuation clothes, because I knew he wasn’t hiking today.
Catching sight of me behind the counter, he smiled broadly. “Hi, Lenore.”
“Nick.” I hurried around the counter and gave him a quick hug.
“How are you doing?”
“Good.” I studied him. “Except for the secrets Mike kept from me. I didn’t know he was special ordering books for you.”
“I didn’t know that was a secret.”
“What did you learn?”
In answer, he pulled a small, leather-bound notebook from his pocket and handed it to me. “This is a list of all the Doyle fairy references Karin and I’ve found and their citations.”
I flipped through the first five pages. Everything after that was blank. I lowered my head. “No offense, but it doesn’t look like much.”
“Take your time and read through it,” he said. “I’ll browse the history section.” He strode to the military history shelf and studied the book spines.
The first two pages of the notebook were covered in fairy references – mainly mentions of the fairy spring in the woods. But Nick had captured references to other nearby springs reputed to have healing waters. I gasped.
He looked up. “So you found it.”
“The Bell and Thistle pub used to be over a spring?”
He tapped a hardback on the Battle of Dunkirk against his chest. “A spring with healing waters. They used the water in the beer they brewed. And then the spring dried up. When I couldn’t find anything on the fairy, I decided to start researching the spring itself. There are springs all over the world reputed to have healing properties. Maybe there’s something to drinking fresh spring water. But I wonder if the rumors are true here. Something has to explain the way you people look.”
I ignored the “you people.” “Why didn’t I know this? It could explain why the pub was taken. If the spring it was built over belonged to the fairy...” I frowned. If it had belonged to the fairy, why had she waited nearly a century to remove the pub?
Nick strolled to the counter. “You’re thinking the bar itself should have been offensive to her, so why did she wait so long? Normally, when humans interfere with something sacred to the fae – a tree, a spring – trouble follows.” His face creased, and I knew he was thinking about his missing sister, Emily. He cleared his throat. “But it didn’t in this case.”
“No,” I said slowly. “Up until its disappearance, I never heard of any problems at the pub. Do you know when it was built?”
“In the eighteen nineties.”
“So sometime after the doctor came to Doyle. Maybe she didn’t mind the pub. Maybe she wanted the spring covered.”
“Why would she?” He braced his sun-weathered hand on the counter.
“Well, she didn’t lose access to the waters, did she? They were using it to make beer, you said.”
“All through Prohibition, if the rumors are true. But she couldn’t use it as a portal anymore.”
I nodded. “If it ever was a gateway.” We’d assumed the fairy spring in the woods was a door to her true home in the other world. “The well,” I muttered.
“You mean the one beneath the wellhouse?” Nick nodded. “That was believed to have healing spring waters too. But it dried up in the nineteen fifties.”
“When was it covered?”
“In the sixties.” He reshelved the hardback.
“But building a well would have affected it too. Would it have damaged the spring, or made it easier for her to access?”
He cocked his head. “You’re asking the wrong guy.”
I smiled. “You were one of the first to figure out there was magic affecting Doyle. I can’t imagine a better person to talk to.”
He ran his hand over the top of his black hair, ruffling it. “Yeah. Well. Necessity is the mother of invention. People have returned from the forest. I have to believe…” He trailed off and looked out the front window.
I coughed. The smoke was seeping into my throat and lungs now. “Were there any more springs or wells you found associated with healing waters?”
He shook his head. “No. Just those three.”
“And two were covered, essentially blocked.” I straightened, my head spinning. Was it possible? “And she didn’t mind. In fact, she’s been fighting to preserve the wellhouse. She wanted those two springs covered.”
“What are you thinking?”
“If we’re right, and the springs are portals–”
“Which is typical in the mythology”
“What if she’s been keeping something out of our world?”
We stared at each other.
“The Rose Rabbit,” we said in unison.
“We’re making some big assumptions,” Nick said quickly. “This is all guesswork. And we don’t even know what this Rose Rabbit character is.”
“But if she’s keeping him out, then they’re not allies.” I paced behind the counter, and spoke more rapidly. “They’re enemies.”
“And the enemy of my enemy might be my friend.”
“Or not,” I said. “When the Bell and Thistle vanished, it left its spring uncovered.” Once the law enforcement teams had left, I’d returned to that site over and over, studying it, trying to feel its magic. All I’d gotten for my pains were some deep meditation sessions and thistles in my butt. It was hard to believe that barren crater had once been a live spring. “But I’ve been seeing him.”
“Seeing who?”
“A man with a scarred face, but he seems to... shine. He’s got to be the Rose Rabbit.”
“You can’t be sure,” he warned. “These are guesses.”
My jaw tightened. “I can. I know it. And the ghost at the hotel described the Rabbit perfectly.”
“You think this Rose Rabbit made the pub and all those people disappear?”
“I don’t know. If the doctor’s worked so hard to keep those two springs covered, it doesn’t make sense that she’d remove an entire pub from one of them.” My insides twisted. I’d hoped the Rose Rabbit would be an ally. But if he’d made the pub vanish, then he was as bad as the doctor. Maybe worse.
“Dammit,” he said, “I should have shown you this sooner.”
“Does Karin know?”
He made a wry face. “She does, but I think she’s got baby brain. And please don’t tell her I said that.”
One corner of my lips curled. “That’s what she’s been telling me.” Doctors still argued whether the pregnancy-induced mental fog was real. But if logical Karin hadn’t picked up this connection... Or maybe the problem was that she was too logical to see it. I’d just gone off on several intuitive leaps. “We need to talk to Jayce and Karin together. We may be right about the springs, but I don’t see how it helps us. Did Mike know you were interested in the fairy legends?”
An odd look crossed Nick’s face. “I
don’t think so.”
“Don’t think?” I asked sharply. “But you’re not sure?”
“I told him I was interested in anything historical on Doyle, including legends. But there was one night... You weren’t here. The bookstore was nearly empty. He said something to me that seemed odd.”
“What?”
“He said there was more to Doyle than met the eye, and I needed to take care. Then he said something, a quote, I think. ‘...If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes into you.’ Mike laughed it off and told me not to get obsessed with the past, but there was something in his eye that told me he was holding back. And then it was gone, and I thought I’d imagined it.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “It’s from Nietsche. And that isn’t the whole quote.”
“What’s the rest?”
“‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he become a monster... If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’”
He angled his head. “That’s… interesting.”
Interesting? It was terrifying. Mike may have known what we were up against. Had that knowledge gotten him killed?
*****
At six o’clock, I locked the bookstore and flipped the sign in the door to CLOSED. Outside the window, the sunset flared in bands of fuchsia and blood orange and violent purple, the colors intensified by the smoke. How could something so destructive create so much beauty?
In the storeroom, I had to count the cash three times before the number came out right.
My thoughts tangled. Finding out if there were more than two editions of The Folk and Fairy Tales of America was proving harder than I’d thought. I couldn’t even find mention of one edition. But that book had to exist, because Mike had listed it in his ledger.
What had Mike known? Had he been warning Nick off from looking too closely into Doyle’s magic spell? Mike’s interest in occult books now took on a new light. If he’d known about the unseelie who ran Doyle, had he been gathering information on her as well? Did others know the truth?
I pushed the vacuum around the front room, its mindless roar the perfect counterpoint for my useless theories.
Finally, I turned out the lights and left, locking the front door. The sky had darkened to the color of a bruise. The bookstore’s exterior light had come on automatically and attracted a crowd of insects. They buzzed and fluttered and pinged off the glass lampshade.
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