Biting the Moon (12 page)

“I'm hungry, aren't you?” said Andi, behind her.

Mary jumped. “Don't come up on people like that. Yes. Let's go to the diner.”

They walked up the short path.

Nine or ten of the townsfolk sat at one end of the counter, leaving the other half free for Mary and Andi, almost as if they were expected to hold court at the opposite end of the counter, the special visitors from somewhere wonderful. They studied their menus—although in a diner you really didn't have to, which was one of the nice things about them—while the residents sitting up at the counter studied them.

The waitress—there was only one—tore herself away from her coffee and conversation with the customers and came along to Mary and Andi, plucking the coffeepot from the warmer as she did. Her look was impassive, as if she were used to seeing pairs of unfamiliar young girls sitting at her counter.

“Coffee, girls?” When they nodded, she nimbly flipped cups into saucers and poured. It was all done in one fluid motion.

Andi said, “I'll have a fried egg and the short stack of pancakes.” She smiled. The waitress gave no sign of recognizing her. The townspeople gave the two of them curious stares, true, but if you lived in a town of only six hundred people you'd probably snag on anything that made for variety. Most of them just went right on eating, some of the men holding their forks in fisted hands and more or less shoveling in that day's special; that was the hot roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes. It looked good, but Mary wanted breakfast, not lunch. She ordered the French toast.

The whole idea of coming here four months after Andi
might
have been here with “Daddy,” and thinking she'd be recognized, was (Mary thought) pretty improbable. Unless, of course, Daddy had done something worth remembering. Winning at high-stakes poker games, maybe?

“Excuse me,” Andi called to the departing back of the waitress. “Excuse me—”

The waitress turned and came back.

“I'm looking for my sister.”

“Say again?” The waitress frowned, perplexed.

“My sister. She was here a few months ago, at least I think so, and I've been trying to find her. She's been—she . . . disappeared.”

The waitress looked sympathetic. “That's too bad, hon. But if it's been awhile, I don't think it's likely anyone'd remember. What's your sister look like?”

“Like me. You'd think we were twins, but we're not.”

The waitress—whose name was Rosie, according to the tag on her shirt—studied Andi's face, as if she might see in its planes and shadows the near image of another girl who'd passed her way once. She was holding the glass coffeepot and shook her head. “Nope. Don't think so, hon.”

This didn't deter Andi. “She was with my uncle. Someone might remember him; he's dark but with really blue eyes. He's a gambler.”

Rosie grinned. “That doesn't set him apart much from most of the people come through here.” Then she said, “I can ask some of these folks, if you like.” Andi nodded and thanked her and the waitress went
down the counter. She put in the order for their breakfasts and then turned and said something to the people at the counter.

Now they had good reason to stare and did. They looked puzzled. No one remembered a girl who answered to that description who looked like the girl sitting down the counter from them.

One of the men, wearing a baseball cap, said, “I was you, I'd go 'cross the street to one of them casinos. Might know somethin' there.” He raised his coffee mug as if saluting them and drank.

That none of them had seen this wayward sister didn't keep them from talking about her, and when one old man asked exactly when she might've been in Cripple Creek, Andi was evasive. It amazed Mary that for all of their gossipy talk about this elusive “sister,” no one appeared to think it queer that Andi would just be looking for her now. Why hadn't she been to Cripple Creek hours or at least days after the sister was missed? But no one did question her. Mary supposed it was probably because they'd fixed on this new subject and they didn't want to question its reliability.

A man they called Jethro left his stool at the far end and came down the counter to take a stool next to them. He brought his coffee with him and drank it while he fingered a cigarette out of a pack that made a bulge in his shirt pocket. He said, “Fella answers to that description come through Cripple Creek, musta been three, four months ago. He cleaned up at poker, I recall that, over at that casino across the street there. Yes ma'am, won hisself a nice little pile o' change.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“Not to my knowledge, there warn't.” Jethro moved a plug of tobacco from one side of his jaw to the other. “This man, he was called Jake. Never did give no second name.” He frowned.

Andi said, “You sound as if you were suspicious of him. Were you suspicious?”

“We-e-ell. . . .” He raised his cap, scratched his head, repositioned the cap. “Maybe I'm just suspicious o' men that's too good-lookin'. Not bein' one my own self.” Jethro smiled and winked. “Now I don't mean to be sayin' nothing against your kin.”

“Uncle Jake's always been the black sheep of the family.” Andi smiled at him. “Did he say where he was from?”

Why didn't any of them think
Andi
was suspicious, asking these questions? wondered Mary.

But Jethro said simply, “No, I don't recall he did.”

“Idaho, maybe?”

Jethro squinted, looked to be thinking hard. “Coulda been. Yeah, I do think that was it.” He snapped his fingers. “That was it, sure.”

Mary ate her pancakes, wondering again why Daddy was leaving a trail so easily traceable, despite the fictitious names. That is, Mary assumed
Jake
was as fictitious as
C. R. Crick.

“Mel Read might know somethin'. . . . What's that ‘Mel' stand for?” Jethro called down the counter. “Mel ain't usually a woman's name.”

“Melissa, prob'ly.”

“No, it ain't neither; it's Priscilla,” the woman who'd been sitting next to Jethro said. She had a strange, disoriented look, probably caused by her wall-eye.

“Ain't no
M
in Priscilla.”

“Y'r both wrong, it's Melody,” said the man in the baseball cap turned backward.

“Melody? Melody? Well, why don't she call herself that?”

“Don't blame it on me what she calls herself. But it's Melody Read, that's what it is.”

They went on like this for some minutes, and Mary was just as glad she didn't live in Cripple Creek when a hot topic of conversation was what name Mel could be a nickname for. At least they agreed she worked at the Silver Spur.

“But she won't be there this time o' day,” Jethro told them.

And asking where she lived only set off another flurry of contradictions. Andi and Mary paid their bill and left while they were still arguing.

Outside the diner, while Andi was putting the maps back on the front seat, Mary stopped and stared at nothing. “Andi.” Andi turned to look at her. “Jethro, he pronounced creek
crick:
Cripple Crick.”

Andi frowned. Then her face seemed to clear like the moon coming out from behind a cloud. They both said it at once:

“
C. R. Crick!
”

And they both started laughing, helplessly leaning against each other.

Her name was neither Melody nor Melissa nor Priscilla. Mel Read told them her name was just Mel, though she couldn't think why her parents would have named her that. She didn't like it, it sounded like a man's name, but she hadn't worked up enough energy to go to a lawyer and get it changed.

She was wearing a dark dress, cinched in the middle with a wide belt of the same material. Mary bet Mel was really proud of her small waist, but the pinched waist didn't do much for her general shape, which looked like a Coke bottle. Mel was sitting at her table—the blackjack table—where she seemed to be taking a busman's holiday, fiddling with a deck of cards, fanning them out, gathering them in. Her hands were swift and dexterous.

Despite a job that must have put her in constant contact with the public, Mel seemed to be starved for company because she invited them to sit down and have a cup of coffee. “Unless you want a drink?”

Mary was secretly pleased by this offer as they both refused it. No, they didn't drink, Andi had said. Mary didn't think she had to go into any reasons for refusing.

“So what can I do for you girls?”

The accent sounded more Appalachian than western.
Can
and
for
came out
kin
and
fer,
which Mary guessed was pretty much the way they'd been talking in the diner. Like Jethro had said
crick
for
creek.
It wasn't like the accents she was used to. People at home talked with an upward tilt on the ends of sentences, as if New Mexicans were forever asking questions. Maybe they were.

“It's about my uncle, Uncle Jake?”

Mel riffled her deck of cards and raised her eyebrows, so well plucked they looked painted. “Should I know him? You're saying he was at the blackjack table? Well, a lot of guys come through here. Be hard trying to remember all of 'em.” She was slapping down cards for what looked like a solitaire layout. “Unless they won big.”

“He was here in January. He's about medium height, dark hair and blue eyes.
Very
blue. Glittery blue. And he did win big—I think. At least that's what I heard from—friends of his.”

Andi didn't want to say she'd just heard this over at the diner, Mary supposed.

Mel had been chewing gum in a ladylike way, and now she stopped, her eyes darting around the casino somewhat in the way her fingers flicked cards from the deck. “Now I remember, I certainly do.” She laughed. “It doesn't happen much someone beats the dealer”—she aimed a thumb at her chest—“but he sure did. Several hundred, if I remember right.” She slapped a red jack on a black queen and didn't say anything for a while. Then she looked at Andi and said, in a not unfriendly tone, “I was wondering . . . well, never mind. For he sure was slick.” She shook her head a little, and her tone was almost admiring. She picked up the cards again, looking from Andi to Mary, dealt out hands.

Her eyes were a smoky green. Mel wasn't exactly pretty, but interesting-looking, which was better than pretty, Mary thought. Better still to be both, like Andi. Mary made a quick study of herself in one of the mirrored pillars. Did she look interesting? Yes, but probably because she was wearing this black hat. It was her favorite: a curled-brim cowboy hat, its narrow leather strap held together near her neck with a silver wolf's head like a bolo tie. Dressed all in black—black cords, black sateen shirt, and the hat—she looked a little menacing. Mary struck a pose to bring out more of the menace. She slouched more in her chair, ran her fingers around the front of the furled black felt. She'd missed some of what Andi had been saying, but now she heard:

“. . . he cheats.”

Mel chuckled. “That don't exactly surprise me, dear.”

It surprised Mary, who immediately sat up straight.

“But then,” Andi went on, “I guess you do too.”

Mel's eyes snapped up and Mary saw for an instant hard pinpoints of light in the pupils like beacons through fog. But the light dissolved in a flash; Mel threw her head back and laughed, laughed hard. “Whew!” she said, dabbing at her teary eyes with a tissue and continuing to lay out cards. “Now, what
ever
makes you think that?”

“All these mirrors, for one thing.”

Mel looked around over her shoulder as if she were surprised to see a pillar of mirror at her back. Since a similar pillar stood behind Mary and Andi, the effect was strange, a seemingly endless duplication of images both front and back. Were people really so stupid as to sit in front of a mirror?

Andi went on: “You've got a straight flush there. Clubs.”

“Well,
I'm
the dealer, hon, so it wouldn't be very clever to show my hand.”

“Or for anyone else. Look, I don't care how it works. I'm just worried about Uncle Jake. He loves to gamble. He's what's called a compulsive gambler—”

“Yeah, well, he wouldn't be the first we got in here.”

“—and he goes off for weeks, months even, at a time. It just worries my mom sick. She's his sister.”

“Shouldn't your mom be worrying more about you being in school?”

The question struck Mary as laughable. It came out of that smug adult world of straight flushes. That a couple of young girls were out looking for a gambler didn't even seem to register with Mel as infinitely odder than why they weren't in school.

“We graduated,” said Andi, without missing a beat.

Mary wanted to hug her for the
we,
but she kept a straight face and leveled what she hoped was a chilly look at Mel, who merely shrugged off their schooling.

“The
point
,” said Andi, “is we're looking for our uncle.”

“After all this time? Been months.”

“I told you, that's not unusual. Once he was gone for a year.”

Mel was dealing hands again to herself and her invisible opponents. She was really good at this; she snapped and sailed each card smoothly home. Great wrist action, thought Mary.

“Well, dear, I just don't see how I can help you.”

Andi leaned over the green baize toward her. “Just try and concentrate on him sitting here. If you remember him, you must remember at least something of what he said. You've got a great memory.”

Mel flipped another card to the hand of the absent player beside her and raised her eyebrows. “How would you know?”