Lake Silence

CHAPTER 14

Vicki

Sunsday, Juin 13

After receiving a call from Officer Grimshaw, Ilya Sanguinati gave me a ride to the Pizza Shack so that I could pick up dinner. He wouldn’t explain why he had ordered a large Meat Eater’s pizza with double meat as well as the mushroom and black olives pizza I had ordered for myself. Well, I’d be sharing it with Aggie if she decided to join me for cop and crime night on TV.

Then I met my new employee-lodgers, Conan Beargard and Robert “call me Cougar” Panthera, and I understood why I was bringing home what you could call the Carnivore’s Special pizza, which had so much meat you couldn’t tell there was sauce, cheese, or a crust underneath.

I looked at Conan and Cougar and hoped it was meaty enough that they wouldn’t be looking to nibble anything else. I rather liked having ten toes, not to mention a full set of fingers.

Aggie arrived before I could set out plates at the round kitchen table that seated four but could squeeze in five or six. She was a little wary of “the boys,” but that wore off in a hurry. My wariness didn’t wear off as fast, but I think I was entitled to a few moments of anxiety. After all, I, the dumpy human, was sitting with a Bear, a Cougar, and a vampire—because Ilya Sanguinati stayed and had a piece of pizza with the rest of us. I wasn’t sure if he liked it or just didn’t want to make it obvious that he had other dining preferences. Or maybe he understood that having a known predator sitting at the table would help me get acquainted with “the boys,” who were chowing down on the Carnivore’s Special.

While we bonded over pizza, I learned that Conan had settled into one of The Jumble’s cabins near Mill Creek because the creek provided good fishing, and he liked eating fish. Except for making patchwork repairs on the roofs and replacing a couple of broken windows in order to prevent any further weather damage to those cabins, I hadn’t done any renovating. By human standards, those cabins were still “primitive,” since anyone staying in them had to go to a separate building for toilets and showers. But Conan seemed to think the cabin was very “human,” although the bed puzzled him and he couldn’t figure out how to sleep on it, so he’d been sleeping on the floor in his furry form.

I explained that the mattresses had rotted and been removed, and that I would purchase a new box spring and mattress, as well as linens and blankets. Cougar was also in one of the primitive cabins, but he’d chosen one from the second set of cabins that were close to the lake. He, too, had been puzzled by the bed frame but hadn’t given it much thought.

As we talked, I had the impression that Aggie had more of what they called a human-centric education than the boys, who made me think of young men in earlier times of human history who would give up formal education before finishing grade school in order to go to work. I didn’t get the impression that Conan and Cougar wanted to get too humanized, but they wanted something enough to settle into two of the cabins and do some work in lieu of rent.

I put away what was left of the vegetable pizza. After confirming what time Ilya would return in the morning to take me to the bank, I said good night to my attorney and settled in to watch cop and crime shows with my new friends.

The boys had never seen television, so I had to explain that commercials weren’t some weird schism in the story, that they were like their own little stories about something humans were selling and wanted other humans to buy. When Aggie said it was all right to talk during commercials because no one wanted to listen to them anyway, that started a whole round of questions about why the TV police did or didn’t do the same things the police who had been sniffing around The Jumble had done. Which made me wonder if I should warn Officer Grimshaw about how carefully he was watched when he came around to investigate.

There were growls when the cops missed a clue and snarls when the bad humans did something sneaky—and more than a few eye rolls over human behavior in general. At one point, Aggie shouted at a woman who approached a villain who was pretending to be hurt. “It’s a trick! There’s no blood! Can’t you smell that there’s no blood?”

During commercials I tried to explain about human senses without sounding too apologetic for the inadequacies of my species. I ended up feeling that all I’d managed to do was convince my new friends that fish were smarter than humans even if humans did have those nifty opposable thumbs.

The other thing I realized by the end of the evening was that humans and the Others did have one thing in common—we both had a love for, and fascination with, stories. I learned that every form of terra indigene had its own teaching stories as well as stories that were the repository of their history and connection to the world. And they all had stories that were told for the fun of it.

After the last show of the evening, the boys and Aggie went to their own cabins, and I triple-checked the porch door to make sure it was locked. Ilya had said one of the detectives had opened the door but hadn’t gone inside. As I did my walk around the rest of the house, I stopped in the library and looked at the books I’d been buying from Lettuce Reed. I hadn’t purchased anything I didn’t want to read. With only one lodger, what was the point, especially since Aggie seemed as enthusiastic about reading thrillers as I was? But now I looked at the books I had purchased and considered them with an eye to reading level. I was pretty sure Conan and Cougar would like the story lines in the thrillers. I was equally sure their reading skills weren’t yet a match for those books, and making a trip to the story place had sounded like one of the big reasons those two had decided to interact with humans at all.

If Ilya Sanguinati was willing to stick around the village for a bit before taking me home tomorrow, I needed to talk to Julian Farrow about some appropriate books before I talked to the boys about a trip into town.