Page 53 of Snow River

“Coping.”

“You don’t think I should know how to cope by now?I’ve been like this for thirty years.”

“I think you do.Maybe sometimes it’s harder than other times.Just like with everything.No need to be so hard on yourself.”

Fully dressed now, he reached out a hand to her.“Come on, I want to hear more about what you saw and heard.But I also want soup.”

He’s a gem, Lila thought as she followed him down the stairs that connected the upstairs apartment to the kitchen prep area of the bar.Like someone panning for gold in the river, she’d come to the wilderness and stumbled across a gem.

Bear heated up the soup on the propane stove while Lila cut pieces of bread from a loaf that Eve Dotterkind had baked as a trade.The Formica counter dated from at least the 1950’s, and the stove was a shade of avocado that would have been retro if it didn’t also have baked-in grease stains.

“Don’t you ever eat upstairs?”she asked him as he stirred the pot of soup.At least the pot was from the modern era, stainless steel and chef quality.

“I used to, before you came along.”He grinned at her, looking so relaxed he could have been five years younger than at the start of the night.“Now it’s easier just to eat what the bar is serving.”

“I don’t know if you should be thanking me or cursing me for that.You need to eat more than soup.”She pulled a covered butter dish from the fridge.

“That reminds me, a guy stopped by the bar yesterday and said he heard I might be looking for kitchen help.He’s a line cook looking to spend the winter here.He has experience running restaurant kitchens and thinks we could do more in terms of serving food.”

“You mean we might get an actual professional to make our soup?”She loved that idea, since her experience was limited to a four-month stint at a Souplantation.

“Maybe.I told him I had to talk it over.With you,” he added, as Lila looked at him blankly.

“With me?”

“We have a small team here.You, me, and a couple of part-time backups.I wouldn’t make a change without consulting you.”

She felt a smile spread across her face.In all her checkered job history she’d never been given that kind of respect, though in fairness, she hadn’t deserved it.This was the longest she’d ever stayed at any job.

“It’s an interesting idea,” she said.“When’s he coming back?”

“Later this week.He’s looking for a place to stay.He left a resumé, you can look it over.”

“Very professional.It’s a good thing I didn’t need a resumé when I applied for the job.If I had one, it would probably be several pages long.”She filled two bowls with soup, and headed for the swinging door that led to the bar area, where they could sit at a table.Bear followed behind her.

“Frankly, I was just happy someone was interested.”He was teasing her.Bear, so stern, so serious, wasteasingher.She loved it.Facing him, she pushed the door open with her hip and backed out of the kitchen.

“If you’d known then what you know now,” she teased back, “you probably would have taken down that sign until I was long gone.Now here you are serving soup and—” As she stepped out of the kitchen and into the bar, a cold feeling of dread swept over her.

Something was wrong.The wrongness clutched at her stomach.She wanted to throw up.But time was doing weird things, or maybe her body was, because everything was moving at the pace of a glacier.Slowly, so slowly, and she was trapped there between worlds—between the kitchen and the bar, between light teasing and dark foreboding, between Bear and whatever was about to come.

Bear pushed her head down, as if he was shoving her underwater.On the floor behind the bar counter, she gasped, struggled for breath, coughed.You’re not in the water, one part of her brain screamed.You’re fine.But another part was screaming and struggling to breathe.

The bowls fell from her grasp and rolled across the floor.She knew it wasn’t the most important thing—they didn’t even break and she could clean up the mess—and yet she tried to scramble after them.

She hit Bear’s leg as she reached for a bowl and the solid feel of his flesh acted like a slap in the face.Bear’s here.It’s okay.Whatever’s going on, he’s dealing with it.She hauled air into her lungs and focused on sensory details to ground her.The faint smell of lemon in the Murphy’s Oil soap they mopped the floor with.The hint of onion in the spilled soup.The rough fabric of Bear’s canvas Carhartts.The taste of Eve’s rye bread from when she’d tried a bit of the crust.A distant rumble that slowly resolved itself into Bear’s voice.

“It’s okay, Lila,” he was saying.“It’s safe to stand up now.”

Nice of him to say, but she’d be the judge of that.As her thoughts cleared, she checked in with the pit of her stomach, where that cold dread had emanated from a few moments ago.

The light around her changed as Bear flicked the switch.That helped.Things didn’t look quite so eerie now.Bear was right, she could stand up, but things were not back to normal, not according to her stomach.But she didn’t want Bear to have to deal with this situation—whatever it was—alone, so she forced herself to rise up.

“What…what is it?”Her voice came out in a croak.

“Probably some kind of Halloween prank.”He showed her the cable strung from one wall of The Fang to the other, crossing the entire table area.A sheet hung from it, as if it was a laundry line.But it wasn’t just a sheet, she saw when she looked more closely.It was a dress, a housedress, marked with splashes of blood, or a red substance meant to look like it.

“A prank?”she said dubiously.Would she have reacted that way to a mere prank?

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