Page 26 of Crossroads Magic
I couldn’t recall her readinganybooks when I was a kid. I’d only discovered them myself when I was already a mother to two kids. I’ve been overcompensating for my lack of childhood reading ever since.
I petered out at midnight. It had been a long day. I slid the bolt on the back of the apartment door into the lock position, put another log in the stove, and settled on the sofa to read.
I didn’t finish the first page.
?
I woke to find the book on the floor, and half the crocheted afghan covering it. My feet were freezing. I stuffed them into my boots, put another log into the stove, and stood next to it to warm up. My phone told me it was five in the morning, but it was pitch black outside the windows.
In those quiet few moments while I thawed out, I made a simple plan. I put the kettle back on the stove for tea, and curled up with my cellphone in one of the wing chairs and researched.
Wikipedia informed me that: Rigor mortis appears approximately 2 hours after death in the muscles of the face, progresses to the limbs over the next few hours, completing between 6 to 8 hours after death. Rigor mortis then stays for another 12 hours (till 24 hours after death) and then disappears.
My mother laid on the bed in the next room in a peaceful position that didn’t match the way she had been found. Had rigor mortis not set in when they moved her? Only, that meant she must have died very shortly before being discovered. And that didn’t make sense, because the snow had washed out the blood on her gown. So she must have laid out in the elements for a long time.
Six hours before she had been found would have been midnight.
Midnight on the solstice.
I shivered. Why did that time make sense? Why did it seem…significant? Even appropriate?
I put my phone aside, deep uneasiness rippling through me.
?
I headed downstairs, looking for people. I wanted a distraction from my own bleak thoughts. I saw a light coming from the bar, showing from the sides of the curtain, which didn’t quite cover the door.
Surprised, I went in.
Hirom was at the fireplace, adding logs with one big hand, and holding a poker with the other. He watched the coals beneath the logs. As I moved toward him, he blew on them.
“They look stone cold dead to me,” I observed.
“They’ll catch. Coals can bank for hours. They just need a bit of something to feed on and—” He grinned as flames puffed up around either side of the logs, licking at the raw, dry bark. “And there you go.”
I had wasted five matches and a small mountain of paper trying to get the log to burn in the stove this morning.
Hirom pushed the poker into an iron stand on the low stone shelf beside the fire and looked at me with a measuring gaze. “Coffee with cream,” he announced.
I wasdyingfor coffee with real cream. I could almost taste it. “Good guess,” I told him. “Seeing at it’s six in the morning. Whatareyou doing here so early, anyway?”
“Nothing better to do. And since Thamina…since your mother died, someone has to watch the place.” He headed over to the bar, ducked under the counter where the phone sat, and then stepped up onto his ledge. He pulled down a big pottery coffee mug, which looked like it had been hand-made.
“That’s considerate of you,” I told him, moving over to the bar. I wrestled the phone stool around the corner of the bar and sat in it, one foot on the brass railing. As he poured coffee from a thermos jug into the mug, I added, “I could be a tea drinker. My mother was.”
Hirom shook his head. “I got a sense about what people want to drink. I’m usually right.” He reached under the counter. I heard the distinctive sound of a fridge being opened. He lifted up a carton of cream, and pushed it and the mug toward me.
“But you only serve beer and a spirit, here.”
“And pop.”
“So the odds of guessing what people are about to order are pretty short, aren’t they? One to three, in fact.”
He headed for the other end of the bar. “I know what theywantto drink, not what they’re going to order. Lots of times, it’s not the same thing. But people will settle when they have a real hankering to drink, which most folks stepping in here do have.” He came back with a cloth in his hand, and wiped the counter where coffee had dribbled. “Besides, my beer has something of a reputation. Folks like it. Or get to like it.” He grinned. “A long mugful and they’re converts.”
“If your beer is like your spirits, that doesn’t surprise me.” I sipped the coffee. It was perfect, and I sighed.
“See?” he said, with a big smile.
