raised their flared bells to the sun. The arched-lattice tunnel, a preview of twilight, led to a sunny front patio where pots were filled with red garnet, red valerian.
The house was a Spanish bungalow. Modest but graceful, it had been tenderly maintained.
The black silhouette of a bird had been painted on the red front door. The wings were on the upstroke, the bird in an angle of ascent. Halfway through Billy’s brief knock, the door opened, as though he had been expected and had been awaited with keen anticipation. Ivy Elgin said, “Hi, Billy,” without surprise, as if she had seen him through a window in the door. It had no window.
Barefoot, she wore khaki shorts cut for comfort and a roomy red T-shirt that sold nothing. Hooded and cloaked, Ivy would still have been a lamp to every moth that flew.
“I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” he said.
“I’m off Wednesdays.” She stepped back from the door.
Hesitating on the sun side of the threshold, Billy said, “Yeah. But you have a life.”
“I’m shelling pistachios in the kitchen.”
She turned and walked away into the house, leaving him to follow as if he had been here a thousand times. This was his first visit.
Heavily curtained sunlight and a floor lamp with a tasseled sapphire-silk shade accommodated shadows in the living room.
Billy glimpsed dark fir floors, midnight-blue mohair furniture, a Persianstyle rug. The artwork seemed to be from the 1930’s.
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He made some noise on the hardwood floor, but Ivy did not. She crossed the room as if a slip of air always separated the soles of her feet from the fir planks, the way a sylph fly may choose to step across a pond without dimpling the surface tension of the water.
At the back of the house, the kitchen matched the size of the living room and contained a dining area.
Beadboard paneling, French-pane cabinet doors, a white tile floor with black-diamond inlays, and an ineffable quality made him think of the bayou and New Orleans charm.
Two windows between the kitchen and the back porch were open for ventilation. In one window sat a large black bird.
The creature’s perfect stillness suggested taxidermy. Then it cocked its head.
Although Ivy said nothing, Billy felt invited to the table, and even as he sat, she put a glass of ice in front of him. She picked up a pitcher from the table and poured tea.
Also on the red-and-white-checkered oilcloth were another glass of tea, a dish of fresh cherries, a sheet-cake pan piled high with unshelled nuts, and a bowl half full of liberated pistachios.
“You’ve got a nice place,” Billy said.
“It was my grandmother’s house.” She took three cherries from the dish.
“She raised me.”
Ivy spoke softly, as always. Even at the tavern, she never raised her voice, yet she never failed to make herself heard.
Not one to pry, Billy was surprised to hear himself ask, in a voice softened to match hers, “What happened to your mother?”
“She died in childbirth,” Ivy said as she lined up the cherries on the window sill beside the bird. “My father just moved on.”
The tea had been sweetened with peach nectar, a hint of mint. As Ivy returned to the table, sat, and continued shelling the nuts, the bird watched Billy and ignored the cherries.
“Is he a pet?” Billy asked.
“We own each other. He seldom comes farther than the window, and when he does, he respects my rules of cleanliness.”
“What’s his name?”
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“He hasn’t told me yet. Eventually he will.”
Never in Billy’s life, until now, had he felt entirely at ease and vaguely disoriented at the same time. Otherwise, he might not have found himself asking such an odd question: “Which came first, the real bird or the one on the front door?”
“They arrived together,” she said, giving him an answer no less odd than his question.
“What is he—a crow?”
“He’s more lordly than that,” she said. “He’s a raven, and wants us to believe he’s nothing more.”
Billy did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing. He felt comfortable with silence, and apparently so did she.
He realized that he had lost the sense of urgency with which he had left Whispering Pines. Time no longer seemed to be running out; in fact time seemed not to matter here.
Finally the bird turned to the cherries, using its bill to strip the meat from the pits with swift efficiency.
