“The dog did nothing in the night-time. That was the curious incident.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle, Silver Blaze
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My heart was pounding as I descended the steps of my lighthouse and stepped into the dewy morning fog.
I had gotten up early, knowing that Eze had breakfast in the main house before going into the office, even on Fridays.
A part of me wanted to avoid him, but another part wanted to unpack what had been said. What had happened last night at dinner.
I pushed the front door of the house open with my palm and the house let me in without a sound.
As I made my way to the cavernous dining room, I saw the long table was set for one.
One placemat. One glass. One folded napkin stranded in thirty feet of felled tree, the wood still giving off the faint nut smell of whatever oil they rub into it. The fog had flattened the light coming through the glass wall until there were no shadows anywhere in the room, and the whole gallery of it looked like a photograph of itself. It smelled like breakfast for eight. Butter, black pepper, coffee, something sweet with burnt edges cooling on a rack somewhere out of sight.
The little robot rolled out with its tray and its self-satisfied beeping and set down a latte and a glass of orange juice, rotated, and went back where it came from.
It was the only thing in that house that came looking for me.
I followed the noise through the stone arch into the kitchen, which in daylight felt like a different world from the witch’s cave Tini ran at night. The previous evening’s beeswax candles had burned down into their iron holders, the wax pooled and gone hard and pale. Something in Spanish going low on the radio. Onions already sweating in butter for a lunch nobody had asked for yet.
Tini was at the range with her back to me, scraping a pan like it had insulted her mother, tiny and wiry and tan, her apron ruined by nine in the morning.
“He didn’t eat,” she said, without turning around.
“Good morning, Tini,” I said.
“Four forty. Standing up. Black coffee and half a piece of bread, like a man in a train station.” She banged the pan into the sink and the water came up hissing. “I made eggs.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“The city.”
“Did he say when he’d be back?”
Tini turned around then. She looked at me a second longer than the question deserved, her bright eyes peeling me like the onions she was cooking, and I watched her decide to be gentle about it.
“No. But it will be before his birthday party tonight.”
She set a plate in front of me at the big wooden island—eggs, the heel of yesterday’s bread, three medialunas still warm and sticking to each other—because I had learned that in her kitchen you eat whether or not you asked to.
“He asked Marisol what time you come down in the mornings,” Tini said.
I put the fork down. “When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.” Water hissed into the sink again. “Then he left at four forty.”
So he was avoiding me.
