Charles de Lint: Forests of the Heart

“You’re right. And it’s on more than one. I wonder if it means something.”

“Sure it does. It’s a secret code for ‘Here there be Celtic harp music.’ ”

Ellie laughed. “Of course. What else?”

Then something else occurred to her.

“There’s no phone number,” she said. “Isn’t that weird?”

Tommy smiled. “Anything is weird if you think about it long enough. Like why are our noses designed so that they’ll drip right into our mouths?”

“Thank you for sharing that.”

She flicked the edge of the card with a fingernail. The man she’d been talking to couldn’t have put it on the dash, not with the doors and windows of the van closed the way they’d been. All the same, she was sure the card had come from him. He had to have opened the door and dropped it on the dash when Tommy was with the police and she was bringing coffee to the two homeless men. But that still didn’t explain why he’d left it. Or what they were supposed to do with it.

She started to toss the card back where she’d found it, then stuck it in her pocket instead.

“Well,” she said. She leaned back into her seat and buckled up her seat-belt. “It’s still cold as hell out there and people need our help. The mystery of this card’s just going to have to wait.”

Tommy nodded. He put the van in gear, checked for traffic, then pulled away from the curb.

“Little mysteries,” he said. “They’re good for the soul.”

“How so?”

“They keep us guessing.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Well, sure. Mysteries break the patterns we impose upon the world—or maybe let us see them more clearly for a change.”

“One of your aunts tell you that?”

“I think it was Aunt Serendipity.”

“Of course.”

Ellie wasn’t particularly fond of mysteries or puzzles herself. She always liked to know where she stood, how things fit. The fact that the universe wasn’t always so obliging never stopped her from trying to keep everything in its place, lined up, just the way it was supposed to be.

“And speaking of mysteries,” Tommy went on, “here’s another one for you.”

She turned to look at him.

“What’s a quick way to tell if you’re dealing with a transvestite or a real woman?”

Ellie shook her head. “I give up,” she said, and waited for the punchline.

“You check for an Adam’s apple,” Tommy said.

“I don’t get the joke.”

“It’s not a joke,” Tommy told her. “That guy you were talking to…”

The niggling feeling she’d had earlier returned, then vanished with a snap of understanding.

“He didn’t have one,” she said.

Tommy nodded. “In fact, he’s a rather mannish she. I was surprised that you hadn’t noticed.”

“So why do you think she’s walking around at this time of night, pretending to be a man?”

Tommy shrugged. “Why not?”

Ellie nodded slowly. Sure. Why not, indeed? On a one-to-ten scale of strangeness, it barely registered as a one. What a city this was.

Hunter Cole stood at the cash in Gypsy Records. Leaning on the counter amid a clutter of invoices and record company catalogs, he stared out the big front window, only half-listening to the music playing on the store’s sound system: a solo album by Karan Casey, the singer from Solas. He should have been enjoying the CD, but it could barely keep his attention today, little say engage it.

He couldn’t fault the music; the trouble lay with him and nothing seemed to help. Not the music. And certainly not the weather.

Early this morning the latest cold snap had broken, but now it was snowing again. Big lazy flakes drifted by the display window, blurring the view he had of Williamson Street. For the way he was feeling, it should have been raining. A steady, depressing downpour—the kind of relentless precipitation that eventually overwhelmed even the most cheerful soul with its sheer volume and persistence. The snow was too postcard-pretty. It hid the ugliness, rounding off all the sharp edges until even a heartless behemoth like this city could seem to hold something good in it. But the softness, the prettiness… it was all a lie. Maybe you couldn’t see them, but the sharp edges remained under the snow nevertheless, waiting to catch you unawares and cut you where it hurt.

Ria had still moved out. Four weeks and counting. He had a Christmas present for her, wrapped up and sitting on a shelf in his office at the back of the store, that he doubted he’d ever give to her now.

He was still in a rut—the same one he’d been in before he’d even thought of buying the store a few years ago—only now it ran deeper.

Buying the store. That had been a mistake.

Gypsy Records got its name from John Butler, a short barrel of a man without even a pretense of Romany blood running through his veins. Butler had begun his business out of the back of a hand-drawn cart that gypsied its way through the city’s streets for years, always keeping just one step ahead of the municipal licensing board’s agents. The store carried the usual best-sellers, but the lifeblood of its sales were more obscure titles—imports, and albums produced by independent record labels. They still carried vinyl, new and used, and they did brisk business with best-sellers, but most of their sales came from back-catalog CDs: country and folk, worldbeat, jazz, and whatever else you weren’t likely to find in the chain stores.

Buying the store hadn’t seemed like a mistake at first. Music was in his blood and he’d been working here for years. A true vinyl junkie, he’d always dreamed of opening his own place, so when John made him the offer that couldn’t be refused, it had seemed like the best thing that could ever have happened to him. But on a day like this, when he faced slumping sales and his footsteps rang hollowly in an apartment he no longer shared with the person he’d been expecting to be with for the rest of his life, it all seemed so pathetic. He was thirty-eight years old and all he had to show for his life to date was a bank balance that edged precariously towards the red and a store that had become the proverbial millstone hanging round his neck.

Maybe he was only having a mid-life crisis. Though if that were the case, shouldn’t he be out looking to buy a nice red sportscar? Not to mention finding some sweet young thing to drive around in it with him. He sighed. All he really wanted to do was dig a hole, crawl in, then pull the dirt in behind him.

He lifted his gaze from the clutter of invoices and looked for solace in the world that lay outside the display window. What he got was one of his staff materializing out of the falling snow—the diminutive and inimitable Miki Greer. He watched her approach the front door, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She spat the cigarette out and ground the butt under the heel of her Doc Marten before backing in through the door, holding a large Styrofoam cup of coffee in each hand. They’d agreed long ago that if she was going to keep going out for smoke breaks, she could at least make herself useful. So she made the runs to the bank, to the post office, to The Monkey Woman’s Nest a few doors down for coffee and lunches.

“Hey, grumpy,” she said as she put the cups on the counter.

She stepped back and shook herself like a terrier, spraying melted snow from her leather jacket and short-cropped hair. This week it was bleached an almost white blond.

“I’m not grumpy,” Hunter told her. “I’m depressed. It’s not the same.”

“I’m sure. And you’re welcome.”

“Thanks.”

She grinned. “But really. Grumpy, depressed—what’s the difference?”