Excerpt: April Fool

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Nick the Owl Faloon is sitting beside a stone fox by the name of Eve Winters, who is apparently some kind of shrink. They're scoffing up fresh-caught sockeye, sharing a long table with four couples from Topeka, Kansas, who are up here on a wet spring holiday. In spite of all the happy talk, the Owl picks up there is an edge to this dinner, the men regretting they brought their wives along. A fishing extravaganza that put them back a few yards each, and they bring their wives when they'd rather get plotzed and bond.

Though square, they are nice average people, and Faloon hopes they're well insured so he's not going to feel bad about the coming night's entreprise risquée, his plan to whack their rooms out. Two weeks ago, while here on a previous dining experience, he made a clean play for the master key, slipping it off its hook long enough to wax it. He also checked a typical room, there was no nighter to secure the door from inside, just a security chain.

"And are you a sports fisher too?"

It's Eve Winters, she has finally become aware of his existence, maybe assuming the little owl-like creature to her left can't possibly be as boring as the other guy beside her, a condominium developer with a spiel of corny jokes. She is somewhere in her thirties, very tall and slender, ash blond, looking in good health -- she has done the trail, Faloon overheard her say that, six gruelling days. Sports fisher, she's politically correct, a feminist.

"No, ma'am, I run a little lodge down the hill. Less expensive than this here establishment, but to be honest my food isn't as good."

The Owl is speaking of the Nitinat Lodge, which is on a back street in this two-bit town of Bamfield without much of a view, and mostly gets backpackers and low-rental weekenders. The Breakers Inn, looking over the Pacific Ocean, survives on its summer fat and still, in March, gets the fishers from Topeka or Indianapolis. And the way these tourists are spending tonight, that'll pay the chef's salary for the month. Faloon had to lay off his own cook for the off-season.

"But I would imagine you have a more exotic clientele." Eve Winters says in a clear, liquid voice, maybe so her other seatmate can get the point. She has marked down the condo developer as a chauvinist bore, with his story about the fisherman and the mermaid. What is interesting about this guy, to Faloon anyway, is that adding to the bulge of his size forty-eight kitchen is a thick moneybelt.

Faloon tells Eve Winters how he bought his small lodge a year and a half ago, and how he caters to hikers mostly; he likes vigorous outdoorspeople, finds them interesting. That gets this lovely creature talking about her six days on the West Coast Trail with three friends. He enjoys the refined way she expresses herself: "I had a sense of eternity out there, the wind in the pines, and the wild relentless surf."

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