Chapter Text
A week after Laura is killed, there’s another death. Deputy Hawk has come in to the station early, and picks up the call himself. Linda Lane, down by the lake. I don’t know how long she been here like that.
He calls Harry, doesn’t bother about Cooper. Drives down to the lake as morning comes on slowly, notices the threat of rain on the horizon. Everything soft and blue and hesitant. There’s a bit of song stuck in his head, about driving down to Harlan. I’m gonna— I’m gonna visit— my own true love, my darling— And then Harry’s voice, clear and calm, saying to Agent Cooper there’s something sorta evil in the woods. Not much is making sense at the moment, and every time he tried to sleep last night, he heard that myna bird saying Leo, no, Leo, no in Laura Palmer’s voice.
Instead of cursing, he winds the window down and lets the predawn rest her cool fingers against his burning skin. Be with me, he asks her, and she does her best to oblige.
He finds Pete Martell standing by the lakeside, twisting his woolen fisherman’s cap in his hands.
“Sorry to call you out so early, Deputy,” he says, wincing. “Oh, it’s a nasty thing. Poor Linda. Poor lady. Never knew she felt that way.”
The rambling old dogwood tree creaks in the little breeze. Linda Lane’s feet brush the top of the nodding onion that grows all along the shore. Hawk takes his hat off, and feels that old familiar chill. What a thing it is, to love a place so terrible.
Harry and Andy arrive together, then, and Andy blanches immediately and starts hopping a little. Hawk knows who he is in this scenario. He finds the edge of work and grips on hard.
It’s the morning after Pete found Linda, and Hawk wants to poke. Agent Cooper was sweet about it, sympathetic, but all up in his head in that way he gets. Hawk knows that man is seeing and hearing more than him and Harry combined, on all sorts of planes. Still, small-town suicide fits too neatly into Cooper’s picture of things to really be shaken loose.
Hawk, on the other hand, distrusts anything that seems too story. Linda was only his age, maybe a little older. Two kids, real young. Moved into town just after the first one was born. It’ll be up to Mikey Lane to look after the kids now. Mikey Lane, he thinks, will want watching.
Hawk shakes the rain off his coat and ducks into the Double R. He’s hit at once by the smell of pie and damp wool and other people.
Norma smiles at him from behind the counter, sweet as ever but maybe a little run down. He smiles back, tips his hat, and thanks God that he can trust the coffee will always be hot and fresh and good.
Glancing around, he does a quick, instinctive tally. There are Donna, James and Maddy, three dark heads bent in furtive conversation. Shelly and Hank dispensing coffee and pie and sodas. Tina, who runs the crystal shop next door, politely edging away from the Log Lady’s monologuing. A family of tourists he doesn’t recognise, a trucker in the corner. Leland’s in one of the booths, massaging his temples and ignoring his stack of pancakes. Hawk lifts his chin at the man, and receives a baffled, haunted stare in response. Be with me, he asks the morning again, but she has to leave him at the door.
There’s a woman seated at the counter, her back to Hawk. He can only see her from behind, but he knows he doesn’t know her. Dark blonde hair, very straight, bobbed just above her shoulders. Tall. Slim. Wearing a thick Fair Isle sweater and blue jeans. Her hands, wrapped around her coffee mug, are long-fingered, with bold knuckles.
In the second before she turns, Hawk knows—something. Feels it in his stomach, a fishhook yank. Knows she matters. Will matter. Has mattered. Something to do with time. My own true— My darlin’—all this noise in his head—
“Hi,” she says.
The noise cuts out. A beat, and the feeling that the floor is slanting toward her. And then a hitch, and the noise starts back up. Quieter now. No music, no creaking dogwood branches, just the sound of summer cicadas in the space behind his eyes.
There’s a trick with pretty people, sometimes, where you think you know them; some sort of pheromone thing designed to draw you closer. But he knows this woman. He knows her, and he’s never seen her and he’s never seen anyone like her.
The thing is, she’s striking. Really striking. Kinda unusual, but maybe even more pretty for it. Long straight nose, dark brown eyes, skinny face with these big high cheekbones, like the big hills of her knuckles, like she’s a landscape more than a girl. It’s fall in Twin Peaks, but he’s filled quite suddenly with the particular lightness of summer, adolescence, feet trailing in the water from the pier—the reflection of the lake in Linda Lane’s open eyes, no, not that—cut grass and weed smoke and Douglas fir baking under the hard sun, the sudden coolness of shade and who is she?
“Do I know you?” he asks, because he has to say something.
Her mouth twists up, and for a moment, he thinks she’s laughing at the clumsy line. But there’s something else, something sort of sad in those brown eyes.
“Maybe,” she says. “I’m not sure.”
It’s evasive, but Hawk sees her expression and realises that she’s trying hard to be honest. There’s not a lot of that about at the moment, so he looks at her from the corner of his eye but doesn’t comment.
Norma brings him coffee and a donut.
“You’ve met Clover!” she says, and the other woman runs a hand through her hair in a way that reminds Hawk of—of what? Of a friend he had, once, maybe. A cousin? Someone, sometime, something to do with here…
“Clover,” he repeats, pulling up a stool.
When she hears her name from him, the woman breaks into a sudden, exceptional smile—big, goofy, her mouth slightly too big for that architectural face. She bites down on it, wrangles it into form, but it's too late.
He tries to look unenchanted as he asks, “Where’ve you come from, Clover?”, and he feels like he wouldn’t be surprised if she said Fairyland, or the spirit realm.
She accepts a top-up from Norma with a smaller smile. “Here. I grew up in Twin Peaks. But I’ve been gone a while.”
Slow voice, sweet, smoky. Hawk wants to run his fingers through the sound of it.
“A long while?” he asks Clover, trying to place those eyes, channel switching in his head, but all that’s coming through is static and random bursts of noise, Leo, no, Leo, no, gonna visit my Uncle Abdul in Harlan, the methodical sound of glass breaking, the beat of some huge wing, the rattle of a train over tracks, the roar of the mill—as in, a whole ton of sound, and none of it useful.
“Seventeen years. The day I finished school, I took my mother’s car and drove as far as I could. But I got pretty tired of all that running. And California got kind of… I don’t know. I guess I missed our seasons.”
She drinks the coffee in big lurches, gripping the mug on the opposite side from the handle and it’s all so familiar, like a story that he’s lived in some other life. Hawk’s used to feeling haunted, but this is something more. Bittersweet, double sharp, dream-spun. Our seasons.
“What’s your surname, Clover?” he asks. In return, he gets a new smile, a grin that holds a little edge of trouble.
“Can’t tell you,” she says. “You’d come to all sorts of conclusions.” A beat later, her lips on the edge of her mug, she adds, “You should talk to Harry.”
“You know the Sheriff?” He doubts he’s impressing this woman with his vacuous questions. On the other hand, vacuous questions are the cornerstone of much police work.
She slurps the last of her coffee and puts some coins down on the counter. “You don’t know how much this has meant. This coffee. Thank you, Deputy.” And, directed over the counter, “Thanks, Norma.”
Norma smiles and flutters her fingers. Clover gathers her things, and Hawk finds himself a few steps behind her, feeling fourteen, flustered, thoroughly out of his depth.
“You know me,” Hawk says.
“Deputy Chief Tommy Hill of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department,” she tosses over her shoulder. “Oh yeah. They still call you Hawk?”
“Yes,” he says, feeling supremely dumb.
“Groovy.” She bites her lip then, and looks up through her lashes. The effect is kind of spoiled because she’s taller than Hawk, but he can’t find it in himself to be anything other than charmed. “Big Ed gave me a job. As a mechanic. I’m working up there. You should go talk with Harry.”
And then she’s out the door, into the late morning drizzle. He’s slow off the mark, feels clumsy, foolish. Jolts into action to offer her a lift to Ed’s. But she’s already off, hands in her jean pockets, loping along with her head straight and the rain catching in that golden hair. He stands at the door for a while, hands in his own pockets.
Be with me? he asks the morning, more hopeful than anything. She laughs, and ruffles his hair a little. Noon’s never as friendly as her sister—he’ll get back to the station before she takes over.