Jen snorted so hard she got orange juice up her nose. “Grove women don’t discuss. Besides, they’ve already gotten half the IMP board on their side … mmm … this is fabulous. I bet these eggs are fresh.” Clearly Jen wasn’t going to tell me anything more until she had sated her appetite. I might as well eat. I took a bite … and nearly swooned. Had eggs always tasted this good? Why hadn’t I had home fries in so long? What was wrong with sausage anyway? Dimly I recalled the concept of weight gain, but, hey, if I ran twenty miles every night I could afford to eat like this. I’d probably lose weight.

When I had polished off my entire breakfast I looked up to find Jen Davies studying me. “Aelvesgold increases the appetite,” she remarked. “But no worries, it also speeds up the metabolism, so you’ll never get fat – or old – or, as far as we know, dead.”

“Really? It can make you live forever?” I asked, but Jen wasn’t listening to me; she was listening to the Stewarts in the next booth.

“… just plain vanished. They found his van parked at the top of the lower branch and his tackle scattered in the woods.”

“Wouldn’t be the first fisherman to go missing on the Undine,” the oldest Stewart remarked.

The middle-aged man made a rude noise and cried, “Don’t be filling the boy’s heads with those tales, Dad.” Unswayed by his son’s objection, the old man asked his grandson if he had heard the one about the mermaid and the old fisherman. The conversation quickly degenerated into dirty guy talk, the kind of hearty bluster that usually covered up real fears. Jen was furiously two-thumb typing on her iPhone. When she finished, she noticed me watching her. “Force of habit,” she said.

“Are you thinking of writing a story on fishing in the Catskills?” I asked.

Jen’s eyes slid to one side and she fiddled with the lid of the tin creamer. “The Grove sent me up to see if there was any unusual activity going on in town – or in the woods. They’re afraid that when word gets out that the door’s going to be closed there will be a mass exodus from Faerie. They want to know if there’s been any increased traffic through the door. That fisherman …” she looked over her shoulder at the next booth where the Stewarts were getting up to go, “… isn’t the only one who’s gone missing. And where there are missing fishermen, there’s likely to be an undine. Would you happen to know anything about that?”

I almost started to tell Jen about the undine run and seeing Lorelei last night, but stopped. “I might,” I said cautiously. “But I have a few questions of my own first.”