She thanked him and drove across the tarmac to the diner. It had a metal shell with spotlights on the roof to let people on the Northway know it was there. She didn’t see a single fly in the beam. Frances had been a real Cassandra about the flies, or maybe the south wind, which kept the air mild, was holding them at bay.
She went inside. It was empty except for a trooper at the far end of the counter. He had on grays and a Sam Browne belt, a gun, cuffs, and a beeper, and a club hung at his waist. A campaign hat sat on the stool next to him. He was eating scrambled eggs sprinkled with what looked like fresh-chopped parsley. Pretty good for an all-night diner off the Northway, she thought.
He looked up, caught her staring, and they smiled quickly at each other and looked away. Just two strangers in a 1940s-type diner.
A month ago, she might have made the same innocent eye contact and touched the counter he was leaning on, and seen things about him. For instance that he’d been passed over for promotion one time too many and had gotten bitter and started drinking and hitting his wife, and, this second, as he tucked into his off-hour dinner of scrambled eggs, fresh parsley, and rough-cut toast that looked like homemade bread, the wife was packing the kids into the car to leave him. Eve would have seen the wife’s grim, anguished face, the bleary look ot the children, who were up past their bedtime. She’d even have seen their little bungalow on a typical American street in one of the typical American towns around here as the wife backed the station wagon out of the drive to the street.
Eve would know that he didn’t know, that he’d go home to an empty house and find his wife’s note on the kitchen counter.
She’d have seen it in high relief; she’d have recognized the wife and kids if she met them, known the house if she drove past it. But tonight nothing happened except that she and the trooper exchanged brief smiles.
She was elated and suddenly starving.
The quilted metal door from the kitchen swung open and a waitress in a beige uniform came over to Eve. She was about fifty, with round rosy cheeks and sparkling brown eyes. Eve liked her, liked the trooper, liked the kid in the gas station. Liked the whole world.
“Two eggs scrambled, please,” Eve said, “and coffee.”
“Decaf or regular?” the woman asked.
“Better make it regular,” she said. She still had 120 miles to go.
The waitress poured the coffee into a thick mug and set it in front ot Eve, then went into the kitchen to put in the order. In the meantime, the trooper finished his eggs, picked up the crumbs of egg and parsley with a toast corner, and drained his coffee mug. He stood up, took the campaign hat, and came down the counter toward her.
Suddenly her stomach did a little flip, and she knew it was going to happen after all. She was going to see pictures about this man, know his deepest, darkest, most terrible secrets. Things even he didn’t know.
She grabbed the edge of the counter and stared down at the clean Formica and waited. She felt a slight draft as he passed her, nothing else, and she risked raising her head.
He was at the cash register; the waitress had come out of the kitchen and was telling him his money was no good in here and he knew it. She called him Bill.
Eve looked directly at them.
The trooper had his hat on; he thanked the waitress, then left. The door swished open and shut, then she heard his cruiser start up and pull out of the lot, back onto the road that led to the highway.
Nothing else happened.
She slumped on the stool. It was over, she had to get used to it, and not verge on catatonia when anyone came within five feet of her.
The waitress came around the counter to her.
“Hey, you all right?” she asked.
Eve nodded.
“You look kinda green.”
“I guess I need some food,” Eve said.
“It’ll be right out, honey. Bet I know what else you need.”
“Not 7-Up,” Eve said quickly.
The waitress laughed. “Naw, I was thinking of Alka-Seltzer. Good for what ails you. Fern—she’s our cook—swears by it. Says if she ever slipped and cut her finger off, Alka-Seltzer’d probably make it grow back. Says it’d probably cure cancer if people’d give it a chance.” The brown eyes twinkled. “Fern’s a great cook, but she’s a little...” She tapped her head with one finger. “But it’s good stuff, even if it won’t cure cancer. And maybe it’ll put some color in your face. Whaddaya say? It’s on the house.”
Her name was Abigail, Abby, she told Adam. No last names, they agreed. She had a good face, not exactly pretty, but certainly not plain. Her hair and eyes were the same shade, reddish brown, and except for the lines around her eyes and mouth, her skin was like a girl’s.
She taught high school in Tupper Lake about thirty miles west of Raven Lake. Daren’t be seen in a pickup bar around there, so once a month, she made the drive to Frank’s. “To be with someone,” she told him. “To drive away the dark...”
That was such a nice way to put it: drive away the dark. This wasn’t cold and brutal as sometimes portrayed on TV and in movies, it was the best they could manage at this point in their lives to find warmth and contact... and drive away the dark.
Suddenly he almost cared about this woman he’d only known an hour, and who was about five years older than he was (she didn’t volunteer her age, he didn’t ask). He thought of the interns looking at the dying man this morning. If anyone could make him feel what he’d seen in their eyes, it was this kind, wise, almost pretty woman.
He asked her to go with him, and she said of course, as if surprised he had to ask.
He glanced quickly around the bar; it was hopping, as Tom the orderly had said, and everyone was involved in their own conversations. No one even glanced at him as he slid off the bar stool and followed her to the door.
They went through the cedarboard front door into the lot. It was still warm and windy, the wind coming from the south.
“Whose car?” she asked gently.
“Mine, if you don’t mind.” He had a new LTD bought last January.
They got to the LTD and he experienced that little burst of pride he still had in the car, with its long light-blue body and new-car smell people commented on.
He remembered the couple he’d seen when he’d arrived here and he moved her back against the car and kissed her, aware of the contrast between his lean, well-conditioned body and the paunchy redneck with the pickup truck. He eased her lips apart with his and reached into his pocket.
She strained against him as his lingers touched the cool steel handle of the scalpel.
They came out of the kiss, and he looked quickly around the lot. No one had come out, no one saw them together. He politely took her around to the passenger side, handed her in, then climbed behind the wheel.
Sam lived here in this town, on Lakeshore according to Greta. But Eve didn’t know where Lakeshore was, and there was no one around to ask. The main drag of Raven Lake was about a block long, with one stoplight, no cars, and a string of dark shops. Even the gas station was closed and she hadn’t passed a state or town police station. Only one building had a light on, a small Victorian house with a porch light illuminating the sign: RAVEN LAKE PUBLIC LIBRARY, FOUNDED 1937.
She didn’t know what to do.
She dropped her speed even from what it had been on the curves and hills between the Northway and Raven Lake and drove up the street almost to the end, where it turned back into State Route 26.
She knew from the map that it curved back and recrossed the Northway north of where she’d exited, then went on to a tiny dot on the map on Lake Champlain where you could get a ferry to Vermont.