Forrester was packing to leave town when Eleanor Parry caught up with him. Her deadpan expression told him immediately that something was dreadfully wrong.
Adrenaline pumped through him.
But he willed himself to stay cool.
Anticipating the news about Kelly.
“Gwynneth Davies.” Parry didn’t bother to clothe the words in sympathy. She spoke in short, sharp sentences. “Found her this morning. Dead.”
Forrester felt the suspension of belief. Shock sucked at his breath.
“Are you sure?” The question was ridiculous. He knew it. Didn’t care.
“Ned Kelly phoned to say she hadn’t turned up to do his leg.” Parry’s words came faster now. “You thought she’d stood you up last night. So I went round...”
Forrester’s head throbbed. He felt weightless. He had to slump against the running board to stop himself falling.
His head fell forwards, then jerked up again at Parry’s next words.
“Looks like she found a stinger in that wild comb honey of yours. Had the jar open, place crawling with ants. Caught it right at the back of the tongue. Throat puffed up like a robber’s dog.”
Sweat beaded on Forrester’s upper lip. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His mind spun cartwheels. Could Parry hear the hammering in his chest?
“I didn’t give her any wild honey.”
The ex-copper grimaced.
“No, but Ned did. Old coot’s so shaken up he’s even starting to sound half sane.”
Parry’s cool eyes surveyed Forrester.
“Said he couldn’t eat the stuff you gave him. Being diabetic. So he passed it on to his nurse. Then, he produced this...”
Parry extracted a faded khaki satchel from the floor of her Landcruiser, opened the drawstring, and extracted The Peacock.
“Kelly’s fessed up enough to guarantee your dad a pardon, posthumous though it is.”
The news was infinitely satisfying to the ex-copper. Taking her old adversary of a senior sergeant into custody had given her a buzz she hadn’t felt in years.
But it was little comfort to Forrester. The earth was tilting. He couldn’t stop it.
“Honey’s been sent off to pathology...”
Parry frowned as she looked again at the bee man, pale with shock, starting to rock.
And reached for her cuffs.
© 2008 by Cheryl Rogers
The Blue Plate Special
by Brendan DuBois
As we go to press with this issue, Brendan DuBois’s new thriller, Twilight, is also hot off the presses from St. Martin’s. The New Hampshire author writes both series and non-series books, but his stories for us, like his 2006 Barry Award winner “The Right Call,” are usually non-series. The award was bestowed at the 2007 Bouchercon in Alaska, and was sponsored by Mystery News and Deadly Pleasures magazines.
So it has come to this, Elaine Fletcher thought, as she parked her Volvo sedan in the dirt parking lot of the Have a Seat diner in Montcalm, New Hampshire. She left the car in Park and kept the engine running, as the Volvo’s radio struggled to pick up an NPR station from Montpelier. It was six on a Wednesday morning and her head and jaw ached. Already the lot was practically full, with pickup trucks and rusty sedans and a couple of SUVs. On the passenger’s side of her Volvo were a reporter’s notebook, a file folder, and her laptop — a pathetic collection that marked the sudden halt to a very promising career. She would leave the laptop and file folder behind during this first visit.
Once, a lifetime or two ago, she had been a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, living in an upscale section of Brooklyn, writing stories about finance and business and purchasing trends. In her varied career she had reported from London and Dubai, had interviewed the head of the London Stock Exchange and two members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and had a nice little career ahead of her.
And now?
Well, now she was living in rural New Hampshire, hadn’t seen her name in print in months, and was about to try to interview the owner and head cook of the Have a Seat diner for a possible freelance article. Among other things.
She gathered up her notebook and went out into the cold October morning, suddenly remembering something from her newspaper days. Once, in an editor’s office, she’d seen one of those workplace inspirational posters hanging on the wall. This particular poster had shown a steamship overtaking a sailing ship, and the large caption underneath had said: CHANGE IS GOOD.
At this moment, in this parking lot in Montcalm, New Hampshire, she knew that if the designer of the poster were to walk out of the diner, she would try to strangle him.
From the quiet of the parking lot, she went into the noisy chaos of the diner, and had to stop for a moment to take it all in. Before her was a traditional counter, with round stools stretching out on both sides, and on the other side of the counter were two refrigerators, a grill, coffee machines, and other odds and ends of diner gear. On either side of the small room were rows of booths, and even at this early hour, the booths and the stools were mostly occupied. She worked her way down one row of booths, where the very last one — next to a fire exit — was made for two people. She sat down, shoved her reporter’s notebook into her purse, took a breath, and looked at the customers.
A fair mix of small-town New Hampshire, a people she was learning about, and would no doubt continue to keep on learning about the longer she was exiled here. There were the women in nurse scrubs, ready to go over the river and up to the big Dartmouth-Hitchcock regional hospital. There were the few farmers who ran dairy farms, in their worn jeans and flannel shirts. A fair mix of other men who worked with their hands — contractors, plumbers, mechanics — as well as a few women heading out to who-knew-where. She found herself smiling, looking at the crew before her. Not one who would be tagged as “professional,” as she’d been in her Manhattan work days, though who in hell knew what a professional was anymore?
An older woman in a pink waitress uniform sauntered over, keeping up her end of the conversation with a bearded man sitting at one of the stools “—so I told her, I don’t care how friggin’ old she is, she’s still under my roof, still my rules—” and she slapped a white mug of coffee before Elaine without asking.
Elaine wasn’t much of a coffee drinker and would have preferred tea, but this was the kind of place the Have a Seat diner looked to be. You got what they served you and didn’t make a fuss.
The waitress looked down at her, little order pad in her chubby hands. “Well, hon, what’s it going to be?”
There was a menu at her elbow, but she felt a bit intimidated by the waitress and didn’t want to send her away while she looked at the menu, so she said, “Two scrambled eggs, please. And toast.”
“Wheat, white, or rye?”
“Wheat, please.”
The waitress looked down, quizzical, and then Elaine said, “That’s all, thanks.”
The other woman nodded, turned, and went back to the grill, and then picked up her conversation as she passed the order over, “—and then she had the nerve to tell me, well, what you feed me—”
Sure. Feed. Elaine looked about the noisy diner, the grease smells assaulting her nose, the taste of it in her mouth. What a place. And she remembered how she had ended up here.
At times eating quick, eating fast, but the types of food available at all hours in Manhattan and its neighboring boroughs, well, it was enough to make a food critic surrender and not even bother to keep track anymore. Two-star, three-star, four-star meals, and best of all, of course, was when they were expense-accounted, and you never really saw the bill, except when it was stapled to your monthly report. Every type of ethnic and sub-ethnic grouping, wines from France, Australia, South Africa, Spain, and Chile, and the conversations that went on and on during those meals, solving the problems of the newspaper, solving the problems of New York, and — in one’s spare time — solving the problems of the world.