I drove the required distance, and pulled into the gravel lot in front of a brown-sided, green-roofed building raised up on a cinder-block foundation. The only car in the lot was a twenty-five-year-old station wagon, dotted with at least fifteen years’ worth of rust.
It was eight o’clock and there were no customers, just a white-haired grill cook behind a pass-through window, humming along with an easy-listening radio station, and a gray-haired waitress sagging in a pink uniform at the far end of a white Formica counter. She was turned away from me, staring out one of the windows. I supposed that anything of interest was better found by looking out of such a barren place.
Neither of them was a candidate to be the missing Sweetie Fairbairn. That was all right. There would be pie. I sat in a booth by the window.
For several long moments, nothing-absolutely nothing-happened. The grill cook continued to busy himself, mostly invisibly, behind the pass-through. The waitress continued to be absorbed by whatever was outside the far window, though to my eye there was nothing out there but spindly trees, and even those were fading in the tiring sun. Hill’s Knob, Indiana, didn’t look like anywhere a right-thinking person would run to. People ran from such places, even if the next stop was a place like Hadlow.
Definitely, it was time to go back to Rivertown.
“Best apple pie in four counties?” I called out to the waitress lost in thought, after another few minutes had passed.
“Good enough,” she said, without tearing her eyes from the mesmerizing view out the window. Her voice was barely audible, and carried no trace of enthusiasm about the pie.
“I’d like a slice, à la mode, with vanilla.”
“Coffee?”
“How much is the pie?”
She mumbled something to the window that I couldn’t hear.
“How much?” I asked again.
“Six fifty,” she said, a little louder. “With the ice cream.”
I would have mumbled, too, if I was looking to get almost nine bucks, with tax and tip, for a piece of pie daubed with ice cream, in the middle of Nowhere, Indiana. Those were Chicago prices, and downtown numbers at that.
“No coffee, thanks,” I said.
She continued to sit, staring out the window, as though expecting me to get up and leave, offended by the high prices. Certainly, such exorbitant numbers could explain why the joint was empty. More time passed until finally, when I’d made no sounds to leave, she sighed loudly, got up from her stool, and disappeared through a door into the kitchen.
Another twenty minutes went by, and I’d just begun to wonder if Hill’s Knob was so removed that Blanchie had to send someone on a bicycle clear to Terre Haute to get the ice cream when the waitress finally came out of the kitchen and ambled over with a plate. Her face was averted, her eyes behind her red plastic eyeglasses still fixed on the parking lot outside, lit now by one lone dim bulb fixed to the side of the diner. It had gone dark.
She set my pie down, but there was no vanilla ice cream on top, as requested. Instead, there was a chunk of melted yellow cheese.
I thought about reminding her I’d ordered ice cream, but reasoned that might delay my research into the quality of the pie by another fifteen minutes, maybe longer, and by now, I was very hungry.
Besides, the cheese, melted as it was on the pie, did look good.
She walked away.
I picked up my fork, cut the point from the wedge, and brought it to my mouth. It was fine pie, and to my mind, the cheese made it tastier than could any scoop of ice cream.
My tongue puzzled, though, as to the identity of the cheese. It wasn’t the usual cheddar or American usually encountered on restaurant apple pie. I lifted off a speck so I could taste only that.
I knew that cheese. The back of my neck tingled. I looked up.
She’d come over with a Thermos pitcher of coffee. She set it down and slid into the booth across from me.
Her forehead was crossed with a dozen deep lines, unhidden now by any cosmetics. Her lips were thin without lipstick, and her breasts were low inside her uniform. If there was a twinkle in her eyes, or a pinch from fear, it was obscured behind those heart-shaped, cartoonish red glasses.
“Around here, folks know to enjoy their apple pie with Velveeta,” she said.
CHAPTER 72.
She poured coffee into the two mugs on the table and pushed one closer to me.
I took another bite of the pie. “I’m sure glad I came.”
“Will I be glad you came?”
“I can leave, Ms. Fair-”
She stopped me with an abrupt shake of her head, and looked to smile at the white-haired man behind the grill window. He was whistling softly, in tune with Sinatra singing low on the radio, and watching us.
“Gus and I like the name Evie,” she said quietly.
“Evie it is,” I said. “Forever more.”
She took a moment to make up her mind about what was in my eyes, and then asked, “How did you find me?”
Without meaning to, I felt my fingers touch my face. I dropped my hand.
“It took me too long, but I finally remembered a picture postcard of a bridge, on the wall of the only sane room in a very swank penthouse. That postcard disappeared some time after the woman who lived there fled.”
“Did remembering that postcard have something to do with the scratches on your face?”
“They’re healing just fine.”
“I’d written ‘Hill’s Knob’ on the back of that card, so I’d never forget. That man”-she gestured at the grill window-“and his wife had been very kind to me once.”
“Alta took that postcard. If you wrote on the back of it, she knows you’re here.”
The shock I was expecting didn’t come. Instead, she looked out at the parking lot, cut from the darkness by only that one dim bulb. Behind us, Sinatra had stopped singing.
“Yes,” she said softly, to the glass.
“You’re not surprised?”
She turned to me. “You came to warn me?”
“Yes.”
Her face relaxed. “She was here.”
I waited, saying nothing.
“Two days ago,” she said, “she parked right out in front, came inside. It was around closing time, like now. She was dressed in blue jeans, plaid shirt, work boots. I took her for a man, a very short man. I walked up with a menu. She didn’t want it. She kept looking at my eyes until finally she just turned and went out the door.”
“By then you’d recognized her?”
“Absolutely not. Georgie said she’d died the summer I left. And the years had twisted her face fiercely, Mr. Elstrom. The years, and the anger.”
“She just drove away?”
A small noise came from across the diner. Gus had come out from behind the grill window, and had put a hand on the stainless steel coffee machine. He was about sixty, powerfully built, with biceps that hadn’t come from turning eggs. I would have bet there was nothing wrong with his ears, either.
His eyes weren’t on the coffeemaker. They were on her.
She shook her head at him almost imperceptibly. I had not yet become a threat. He gave her a small shrug and went back behind the grill window.
“She did not leave right away, Mr. Elstrom,” she went on. “She stood outside, leaning against her car, an old, beat-up tan thing. After five minutes, I began to wonder if she was sick. Other than Gus, there was no one in the diner, so I walked outside. Whip fast, she was up against me. She had a knife-but first, she had things to say.”
Her hands trembled as she refilled our cups from the carafe.
“I was dumbstruck; she wasn’t supposed to be alive. I sure never connected her with the TV reports of Darlene being found dead at your home. She started jabbering so fast and choppy I couldn’t make out all the words, but there was no mistaking her rage. Or her intent with that knife.”