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  Later that week he drove to Carlene’s to pick her up, and she motioned him inside. As soon as he crossed the threshold, his nostrils filled with cooking smells and he knew they weren’t going anywhere.

  She’d set the table with proper china and cloth napkins, and she made him sit while she filled two plates in the kitchen and brought them to the table.

  It was a Belgian-style beef stew, with the cubes of beef cooked in beer, along with potatoes and root vegetables. She’d done the prep work the night before, then switched on the slow cooker before she left for work.

  “It’s very frightening,” she said, “to prepare an elaborate meal for a man who cooks for a living. But it’s good, isn’t it?”

  It was delicious, and he told her so. She’d bought three bottles of the beer, a dark German brew, and only used one in the stew, and they each drank a beer with the meal. Later they shared the sofa and watched TV and wound up in bed. Their lovemaking was slow and gentle, and then passion took hold of both of them.

  Afterward he caught himself dozing off, and started to get up. She said, “Don’t, you’re tired.”

  “They’ll see my car.”

  “So? It’s a perfectly nice car. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant, and do you really think we’re likely to shock anybody? Everybody knows we’re an item.”

  “An item.”

  “We can decide what to call it in the morning.”

  And in the morning, without raising the subject of what to call whatever they had, she suggested he might want to keep a change of clothes at her house. And, oh, a spare razor. That sort of thing.

  He had a shower, put his clothes back on. Drank a cup of coffee.

  It had been six weeks since he bought Andy’s Toyota, and he’d been wondering when they’d have that conversation about an investment he might want to consider. He was in no rush, but he knew it was coming.

  Cross Creek got snow flurries one evening, and then two days later the first snow of the season fell overnight and melted in the morning sunlight. That gave the breakfast crowd a topic of conversation, and everybody had something to say about it, none of it very interesting.

  When the room had mostly cleared, Andy drew two mugs of coffee and gave a nod to Helen, who took it as a signal to take his place behind the counter. “Come on,” he said to Bill. “Want to talk with you.”

  When they were seated across from each other in a back booth, he said, “Conversation I been having with you in my head for months now, and it’s time I came out and let you know what I’ve been thinking. Though you can probably guess.”

  “Just so you’re not about to fire me.”

  “Yeah, building up my courage.” He sipped his coffee. “The hell, you have to know where this is going. I been running this place all my life, it feels like, and I’m not getting any younger, and if there’s anything I want to do in my life, it’s getting to be time to do it.”

  “Like that trip to Paris.”

  “Which is never gonna happen, except it might, except it won’t if I’m running this joint. You see where this is going.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “What keeps me here is, what am I gonna do, lock the doors and drop the keys in the storm drain? I suppose I could do just that. This town’s been good to me, and same for the people who eat here and the ones who work here, but that doesn’t mean I owe anybody anything but a fair wage or a good meal. And if Kalamata closes, who’s gonna go hungry?”

  Andy was looking off to one side, looking at nothing but the past and the future. Looking for words, Bill thought, and he gave him time to find them.

  “You spend your life running a joint, do you want to walk away from it? Well, you do and you don’t. You want to leave it in good hands.”

  Silence again, and his turn to break it. “I have a feeling you’re not talking about Helen or Francine.”

  “It’s a good business, Bill. It’s fed me and mine for a lot of years, and put clothes on our backs, and I have to say it’s as recession-proof as a funeral home. People gotta eat. They may cut back on the white tablecloth joints, but they’ll still show up for their eggs over easy.” His face softened. “And their goulash,” he said. “And their rhubarb pie.”

  “With a scoop of vanilla,” he said. “Andy, you said it yourself, it’s a good business. Which means it’s worth money, which means you can’t give it away.”

  “No, I’d need to sell it.”

  “And that’s only right, and if I had the money—”

  “Could you get your hands on twenty-five hundred dollars?”

  He had a little over twice that in the money belt.

  “Say I could. What would that buy me? The coffee urns and a couple of counter stools? Jesus, besides the building you own the structure, the real estate.”

  Andy held up a hand to stop him. “I been talking to my accountant,” he said, “and it works. You’ll pay me out of your receipts. Twenty-five hundred down, and the rest according to a formula. I forget how many years you’ll be paying me off, but in the meantime you’ll be making a decent living, and at the end of the rainbow it’s all yours, free and clear.”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Now what you want to do is think about it, Bill. It’s not like I want to go home and start packing. I figure I want one more Montana winter so I don’t forget what they’re like, so we got plenty of time for you to decide and for the accountant to work out the details and the lawyer to put the paperwork together. But what I’d love to do is shake your hand sometime in May or June, and once that’s done, you’re the owner and proprietor of Kalamata.”

  “It’s a lot to think about.”

  “Of course it is—or it’s a no-brainer, depending how you look at it. Incidentally, Kalamata. No reason you can’t change the name to something you like.”

  “What would I change it to?”

  “Well, half the town calls it the Calamity. You could change the sign and make it official.”

  “What everybody calls it,” he said, “is Andy’s.”

  “And they’ll keep on calling it that for the first year or two, and then it’ll be Bill’s and pretty soon not one person in ten’ll remember it was ever anything else. Jesus, I’m getting choked up, and it’s a fucking diner is all it is. A diner I’ll be glad to walk away from, and the day you cooked that first omelet, what came into my head is maybe this is the guy who’ll take the place off my hands. So you think about it, okay?”

  He thought about it off and on for three days. Then he told Carlene.

  They were on her couch eating pizza in front of her TV, and she just listened while he recounted Andy Page’s offer. She was very good at listening, at giving a person room to talk, and that was one of the things he particularly appreciated about her.

  When he finished, she remained silent for a moment, and then what she said surprised him. She asked him if he’d change the name.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you think I should?”

  “I guess that depends on how much you’d change the place itself.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Would you redecorate? Redo the menu?”

  “A coat of paint wouldn’t hurt, but there’s no rush, and it wont look that different afterward, just a little less shopworn. The menu, well, I’ve been making changes now and then, and I’d keep tweaking it, you know? I could take a couple of the Greek dishes off the menu. Pastitsio, most customers don’t know what it is. Change it up and call it lasagna, and I bet it’d move faster.”

  He told her some more of his ideas. She said, “You’re excited about it.”

  “A little.”

  “And something else. What’s holding you back?”

  “Well, what do I know about running a restaurant?”

  “A lot, I’d say.”

  “About cooking, and selling food. What do I know about being a boss?”

  “You’ve watched
Andy.”

  And a lot of other men over a lot of years. “You can only learn so much by watching,” he said. “Hiring and firing, dealing with suppliers. It could be a headache.”

  “I guess it could.”

  “He was going nuts before I showed up. I could run the place the way he did, with just Francie and Helen, but I’d be working myself to death unless I found somebody.”

  “You’d put a sign in the window,” she said, “and some handsome stranger would take one look at it and hop off the bus.”

  “Yeah, there you go. And I’d have to hope he spotted some equivalent of a hot librarian and decided to stick around. Andy makes decent money, but that’s no guarantee that I would. I could go broke.”

  “And if you did?”

  “I’d give the place back to him and get on the next bus.”

  “Or you could give the place back to him,” she said, “and not get on the bus. But first you’d have to go broke, and I don’t think that would happen. You’re too good at what you do.”

  And a little later he said, “You know, maybe I’ll hit the library tomorrow. Check out something on restaurant management.”

  He showed up midmorning, browsed the business section and the food section, carried a couple of books over to a table, sat down, and read. At one point he realized nothing he read was registering. The words just passed in front of his eyes and trailed off into the distance.

  He reshelved the books. You were supposed to leave them, on the premise that you couldn’t be trusted to put them back in the right place, but he remembered where they’d come from and managed to put them where they belonged.

  Went over to the computers. All four were unattended, and he sat down all by himself and logged on, did a little idle surfing. Checked out a few recipes for lasagna, which seemed to be a dish with infinite variations and no ironclad requirement besides big flat noodles, and for all he knew even that was negotiable.

  Could be interesting. Try different recipes, find the one he liked the best, then play with the proportions and the seasoning until it was just the way he wanted it.

  Other dishes he could experiment with as well, menu staples he’d learned to make the way Andy made them, but if it was his diner, he could make his own rules.

  Thought about William Jackson and Galbraith, North Dakota. But nothing had happened, he reminded himself. He’d left town, had felt the hot breath of the hound of hell on his neck even as the bus took him away from there, but it was all unnecessary, wasn’t it?

  If he thought about it clinically, it was just a fear, one that came to him automatically when drink left him with holes in his memory. If there was a span of time unaccounted for, he could only imagine the worst. He must have done something wrong, something unspeakable. Otherwise, why would his memory insist on blocking it out?

  And so he’d feared the worst, and acted accordingly. Pure unreasoning fear, based on nothing.

  He drew a breath, held it for a moment.

  And then he did something he hadn’t done in longer than he could remember. Not since he got to Cross Creek, not once in Galbraith, nor in the town before Galbraith, or the one before that.

  He called up Google, keyed “Walter Hradcany” into the search box. Hit Enter.

  And the entries popped up, even after all the years. There was a slew of them, mostly in West Texas, but some more recent ones popped up on websites devoted to unsolved crimes. The stories they told differed in details, but not in their essentials. A young woman named Pamilla Thurston had been found strangled to death in the house trailer she had previously shared with her estranged husband. She’d been dead for forty-eight to seventy-two hours before her body was found.

  Inevitably, suspicion centered upon the husband, but he held up under questioning, and so did his alibi. Pamilla had last been seen at a roadhouse just outside the town limits of Plainview, no more than two miles from her residence. She had been a regular patron, especially since her husband had moved out, and left with one man or another more often than not.

  It was hard to determine which night had been her last, and hard for anyone to recall with certainty who’d been her companion on either of the possible final nights. Several names came up, and several men had the challenging task of proving that they hadn’t gone home with Pamilla. But one man whose name came up was a short-order cook named Walter Hradcany. No one remembered seeing him leave the roadhouse with Pamilla, but two people recalled he’d been talking with her, so the Hale County cops went looking for him.

  And found out he’d disappeared. One day he was there in Plainview and the next day he was gone. He was supposed to work the early shift at Grider’s Family Restaurant, but he never showed and never called in. He’d been one of the permanent guests at a budget motel, paying by the week, and he’d left clothes in the dresser and toilet articles in the bathroom, and his car was still parked in front of his unit. It seemed possible that he was dead himself, murdered by the same person who’d killed Pamilla. Or he might have died by his own hand, wandered off into the middle of somebody’s wheat field and shot himself.

  His body never turned up. And the DNA they got from the hairs in his comb matched what they found under Pamilla’s fingernails. So as far as local law enforcement was concerned, Walter Hradcany was more than a person of interest. They had enough on him to close the case, but they couldn’t clear it, because they never turned up a trace of him.

  A distinctive name, Walter Hradcany.

  There had to be a way to clear the computer’s history, and he looked for it until he found it. He erased everything for the past two days, and then he built up a little fresh history, searching once more for recipes and restaurant management tips.

  Not that the Walter Hradcany search could be entirely expunged. He’d seen enough TV to know that anything you did on a computer left a spoor that lingered forever. On the hard drive, in Google’s infinite files, or in some metadata base in Washington.

  But they’d have to be looking hard to find it, and they’d need a reason, and they didn’t have one. And he didn’t intend to give them one, either.

  The next day he opened up at Kalamata and served a lot of breakfasts. Around eleven he almost said something to Andy, but he let it go until the middle of the afternoon.

  Then he said, “Well, I thought it over, and I could just as easy have answered you on the spot. It’s a wonderful offer and I’d have to be crazy to say no to it. Only bad thing about it is I’ll miss working alongside of you.”

  “And the only problem you’ll have is finding a fry cook as good as the one I found. I’ll get my guy to put something on paper, but that’s just the formalities. Far as I’m concerned, we got ourselves a deal.”

  He spent the rest of his shift thinking of the computer search, thinking about Plainview, Texas. Out in the Panhandle, and the name fit; the only view you had out there was a view of the Plains.

  Nice enough town.

  Pamilla Thurston. He’d never known her last name, or the unusual way she spelled her first name. Still didn’t have a clue how she’d pronounced it, same as if it was Pamela or to rhyme, sort of, with vanilla.

  Pam, that’s what people called her.

  He couldn’t really remember what she looked like. When he tried to picture her, the image that came to him was a blend of photographs he’d seen in the newspaper.

  So what did he remember?

  Talking to her, buying her a drink. He’d been wearing a string tie—well, it was West Texas, it was a cowboy bar. And she’d stepped in close and snugged up the turquoise slide, letting her body lean a little against his, giving him a noseful of her perfume.

  That was all he remembered.

  Until he woke up in his motel room, all his clothes on, including his boots. Sprawled on the bed, his feet trailing on the floor.

  Nothing in his memory after she’d tightened his tie. Nothing in his head but the sure knowledge that something bad had happened.

  He was on a northbound bus, and hal
fway to Lubbock he started to wonder if he’d lost his mind. Wake up with a bad feeling and skip town like a shot? Leave everything behind, even the car that would have been a lot more comfortable than the damn bus? All that because he was hungover bad enough to think something must have happened?

  That was a few minutes before he was aware of the soreness in his forearms. Noticed the blood that had seeped through his shirtsleeves, rolled up the sleeves and saw the scratches.

  It wasn’t until the following evening that he saw Carlene. He’d expected to tell her of his decision, but somehow kept letting the opportunity go by. They went to a movie, and his mind kept wandering from the story, rehearsing a conversation in his head. Then, by the time the film was over, he’d decided to let it ride.

  But he didn’t want her to hear it from someone else first, and news got around in Cross Creek. A day or two later he was looking for a way to ease into the subject, when she made it easy for him by asking if he’d decided yet.

  “I think I probably decided the minute Andy popped the question,” he said. “He called it a no-brainer, and he was right.”

  “Still, it’s a big step. I’d say you were wise to take time to think it over. Well, congratulations, Mr. Restauranteur.”

  “Right. Next thing you know they’ll give me a TV show, like what’s his name.”

  “Emeril?”

  “I was thinking of that guy who goes around the world eating bugs and worms.”

  “Anthony Bourdain. We’ve got several of his books in the library.”

  “Well, if I ever need to know how to cook a cockroach…”

  “You’ll know where to look. Honey, we should celebrate. This time I’ll take you out to dinner. Tomorrow night?”

  “Sure,” he said. “That’d be great.”

  Their lovemaking was practiced but intense, and even as he took his pleasure he felt a wave of sadness roll in on him.

  When her breathing slowed, he slipped out of bed and put his clothes on. He drove home, left his car in his spot at the diner, and walked on home.