Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

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.

To be a journalist on your own and with your own career seemed the finest thing possible, and then one night — or early morning, depending on your point of view — it had all changed, with a smile and an offer of a free drink, when Casey Riley had entered her life.

She listened as she waited for her breakfast as voices were raised, points were made, even a few arguments conducted at various places across the room. In a space of a few minutes she had heard about the dating habits of one of the local selectmen, two sons who were about to go to county lock-up for burglaries, a messy divorce, and a contractor from across the river in Vermont who liked to help lonely housewives with more than just leaky roofs.

There were lots of loud voices and laughs, and she felt so out of place. She stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee, took a sip, and, surprised, took another. Not bad... actually, pretty damn good for diner coffee. She had read once that making good diner coffee meant being a bear in cleaning out the urns and associated plumbing on a daily basis. So someone here was paying attention, and she knew who it was: the large man by the grill, shaved head and black goatee, wearing a tight black T-shirt, white apron tied snug about his jeans-enclosed waist. He looked to be about fifty or sixty, depending on the light, and in the midst of frying up bacon or sausage, or stirring up eggs, or cracking eggs over the grill, he worked hard to get the food out as quickly as possible.

But even with the flurry of motions in his arms and hands, he kept up a constant patter with the rest of the customers, and kept his eyes on the grill.

Sausage patties flipped over.

“That’s what you get from inviting out-of-town talent, I’ll tell ya.”

Two eggs cracked open, the whites and yokes sizzling on the grill.

“I don’t care if he sleeps with his cousin or his wife, so long as the tax rate doesn’t go up next year.”