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

They weren’t the happy, laughing eyes she had first seen.

He had her wet clothes and sneakers in his hands.

“Mind telling me what the hell is going on here?” he had asked, his voice low and even.

She wiped a drop of water off her nose. “Oh, Christ, I was taking a run and then the skies opened up, drenching me, and you wouldn’t believe those jerk drivers who won’t even make an effort to dodge the puddles and—”

Now she was talking to his back. He was out in the dining room and she had followed him, and he dropped her sneakers and clothes on the floor and went to the table and with a sudden motion that froze her he shot out with an arm and swept the mail off the table and onto the floor.

“Look at that!” he had demanded. “Look at that! I come home from a trip, trying to keep my company afloat, trying to keep us afloat, Elaine, and what the hell do I see? Hunh? Your wet clothes, your wet sneakers, on the carpet and floor that I paid for, and the day’s mail... soaking in a heap on the dining room table!”

Now the eyes were really scaring her, and she felt herself unexpectedly take a step back, and now she could smell the booze on his breath, too early to be drinking, part of her thought, and she had said, “Casey, please, take it easy, it’s not that big a—”

And then he had punched her.

So where had the morning gone? She wasn’t sure. She went into her office and spent some time on the Internet, and then before she knew it, it was a quarter past ten. Time to go back to the Have a Seat diner. She looked at the damn screen. For a while, her inbox for her e-mail had been stuffed with messages from old friends at the Journal and other places, inquiries on how she was doing, how the book was coming along, and after a while, she found it tiring to reply, and had stopped. And then the messages had dribbled away. And of course, she found it so much easier to stay at home, playing with the computer, with the Internet, than to try to make new friends in Montcalm.

She went out to the car, purse over her arm, ready for the rest of the morning.

Time to be a journalist again, and despite herself, she felt a little flicker of hope.

A day after Casey had punched her, she had come out of the bedroom, where she had barricaded herself for the previous twenty-four hours. For the longest time, she had looked at the phone, at the receiver, and wondered why she couldn’t pick it up. Why she was so weak. To pick up the phone, make the phone call...

She had been assaulted.

She was a victim.

Her husband had struck her...

And then... well, then what?

The local cops would come by, and who knew what kind of law-enforcement professionalism they had. Would they take her seriously? Or would they laugh it off, take Casey’s side? And suppose they arrested him, what then? She’d have to move out... and move out where? With a thin bank account, she could take refuge in a motel for a while... and then what?

To somebody’s house in Montcalm? Please. She had a few passing acquaintances, but no one she could call a friend.

Back to New York? To tell her friends what a loser she had become? Not, not likely.

To Mother? Impossible. She couldn’t dream of spending a day with Mother, not to mention having to tell her what had happened with Casey, for she would take great pride and pleasure in saying I told you so, I told you so, I told you so, in so many different ways and styles.

A battered-women’s shelter, or whatever passed as a shelter in this remote part of the world? She, a journalist with a master’s degree from Columbia, trying to explain to the local yokels how it came to be that she needed their help?

So the phone had remained untouched. And she had stayed. And apologies were eventually made, promises as well, to never do that ever again, and that had been fine, for another few months or so, until he had punched her again, when dinner had been late.

Elaine parked the Volvo in the lot of the Have a Seat, pleased to see that the lot was now nearly empty. She grabbed her notebook and the file folder, went out into the still-cool morning air, and then went into the diner.

My, what a difference. Just a handful of people, hardly any noise at all, and Jason Lovell was leaning over the counter talking to a woman mail carrier, taking a coffee break, no doubt, but when he saw her come in, he stood up, grinning.

“Sorry, Stacy,” he said. “I’ve got an appointment.”

He went to one of the coffee machines, drew a mug of coffee for himself, turned, and unlike the waitress earlier that morning, said, “Coffee? Or something else?”

“How about some juice?”

“Sure. Orange, grapefruit, or cranberry?”

“Orange would be nice.”

“You got it.”

He deftly drew a glass of orange juice, and carrying the juice and the coffee mug in his big hands, he took her back to the same booth from the morning, at the very end of the row, and only big enough for two people. She sat down and placed the file folder and her reporter’s notebook on the table, took a breath, felt her legs quivering. Amazing. All the people she had interviewed over the years, and now she felt like an undergrad, reporting for the first time for her college newspaper. She took a breath, and—

He noticed.

Cocked his head a bit. “You okay? Can I get you something else?”

Damn, she thought, he’s good. Very good. Be careful, hon, be very careful of him. This isn’t some investment banker you’re interviewing, or some Silicon Valley geek who’s never seen a naked breast in his entire short life.

“No, I’m fine,” she lied. “And I appreciate you giving me the time this morning.”

He shrugged. “Not a problem. Just don’t take too much time, you know? The lunch crowd starts streaming in in just under an hour.”

Elaine flipped open her reporter’s notebook. “I’ll do my best.”

“So, before we start, mind telling me again how you decided to do a story on me?”

She smiled, and this time, at least, she was telling the truth. “I thought you and the diner would make for an interesting story.”

And maybe it was kismet, karma, or some other ordering of the cosmos that began with the letter k, but one day, cruising through her e-mail account, there was an invite, an honest-to-God invite, from someone she had known at the Journal, an assistant editor named Winslow, and the message was brief and to the point: He had gone off to a regional magazine in New England, needed some human-interest stories, knew she was in the wilds of upstate New Hampshire. Would she be interested in doing an article, five thousand words max, about some local feature, maybe a coffee shop or something, one of those stories about crusty New Englanders that the East and West Coast elites lap up and love so much?

When she had read the note, her very first thought was to turn it down. Damn it, she was trying to work on a novel, do something different, and—

Well. How was it working, then? How much had she accomplished?

So far, well, nothing. The novel was more than just dead in the water, it was sinking with no hope of survival.

But a freelance nonfiction piece... she had been amazed that the thought of doing a story about a diner or something had kindled that little spark of creativity that she thought had been snuffed out and drowned by her new life in Montcalm, and before she changed her mind, she had said yes.

Yes, oh God, yes.

Elaine said, “So, how long have you been here, Mr. Lovell?”

He grinned. “Please, call me Jason. And I’ve been here four years.”

“And what did you do before you came to the diner?”

“Worked in the government for a while, put in my thirty — pretty weird, hunh, spending thirty years in one place? — and then decided to cash out and come back up here. My parents had a summer place nearby and I had some great memories of the place when I was a kid, so I knew I’d retire here. And retire I did. But then I found out after a year that twelve months of fishing, canoeing, and goofing off was hard for the soul. I needed to keep busy... and when the diner came up for sale, I bought it and there you go.”