Anna Leonard - The Hunted

Maybe even two, if she only had a salad for dinner itself.

An hour later, sweating and grinning, éclairs earned and her mood on a definite upswing, she locked the bike up outside the local diner and went inside.

“Morning, Miss Elizabeth,” the man behind the counter called out. “Coffee ‘n’ eggroll?”

“Please, yes, thank you, Ben.” The eggroll had been a joke since she was ten—it was exactly that, a hard roll with scrambled eggs inside. No bacon, no ham, nothing except egg, to which Beth would add a dose of hot sauce just before she ate it. The first time she had gone to a Chinese restaurant, the notion that there might be another kind of egg roll had completely floored her.

She sat at the counter, since there wasn’t anyone else in the diner except a trucker at one of the tables, staring into his coffee like it held the answer to everything. After dumping her bike helmet on the seat next to her, she propped her elbows up on the Formica counter and waited for the coffee and inevitable.

“Didja heah about the guy washed up on the beach?”

Glory not only made the best eggroll in the world, she also knew everything that happened in town, often before the people it was happening to knew. She should have been a reporter for the Times, not a short-order cook.

Beth looked at the square-shouldered woman, her gray curls pulled into a ponytail that should have looked ridiculous on a woman her age, but somehow worked. She and her husband, Ben, had owned the diner since before Beth was born, and she suspected they’d be here long after she had died. They were just so … solid. Like granite underfoot, only not so heavy, since neither Glory nor Ben were very large individuals. In fact, Ben was shorter than Beth was, and couldn’t weigh much more than she did, soaking wet, for all that he gave off a reassuring impression of solidity. When her parents had died, and there hadn’t been anyone else to take the teenage Elizabeth in, those two had stepped forward, fostering her until she could be on her own, so that she didn’t have to leave her home. She owed them a debt they refused to even acknowledge. The least she could do was indulge Glory’s love of gossip.

“I was there,” she told Glory. “On the beach last night when they found him.”

“Yes, but did you heah?”

Beth sighed. Obviously, there was more to the story, and Glory wasn’t going to be satisfied until she had the telling of it. “I need coffee before anything else,” she told the older woman, pretending that something inside her hadn’t done a weird flip at the mention of the stranger.

Suddenly, she wasn’t sure that she wanted more coffee after all. That flip feeling wasn’t good. Nothing that made her feel like her world was being turned upside down and roundabout like that could be any good.

Glory, unaware of Beth’s sudden mood change, was already pouring the black liquid into a thick white mug and pushing it across the counter into the younger woman’s unresisting hands.

“All right.” Beth sighed, her fingers curling around the mug despite herself. There wasn’t any graceful way to escape. “Spill all.”

“His name’s Dylan, he’s been checked out of the clinic already and Doc, as usual, refused to take any money for it. That man is going to run himself into the ground, he doesn’t watch it.”

The rant about Doc Alden was familiar territory, and Glory skipped over it to the new and interesting material. “The boy, Dylan, he was sailing, a boat called the Daughter of the Sea, all by himself although nobody seems to know out of what port. Boat’s gone now, obviously, not even flinders to be found.”

“Lucky guy,” Ben muttered, coming behind Glory with a menu for someone who had just come in, and Beth nodded in agreement. A boat that thoroughly destroyed, the captain didn’t usually survive.

“He’s taken a room at the Blue Anchor for don’t know how long. Paid in cash, too. Sold a nice piece of jewelry over at Rosen Jewelers to pay for it. Hasn’t called anyone since he’s been here, poor boy. Must not have any family. Can you imagine that—” Glory stopped, suddenly aware that Beth would be all too able to imagine that.

“And I’m a thoughtless idiot, but you knew that already. I’m sorry, baby. Here, have some more coffee and I’ll go make your eggroll.”

Beth couldn’t take offense, not from Glory. Despite the efforts of her friends, she had been alone for so long, sometimes she forgot what it was like to be part of even a small larger group. Sometimes. Most of the time it didn’t bother her.

Mostly.

“She forgot to tell you that he was single,” Ben said, sliding up to the counter and taking right over where his wife left off. “Or at least, no ring and not talking about a wife and kidlets.” He had a mug of coffee in his own hands, except that, unlike Beth, this was probably his sixth or seventh mug since the diner had opened at five that morning. Even when he was outside the diner, there was always a to-go cup of coffee somewhere near Ben.

“Probably because I’m not interested?” Beth offered, smiling despite herself.

Ben had known her since she was in the womb, and had been speaking his mind about her personal life since then. “Uh-huh. When was the last time you and Jake made the bed shake?”

“None of your damn business, you pervert,” she shot back, refusing to blush or blink.

“I rest my case.” Ben looked too damn pleased with himself for a guy who had just pointed out that her social life sucked. She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him. Ben was the only person she knew who could make her revert back to being a ten-year-old just by poking her.

“Here you go.” Glory returned with a platter of eggroll and a side of hash browns. “Benjamin, you leave the girl alone. You know better than to meddle.”

“He does?” That was news to Beth.

Glory knocked her husband affectionately on the shoulder. “You’ll come to your senses on your own schedule, or not at all. Nothing we can do to rush it along without making things worse. Now eat. If I know you, you haven’t eaten a thing since, oh, lunch yesterday?”

She had, actually, but in the aftermath of the storm and her dreams, she wasn’t sure if she could remember what, and Beth suspected Glory would say a meal you didn’t remember didn’t count.

She ate, and Ben and Glory both left her alone, disappearing back into the chrome-and-white depths of the diner’s kitchen.

Her own schedule? Schedule for what? On any other day the comment would have washed right over her, but today it stuck at her restlessness like a burr, and itched in a place she couldn’t quite reach. She and Jake might not have been setting the world on fire, but what did that have to do with a schedule?

And if Glory or Ben made one single comment about biological clocks ticking, she was going to clean their clocks. Of all the things she ever wanted in her life, gotten or not gotten, kids were not on the list. She wasn’t even much for pets, although her mother had fed stray cats in the neighborhood. They had all slipped away in the year after the accident; she had forgotten that, too. So much, she had made herself forget.

The eggroll satisfied her stomach, but the contentment she had earned slipped away, leaving her feeling irritable and restless all over again. What was here for her, really? Okay, the family house, and people who had known her since her mother went into the hospital to give birth, but … so what? Things that normally made her feel supported and secure now added to her irritation.

Maybe it was time, finally, to do something different. Maybe that was what this restlessness was about. Maybe. maybe she would paint the house pink. Or black. Black, with hot-pink trim.