NaNo2008
Chapter One – Gillespies
The funny thing about the east wall of the diner was the shadow that was permanently cast there. It was a bit grease and grime covered, as walls of eating establishments tend to get after years of neglect. However, there was more to this particular stain than met the eye. For starters, it had a chalk line drawn around it.
The line was actually painted there about 10 years prior, as a barrier to protect the grimy shadow from the harm of being washed away or painted over. The shadow, which was really more of a greasy stain, ironically, was the final one cast by the founding proprietor of Gillespies Diner, and had occurred some thirty years past.
The town of Newton was small enough that none of the locals needed explanation of the mysterious smear of grease on the wall. Every once in awhile, someone new would roll into town and, small burgh that it was, would end up walking through the swinging doors of Gillespies in search of a hot meal.
It was a crisp, chilly fall day when the most surprising of such events transpired. A man no one in the town had ever seen before stepped out of a yellow cab, tipping his bowler hat to the driver as he handed over his payment.
As the door to the cab swung shut, nosy Mrs. Reynolds from the video store had already grabbed the phone and started dialing, to let Mrs. Swanson from the local grocery store know a stranger was in town. By the time the man had set foot in the diner, five more people across town knew of his arrival. Newton didn’t have cable TV, being as isolated as it was, and so far into the hills, so the denizens had to make their own entertainment.
As the stranger looked around the diner, taking in its strange sights for the first time, Mrs. Pointer, the blind woman who lived on a farm half a mile away, was listening to her best friend, Mrs. Tibbits, gush about the handsome businessman with the scruffy beard and the bowler hat. It was the hat that got people talking the most, because, though he was dressed in a fine business suit and tie, the hat was so preposterously out of place with the rest of his outfit. It was worn, and a bit grimy and seemed to be more be-fitting to one of the bums who slept next to the dumpster by the grocer’s, than to a well kept man of the business world.
Mrs. Pointer proposed that perhaps he was a bum, had stolen the suit from a real business man and was pretending to be someone he wasn’t. Her best friend thought she was nuts, he was clearly just a man with a lucky hat, who was probably down on his luck and needing all the charms he could get. Mrs. Reynolds maintained that he was clearly a psycho who had escaped from the loony bin over in New Castle, and he stole the hat from a bum, and the suit from a contract attorney in Bingham, which was the town between New Castle and Newton. Only a contract attorney would think a purple tie was acceptable lawyering attire, she continued, all-knowingly.
Not one person agreed in their reasoning for how out of place it seemed, but they did agree on one thing: he was obviously a man on a mission, and a man with something to hide. The speculation meter was off the charts on this one, and Ann Parsons at the local science lab was the first to notice that something was not right with the balance of the town. As she hung up the phone with Mrs. Reynolds, she immediately checked all her gauges. This one man had upset the balance enough for twenty, like the time the tour bus broke down just outside of town, and all the passengers hiked up to the diner to get a bite to eat while they waited on Gus Jenkins, the town’s mechanic, to sort her out and get her back on the road. Ann quickly got on the phone with her superior, Professor Dobkins, who dismissed her claims as mere seismic anomaly, which he himself had predicted would be hitting the town right about now, or so he projected in a paper he had published in Mad Scientist Bi-Monthly, some three years ago.
Back at Gillespies Diner, Sally Kimball was filing her nails, bored behind the counter. She had just come on shift and was waiting for Jill Denham to hurry up and cash out so she could start fresh at the tables. At the diner, boredom was circumvented by reserving a certain seat for people new to town. So the moment the stranger walked into the diner, even though it was practically brimming over with the lunchtime crowd of customers, and had a queue of folks waiting on the benches outside, he was still seated immediately. Had he not had a plethora of important things looming in his mind, he might have taken notice of said oddity, but his brain was awash with far too many things to notice these certain subtleties of every day life.
As the stranger sat there, debating over the many delicious choices on the menu, the staff of Gillespies quickly made their bets as to how long before the man asked Sally, who had just pulled the short straw and scored the stranger’s table, what the deal was with the shadow on the wall.
Sally made her first pass of the man’s table, poured him a fresh cup of coffee and asked him, “What can we get you today, sir?”
“What’s the special?” He asked, peering up at her.
They always asked that. Once the staff figured that out, about ten strangers in, they stopped placing bets on the “what’s the special” wager.
“Pear and bacon tart, chef’s new invention of the week,” Sally replied, not missing a beat.
The man furrowed his brow in what Sally assumed was obvious contemplation of the flavor profile. She was studying to be a chef at the culinary school in Bingham, so she knew these things.
“I’ll just take the ham and swiss platter, and a slice of that special pie,” he concluded, curtly handing her the menu, dismissively.
He folded his hands on the table, like a small child in prayer, and his gaze fell on the wall in front of him. He frowned and looked at his hands, a pose he held until his food arrived.
The staff exchanged nervous glances. Something was different about this stranger, something dark and foreboding when Sally looked sweetly into his eyes. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she felt like she’d seen him somewhere before.
She had a sneaking suspicion as she watched him finish his meal in silence, his focus on his meal only. But she was going to be god-damned if the impossible happened on her watch. Never, in the thirty years of the shadow on the wall, had a stranger not asked his waitress about it. The betting all hinged on the timing of it.
She re-filled his coffee as he finished his sandwich and started on his pie.
“Pear and bacon,” he said, his mouth full of food. He swallowed hard. “Never would have thought to do that.”
“Oh, that,” Sally said, smiling brightly. “The pastry chef is a bit avant garde,” she replied.
She waited for him to reply, but instead, he shoveled more pie into his mouth. She took the cue not to push any further and stepped back.
Once he had finished his dessert, she did another sweep to re-fill his coffee and hand him the check, dawdling for a moment, waiting.
“Anything else I can get you sir?”
“You’ve already given me the check, so, no,” he replied curtly, removing a crisp twenty dollar bill from his wallet and thrusting it at her.
It was a rookie mistake, she had to admit, realizing her error too late. She took the money and when she came back to hand him the change, he had already snuck out of the diner.
She braced herself for the barrage of teasing that was sure to bellow forth from her co-workers. Instead, they all shook their heads and shrugged.
“Could have happened to any of us,” said Jill, who was usually the bitchiest of the diner gals, and truth be told, Sally’s nemesis.
“Something not quite right about that man,” old Mrs. Myers, the diner’s current owner, said, patting her on the back. “How about we give you the next one when you’re on shift, sweetie, to make it up to you?”
“Thanks, Mrs. Myers!” Sally said brightly, shaking off the gaze of the man from her mind. If only it was that simple to get him out of her head. She would dream about him that night, and it wouldn’t be the only time he entered her thoughts without permission.
As for the strange man, he walked quietly down the street. He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and smoothed it out on his thigh as he walked. He stopped, shielded his eyes from the sun, and examined the document.
He continued walking down the road, and out of sight of the staff and patrons of Gillespies, who were still whispering about him as his hand turned the doorknob of Talbot Investigations.
He pulled on the doorknob, but nothing happened, he rattled it, thinking maybe it was stuck, but it didn’t give. He looked up at the door, and noticed a sign that read “closed” in bright red mocking letters.
Also taped to the window was a crudely written sign. He read the message, and his head dropped. He stepped back and sat down on the curb, his large hands cradling his head, pulling down on his bowler hat as if he might disappear inside it, and he began to sob.
