“Oui. The magazine is paying for my trip. I’ve been on my own, but my rental car is out of, what do you say, whack? I’m thinking of joining this group for some of their activities, if they’ll allow me.” As he smiled his way around the table, I had no doubt that he’d be welcome, and I could tell he had none either.
“You can bunk with us,” said a young woman in a down vest, eliciting giggles from her companions.
Annie cleared her throat. We’d been ignoring her. But, all things considered, she was doing very well, especially in the face of the competition in the booth. I hoped she wouldn’t decide to join the tour herself, though I couldn’t have said why I cared. “We can certainly accommodate you until Max can fix your car,” she said. “If you decide not to join the tour.”
I was glad to hear Victor call out an order before I had a chance to ask who “we” might be.
As usual, once everyone was served a main course, chewing and swallowing took over. Talking and requests from patrons died down. I was about to check on Trooper and Chris, then remembered an important factor: the regulars, who wouldn’t be expecting their preferred stools or booths to be occupied. In my excitement over a full house, I’d forgotten them.
I had a stark reminder when two semis pulled off the road and into my parking lot at almost the same time. Moe and Jack had arrived, minus Manny this evening. I couldn’t remember when I learned that those weren’t the real names of the three truckers who came around as often as anyone who lived in town. I had to wrap my brain around the reality that there really was a famous trio with those names. They were the advertising icons for a company of automotive service centers dating back a century and still thriving. Not quite as much of a myth breaker as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but close.
My particular Manny, Moe, and Jack were Arnold, Steve, and Dave, in that order, and their truck cabs were blue, green, and red, in that order. There was definitely not the same lyrical quality to their real names as the car guys could boast. These were truckers with different companies who often traveled together. I decided I’d better head off Moe and Jack before they invoked a phrase or two that was not family friendly.
First, however, I had to pave the way for an idea I hoped they’d buy into. I made a quick trip to the kitchen, pulled Nina aside, and gave her a new rush job, then rushed myself out to greet the two truckers as they filed in.
“No Manny tonight?” I asked, as if that were the reason there wasn’t an available booth nor three or even two empty stools together.
“He’s been running late all day,” Moe, aka Steve Carter, said, talking around a toothpick. “But, hey”—he switched the toothpick to the other side of his mouth—“what’s happening here?”
Moe had his hands on his hips. I had the feeling he was ready to do battle, perhaps arm-wrestle over a spot.
I leaned in to diesel-scented jackets. “Tour bus,” I said in a quiet voice. “But follow me. I have something special for you.”
I walked toward the kitchen slowly, to give Nina as much time as possible to carry out my plan. When I saw what she’d been able to do in a matter of minutes, I mentally raised her salary. Earlier, I’d heard her explaining the subjects of the framed photographs and sketches on the walls to a family of four. Most of the photos, like the ones of Vitus Bering, the Danish explorer who was the discoverer of Alaska, were older than I was. I remembered as a kid memorizing scripts for each photo and it seemed that Nina had done the same. I could see that she had a future in the diner business.
Next to the wide metal table in the kitchen was a smaller wooden one we used for sides or temporary storage. Nina had found a tablecloth, probably left over from an office party of yore. She’d set it with three plates, glasses, a crystal-like pitcher of water, and a carafe of hot coffee. I could have sworn she’d also combed her hair. Her smile was wide and welcoming, as was that of her brother, who stood proudly behind her, ready to cook up dinners before their eyes.
I crossed my fingers behind my back to ward off the evil spirits of inspectors who might call this an infraction of a diner zoning rule, seating customers in the kitchen. Desperate circumstances call for desperate measures, I thought as I placed my hand over my heart to complete the ritual.
“We figured this would be more comfortable for you, what with that crowd and all.” I tipped my head toward the main dining area. The only dining area, usually. I wasn’t as embarrassed as I should have been with such deception, but then, I did always try to put the customers’ needs first. Mom would have been so proud, maybe even enough to erase my lack of civility with Oliver earlier in the day. I doubted he would have accepted this creative seating arrangement. Though I did miss him, I could see that there were advantages to his absence.
I stayed to chat with the flannel-clad drivers (Nina had hung up their jackets—Ritz-Carlton-style service) until their special meatloaf orders were ready. She placed their platters in front of them with a flourish.
Moe lowered his face to his plate and took a noisy whiff. “Moose, right?” he asked.
Victor nodded and placed a bottle of ketchup on the table, something Oliver would never acquiesce to. It wasn’t long before Manny, aka Arnold Quinlan, the stockiest of the trio, as well as the oldest and most ready to retire, came in the front door. He was more disheveled than usual, looking like he’d had a bad day. Nina escorted him back to where his friends were ready to extol the special service this evening.
“Where’s Oliver tonight?” Manny asked.
“Night off,” Victor said. “But the same great mooseloaf,” he said.
More meatloaf, more ketchup, and I excused myself to return to the main area to help Annie clear the plates and take dessert orders.
Another ordinary evening at the diner.
It always amazed me how many people called a bear claw dessert rather than a breakfast pastry. They would qualify even more as a dessert if they had a layer of chocolate in their core, I mused.
I was ready to approach the last booth and visit with—i.e., query—Trooper and Chris. Imagine my surprise when I looked back and found not my two so-called friends, but a new crew of parka-clad millennials, three of them on each side of the booth, also equipped with Denali literature. More strays, like Pierre, driving on their own, I guessed.
Trooper and Chris must have used their booth as a meeting place, then once again escaped through the back door. I saw that they’d had coffee only. Too bad they didn’t have the courtesy to leave when they saw that Moe and Jack needed a place to sit. Not that I was peeved with them. They had overpaid, after all, for coffee they’d hardly touched.
* * *
* * *
The tour leader’s second-in-command announced the end of dinner and told everyone to settle up at the register and climb aboard the waiting vehicle. He’d been sitting on a stool flirting with Nina for a lot of the time and must have decided to call it quits when Nina went home with her brother in what we called “the oldest jalopy in Elkview.”
Annie had a different plan for Pierre, having offered to drive him to the inn in her pickup. I told her yes, of course she could leave, since this wasn’t her place of employment in the first place, and, by the way, she wasn’t getting paid, except in food and drink.
“I’m taking him up on his suggestion of a nightcap,” she whispered to me. “He has photos of this ox where it’s digging a hole to put some food in. Or something. I’m sort of interested in those facts”—she waved her hand in the air as if brushing off fleas—“but I’m hoping he’ll tell me more about his place in the Alps and all.”
I didn’t need to know the “and all,” or anything else the nightcap might bring about, though I knew I’d eventually hear details whether I asked for them or not. Annie had been through a series of unpleasant breakups, though none as recently as I could claim, and none where she had to return a ring.
I waved as Annie and Pierre left. She was
the most easygoing person I knew, and I hoped she’d find someone who would appreciate her, no matter what country he lived in.
* * *
* * *
Not for the first time, the promise of a big storm didn’t materialize, at least not by Alaska standards. The freezing rain had been reduced to mere snow flurries that hardly stuck to the ground. I was especially happy for the eager travelers who’d marked up their brochures and needed safe driving to make their trip pleasurable. The tourists I’d entertained this evening still had miles to go before they hit their destination. The bus would make a few stops, each one with spectacular river and mountain views and wildlife.
I still had a lot of baking ahead of me. Annie had ordered double digits of bear claws for those who chose to stay at the main house and enjoy a continental breakfast in the morning. In spite of that, I decided I could afford a nap.
As soon as the place cleared out, I put a sign on the door that said, in so many words, wake me up if you really, really need anything. The sign was designed by a friend of Mom’s and thus had the seal of approval—Mom might take a nap now and then, but I couldn’t remember a time when she’d actually closed the diner. She hired a string of students from the local community college who were only too happy to work the graveyard shift, serving a few stragglers while having most of the time available for doing their homework or surfing the net, and getting paid for it. I was happy for the mutual benefits.
I checked the schedule and noted that Tammy and Bert were due at one a.m. Perfect. Tammy was one of the few in the crew who knew how to bake. I could get her started on the bear claws and go home for a few hours. I hoped she didn’t have a term paper due.
I rolled out the most comfortable chair in the kitchen, an old office chair that had seen better days but seemed perfectly contoured to my long torso. I plugged my phone into its charger and turned the chair so that my back was to the blinking diner sign—the red neon BEAR CLAW DINER in vertical array. Once I was comfortable, I hit the Benny app. He was fast asleep on a pile of blankets, including one king-size quilt, on a living room chair, his paws wrapped around his face, his feet tucked under him.
I told him I was sorry I hadn’t gotten home since early afternoon and promised to head back as soon as I set Tammy up in the kitchen. I was asleep before I could hear his answer, though I thought I saw his tail twitch in approval.
* * *
* * *
At first I thought I was dreaming. Thunder? Loud music from a pickup? More like insistent banging on the front door of the diner. I shook my head awake, turned my chair around, and saw the source of the noise. Trooper Graham. He stood so the gold stripe down the length of his pant leg caught a reflection from our red sign, resulting in a strange orange glow. It wasn’t unusual for him to show up at this hour, but he rarely woke me unless he was desperate for a cup of coffee and a bear claw, or simply bored. I regretted that there’d be no pastry tonight. The tourists had cleaned me out. Maybe he’d be satisfied with another corn muffin.
I hoisted myself from my pseudo-bed and made my way to the door.
“I should have saved you a bear claw,” I told the trooper once he was over the threshold.
“Not here for that.” His somber voice cued me to his grim face, and I remembered seeing the same look when he and Chris had come by during the tourist rush.
“What’s up?” What I wanted to ask: What was that page that had you and Chris rushing out of here all about?
He motioned me to the first booth. “Have a seat.”
Uh-oh.
I slid in across from Trooper, wishing I’d made a fresh pot of coffee, a touch of panic setting in. Was he bringing me bad news? Mom and Dad were thousands of miles away, having a good time, as of three o’clock this afternoon. Had things changed? Had they left the trooper’s number as an emergency contact? Not likely, but I had no idea what international protocol might be. I had no other relatives to worry about. And I was between boyfriends, I thought, optimistically. Was Annie in trouble? Had that Frenchman . . . ? Was it Benny? My house? I lived only a stone’s throw away; if my home had burned to the ground, I would have heard fire engines or even seen the flames.
Who or what else could bring about this serious turn? It dawned on me. I leaned forward, elbows and arms on the table.
“Oliver?”
“Why would you think that?” Trooper took out his notebook.
I gulped. “He’s been gone all day.” I looked at my watch. Twelve forty. “Actually, almost twelve hours. Was there an accident? The roads are—”
“No accident.”
I frowned. “What, then?”
“Murder.”
I pressed my back against the booth, as if I could sink into it and end up in another reality, one where Oliver was at the door of the Bear Claw, ready to cook, ready to bark about how someone had left his kitchen a mess, someone had served mustard, someone had added salt to his perfect recipe.
“How?” I thought I said, but my voice seemed to be echoing through my body.
“Were you here all day, Charlie?”
“Yes, with Oliver gone, I had to stay to be sure—”
“You didn’t leave the diner all day?” he asked, scribbling something in his notebook.
“No, I—”
“Not between, say, one and two?”
I paused. “Oh, right. I stopped off at home to see Benny for a few minutes.”
I strained to see what he was writing.
Trooper closed his notebook, slapped it on the palm of his hand, and slid out of the booth.
He took a long, loud breath as he walked away. “Just, don’t leave town, okay, Charlie?” he called over his shoulder.
“Where would I go? Why—”
But the door closed behind him.
I was left with more questions than before he arrived, the biggest one being: Why was the trooper, who’d known me since I was a kid, treating me like I was a . . . I could hardly bring myself to finish the thought . . . a murderer?
* * *
* * *
There was no going back to sleep. I could either sit and stare at the Big Dipper on the state flag draped on the wall, or do something useful. Like search the net for information that wasn’t forthcoming from my alleged friend Trooper Graham.
My first efforts were futile. Oliver Whitestone’s death—murder—was apparently too recent or too unimportant to make my local news feed or any search engine. A shudder ran through me, traveling from my toes to my head as I tried to absorb the reality that a person I knew well was gone. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. I’d been relatively lucky in that I’d never lost anyone close to me, even from natural causes, let alone through violence. I was a baby when my grandparents died, and my one deceased aunt, my father’s sister, lived most her life and all of mine in Florida.
I went back and sat on the chair I’d been napping on. My gaze fell on the same booths, the same stools, the same photos of our beautiful state—whale sighting in the Bering Sea; the forget-me-not, our state flower; glaciers on the majestic Denali, the tallest peak in North America, at more than twenty thousand feet. All were familiar, except now everything had changed and the photos seemed blurry and out of whack. Askew on the wall, or in my head? I looked toward the through-window to the kitchen, my eyes swelling with tears.
One thing I knew—I needed to leave the Bear Claw, where Oliver’s shadow hovered everywhere, sometimes chiding me for wanting to change his menu, other times laughing with me when I told him a Benny story, like the time Benny’s day-long toilet-flushing antics had run up my water bill. One thing for sure now, I needed to get home to Benny, wake him up if I had to, talk to him.
I nearly kissed Tammy when she arrived about ten minutes early. She looked as cool in leggings as anyone over six years old could, with a bright green tunic top that might have taken first prize in las
t week’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. I remembered how Oliver would claim to be five percent Irish so he could take the day off and head south to Soldotna for the parade and a pub spree.
Was everything from now on, even a common color, going to remind me of Oliver?
As I’d waited for Tammy, I’d wrestled with whether to tell her about Oliver’s murder. They seldom crossed paths in the Bear Claw, and I didn’t see the point of concerning her for no reason.
I needn’t have given it a second thought.
“Horrible thing, huh, Charlie?” Tammy said. She took a clean apron from the kitchen closet and tied it around her waist.
“How did you hear?”
“My boyfriend—he drove me here tonight—he has the police channel. I couldn’t believe it. Do you know what happened?”
“What did they say on the radio?”
“Not much. You know how they say everything in code.” Tammy shrugged. “Just that his body was found outside of town and they had no witnesses. Oh, and they gave a number to call if you have a tip, yada yada.”
I couldn’t fault Tammy’s casual approach to Oliver’s violent death. She hardly knew him, except for notes he would leave her. Reprimands for leaving the oil uncapped or failing to clean the grill to his standards or putting her notebooks on surfaces in contact with food.
I didn’t trust myself to entertain murder theories with Tammy, or any human at the moment. I needed my tabby. I was saved from making the choice when a family of four that included two preteen boys came through the door. Usually when folks stopped in at this hour, they were looking for a restroom and a warm place to sit for a while. Tammy hopped to it and suggested hot chocolate for the boys.
When Bert arrived a few minutes later, I felt I could leave the diner in enough good hands. The two college students got along well and would work together to fill Annie’s bear claw order. While they dealt with the recently arrived nuclear family, I wrote a detailed note to whip up a batch of four dozen bear claws, besides the inventory for the usual breakfast crowd. “Call if you have any problems,” I added.
Mousse and Murder Page 3
