Are You Haunted (part forty-four)

Are You Haunted

(part forty-four)

That smack of the arm, jogging past, like Alfin’s. Unmollified, Powell gave Tovey the lead, heard come back, “I can get that buggy down the hill for you. Better let me.”

He let his feet carry him, counseling himself against it.

And without surprise found Tovey at the wheel. Tovey had come out in his uncle’s truck, taken his uncle’s tools…

Probably ran him out of gas.

The mill gate zipped by. A few seconds later, the sign for route seven. Tovey rode the gas pedal, and Powell saw him ticketed for speeding, himself answering to Lloyd Guy—

Is that payin attention to how they do, puttin yourself in the middle and goin along? No it ain’t.

Not that, docking him the money and giving him his marching orders, Guy would ask.

Tovey glided to his favored spot, banged the driver’s door and lit off up Canal. I’m driving back now, Powell told himself, scooching sidewalk-wise, not taking the wheel.

What’s it got to do with me? he asked himself, crossing as the jaywalking Tovey darted inside the Crown café.

Watch him be sitting there ordered already. Watch me have a tab all of a sudden, that I can’t use because I already owe too much.

Powell pushed the door with a cautious hand silencing the blind. He looked up and saw Isobel at the counter, in the uniform of a waitress. Tovey timed a wink so Powell would catch it.

“Go burn us a couple burgers, Bel.”

“I’m not on the grill.”

“Make friends with the chef, then. Kenzie says he’s got a quarter. Sign says quarter per…quarter in the hole’s almost law-abiding. Slide that plate down here.” He jerked his head at a departing diner’s scraps: half a biscuit, two peaks of mashed potato, a streak of gravy, a spoonful of peas.

“Dennis…”

This time she was so unsuccessful in suppressing laughter that she smiled with her teeth showing. “Well, why not? If there’s a rule against it, they haven’t told me.”

She lifted the plate and presented it to her husband, who set to work kniving out tiny equal portions.

“There you go, Kenzie, my treat. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

A stone wall rose in height as a slope descended, running parallel to foundation blocks, framing a trough of sunken earth. Powell gauged the bed of needles showered here…a first stop, could be, moving on. He leaned back and saw black whorls of pine against a cirrus-streaked sky.

43

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part one)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)