While she was filling him in, Mayzelle walked in with her poodle and started heating up a Lean Cuisine in the microwave in the break room. Two other agents arrived, excitedly discussing the current ad for the old textile mill in the Wall Street Journal, and Dixie fielded a call from a man who had discovered one of her listings on the Internet and asked if the house had a bonus room where he and his wife could raise Maine coon cats. Never a dull moment, Dixie told herself as she headed out to show one of the new houses up on the lake to the man with the cats.
Just the same she sure wished she knew what Kyle Sherman was up to.
AFTER HE CLEANED OUT the remaining three flower beds and fired up the Weedwacker to trim the overgrown grass at the edges of the driveway, Kyle treated himself to a long cool drink of water from the artesian well on Dixie’s property. The water bubbled up out of a pipe sunk into the earth and into a pool made by piling rocks in a circle. The water was clean and cold and pure, though some of the rocks had crumbled or were missing. They needed to be replaced and arranged in a downhill pattern so the pool could become a pretty little waterfall. He’d like to do that for Dixie if he stuck around long enough.
He tried to call his friend Elliott, with whom he’d tented at the reenactment. He wanted to let Elliott know that he was okay, but his cell phone was still not working. In the meantime, he noticed that the sky was a bright china blue with no clouds in sight. The lake crested in tiny waves driven by the warm breeze, and after cooling off, Kyle had an itch to get out and about, to explore this place where he had landed through no planning of his own.
He intended his driving tour to encompass downtown Yewville and leave it at that. Smitty’s Garage and Gas Station seemed to be doing a good business with cars lined up at the pumps. And at the town’s only traffic light, drivers saluted each other by raising a forefinger and nodding solemnly. The one depressing sight was the old Yewville Mill building, closed and shuttered. A For Sale sign hung on the chain-link fence that surrounded it and weeds grew up through cracks in the sidewalk. Someone had scrawled Moved To Mexico on the brick wall in front of the administration building.
His turn about Yewville took seven minutes total, beginning to end, after which he wasn’t of a mood to go back to his Hobbit cottage. Besides, he was hungry, so he stopped at the Eat Right Café.
It was a small storefront restaurant with red-and-white checked vinyl cloths tacked to the tables in the booths. The servers, all women, wore pink uniforms with bright handkerchiefs blossoming from their chest pockets, reminding Kyle of pictures he’d seen of 1940s diners. He sat down at the long black counter and checked out the menu stuck between the sugar shaker and napkin holder.
His waitress, who wore a name tag announcing herself as Kathy Lou, favored him with a great big smile as she came to take his order. “You must be the Yankee who’s staying in that old playhouse out there at Dixie Smith’s new place on the lake,” she said.
“How’d you know that?” he asked mildly, noting that chicken bog was today’s blue-plate special and wondering what in the world chicken bog could be.
“Word gets around.”
“Amazing. What’s chicken bog?”
“Local specialty,” Kathy Lou said. “Some people calls it chicken and rice, more soupy than the usual. I don’t recollect where the bog came from, ’less it’s because somebody was trying to impress people that we have a lot of swamp around here, though I’m not sure why anyone would want to do that, considering that all the swamp ever produced was Lizard Man, and it was a long time ago anybody saw him.”
“All right, I’ll order the chicken bog, only if you tell me about Lizard Man,” Kyle told her, and she laughed.
“Around here we figure the less said about it, the better,” she told him as she dished up a plate of chicken and rice. “It involved a teenager riding home through Scape Ore Swamp with a mess of fried chicken in a take-home bucket on the seat beside him. This thing rushed out of the swamp while the kid was changing a tire, and he said it looked like a cross between a lizard and a man. It tried to steal his chicken dinner. They never found the creature, if that’s what you’re wondering.” She started a fresh pot of coffee as the lunch crowd began to converge on the only eatery in town.
Kyle thanked Kathy Lou for the chicken bog recommendation and the Lizard Man story before leaving. As he walked out the door, several other servers clustered around Kathy Lou to “ooh” and “aah” over his magnanimous tip. He was secretly amused and made up his mind to leave an even larger one next time he stopped in.
He rode back down Palmetto Street, spotting Dixie framed in the big window strung across the front of the Yewville Real Estate Company office. She was talking on the phone in an animated fashion, and she was beautiful.
He wasn’t sure what to make of her. Usually he was a stickler for the accepted pacing of a relationship. In other words, first he’d call the woman in whom he’d developed an interest. Then he’d schmooze her, ask her out, and if his luck held, bed her by the third date. Yet with Dixie, he wanted to move faster than that. Dixie seemed to return his interest four times over, if he was any judge of women.
As he pondered this, he found himself on the highway driving toward the town of Camden. He smiled at Yewville’s famous peachoid water tower as he passed it his way out of town. Dolly’s, a truck stop out on the bypass, was doing a brisk business. A short distance down the road, a decrepit motel advertised ROOMS $6 AN HOUR WEEKLY $85 CLEAN SHEETS. After that, the countryside was mostly flat and canopied with trees rising lush and green on both sides of the narrow highway.
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