Chapter 5 The Rumor at the Diner

The diner was the only lit thing on Main Street.

I stood outside for a long minute, hands shoved in my jacket pockets, watching the yellow glow spill through the window onto the wet sidewalk. A neon sign buzzed in the glass: EAT. Just that. One word. Like an order.

I wasn't hungry. I was cold, and my phone was dead, and I had a stolen photograph in my pocket and a sheriff's warning still ringing in my ears. But the diner had heat, and I had nowhere else to go. So I pushed the door open, and a little bell announced me to the room.

Every head turned.

There were six people inside. A waitress behind the counter, hair pinned up, order pad frozen mid-ticket. Two old men in a booth by the window, coffee cups halfway to their mouths. A woman in nurse's scrubs. A man in a feed-store cap. And at the far end of the counter, sitting alone on a red vinyl stool, an old woman with white hair and a face like crumpled paper.

Nobody said anything.

The bell stopped ringing. The jukebox in the corner finished its song, clicked, and went silent. I stood in the doorway with my hand still on the handle, and I felt the room close around me like a fist.

"Just her," I said. "Not the plague."

The two old men looked at each other. The waitress looked at the floor. The woman in scrubs suddenly became extremely interested in her omelet.

I walked to the counter and sat down.

"Coffee," I said. "Black."

The waitress was maybe forty, with tired eyes and a name tag that said DEENA. She poured without looking at me, set the mug down, and slid it across the counter with two fingers like the cup itself might bite her.

"Cream's in the fridge," she said. And then, quieter, almost an apology: "We don't got pie."

"That's fine."

She hovered for a second, like she wanted to say something else. Then she turned away and went back to wiping down the same clean spot on the counter.

I drank my coffee and listened.

The whispers started almost immediately. Not loud enough to make out at first — just a low hum, the sound of a room deciding what to do about an intruder.

"—Thorne girl, that's the daughter—"

"—she's got no idea—"

"—Morwen's back, God help us—"

The old men in the booth. Their voices rose and fell like tide. I kept my eyes on my mug and my ears open and tried not to look like someone who was listening.

"—sixteen or seventeen, looks just like—"

"—Larkin said the same thing, remember, she said—"

I went still.

The waitress's hand stopped moving. She glanced at me, quick and nervous, and then at the old men, and then back at her rag.

I turned on my stool.

"Excuse me," I said.

The two old men froze. One of them — the one without the cap — had a face like a dried apple and hands knotted with arthritis. He didn't meet my eyes. He stared into his coffee like it held the secret to the universe.

"I heard you say a name," I said. "Larkin."

The diner went quiet again. Quieter, this time. A different kind of quiet — not hostile, but afraid.

"You're mistaken," said the man with the cap.

"I'm not."

"You're mistaken."

"He's right," said the waitress, too fast. "Nobody said anything. You must've misheard. Coffee's on the house. You can go."

I looked at her. She looked at me. There was something in her face I hadn't expected — pity. Real pity, the kind you give to someone who's already drowned and doesn't know it yet.

"I just got here," I said. "I don't know anything about this town. I don't know what happened to Larkin Crowe. But I'm starting to get the feeling that everyone in this room does."

Nobody answered.

And then a voice from the far end of the counter said, "Sit down, girl."

I turned.

The old woman on the red stool hadn't moved. She was holding a cup of tea with both hands, and her eyes — clear, grey, unnervingly sharp — were fixed on my face. She was small and neat, dressed in a blue cardigan buttoned to the throat, with hair like snow and a brooch at her collar shaped like a tiny silver bird.

"Verity Sloane," she said. "I knew your grandmother."

"I don't have a grandmother."

"You did." She sipped her tea. "She died when you were three. You wouldn't remember. That's the problem with this town, isn't it? Nobody remembers anything they didn't choose to forget."

The room shifted around me. The old men found sudden interest in their bill. The waitress busied herself with the coffee pot. Nobody was going to stop this. Nobody was going to help, either.

I walked down the counter and sat on the stool beside her.

"My name's Sable," I said.

"I know your name." Verity Sloane set down her cup and folded her hands, and I noticed then that her fingers were bare of rings — no wedding band, no jewelry at all except the bird. "I've known it since before you were born. Your mother used to sit on my porch when she was a girl. Her and Larkin both. They'd eat my lemon cake and complain about their mothers, and I'd pretend not to listen."

"You knew them."

"I taught them Sunday school." A small, dry smile. "Which is why I can tell you, with authority, that the devil was already here long before either of them was born."

I leaned closer. "Then you know what happened."

"I know a version."

"Tell me."

She looked at me then — really looked — and for a moment the sharpness in her eyes softened into something that might have been sorrow.

"Larkin Crowe was a good girl," she said. "She was brave. She was kind. She was the best of all of them, and that's exactly why she's not here anymore. This town doesn't keep its best. It eats them."

"Eats them?"

"You'll want to watch your metaphors, dear. Nothing supernatural about it."

But her eyes slid sideways when she said it, toward the window, toward the dark woods beyond the glass.

I took a breath. "Sheriff Harlow told me she ran away."

"Harlow." She said the name like it tasted like pennies. "Harlow was the reason she started thinking about running in the first place. He got her pregnant that summer. Did you know that? I imagine not. Nobody here talks about it. Nobody talks about anything." She picked up her tea again, unbothered. "That's the trick, you see. The trick isn't lying. Anyone can lie. The trick is making everyone agree not to discuss."

My mouth had gone dry. "She was pregnant?"

"She was seventeen. She was frightened. And then one night, she wasn't any of those things anymore. She just wasn't." Verity Sloane took a long sip of her tea. "Your mother was the last person to see her. Did she tell you that part?"

"She—" I stopped. My mother had told me Larkin volunteered. Walked into the woods willingly.

Had that been true?

"Your mother came back alone," Verity said. "That's all anyone knows. She came back alone, and the next morning Larkin's bed was stripped and her father was drinking on his porch, and that was that. A runaway. Sixteen years old. Very sad." She set the cup down with a precise little click. "And then the next month, your mother left town with a baby and never came back."

The diner was so quiet I could hear the fry cook's spatula through the window to the kitchen.

"Until now," I said.

"Until now." Verity Sloane turned on her stool and looked at me full-on for the first time, and her eyes weren't soft at all anymore. They were pale and flat and terribly, terribly certain. "Your mother owes this town a debt, girl. She's owed it for thirteen years. I don't know what arrangement she thinks she's made to get out of paying it." She leaned in, her voice dropping. "But you're not an arrangement. You're the interest. And if you don't get out of Echo Ridge before your birthday, this town will collect."

I stood up so fast my stool scraped backward on the linoleum.

"You know something," I said. "You know what's out there."

"I know a version."

"Then say it."

Verity Sloane looked up at me, and for a moment — just a moment — something moved behind her eyes. Something that might have been the truth trying to get out.

"Larkin Crowe never left this town," she said.

My heart stopped.

"She's still here," the old woman said, very quietly. "She's under it."

And she picked up her cup of tea and took a sip, and every person in the diner turned back to their plates at the same moment, as if they'd all decided the conversation was over.

---

I left my coffee on the counter and walked outside.

The wind had picked up. It came down off the ridge and cut through my jacket like a blade, and I stood on the sidewalk with my arms wrapped around myself, trying to breathe.

She's still here. She's under it.

That couldn't mean what I thought it meant. It couldn't.

Behind me, the diner's door opened and closed. I didn't turn around.

"Rough crowd," a voice said.

I looked.

He was leaning against the brick wall a few feet away, hands in the pockets of a grease-stained jacket, one boot propped against the wall behind him. He was tall and lean, with dark hair falling into his eyes and a face that had learned early not to smile too much — a mechanic's face, practical and closed. I recognized him from the shop at the edge of town, from the one time in thirteen years I'd walked past it.

"You were watching," I said.

"I was waiting." He pushed off the wall. "Name's Orion. Orion Kael. I saw you go in there, and I figured I'd see how long it took before Verity Sloane got her claws in you." He tilted his head. "Two minutes? Three?"

"Long enough."

"Yeah. That's about right." He looked at the diner window, at the shadowed figures inside, and something flat and cold settled over his face. "She told you about Larkin, I'd guess. She tells everybody. She's the only one in this town with the guts to say it out loud, and the only one with the guts to never say it clearly."

"Who are you?"

"Nobody." He said it without self-pity, like a fact. "My brother ran off six years ago. Milo. Everyone says he ran off. I know he didn't."

I looked at him. Really looked at him, for the first time.

"You believe me," I said. "Before I say anything. You believe me."

"I believe this town." He nodded at the diner, at the church, at the leaning steeple, at everything behind us. "I've lived here my whole life. I know what it does. People go into those woods and they don't come out, and then everybody agrees they were never really here to begin with. And they'll do the same thing to you." He met my eyes. "Unless you don't let them."

"How?"

"You need to know what you're dealing with." He reached into his jacket and pulled something out — a folded piece of paper, soft from handling, torn at one edge. He held it out. "Milo left this behind. I never knew what it meant. But when I heard Morwen Thorne came back to town with a daughter—" He stopped. "I figured out it wasn't about him at all."

I unfolded the paper.

It was a page torn from a notebook, in handwriting I didn't recognize. Young, slanted, hurried. Just one line, written over and over down the whole page, the ink getting heavier each time:

Every seventeen years. Every seventeen years. Every seventeen years. Every seventeen years.

And at the very bottom, in a different hand, someone had written a single word in red ink:

THIRTEEN.

I looked up at Orion. The wind whipped between us, cold as a knife,

and the lights of the diner flickered once behind him.

"Thirteen," I said. "That's — Larkin's been gone thirteen years. But this says seventeen."

"Yeah." Orion's jaw tightened. "So who's been counting?"