“Yeah, about that,” I said. It was only two o’clock in the afternoon and I wanted a soft bed, a dark room, and no interruptions for about three hours.
“Follow me. Fifteen minutes?”
“Thanks,” I said.
I watched her turn the key in the ignition and smoothly do a U-turn on Liverpool Street.
Some twenty minutes later, once I’d ordered meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans, and she’d ordered a huge chicken salad from Mr. Pete, a grizzled old varmint who was the only waiter for all ten patrons at The Edwardian at the moment, I leaned back against the hard wooden back of the booth and said, “I visited here about five years ago, as I said. I’d just gotten back from London, and Paul and Jilly invited me out here to meet his parents. I remember this place well. Nothing seems to have changed. How long have you been the sheriff?”
“Going on a year and a half now. The mayor of Edger-ton is Miss Geraldine Tucker. Evidently she was going through a feminist phase, said she’d missed it when it first came around, and decided what the town needed was a female sheriff. I was a cop in Eugene at the time and had ran into some bad trouble. I wanted out of there. This seemed a perfect opportunity.” She shrugged. “I have one deputy and a secretary and about a dozen volunteers whenever I put out the call, which hasn’t happened since
I’ve been on the job. There’s little crime, as you’d expect, just parking or speeding tickets, kids raising occasional hell, a couple of burglaries a month, probably by transients, normal stuff like that. There has been a rise in domestic cases recently, but nothing like it was in Eugene.” She gave me a look that clearly said, How much more level can you get?
I smiled at her and said, “What happened in Eugene?”
Her lips were suddenly as thin as the soup an old guy was eating at the next table. “I think I’ll keep that to myself, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. Hey, I’m just hoping that the meat loaf will stick to my ribs. They need all the padding they can get right now. What did you want to talk to Paul about?”
Before she could answer, an old man sauntered up, holding an Oakland A’s baseball cap between his hands, big hands I saw, gnarly and veined but still strong. He had a full head of white curly hair, tobacco-stained teeth, and he was smiling at me. I put him in his seventies, a man who’d spent many years working hard.
“Charlie,” Maggie said, leaning forward to take his hand. “How’s tricks? You seen anything interesting I should know about?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice all scratchy and thin as old drapes. “But it can wait. Is this the young feller from Washington?”
Maggie introduced us. He was Charlie Duck, a local who’d been here fifteen years. He nodded, never taking my hand, just twirling that Oakland A’s baseball cap around and around in his hands. “You’re all tied up now, Mac, but later, when you’ve got some time, I wouldn’t mind having a talk with you.”
“Sure,” I said, and wondered what kind of tall tales I’d be hearing.
He nodded, all solemn, and sauntered back to a booth where he sat down, alone.
“You see, not everybody doesn’t like me.”
“Charlie’s a real neat old guy. You’ll enjoy him if you two get together.”
I said again, “What did you want to talk to Paul about?”
Maggie picked up her fork and began to weave it through her fingers, just like the old man had done with that baseball cap. She’d pulled off her driving gloves. She had elegant white hands, short nails, calluses on her thumb pads. “Just talk,” she said. “I still can’t believe how lucky Jilly was. Rob Morrison, the highway patrolman who saved her life, came in third in the Iron Man Triathlon over in Kona last year. That means a two-mile swim, a hundred miles on a bike, then twenty-six point two miles of running. He’s in awesome shape. Anyone else, and they’d probably still be trying to get her out of the Porsche. The luck involved, it still boggles the mind.” I felt both grateful and envious. “The Iron Man. I had a friend who tried that. He made it to Kona, but he got cramps in the marathon leg. I want to meet this guy. I wish I had something more to give him than just my heartfelt thanks.”