A Real Pickle Read Free Page B

moved it a quarter turn, and the spectral image suddenly disappeared.
    “It’s gone!” Ellen said loudly.
    “Take it easy.  It was just a reflection.”
    She shivered noticeably.  “It still gives me the creeps. I’m glad that my shift’s about over.  Thanks for letting me take off an hour early today.”  Ellen usually worked until two, but she’d asked for permission to duck out early today, and I hadn’t seen any reason not to accommodate her.
    “You can take off now, if you’d like.”
    “No, I’ll wait it out,” Ellen replied.
    Wayne, the mechanic who was sweet on her, came by the diner ten minutes later to pick her up.  Ellen still had five minutes left on her abbreviated shift, but I told her, “Go on.  I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “Bye,” she said as she put her arm through Wayne’s.  They had gone through some tough times lately, but it was finally starting to look like they just might make it.
    Greg came out of the kitchen as they left and smiled at me.  “It’s just the two of us now,” he said.  “Care for a quick bite to eat before things get crazy again?  I know for a fact that your lunch was interrupted twice by customers, and you ended up throwing most of it away, so you’ve got to be starving.”
    “I could eat,” I said, answering his smile with one of my own.  “What did you have in mind?”
    “Would grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken soup be too plain for you?”
    “Not if you’re the one who makes them,” I said.  Greg had a knack for taking the most mundane ingredients and turning them into the most delightful meals.
    “Two of each, coming right up.”
    As he ducked back to the grill to make our food, I looked around the diner.  There were fewer customers than I’d hoped for at that time of day, but it might not have been because of what had happened at the diner earlier.  It could just be part of the lull we usually experienced between the lunch and dinner crowds.  I just hoped they found their way back to us, and quickly.  We couldn’t afford to have too many customers leaving us, not if we were going to keep The Charming Moose afloat.
     
    “I’m afraid that I have some bad news,” Sheriff Croft said when he walked into the diner a little later.
    “Thanks, but we already heard,” I said.
    He looked shocked by my admission.  “How is that possible?  I know that Jasper Fork is a small town, but somebody’s going to jail for this.”
    “Take it easy,” I said.  “Jeffrey came by earlier to let us know that Curtis didn’t make it.  There’s no reason to lock him up for it.”
    “Is that all that you know?” he asked me.
    “What else could there be?”  What was the sheriff talking about?
    “It was murder, Victoria,” he said softly.
    “Murder?” I asked, no doubt much louder than he would have wanted.  I couldn’t help myself.  Someone had killed a friend of mine in my diner!  “Was it poison?” I asked softly.  That was every restaurateur’s nightmare, and I was no exception.  We could lose our business if someone had slipped something into Curtis’s meal.
    “No, he was stabbed in the chest with a thin metal rod, and it went straight into his heart.  The poor man didn’t stand a chance.  Whoever did it left the weapon in, so there wasn’t very much blood at all, and with the red shirt he was wearing, it was easy to miss.  The EMTs found it on the way to the hospital, but I ordered them to keep a lid on what they found until I had time to investigate.  That’s why I was threatening to lock somebody up for telling you about it.”
    “Jeffrey just assumed that it was cancer that killed his boss,” I said.  “Sheriff Croft, why would someone murder a man so close to death anyway?”
    “That’s what I aim to find out,” he said.  “It’s probably crazy for me to even ask you this, but you’re not going to stay out of this case, are you?”
    I shook my head.  “You know that I can’t.  He was my friend,