I hope everyone had an excellent holiday. Mine featured video calls to loved ones it is not safe to currently visit and far more food than I am used to eating in one sitting. It has cause me to want to hibernate. The cold and rainy weather don’t help. But we must press onward!So timers set and here we go!
I can’t decide if the quiet man is up to no good or if he is going to be the hero of the story. i may have to write it to find out.
Friday, November 27th: He was a quiet man.
He was a quiet man. Deirdre noticed him because of it. In the café those who came used the award winning pie and free coffee refills as an excuse to sow and harvest gossip. The pie was, despite its awards, just something to nipple on while processing the news. As such the air fairly buzzed from the time they opened at five in the morning until they closed at midnight.
There were lulls of course. After the morning breakfast crowd cleared out there was generally a lull between nine and ten. By ten most in town had justified the need for either a coffee top up or a slice of pie. Likewise after lunch they had a short break from one until two in the afternoon before the afternoon snackers lead the diner straight into dinner and beyond.
In the midst of all this chatter, he was an anomaly; A well of silence in the babble of white noise that served as the melting pot of Fell’s Harbor News. Even more strange she found was the fact that he didn’t seem to be listening to any of the gossip around him. Others, even if they had little to say, leaned in to hear the stories of others. If he was listening Deirdre couldn’t tell who to. She hovered, in a politely attentive way, always keeping some attention on the quiet man.
He left midway through the telling of Gina’s story about catching her husband with the dental hygienist when Gina was just getting to the juicer bits of the story one morning. The next day he left without hearing the ending to the story involving hank Whitmore’s three headed calf. There was no one he seemed intent on hearing out.
The quiet man paid cash so she couldn’t get his name from the card. He tapped the menu item he wanted and nodded or shook his head in response to any question she asked, so she couldn’t hone in on an accent. Deirdre admitted her position offered her little room for probing questions that couldn’t be answered with a yes or a no.
When she looked out of the window she saw no car so there were no plates to let her know if he was out of state or in, or if the car was a rental. While she didn’t consider herself to be nosy, she had her share of curiosity and the quiet man had her curious. Each time he left, as far as she could see, he walked off in the same direction. East, down Water Street.
There were no residences that she knew of on Water Street. It branched off main and once held the secondary businesses. While Main Street had the shops, Water Street held the offices. Most of Water Street was still composed of nineteenth century brick office buildings rising two stories, with the occasional three story building thrown in. If one continued down Water Street the offices ended and the more industrial buildings took over. Old warehouses and lumber yards, metal sided buildings with rusted chains and machinery. Further out and you came to the old textile and paper mills that were once the life blood of the town. She never saw him arrive so she thought it was possible he lived in one of the other directions and had business out in the offices, but she couldn’t imagine what that would be.
Ten til Midnight 