Last Room at the Cliff's Edge: A Detective Linda Mystery (Detective Linda Mysteries Book 1) by Mark McNease

Author:Mark McNease [McNease, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MadeMark Publishing
Published: 2016-09-20T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Marge’s Diner

BUSINESS AT Marge’s slowed during the mid-afternoon hours. When Linda and Kirsten were there for breakfast they’d been lucky to find a parking spot. Now, with the lunch crowd gone and dinner several hours away, they had their pick. Linda counted a total of six cars in the lot and figured at least three of those belonged to people working there. She wondered which was Betsy’s, then took a guess on the beat up yellow VW Beetle with the giant pink dice hanging from the rearview mirror. She could be wrong, but Betsy had seemed like the sort of woman who would have something big and pink dangling in her window.

She pulled into a slot near the diner’s front door, next to a rusted pickup that had once been blue.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Kirsten asked, grabbing her laptop from the back seat.

“I’ll know when we find it,” Linda replied. “I’d like to read over that story Jeb Harris wrote about the Cliff’s Edge, that’s a good start. Then let’s see what else is out there in the vast data storehouse of the internet.”

Linda locked the car and they headed inside. Betsy was still there and Linda recognized the cook through the kitchen window, as well as one helper when there had been two during breakfast. A young man was now working the cash register—so young that Linda guessed he was part of the owners’ family, whoever they were.

“Back so soon?” Betsy said, heading toward them with a coffee pot in her hand. “You can ignore the ‘Please Wait to be Seated’ sign and just sit anywhere. You get your pick this time of day.”

She was right. There were only five other people in the restaurant, two eating alone at two-tops and one group of three. All the other tables and booths were clean but empty.

Linda and Kirsten took a booth by the window. Kirsten always liked being able to see their car, even though there was nothing in it to steal and the car itself wouldn’t fetch more than a few thousand dollars.

“Did you lock it?” Kirsten asked.

“Pointlessly so,” said Linda.

She always locked the car—and the house, and anything else they owned that could be locked—and let it go at that. Worrying about someone stealing a belonging had never been a concern for her, excluding her guns, and those were stored in a safe, with the exception of her father’s pistol that she kept in the bedroom and that was now in the car trunk. Even if someone stole the car they would not get into the gun case. Kirsten didn’t like Linda traveling with a firearm, but Linda was licensed to do so as a retired police officer. She also had an unfortunate history of run-ins with murderers, so Kirsten decided it was best to get used to it. In fact, Linda was getting very close to convincing Kirsten to take up shooting. Now that Kirsten was writing a mystery series about a lesbian private detective, she’d warmed to the idea, “for research,” she said.

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