Mrs. Sunderman had set down the kettle. "We don't promise anything, dear. We just don't say. The Story Lady is the Story Lady. Children like a little mystery. And it's kinder that way, for the readers. We had a man once, before you, a retired schoolteacher with a wonderful voice, and a boy figured out who he was and started following him home from the Kroger. Nothing sinister. The boy just wanted a grandfather. But it got complicated." She looked at Cass over her glasses. "Has someone figured you out?"
"I think so. I think a little girl recognized my voice. At the diner."
"The R girl?"
Cass looked up, startled.
"I listen to the tapes too, you know," Mrs. Sunderman said gently. "I'm old, not deaf." Then she heard herself, and colored, and reached across the table and put her hand on Cass's wrist. "Oh, my dear. I'm sorry. That was a stupid thing to say."
"It's all right."
"It isn't. But I'll tell you what I think, if you want it."
"I want it."
"I think that little girl has been talking to you every night for six months," Mrs. Sunderman said, "and you have been listening every week, and if you think the two of you are strangers anymore, you're fooling yourself. Whatever you decide to do, don't pretend she isn't real."
So when the yellow raincoat came through the door of the Wabash Lantern on Saturday afternoon at a quarter past two, during the dead time between lunch and supper when Cass usually rolled silverware and read whatever paperback was in her apron, she put down the silverware and she put down the paperback, which was a Louis L'Amour somebody had left on the counter, and she went and took the coconut cream pie out of the case.
"Al," she said, through the pass-through. "I'm taking the coconut."
"You're not," Al said.
"Two slices. I promised."
Al looked at her and then he looked past her, through the window in the swinging door, at the little girl climbing into booth number four, and something happened to his big gray face that might have been a smile, on another man.