* * *
The Hemlock was the kind of diner that had been built as something else and never quite admitted it. The front half had been a gas station office once, and the back half had been added on in the sixties, and somebody in the eighties had wrapped the whole thing in brown vinyl siding and put in a long counter and six booths along the windows. There was a rack of chips and a cooler of night crawlers and a wall of hunting licenses and missing-dog posters by the register. It smelled like coffee and fryer oil and wet wool. A radio on a shelf behind the counter was playing a station out of Olean, low, a ballgame recap and then a song Hollis did not know.
There were four people in the place, not counting him.
At the counter sat a woman of about sixty in a canvas jacket with a Kenworth logo, working through a plate of eggs with the steady concentration of someone who had been driving for nine hours and had six more ahead. Two stools down from her, an old man in a red-and-black wool coat and a feed cap was reading a folded newspaper and drinking tea. Behind the counter, through the pass window to the kitchen, Hollis could see a cook in a stained white T-shirt, seventy if he was a day, scraping the flat-top with a long-handled blade.
And in the last booth, the one nearest the back hallway where the restrooms were, a boy was sitting with a spiral notebook and a box of colored pencils and an empty glass of chocolate milk.
He was ten or eleven, thin, with a cowlick and a hooded sweatshirt that said POTTER COUNTY BOBCATS on it in cracked letters. He had looked up when the door opened. Hollis saw him look up, and saw him look at the vest, and saw him look past Hollis at the window, at the lot, the way a dog will look past you at the thing behind you.
A waitress came out of the back with a rack of clean mugs. She was in her early thirties, brown hair pulled back hard, a face that would have been pretty if it had gotten more sleep in the last few years. Her name tag said RENÉE. She saw him and did the thing waitresses in places like this do when a man like Hollis comes in, which is a quick inventory, a decision, and a smile that is mostly professional and partly brave.
"Sit anywhere, hon," she said. "Coffee?"
"Please."
He took the booth by the front window, two down from the boy, because it let him see the lot and the road. He hung his wet jacket on the hook and kept the vest on. The coffee came in a heavy white mug and it was terrible and it was hot, and he wrapped both hands around it and let the heat go into his fingers.
"Kitchen's open," Renée said. "Ferris'll make you anything that's on the board and some things that aren't."
He looked at the board. "Hot roast beef. And whatever pie you've got."
"Apple or coconut cream."
"Apple."