"Okay, Toby Marsh. I'm Hollis. I'm going to drink this coffee, and you're going to tell me who's in that truck. You don't have to tell me why yet. Just who."
Toby's eyes went to the window and came back. "One of them is Curt Shuler," he said. "I don't know the other one's name. He's older. He has a beard. He drives for them too."
"Drives for who?"
"Shuler Water," Toby said, as if everyone in the world knew it. And out here, Hollis supposed, everyone did. He'd seen the name on the side of half the tanker trucks between Mansfield and Coudersport: SHULER WATER & HAUL, white letters on green, a cartoon water drop with a smile. "They do the water for the gas wells. Curt's dad owns it. He owns the diner building too. And the trailer park where we live." Toby swallowed. "He owns a lot of stuff."
Hollis drank his coffee. He made himself drink it slowly. Out the window, in the corner of his eye, the truck's exhaust curled up into the rain.
"All right," he said. "Now tell me why."
Toby didn't answer right away. Renée came with the hot roast beef, a slab of white bread under a slab of gray meat under a lake of brown gravy, and a side of mashed potatoes with a crater of butter in the middle, and she set it down and looked at her son sitting in the stranger's booth and her face changed.
"Toby. Leave the man alone, he's eating."
"He's fine," Hollis said. "He was telling me about the Bobcats."
Renée looked from him to Toby and back. She had a waitress's instinct and a mother's instinct, and both of them, Hollis could see, were telling her something was off. But she had a trucker at the counter wanting more coffee and a cook calling her name from the kitchen, and it was eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday, and her son was sitting with a man who had just said a polite thing. "Ten minutes," she said to Toby. "Then back to your math." She went.
Hollis ate a forkful of potatoes so he'd look like a man eating. "Go on."
Toby looked at his hands on the table. They were small hands with bitten nails and a smear of green pencil on the side of one finger. When he spoke, he spoke to them.
"There was this guy named Jesse," he said. "Jesse Kline. He drove a water truck for Shuler. He came in here a lot, at night, on his break. Like three or four in the morning. He'd get pancakes. Mom works overnights Sunday through Thursday, so I'm here a lot, I sleep back in the office on the cot, and sometimes I'd wake up and come out and Jesse would be here." He stopped. "He was nice. He knew all the stars. He said Potter County has the darkest sky east of the Mississippi, and there's a park up the road where people come from all over with telescopes. Cherry Springs. He said he'd take me sometime. He'd take me out to his truck and turn the lights off and show me stuff. Cassiopeia. The Pleiades. He said the Pleiades are seven sisters but most people can only see six."
"Okay," Hollis said.