But maybe Turner had been telling the truth…

I waited.

It was a long night. I drank coffee. Lots of it. I read a paperback western and when my eyes got heavy, I allowed myself the television, playing the volume so low by morning I had learned to lip read.

He didn’t come. Not him or his partner, not anybody, and I waited until noon, when I decided to take Wilma up on that free lunch.

The cottage had been warm and the air a little stale, so the outside air, which was cold and a slap in the face, was okay with me. I felt almost refreshed, nearly awake, by the time I’d walked the short distance to Wilma’s Welcome Inn, and you’d never guess I had been up so long.

There was a “Closed” sign in the window, but the door was unlocked, so I went on in. Charley was alone in the tavern area, sitting in a booth, with his hands folded.

“Where’s Wilma?” I said “What’s going on?”

“She’s at Johnson’s,” he said. His voice was strange, strained.

“Johnson’s? What’s that?”

“A funeral home.”

“Who died?”

“She did.”

9

Charley said it was okay if I had a look around. I saw the stairs, where she had fallen, a steep but tightly enclosed flight of stairs, with a rail, and between the rail and the close walls, you’d think a big woman like Wilma would’ve been able to catch herself, to brace her fall at least a little bit. But she hadn’t. She’d fallen the entire flight and by the time she landed, her neck was broken and her life over.

No one had seen it happen. No one had even heard it. There was only one person staying in the hotel section of Wilma’s Welcome Inn, a man registered as Paul Thomas, and he had apparently packed up and left early that morning, before the accident, Charley said.