In this case, what it solved was the hour between waking up and the time the garage opened when he had nothing useful to do, and his mind would otherwise fill the space with things that weren't useful either. Dot Fitch was there every morning. She moved through the diner the way good people move through the spaces spent decades in, with an ease that looked effortless, but was actually the product of 10,000 repeated choices, each one slightly refined from the last. She was 64 years old. Had Run Dot's place for 31 of those years.
Before that, she'd worked in the diner when it was her mother's, which meant she'd been inside these walls on and off for most of her life. She knew this town the way you know a person you've lived with for 40 years. The habits, the patterns, the things said and the things carefully unsaid. The conversation happened gradually, not all at once, not the way it does in movies where two people sit down and immediately begin exchanging meaningful information. Real conversation, the kind that mattered, came in pieces, a thing said on Tuesday, a thing responded to on Wednesday.
A thread picked up on Friday that had been set down on Monday. By the end of the first week, Ry understood several things about DotFitch. She had been married for 21 years to a man named Gerald who had died 9 years ago. A car accident officially on a road Gerald drove every day. A road he knew like his own kitchen.
A road he had never in 21 years of driving it had any trouble on. She did not believe it was an accident. She had not said this to Ry directly. She'd said it in the way people say the true things sideways while talking about something else. He'd mentioned Gerald while pouring coffee, mentioned the road, mentioned the year, and then she'd said carefully that some things in Greystone Falls didn't have clean explanations.
Ry had heard that he was the kind of man who heard the things people said between the lines. He asked about Bo Harrove on Thursday morning. Not directly. He'd asked about town council, about who ran things, about what the political architecture of Greystone Falls looked like underneath the flags on Main Street. Dot had set down his coffee cup.
Looked at him. Why are you asking? She said, curious, he said. She looked at him a moment longer. She was a woman who had developed over 40 years of running a diner and listening to everything that happened in a small town.
A very finely calibrated sense of when someone was casually curious and when they were asking because they needed to know. She understood that Rey needed to know. Bo Harrove, she said, has been on the county council for 12 years. He came from money. His family owned farmland east of here.
Sold it for development money in the 90s. Got rich. He presents himself as a man of the people. He's good at it. She wiped the counter.
Slow, deliberate. In 12 years, she said, four businesses that publicly disagreed with his proposals lost their licenses or their leases. Two families were forced to sell properties that Hardrove Connected Developers bought the following year. One man who ran against him for a council seat in 2018. A decent man named Earl Fletcher had an investigation opened into his contracting business two weeks before the election.
Ry said, "Was the investigation legitimate? " Investigation went nowhere. Dot said. Fletcher withdrew from the race. Moved to Chattanooga. She paused.
His business is doing fine now, by the way. Different county. Ray turned his coffee cup in his hands. Harro's boy, he said. Garrett win.