Read Angels Fall for Free Online Page B

on a big buffet for the tourists, but the smart money's right here." He settled back with the coffee Linda-gail put in front of him. "You go right on and eat that while it's hot."
    Instead of looking at it, he thought, like the food on the plate was a puzzle to be solved. He'd been the town doctor for nearly thirty years, and so he told her. He'd come as a young man, answering an ad the town council had placed in the Laramie paper. And so he told Reece as she played with her food.
    "Looking for adventure," he said in a voice with the barest hint of rural western twang. "Fell in love with the place, and a pretty brown-eyed girl named Susan. Raised three kids here. Oldest is a doctor himself—first-year intern—in Cheyenne. Middle one, our Annie, married a fella takes pictures for the National Geographic magazine. They moved all the way out to Washington, D.C. Got a grandson there, too. Youngest is in California, working on a degree in philosophy. Don't know what the hell he's going to philosophize about, but there you go. Lost my Susan two years back to breast cancer."
    "I'm so sorry."
    "It's a hard, hard thing." He glanced down at his wedding ring. "Still look for her beside me when I wake up in the morning. Expect I always will."
    "Here you go, Doc." Linda-gail set a plate in trout of him, and both of them laughed when Reece goggled at it. "He'll eat every bite, too," Linda-gail said before she headed off.
    There was a stack of pancakes, an omelet, a thick slice of ham, a generous portion of home fries and a trio of link sausages.
    "You really can't eat all that."
    "Watch and learn, little girl. Watch and learn."
    He looked fit, Reece thought, in his plaid shirt and sensible cardigan. Like someone who ate healthy meals and got a reasonable amount of exercise. His face was ruddy and lean, with a pair of clear hazel eves behind wire-rimmed glasses.
    Yet he tucked into the enormous breakfast like a long-haul trucker.
    "You got family back East?" he asked her.
    "Yes, my grandmother in Boston."
    "That where you learned to cook?"
    She couldn't take her eyes off the way the food was disappearing. "Yes, where I started. I went to the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, then a year in Paris at the Cordon Bleu."
    "Culinary Institute." Doc wiggled his eyebrows. "And Paris. Fancy."
    "Sorry?" She realized abruptly she had said more about her background in two minutes than she normally did to anyone in two weeks. "More intense, actually. I'd better get back to work. It was nice meeting you."
    Reece worked through the lunch shift, and with the rest of the afternoon and evening stretched out in front of her decided to take a long walk. She could circle the lake, maybe explore some of the forests and streams. She could take pictures and e-mail them to her grandmother and, between the fresh air, the exercise, tire herself out.
    She changed into her hiking boots, outfitted her backpack precisely as her guidebook recommended for hikes under ten miles. Outside again, she found a spot near the lake to sit and read over the handout brochures she'd gotten from the hotel.
    She'd take time every day she could manage it, she decided, fanning out from the town, into the park, maybe dip just a little into the back-country. She was better outdoors, always better in the open.
    When she had her first full day off. she'd take one of the easier trails and hike up to see the river. But for now she'd better get started doing what her guide suggested and break in the hiking boots.
    She set out at an easy pace. That, at least, was one of the advantages of her life now. There was rarely any hurry. She could do what she chose to do in her own tune, at her own speed. She'd never really given herself this in the time before. In the past eight months, she'd seen and done more than she had in the previous twenty-eight years. Maybe she was a little bit crazy, and she was certainly neurotic, phobic and slightly paranoid, but there were pockets of herself she'd