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movie were good, if it distracted him enough, maybe he could forget how cowardly an act that would be.
    "Damn it," he muttered under his breath, and his pace quickened as he kept going right past the Empire.
    With a quick glance in either direction, Alan strode across the street. On the far corner of the intersection of Pine Hil and the Post Road sat the Paperback Diner. These days it would have been more accurate to cal it a cafÈ, but the owner, Trish Scharnhorst, had always loved the place when she was growing up, and had kept it, name and al , just the way it was when she bought it.
    The front door was open - flies or not - and Alan walked in with his hands in his pockets. He was far more subdued than usual, but so was the Paperback. Trish was nowhere to be seen.
    Old Burt Johnston was behind the counter, and the new girl, whose name he could never remember 'cause she wasn't local, was taking orders from the tables. There were maybe a dozen people in the place, al told. Burt was the only one who greeted him, and it wasn't with hel o.
    The old man raised a hand, more of a salute than a wave. "Alan. Anything?"
    "Working on it, Burt," the deputy replied, hating the helpless, useless taste of the words on his lips.
    The Paperback Diner was unique in Alan's experience. It had breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and brunch on Sundays, and it had the best coffee in town, but it also had books. On shelves built around the wide windows and along the back wal , there were hundreds of paperback books, al of which were available to customers. If al one wanted was a cup of coffee and a good book, that was more than acceptable, it was encouraged. The books could be taken home, as long as they were brought back eventual y.
    When Alan surveyed the diner, he spotted Tina Lemoine almost immediately. She sat in a booth against the far wal by an open window, only a glass of water on the table. He could not make out what book she was reading until he moved closer. It was Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls.
    Alan smiled. That was one of the things he loved most about Tina - her intel igence. He had tried reading Hemingway a couple of times but just could not wrap his head around it. But Tina would probably burn through the book in a couple of hours, while other customers at the Paperback engrossed themselves in Daniel e Steel and Louis L'Amour. Not that there was anything wrong with L'Amour. He was a personal favorite of Alan's.
    Tina was just special. She was something else, not like any other girl he had ever known. Ever since junior high school she had been a tiny flame burning in his heart. When she came back to Buckton after col ege, they found that they had their love of their hometown in common. It was the first of many shared passions they had discovered.
    Tina always made Alan feel like the luckiest man on earth. Even after a week like the one he'd been having.
    "Good book?" he asked as he slid into the booth across from her.
    The smile on his face was genuine, an involuntary reaction to being in her presence, but there must have been something of his melancholy lingering, for when she glanced up at him her eyes narrowed, the skin around them crinkling with concern.
    "Oh, Alan," Tina said and sighed. She marked the page in her book and laid it on the table. Then her voice dropped to just above a whisper. "You have just got to stop letting this thing get to you so much."
    "I know." He nodded slowly, letting some of the stress seep out of his joints. "It's just . . . this kinda thing doesn't happen in Buckton. Now, in a week, we've had two . . . murders. God, I can barely say the word. Nobody liked Foster, true enough, but Phil Garraty was a saint, Tina. Do you realize we hadn't had an honest-to-God murder in this town since 1957? It's like the natural order is suddenly breaking down. People expect me and the sheriff to keep that from happening, and they're taking it out on us."
    Tina sighed. She reached across the table and took his hands in