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of quotes. Reusing just doesn’t seem his style.
    “Afternoon, John!” said Morty. “How’s Chicago?”
    “I’m in Vermont actually.”
    “A very long flight layover?”
    “More like a lead.”
    “See?  This is what I told them.  My golden boy would have the girl found within a week.”
     “You give me too much credit, Morty. Finding a missing girl in an unfamiliar town is very different from taking a few pictures of an unfaithful husband dipping his wick in the wrong place.”
    He laughed.  “Yet you are already in Vermont following a lead you didn’t think you’d have.”
    “Yeah, well, about that.  Consider this a very long shot.  I got a feeling on this one.”
    “Just a feeling?”
    “Sometimes I have to go with a feeling, Morty.  But I’ll let you know this pans out.”
    “Of course,” he said. “Don’t let me keep you, Mr. Tough Guy Detective.”
    “I wish,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
    “Good luck, my friend.”
    I stopped for gas in Lowell, where I decided to pick the gas station attendant’s brain. I went inside the shop and grabbed myself a candy bar to bring to the register. The man at the register wore blue jeans, a baseball cap, and a fleece jacket. As he rang me up, I asked casually, “Hey, is there anything west of here? In the woods? Parks, hunting?”
    “You mean Tillotson Mill?” he asked, chewing his gum.
    I had seen Tillotson Mill on the map and knew it was a bunch of lonely roads between here and my coordinates. I had considered that she could be there, but the coordinates were so exact. I played dumb. “Tillotson Mill? What’s that?”
    “A couple of homes out that way. Old roads. Technically a village, but all spread out. No parks. No hunting unless you know someone who lives out there. Nice people, though. I have a cousin there.”
    “Anything past that?” I asked. “I saw on the map there are some woods there. No hiking and camping there?”
    He gave me a funny look I couldn’t read. “You don’t want to go out there.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “You just don’t want to go out there,” he said, putting my candy bar in an unnecessary bag.
    “Why? What’s out there?” When he looked at me strangely, I said with a friendly smile, “C’mon, you can’t just say something like that and not expect me to be curious.”
    He cracked a smile. “That’s fair. But curiosity killed the cat, y’know.”
    “Luckily, I left my cat at home,” I said. “Now c’mon, really. What’s out there that I don’t want to see?”
    “There’s just not much out there, just a small town…”
    “Tillotson Mill?” I asked.
    “No,” he said, taking a moment to swallow and wet his mouth. “There’s another town.”
    “Huh?” I said. “The map I got from the gas station in Newport had nothing between Tillotson Mill and Belvidere. I think I got ripped off.”
    “No,” he said, “It’s not like that. It’s not on maps. It’s that way purposely.”
    “Purposely? Why?”
    He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody I know at least.”
    “So there’s this town that’s not on the map, but nobody knows why and no one questions that?” I wasn’t sure if he was being on the level. It was adding up wrong.
    He leaned across the counter conspiratorially. “There’s a place there. Nobody likes to talk about it. Never was a good place, the current doctors aren’t anything better. People around here don’t like talking about it, and people there don’t want it advertised. So I guess it doesn’t get on maps.”
    “But I’ve seen satellite photos!” I said. “It doesn’t appear on there either!”
    He leaned back. I had just overstepped “seeing it on a gas station map”, and I think he knew it. He folded his arms. “Maybe they got some friends in high places.”
    The rest of our conversation was rather cold. I was asking too much and I had overstepped the bounds of friendliness. I did manage to get directions out of