me at our wedding and most of all I can’t believe that I fell in love with him and didn’t realize he was such a slimy creep.” She drew a tremulous sigh as tears once again filled her bright blue eyes.
“Listen, honey, you aren’t the first woman in the world who fell in love with a creep,” Nina replied as she gave Molly a hug. “Just be grateful that you found out what his real character was like before the wedding actually took place.” Nina pulled a napkin from a nearby container and handed it to Molly.
“Flint says he can’t go after him for the money Jimmy stole because his name was on all the accounts, and that means he had the legal right to take it. I don’t care so much about the money, but I’m so sick that he took my grandmother’s ring.” She dabbed at her eyes with the napkin.
“And didn’t Flint tell you that once they find him, he will be arrested for the theft of the ring?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid he pawned it or something, and I’ll never get it back,” Molly replied.
Nina patted Molly’s shoulder. “If he pawned the ring here in town, then Flint will find it, and since he can’t get out of town, the odds are good that he still has the ring with him. Are you okay to work or do you need to go home?”
Molly sniffled and wiped her cheeks once again. “No, I’m fine. I just had a momentary mini-breakdown. Besides, I’m helping Helen close up tonight.”
“And I’m leaving a bit early to take dinner to Grace,” Nina said.
Molly’s blue eyes deepened in hue. “Aren’t you afraid that she has the virus?”
Nina smiled gently. “All I know for sure is that Grace went home sick yesterday. I don’t know if she has a bad cold, the common flu or the Dead River virus. I’m sure she won’t feel like cooking tonight so I’m fixing up a care package, and I’m taking it to her and Billy.”
She gave Molly a shove toward the dining area. “Now get back to work and stop beating yourself up over that jerk Jimmy, and stop worrying about me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Molly gave her a saucy salute and left the kitchen.
Nina was grateful to see Molly back to her cheerful sweetness. At twenty-one years old, Molly was probably going to kiss a lot of frogs before she finally found the man meant for her.
Nina had certainly kissed a lot of frogs in her life, but she wasn’t looking for any special man to share her life. She was perfectly content alone, always had been, always would be.
With the dinner rush finished, Nina got busy filling a large Styrofoam take-out container with slices of meat loaf and mashed potatoes, green beans and two dinner rolls. There was not only enough food to feed Grace, but also her eight-year-old son.
Grace had left work early the day before with a bad cough and complaining about a bad headache. Nina had called her this afternoon, and Grace had confessed she still didn’t feel well at all.
Nina had told her to stay in bed, drink lots of fluids and had promised she’d stop by this evening with dinner for both her and her son, Billy.
Just before she finished packing up the food, she threw into the bag a couple of her special double chocolate chip cookies, knowing that they were one of Billy’s favorites.
Billy was almost a daily visitor to the diner. Grace worked an eight-to-five schedule, and Billy would come in after school during the weekdays and take a two-top table in the corner to wait for his mom’s shift to be over.
He was a cute kid with shiny brown hair and blue eyes like his mother. He was also a good kid, who sat quietly and did his homework, never bothering anyone while he was there. Nina had taken to him immediately, as she did most of the younger diners who came in with their parents.
Darkness had already fallen when Nina finally stepped out of the back door of the diner where her car was parked. Clad in a long-sleeved white blouse and a pair of black slacks that all the waitresses wore, she wished she’d thought of bringing her coat with her that morning as the night had brought with it a nip of a wintry chill.
She got into her car and placed the bag of food on the passenger seat and then turned her key to start the engine. She frowned at the sound of the familiar whir-whir of her battery refusing to catch. She turned the ignition off, waited a minute and then tried again, grateful to hear the engine finally roar to a start.
Gus at Dead River Auto Body had put in a new battery for her last week, but had warned her that the problem might be her alternator.
She waited for the heater to begin to blow warmth, trying to decide when she could take the time off to get the car back in for Gus to fix. Most days and evenings she was at the diner.
She supposed she could drop it off on the way to work one morning and pick it up on the way home. She could get either one of the cooks or a waitress to drive her from the auto shop in the morning and take her back there in the evening.
As she waited, she thought of all the recent events that had changed the town she had come to love and call home.
It was hard to believe that it was just a month ago that Mimi Rand, a local socialite, had returned to town with a baby she claimed was Flint’s brother Theo’s, the result of one night the two had spent together.
She’d arrived at Theo’s house, introduced him to the three-month-old little girl and then collapsed.
Dr. Lucas Rand, the head doctor at the Dead River Clinic had worked desperately to save the woman, who was also his ex-wife, but she had died anyway. By the time of her death, another man was dead along with two children, also suffering from the same mysterious symptoms.
When Flint’s grandmother, Dottie Colton, had fallen ill along with a teenage boy, the town was shut down by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Overnight the town had transformed from a small tight-knit community to something out of a science-fiction film. CDC trailers and equipment now surrounded the Dead River Clinic, and National Guard and other security forces, who looked like space men in their HAZMAT gear and guns, formed a perimeter around the town. Nobody in...nobody out.
With warm air finally blowing out of her car’s heater vents, Nina pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward Grace Willard’s small home.
She hoped her words to Molly proved true, that Grace had a simple cold or a common case of the flu and not the Dead River virus, of which the initial symptoms were very similar but then escalated quickly until the patient was deathly ill with severe respiratory issues and a high fever.
Nina wasn’t afraid for herself by going to Grace’s house. She figured she’d already been exposed to the virus day after day with the stream of people who came into the diner to eat. Of course, as a waitress, Grace would have the same kind of exposure and so would Billy.
There had also been the escape of a hardened criminal and Molly’s heartbreak, and all of these issues had changed the very heart and soul of Dead River.
Everyone regarded everyone else with suspicion, wondering who might be sick with the mysterious illness or who might be some sort of carrier. Then there were the suspicions of who might be helping the two fugitives in town, killer Hank Bittard and Molly’s jerk, Jimmy Johnson.
She desperately hoped that the Thanksgiving feast she had planned would bring people together, bring back a sense of community and remind everyone that they were all in this mess together, but the holiday was still weeks away. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem likely that a cure would be found by then.
Just before turning onto the side street where Grace lived, she frowned and slowed as she saw a couple near the streetlamp just ahead. As she drove closer, a sense of horror swept through her.
In the spill of illumination from the light, she could now see that it was a man and a woman. The man had a rope around the woman’s neck, and although Nina couldn’t hear a scream or a single indication of the woman’s terror, she felt it ripple through her blood.
Nina