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  “Here you are,” Deirdre said. “I hope you enjoy your meal.”

  “I’m sure we will,” Scott said. “It’s good to be here. I’m sort of hoping we can start over, Ms. McComb. Do you think that would be possible?”

  She looked at him calmly, but without warmth. “Gina will be right with you, and she’ll tell you the specials.”

  With that she was gone.

  Doctor Bob seated himself and shook out his napkin. “Warm packs, gently applied to the cheeks and brow.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Treatment for frostbite. I believe you just took a cold blast, directly to the face.”

  Before Scott could reply, a waitress appeared—the only waitress, it seemed. Like Deirdre McComb, she was dressed in black pants and a white shirt. “Welcome to Holy Frijole. Could I bring you gentlemen anything to drink?”

  Scott asked for a Coke. Ellis opted for a glass of the house wine, then put on his specs for a better look at the young woman. “You’re Gina Ruckleshouse, aren’t you? You must be. Your mother was my PA when I still had my office downtown, back in the Jurassic Era. You bear a strong resemblance to her.”

  She smiled. “I’m Gina Beckett now, but that’s right.”

  “Very good to see you, Gina. Give my regards to your mom.”

  “I will. She’s at Dartmouth-Hitchcock now, over on the dark side.” Meaning New Hampshire. “I’ll be right back to tell you about the specials.”

  When she returned, she brought appetizers with their drinks, setting the plates down almost reverently. The smell was to die for.

  “What have we got here?” Scott asked.

  “Freshly fried green plantain chips, and a salsa of garlic, cilantro, lime, and a little green chile. Compliments of the chef. She says it’s more Cuban than Mexican, but she hopes that won’t keep you from enjoying it.”

  When Gina left, Doctor Bob leaned forward, smiling. “Seems you’ve had some success with the one in the kitchen, at least.”

  “Maybe you’re the favored one. Gina could have whispered in Missy’s ear that her mother used to labor in your medical sweatshop.” Although Scott knew better . . . or thought he did.

  Doctor Bob waggled his shaggy white eyebrows. “Missy, eh? On a first-name basis with her, are we?”

  “Come on, Doc, quit it.”

  “I will, if you promise not to call me Doc. I hate it. Makes me think of Milburn Stone.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Google it when you get home, my child.”

  They ate, and they ate well. The food was meatless but terrific: enchiladas with frijoles and tortillas that had obviously not come from a supermarket package. As they ate, Scott told Ellis about his little set-to in Patsy’s, and about the posters featuring Deirdre McComb, soon to be replaced by less controversial ones starring a flock of cartoon turkeys. He asked if Myra had been on that committee.

  “No, that’s one she missed . . . but I’m sure she would have approved the change.”

  With that he turned the conversation back to Scott’s mysterious weight-loss, and the more mysterious fact that he appeared not to have changed physically. And, of course, the most mysterious fact of all: whatever he wore or carried that was supposed to weigh him down . . . didn’t.

  A few more people came in, and the reason McComb was dressed like a waitress became clear: she was one, at least tonight. Maybe every night. The fact that she was doing double duty made the restaurant’s economic position even clearer. The corner-cutting had begun.

  Gina asked them if they wanted dessert. Both demurred. “I couldn’t eat another bite, but please tell Ms. Donaldson it was superb,” Scott said.

  Doctor Bob put two thumbs up.

  “She’ll be so pleased,” Gina said. “I’ll be back with your check.”

  The restaurant was emptying rapidly, only a few couples left, sipping after-dinner drinks. Deirdre was asking those departing how their meals had been, and thanking them for coming. Big smiles. But no smiles for the two men at the table beneath the frog tapestry; not even a single look in their direction.

  It’s as if we have the plague, Scott thought.

  “And you’re sure you feel fine?” Doctor Bob asked, for perhaps the tenth time. “No heartbeat arrhythmia? No dizzy spells? Excessive thirst?”

  “None of that. Pretty much the opposite. Want to hear an interesting thing?”

  He told Ellis about jogging up and down the bandstand steps—almost bouncing up and down them—and how he had taken his pulse afterward. “Not resting pulse, but pretty damn low. Under eighty. Also, I’m not a doctor, but I know what my body looks like, and there’s been no wasting in the muscles.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Ellis said.

  “I don’t think there’s going to be. I think mass stays the same, even though the weight that should go with mass is somehow disappearing.”

  “The idea is insane, Scott.”

  “Couldn’t agree more, but there it is. The power gravity has over me has definitely been lessened. And who couldn’t be cheerful about that?”

  Before Doctor Bob could reply, Gina came back with the slip for Scott to sign. He did so, adding a generous tip, and told her again how good everything had been.

  “That’s wonderful. Please come again. And tell your friends.” She bent forward and lowered her voice. “We really need the business.”

  * * *

  Deirdre McComb wasn’t at the hostess stand when they went out; she was standing on the sidewalk at the foot of the steps and gazing toward the stoplight at the Tin Bridge. She turned to Ellis and gave him a smile. “I wonder if I could have a word with Mr. Carey in private? It won’t take a minute.”

  “Of course. Scott, I’m going across the street to inspect the contents of the bookshop window. Just give me a honk when you’re ready to roll.”

  Doctor Bob crossed Main Street (deserted as it usually was by eight o’clock; the town tucked in early) and Scott turned to Deirdre. Her smile was gone. He saw she was angry. He had hoped to make things better by eating at Holy Frijole, but instead he had made them worse. He didn’t know why that should be, but it pretty clearly was.

  “What’s on your mind, Ms. McComb? If it’s still the dogs—”

  “How could it be, when we now run them in the park? Or try to, at least. Their leashes are always getting tangled.”

  “You can run them on the View,” he said. “I told you that. It’s just a matter of picking up their—”

  “Never mind the dogs.” Those green-gray eyes were all but snapping off sparks. “That subject is closed. What needs to be closed is your behavior. We don’t need you standing up for us in the local grease-pit, and restarting a lot of talk that had just begun to die down.”

  If you believe it’s dying down, you haven’t seen how few shop windows have your picture in them, Scott thought. What he said was, “Patsy’s is the farthest thing in the world from a grease-pit. She may not serve your kind of food there, but it’s clean.”

  “Clean or dirty, that’s not the point. If standing up needs to be done, I’ll do it. I—we—don’t need you to play Sir Galahad. For one thing, you’re a little too old for the part.” Her eyes flicked down his shirt front. “For another, you’re a little too overweight.”

  Given Scott’s current condition, this jab entirely missed the mark, but he felt a certain sour amusement at her employment of it; she would have been infuriated to hear a man say some woman was a little too old and a little too overweight to play the part of Guinevere.

  “I hear you,” he said. “Point taken.”

  She seemed momentarily disconcerted by the mildness of his reply—as if she had swung at an easy target and somehow missed entirely.

  “Are we done, Ms. McComb?”

  “One other thing. I want you to stay away from my wife.”

  So she knew he and Donaldson had talked, and now it was Scott’s turn to hesitate. Had Missy told McComb that she had gone to Scott, or had she, perhaps in order to keep
the peace, told McComb that Scott had come to her? If he asked, he might get her in trouble, and he didn’t want to do that. He was no marriage expert—his own being a fine case in point—but he thought the problems with the restaurant were already putting the couple’s relationship under enough strain.

  “All right,” he said. “Now are we done?”

  “Yes.” And, as she had at the end of their first meeting, before closing the door in his face: “Good discussion.”

  He watched her mount the steps, slim and quick in her black pants and white shirt. He could see her running up and down the bandstand steps, much faster than he could manage even after dropping forty pounds, and as light on her feet as a ballerina. What was it Mike Badalamente had said? I can’t wait to run with her, not that I’ll be running with her long.

  God had given her a beautiful body for running, and Scott wished to God she was enjoying it more. He guessed that, behind the superior smile, Deirdre McComb wasn’t enjoying much these days.

  “Ms. McComb?”

  She turned. Waited.

  “It really was a fine meal.”

  No smile for this, superior or otherwise. “Good. I suppose you’ve already passed that on to Missy by way of Gina, but I’m happy to pass it on again. And now that you’ve been here, and shown yourself to be on the side of the politically correct angels, why don’t you stick to Patsy’s? I think we’ll all be more comfortable that way.”

  She went inside. Scott stood on the sidewalk for a moment, feeling . . . what? It was such a weird mix of emotions that he guessed there was no single word for it. Chastened, yes. Slightly amused, check. A bit pissed off. But most of all, sad. Here was a woman who didn’t want an olive branch, and he had believed—naively, it seemed—that everyone wanted one of those.

  Probably Doctor Bob’s right and I’m still a child, he thought. Hell, I don’t even know who Milburn Stone was.

  The street was too quiet for him to feel okay about even a short honk, so he went across the street and stood beside Ellis at the window of the Book Nook.

  “Get it straightened out?” Doctor Bob asked.

  “Not exactly. She told me to leave her wife alone.”

  Doctor Bob turned to him. “Then I suggest you do that.”

  He drove Ellis home, and mercifully, Doctor Bob didn’t spend any of the trip importuning Scott to check into Mass General, the Mayo, the Cleveland Clinic, or NASA. Instead, as he got out, he thanked Scott for an interesting evening and told him to stay in touch.

  “Of course I will,” Scott said. “We’re sort of in this together now.”

  “That being the case, I wonder if you’d come over, perhaps Sunday. Myra won’t be back and we could watch the Patriots upstairs instead of in my poor excuse for a man-cave. Also, I’d like to take some measurements. Start keeping a record. Would you allow that much?”

  “Yes to the football, no to the measurements,” Scott said. “At least for now. Okay?”

  “I accept your decision,” Doctor Bob said. “That really was a fine meal. I didn’t miss the meat at all.”

  “Neither did I,” Scott said, but this wasn’t precisely true. When he got home, he made himself a salami sandwich with brown mustard. Then he stripped and stepped on the bathroom scale. He had declined the measurements because he was sure Doctor Bob would also want a weigh-in each time he checked Scott’s muscle density, and he had an intuition—or perhaps it was some deep physical self-knowledge—which now proved to be correct. He had been at a little over 201 that morning. Now, after a big dinner followed by a hefty snack, he was at 199.

  The process was speeding up.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Wager

  That was a gorgeous late October in Castle Rock, with day after day of cloudless blue skies and warm temperatures. The politically progressive minority spoke of global warming; the more conservative majority called it an especially fine Indian summer that would soon be followed by a typical Maine winter; everyone enjoyed it. Pumpkins came out on stoops, black cats and skeletons danced in the windows of houses, trick-or-treaters were duly warned at an elementary school assembly to stay on the sidewalks when the big night came, and only take wrapped treats. The high schoolers went in costume to the annual Halloween dance in the gym, for which a local garage band, Big Top, renamed themselves Pennywise and the Clowns.

  In the two weeks or so since his dinner with Ellis, Scott continued to lose weight at a slowly accelerating pace. He was down to 180, a total drop of sixty pounds, but he continued to feel fine, tip-top, in the pink. On Halloween afternoon he drove to the CVS drugstore in Castle Rock’s new strip mall, and bought more Halloween candy than he would probably need. Residents of the View didn’t get a lot of costumed customers these days (there had been more before the collapse of the Suicide Stairs a few years earlier), but whatever the little beggars didn’t take, he would eat himself. One of the benefits of his peculiar condition, aside from all the extra energy, was how he could eat as much as he wanted without turning into a podge. He supposed all the fats might be playing hell with his cholesterol, but he had an idea they weren’t. He was in the best shape of his life, despite the deceptive roll hanging over his belt, and his frame of mind was better than it had been since the days when his courtship of Nora Kenner had been in full flower.

  In addition to all that, his department store clients were delighted with his work, convinced (fallaciously, Scott was afraid) that the multiple websites he had crafted would turn their bricks-and-mortar business around. He had recently received a check for $582,674.50. Before banking it, he photographed it. He was sitting here in a little Maine town, working from his home study, and he was next door to rich.

  He had seen Deirdre and Missy only twice, and from a distance. Running in the park, Dee and Dum on long leashes and not looking happy about it.

  When Scott got back from his drugstore errand, he started up his walk, then diverted to the elm tree in his front yard. The leaves had turned, but thanks to the warmth of that fall season, most of them were still on the tree, rustling gently. The lowest branch was six feet over his head, and it looked inviting. He dropped the bag with the candy in it, raised his arms, flexed his knees, and jumped. He caught the branch easily, a thing he couldn’t have come close to doing a year ago. No wasting in his muscles; they still thought they were supporting a man who weighed 240. It made him think of old TV footage, showing the astronauts who’d landed on the moon taking ginormous leaps.

  He dropped to the lawn, picked up the bag, and went to the porch steps. Instead of walking up them, he flexed again and jumped all the way to the stoop.

  It was easy.

  He put the candy in a bowl by the front door, and went into his study. He turned on his computer, but didn’t open any of the work-files scattered across the desktop. He opened the calendar function instead, and called up the following year. The date numbers were in black, except for holidays and appointments. Those were in red. Scott had marked only one appointment for next year: May 3rd. The notation, also in red, consisted of a single word: ZERO. When he deleted it, May 3rd turned black again. He selected March 31st, and typed ZERO in the square. That now looked to him like the day when he would run out of weight, unless the rate of loss kept speeding up. Which might happen. In the meantime, however, he intended to enjoy life. Scott felt he owed it to himself. After all, how many people with a terminal condition could say they felt absolutely fine? Sometimes he thought of a saying Nora had brought home from her AA meetings: the past is history, the future’s a mystery.

  It seemed to fit his current situation pretty well.

  * * *

  He got his first costumed customers around four o’clock, and the last ones just past sunset. There were ghosts and goblins, superheroes and stormtroopers. One child was amusingly got up as a blue and white post office box, with his eyes peeking out through the slot. Scott gave most of the kids two of the mini-sized candybars, but the mailbox got three, because he was the best. The younger children were acc
ompanied by their parents. The latecomers, a bit older, were mostly on their own.

  The last pair, a boy-girl combo who were supposed to be—maybe—Hansel and Gretel, showed up at just after six thirty. Scott gave them each a couple of treats so they wouldn’t trick him (around nine or ten, they didn’t look particularly tricksy), and asked if they’d seen any others in the neighborhood.

  “Nope,” the boy said, “I think we’re the last ones.” He elbowed the girl. “She kept wanting to fix her hair.”

  “What did you get up the street?” Scott asked, pointing to the house where McComb and Donaldson lived. “Anything nice?” It had just occurred to him that Missy might have created some special Halloween treats, chocolate-dipped carrot sticks, or something of that ilk.

  The little girl’s eyes went round. “Our mother told us not to go there, because those aren’t nice ladies.”

  “They’re lesbeans,” the boy amplified. “Daddy said so.”

  “Ah,” Scott said. “Lesbeans. I see. You kids get home safe, now. Stay on the sidewalks.”

  They went on their way, toting their sacks of sugary treats. Scott closed his door and looked into the candy bowl. It was still half full. He thought he’d gotten sixteen or maybe eighteen customers. He wondered how many McComb and Donaldson had gotten. He wondered if they had gotten any.

  He went into the living room, turned on the news, saw video of kids trick-or-treating in Portland, and then turned it off again.

  Not-nice ladies, he thought. Lesbeans. Daddy said so.

  An idea came to him then, the way his coolest ideas sometimes did: almost completely formed, needing nothing but a few tweaks and a little polish. Cool ideas weren’t necessarily good ideas, of course, but he intended to follow up on this one and find out.