Reunion at Red Paint Bay - By George Harrar Page 0,61
guy made a seven o’clock dinner reservation and said he was going down to the bay. But he didn’t show up. They didn’t think much of it except that this morning Ken McBride, he’s the—”
“I know Ken, Joe.”
“Oh yeah, right, well he found the guy’s shoes and socks on the dock, so they figure maybe he was walking along there barefoot and fell in. I guess he was known for being kind of dizzy. I was going to head over there, check it out. That okay?”
It had to be okay. A reporter would naturally follow up on the possibility of a man staying at the Bayswater Inn disappearing, perhaps drowning. “Of course,” Simon said. “Go get the story.”
He assumed the body would be found. Red Paint Bay was no more than ten feet deep at the end of the dock, and the current there was weak. A person falling in wouldn’t drift far away. As he sipped his morning coffee and scanned the out-of-town dailies, Simon tried to work out the likely sequence of events. A body would be found and identified by Ken McBride as Paul Chambers, a guest at Bayswater Inn. The evidence would point to the simple drowning of a clumsy man (the impact of small trauma to the chin would go unnoticed). An investigation would be launched into who exactly Paul Chambers was and why he was in Red Paint. The Register would run his picture with the caption Do You Know This Man? Someone, a former classmate or close friend, if he had any, would probably recognize him despite his changed appearance. They would say that he was Paul Walker. People would remember his being at the reunion and wonder why, since he was the year behind. Amy, feeling freed from privacy laws by her patient’s death, would perhaps come forward to state that she had seen him professionally several times. It was unclear to Simon whether she would say more.
He decided to eat at Red’s, his usual Friday routine, and sit at his customary spot, the red-cushioned stool at the far end of the counter. It was late for lunch in Red Paint, past one, so there were only a few customers sprinkled throughout the L-shaped diner. The waitress, Red’s wife, had plenty of time to lean back against the frappé machine and catch Simon up on local gossip. “Old man Rhodes,” she said, “he’s on his last breaths. Doris said they’ll probably put him out of his misery this weekend. It’s their seventieth anniversary on Saturday. She’s had her mind set on them reaching that for years, like it’s some kind of record.” Simon considered sending Ron over for an anniversary picture, but what would it show—a feeble old man wearing an oxygen mask and his equally old wife goading him to stay alive a little longer? People didn’t want to see that. “Lenore Jenks,” Red’s wife said as she picked up the glass salt and pepper shakers in front of him to inspect their levels, “did you hear about her?”
“Can’t say as I have.” Simon scanned the menu, three pages full of fried clams and calamari, mushroom caps and mushroom burgers, pastas, curries, soups, beef and chops. Red was a versatile cook. But he couldn’t spell. Simon found new mistakes every meal—the spacy chicken salad, the mazzarella sticks, and eggplant parmagiana.
“She says she knows what happened to that missing man out on the bay.”
He kept his eyes on the menu, reading the nonsensical entrees, just casually interested in Lenore and what she saw. “What does she think happened?”
“She says he didn’t just fall in on his own, he was pushed.”
Simon thought it an appropriate time to look up, show a bit of journalistic curiosity. “How would she know that?”
“She was out walking her dog just down from the pier and she heard two men arguing, then one pushed the other. That’s what she says.”
Two men, that’s all she apparently saw, too far away to be identified by an old woman with undoubtedly bad eyesight. All just her wild speculation. “I assume she went to the police.”
“Oh sure, but she’s always going over there with something she’s seen, like that UFO she said was hovering over the bay last month. Like nobody else would notice a flying saucer as big as a football field.”
“That is crazy,” Simon said.
“Lenore’s batty as hell, that’s why nobody believes her. I go visit with her twice a week, and the stories she tells. That woman could drive