STOPOVER and Other Stories for a Rainy Night
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Just some of the cozy and noir short stories from STOPOVER and Other Stories for a Rainy Night–from detective and police procedural to the cozy amateur sleuth–that come to life in the pages of this collection. Best read when the wind howls…
A private detective is on a personal errand of revenge when he makes the mistake of stopping at an abandoned diner; Arnold Knight is sure he’s spotted a crime in the neighborhood through binoculars, to the annoyance of his sister and the police; two men are stuck in an elevator and one decides to tell a scary story, props and all, to pass the time; a new warden uses a Tarot card to uncover a woman’s escape from a foolproof cell . . .
Excerpt from title story “Stopover”
Interstate 84 from east Oregon to southern Idaho goes past more than one broken-down building left over from better times, especially if you take an off-ramp into one of the U.S. 30 alignments. Once past Idaho I could follow that old U.S. 30 route all the way to Atlantic City, though that wasn’t my plan. Still, I’m a history buff and I liked driving on what used to be called the Lincoln Highway, the first road built cross-country from New York City to my home town of San Francisco.
About a hundred miles along the interstate I saw a sign for one of the alignments and swung off, looking for a place to eat. I wasn’t in a hurry. I wasn’t on anyone’s timeline but my own. A diner would do just fine as a stopover for a couple of hours, even it meant I was taking a risk with its fry-up. Janie wouldn’t have let me hear the end of that, if she’d been with me. Only, she wasn’t.
Funny how you can live twenty years with someone and never know who they really are. People thought we had the perfect marriage. So did I, but my best friend proved me wrong. I couldn’t figure out if I was more upset by the way they both fooled me or because it made me the butt of the classic cliché. Jim and Janie were gone before I even knew something was up. It was a hot day and I was tired from work. We were going to go see a movie, Janie and me, catch the air conditioning for a while. I hadn’t gotten around to installing it in the house. Instead, I found a note on the kitchen table, empty closets and drawers, and her favorite set of china taken from the glass display we had in the dining room. The rest was mine and good luck to me, her note said.
Right. Thing was, as a private investigator I tracked people who were missing for a living. Did they think I wouldn’t go after them? Wouldn’t find out they’d set up house in Twin Falls, Idaho? Maybe that’s exactly what they thought. Maybe they didn’t know me any better than I knew them. So I didn’t do anything for a few weeks. I knew they’d start to relax. That’s what I wanted.
Book categories: Mystery