Blue Stew (Second Edition) by Nathaniel Woodland Read Free Book Online Page A

that appealed to Walter, on some unclear level.
    Henry dropped him off at five-before-eight. A heavy, driving mist still enveloped the wet town.
    Henry pulled away, and Walter had only taken a few gimpy paces towards the front entrance when the door burst open.
    “Walter!” It was Kall Chansky, the proprietor. “I can’t believe you would come in this morning!”
    “So you heard?” Walter had to fight back an inappropriate grin.
    “Melisa Corey came in early. Sounds like Tom has been up all night with this one.” Kall shook his head. “Can you believe any of it?”
    Walter gave him a look.
    “I mean—of course you can, you were there . What am I saying?” Kall laughed, but then tried to cover it over with a cough. He frowned, now, instead. “I didn’t think there’d be any chance you would come in, after going through that. How are you?”
    Walter shrugged, and, knowing full well it wasn’t what Kall meant, said, “I’m still sore from the crash, but nothing I can’t work through.”
    “ No , no. I heard about the man in the jeep . . . about Tom Corey cornering the disfigured psychopath in Doris’s house . . . and then him stabbing himself right in front of the both of you. How do you deal with stuff like that?”
    “Well, Kall, I guess just come into the work the next day and try to act like everything’s normal.”
    Kall held up his hands apologetically, “ Yeah , yeah. Of course you didn’t come in to talk about this, I’m sorry . I can—”
    “It’s okay,” Walter cut in. “That’s not what I meant.”
    “ No , I can put you to work on the lift in the stock-yard so you don’t have to deal with no-good gossipers like myself.”
    “Really, no ,” said Walter with powerful emphasis. “I think it’ll be good to talk about it. Therapeutic, you know?”
    Kall tightened his lips and nodded. “Okay, sure, okay. Hey, speaking of therapy, is it true about Doris, that she’s going to have to go see somebody?”
    “Wouldn’t surprise me.”
    “I guess having a deranged lunatic break into your house at night and try to kill you can . . . have that effect.”
    “He wanted to do much worse than kill her,” Walter spoke flatly. “If you had seen him, or seen the man in the Jeep . . .”
    Kall didn’t respond. His sense of decency had just been pitted to a stalemate against his curiosity: both were strong.
    “Anyway,” Walter spoke into the silence. “What are we still doing out here?” He held out his hands, bringing to attention the drizzle.
    “Yeah! Sorry. Let’s get in and get us some coffee, then get to it.”
     
    •   •   •
     
    The short, initial back-and-forth between Kall and himself turned out to be a pretty consistent template for Walter’s interactions throughout the day. Everyone has a dark side, and as much as everyone’s dark side yearned to dive into the gruesome nitty-gritty with Walter, everyone that day showed enough self-restraint to only brush over or hint at the extent of the derangement that Walter had witnessed.
    One, maybe two of the customers who drove around back to have their heavy purchases retrieved and loaded by Walter touched on something unfamiliar, something about “men in the woods.” But, with how they would vaguely jumble it in with other muddy details of the night, Walter just assumed that they had misspoken, or simply were regurgitating third- or fourth-hand gossip decidedly removed from the truth. At any rate, in each instance there was never a good opportunity to clear up the details.
    So, when Melisa Corey—wife of Officer Tom Corey—came around again near two in the afternoon, Walter was oblivious to the large ongoing developments.
    Walter, just inside the store’s entrance, was arranging the heavier pumpkins throughout an autumnal display of twine-bundled dried cornstalks, locally woven brooms, and green squash. It was part of an attempt to bring some local, old-fashioned flavor to an establishment that resided in one of the