The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) by Mark Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page B

course; Nicholas
Dabble was no voyeur. He shelved books, casting only occasional glances in her
direction. Or he tallied receipts from the day before, transactions marked down
in an old-style ledger, lifting his gaze from the green lines to see what she
was doing or how she was acting. Sometimes he would pretend to stare out the
front window idly, all the while watching her reflection as she moved around
the store in a kind of quiet detachment. He was not unmindful of the fact that
she was acting differently today; a little different from yesterday; even more
different from the day before. Ellen was getting worse. And everything she did,
every task she put herself to, was a desperate and ill-conceived endeavor at
normalcy that she simply could not carry off.
    At least, not well enough to fool him.
    He would have lamented her case, would have felt that
uncommon—so very uncommon—twinge in his heart at her gradual decline, were it
not for one very important nuisance of a detail. A detail he could neither refute
for its sheer tangibility, nor explain. And it was that detail that stuck in
his craw, rubbing at his brain the way a piece of grit rubs at the soft tissue
of an oyster.
    The book.
    He could have dismissed all of it, Ellen included, save for
the book. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. She had a good heart and a pure
soul. And as for her past, well, a part of him relished its dark side, lusted
after that seamy nature of mankind housed in her flesh, ever-present in her
mind. But an equal part of him deified the gentle nature of her soul. To come
through so much, and still believe in goodness and love and the gentle side of
human nature was a wonder.
    Fools were remarkably
interesting.
    That was why he took her
into his shop, took her under his wing. She worked hard and tried to be
helpful, but he honestly did not need an assistant. Never had, never would. But
while he did not need Ellen Monroe, he liked having her around. And for that
simple reason and no other, he kept her there. And sometimes, all he did was
watch her. Watch her… and wonder.
    Now he had a clue to the
riddle that was Ellen Monroe, only the clue made no sense, and that hardly made
it a clue at all. Just another riddle.
    Nicholas Dabble liked a
riddle only so long as he had the answer. Without it, a riddle was a mystery,
something he cared little for. Messy, hard to solve, the answers frequently
unpleasant. No closure on the last page, no rambling confession by an
unconvincing villain while an incompetent narrator served up spoonfuls of clues
to the reader, ensuring the inevitable restoration of normalcy. Normalcy was a
lie. Normal was what people thought existed when they closed their eyes, fell
asleep at the wheel, saw nothing, knew nothing. Life was not normal, not some
pocket watch you could wind up and read the hour of the day as the minutes
rhythmically ticked away. Existence was an ugly, organic creature whose mind
could not be fathomed simply by its appearance, a capricious monkey just as
likely to bite you as nuzzle your hand. To get answers, you needed an abundance
of both time and information, which Nicholas Dabble had.
    But he had no answers to
Ellen Monroe. No answers to the book she carried, The Sanity’s Edge Saloon .
    And that troubled him.
    Where had it come from?
How had it fallen into her hands? And what did he actually know about her?
Once, he would have thought everything. He saw her fall into the predictable
routines of someone in her situation, and he followed her through these
routines with a careful but not overly curious eye.
    And then the book showed
up, and Ellen was the one who found it, and Ellen was the one who read it, and
Ellen was the one who seemed to understand it, if only subconsciously. It was
enough to disjoint his carefully controlled world, a state of flux he could
neither fix nor abide, but which would go on and on and on. She had upset his
equilibrium.
    But in spite of that, he
truly liked her.
    “Ellen,