A cowbell clanked overhead, triggered by his opening the door, and it made Stiles wince. He didn’t like attracting attention, but that was just what it did. All four people in the store looked in his direction. There was a girl behind the register and another behind the lunch counter along the north wall and a couple of locals sitting in the dining area nearby. Stiles tried to ignore them. The smell of fresh coffee was stronger in here, enticing, and mingled with it was what, hot apple pie? He started picking his way through the aisles and displays.

A placard caught his eye. It was white poster board on which someone had scrawled Bargain Basket in Magic Marker. It leaned against an oversized laundry basket full of damaged goods and underselling merchandise. There was an abused He-Man doll, some kitchen utensils, lotions, dishtowels, a fire truck missing one wheel, and several Harlequin Romances.

Treasure! He rescued one of the paperbacks. Love at Sunset. Had he read that one? It didn’t sound familiar. Neither did Train to Istanbul or Under a Pale Moon. And there were others, not in the greatest condition but still readable. He checked the price . . . three for a dollar! He dug the sole five-dollar bill from his pocket and looked it over and tried to talk himself out of it, then stacked six of the books and took them to the register. The young girl behind the counter snapped her gum and smirked at seeing the covers but didn’t say anything.

She didn’t give him a sack either.

He took his bounty to the lunch counter and chose a stool away from a spindly old woman in a scarf and sunglasses with too much makeup and a match between her teeth. He sat the books on the counter and made sure the receipt was in plain view, then picked up the menu and glanced over it, careful not to let the jelly stains rub off on him.

“Hey, you read those too?” the woman behind the counter said in a husky voice, soft but with an appealing, gravelly edge to it. “Or are they for your wife?” The voice brought his eyes up from the menu card. Two things about her caught his attention. First, her face. She was lightly freckled and wore no makeup, at least none that he could see. Her features were strong but feminine and had that ageless quality that could have been twenty or forty, though he placed her somewhere a bit younger than himself. Her dark hair was almost shoulder length and curled about her face and contrasted the light of her smile. No raving beauty, but nice. What Charlie Bean had said about Isherwood. Comfortable.

The second thing he caught was a bit of plastic pinned to the ample bosom of her turtleneck sweater. It bore a happy face and said, “HI, MY NAME IS” with Billie written below. Billie, huh? The name fit the voice, and the voice fit the face.