She turns away from it and looks down into the Ratskeller. One of the Eighty-eights and town manager Rag Doll, also known as Evelyn Hart, are waiting. Dare she go sit with them? She could still run away. They seem to have not spotted her yet at the top of the stairs. But she’d been studying that painting with cashmere robed Shelley for a while. They could have looked up here when she didn’t notice. Can’t take a chance, she realized. That’s how town rumors and gossip get started. And she’d had enough of that already in this place full of time and space.
But it wasn’t just one of the Eighty-eights down there. It was 2 of them, Eight and Eighty together. She’d imagined seeing Rag Doll aka Evelyn Hart all along, all this time while both glancing down there and simultaneously studying De Boy’s painting up here with Shelley. What gives?
—–
“I’m here to see the manager,” he said to Sue Anne the counter attendant of the moment. She waves her arm in the direction of the only other person in the diner while saying, “How about the owner?”
Promotion, ahh. Rag Doll aka Evelyn Hart was not in the same position Alessandra (= white-clad Wheeler) assumed she would be in this town of New.
She dug right into him. “You were suppose to turn right at the can. What *happened*?”
(to be continued)
Sunklands 