Silence

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Okay, so you’re Paula Kerry’s gal.” She felt a surge of dismay that he knew her mom’s name, which meant he must know at least something about her, and—she flushed with embarrassment. Her mom never had a good reputation. He crossed his arms and leaned against the side of the alley he had surprised her from. “What’re you doing in this part of town? Bucket closed a while ago.” He had this little half-smile on his lips that kept on distracting her, making her trip over her own thoughts.

  “I was looking for someplace to get breakfast,” she confessed. Is this where Mom works? Somewhere around here?

  He chuckled to himself. “You’re definitely in the wrong place, then. Unless you’ve got a hankering for bait. Hardware store sells worms and some old shoe leather that they call ‘beef jerky.’”

  “What are you doing in this part of town? Besides scaring girls.”

  Dylan regarded her for a moment, that same smile on his face. “I parked my bike back there,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Figured that I would take in the morning air on a walk.” He looked up and down the street, pausing. “You know, I’m heading down towards the docks; that should be your best bet for finding some food. Want me to show you how to get there?”

  The hottest guy I’ve seen all year, let alone here, is offering to walk me to breakfast…New York smarts would have said, “Ask him for directions, and let him wander off.” But this wasn’t New York. And he wasn’t giving off a dangerous vibe even though he looked a little dangerous. Besides…how much trouble could he give her? You can’t knock someone out and carry them off on a motorcycle without people noticing. This was a small town; people would notice anything unusual. “Sure,” she said.

  “There’s a diner that opens for the fishermen,” he told her, as they headed back from where she had come. “I don’t even know if it’s got a name. ‘Diner’ is all it says on the sign on top, and if you ask for ‘the diner’ that’s where people will send you. It opens at 4 A.M. and closes at 2 in the afternoon. There’s a fancy restaurant over by the Yacht Club, but they don’t open until 3, and unless you happen to be the kid of someone that belongs to the Yacht Club, they’ll never let you in wearing jeans.” He glanced down at her slim-cuts and trainers. Was he just checking me out? “Us peasants have to learn to keep our place, y’know?”

  Staci shook her head. “I—this isn’t like New York. And every other place Mom lived at, I was never there long enough to matter.” She felt her heart sinking. So I’m going to have to go to school here, and…figure out the other kids here. Yacht Club? I mean—In New York when you had money, you went to private school. Dad did all right but he didn’t have that kind of money, or at least, he hadn’t seen a reason to spend it on her schooling. Here…she was a complete outsider, from the Big City. She groaned internally, just thinking about what she would have to deal with when the school year started up.

  “So tell me what New York was like,” Dylan responded easily.

  “Um. Louder. And brighter. And it actually had, you know, people.” She bit her lip, determined to stare ahead instead of meeting his perfect eyes again. “People like my friends, everyone I’ve ever known. I just got here yesterday, and this place feels like a ghost town.”

  “Moving is never easy. Unless you’re rich, of course. You’ll find your place, though. Small towns like this can have their charms, if you give them a chance.” She caught his grin from the corner of her vision, and instantly felt herself blush again. Down, girl.

  “Have you been here long? Going to school, or…?” Staci let the question hang in the air. She chanced a look at Dylan; he walked so confidently, thumbs looped through his belt, chin thrust out and head up. He looked like someone straight from a movie set.

  “No, not too long. I don’t live in town at the moment. And I’m out of school, thank you very much. Just kind of doing my own thing, for now. I’ve got time, after all.”

  Now they were heading back towards the waterfront; the street was wider, and running downhill again. There were a couple of people out on the street, but they all seemed to be in a hurry to get what they needed to do done and get out. There were a couple of cars out too, parked in front of stores. They were all old models though, and looked as if they hadn’t been washed since the last rain. Like the buildings, they looked faded and tired.

  Another thing; there were wires everywhere. Old-fashioned telephone wires and electrical wires. Every other place Staci had lived, people had started putting wires underground, but not here. And most people she knew didn’t even have landlines anymore, they only had cell phones. But here—big old telephone poles with wires connected everything. To her astonishment, there was even a public telephone box halfway down the street from where they were walking.

  Reflexively, she pulled out her cell phone. Still no bars. She tried to think of what that was going to mean. If I make any friends…I’m going to like, have to wait by the phone if I’m expecting them to call. I can’t text! Oh my god…this is like the Dark Ages!

  Dylan didn’t seem inclined to ask her any more questions, so she asked him one, to get her mind off the disaster her social life was about to become. “That’s a nice bike you’ve got. What kind is it?”

  He laughed, showing very white teeth. “It isn’t. It’s a custom job. I never saw any reason to limit myself to what some ‘brand name’ wants to offer me.” He shrugged. “Besides, there are some places that you go to, a guy sees a brand name bike that he doesn’t like, and he’ll beat you or try to key your ride. People are funny, like that.”

  Her eyes widened at that. “What kind of places do you go, where people do that sort of stuff?”

  Another shrug. “All sorts of places.” He nodded. “Looks like we’re here, kid.”

  They were at the waterfront; across the street from the diner on the corner were the docks. The diner itself—well, people who were all into retro would probably have gone nuts when they saw it, because it was a classic, streamlined, chrome-decorated diner, right out of the 1950s, like so much of this town seemed to be. But if it had ever boasted neon, the bulbs were long since burned out and taken off. Like everything else, it was showing its age, looking shabby and tired. And just as Dylan had said, it had a big white sign on top of it, with a faded blue outline around the edges and faded blue lettering that just said DINER. Staci took a couple of steps toward it, and realized that Dylan wasn’t following her. She turned. He gave her a three-fingered salute and a half-smile. “See you later, kid,” was all he said, and turned to walk away.

  “Wait!”

  Dylan stopped, only half turning to look at her.

  “Um, thanks. For helping me find my way. To here. The diner.”

  “Think nothing of it.” With that, he started to walk off again, closer to the docks.

  She went up the three steps to the door, which had another one of those hanging cardboard OPEN signs on it. She pushed the door open.

  There was a row of small booths on the street side, and a lunch counter. There was one tired-looking man in a faded plaid shirt and dungarees at the far end of the counter nursing a cup of coffee. He didn’t even look up when the bell (another bell!) over the door jangled at her entrance. She didn’t see a waitress, so she figured it was a seat yourself kind of setup.

  She couldn’t help herself; she leaned against the window, watching as Dylan walked down the street. Before he was at the end of the block, a police cruiser had rounded the corner and stopped next to him. An older police officer wearing a wide-brimmed ranger hat stepped out of the car; he looked pissed to Staci. He walked straight up to Dylan, and it looked like he was talking to the younger man angrily, pushing his finger into Dylan’s chest several times to punctuate his words. Dylan looked…calm, but not at all happy. He didn’t talk back to the police officer until the very end. Whatever he had said stopped the officer cold; the older man got back into his cruiser, calling something over his shoulder before slamming the door and driving away.

  “What can I do for y
ou?”

  The voice startled her and she whipped her head around to see a girl about her age, or maybe a little older, in an honest-to-god waitress outfit, standing there with a pad and pencil in her hand. “Oh! Uh—” She fumbled for the menu. “Is it too late for breakfast?”

  “It’s never too late for breakfast. Don’t order the sausage, it’s gross. Or the fried potatoes, they’re grease-bombs.” The girl grinned at her. Staci blindly ordered what her dad would have called “a good solid breakfast”—toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, juice. As she finished, on impulse, she was going to ask the girl about Dylan, but when she glanced out the window again, he was gone.

  When the girl brought her food, the man who had been nursing that cup of coffee had left, leaving them alone in the diner. “Can you take a minute to talk?” Staci asked, a little desperately. “I just moved here—and—”

  “Sure thing.” The waitress actually sat down across from her in the little booth. “Nobody cares what I do as long as there’s no one here. My name’s Beth Phillips. What’s yours?”

  “Staci. Staci Kerry.” She crunched down a piece of bacon. “I just moved here. I’m staying with my mom.”

  “Okay, so you’re Paula Kerry’s daughter.” The waitress—Beth—nodded knowingly. Oh God, does everyone in town know about my mother? But Beth’s expression was one of sympathy, rather than superiority. “I bet this place feels medieval to you.”

  “I can’t find anything!” Staci almost-wailed. “Where’s the McDonald’s? The Starbucks?”

  “Forget that,” Beth replied, flatly. “This town is stuck in 1950. No big chains, no franchises, nothing but stuff that was started by somebody’s granddad and is being run by the grandkid. This diner’s probably the newest thing in town.” Reflexively, Staci reached for her cell and pulled it out.

  Still no bars.

  “Oh, and if you want any reception, you’ll have to go to Makeout Hill.” She pointed through the window over Staci’s shoulder; Staci turned in her seat and strained her neck a little to see that Beth was pointing to a bluff high above the town that overlooked the ocean. “It’s a long walk. You’d better get a car. Or a motorcycle or at least a bike, or make friends with somebody that’s got a car.”

  There hadn’t been a car parked out in front of the house when Staci had left…which probably meant her mom didn’t own one.

  “Beth!” came a muffled shout from the back of the diner.

  “Finish your breakfast before it gets cold, I’ll be right back,” the girl said, and stood up. “Coming, Ray!”

  In a kind of numb haze, Staci finished the food, nibbling on the last piece of toast when Beth returned, carrying a pad of paper, a separate piece of whitish paper and a red pen. “Here, this is a map of the town,” she said, spreading it out between them. It turned out to be an old placemat, printed with a map and the words Welcome to Silence in one corner. “Here’s the diner,” she said, marking it with a little red dot. “Here’s the pizza joint.” That got marked with a triangle. “Here’s the drive-in, they open at four.” She drew a tiny thing like a burger. “Here’s the movie theater, here’s the grocery store, this is the bookstore that doesn’t kick kids out for browsing, this is the five-and-dime and they get decent magazines in anyway.” These were marked with a movie reel, a bag, a book and a circle with the number five in it. “Everything else that matters is already printed on this, and it’s not as if anything’s changed in the forty years since they made these placemats.”

  Staci stared at her in shock. “Forty years?”

  Beth shrugged. “What can I say? We only just started to get to the end of the print run last year. Nothing ever changes here. Okay, look. Here’s the lumber mill, and here’s the cannery, those are where most people around here work. Here’s the school; grade school and high school right next to each other, so all anyone ever says is ‘the school.’ Here’s the Yacht Club—like you and me will ever get invited there!” She snorted. “Here’s the Hunt Club, which is mostly a bunch of old guys too cheap to go to a bar who got an old building where they can drink their own booze and smoke cigars without their wives around. This is the okay church—sometimes they do stuff for kids that doesn’t suck. This is the not-okay church—they hate gays, hate feminists, hate blacks, hate Mexicans, hate—you get the picture. This is the boathouse where the stoners hang out.” Marked with a little curl that could have been smoke. “Skaters hang at the high school parking lot. Jocks hang out here—the Municipal Gym. It’s just a gym, no classes, no pool or anything.”

  Staci felt in shock, but Beth wasn’t done. “This is where your ma works.” She drew a tiny glass about a block from the pizza joint. “Anything else is in the phone book, and you should be able to figure out where it is on this map.”

  “Internet?” Staci said faintly.

  Beth shook her head. “Dialup,” she replied. “Fifty-two baud if you are really lucky, mostly it’s not quite 24-baud. Except maybe the rich kids, I dunno, I’m not nearly important enough for any of them to talk to me. The Goths drive to the next town and the FreeSprings Mall, and use the free wifi there. There’s no cable here, and I dunno why. I know for cell we’re in some sort of dead spot; every year or two some cell company gets all excited about a whole town where no other cell company has come in, and they put up a tower and get frustrated because it won’t work. Maybe the same goes for cable. I know when you use the phone around here, there’s always a kind of weird background hum. The UFO crazies love it. Maybe that’s why the Blackthornes have their place out of town on Gray Oak Hill; it might be out of the dead zone.”

  “The Blackthornes?” Maybe she ought to try and get to know these people…if they had net…

  “Yacht Club people. More like the Yacht Club people. Ultra-rich. Own the cannery and the mill.”

  Well, so much for that idea. Nobody in the local silver-spoon contingent was going to have anything to do with the kid whose mom was the messed-up waitress for the local dive.

  “Anyway, that’s Silence. School doesn’t have classes in the summer, so you’ll have to hook up with the kids that aren’t working at the drive-in or something. Try to find a crowd to hang with, otherwise you’ll die of boredom.” Beth nodded as if she had experience of just that. “There’s not a lot of jobs around here unless you want to work at the cannery or the mill or on a lobster boat. That’s what the teachers all do in the summer, and most of the kids who are trying to make some money for a car. That’s the only seasonal work. Not like tourists would ever come here.”

  “So, there’s Goths, skaters, and jocks, rich kids, and that’s all?” Staci asked, feeling a little desperate.

  Make that a lot desperate.

  “Well, there’s some nerds. It’s really hard to be a geek in a town where the net is dialup. They mostly stick to themselves, for obvious reasons. They mostly hang out at the bookstore.” Beth put her finger on where it was on the map she had drawn. “The Blackthornes don’t own that, but it’s one of the few places they don’t. They do own the drugstore. And the movie theater. And I think the drive-in. And the bar where your ma works, and the fisherman’s bar and the lumberworker’s bar.”

  “They own the whole town?” Staci said, aghast. “That’s—like, medieval!”

  “Told you.” Beth leaned over the table, dropping her voice. “They’ve been here forever. Sean Blackthorne is a senior at the high school. They’ve got, like prehistoric money, they all look like movie stars and live like movie stars too. There’s all kinds of stories about them, where they get their money, because the cannery and the mill can’t be taking in as much as they spend. Some people say that they’re in the mob, some people say they’re a family of super spies or something equally stupid. I think it’s simpler than that—I think they were smuggling booze in the Twenties and drugs after that. The stoners around here never seem to have any problem getting their stash, and the cops never hassle the stoners, which would make sense if the Blackthornes are the suppliers, since they pretty much own the cops.
”

  Beth stopped to catch her breath, her eyes wide and a small smirk creasing her lips. “The little bit of excitement this burg has is the gossip about the Blackthornes; sorry about the run-on.”

  “Naw, it’s okay,” Staci replied, thinking to herself that the “mysterious” source of the Blackthorne money probably was no more mysterious than that it was all coming out of Wall Street. Having grown up mostly in New York City, and overhearing Dad’s conversations with clients, she had at least a passing knowledge of stocks and investing; it seemed like magic for other people sometimes, and that always confused her. The only “mystery” about the Blackthornes to her would be—why live in this backwater burg, and why Sean Blackthorne wasn’t going to a fancy prep school.

  Then again, she’d glimpsed crazy money in New York, and maybe what kept the Blackthornes here was that here they were the local kings and could hold court in the Yacht Club, whereas in New York they’d be “just another millionaire” and couldn’t get a table at Nobu.

  Or maybe they really are running drugs, and are smart enough to stay where they have the cops paid off.

  “Beth!” This time the owner of the voice came out from the kitchen and stood behind the counter, wiping his hands on his apron. “I need you to get the prep work done for the morning!”

  “Yessir, Ray,” Beth sighed. She stood up. “Nice to meet you, but it’s back to the salt mines for now. See you later, Staci.”

  Beth vanished into the back, and since she was done with breakfast, Staci decided she might as well leave. She climbed the diner steps down to the street and stood there with Beth’s map in her hands, looking up and down the street.

  It was pretty obvious that Mom didn’t have it together enough to keep groceries in the house. If she couldn’t manage to put stuff in the fridge when she knew I was coming…And at the rate she was meeting people—or rather, not—there was no way she was going to make friends with anyone who had a car.