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“Good morning!” I said brightly.
“Mmm,” he mumbled, clasping his hands nervously in front of him. He looked like a kid about ready to say their bedtime prayers.
“Oh, boy. Spit it out, Carl.” I sighed, losing my smile a bit. “You’ve been comin’ in here for years, and I’ve never seen you look so miserable.”
“Mmm,” he said as he twiddled his thumbs. I saw a line of black under each nail.
“C’mon, Carl, waitresses and bartenders are just underpaid therapists,” I smiled wanly. “I bet I’ve heard it all before. What’s up?”
A creeping feeling began to worm its way into my perfectly normal, wonderful day, and before he even said it, I knew what he was going to ask.
“Marnie, is it true?” he said with a frown. “You moved into the Mur—” He cut himself off quickly. “Um, the old Randall place?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. I should have expected this reaction, especially from the older people in town. I just… really hoped I wouldn’t have to deal with it the second I was at work. I hadn’t even been on the clock for fifteen minutes.
“Yes, Carl,” I said matter-of-factly, squaring my shoulders. There was no use in being sheepish or embarrassed. “It was a good deal, and the new owner fixed it up.”
The old plumber scoffed. “Fixed it up? I did the pipes there, and he did just about the bare minimum. I’d hardly qualify it as a spit-shine.”
As much as I sorta wanted to agree with that sentiment, I wasn’t about to admit to anyone else I was less than thrilled by the house. After all, it was mine, and that counted for something.
I cleared my throat primly and tapped my pen on the table. “Well, if I need any help with the plumbing, I’ll call you. Now, how about that order?”
After Carl mumbled out his usual for me, I went back into the kitchen and stabbed it into the POS system. It was one of the few modern commodities the old diner had, though the old touch-screen menu system was still about fifteen years old.
“Whoa, easy killer,” Celia, our cook, said as she eyed me under her grease-stained baseball cap. “What’d that computer screen ever do to you?”
“Sorry,” I said with a little huff. “Carl Brimley was giving me some shit about moving into the old Randall house. I just… I just know it’ll be the first of many. It’s going to be all day.”
“Ripper Randall,” Jessica said as she came up behind me. “I think you mean Ripper Randall’s house.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I rolled my eyes, something I figured I’d be doing a lot of that day. “I expected to get hell from you two but not the whole damned town.”
“Well, hon,” Celia started kindly, “it’s just… it’s just odd, is all. Not even that it’s you… that it’s anyone. All small towns have an abandoned spooky house, and most folks would probably like it to stay that way. You don’t slap a ‘For Sale’ sign on an old murder scene, and you certainly don’t expect a local to take the bait.”
“Technically, I’m renting,” I corrected. “It’s not like I bought it! I just… Beck and I really need this.”
Celia and Jessica shared a knowing look. It was one I knew all too well.
“Spit it out.” I sighed. “I know you’ve both got plenty of opinions.”
“W-we just have your best interest in mind,” Celia said, choosing her words carefully. She was over forty and more of a mother hen type despite her sometimes gruff exterior. I could tell she was trying to mince words a bit.
“I’d do a lot of things for a man,” Jessica quipped. “But I would do zero things for a man like Beck.”
Jessica, on the other hand, never minced her words. She was as blunt as a baseball bat to the side of the head.
“I can’t believe you rented the Murder Shack,” she continued with a grimace. “It’s just weird, Marnie, even for you.”
“Hey,” I said defensively as I swatted her arm. “I’m not that weird.”
“You kept a binder about shipwrecks when we were seven,” Jessica shot back. “Instead of playing Barbies, you were convinced you could find the lost wrecks of Lake Erie or whatever. You carried a comic book about Dahmer around in high school and wore a Cannibal Corpse shirt and then wondered why Jake Owens called you a freak in front of everyone.”
“In my defense… Cannibal Corpse has some decent songs,” I said with a shrug. “Metal music calms me down.”
“Weird,” Jessica muttered, but with a smile. “You’re weird. And as someone who is weird and who knows all the dark and spooky creepy-crawlies around Delaney, then you know why the Murder Shack is not a cool place for a love nest.”
“Yeah, well, my love nest is with a failed musician, and I work here,” I said as I wiped some sweat away from my forehead. Damn, the kitchen was hot. “I can’t afford anything else. And I can’t live with the failed musician’s mother anymore, either. She smokes a pack of Virginia Slims per day beside her damned oxygen tank. Not to mention the fact that she hates me.”
