Maybe when Jean went through the video files she would come up with something solid we could pursue.
Until then, I had a meeting at midnight I didn’t want to be late for.
~~~
By the time I was done checking in with Myra, and Jean who was poring over the video and still hadn’t come up with anything more we could use, it was close to dinner time. So I drove to the diner to eat something while I waited for midnight to roll around.
Piper looked a little startled when I walked in, but quickly gave me a big smile. “Hey, Chief. One tonight?”
“Yep. Go ahead and stick me in a corner, if you have one. I’ve some paperwork to get through.” That was the partial truth. I was going to go through the stack of notes on the case, but mostly I wanted to be somewhere unobtrusive. Whoever had sent me that letter might already be here in the diner. I wanted to people watch for a while.
“This okay?” She stopped at the table in the far corner from the door, next to a window, with a view of the door and most of the diner.
“Perfect. Like you read my mind.”
Her smile faltered, eyes going wide for a half second before she recovered. “Well, I’ll be right back with coffee and give you a minute to check out our diner menu.”
I nodded and made a show of sorting out places for the file folder, my phone, and the wire condiment carrier in the middle of the table.
Something about Piper was tugging at my brain.
I hadn’t told her I wanted dinner, though I did. She’d mentioned the dinner menu. This was exactly the table I’d been hoping to sit at when I’d first walked in and she’d taken me to it without my prompting even though there were a couple other corner tables available.
Coincidence? Skills of a long-time waitress?
Maybe.
But now that I thought about it, she had known Myra, Jean, and I all wanted pie the other night, had brought us coffee, then poured two regular and one decaf without us asking.
I wondered if Piper was a precognitive, or if she had the ability to read minds. I knew she wasn’t vampire...her skin was the wrong tone, she wasn’t vamp-thin. Besides, Rossi would have told me about her when she came to town. She could be a witch, or part fae, or any number of other things, and I wouldn’t know it.
And while being a precog would make waitressing pretty easy, it seemed like there were other and better uses for that kind of talent.
But then, I’d watched gods and goddesses choose jobs for which they were wildly unqualified. Sometimes a person just had to take any gainful employment that was available to them.
And sometimes a person didn’t want their job to have anything to do with anything else in their life.
I made a note to check into her background, and watched her chat with customers. She refilled coffee, ice tea, and sodas at the perfect moment. She checked to see if the meal was all right at exactly the second when no one’s mouth was full so they could actually answer.
That right there was an unnatural talent.
She ducked down the hallway past me, grabbed a wooden highchair, set it next to a table that would seat four, then was at the door to greet a young couple followed by an older couple who were obviously their parents. The young woman was holding a baby on her hip.
The baby wore a tiny umbrella hat.
Sigh.
Still, Piper had known they were coming through that door before they came through that door. She hadn’t even glanced out the window. Definitely some kind of ability.
Creatures and deities were required to check in with any one of us Reeds, and usually Bertie when they first came to town. But mortals with powers, such as witches, telepaths, empaths, mediums, were a little harder to keep track of. So many mortals with powers either didn’t know they had powers, or spent their lives trying to hide them. Most of them probably didn’t even know that Ordinary was a gathering place of the weirdly-abled.
I turned my gaze down to my menu and tried to decide between something moderately healthy, and something that I actually was hungry for.
I glanced back up when I sensed eyes on me.
Ben Rossi and Jame Wolfe had just come in. Jame waved a couple fingers and tipped his head in question.
They wanted to sit with me.
