Mockingbird Songs by R.J. Ellory Page A

difficulty. Alice Honeycutt herself came to the door when he knocked. She was a head shorter than Henry. She and her husband must have appeared an odd pair those times they were seen together.
    “Knox send you down?” she asked.
    “Yes, ma’am,” Henry replied. “Said it would be okay if I stayed over for the night.”
    “No problem at all, young man,” Mrs. Honeycutt said. “And if you’re hungry, I can make you up a plate. We sort of finished dinner a little while ago, but there’s more than enough left.”
    “That would be appreciated,” Henry said.
    “You have a bag or some such?”
    “In the pickup,” Henry said.
    “Well, let’s get you fed. I’ll get a bed made up, and then you can fetch your things.”
    Henry was shown through to the dining room. There were a half dozen smaller tables, some of them set for two, some for four, and in front of the street-facing window there was a longer table with eight chairs around it.
    “Pot roast,” Alice Honeycutt told him. “That’s gonna have to do you, because that’s all we got.”
    “That would be just fine, thank you, ma’am.”
    She left him sitting there, wondering why there had been no talk of money.
    Ten minutes, no more nor less, and a young woman came through with a plate. Henry guessed she was in her early twenties. Dressed in jeans, suede moccasins, a cheesecloth blouse, her hair a wild tangle of tight curls corralled with a leather thong, she seemed more suited to a rock festival than a small-town boardinghouse. She was pretty, no doubt about it, and Henry sensed his own awkwardness after three years of nothing but the company of men.
    “Hey,” he said.
    “Hey you,” she replied.
    “Are you Mr. and Mrs. Honeycutt’s daughter?”
    The girl sort of half laughed. “I look like the kind of daughter they’d have?”
    “Lot of people don’t look like their folks,” Henry ventured.
    “Well, I ain’t, no.”
    “You work here?” he asked pointlessly.
    “Nope. I just do this for the hell of it.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “You with the cops, or what?”
    Henry laughed. “No.”
    “What’s with the third degree?”
    “Just being polite. Making conversation, you know?”
    “My name is Evie Chandler,” she said.
    “I’m Henry Quinn.”
    “Good for you,” she replied, and turned to walk away.
    “Thank you for the dinner,” Henry said.
    “Think nothing of it,” Evie said over her shoulder, and left the room.
    While he ate, Henry wondered if Evie Chandler was as abrupt and unfriendly to everyone, or if he’d been selected for some kind of special treatment. Regardless, he couldn’t ignore the effect she’d had on him. He guessed any pretty girl would have done the same.
    Henry ate. The pot roast was good. He was thirsty, but there didn’t seem to be anything to drink.
    His dinner finished, he went back out to the front porch of the house, heard nothing, saw no one, and figured he should get his things from the pickup.
    Out on the veranda, he found Evie smoking a cigarette.
    “So what’s your story, mister?” she asked. Her attitude was still brusque and surly.
    In the semidarkness, sitting there on the railing, now sporting a denim jacket over her blouse and cowboy boots in place of moccasins, she was West Texas through and through. Her hair, now let down, was a cascading mass of featherweight chestnut curls. She really was a very pretty girl, no doubt about it, but the snarly attitude wasn’t doing her any favors.
    “Maybe I don’t have a story,” Henry said.
    “Everyone has a story.”
    “I’m here to find someone.”
    “You don’t say?”
    “Too late. I just said it.”
    Evie smiled. “You think you can win against me?”
    “Is there a contest here?”
    “Life is a contest.”
    “Sure it is, but not between you and me, lady.” Henry started down the steps toward the pickup.
    “That your guitar in the back of that pickup?”
    “How do you know I have a guitar in the back of my pickup?”
    “I went