The waitress brings Nate his sandwich and then immediately gets on the phone with her kid’s school. Which would be fine — he’s the only customer in the place — except he didn’t come here for tuna on sourdough. He wants to hear about the Hanging Lady.
This restaurant could easily be replaced by a food truck. It only serves people in the nearby office buildings, it is only open for breakfast and lunch, the menu is generic. Nate prefers lunch spots with a bit more character. And a liquor license. But although his morning meeting went very well, it ran late, and today he decided just to dash to the little business district luncheonette. The one he’s been meaning to get to. The one that shows up on some “Most Haunted” list every October.
He sits at the lunch counter. The waitress is slumped at a bistro table by the front window, her back to him. “No,” she says into the phone. “No more tests. Please.” The kitchen is somewhere in the back, but he can hear a cook taking out his aggressions on pots and pans. Nate eats his adequate sandwich, composing a bad review in his head. Inattentive staff, he thinks. Lingering odor of onion rings.
A middle-aged woman steps out from the back room, wiping her hands on her jeans. Her clothes are casual — peasant blouse, checkerboard high-top Chuck Taylors — but she is professional enough to take in the waitress on the phone and the customer in need of attention. She approaches him from the other side of the lunch counter and asks, “Sir, do you need anything?”
Nate makes a big show of chewing his food, and she smiles while she waits. He swallows and smiles back. “I hear you’re haunted.”
The woman doesn’t quite roll her eyes, but he can tell she wants to.
“Come on,” he grins.
The cook clangs pots in the kitchen.
The waitress wails, “Because I don’t want him getting labeled! He’s only in second grade! That’s the kind of thing that stays with you forever!”
The middle-aged woman looks over his shoulder at her and sighs something that sounds like, “Every day.” When she looks back at him, Nate is still smiling. He is sitting up straight. If he weren’t holding a tuna salad sandwich, he would fold his hands. She actually does roll her eyes now, and she says, “You want to hear about the Hanging Lady.”
“Yes, please.”
She nods laboriously and gets a rag from beneath the counter and starts wiping it down. Nate thinks perhaps she doth protest too much, but he goes along with it. Takes an enthusiastic bite of his adequate sandwich. Is all ears.
“So one night,” the woman says, “after everyone went home, the old owner cleaned everything, did the breakfast set-up, and then hanged herself in the prep room.”
Nate already knows this part, but it still gives him a little chill. “And…?”
“And apparently she’s still around.”
“Doing what?”
“People see her, or hear her, working in the kitchen. Sometimes mopping. Sometimes they see her hanging.”
Beneath Nate’s Brooks Brothers shirt the hair on his arms stands up. “Have you seen her?”
“No. I don’t think everyone’s sensitive to it.”
“That’s probably true,” Nate says. He is confident that he is sensitive to it. In fact, it is occuring to him that the cook he has been hearing slamming around, the one that nobody else is reacting to, might not be male, after all.
Behind him, the waitress appears to be winding down her conversation. He senses his window of opportunity closing. He puts on his most charming smile, the one he thinks of as boyish. “Can you take me back there?”
“Oh God, no. Employees only.”
“Come on,” he laughs.
“Can’t. Health code. Sorry.”
He finds it amusing that the kind of place that lets the employees wear jeans and Chucks to work is so hung up on health code, but Nate keeps his smile friendly. Once the waitress hangs up the phone he will be outnumbered. It has to be now.
He looks at the middle-aged lady scrubbing ketchup off the counter and thinks about his angles: Flirtatious? Threatening? In the end, he goes with Respectful. “Please, ma’am,” he says.
She sighs again, glances over his shoulder at the waitress, then meets his eyes. “Real quick,” she says softly.
“Promise,” he whispers, hopping off his stool. He glances over at the waitress, who has hung up but who is still facing away as she looks at her phone, and he walks beside the middle-aged lady with the counter between them. Then he follows her behind it, past a hand-lettered sign that says STAFF ONLY.
The clattering from the kitchen is louder as he goes through the doorway. He follows the woman around a corner to the left and as he rounds the corner he nearly bumps into a pair of checkerboard Chucks dangling at eye level. And before he raises his eyes to look up the faded jeans and peasant blouse to her face, which he knows will be purple and bloated and staring directly at him, before he even breathes in and smells the putrefaction mixed with onion rings, Nate thinks: This is the kind of thing that stays with you forever.
