We ate at a local establishment with an all-you-can-eat salad bar. Since I knew about Rachelle and we were out of sight of the restaurant’s front room, Rachelle didn’t have to be so sneaky about stuffing food into one of her pockets for Spitfire. I watched an entire banana disappear into a pocket for which the banana was too tall, leaving the pocket flat afterwards. It was like watching Mary Poppins unpack her bag or Santa Claus empty his sack. The normal physics of volume were entirely absent. Extradimensional space, I thought.

While we were there, I tried to book hotel rooms for us with my phone over the internet. However, as the briefing for the mission had told us, none of the businesses in Dust Bowl were associated with corporate franchises, they were all mom-and-pop local operations. Thus, online services such as Expedia, Kayak, Priceline, or Hotels.com were useless. No hotels in Dust Bowl even showed up on those websites. We’d have to actually check in at the desk in person the old-school way, which was fine, but it was one more reminder that Dust Bowl had things going on under its superficial presentation as a desert tourist town. We expected that as Memorial Day weekend got closer, we would probably be pressured to move on and get ourselves out of Dust Bowl, but we did not have any idea so far what form that pressure might take.

We were seated at a large, circular corner booth in the restaurant’s back room because that was the only place ready to go that would seat six comfortably. There were other customers in the front area who could not see us in the back room. We were pretty much done eating and no one had gone back to the salad bar for some time, so I think that after a while, we might have been forgotten. We could overhear some of the front room customers, townsfolk apparently. Some of them with voices that were either low and deep or high-pitched enough to carry well were saying some interesting things. We all hushed and listened.

“Bob Beauford is boarding up his house again this year. I saw him starting today.” This was a deep, baritone voice.

“How many years has he been doing that?” This was a higher pitched voice.

“Ever since his wife died in 2019. He says no one is getting inside his house again during the Dirt storm,” answered the first voice.

“The way I heard it, it didn’t get into his house. It taunted his wife into coming outside and it killed her on their lawn,” the second voice responded.

Next, a voice that didn’t carry so clearly could be heard speaking in an admonishing tone.

“Well, why didn’t you say there were out-of-town folk in the back?” The first voice sounded a little annoyed.

After that the voices in the front were kept too low for us to hear more.

*******

After dinner when we were checking into our hotel, the clerk asked us how long we planned to stay. Liz answered that we planned to stay through the Memorial Day weekend and leave Tuesday after Memorial Day. The clerk informed us that would be impossible, that we’d have to check out no later than Saturday. The hotel would be closed starting on Sunday for an entire week.

“But that should be enough time to see our little town. There’s not much here,” said the clerk as she handed out our keycards, one set to our group’s men and one to our group’s ladies.

Jonie, who had been super-introverted and quiet on our road trip, chimed in. “I think your town out here in the desert is adorable.” I thought that not that Jonie was working a case, that she was throwing herself into the work and was becoming more focused and functional. I could relate to that. I may not have had to kill my own mage apprentice, but I knew grief and how finding work to do helped.

“Thank you. Please enjoy your stay, but remember when Saturday comes, you need to be gone.”

As we walked down the hallway toward our rooms, Liz asked. “Did anyone notice a strangeness to the customer service we just experienced?”

“It’s a little odd for someone working in hospitality in a town that’s built on tourism to say that there’s not much to see in their town,” noted Rachelle.

“And what’s with this ‘you need to be gone’ stuff?” asked Mont. “That sounded like a threat.”

“It did. Didn’t it?” Liz agreed.

Our rooms seemed normal. The cable TV channels were all normal and showed that the rest of the world was as normal as it ever was. Our rooms could have been anywhere, in any small town in America, not necessarily the one into which the Dirt was about to blow in.

*******

The next morning, Thursday morning before the Dirt was to arrive Sunday night at midnight, we returned to the same restaurant in which we’d overheard the discussion about the Dirt the night before. The smell of bacon and eggs washed over us as we entered. The kitchen sounded lively, but the patrons seemed melancholy, resigned, as if they knew what was about to happen to their town, and why wouldn’t they? They lived with whatever happened here year after year. None of them seemed talkative even amongst themselves with those at their own tables. The kitchen sounded lively though, as workers filled orders and shoved food through the serving window at the waitresses.

The only person in the place who seemed to be in a good mood was a man sitting by himself enjoying eggs, sausage, and coffee. He tried chatting up the waitress that was serving him, and she returned his small talk with some of her own, but it was easy to tell her heart wasn’t in her work or serving customers that day.

As we sat down, Mont stretched and remarked, “I couldn’t sleep a wink last night. This town must have quite the night life. I could see police lights through our curtains of people getting pulled over all night at odd hours. It kept me up.”

I hadn’t noticed. I had slept well. But, I did notice one problem with what Mont said. “Our room’s window doesn’t face a street, the highway, or a parking lot,” I said. “There’s nothing back there.”

“Then what were the lights?” Mont seemed confused.

“Perhaps something we should discuss in private later.” Liz suggested. “Let’s change the topic.”

Liz was right, It did feel like everyone in the place, though they weren’t staring, was paying a little too much attention to us, listening.