The Shadow Men by Christopher Golden; Tim Lebbon Page A

which was the name of this place back then. I cried a lot that afternoon, waiting here. Not my grandmother. Her eyes were red but she didn’t cry. The woman looked like her face had turned to stone.” Trix shook her head, gazing at the wall as though she could see through it, back across the years.
    “And?” Jim said. “Did she come? The Oracle?”
    Trix reached up and pushed a matted lock of pink hair from her eyes. “Do you think we’d be sitting here if she didn’t?”
    The waitress arrived and slid the metal pizza tray onto the table. Jim and Trix stared at each other, both drinking, as the woman served them each a slice and then asked if there was anything else she could get them. They both muttered noncommittally, and the waitress hurried off to her next customer.
    “You found your grandfather?”
    Trix took a swig that drained the remains of her Heineken. “He’d been a tailor in Chinatown in his thirties and forties. He was walking up and down Harrison Avenue trying to figure out why the business wasn’t there anymore. He thought he was late for work and had gotten turned around.”
    “And that was where this Oracle woman had told you he would be?”
    Trix glanced at the door. That was answer enough for Jim.
    “This is nuts,” he said.
    She bit into her pizza, chewed, and swallowed that first bite. “If you have a better idea … if you have the first clue what the fuck we should do about this …” She laughed a little crazily and touched her hair. “Please share. Because I don’t think calling Missing Persons is going to bring Jenny and Holly back.”
    As Trix ate, Jim stared at the pizza cooling on his plate. Perhaps two full minutes passed before he picked it up and started to eat, feeling with every bite like he was somehow betraying his wife and daughter by feeding himself. He should have been out on the street, visiting every place they had ever been, or back at home waiting for them to return. But inside, he knew that was foolish.
    Trix caught him staring at her. “What?” she demanded.
    “Just trying to adjust to your new look.”
    Trix shook her hair back. “Me, too. You know, I’m not the only one who looks different.”
    “What, me?”
    She tapped her eyebrow. “Your scar, from the night you and Jenny went to the U2 concert? It’s gone.”
    Jim reached up and ran his finger across the place where the scar ought to be, but he couldn’t muster shock or even surprise. He’d earned the scar in a quick exchange of fists with an asshole who’d groped Jenny’s ass at the concert. There had been blood in his eyes—the guy wore a ring with a Celtic design—and by the time he’d wiped it away they were all being thrown out. But that had never happened, so there was no scar.
    “You’re in better shape, too,” Trix told him. “Leaner, maybe a little better built. In the car, when you hugged me, I could tell.”
    Now that she mentioned it, he did feel different. For several seconds he studied her again, then he flagged the waitress as she went by. “Another whiskey, please.”
    “Do you want another Heineken, honey?” the waitress asked Trix.
    Trix laughed uneasily. “Damn right.”
    And so they ate and drank and waited, talking very little. There was nothing they could have said that would not have seemed either redundant or ridiculously trivial.
    But when the glasses were empty and they’d eaten their fill—and even after they had ordered coffee and the dregs were cooling—no one had come over to talk to them, and no one Trix recognized had come through the front door. The restaurant had a bar that ran its length, right across from the booth where they sat, and from what Jim could tell there weren’t even any single women there.
    The waitress had brought the check, but they weren’t in a hurry to pay, though they could feel her silently willing them to give up the table. He had to fight the urge to be up and out of there, to be doing something—anything—to find out