By late afternoon, things had finally quieted down in Maria's Café. The day had been filled with conversation. Mrs. Teabody had held forth until the last of the villagers had gone home to cook their dinners. At last, Mrs. Teabody sailed out the door, in a hurry, as she always seemed to be, in spite of having spent the better part of the day in the Café seeing to it that everyone who chanced to enter knew what her opinion of the tragedy were. As she was leaving, two young people came in and dumped their backpacks on the table furthest from the others. They each purchased their cup of house coffee, ignoring, as they always did, anything Italian about the café, and sat across from each other, heads bent towards the center of the table so that they could hear each other talking softly.
"I don't care what anyone says, Bob didn't get drunk and fall off that cliff. I saw him that evening. He called me that evening and asked me to meet him at the Coffee House. He wasn't drinking. He just wasn't. It's all nonsense, anyway. I haven't seen Bob drink alcohol twice since I've known him. Suddenly, with no evidence whatever, he is a drunkard."
"He was worried about something, though. I could tell. It seemed like he wanted to talk about it with me, and then changed his mind for some reason."
Sally McDougal was speaking. She was tall and rangy, or maybe you could say slim, with long curly brown hair. She was one of those that looked outside to see what the rest of the world was up to, rather than inside to see what she looked like to the world. She was a scientist, or would be in about a year, when she finished her PhD. It had to be in a year, her grant would run out then. She had plans to work in marine biology after that, and those plans had included Bob. She and Bob had had a sort of arrangement, which was to have become formal once they finished graduate school.
"Maybe he fell off the cliff without being drunk," Tom said. Tom was somewhat of an enigma. Most of the students living at the Research Station were graduate students involved in Marine Biology, or something closely related. The station was a research facility of the State University, and those there were nearly all doing research in the general fields of oceanography, environmental science, marine fisheries, or biology.
Tom was a poet. He was in Goose Cove, not exactly attached to the Research Station, to "Take some time off, to write a poem or two." Then he would return to the main campus to complete his PhD in English literature. That was the story, and sometimes he believed it. Meanwhile, he did part time work helping the tourists have a good vacation during the season and lived by himself most of the time. He had exactly two friends in Goose Cove. One of them was sitting across from him, and the other one was now dead.
"Friday afternoon, Bob came to my place from his office to freeload a sandwich, as usual. He was even quieter than usual, and wandered off in the direction of his place at about 7 o'clock. He called me about 8 and asked me to meet him in about an hour at Marie's. Normally, I would ask him who was paying, but for some reason this time I didn't. I think he knew that I knew that something was bothering him, and he probably wanted to talk to me about it."
"He seemed bothered about something, but I guess he decided not to talk about it after all. We didn't talk about anything important. In fact, I can't even remember what we did talk about."
"From there, he went directly to walk off a cliff. That doesn't follow. There must be a couple of things left out of that. Bob wasn't the type to walk off a cliff."
"Sally, he didn't walk off the cliff on purpose. He walked off it accidentally, in the fog."
"No way, Tom. Just no way. I know the cliff doesn't have a barrier, and probably should, but we go there every day. We know where the edge is. The fog wasn't that thick. I want to know what was on his mind when he left Marie's. He hadn't been acting like himself all evening."
"We'll never know now," Tom said, somewhat dreamily.
"Tom, do you know anything about his family?" Sally didn't sound dreamy at all. She sounded irritated. "Do they even know that he was in Goose Cove? I think I should go to Bob's place and straighten up, and maybe send his stuff back to his relatives. I think they live somewhere in the Midwest, like Kansas. Will you go with me? I don't want to be alone right now."
"Sure thing, Sally. You want to go now?"
"Can you? Right now? Yes."
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