Excerpt from The Webster Chronicle by Daniel Akst, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Well, I’d still like to do a story about you. About your coming here. We could talk about all that."

They drove in silence, out past where Main Street turned into the county road. Webster sprawled haphazardly in this direction, with buildings seeming to be set almost randomly in the former cornfields that were now mainly parking. Not more than a quarter of the spaces were ever filled, and tonight they were almost all empty. There had been a thaw, melting enough snow to make all the roads wet, but by now everything was frozen again, and the temperature was dropping fast, making driving treacherous. Diana drove jerkily, taking too much time to work the shift so that the car was losing momentum whenever they entered a higher gear, and he could feel the scantness of their traction sometimes during these powerless intervals. She must be from someplace warm, he decided. (Fresno, he would later learn. Her father had been a minister there, and she inherited his religious impulses. Lacking his faith if not his calling, she had chosen to save the tenderest souls in her own way.) When they arrived at Aiello’s, an Italian diner on the edge of town, they found the icy parking lot curtailed by gray banks of frozen snow, the stripes between spaces invisible and the cars parked in such haphazard array that they seemed abandoned by their drivers to the winter. They slipped into a spot hidden like a canyon between four-wheel-drive vehicles, the new craft of choice even for Webster’s vegans.

"Hiya, Chip. Decaf for you?"

"Thanks, Harriet." He blushed at being called by his boyhood nickname. "And a piece of something sweet."

"And coffee for you?" Harriet smiled crookedly at his companion, arching her penciled eyebrows. Her hair was dark brown, but you didn’t have to look too closely to see that she was old. "I’ll get you a menu."

"Just decaf for me too," Diana said, removing her coat and jacket. He noticed that the bottle-green cable-knit sweater that she wore was frayed slightly, and too long, so that the sleeves covered her knuckles, which enhanced the impression given by her small size and big eyes that she might still be a little girl. He groped briefly for a word from a recent crossword until finally it came to him: neoteny. He spotted cat hairs on her youthful bosom and, eager not to be caught staring again, quickly looked around the restaurant. Aiello’s was off the beaten path, and its patrons at this hour were mostly strangers to him except for plump old Pearl Gibson, who sat in a corner dunking dog biscuits in her coffee and feeding them to the cocker spaniel who sat in the booth beside her. Terry motioned with his chin, and Diana turned to look. When she turned back she was flushed and smiling, and mentally Terry thanked the old lady for so thoroughly disarming his guest.

Reprinted from The Webster Chronicle by Daniel Akst by permission of BlueHen Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 2001 by Daniel Akst. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.