The All-Night Diner

That's what the sign says, glowing red off Route 9 in the flatlands outside Choctaw Bend - red that isn't quite neon, and isn't quite anything alive. Every trucker on the CB has a story about the All-Night Diner. Best meatloaf on the interstate. Best coffee you'll ever drink. And a waitress named Loretta who's been dead since 1974.

Russ Kepler knows he should keep driving. He doesn't.

One plate of the special turns into a habit. A habit turns into five nights a week. And somewhere around the fifth or sixth visit, Russ starts noticing what the other regulars already know and won't say out loud: eat there enough times, and Loretta stops staying behind the counter. She starts showing up in your mirrors. At empty rest stops, hundreds of miles from Choctaw Bend. Closer every time.

Then trucks start turning up abandoned in the gravel lot - engines off, keys in the ignition, plates of meatloaf cooling on the hood - with no drivers anywhere to be found.

Forty-one names are pinned to a sheriff's corkboard that the Choctoberfest tourism committee would very much prefer nobody mention. A grease fire that somehow left a dead girl's hands perfectly clean. A hallway that shouldn't fit inside the building it's hiding in. And a bus ticket to Nashville that's been sitting in an apron pocket for fifty-two years, waiting for someone brave - or lonely, or hungry, or foolish - enough to finally help her use it.

Pull up a stool. Order the special.

Just don't come back tomorrow.