Pancakes After Midnight — a mystery

Pancakes After Midnight

Chapter One

I’d been married for six years, and apart for four of them while I was handling a gun for my country, and I suppose what happened can be traced to that.

We’d had less than a year before I went into the Service, and a little more than a year since I’d been discharged.

And we had no children.

Perhaps, too, we had too much — well, call it ambition, though greed might be a better word.

But, as Ruth said, if we couldn’t make it now, when could we?

We were making it.

Ruth was a secretary to the vice-president at Alcuna, at seventy-five every week.

I was working a six-to-midnight shift at Newton Press, and writing features at home the rest of the night.

I’d get home about twelve-thirty, pound the laptop until five-thirty, and then hit the hay.

I was selling about three-quarters of my production, and beginning to get a few fiction sales, too.

It made a long night, working like that.

I left for work about twenty minutes after Ruth got home after work. She would be sleeping when I was tapping the machine.