CHAPTER TWELVE
Mrs. Goudeket caught up with Polly and Groff. "So long I slept," she said, panting. "They wouldn't wake me up. How's Mr. Starkman?"
"They think he'll be all right for a while, anyway," said Mickey Groff. "There's a whole field hospital coming in, somebody said. If he holds out until then he's got a good chance."
"Thank God," said Mrs. Goudeket, beaming. "And Mr. Chesbro?"
Polly Chesbro said cheerfully, "I haven't seen him all day."
Mrs. Goudeket looked at her appraisingly. All she said was, "I guess he's pretty busy."
Mickey Groff coughed. "Uh, the diner up the hill is in business, Mrs. Goudeket. We were just about to go up and get something to eat. Would you like to come along?"
"Why not? Then I got to find a car to get back to the hotel. Imagine," she laughed. "One hundred and sixty guests, and the only one there to keep an eye on them is Dave Wax. Believe me, Goudeket's Green Acres is one place they'll never come back to again!" She was very gay about it, Groff thought.... If you didn't look too closely. He had a sudden picture in his mind of what the last twenty-four hours meant to Goudeket's Green Acres and to Mrs. Goudeket herself. One hundred and sixty guests. At, say, five dollars per day per head. Over eight hundred dollars a day; and out of that you could pay for the putting green and the swimming pool, pay the salaries of the cooks, trumpet player and chambermaids and busboys, pay the installments on the mortgage and the electric bill. And squeeze out a profit; enough to keep you for a year on what you made in a summer. But, although your one hundred and sixty guests could cancel themselves out overnight, reservations or no reservations, you couldn't cancel the trumpet player or the mortgage or the putting green....
They had to wait in line, but they finally got a booth in the diner. The menu was soup, sandwiches, and stew—apparently slapped together in a hurry out of what would otherwise have spoiled in the refrigerator. There still was no power; evidently the diner was operating its stoves on bottled gas.