Marie, The Rest Of The Story

Old timers will remember Marie Helme, the mysterious older woman encased, rain or shine, in a black winter coat who we’d see gingerly making her way from the Mannix Building every afternoon to the Boonville Lodge. She was as central to Boonville’s human tableau as the Mannix Building itself. Once at the bar, typically on a stool at its far end, Marie, that amused little smile on her face that she wore as religiously as she wore her black coat, would down a leisurely single mini-bottle of Miller’s then, just as carefully as she’d picked her way the hundred yards from the Mannix Building to the bar, and always keeping her wary, darting eyes on the uneven ground beneath her and the multiple possible hazards surrounding her, Marie would walk carefully back to her tiny apartment in Homer Mannix’s intriguing two-story complex.