The End of The Road (21 page)

I took Stretch in with me. A couple of the clerks who work there are friends of his and don’t mind if I bring him in on his leash. They also usually have a treat or two saved for him, which he expects and accepts as his due.

I took my time in the yarn department, picked out the colors I wanted, and had started for the checkout counter when I was side-tracked by the puzzles and games selection. Not finding anything new or tempting, I decided to give my friend Becky a call and see if she’d like to come for dinner and a game or two of Farkel. Lew was an avid game player and would probably also enjoy an evening that included a meal he didn’t have to make for himself.

“Time to go home and get ourselves some lunch,” I told Stretch, as we started for the car. “Then I’m going to call Becky and Lew and we’ll make a cheerful evening of it.”

They both happily accepted my invitation.

“I’ll bring the wine this time,” Becky told me.

“Something smells delicious,” Lew, arriving first, said as he hung his coat by the door. “Any more trouble with unwanted houseguests?”

“Nary a one,” I told him. “Thanks to your assistance with the new lock, I’ve managed to keep them at bay. But actually none have shown up at all.”

“Good,” he said, and assured me once again, “You’ve got my number if they do.”

Becky followed him closely. So we had time for a glass of the wine she had brought along and conversation around the fireplace before dinner.

“So Joe and Sharon have decided to tie the knot finally,” she said. “Harriet Christianson told me when I stopped at the library the other day. How about having it tied out on Niqa Island?”

“Great idea,” I agreed. “She suggested that to me a few days back and I was going to ask you about it before I said anything to Joe and Sharon. Do you think it would be okay with the rest of your family?”

“Sure. But I’ll check if you like and you can let me know what dates they pick.”

The dinner turned out well and we had the cake with ice cream for dessert, which especially pleased Lew, as he is a chocolate lover.

Then I cleared the table and got out the Farkel board and the box of the dice required to play.

It’s an addictive game and we played four rounds, two of which Lew won, to his delight, but it’s all in the numbers you can roll with the dice that add up as you count and move your piece around the board. Sometimes they fall your way, sometimes not, and you get left behind while someone else makes it all the way to the finish line.

By the time we had played four rounds and the bottle of wine was empty, we were about ready to call it a night.

“Time to head for the barn,” Lew said. “Thanks for asking me, Maxie. Don’t forget to give me a call if you have any more trouble.”

I told him I wouldn’t, waved to him from the door, and went back to toss a log on the dying fire and sit down with Becky for a few minutes.

“What trouble?” she immediately asked me.

I told her about finding that someone had stayed uninvited in my house while I was gone to Anchorage and Wasilla.

“Good grief! Did you call the police?”

“Not right away, no. But Lew came and changed the lock on my front door, which gives me confid ence that whoever it was won’t be able to get in so easily again. Also, I’m leaving my shotgun within easy reach these days. So don’t worry. The police know now and I live closer than most people to the station, so they could be here quickly if I had to call.”

“Well, promise me you’ll take care,” she said. “And remember that you can come and stay with me if you want to.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind,” I assured her, as I had assured Lew.

It’s really great to have good friends who treat you almost like family. Sometimes I think it says more than that, actually. Good friends make a choice in helping or taking you in. Family can’t.

TWENTY-ONE

THE NEXT MORNING AFTER BREAKFAST I gave another thought to finding Joe’s Christmas stocking in the attic.

“Come along,” I called to Stretch. “You can come up with me while I search the attic for the Christmas trunk.”

I carried him up and was surprised to find the door at the end of the second-story hall not standing open, but not closed tightly either.

I couldn’t remember when I had last been up there, but the attic isn’t heated, so I always close the door to keep the cold out. I carefully closed it behind me and carried Stretch up the stairs.

Like most attics, through the years it had become a repository for odds and ends that are somehow precious, are too good to get rid of, or are seldom used. Christmas ornaments, for example, have a specific, once-a-year purpose and spend the rest of it waiting for the holiday to roll around again. Under one small window I have a trunk full of things I have collected over the years that have meaning to me: my high school and college annuals and diplomas; letters I want to keep from people I have known and valued; the birth certificates of my two children, son Joe and my daughter, who lives on the East Coast. And there are other miscellaneous items that mean something only to me—and a few things I have forgotten why I wanted to keep, but never seem to find the time or inclination to sort and discard.

Sometime in the summer I had gone up to the attic, then even farther up a steep stair that is almost a ladder on one side of that under-the-eves space, pushed open a narrow door overhead, and stepped out onto the small, fla t part of the roof my husband Joe had built. About ten feet square, it is a widow’s walk with a decorative, waist-high railing—like the ones he had grown up seeing on the Northeast coast, where wives watched for their husbands’ fishing boats to come back safely from the sea. Those that never saw them come home must have walked nervously back and forth in the small space, and given rise to the name for this type of outlook. I don’t think there’s another like it anywhere else in Homer—maybe even in Alaska.

This time I didn’t go up that far, however, as I was looking for the trunk that contained our family’s traditional Christmas decorations, which were most precious and irreplaceable. There I thought I would find son Joe’s hand-knit stocking to use as a pattern for the one I intended to make for Sharon.

Looking across the attic to a space under a small window, I saw it, as expected, with a box or two of Christmas tree lights lying on top. Winding my way through the odd bits and pieces of our lives through the years—a chair with a broken rocker, a pile of motorcycle books a younger Joe had collected, a clear plastic bag holding my daughter’s dolls and the stuffed animals that had filled more of her bed than she did as a child, a few framed and now dusty family pictures I had no room for on the walls downstairs, a filing cabinet that held I wasn’t sure what, old tax records probably, but wasn’t about to find out on this particular day—I came at last to the south side of the attic and the trunk I was aiming for.

Inside, under a pile of unused, leftover holiday cards, I found Joe’s stocking, took it out, and closed the lid again before turning back toward the stairs.

On the other side of the attic I could hear Stretch scratching and growling at something against the west wall, so I took a different route through the attic collection to see what he was worrying, hoping he hadn’t found a mouse.

A stack of cardboard boxes lay between us. I walked around them and what I saw there on the floor stopped me cold.

An old carpet I had once used in front of the fireplace downstairs, rolled up and put next to the attic wall several years earlier, had now been pulled out and lay, more loosely rolled, in the space in front of me. Stretch had been pulling on its closest end, enough to partially unroll part of it. From the end closest to me a foot protruded—a woman’s foot, in a plain brown businesslike shoe with a low heel—a shoe I didn’t recognize.

I caught my breath and stood staring at it in total surprise and shock for a long minute.

Then I stepped forward, snatched up Stretch to keep him from any more tugging on the carpet than he had already done, and though he wiggled and whined to be put down, I took him down the stairs to the bedroom level.

“Stay,” I told him, and, closing the door fir mly to keep him out, went back up to the attic.

There I hesitated. Should I or should I not unroll the carpet to find out if the person inside it was really as dead as I believed? I reached out cautiously and laid my fingers on the ankle above the shoe. It was as cold as the rest of the attic, which was cooler than the rest of the house, but not freezing cold, as some of the household heat creeps in under the door and up the stairs, and the fireplace chimney rises through it in the southeast corner, adding a little warmth.

It was pretty clear that whoever the woman was, she was no longer alive.

That observation decided me to leave things as they were, ignore my curiosity to know who it was, and go back downstairs to call law enforcement.

I picked up Stretch on the way down and called Trooper Nelson in Anchor Point, who said he would be there as soon as he could drive to Homer, but also that I should call the local police.

I did that, then sat down at the table with the cold half cup of coffee I had left there to await their arrival as I wondered who this dead person was and who had left her in my attic—possibly the same person who had stayed in my house while I was away?

If I hadn’t decided to knit Sharon a Christmas stocking and gone up to find Joe’s, it would have been at least a month before I went up to retrieve the holiday decorations.

How long had I been sleeping in the room pretty much right under her and how long would I have gone on doing so if not for that stocking?

It gave me the shudders.