by Sue Henry
I have never suffered from underconfidence, you understand.
TWENTY
PEACE AND QUIET WERE A GOODLY PART OF THAT MORNING. I made and ate breakfast as I watched the rising sun make sparkles on the waters of the bay and gild the mountaintops on the other side.
Clean, well rested, and ready to take on whatever the day might have to offer, I found my outlook had shifted, as it often does when I stop focusing too much on anything or one side of a question. I told myself to stop worrying about defending my territory from an unknown someone who had trespassed, though I still wondered why they had picked my house in particular.
With no way of answering that question, I decided to let it go completely for the moment. My defense had confined me to my house, however much I valued it and resented the intrusion. Was I going to allow myself to be a prisoner of my own worries and anger, or not? I resolved that I was not.
I would take Stretch and leave the house—go somewhere else for a while.
I would have headed for another of my walks on the beach of the spit, but had no desire to wade through snow and knew it wouldn’t be any fun at all for my low-slung dachshund.
Then I remembered that I had forgotten to pick up the mail on my way back from the airport on Sunday and that became my goal for the moment.
First I went around and made sure that the doors to the deck and windows were locked and noticed that in the sunshine the snow was beginning to melt and drip off the roof. I put on a warm coat, boots, and gloves, and used one of the new keys to lock the front door as I went out.
Stretch, wearing his red sweater, I carried to the car, so he wouldn’t get his feet wet, and deposited him in his basket.
I backed out of the drive and headed for the post office, where I found a handful of mail waiting in my box—several bills, two mail-order catalogues, and a Hallmark card from Sharon. In bright colors it read:No one ever said that life was easy.
Well, someone may have said it.
Someone dumb.
She had added a note to say that it matched her mood of the moment as she hadn’t realized just how much stuff they would want to take along in their temporary move to Portland, that they were both busy packing, but would call me soon.
Good choice, Joe, I thought, not for the first time. She has a healthy sense of humor and I’m going to enjoy having her as a daughter-in-law.
From the post office I headed to the grocery store that is almost next door, where I parked, and left Stretch in the car once again. There I picked out a small pork roast to put in the oven for dinner and added a couple of baking potatoes to my cart, along with a jar of applesauce, and some greens and tomatoes for a salad. Living alone, I seldom do much baking anymore, so I went to the bakery for half a chocolate cake that I knew from past experience would be an indulgent dessert addition.
Having paid for the groceries, I was looking over the rack of new movies for rent in the front of the store when someone laid a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey,” said a familiar voice, and I turned to find Harriet Christianson smiling at me.
“You’re home again, I see. Tried to call you the end of last week, but all I got was your machine. You missed a good evening with the quilting ladies. They were disappointed when you didn’t show.”
“Oh, Harriet,” I said, remembering the quilting party I had skipped out on in order to get away to Anchorage. “Will next meeting do?”
“Of course,” she told me. “We’d love to see your treasures anytime you can make it. Did you have a good trip?”
“I did. I got a little Christmas shopping done and had a two-day visit with some old friends.”
We talked a little longer before I took my groceries out to the car, where Stretch was watching the people coming and going. I put the sacks in the backseat before returning the cart.
“With this melting snow it’s a bad day for a walk, lovie,” I told him as I slid in behind the wheel. “How about we stay warm and dry in the car and just take a drive out to the end of the spit and back?”
He never disagrees.
So that’s what we did. We stopped in a pull off to watch the tide slowly coming in from Cook Inlet, splashing its lacy edges up a little farther with each wave. The beach was empty of people, except for one lone walker who I didn’t recognize. He was strolling along with his hands in his pockets, cap flaps pulled down around his ears, rubber boots on his feet.
I watched him go casually out for a walk, snow or no snow, though the incoming salt water was doing its best to melt and erase as much as it could reach, wave by wave, each a little higher than the last.
We drove back to town and on impulse I pulled in to Ulmer’s to pick up some red, white, and green yarns, thinking that, as she and Joe were coming for Christmas, I’d knit Sharon a stocking to match the one I made for him years ago when he was small. I could use it as a pattern if I could find where I had packed it away with the holiday decorations and ornaments in the attic.
It would be a good project to keep my hands busy in the next week or two. I decided that I’d go up soon, find it and my knitting needles, and make a start.
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.
Two sips of cold coffee later the police were knocking on my door.
I showed them up the stairs and into the attic where the body lay wrapped in the carpet, told them how I had found it, and said that I had no idea who it was. Then I went back downstairs to wait for Alan Nelson, who showed up a few minutes later.
“Who is it?” he asked me as he came in the door.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “She’s rolled into an old carpet and I didn’t unroll it, though Stretch had pulled at it a bit. I left her as I found her and brought him down to call you. I wouldn’t even have known she was there if I hadn’t heard him growling and gone to see what he was after in that far corner of the attic.”
“Why did you go up there?”
I told him why and showed him the Christmas stocking I had gone to retrieve, which now lay on the table along with the yarn from Ulmer’s and my knitting needles.
“Well, I need to go on up,” he said. “And you’d better come with me to see if you can identify this person. There must be a reason she’s been left in your attic, mustn’t there? So it may be someone you know.”
That thought didn’t appeal to me at all. I had wondered about it before his suggestion and was hoping against ho
pe that it was not.
So I left Stretch downstairs in the offic e, with the door securely shut so he couldn’t follow us, and went up as requested.
We reached the top of the stairs and stepped into the attic. Across the space between us the three policemen were gathered around the rug, which they had unrolled to uncover the body that had been wrapped inside. All three of them turned and recognized Trooper Nelson with nods.
He stepped forward and took a long, frowning look at the body, then turned back to me.
“Mrs. McNabb,” he said formally, “would you take a look and see if you can identify this woman as someone you know?”
The four men moved aside to leave room for me to step forward and see her clearly. Taking a deep breath, I walked the few steps required to reach the space where the dead woman now lay on her back, arms at her sides, at one end of the carpet in which she had been wrapped.
For a long moment, as they waited, I stood silent at her feet and stared at the pale face that was streaked with blood from a bullet hole in the right temple. It had run into her hair and left a significant stain on the carpet that had concealed her identity.
I slowly realized that I had somehow half expected the body to be that of the disappearing Amy Fletcher. And I suppose that I might have understood her having followed her brother John in suicide. But there was no gun and she couldn’t have wrapped her own body in that heavy piece of carpet, so someone else had to have killed and left her there in my attic.
But it was not Amy.
To my astonishment and confused shock, it was the woman who had flown with me on the plane to Anchorage, whom I had seen again in the Hilton Hotel lobby, and thought I might have seen a third time in Wasilla as we left the bookstore.
I turned toward Trooper Nelson, who had moved to stand at my side. I must have turned white because he was holding my elbow, as if afraid I might faint.