by Sue Henry
“You do recognize her, don’t you?” he asked quietly.
“Yes. I don’t know her name or anything about her, never talked to her, but I think she was following me when I fle w to Anchorage last week. I saw her clearly twice—once here as we both boarded the Grant Aviation plane and once in Anchorage in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, where I stayed for one night—possibly once again, later, in Wasilla, as my friend Jessie and I left a bookstore in a small mall there. But I’m not sure about that because when I looked again she was not to be seen, so I could be mistaken.”
But somehow I knew I was not and wondered why in the world she had simply lurked about where I could see her and not come to speak to me.
Maybe I was wrong and just imagining things.
At that point Trooper Nelson suggested that we go downstairs to call and wait for a van to transport the woman’s body. So that’s what we did.
Two of the policemen left to report to the station, leaving the third, Lanny Toliver, with Trooper Nelson to hear and record whatever I could tell them.
I put on a fresh pot of coffee and we sat around my table to drink it as we talked.
The young policeman fli pped open the notebook he carried and asked the first question.
“There’s no identification on the woman at all—no purse and nothing in the pockets of her slacks. So we have no way of knowing who she is. But you say she took the same plane to Anchorage that you did? What day was that, and which flight?”
I told him that it had been the nine o’clock flight on Wednesday of the preceding week.
“Good,” said Trooper Nelson, rising from the table. “I can check on who she is through the Grant Aviation records. May I use your phone?”
“Certainly,” I told him.
“But you never spoke to her? Just noticed her on the plane and at the hotel?” asked the policeman.
“That’s right. She sat across the aisle and one row ahead of me on the plane. Then she was sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel when I went through on my way to do some shopping.”
“And you’re sure you don’t know who she is?”
I assured him I didn’t, and that I had never spoken to her.
As the policeman wrote down my answers, Trooper Nelson returned to the table with a frown of hesitation and confusion on his face. He sat down and gave me a long, thoughtful look before telling us what he had learned. Somehow I knew I was not going to like hearing it.
“The Grant Aviation ticket records say that the driver’s license she showed them was current and issued in New York City,” he said slowly. “The picture on it matched the face of the dead woman upstairs, who bought the ticket . . . and the name . . .”
He hesitated a second and gave me another perplexed and questioning look before continuing.
“The name was . . . Amy Fletcher.”
TWENTY-TWO
IT WAS SO UNEXPECTED AND STARTLING THAT I froze there at the table, eyes wide, mouth open.
“But . . . But . . . ,” I sputtered. Then I caught a breath. “That can’t be right.”
“I think it is,” he said. “And there is more than one way we can find out—through records in that state, for a start. Did you ever see identific ation from the woman who said she was Amy Fletcher? The woman who stayed with you here?”
I shook my head. “One doesn’t usually ask for identification from houseguests, does one?”
At that point the young policeman, who was listening carefully, got up from the table to meet the other two who were coming in the door with a stretcher, having returned with a van.
“Take notes for me, Alan, will you?” he asked.
“Sure. We’ll go over them later.”
“Wait just a minute, Lanny,” I said to him. “How’s your father? I heard he’s been ill.”
“He’s doing fine now,” he said, turning back with a smile. “Thanks for asking. Got his medication mixed up and it put him in the hospital for a night or two. He’s okay now.”
“Tell him I asked, will you?”
“Will do.”
Homer really is a small town.
I watched him walk past us and disappear up the stairs, following the other two on their way to the attic.
“Will they take her to Anchorage?” I asked, wondering about the woman they were about to carry down.
“Yes, to the crime lab, like John,” he told me. Then he turned back to the notes he was taking.
“And everything this woman who stayed here told you about herself and John Walker—Fletcher, perhaps—seemed credible?” he asked.
“Yes. She knew things about him—and his wife, Marty. What she told me was completely possible—and plausible.”
“Interesting. She must have known both of them before—in New York.”
“But why would the woman who came here—stayed here with me when I invited her—tell me she was Amy Fletcher, John’s sister, if she wasn’t—isn’t?”
“I don’t know, but she must have her own pretty strong reasons for impersonating Amy,” he said thoughtfully.
“Maybe that’s why she disappeared so fast when I went to the police station to have them call you because my phones weren’t working—they were dead. But there was nothing wrong with them when the repairman checked them later. They had all three been unplugged, and now I’m thinking it must have been by her. But she and everything she had brought in with her was gone when I came back about half an hour later. And the photograph I showed you had been torn up and tossed in the wastebasket. I don’t understand that at all.”
“Could something about it have made her angry?”
I thought about it briefly, shrugged, then turned to his next question.
“You said you haven’t seen her since.”
“No, I haven’t. I thought at first she might come back, but she hasn’t, so I let it go.”
He frowned. “It makes me think that, whoever she is, she didn’t want to have to identify or explain herself to law enforcement. It reinforces the idea that she also may have been responsible for the death of the woman in your attic.”
That was a sobering thought.
“I spoke with the crime lab this morning,” he told me after a moment’s thoughtful pause. “They are under the impression that Walker—or Fletcher, if that’s who he turns out to be—possibly didn’t kill himself after all. The fingerprints on the gun are his, but it had been carefully cleaned, inside and out, before it was used that last time and placed in his hand. And there are too few on it for him to have carried and handled it without that cleaning, just enough to make it ostensible that he shot himself with it. Who would bother to clean a gun they were going to use for that purpose?”
“So you’re thinking that she may have shot him, right?”
“I’m thinking one of them did and it makes more sense that it wasn’t that one,” he said, waving a hand in the direction of the stretcher that had been brought down from the attic and was now being carried out my door by two of the policemen. The third followed closely with the bloody carpet, now rolled up again. “She at least was making no secret of who she was, was she? At least it seems pretty clear, but we’ll verify it, of course.”
“You’re telling me a lot of things I wouldn’t expect to hear,” I suggested.
“Yes, that’s right,” Nelson said. “But I’ve learned a lot from what you’ve told me and I want you to know as much of this as I can.”
“Why? My impression of law enforcement officers is that they keep most of what they do and learn to themselves.”
“Well, that’s correct and not correct. It depends on the situation. We don’t share details that may compromise a case we’re working unless it’s necessary. That’s true. But you can understand that there are reasons behind it.”
“You don’t want what you know to reach the people you’re investigating, I suppose.”
“Right again. But there are times when keeping things—details and problems—to ourselves actually makes it more dangerous to innocent people
and, perhaps, to us as well. I think this is one of those times—for you.”
“Why?” I asked again, suddenly feeling vulnerable in a way I hadn’t before. If someone else thought I was at risk, then it would behoove me to think so, too.
“Because you’re obviously an intelligent and observant woman, who’s pretty accepting of people and what they do, as long as it’s not threatening to anyone, including yourself, but who takes things as they come and makes pretty good decisions about them.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’d like to think that’s true. But I’m as fallible as the next person in line.”
“Aren’t we all?” He grinned.
Did I happen to mention that I really like State Trooper Alan Nelson?
His next question startled me again, as he glanced across the room and his grin faded.
“Have you checked that shotgun since she left?”
It lay where I had kept it handy, on the kitchen counter by the door.
“No. Should I have?”
“Let’s take a look,” he said, rising to pick up the shotgun and bring it back to the table.
There he broke it open so we could both take a look at the shells with which I had loaded it.
They were gone. The gun was empty.
Aside from holding it by the barrel and beating someone over the head with the stock, there was no way it would provide protection at all. And no one was going to allow me to get close enough to do that. Particularly someone we both were now certain had unloaded and made it useless as a defense, who would now think that it was no threat.
“She must have collected what was hers, torn up the photo, and gone out the door in a hurry,” he observed. “But she took the time to unload this gun before she left. And that tells me it’s probable that she means to come back.”
“Why ever would she want to do that?” I asked. “If it were me, and I’d killed two people at the end of the road in Homer, Alaska, I’d take the first plane out of Anchorage to the Lower Forty-eight and lose myself in some big city in the very middle of the United States. Maybe even fly out to Europe or Asia.”
“You,” he reminded me, “are not a stone-cold killer with an obsession to kill not only two people, but anyone who gets in her way, or who knows what she looks like, are you? If I were you, I’d let me drive you to Anchorage and put you on the first plane out of there to anywhere. I’d take your own advice and get lost somewhere she would never, ever think of looking for you.
“For she would look. Never doubt it. If she has gone to the trouble of tracing both John and his sister, Amy, for years, all the way across the country and up to Alaska, to kill them both, she’d look for you, too. And she’s not only gotten good at it. She’s a chameleon—changes into whoever, whatever she feels will convince people that her truth is worth paying attention to, taking care of. She had you fooled. And you’re the only person who can identify her, right?”
As I thought about that, something cold turned over in my stomach, for I believed he was right and I was that person. But it also made me very, very angry. To be forced out of my own home—to run from the place where I grew up and belonged—was not only intolerable, it was ludicrous.
I shook my head as I looked up at him.
“No,” I told him stubbornly. “I’ve never run from anything in my life and won’t now. I’d be always looking over my shoulder— living in fear—unless I got complacent and made mistakes that would get me killed. I won’t do that—can’t. It’s just not the way I’m wired.”
We looked at each other and each took a deep breath as he sat back down, the shotgun between us on the table.
He shook his head and grinned.
“I wouldn’t either,” he said. “I understand that wired bit. I didn’t think you would and I couldn’t, either. So let’s figure out what we can do, for I can’t stay here to stand guard, you know, however much I’d like to. She’d findaway around or through me if she knew I was here. So, if she’s watching, she’s got to see me leave.
“Now, where are some new shells for this shotgun?”
TWENTY-THREE
BY THE TIME TROOPER ALAN NELSON left my house it was dark outside, but we had a plan that was as good as we could make it and had implemented parts of it.
“We’re not going to think that it’s possible that she may come back,” he had told me. “We’re going to proceed believing that she will—and soon. But I think that now we’re as ready for her as we can be.”
We were almost right in that assumption.
“She may be watching the house,” he said, as he got up from the table, where we had worked out and agreed on strategy. “If she is, I want her to see me leave. But I’m going to spend the night here in town at the police station. So I’ll be minutes away. I’ve added my cell phone number to your cell’s list, so you must keep it close—in a pocket would be best. I’ll do the same with mine. Anything happens—she shows up—you don’t let her in. You call me, right?”
“Right!”
“You don’t have to say anything if she’s where she can hear you. Just put it through and I’ll wait a second or two to listen. If you don’t say anything to me, I’ll know that she’s there and listening, too. Then I won’t say anything because she might hear my voice on your phone. I’ll just come—fast—while you keep her talking.”
It sounded good to me and reasonable.
“And don’t forget to keep that shotgun within hand’s reach if you possibly can.”
As if . . . I thought.
I walked him to the door, thanked him as he stepped out through it, and watched for a minute as he walked down the drive to his car.
“Lock that door,” he called before climbing in, starting the engine, and beginning to back out of the drive.
“You’ve got nothing to worry about there,” I said under my breath, closed it, and did as he said.
Then I walked slowly around the spaces that made up that first floor of my house, looking again to make sure everything was in the order we had decided on. It looked completely normal, but he had helped me pull closed all the curtains and blinds on the windows and doors, so no one could peer in from outside.
We had left several lights on that I normally turned off when I settled by the fireplace for the evening: the ones over the kitchen sink and dining table, the one I always turned on to read, one across from it next to the television. I left both the television and radio turned off, abandoning my usual music for the ability to hear clearly. Everything seemed in order.
Stretch raised his head from where he had been napping on the rug by the fire I had kindled earlier. He watched me carry the shotgun across the room, lay it on the floor beside the sofa, and sit down in my usual place before returning to his snooze. I knew he would hear faster than I would if anyone came close to our house—my early-warning system.
I sat looking at him, hearing him snore softly, and thinking how quickly he was growing older. Weren’t we both? But one day not so long from now he would pass. What would I do without him? But I had always imagined that he would simply go to wherever Daniel waited; he would be as glad to have his dog’s good company as I hoped he would mine, when it was my turn. So my being left behind would be their gain, and that idea, loving them both, pleased me, though I already knew how lonely I would be without them.
How little we know of death. What’s left behind physically is just a shell of a person and we have no way of knowing what comes after, if anything. Memory is really all that’s left, isn’t it? We keep a few familiar things that are precious to us for a myriad of reasons, but mostly because they remind us of whatever we want or need to remember.
But considering death shouldn’t be part of the current equation, I decided. It wasn’t helpful.
Settling back, I left my shoes on the floor and lifted my legs onto the sofa, gaining a slightly different perspective on what lay around me, familiar, yet somehow newly seen under the current circumstances. A lot of my living space and the things in it I t
ook for granted and seldom really looked at. Now wasn’t the time for that, I decided.
I heard a car pass on East End Road at the far end of my driveway, had been hearing them, but not consciously marking the familiar background sound of tires on asphalt. My driveway is not paved, so I knew I would hear the sound of tires on gravel if a car turned into it. Shortly after that what was probably a pickup went by, going in the same eastward direction, for something in the bed of it rattled.
Giving up listening, I picked up my book and tried to read, but it had been a long and stressful day and I grew a little drowsy.
Then, suddenly, I was wide-awake, sitting straight up and listening hard.
There had been a sound. And it hadn’t come from outside. It had come from somewhere inside the house: a very soft sound, but definitely inside somewhere.
Listening hard, I didn’t move, waiting to hear it again.
Nothing.
You’re being paranoid, I told myself, deciding it was probably just one of those aged-house sounds you become so used to that you don’t even hear them except once in a while as familiar and comforting background music.
But I didn’t go back to drowsing, either, though I relaxed enough to lean back.
Stretch had raised his head as I sat up abruptly. Now he laid it down again and closed his eyes.
I had to smile. If there had been anything unusual, he would have heard it, too, wouldn’t he? I considered, as I had been doing for the last few months, that maybe he was growing a little deaf in his advanced years. On our next trip to the vet I would have to remember to mention it to her.
Maybe some coffee would help keep me awake, I thought. I went across to the kitchen, where I poured a mug half full of the cold coffee in the pot, put it in the microwave, and waited for it to heat as I watched it go around inside.
It must have been the hum of that handy kitchen appliance that covered any small sound she made as she came down the stairs and into the room behind me, for I didn’t hear her. But, as the microwave finished its work and the hum subsided, I did hear Stretch growl warningly, as he would to an unknown or uninvited stranger that he considered an invasion of his space and, therefore, threatening to himself and me.