by Sue Henry
“That’s possible, I guess. Given where and how it was found, I imagine they’ll check that out as well,” Alex told her. “But, as Nelson said, those buckles were probably sold nationwide and it could have come from anywhere. Hard to follow up, I’d say.”
After a few more questions and speculations, Jessie called a halt to the discussion.
“Maxie’s clearly had about all she needs of this right now. Let’s change the subject. How are Joe and Sharon?”
I was pleased to tell them about the current temporary move to Portland and that they had decided on a wedding in the spring.
“They’re coming up for Christmas, so we’ll make plans then, but it’s possible we’ll have the ceremony on Niqa Island across the bay if Becky and her sister are agreeable. You’ll come down for it, yes?”
Jessie nodded thoughtfully and a little hesitantly, then gave me a smile.
“Of course,” she said. “Past experiences aside, I really like that island. It’ll be good to replace old memories with pleasant new ones.”
Then I remembered that before we had met she had hidden out on the island far from home, where a stalker she thought she had escaped had managed to find her anyway. But she assured me it would be fine, as I knew it truly would.
“I wouldn’t miss their wedding for anything. And please tell Joe and Sharon that we’d love to see them while they’re here in December, right, Alex?”
“Yes, of course we’d like to, but you’re forgetting that we’ve planned to go to my mother’s in Idaho for the holidays,” he reminded her. “I’ve already put in for time off.”
“You’re right and I must have fluff for brains in forgetting. Give them our good wishes instead, Maxie. And tell them we’ll surely be there with bells on in the spring.”
“I’ll make sure you get an invitation with the dates.”
We had a good dinner and a pleasant evening with a little wine, soothing background music, and much laughter as we caught up on what we had all been doing since the last time we three had seen each other. As Alex had to work the next day, we made it an early evening and I fell asleep with Stretch lying comfortably on a rug next to my bed.
It was a definite relief to be away from Homer for a few days that would have been full of questions for which I had no answers. I knew Stretch was happy to be back with his old friend, Tank, who Jessie had taken out to his box in the kennel for the night.
“Can’t make the rest of my guys jealous by letting him stay inside at night,” she told me with a grin. “Besides, he snores sometimes—enough to wake me up. Would you believe it?”
“I would. Stretch does, too, at times. So did my Daniel, whose dog he was first. A time or two after Daniel died I found myself half awake waiting to hear that familiar sound and hearing Stretch instead.”
As I drifted off I had to smile as Stretch reminded me of that fact with a couple of gentle snores, then rolled over and they stopped, or if they didn’t I slept soundly enough not to hear them.
ELEVEN
I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING to the welcome scent of coffee and could hear Alex down in the kitchen, singing as he made breakfast.
Stretch was gone from his place on the braided rug next to the bed, so I knew Jessie had brought Tank inside and the two dogs were probably now downstairs and happily ensconced in their usual spot by the stove.
I rolled out of bed, washed my face, combed and pinned my hair up in its twist, and dressed comfortably for the day in slacks and a sweater, glad to find the sun shining brightly in the window. I smiled, knowing that Jessie would see it simply as another day without snow for taking her dogs out on the local trails, unless she used her four-wheeler, as many mushers did before the snow fell and grew deep enough for sleds.
“Good morning,” she called, coming from the cupboard with plates to set the table as I came down the stairs.
Alex leaned around the corner of the kitchen to greet me with a grin. “Sleep well?” he asked. “Sorry if I woke you with my off-key warbling.”
“Not at all. I’ll take your warbling over an alarm clock any day. And I enjoy hearing it anyway.”
In short order he was setting a platter full of French toast, bacon, and eggs over easy on the table between Jessie and me.
“Help yourselves to syrup or jam before it gets cold,” he encouraged, reaching to fill our coffee mugs before setting the pot back in the kitchen to keep warm and coming to the table with his own mug in hand.
“I called the crime lab in Anchorage earlier,” he told me between bites. “They’re still at it, but so far have had no joy in finding a match to your John Walker’s fingerprints. It takes a fair amount of time to search all those millions of prints, so I’ll check again later, but don’t hold your breath about it. I’ll call if I find out anything.”
He finished his breakfast in short order and was on the porch calling good-bye on his way to work a few minutes later, leaning back in before he shut the door to make a suggestion to Jessie.
“Ask Maxie if she’d like to go over to Oscar’s for chili tonight. Last week he predicted that tonight would be the night, but you might call and make sure.”
Oscar’s was a nearby local pub that had been replaced and renamed after a fire destroyed it several years earlier. I knew that Oscar also owned a pub in town that was simply named Oscar’s and had intended a different name for this one. The local people, however, had always called it Oscar’s Other Place no matter what he intended, so he cheerfully gave in and put up a sign making the name official, acknowledging their feeling of ownership in having helped with the rebuilding of it.
It was frequented by many of the local sled dog racers, their handlers, and their followers, and at least once a month Oscar offered homemade chili and the place was always more crowded than usual. I had been there once before on a visit to Alex and Jessie’s and was definitely agreeable to repeating the experience.
Jessie made the confirming phone call and came back to the table with a grin.
“Alex almost never forgets chili night at Oscar’s. I assume you want to go?”
“You bet,” I agreed. “Oscar makes better chili than anyone I know. Besides, he runs a good bar and, as you’ve told me, never has a bad word for anybody.”
“Well—hardly ever,” Jessie said, and grinned. “Just don’t get him started on his feelings for the guy who burned down the old one. They aren’t so good-natured and friendly.”
“I wouldn’t be either if someone destroyed my house,” I told her. “Neither would you.”
“Right. I wasn’t when mine burned,” she said, recalling another past arson.
Before sitting back down she poured us both more coffee and removed our now empty plates to return to the kitchen. Coming back to her place at the table, she paused to stare out the window for a few seconds, a frown on her face as she turned away.
“Rain!” she said with a sigh. “More rain! When are we going to get some snow? We had a good amount for a few days last month, but it went away as fast as it came and I only got half a dozen runs in with the mutts and sled. They’re getting fat and lazy, and so is their owner at this rate.”
I had to smile, for she is anything but fat or lazy, and slim as a girl. She seems almost always in motion, doing something, even if it is just walking back and forth to once again check the sky for any hint of snow-bearing clouds, as she had just done.
She smiled back and sat down to take a sip of her coffee.
“What would you like to do today?” she asked me. “You said you were shopping in Anchorage, so you’re probably shopped out by now. Is there anything else you’d like to do while you’re here? I should take a run into town to pick up a pile of food I ordered for the mutts and a couple of new harnesses for my leaders. Anywhere you’d like to go?”
“I wouldn’t mind stopping at the bookstore in Wasilla,” I told her. “You know Annabel’s under the clock tower. There’s a book I’d like to find for son Joe for Christmas, but it’s out of print. Neither Title
Wave nor C and M Books in Anchorage had a copy and it wasn’t to be found in Homer. Annabel’s might have it. Could you drop me there while you run your errands?”
She gave me an amused smile with her answer.
“Sure. Break my heart! Make me come into a bookstore to find you. We may both be in serious trouble with books to be had. Good thing Alex’s working today. He’s a bigger addict for them than I am.”
We both glanced across the room at the two tall bookcases under the stairway, which were packed full of so many books that several piles had been stacked up on the floor in front of them.
“Looks familiar to me,” I told her. “You’ve seen mine. There’s not much difference.”
We took Jessie’s truck, as she could load it with the bags of the dog food she needed and my rented car was too small. But we left our two dogs at home, knowing the cab would be overly crowded with four of us in it, and its bed was filled with the large box used to transport her teams of dogs wherever they were needed, each in its own compartment. Tank and Stretch would be left behind and relied on to behave themselves inside the house while we were gone for a couple of hours, well trained as they were.
In less than half an hour I was waving Jessie out of the parking lot in front of Meta Rose Square, a neat building with a few shops, the tall clock tower high above, and, my goal of the moment, Annabel’s.
Besides several customers, both Carol and Richard Kinney, the owners, were there and greeted me warmly when I went in. Though I seldom have a chance to talk with them and browse their shelves of new and used books, it is always a treat when I do, for they are book people to the core and instant friends of book lovers.
Wonder of wonders, they did have a copy of the book I wanted for Joe, a book of photos of Homer back when it was just beginning to be a town, which pleased me, as I was about to give up looking. I also found a couple of Ellis Peters mysteries I didn’t have in my collection and a wonderful old book of selected verse by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a favorite poet of mine since college days.
The best part of an hour later, I was about to tackle the history shelves in search of something Lew didn’t already have in his historical collection in Homer when Jessie came breezing in, greeted the Kinneys, and grinned at the pile of books I had waiting for me at the front desk.
“I had a hunch I was leaving you too long,” she said. “Not fair. You got a head start. Did you find the one you were looking for?”
Assuring her I had, I was headed for books on the Revolutionary War when the cover of a paperback book displayed face-out on a shelf I was passing caught my eye:BIG SHOTS
THE MEN BEHIND THE BOOZE
THE REAL-LIFE STORIES OF
JACK DANIEL
CAPTAIN MORGAN
JIM BEAM
AND MANY MORE
I opened it to the table of contents and found that most of the chapters listed gave the names of the men who had created the various liquors, including a fair number of whiskeys with names I had written down from the bottles on the shelves of my local liquor store. Chapter eleven was Johnnie Walker.
That was enough for me to take it to go through later and give up searching for another day, with two books I didn’t think Lew had on his shelves and might enjoy adding.
Jessie came back to the front desk and I smiled to see that she had wasted no time in creating a pile of her own, which had grown almost as tall as mine in the few minutes she had taken to shelf-read.
“If we have something you’re looking for and can’t fin d, we’ll be glad to mail it to you in Homer,” Carol said to me. “Just give us a call.”
“I’ll remember that,” I told her as I paid for the books, tucked their card between the pages of one of them, and thanked them for their assistance.
As we headed for the building’s exit we passed a cooking shop that had intrigued me the last time I was there. I slowed and turned my head to look and Jessie laughed.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said, clutching my elbow and towing me toward the outer doors. “Keep saying to yourself, ‘I have to flyhome.’ ”
But I pulled away and went back to take another look from outside the shop’s door, for as we passed I had caught a glimpse of not the terrific assortment of anything related to cooking or eating, but a fig ure that I thought I recognized—the woman who had been on the plane I had taken from Homer to Anchorage and in the lobby of the hotel when I passed with Stretch on my way to do some shopping two days earlier.
“What is it?” Jessie asked at my shoulder. “Something you really want to take a look at? I’m sure they do mail orders, too.”
I shook my head and turned back toward the door to the outside again.
“No,” I told her. “Just someone I thought I recognized, but I guess I was mistaken.”
I thought about it as Jessie drove us home and somehow it made me uneasy. Was the woman somehow following me? If so, why? But it seemed unlikely that she could have been in all three of the towns I had either left or visited on this trip by accident—didn’t it? Who was this woman who kept showing up in my escape from home? If she wanted something, had something to say to me, why couldn’t she be direct and ask?
“That’s a worried sort of frown,” Jessie commented as she turned the truck off the highway into her driveway and drove up to park near the house. “You okay?”
Quickly, I relaxed the frown, which I hadn’t been conscious that I was exhibiting, and gave her a smile instead. “Oh, yes, I’m fine. Want help unloading your dog food?”
“Not necessary. It’s fine for the moment in the dog boxes in back. When Alex comes home he’ll help get it in the shed before we head for Oscar’s. Those bags are pretty heavy, and you’re supposed to be company anyway, not kennel help. Let’s go in and see how the mutts are doing.”
“The mutts” had heard us drive in and met us at the door with tails wagging, as eager to greet us as if we had been gone a week instead of a couple of hours. They make such an odd pair in size that it always amuses me to watch them together, and this was no exception. I forgot my consideration of the woman I thought I might have seen and turned to helping make sandwiches for lunch, which we ate at the table while we looked over the books we had brought back.
The better part of an hour later I was examining the one I had found for Joe when Jessie suddenly shoved back her chair and stood up to face the window.
“Snow!” she crowed. “It’s snowing !”
I turned to see that, sure enough, fat white flakes were falling like a lace curtain through the air and into the yard and had already thinly coated the roofs of the dog boxes in the yard with half an inch or so.
“Oh, I do hope it doesn’t all melt off this time,” she said.
It didn’t, but went on coming down quite steadily for the rest of the afternoon. There were three or four inches outside by the time Alex arrived.
“Well, you got your wish finally,” he said, greeting me as he swept Jessie into a hug. “About time, too. I was beginning to think you’d soon be impossible to live with, but I checked and the weatherman is predicting snow for the next twenty-four hours at least and temperatures cold enough so it won’t melt off immediately this time.”
“I know. I checked, too,” she told him gleefully, stomping on boots and reaching for her coat. “Don’t take off your parka. I’ve got a load of dog food that needs to go in the shed and can use some help.”
I watched from the window as they went out together. Jessie skipped ahead and scooped up enough snow for a snowball, which she hurled at Alex. He instantly retaliated and the battle continued for a few minutes until he grabbed up a handful and washed her face with it.
What a great couple they made, I thought as I watched and laughed at their antics. In a few trips to the storage shed, they had unloaded the sacks of dog food, then fed and watered the dogs in the yard, and were coming back inside, shaking off the snow before entering.
“She gets like this every fall, waiting for snow. I think she’d be
happy to have it year-round if the weather would cooperate,” Alex told me with a grin. “Now—everyone ready to head over to Oscar’s? How’re you at dart tossing, Maxie?”
“Rusty, but willing,” I told him.
So we were soon on our way in his larger truck with its crew cab, taking Stretch and Tank along, knowing they were always welcome at the Other Place.
TWELVE
WE HAD A FINE EVENING AT OSCAR’S OTHER PLACE.
From behind the bar he greeted our two dogs and us warmly, as he set up our bottles of Killian’s lager.
“Good to see you again, Maxie,” he told me. “Has it snowed in Homer yet?”
“Once, but it was gone when I left a couple of days ago. There’ll be more soon, according to the predictions.”
He waved us toward the chili, which was set on a table across the room in a large kettle with a hot plate under it and bowls and spoons handy.
“Help yourselves. Good thing you came early. It’ll be gone in another hour. Word gets out, you know?”
The place was full of local people, mostly those with kennels of sled dogs, all delighted with the snowy weather, but we found a table somehow and enjoyed the chili between greeting friends and fellow mushers of Jessie’s. As soon as we had finished, Alex removed the bowls and replenished our Killian’s, and Jessie went to meet a challenge at the pool table. Alex and I waited for a dartboard and he trounced me badly two out of three, but somehow I managed to beat him once—though I think either he allowed it with intent or I got extremely lucky.
We drove home pleasantly satisfied with the evening and went shortly to bed. Sometimes just hanging out with friends is one of life’s best pleasures, and this had been one.
Sometime in the middle of the night I woke in the dark, slipped out of bed, and went to the window, where I could see that snow was, as Alex had predicted, still falling, even more heavily than it had earlier.
