Home Another Way (2 page)
Grandmother’s eyes had bulged. “Who told you?”
“Aunt Ruth,” I said. “Don’t you think God wanted me to know the truth about my parents?”
Grandmother didn’t talk to me about the Bible anymore after that. She stopped talking to Ruth completely.
Lucky Aunt Ruth.
The inn’s gray clapboard siding flaked like dead skin onto the front porch. I hoped the bed had clean sheets.
The door unlocked, I entered to a bell chime. A sleepy voice called, “One minute.” I heard scuffling from the room to my left, and a woman limped out, hair the same sad color as the house. About fifty years old, she wore a too-big sweater with leather patches on the elbows, and thick fleece socks.
“This is mighty unexpected,” she said, but smiled.
“I can go somewhere else, if you’re not ready for guests.”
Silent a moment too long, the woman realized she was staring. “Sorry, dear. I’m just a little fuzzed up with sleep is all. There’s no place else to stay, except here.” Pulling a ledger from the desk by the front door, she asked, “What’s your name?”
“Sarah Graham.”
“You a skier, here visiting?”
I cleared my throat. “Just passing through.”
Under her flannel pajamas, the woman’s bony frame stiffened at my lie. She finished writing my name in the book, and handed me a dusty key.
“I’m Mary-Margaret Watson. Folks here call me Maggie. You’re welcome to do the same. That all you have, or do you need to go back out to your car?” She nodded toward my duffel bag.
“This is all I need tonight.”
“Okay, then. Follow me.”
The old stairs creaked in protest, unhappy to be bothered so late at night. Maggie opened the door to my room, pointed at another door just to the left. “That’s the bathroom. Towels are in there. You’ll need to let the hot water run a bit.”
“Thank you.”
“Yup. Pick up the phone in the room if you need something. You’ll get me. Spare blankets are in the closet. Sleep tight,” she said, and then disappeared back down the stairs.
I felt oily. I hadn’t showered in three days but was too tired to clean up now. I didn’t even change my clothes—just shook off my shoes, turned on the bedside lamp long enough to find the extra blankets, and climbed into bed.
I forgot to check the sheets.
Unable to sleep, Maggie listened to the floorboards crackle above her as Sarah tossed in the bed. Old houses, old bones, they’re the same. Her hips ached—pain fueled by the raw autumn night.
She reached for a blue glass jar on the nightstand, a salve that Aggie Standing mixed for all the stiff joints in town. There were many. She rubbed on the cream, smelling camphor and eucalyptus, a hint of lemon, a dash of witch hazel. Then she took four painkillers. She was only supposed to take two, but two didn’t do a darn thing.
Sinking back into the featherbed, she pulled her worn sweater tight around her spindly ribs and prayed silently for the pain to subside. Finally, the roar in her hips dimmed to a whimper.
Maggie had known it was Luke Petersen’s daughter as soon as the sleep cleared her head. It wasn’t so much how she looked, with hair the color of dried apricots and huge, dark eyes, but the way Sarah looked at her—still as a doe that smelled the hunter, but couldn’t quite see him through the trees. Her father, however, had come into Jonah wind-beaten and searching for peace. Sarah seemed to want a fight.
It was Luke’s sweater Maggie wore. He’d lent it to her one chilly night after church, and she never returned it. Day to day she told herself she just forgot, but on nights like tonight, when the pain made her honest, she admitted she kept it because it was his. For nine months, Luke had lived at the inn, until the ground thawed and he finished fixing up the house he bought. Maggie cooked for him, washed his socks and hemmed his pants, and talked with him late into the evenings. Folks had whispered in the beginning, but as they ate and shopped and worshipped with him, the rumors fell away, like woolen coats at spring’s first thaw. Luke grew into the town, as if he’d always lived in that little cabin two turnoffs past McMahon’s Sugar House, three-and-a-half miles down on the right.
She never expected to love him.
She never expected Sarah to show up in Jonah, at her inn.
Maggie reached over and set the alarm as her eyelids started to droop—not that, after all these years, she needed a clock to goad her out of bed. She would wake early to prepare a big breakfast, the kind she saved for Christmas mornings. She stirred love into those meals, and Sarah looked like she needed some of that something fierce.
I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I woke to sunlight carelessly passing through a frail paper window shade and jabbing at my eyes. I turned my head, stretched under the three layers of handmade quilts and glanced around the room. Pretty, but faded. Flowers dotted the wallpaper, pink and yellow. A few framed prints. No curtains. The clock read 2:14 p.m. I couldn’t believe I slept so long.
The air was cold against my face. I didn’t want to get out of bed, but I had to pee and my teeth felt slimy. Moving quickly, I grabbed my duffel and went into the bathroom.
I turned on the shower. It took five minutes for the water to warm up. While waiting, I brushed my teeth. The hot water soothed my car-weary muscles but didn’t last long. I toweled off and blew dry my long red hair, my grandmother’s tea-soaked voice echoing in my head.
“Don’t go out with wet
hair or you’ll catch pneumonia.”
Before going downstairs, I pulled the coverlet all the way down. The sheets were very white.
“Can I get you something to eat?” Maggie asked as I entered the front hall. She dusted the banister, the grandfather clock. “It’s a bit late for breakfast, but there’s French toast already made, and bacon and oatmeal. I can reheat it. Or I can make you a sandwich. You look like you need some stick-to-your-bones food.”
“No, thank you, Maggie.”
“Coffee?”
I pulled a well-creased envelope from my jeans, the one I’d ignored for the past eleven months. Fumbled to take the letter from it. “No, really, I’m fine. Could you just tell me how to get to 36 Main Street?”
“That’s heading into town. You want to take a left out of here and make your first left. The road’s steep and curvy, so you be careful. ’Bout three or so miles up, there’ll be a fork. Go right onto the paved road. That’s Main Street. You sure you don’t want something hot? It’s nippy out there. I can get you some coffee in one of those travel mugs.”
“No, thanks.”
As I stepped through the door, Maggie asked, “How long can I expect you here?”
“About a week.”
I took a left out of the driveway as instructed, and then another. The pavement narrowed and turned to potholes. I drove slowly, looking at the houses that lined the road. No, not houses. Trailers. Soup cans with wheels and broken fences in front. An old man sat on a front deck made of barn wood and old tires, cheek fat with chaw. A coatless woman came quickly from her home and scooped a toddler into her arms, his mouth ringed with red Kool-Aid.
I drove past the fork and into town before my windows fully defrosted. Not that it was much of a town. A half-mile of hunched wood buildings, with a few brick storefronts between. I found 36 in the middle, next to a log diner. A hand-lettered sign hung near the door:
Small Appliance Repair, Taxidermy,
Notary Public, Live Bait.
Inside, a beefy man leaned over a table, screwdriver in his teeth. He wore canvas overalls, straps unhooked and crammed into his back pockets. All sorts of appliances and other mechanical doodads cluttered the shop—blenders and toasters, lawn mowers, televisions and pieces. Heads hung on the wall. I counted nine deer, two moose, and a bear. Some game birds and small rodents posed dramatically on a glass counter, wings spread or teeth bared.
“You must be Sarah Graham,” the man said. “Only stranger to ever walk through my door.” He didn’t wait for a reply before straightening and pumping my hand in his, crunching my fingers. “Rich Portabella. Like the mushroom. Have a seat.”
Rich pulled a chair out from behind the counter. “Coffee?” he asked.
“No,” I said, handing him the letter he sent, and the deed. “I had an awful time finding this place. It’s not on any map.”
“Not on any recent map,” he corrected me. “A handful of years ago, the county powers that be decided Jonah was too small to be its own municipality. Too much trouble keeping it separate on the tax rolls, or some nonsense like that. So, they merged us with the town below. Technically, we’re Ogden. But no one around here thinks of us that way. We haven’t changed the name on anything.”
I sensed Rich the Mushroom could make small talk all day, so I asked, “What is there?”
“Of the estate? Well, the house, and everything in it. Quite a few books, I believe, furniture—”
“Money?” I interrupted.
“Some,” he said, rolling the word over in his mouth.
“What?”
“Why don’t we go see the house?”
“What does that mean?” I asked. My jaw tightened. After everything, I wouldn’t even get the money?
“The house, the house. I’ll drive. We’ll talk there,” Rich said, pulling on his coat, a fake-fur-lined parka. I wore a nylon windbreaker.
We climbed into an early-model Jeep with black vinyl seats. The cold seeped through the back of my jeans. Rich apologized for the broken heater, and then prattled on about birds and maple syrup, and his kids. I ignored him, seething, convinced I came all this way for nothing.
The house sat in the middle of a field, plain and lonely, with boarded windows.
“It’s been empty more than a year,” Rich said as he pulled up to the porch.
He unlocked the door and walked in, turning on the flashlight he brought with him. I peeked in from the bottom of the stairs. Sheets covered the furniture, ghosts of the past.
“You coming in?” Rich called.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice disappearing into the wind. I closed the door behind me to keep out the cold. Or keep me from running back to the car.
I didn’t know what I expected a murderer’s home to look like, but I certainly didn’t think it would look so . . . normal. Floors, walls, ceilings. Yes, normal.
“So, what won’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Want to look around first?”
“No,” I said.
I couldn’t move. Twenty-seven years of hatred and longing sank into my feet, weighing me to the plank flooring. I just wanted the money. No, I wanted the life I should have had. I’d take the money as a consolation prize.
“Well, Sarah.” Rich spoke with care, the words tiptoeing off his lips. “When your father died, he had a bit over forty thousand dollars in the bank, and about the same in stocks and other holdings.” He paused.
“And?”
“And, as part of the requirements set out in the trust your father established for you, you must live here, in Jonah, for at least six months. If you don’t do this, you don’t get the money.”
I exploded. “What? Are you insane? Do you know what he did? Where does he get off, thinking he has the right to demand anything of me? He can rot in his grave. I won’t do it.”
Rich the Mushroom didn’t flinch.
I flung open the door, and began walking back to town. I wanted to be alone, to stew in my own venom. Within fifty steps, though, the snow glued clumps of wet autumn leaves to my feet, my leather Mary Janes soaked through.
Rich pulled up behind me. He stopped. I got in. He said nothing. I said nothing. He dropped me off in town.
I’d lived on peanut M&M’s and Diet Coke for the last three days, as the pounding in my head now reminded me. I went into the diner. A bell tinkled as I opened the door, and heads turned to see who was coming in. Within seconds, the chatter stopped. Patrons inspected me with darting glances.
The woman at the counter said, “Have a seat anywhere you want. Someone will be with you in a sec.”
So I sat in a high-backed booth at the far corner. No one could see me, and that fueled the whispers. I put my head in my hands, rubbed at my temples.
“Hi. Can I get you some coffee?”
I looked up at the waitress, young and half pretty. The right half of her face was smooth and bright and scrubbed a sweet pink. The other side was scarred. Badly. It looked as if a plastic baby doll had been held too close to the campfire, skin melted tight and shiny. Her left nostril smushed flat into her cheek. She had no eyelashes or eyebrow on her left eye.
“Uh, no.” My tongue caught in my throat. “Just water. Please.”
“Sure thing,” she said. “The menu is right there behind the napkins. Our specials are in there.”
“Thanks.”
“Not meaning to be nosy, but are you okay? You look really pale.”
“I’m fine. It’s just a bad headache.”
“Can I bring you something? Tylenol? Aspirin? I have both in my purse.”
“Tylenol, please.”
The waitress disappeared for just a moment before coming back with a filmy glass and bottle. She dug her thumbnail under the cap and shook a couple of capsules into her hand, gave them to me. I tossed them in my mouth, swilling the ice water too fast. My headache swelled.
“I’m Beth. You must be Sarah,” the girl said.