One
The End.
I looked at the words.
Then I grumbled and rolled the paper up the typewriter and grabbed the Wite-Out from my desk. It wasn’t the end. Something was wrong with this story.
I just didn’t know what it was.
I painted over the two words, then sighed. It was bad luck to leave them there for the universe to see if I was certain that the story wasn’t finished or wasn’t right, or something.
“What do you suppose the problem is?” I asked Gus. He was curled up on the dog bed next to my desk.
He raised eyebrows over his husky-blue eyes. Even if he hadn’t been a purebred, I’d have thought he was the most beautiful dog ever. I adored him and sensed the feeling was mutual, particularly when ear scratches were involved.
“Well, maybe I’ll read the whole thing to you, and you can help me figure it out.”
He seemed lazily amenable. I laughed. “We have a walk soon. Kaye and Finn will be here in about thirty minutes. That okay?”
At the word walk, he perked up, though he didn’t rise. He whined in agreement and then rested his head on his front paws again.
“Okay, I need to think about something else for a while. That’s the only way to figure out what’s wrong with a story, think about something completely different.”
When I’d been tasked with finding homes for several dogs after their owner disappeared during the throes of the dark winter, local resident Kaye Miller had taken Finn. He was part Saint Bernard and part mystery breeds that were a concoction of smart and strong. The dogs had been members of a sled crew and had lived together for a long time. To give Gus and Finn a chance to see each other, Kaye and I had taken them out for a walk together once a month. When we’d first ventured outside, it had been mostly dark with challenging weather. Now, as we’d come into June, we were seeing much longer days and lots of thaw, which meant some mud but also temperatures that weren’t always below freezing. It was still raining a lot but not today. The walk toward town down the road outside the shed might not be too terrible.
I looked forward to it, to seeing both Kaye and Finn. I couldn’t say that Kaye and I were friends, but I’d enjoyed our time together, and I hoped we’d be able to walk the dogs more now that the weather might permit easier travel.
Truthfully, I was excited about making a friend, a woman close to my age, who based on our few times together, seemed to share a similar sense of humor.
I acknowledged that maybe excitement about such a thing was odd, perhaps immature for someone who was thirty. Did age matter when making friends? I really didn’t know. I hadn’t made very many of them over my lifetime. The strange turns of events in my life had kept me mostly a loner, though not an unhappy one.
“All right,” I said to Gus, “I have thirty minutes for housekeeping.”
I put attention to straightening my desk, making a few notes, and looking out the window. I hid the manuscript, including the page with the Wite-Out, sticking everything into one of the desk drawers. Though more people than just the local police chief, Gril, now knew my real identity, Kaye wasn’t one of them.
I opened the top middle drawer to replace the red pens I used, and my eyes landed on a piece of paper with a phone number, stalling my tasks. It was a number I’d dialed more times than I could count since it had been given to me around the same time the dogs had become my responsibility. For a couple months, a generic voice mail had picked up. I’d left messages. But around March, the voice mail greeting disappeared. Now it only rang and rang.
It was allegedly my father’s number, but I doubted I’d ever know for sure if it was or had ever been.
I closed the drawer but then opened it again. I hadn’t tried the number for a week or so. I’d told myself I was going to stop calling it. My father had left my mother and me when I was seven. He hadn’t responded to any of the messages I’d left at the other end of this number. At some point, I needed to accept that he was never going to come back into my life and didn’t want to—hadn’t wanted to for a long time. I sighed and then closed the drawer yet again.
“Pathetic,” I said to myself, then looked down at Gus. “I’m pathetic.”
Gus lifted an uncertain eyebrow, as if not sure whether or not to agree.
My circumstances weren’t typical. My life hadn’t been, so maybe this experience was simply my normal, not pathetic. No, I decided quickly, this continued sense of longing for a father who didn’t want to be in my life was most definitely pathetic. Maybe a little justified, sure, but I needed to get over it. I was trying—and it was only one of the reasons my life wasn’t normal.
I’d come to Benedict, Alaska, directly from a hospital in Missouri. A week or so before that, I’d thrown myself out of a van after being kept inside it for three days by Travis Walker, a name I hadn’t immediately remembered and a man who hadn’t been caught yet. I’d felt compelled to run away and hide, thinking that no one could find me here. I’d been wrong about that, but I still felt mostly safe, and as far as I knew, Walker hadn’t made his way here.
One of the secrets I lived was my pen name, Elizabeth Fairchild, and my actual career as a thriller writer. Here, most people knew me by my real name, Beth Rivers.
I grabbed some files from the corner of my desk and straightened them. They were filled with details on local events and things I used for my cover job, editor of the local paper, the Petition. This shed, the home office for the paper and a place I could hide to write my books, had served me well.
No matter how I worked to distract myself by straightening up, the phone number kept flashing through my mind. No, I wasn’t going to call the number today.
I had wanted something else to think about, something to get my mind off the book, but now I would rather have been obsessing about it instead.
I’d channeled some anger into this new manuscript, using the story as a way to maybe work out some of my own. Maybe I wasn’t doing it right. Maybe I wasn’t being honest enough about it. It would come to me.
I had a therapist now to help me through my traumas and resentments. Leia had encouraged me to journal, but when I told her I thought I could finally use what I’d been through in one of my books, she said it might be a good idea. Might. She’d had some reservations and wanted to make sure that whatever I wrote didn’t send me into a downward spiral. It hadn’t, but I sensed a roadblock of some sort—both in my real life and in the book. It was as if I could see what was ahead, but it was awfully blurry.
No matter what, though, Leia was glad I was ready to write it down—or as she said, “write it out of me.”
I stood and walked to the other desk in the shed. I gathered a remaining pile of flyers I’d been putting up around town the last few days and neatly restacked them. Though I’d published the date of tomorrow’s big event in the Petition’s weekly editions for months now, the flyers had been extra reminders. Everyone was required to attend the event. If they didn’t, they’d be searched for and inquired about until eyes were put on them.
Tomorrow was Benedict’s annual Death Walk, wherein Gril, the local police chief, and Donner, the other member of the local law enforcement team as well as a park ranger, took a head count, hoping everyone survived the winter, and then searched the community for those who didn’t report in.
The Death Walk was not only important but also exciting. I’d heard many Benedict residents speak about it in expectant tones.
Don’t forget about the Walk.
Unless you’re dead, be there.
I’d learned that this was another reason the Walk was so important. It gave the community something to look forward to and talk about, a social event.
Just as my eyes moved back toward the drawer with the phone number, I heard the rumble of a truck engine approaching.
“Oh good,” I said, grateful for the distraction. “That must be them,” I said to Gus as I made my way to the shed’s door, happy to get out of my head, at least for a little while.
I opened it wide just as Kaye and Finn exited an old blue truck. I assumed the man behind the wheel was Warren, Kaye’s husband. I hadn’t met him yet. I stepped off the small landing from the shed, planning to introduce myself but was stopped by Finn and his happy greeting.
“Hey, boy,” I said as I scratched behind his ears and he and Gus also said hello to each other.
“Hi, Beth,” Kaye said as she joined us.
In that short few moments, Warren put the truck in reverse and backed onto the road. He smiled and waved in our direction before he turned and took off toward town.
“It’s great to see you both,” I said, smiling at Kaye.
“You too.”
Kaye’s light brown hair was always smooth and had been pulled back into a perfect ponytail every time I’d seen her. Her skin was pale, and her bright brown eyes seemed unbothered by whatever challenges tugged on the corners of so many people’s eyes out here. I’d only lived in Alaska for about a year, and some parts of me felt stronger, more youthful even, but I’d experienced the stress of the winter, and I wondered how much it showed on me.
“Warren will pick us up later,” she added.
“That works. Come on in for a second. Let the boys say hello to each other. I’ll change into boots.” I turned back toward the shed.
It became crowded quickly. Bobby Reardon had originally set up this old hunting shed with a tin roof to house the workings of a weekly paper, the Petition. Bobby had been dead a few years now, but it seemed everyone thought of him fondly. He’d always had a chair and a full bottle of whiskey at the ready for any visitors. I’d tried to continue his hospitality, but I didn’t think as many people stopped by to chat with me as they had Bobby.
He’d decorated the place with old black-and-white movie posters and a few typewriters atop two desks. I’d added my own Royal, which I’d found a long time ago in a Missouri secondhand store. All of my novels’ first drafts had been typed on it. Subsequent drafts had been done on my laptop, but I doubted I’d ever change up the tradition of typing on the Royal, no matter how difficult it might eventually be to stock up on Wite-Out in Benedict.
Two big dogs and two adult humans made the space tight, but the dogs didn’t seem to mind.
“How have you been?” I asked as I sat in my chair and reached for the boots under my desk. I’d slipped into tennis shoes earlier that morning.
“Oh, I’m good.”
I looked up at her funny tone.
She sent me a tight smile. “No, really, I am.”
Other than the fact that she was close to my age, I knew only that she lived with her husband and in-laws out west about “a good five miles.” She’d told me a little about her husband, Warren, and how well they seemed to get along but not much about her in-laws. One time she’d mentioned that two of Warren’s brothers also lived there, and I’d said something about that making for a lot of people in the house. She’d changed the subject quickly. I hadn’t asked anything more about it.
I’d meant to ask my landlord, Viola, about Kaye, but with so much else going on I never had. That small, strained tone in Kaye’s voice made me wish I knew more about her situation.
“Yeah?” I asked.
Her tight smile relaxed into something more real. “Yes, definitely. Sorry, I do have something on my mind, but it’s not bad. I’ll tell you about it on the walk.”
“Sounds good.”
Once the boots, coats, hats, and leashes were in place, we left the shed and started down the road toward town. I was grateful it wasn’t raining yet—and even more pleased that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There would be soon enough.
“Warren reminded me to be on the lookout,” Kaye said. “He’s seen more bear cubs and mamas roaming around this year than in a while.”
“Just yesterday I saw a mama black bear and two cubs walk right by the shed’s window. It was quite the sight, and I was glad I was inside at the time. Gus sniffed curiously but didn’t seem to be bothered by them. I could smell them through the window, and they were ripe.”
Kaye laughed. “Finn isn’t bothered by them, either. Elijah trained his dogs very well.”
“He did.” My heart sank a little at hearing his name. Everyone missed him and wondered where he’d gone. I was probably more curious than everyone else because I suspected that my mother had gone with him, and I wondered about her too, though she’d always been pretty good at taking care of herself.
Gus and Finn had both been part of Elijah’s dogsled team. He’d taken care of his dogs, even to the point of keeping files on all of them with instructions where the dogs should go if something ever happened to him.
That’s how I’d met Kaye. I’d called her one day to tell her she was listed as Finn’s first possible connection and asked if she wanted to get together to talk about it.
She had. We’d met downtown at the one small restaurant, both ordering pancakes and coffee as we discussed if she was willing and ready to take care of the dog.
She’d been enthused. She’d owned dogs as a child but not since moving to Benedict from Montana and marrying Warren. I’d asked her if she wanted Warren to meet Finn first, but she’d said he would be fine. I’d had a moment or two of concern that maybe I hadn’t been as thorough as I needed to be in checking out Finn’s new home, but Kaye had been so excited about taking the dog that ultimately I’d accepted things as they were.
All the dogs had been placed in good homes, but nothing was perfect around here. There were no dog parks, and a veterinarian came through town only twice a month if the weather permitted. Wild animals were always a potential threat.
But I knew that the dogs were with people who would love them and do their best by them. I figured that was about all anyone could ask since I didn’t think I could take care of all of them myself.
“How have you been?” Kaye asked as we set out. “I haven’t seen you since our last walk. As small as this place is and with the weather improving, I thought I’d see more people over the last few weeks.”
“I’m still in my first year. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have been out more but not a lot. Since I live downtown, I’m either there or here at the shed.” I nodded back toward the building. “I felt moments of isolation during the winter, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. Since I live in the same building as Viola, we had each other’s company and our own rooms if we didn’t want company. Downtown only shut down a few days, so most of the time we could walk a short distance and see someone else. How did you and your family do?”
Copyright © 2022 by Penelope Publishing LLC
