The End of The Road Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MAXIE AND STRETCH MYSTERIES BY SUE HENRY

  The Serpents Trail

  The Tooth of Time

  The Refuge

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, November 2009

  Copyright © Sue Henry, Inc., 2009 Map copyright © Eric Henry, Art Forge Unlimited, 2009

  All rights reserved

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Henry, Sue, 1940-

  The end of the road: a Maxie and Stretch mystery/Sue Henry.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15128-0

  1. Women dog owners—Fiction. 2. Dachshunds—Fiction. 3. Suicide victims—Fiction.

  4. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.E534E63 2009

  813’.54—dc22 2009021237

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  With the author’s sincere thanks,

  this one is for

  the many generous and helpful people

  at the end of the road in Homer,

  from the top of the kill to Land’s End,

  who patiently answered many questions

  and provided information that greatly

  assisted in the creation of this book.

  ONE

  I WOKE LATE ON FRIDAY, THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER, having stayed up late with a favorite book that I was reading between trips to the door in answer to the intermittent summons of several pirates, a robot costumed in cardboard boxes, a couple of skeletons, and a steady stream of other trick-or-treaters whose attire defie d analysis in combination with their winter boots, coats, hats, and gloves. “Trick or treat!” they called out when I opened the door and gave them back a “Happy Halloween!” along with their expected treats, a couple of which fell into the depths of large, optimistically offered pillowcases.

  One of the earliest visitors was a small blond fairy wearing blue wings over her down jacket and clinging shyly to the hand of her father—my next-door-but-one neighbor, Jack Gifford.

  “What do you say to Mrs. McNabb?” he prompted her, after I had dropped several candies into the plastic pumpkin she carried in her other hand.

  “Thank you,” she told me in just over a whisper.

  “You’re very welcome, Shelly,” I told her, then watched with a smile as they went down the drive, remembering how my own two children had loved dressing up for Halloween.

  The tradition was clearly alive and well in Homer, Alaska, and I enjoyed the parade of costumed spirits that mittened expectantly on my door. For the first time in several years, I had not driven my motor home down the long Alaska Highway in the fall of the year to spend the winter in warmer southern climes. During the school year, RV parks are often short on children and long on retired senior citizens. So it made me feel very much at home to recognize the children of my neighborhood, now grown a little taller than I remembered them.

  Rolling over that morning after All Hallows’ Eve, as my Daniel liked to call it, I sat up and swung my feet over the side of the bed to feel for the slippers I had left on the floor beside it. Instead, one foot brushed the warm back of my mini dachshund, Stretch, already wide-awake and waiting attentively, holding down one of my blue fuzzy slippers with both paws as if he expected it to attempt an escape.

  “Good morning, lovie,” I told him, giving him a pat before reaching to retrieve the slipper and standing up to put on the fleece robe I had hung on the bedpost before retiring. “I know it’s late and you want to go out, don’t you? Well, let’s go down and you can do your business while I start the coffee.”

  I scooped him up and carried him down the stairs and into the hallway next to the kitchen.

  Unlocking and opening the door just enough to let him scamper out into the cold first of November morning, I was reminded by the icy breath of the early Alaskan winter that it was arriving as anticipated, though we had yet to see snow. So I quickly closed the door after him and stepped to the nearby thermostat to turn up the heat, which I normally lower several degrees at night, preferring to sleep cool, but not cold.

  With the coffee gurgling cheerfully through a filter into the pot, I turned to fil l Stretch’s water and food bowls, then went back to the door in response to his scratching on the other side. Cold weather meant he didn’t take time to tour and inspect the yard before wanting to come back inside—his usual practice before the temperature drops significantly.

  Though the weatherman had predicted the possibility of clouds rolling in later in the afternoon, it was bright and sunny outside that morning and the thermometer outside the kitchen window read thirty-four degrees—just above freezing.

  Si
tting at the table with a mug of coffee and an English muffin liberally spread with peanut butter and peach jam made earlier in the year by a friend, I enjoyed the view to the south over the wide waters of Kachemak Bay that were sparkling in the sunshine and the Kenai Mountains rising beyond, white with a line of snow halfway down.

  It was, I decided, a perfect morning for a walk.

  “Want to go walkabout?” I asked Stretch, who had finished his breakfast and gone to lie down by the sliding door to the back deck, where he could keep an eye out for any squirrel or bird trespassing in the yard.

  Though walkabout was one of my deceased husband Daniel’s Aussie terms, which I had adopted, Stretch, originally his dog, knew immediately what I meant and was on his feet in agreement with the idea.

  “Good. We’ll stop by the post office and pick up the mail, then go out on the spit and walk the beach for a bit. Okay?”

  His enthusiastically wagging tail was answer enough, so after a quick shower, I pinned my hair up in its usual twist, noticing a bit more gray at the temples, dressed warmly, and put his red plaid coat on Stretch. Though it was sunny I knew we could count on it being cool, especially with the breeze that usually whispers in across the waters of the inlet and flows over the long, narrow arm of land that forms the spit. This narrow natural extension of land reaches five miles out into the bay and holds the marina and port of Homer, along with condominiums, small tourist shops now mostly closed for the season, huge parking lots, and the Land’s End hotel and restaurant.

  After pouring the rest of the pot of coffee into a thermos, I added sugar and a splash of milk, and took it with me, along with a bottle of water and a plastic bowl for Stretch.

  We were on our way shortly in my small car, Stretch riding shotgun in the basket that hangs from the back rest of the passenger seat, a considerable and welcome boost for a small dog who likes to be able to see out the window.

  I drove west on East End Road through Homer’s main downtown intersection where it becomes Pioneer Avenue, then turned left on Heath Street and went down the hill to the post office, parked and went in, leaving Stretch in the car. There was little mail, a couple of fliers of no interest to me, which I discarded into a recycling bin left for that purpose, and took only the latest issue of Alaska magazine and two envelopes, one large, one small, back to the car with me, glancing at the return addresses as I walked.

  The large one was my bank statement, which I tucked away in my day pack without opening. There would be plenty of time later for that.

  The smaller one bore a familiar address, and I tore it open as soon as I was back in the car with the engine running to keep us warm. Inside I found a bright Halloween greeting card from Jamie, the daughter of a now-departed dear friend in Colorado, with whom I had kept in touch after meeting her the year before. Along with the card was a photo of her small son dressed in the cowboy costume he had evidently worn trick-or-treating, and she had written a few lines to let me know that she had recently moved from Salt Lake City into the house her mother had left her in Grand Junction and I should address any mail to her there. This pleased me, for Sarah’s historic Victorian house was a real treasure and I knew Jamie would be happy living in it with her boy. She included an invitation to stop and stay with them any time I was traveling through Colorado.

  “We’ll have to drop her a note and let her know we’re staying home this winter, won’t we?” I asked Stretch, who gave me a glance before returning his attention to the people who were passing on their way in and out of the post office.

  “Okay,” I told him. “Forget the we. I’ll write the note. Let’s go find a place to walk, yes?”

  I backed out of the parking place, turned the car and drove us out of the lot and onto the highway that would lead to the spit in a mile or two.

  Alaskans have long said that if the small community of Homer is not “the end of the road” in our state, at least “you can see it from here.” It is perfectly true that once you arrive in Homer, there is nowhere else to drive but back up the Kenai Peninsula on the highway you came down on; through Soldotna and Cooper Landing, over Turnagain Pass, and down to Girdwood, where Alyeska Resort provides some of the best skiing available in the country, then on another fifty-plus miles to Anchorage, a total of just over two hundred and twenty miles.

  They also say, with Russia on the other side of the Bering Sea, that it is “as far as you can go without a passport.”

  I love living in Homer and was not unhappy to be spending the winter in my hometown. I’ve been there all my life and watched it grow from a village to a fair-sized town. Still, it maintains its casual, small community attitude and reputation as a fis hing and art center, drawing hoards of visitors in the summer months—tourists that crowd the hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, shops and art galleries, museum, and Sea Life Center, and fishermen who charter boats to go out in search of the giant halibut that secrete themselves in the deep waters of the bay and larger inlet.

  The Homer Jackpot Halibut Derby was started in 1986 by the Chamber of Commerce and from Memorial Day to Labor Day each year draws participants from all over—many from the Lower Forty-eight. In the summer of 2007 the largest halibut caught weighed 358.4 pounds, was too large for five men to pull into the boat, and won the fisherman who caught and brought it in to be weighed a prize of $37,243. But it was not the largest on record—a monster caught in 1996 had tipped the scales at 376 pounds.

  During the winter months Homer turns into a much quieter place and the locals take a deep breath and have time to visit with their neighbors and friends. Many small shops, especially those out on the spit, close until the next tourist season and their owners settle down to enjoying life in one of the warmest spots in the state north of the southeast panhandle. Besides being at the end of the road, Homer is sometimes called “the banana belt,” with winter temperatures ten degrees or more higher than Anchorage, which is northeast of us at the head of Cook Inlet. But then, according to a bumper sticker I noticed recently, it is also called “a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.”

  About a block from the post office the highway angled south to cross the slough, curved east and became Ocean Drive, then, shortly, south again as Homer Spit Road, and passed the airport before dipping onto the spit itself. I drove us out approximately three-quarters of its length, with ocean water on each side, until it widened and we reached the large lot that overlooked the marina to the east. Except for a few cars and trucks at the south end it was almost empty, a condition totally different from that during some summer weekends, when in a crowd of vehicles I might have been lucky to find a space to park anywhere but far at the north end.

  I pulled in and parked closer to the road than to the marina, walked around to take Stretch out of his basket, lower him to the ground, and attach his leash. After locking the car, I pocketed the keys and shouldered my day pack, and we headed across the highway toward a path that would take us down to the west beach, a dozen or so feet lower than the road.

  As we started down it the horn of a vehicle honked behind me and I turned to recognize a friend who was a nurse at the Homer South Peninsula Hospital and was evidently on her way back into town from somewhere farther out on the spit. She pulled over to the side of the road, let the motor idle, rolled down her window, and offered a smile as I walked up to say hello.

  “Maxie! What are you doing in Alaska? I thought you’d be long gone to somewhere down south for the winter.”

  “Hi, Becky. I decided to stay here this year,” I told her. “Guess I was homesick for the place.”

  “You’re a glutton for punishment,” she warned. “There’ll be snow soon, and below-zero temps. Better think again.”

  “Already put the motor home into storage in Anchorage for the season. Guess I’m stuck.”

  “Well, in that case, can you come tonight for spaghetti and an evening of dominoes and Farkel?” she invited. “Linda’s here—flew down from Anchorage yesterday for a night or two, and it’d be more
fun with three of us.”

  “Love to,” I agreed. “What time? And I’ll bring the wine, okay?”

  “Great. Come on over—oh—whenever. Five. Six. Whatever works for you. I’ll see you then. Now I gotta run to meet Linda for lunch. I left her at Ulmer’s looking for a new filter for her fish tank and a glass top for the coffeepot. See you later.”

  She was gone with another wave, this one out the window, as Stretch and I turned again to go down to the beach.

  The tide had been on its way out since early that morning, leaving a wide shingle of wet sand in its wake. The sea was fairly calm, though the breeze was strong enough to blow a bit of spray off the surface of each low incoming wave.

  A couple of glaucous-winged gulls were riding the air currents in wide, sweeping circles over the water. Like the eagles, they would stay all winter. I was surprised, however, to notice a solitary arctic tern, with its black cap and red bill and feet, huddled close on the sheltered east side of a battered log that had drifted in and been stranded when the tide went out. Usually these attractive birds migrate south in the fall to escape the cold and return in the spring. They have forked tails and long pointed wings trimmed in black on the posterior edges and I love to watch their graceful flight, swooping in over the beaches where they nest, sometimes in colonies, among the rocks and grasses of the beaches of Kachemak Bay.

  Reaching the bottom of the sloping path on the dry part of the beach, I turned us south to walk along behind a row of little shops with steep pointed roofs that had been built on a platform over heavy pilings that raised them up to be level with and facing the road, their backs to the sea. When all the visitors and fishermen leave at the end of the tourist season the proprietors of these small businesses close them up tight and retreat to their homes in town for the winter. Only a few larger, more solidly built structures remain open—a restaurant or two, the Harbor Master, Coast Guard, and Alaska State Ferry Offices, and the Land’s End Resort, for instance.