The End of The Road (22 page)

Two sips of cold coffee later the police were knocking on my door.

I showed them up the stairs and into the attic where the body lay wrapped in the carpet, told them how I had found it, and said that I had no idea who it was. Then I went back downstairs to wait for Alan Nelson, who showed up a few minutes later.

“Who is it?” he asked me as he came in the door.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “She’s rolled into an old carpet and I didn’t unroll it, though Stretch had pulled at it a bit. I left her as I found her and brought him down to call you. I wouldn’t even have known she was there if I hadn’t heard him growling and gone to see what he was after in that far corner of the attic.”

“Why did you go up there?”

I told him why and showed him the Christmas stocking I had gone to retrieve, which now lay on the table along with the yarn from Ulmer’s and my knitting needles.

“Well, I need to go on up,” he said. “And you’d better come with me to see if you can identify this person. There must be a reason she’s been left in your attic, mustn’t there? So it may be someone you know.”

That thought didn’t appeal to me at all. I had wondered about it before his suggestion and was hoping against hope that it was not.

So I left Stretch downstairs in the offic e, with the door securely shut so he couldn’t follow us, and went up as requested.

We reached the top of the stairs and stepped into the attic. Across the space between us the three policemen were gathered around the rug, which they had unrolled to uncover the body that had been wrapped inside. All three of them turned and recognized Trooper Nelson with nods.

He stepped forward and took a long, frowning look at the body, then turned back to me.

“Mrs. McNabb,” he said formally, “would you take a look and see if you can identify this woman as someone you know?”

The four men moved aside to leave room for me to step forward and see her clearly. Taking a deep breath, I walked the few steps required to reach the space where the dead woman now lay on her back, arms at her sides, at one end of the carpet in which she had been wrapped.

For a long moment, as they waited, I stood silent at her feet and stared at the pale face that was streaked with blood from a bullet hole in the right temple. It had run into her hair and left a significant stain on the carpet that had concealed her identity.

I slowly realized that I had somehow half expected the body to be that of the disappearing Amy Fletcher. And I suppose that I might have understood her having followed her brother John in suicide. But there was no gun and she couldn’t have wrapped her own body in that heavy piece of carpet, so someone else had to have killed and left her there in my attic.

But it was not Amy.

To my astonishment and confused shock, it was the woman who had flown with me on the plane to Anchorage, whom I had seen again in the Hilton Hotel lobby, and thought I might have seen a third time in Wasilla as we left the bookstore.

I turned toward Trooper Nelson, who had moved to stand at my side. I must have turned white because he was holding my elbow, as if afraid I might faint.

“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.