Chapter 7 One Last Story #2
Three years ago, beavers had dammed a nearby creek, diverting the water over our driveway.
We’d noticed it after a particularly wet fall, and we’d known it’d be even worse after spring flooding.
Our grandson, David, and his partner, Mick, had jumped to volunteer their services in return for a few weeks at the house.
That’s how we were able to keep a place like this.
Anytime work needed to be done, we only had to casually mention it and our family members would vie for the “privilege” of fixing it, when payment was exclusive use of the house.
“What’s going to happen to the house now?” Richard’s voice murmurs behind me.
That’s already been arranged. Our children will share it, time divided equally, for their own use or their children’s use, as they see fit.
“And they’re going to want to come?” Richard says. “After you were murdered here?”
I silence his voice. I’m not thinking about that. There’s a lot I’m not thinking about.
I get back into the SUV, park it and lug my baggage up the drive, one by one. It’s only three bags—a suitcase, a backpack and a laptop case—but I’m past the age of being able to load everything into one haul.
As I take up the last piece, I mutter under my breath. This is not the way I intended to start my last trip. I was supposed to drive up the lane, see the house and bask in that first spark of joy one last time.
A cabin in the woods. Richard always joked about that, saying I should write nothing but horror stories while I was here.
It began life as a place for me to escape and write.
The old writing cabin is usually the first thing I see, the little building perched on a bluff overlooking the lake.
Calling it rustic is a kindness, but one it deserves.
We found this place after I sold my first book and fretted of ever selling another, with two kids at home and a third on the way.
Richard wasn’t about to let that happen, so he took me on a tour of cottage properties, and this is the one I chose.
It was also the only one we could justifiably afford.
Still, I’ve never regretted that. The other properties may have had cute and tidy cottages—with electricity!
—but they didn’t have the beauty of this one.
For ten years, I made the monthly drive up during good weather and sometimes in bad, if the muse struck hard.
We no longer live a mere two hours away, and the property no longer holds only a rustic writing cabin.
There’s a proper summer home now, but the cabin stays, even if it’s been twenty years since I actually wrote in it, preferring the sun-drenched studio Richard added to the main house.
That cabin is where I go today, though. The center of my plan.
Once I’ve put my bags into the house, I head down to the cabin. It’s locked, though we always joked that was mostly to keep hikers from taking refuge in there and then suing us when the roof collapsed.
The cabin is a sturdy little building of rough-hewn wood.
According to the former owner, her father built it by hand, with timber he felled from these very woods.
We can joke about the roof, but in fifty years, we haven’t done more than minor repairs.
She’s old and not much to look at, but she’s holding her own against time and the elements, not unlike her owner, and I will now give her one last story, as she deserves.
The key is in the house. I don’t bring it down. Instead, I break the lock. Oh, that’s not easily done, but I am prepared. The lock must be broken. That is “obvious clue #1.” The lock will be broken, and a trap set up inside to warn of intrusion.
I will set the trap. I will also trigger the trap.
The next obvious part of the narrative is that there will be signs someone has been living inside.
Someone was living in the shed, possibly taking refuge during the pandemic, and when octogenarian author Marguerite Woodhouse returned, after the death of her husband, she startled the inhabitant, who murdered her.
Yes, that’s the obvious story, which is why I’m not doing it. The lock will be broken. The door will have been left ajar. Yet there will be no signs that anyone stayed there, and I will make a note of it in my journal, which I began two months ago.
The lock on the writing shed was broken, and there was a simple intrusion alert set up, which I tripped.
I presumed someone had been staying there, so I approached with caution, but there was no sign of a current—or even past—occupant.
Not so much as a footprint on the desk or ashes in the hearth.
Even a stash of chocolate bars, which the children left in the cupboard, are untouched. How very odd. A real-life mystery. Ha!
The last part goes a bit far, and as a writer, I would never stoop to such an obvious setup.
Little did she know that the real mystery would be her own. The mystery of her death!
While I would be more subtle, newspapers are not known for such subtlety in their narratives, and they will devour the irony of this one. I’ll make sure of it.
After I’ve broken the lock, I go inside and walk around.
I’ll want to leave footprints in the dust. Double-check those candy bars I’d seen in the cupboard, make sure mice haven’t gotten to them.
It should appear as if I took a good look about the place, but none of my poking about can be attributed to an intruder.
I grab a book from the shelf—that’ll provide an excuse for why I came in here, in case my family mentions that I write in the main house. I’m thumbing through my options when a knock sounds at the door.
I spin so fast I grab the bookcase just in time to break my fall.
Goddamn it! The last thing I need is for my corpse to be found a week from now outside the cabin, where I dragged myself after breaking my damn hip.
That might get me in the papers, but only as a pathetic epitaph.
Old lady forgets she’s old, dies because of it.
Yes, I’ve reached the age where every stumble brings with it the specter of a broken hip, and such an accident is a lot less deadly when I have cell-phone access.
That is my first thought. My second is: “Holy shit! Someone just knocked at the door of my cabin in the woods.”
“Hello?” I call as I reach for my pocket knife.
A gust of wind catches the door and bangs it against the post, and I exhale with a shaky laugh.
I hadn’t heard someone knock. It was just the open door banging in the lake breeze.
I stride over and shut the door. Then I return to the bookshelf. I think I’ll take—
Two staccato raps send me spinning again. I stare at the now closed door and mentally replay the sound. A definite double-tap at the door, quick and friendly.
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
I resist the urge to say the words and instead stride over and yank open the door, hoping to catch the trespasser off guard.
No one’s there.
I step outside.
“Hello?” I call.
The wind rustles through the trees. Somewhere on the lake, a loon’s haunting call sends a chill down my spine.
I walk to the edge of the bluff, knife in hand.
I tell myself to relax. People use the lake, even if it’s usually empty this late in the fall.
I have neighbors. Distant ones. Seasonal ones.
But the point is that people are out here, and they sometimes stumble over our hideaway and poke about, ignoring the polite “Private Property” signs.
“Hello?” I call, louder now.
The loon answers. Then the wind rattles the door against the jamb.
Is that what I heard? I close my eyes. The rattle seems much softer than the double rap I remember, but I’d already been on edge. It could have been the same sound.
One last glance around and then, seeing nothing, I head for the main house.
I’ve been in the house long enough that any lingering unease has disappeared.
It’s been many years since I came up here alone, and I’ve forgotten how easy it is to get spooked.
The dog would growl, and I’d envision winter-hungry bears, only to see a young fox trotting past. Voices would raise the hairs on my neck, and I’d envisioned a showdown with belligerent hunters, only to see kids canoeing across the lake.
We’ve never had to deal with more than drunk college kids camping on our beach…
which wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t also expect to use our bathroom in the morning.
Everything is fine. It has always been fine, and that is part of the story I’m spinning. It would be far less of a mystery if we’d been in constant conflict with local hunters or under constant siege by entitled campers. No, when the authorities look for clues there, they won’t find any.
I spend the next hour setting up clues inside the house.
There’s a storage space under the stairs, where I move items around and hide a stash of wrappers from British import candies.
Then into the crawlspace under the house, where I place two shoe prints.
One is a boot larger than my own, and one a shoe significantly smaller.
A single print each, in a soft spot on the earthen floor.
As for the actual shoes, they don’t exist. I’ve made the soles from papier-maché.
I take the shoe models outside. I’m going to put one set of prints behind the long-abandoned outhouse, and the other behind the cabin.
Then I’ll burn the papier-maché down to ash.
That will be the start of my fire set-up, where I’ll also half-burn a page from one of my novels. It’s an old edition, long out of print.