The End of The Road by Sue Henry Page A

later and give up searching for another day, with two books I didn’t think Lew had on his shelves and might enjoy adding.
    Jessie came back to the front desk and I smiled to see that she had wasted no time in creating a pile of her own, which had grown almost as tall as mine in the few minutes she had taken to shelf-read.
    “If we have something you’re looking for and can’t fin d, we’ll be glad to mail it to you in Homer,” Carol said to me. “Just give us a call.”
    “I’ll remember that,” I told her as I paid for the books, tucked their card between the pages of one of them, and thanked them for their assistance.

    As we headed for the building’s exit we passed a cooking shop that had intrigued me the last time I was there. I slowed and turned my head to look and Jessie laughed.
    “Don’t even think about it,” she said, clutching my elbow and towing me toward the outer doors. “Keep saying to yourself, ‘I have to fly home.’ ”
    But I pulled away and went back to take another look from outside the shop’s door, for as we passed I had caught a glimpse of not the terrific assortment of anything related to cooking or eating, but a fig ure that I thought I recognized—the woman who had been on the plane I had taken from Homer to Anchorage and in the lobby of the hotel when I passed with Stretch on my way to do some shopping two days earlier.
    “What is it?” Jessie asked at my shoulder. “Something you really want to take a look at? I’m sure they do mail orders, too.”
    I shook my head and turned back toward the door to the outside again.
    “No,” I told her. “Just someone I thought I recognized, but I guess I was mistaken.”
    I thought about it as Jessie drove us home and somehow it made me uneasy. Was the woman somehow following me? If so, why? But it seemed unlikely that she could have been in all three of the towns I had either left or visited on this trip by accident—didn’t it? Who was this woman who kept showing up in my escape from home? If she wanted something, had something to say to me, why couldn’t she be direct and ask?
    “That’s a worried sort of frown,” Jessie commented as she turned the truck off the highway into her driveway and drove up to park near the house. “You okay?”
    Quickly, I relaxed the frown, which I hadn’t been conscious that I was exhibiting, and gave her a smile instead. “Oh, yes, I’m fine. Want help unloading your dog food?”
    “Not necessary. It’s fine for the moment in the dog boxes in back. When Alex comes home he’ll help get it in the shed before we head for Oscar’s. Those bags are pretty heavy, and you’re supposed to be company anyway, not kennel help. Let’s go in and see how the mutts are doing.”
    “The mutts” had heard us drive in and met us at the door with tails wagging, as eager to greet us as if we had been gone a week instead of a couple of hours. They make such an odd pair in size that it always amuses me to watch them together, and this was no exception. I forgot my consideration of the woman I thought I might have seen and turned to helping make sandwiches for lunch, which we ate at the table while we looked over the books we had brought back.
    The better part of an hour later I was examining the one I had found for Joe when Jessie suddenly shoved back her chair and stood up to face the window.
    “Snow!” she crowed. “It’s snowing !”
    I turned to see that, sure enough, fat white flakes were falling like a lace curtain through the air and into the yard and had already thinly coated the roofs of the dog boxes in the yard with half an inch or so.
    “Oh, I do hope it doesn’t all melt off this time,” she said.
     
     
     
    It didn’t, but went on coming down quite steadily for the rest of the afternoon. There were three or four inches outside by the time Alex arrived.
    “Well, you got your wish finally,” he said, greeting me as he swept Jessie into a hug. “About time, too. I was beginning to