one had been there for months. Strangest were the signs that no one had actually lived there for more than a decade. The calendars, the newspapers, the magazines—everything stopped after May, 1985.
“Come on now. Contrary to what you might think, I’m glad you’re here,” the voice called. “You seem to be taking good care of the place. I’m going to fix us something to eat. I hope you’ll join me in the kitchen.”
Eventually Nadia did get hungry and cold. She smelled something meaty and sweet and delicious, along with smoke from the woodstove. Because she could not afford to pause to consider the consequences, she traversed the yard and climbed the steps to the front door without hesitation. She knocked on the door, which felt odd, and when an old woman with a white braid answered, Nadia held out the basket of chanterelles like the neighbors attending a holy day feast back in the village. The woman smiled, her wrinkles a map of her long life. Repositioning her braid so it lay behind her shoulder, she thanked Nadia and took the basket.
She said, “You poor sweet girl. I hope you like homemade beef vegetable soup and bread and chocolate chip cookies.”
Nadia had nodded, pushing the heels of her palms against her eyes.
“Don’t you worry now, you hear me? I’ll tell you what. No one’s going to badger you or make you go anywhere.”
And Lettie had stuck to her word.
If only Kachemak took after his grandmother. It seemed evident that “my non-meddling gene,” as Lettie had called it, had not traveled down through the generations.
Already Kachemak had asked more questions than Lettie. And already Nadia had decided she needed to find someway to leave, and somewhere to leave to. Somehow.
Snag needed to call Claire Hughes to get a ride to the Caboose Chamber meeting. Kache hadn’t returned the previous night, which meant Snag hadn’t slept even one quarter of a wink. But he called from his cellphone that morning and told her he was fine, not to worry. When she tried to ask him about the homestead, he’d only said they’d talk later, then hung up.
Snag cleaned all morning, cleaned over what she’d already cleaned in preparation for his arrival, because cleaning calmed her nerves. Not this time. Everything veered off course, as if the earth had freed itself from its steadfast journey around the sun and decided to skedaddle over to Jupiter with a side trip around Mars on the way.
She should go out to the homestead. Obviously. But she didn’t have her truck, which meant she’d need a ride out there, which meant whoever drove her might detect her own unbelievable capacity for negligence, which meant, in Caboose, perhaps forty-five minutes, tops, would pass before the town and its outlying communities would hear the whole humiliating story.
Besides, she really did have to get herself to the Chamber meeting. She’d been heading up a project, trying to get the train running all the way to Caboose again. A long haul, so to speak, but they’d finally gotten approval from the railroad company and the Department of Transportation, which had already begun renovation on the tracks. Now the town squabbled about one major detail.
Way back, when Caboose used to be called Herring Town with the perfectly clever slogan The End of the Line, the herring boom brought the train, the train brought the people, the herring were loaded on the train by the people—everyone was happy, and everyone got down on their knees at night and thanked the good Lord for the train and the herring in all its abundance. But then, as too much of a good thing is bound to do, the herring industry dried up from overfishing as fast as it came and the town all but dried up and the railroad company crowned Wilbur, Alaska, as its new End of the Line, about seventy-five miles up the tracks. For some reason no one quite knew, a caboose was left abandoned at the end of the Herring Town Spit, that jut of land four-and-a-half miles long, that long finger pointing to the mountains across the bay.
About fifty years after the herring left, someone came up with the idea of changing the town name because calling it Herring Town was a bit like calling the Mojave Desert “Seaside.” A vote made it officially Caboose. They needed to change the slogan too because it was no longer the end of the line, so some idiot, as far as Snag was concerned, came up with the zinger: See the Moose in Caboose. Wow. That was interesting. Moose appeared around every other bend in the state of Alaska, and most of Canada. Not exactly bragging material.
So Snag had devised a plan to get the railroad to consider bringing the train back for the tourists and thus, reestablishing the old slogan, which would once again make sense. Caboose was one of the prettiest towns in Alaska. Although, she had to admit, Alaskans used the term “pretty” rather loosely when describing towns. Caboose itself was a typical frontier town where mostly ugly buildings had cropped up as needed without much of a plan, but everyone said the setting on the mountain-bordered bay wasn’t just one of the prettiest in Alaska. It was one of the prettiest in the world. The tourists flocked like locusts every summer; the road backed up with motor homes all the way to Anchorage. A major cluster. Bad for the environment, and hard on everyone’s nerves—locals and tourists alike. So she got the railroad to agree to bring the train back. Hallelujah, right?
Wrong. Now that they’d started refurbishing the track, everyone was pissed over the fate of the caboose, the town mascot that sat at the end of the Spit and currently housed a mini-museum with photos and artifacts of the early Alaskan pioneers.
Snag wanted to have the original caboose refurbished and let it run as intended, at the back end of the train, with the pioneer memorabilia on display along with sou-venirs for sale. A great story, extra publicity—just like the town that had once been abandoned, the old caboose had been reborn and had a new lease on life. Stuck for all these years, and then, finally, on the move. She could practically write the publicity materials in her sleep.
But a big chunk of the town had their Carhartts in a bunch over the idea.
“We can’t move the caboose! It’s what our town was named after.”
“The caboose,” Snag had reminded them, “will still be here twice a day. But it will have a purpose, just like its namesake. It will be alive again, just like our town. Come on, people. Let’s just get another new caboose to stick out there and use the original as it was intended.”
She was beginning to realize she made up the entire minority on this issue. Snag, who’d been told by Marv Rosetter she could sell ice to an Inupiaq, had not been successful in convincing the people of Caboose of this one obvious solution. Another reason she should get herself to the meeting.
But Nicole Hughes didn’t pick up the phone. Neither did Suz Clayton. Melanie Magee’s line was already busy—with one of the others calling her, Snag suspected. They, of course, played on the side of the caboose keepers. And they had caller ID. So Snag could almost see them standing in their kitchens, listening to her ask if they might be able to give her a ride. They may as well have shouted into the receiver, “No, and hell no!”
She pulled on her coat, stepped into her boots on the porch and started marching toward the Chamber meeting. But as she walked she thought of Kache. Again. Where was he? Had he gone to see Lettie? She didn’t know that the homestead had been abandoned. Every time she said she wanted to go out there, Snag lied. She told her there were renters who didn’t want to be disturbed. She told her the road was too bad and she’d get stuck. She told her maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe in the summer.
One day, after Lettie could no longer drive, she’d set out walking toward the homestead,
