She shrugged her thin shoulders almost to her ears. “Maybe someone will steal them if we don’t watch too close.”

“That’s about as likely as one of these critters running off. But we can always hope.”

We went back to the house and started cleaning the area that had been a store. To my surprise, beneath the cash register I found a wide ledger filled with neat entries, each dated and balanced to the right. The totals showed Uncle Jefferson made a small profit most days. If so, what did he spend his money on? The lawyer said he had none at the time of his death except for what he wanted mailed to me for traveling expenses and lawyer’s fees. There was no sign he’d bought anything, from clothes to furnishings, for thirty years. But if there was income, somewhere there had to be money going out. The only thing on the place that looked younger than me was the final ten feet of dock planks.

I shoved the ledger back under the register and pushed the “no sale” button. The drawer sprang open. Empty except for ten pennies and two nickels. I returned to dusting, plugging in the twinkle lights along the back wall.

Next to a potbelly stove old enough for Ben Franklin himself to have delivered, I found a small safe covered in dust. Most of the lettering on the two-by-two door had worn off and mud was caked to the sides. I rattled the handle, but it didn’t open. If I strained, I could push it a few inches, but after a few minutes of effort I decided the safe would make a fine footstool to sit on when winter came and I lit the stove.

In a closet behind the twinkle lights, I found a bucket of cane fishing poles and a stack of dusty, but never used, blankets. I spread the blankets inside the display case and put the bucket in a corner. The place still didn’t look like much of a store, but it was a start.

An hour later, the old fisherman I’d seen in the boat the day before stepped up on my porch as I was testing out one of the wicker chairs. “Morning,” he muttered around a wad of tobacco, sticking out his hand. “I’m Willie Dowman. Got a fishing shack on the other end, close to the dam.” He pointed with his head. “I was admiring that bass you got out by the road.”

I fought down the need to question his taste. “Good morning, I’m Allie.” I put my hand out to shake his.

He nodded, small little nods in rapid succession like his head was loose and we’d just hit a bump in the road. “I know. Jefferson told us you’d be coming.”

Tugging my hand out of his sandpaper grip, I took a step backward, disturbed by the fact he must have known I was coming long before I did.

Nothing about Willie was the least bit threatening, but the short, square-built man smelled like a neglected aquarium. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see algae growing out his ears.

“I used to come out on weekends to get away from my wife.” His bushy eyebrows wiggled, doing the wave across his forehead. “Since I retired, I come out most every day.”

“Why don’t you leave her and move out here?” I asked just to see what he’d say.

Willie looked like he thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. “Who’d cook all the fish I catch if I left her?”

I asked him who Mrs. Deals was since he’d yelled that he planned to tell her I had arrived. But talking to Willie wasn’t easy. We might be standing eye to eye, but somehow I got the feeling he was having a different conversation than I was. He never answered the questions I asked, but rambled on about people I didn’t know as if they were family. Talking to Willie made my head hurt.

I moved inside out of the sun and he followed, taking the third stool at the bar as if it were his assigned seat. I introduced him to Nana and they both nodded at each other in greeting.

After haggling for a while, he finally agreed to pay me three dollars and a bushel of apples for the mounted fish. The money smelled of bait and the apples he brought in looked like he’d picked them off the ground by a wild apple tree. I wondered if I’d been had, but he was hauling off a stuffed bass so the deal couldn’t be all bad. We shook on it.

“What did you do for a living before you retired?” I asked just out of curiosity.

He grinned. “As little as possible.”

Then, without a hint of barter, he offered a buck for two of Nana’s biscuits. She wrapped them in waxed paper and handed them to him across the pass-through.

Ten minutes later, the mailman drove up in a battered, blue hatchback and delivered a sack of mail.

“I’ve been holding this till you got here,” he grumbled as though angry that it took me so long to show up. “All you got to do is put it in order and the folks around will pick it up. You’re the one drop I’m allowed in this area.”

I peeked in the bag. Most of it looked like catalogues for fishing equipment.

The mailman nodded his good-bye as if he were in a hurry, but stopped at the road to talk to Willie, who was hauling the bass to his truck.

Wondering why the mailman had been so unfriendly, I studied him from the porch. He was a tall, thin guy in his forties with thinning hair and fingers so long they must have had an extra knuckle in there somewhere. Alien hands, I decided, like E.T.

I laughed suddenly. So far all the men I’d met in Texas seemed strange. Luke, my under-the-bed monster, was turning out to be the best of the lot. Though he wasn’t exactly handsome, he was a lot easier on the eyes and nose than the other two.

Almost as if he heard me thinking of him, Luke stepped from the side of the house.

“Morning,” he managed.

“Morning,” I answered.

When the mailman crunched back across the gravel in front of the porch, Luke slipped into the shadows.

“Sorry, miss,” the mailman began. “But I have to have the bag back. It’s U.S. Postal property.” The spider of a man looked as if he thought I might make a run for it with his official bag.

I dumped the rest of the mail out on the porch.

As the mailman watched me, I asked, “Want to buy one of the heads out by the fence?”

“Nope,” he answered, “but you got any more of those biscuits? Willie said you were selling them. Jefferson never had anything worth eating to sell with his coffee.”

I led him to the pass-through window.

Nana wrapped two more biscuits and passed them along with a small paper cup of coffee. “The coffee’s free to uniformed men,” she said, “but the biscuits will cost you.”

While the mailman folded back into his hatchback, a dented Mustang rattled down my road, pulling a flatbed trailer with two canoes. Boys, so young they must have been skipping school, asked if they could set their boats off from the dock.

I couldn’t think of a reason to say no. While Nana wrapped more biscuits, I helped them unload.

When I walked back from the dock, I noticed Luke standing by the side of the house watching. “Did you mean it about helping out?” I yelled.

“Yep,” he answered without looking overly interested.

I decided to spend a few more dollars of my traveling money. “I could pay you ten bucks an hour, plus meals, if you’d help me get this place in shape.”

He nodded once. “What’ll we do first?”

I looked around. The list was endless. “How about we clean out the rest of Jefferson’s things from upstairs?”

He followed me up and we worked without talking.

By noon, Nana had made twelve dollars in biscuit sales and I’d made another three off a deer head.

After a lunch of soup and sugar cookies-left over from our dollar-store raid-Nana decided to cut the good parts out of the pitiful apples I’d traded with Willie and make fried apple pies. While she baked, I tackled the boards covering the front windows.

I didn’t think it would be hard. I’d seen men put the hook of a hammer between a board and a wall, then pop it off. Only problem was whoever nailed the planks over the windows forgot to leave any room for the hook. After five minutes of struggling, I had splinters in my palm and had managed to hit myself in the knee with the hammer. All the boards were still in place.

Manual labor had never been my strong suit, but you’d think with two years of college I could manage to get a few boards down. I’d even tried using a few carpenter swear words Nana wouldn’t notice, like “screw you, you knot-holed plank.”

It didn’t work.

I wasn’t surprised when Luke stepped onto the porch and took the hammer away from me. I must have looked like an idiot. His big hand wrapped around the first board and with a tug he loosened it.

In the sunlight I could see that he wasn’t near as dirty as I thought. His clothes were worn, but relatively clean. He wore a pair of hiking boots and an old fishing jacket. He didn’t look directly at me. I caught myself wishing he would, just so I could see his blue eyes.

I shook my head, disgusted with myself. I wasn’t nearly as starved for a man as I was for color. It was pathetic.

While Luke worked, I sat on the porch and sorted the mail, tossing most of it in a plastic laundry basket with my uninjured hand.

He made easy work of the boards, then lifted them over his shoulder and carried them to one of the sheds. I’d waited for him to say something when he returned. He didn’t. I couldn’t think of any way to open a conversation.

To my surprise, he lowered on one knee beside my chair and pulled a knife from his pocket. It was one of those expensive kinds that could do anything. Pulling the tweezers from the end, he took my hand and began pulling out splinters with no regard to my yelps.

I tried to pull away several times, but he held my hand firmly against his bent knee until he was finished.

The nearness of him made me nervous. He wasn’t flirting; in fact, he wasn’t even friendly.

When he finally let go and folded up his knife, I cradled my hand and said, “Great bedside manner, Doc.”