Dead Dancing Women Read Online Free PDF Page A

went flying too, into the bathroom. I closed the door and climbed into the tub, where I’d cowered with a pineapple-printed shower curtain wrapped around me, and a bath mat on my head, until the house stopped shaking and quivering like something out of The Wizard of Oz .
    It was at that moment living alone in the woods lost all sense of romance and bravado. This was real life I discovered in those long minutes in my bathroom, not a Disney movie with birdies flitting on my shoulders as I sang a pretty song.
    During that storm, I learned to live alone. Bears shaking my garbage can at night didn’t bother me. Trees falling on my house didn’t bother me. Snow so deep I had to shovel out my windows didn’t bother me. Quiet bothered me. Sometimes loneliness bothered me.
    But finding part of a poor old woman in my garbage can …
well … there were some things in life you could never be prepared for.
    I set the diet soda at my feet. I must’ve moved too fast. I surprised the beaver swimming out from the dock, coming from his growing twig house back in the reeds. He slapped the water hard with his tail, sending a huge spray of lake water over me. I leaped out of my chair.
    He really got me, my summer’s nemesis. I was still unnerved by the morning’s events and he’d caught me off-guard. We were in a knock-down battle—him taking down the soft woods around the lake, and me hoping to scare him away.
    I wasn’t in the mood for the game right then. I grabbed my dish and soda can and headed back to the house, muttering that I was going to talk to old Harry about getting rid of the beaver, save my lake, free the world from one more nuisance. Let the creature end up as a beaver stew. Maybe the Survivalists had it right.

FOUR
    I woke up at six the next morning feeling as if I’d been hit on the head. I took a tepid shower and shook my hair dry, pretending to glamour with my head of streaky blond hair that had grown too long and too wild. I put on a clean yellow cotton sweater and a pair of jeans, and jumped into my yellow Jeep, heading into Leetsville where beavers and crows wouldn’t taunt me, and people wouldn’t try to scare me to death.
    Leetsville was twenty minutes in by some of the worst potholed roads I’d ever driven. It took a lot longer than it should have to get there because of going slow to dodge the holes and stopping for a flock of turkeys. I stopped for the turkeys to be courteous, giving them the right of way. One jenny shook her head at me, scolded, and made as though she was going to attack my Jeep. Disgruntled, I supposed, that I was in her road, that I leaned my head out the window asking them to hurry it up, that I happened to be alive that morning.
    Except for the turkeys and the potholes, my drive to town was fairly tranquil.
    Leetsville is a mid-sized village. Two grocery stores, one an IGA and the other a Whitney’s Discount Foods. A library. A Guns and Ammo store where you can get a Michigan Lotto ticket and a Traverse City Northern Statesman (to check last week’s Lotto numbers), right along with your shotgun shells, flies for fishing, Pinconning Cheese, and cartons of night crawlers.
    I loved planning my trips to town. Maybe it wasn’t Ann Arbor—no art, no galleries, no downtown, no lectures, no professors, no visiting writers, no Zingerman’s for corned beef sandwiches; but we did have Fuller’s EATS, the only restaurant for miles around, owned by Eugenia Fuller, a big, motherly woman who fed everybody in town whether they had the money to pay or not. EATS was where the locals gathered and gossiped and socialized, and where everybody tried to dodge Eugenia when she was on a tear about some relative of hers she’d just discovered. She was a fanatic about her family genealogy. The five-by-five foyer of Fuller’s was pasted with charts of Eugenia’s family tree. She liked to keep them there so people could watch