This Old House

By Anna L. Walls

Elsie and her very best friend cut all ties and headed out into the great unknown, intent on starting a new life on the other end of the country. The journey quickly turned bad, and bad only got much worse until she was tempted to leave the car the very next time it stopped. She never expected to find her new life so much sooner than she planned, and she knew it was so very much better than she could ever anticipate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna L. Walls
• Release date: Jan 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463201299

Anna L. Walls

I grew up a rancher's daughter hoping to inherit the ranch and run a riding school for city kids. However, my brother bought the ranch from our parents in order to avoid an inheritance tax and I ended up joining the army, marrying my fisherman husband and moving to the wilderness of Alaska where I raised two wonderful boys. One of them gave me an old laptop computer and now I'm a published author. Go figure.

Book preview

This Old House

I regretted getting into the car almost from the very beginning. My girlfriend, Barbra, got this new job on the other end of the country and her boyfriend, Bob, offered to drive her. She invited me along because I had no real entanglements here and I might find something there. Since her job came with lodging, what did I have to lose?

As the miles went by, I numbed myself to their doings. They never just talked to each other, they yelled, screamed, and laughed at each other at the tops of their lungs; they had to, because they had the radio cranked all the way up tuned to some heavy metal channel.

I was in purgatory.

Two days later – non-stop travel – we were on this little two-lane country highway and it was near dark. We’d just passed a sign that said whatever town some 2 miles ahead. At least I think that’s what it said; I was just trying to endure. As much as I wanted out of this car, you don’t just get out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter. Next, we passed a sign that pointed at some small lane. It promised lodging – just what we were looking for.

This little snow-covered lane took us up a hill and then made a sharp left at the top. We should have made another sharp left right there; the house was all lit up, but we missed the turn. That Bob was driving too fast might have been a factor, but it was moot now. Instead of stopping and backing up, he sees this tractor straight in front of him and decides to play chicken or something – I don’t know. It was just parked there looking like it had been put up for the winter, and it’s not as if we were driving anything impressive; it was just a car, and not a big one at that. I don’t have a clue what he thought he might accomplish; blame it on the full moon. Stupid people do stupid things during the full moon. If you ask me, if he was to ram that tractor just sitting there, we would have been the losers. He didn’t make it that far though. He ran up on something buried in the snow in front of it.

Now enraged, saying something underneath was probably scratched, he rammed the car into reverse and backed up, swinging the rear end into this untouched yard in front of this little house that sat right at the top of the hill. Coming up the hill, the lane to this house was straight ahead, but off by about half a lane. Backing up in there allowed us to either approach the big house that was supposedly our night’s lodging or go back down the hill. I thought at first he was