The Boarding House (42 page)

It was just after 1:00 p.m. when Ellie pulled up to a big truck stop just off Interstate 40 in Forrest City, Arkansas. She was hungry and this was as good a place as any to grab a bite to eat. She filled up with gas first, paid at the pump, then drove up to the station and went inside carrying her purse and the Walmart sack with Daddy’s ashes.

The deli case next to the register was full of greasy offerings of corn dogs, potato wedges and hunks of fried chicken, or if she wanted to go ethnic, she had a choice of
taquitos
or nachos with thick canned cheese sauce that tasted more like yellow paste than cheese.

Ellie bypassed the fried stuff for the Subway sandwich area and ordered a ham and cheese sub on flatbread, and a Pepsi. It was so different from what she’d been eating for the past year that her mouth was actually watering when she took her first bite.

She ate without thought, thankful for the freedom to be sitting here and choosing her own food. When she was finished, she dumped the remains in the trash, picked up her purse and her Walmart sack and headed for the ladies’ room.

There were six stalls, including the one for the handicapped, and they were all empty except for one, which she quickly bypassed. She could get to it later.

Ellie used the bathroom, flushed the stool then took the box with her father’s ashes out of the sack.

“Right where you belong,” she muttered, as she dumped some in and flushed.

She waited until the smoky contents had more or less gone down the hatch before she moved to the next empty stall where she repeated the process, dumping ashes, then flushing, moving from toilet stall to toilet stall until she’d covered them all and there was nothing left to flush.

She dumped the box in the trash, then calmly moved to the sink where she soaped and rinsed her hands over and over until she was satisfied there wasn’t an iota of the Devil on her person.

It had taken Ellie a couple of days to find just the right house near the Baylor campus. It was a small, one bath/one bedroom with a great kitchen, a living room and a tiny dining nook. The draw had been the fenced-in backyard. Ellie was toying with the idea of getting a dog. She’d always wanted one, but had never been given the option. After another two days of unpacking, she was finished.

She stood in the middle of the living room, eyeing her new furniture and fluffing a pillow here and there, then finally stopped fussing and stepped back for a final look. The suncatcher Wyatt had given her for her eighteenth birthday was hanging in the front window. It gave her hope for the future.

You will be happy here.

Ellie’s heart skipped a beat. “Wyatt?”

But when she turned to look, he was nowhere in sight. She swallowed past a sudden lump in her throat as reality hit. Then she took a deep breath and lifted her chin.

“You’re right, honey. I
will
be happy here. I promise.”

As promised, she called Dr. Tyler,
who gave her the name and phone number of a psychiatrist there that he wanted her to see. The doctor’s name was Butterfield. She liked that. It made her think of butterflies. Tyler told her that he had already filled the man in on her history, which was good. It saved her the trouble of rehashing it with a stranger.

It had taken some fancy paperwork, as well as letters of recommendation from Preacher Ray, her executor, and her banker, to get her into the fall semester at this late date, but when school at Baylor College began, Ellie Strobel was listed as a freshman.

She’d dressed for the day as carefully as a bride would have dressed for her wedding, choosing just the right clothes and shoes—even the right backpack, with just a touch of pink.