Dirk: A Stepbrother Romance(86)
Aria shivered as she walked the several blocks to the address. It turned out to be a small house/restaurant and when she opened the door, several pairs of eyes were instantly on her. There was a small bar with a few stools and she went to sit down, smiling at a few people that kept her eye contact. A waitress quickly brought over a menu and asked what she wanted to drink.
Trying to prop the large bag up, she asked for the name she had written down on the piece of paper.
“Ralph!”
The woman turned her head back towards Aria and told her that he would be out in a moment. Aria asked for a Coke and settled in to look at the menu. She had ordered and started eating by the time Ralph came up from the back. He turned out to be a rotund older man that looked much like his name sounded. He gave Aria a once over that made her a bit uncomfortable.
“So you’re Aria?”
“Yes Sir.”
“Look at you, so polite. I daresay that won’t last long around here. You kind of look like Martha you know. We never knew she had nieces.
“Great niece. I think her and my mother had a falling out when they were younger. I actually never met her or even knew that she existed until a couple of months ago.”
“Tragic. Hell of a way to learn.”
His green eyes stared into hers, as if probing for something for a moment, until he finally turned away when she didn’t. It sort of reminded her of a stare down that she had with her cat a week before.
“So you ready to pick up your car? She is a beaut. I really think you are going to like it.”
Aria had hoped for a picture, or something, but the man did not seem too on top of things technologically speaking. When she explained cell phones with cameras, he snorted. But she had been a little desperate so she went on his word.
“Oh I don’t have one of those fin dangled picture phones. What do you need that for?”
As Aria looked around the man’s yard, she believed him. There wasn’t a thing in it that didn’t look like it had been there at least ten years already. He seemed to have a combination used car and salvage business – and diner. They walked to the back where he had most of the cars. They went pretty far before he finally pulled a sheet out from the wipers of a sedan of some sort. It was a beaut and though it was old, it seemed to have no outside damage. Aria did not know the model unless she looked at the paperwork, but it was a pretty powder blue and was more of less what she had had in mind. She had been warned that it would be useless 6-8 months out of the year, but for now it was perfect and she would worry about winter when the time came.
Chapter 2
Stowing her luggage in the trunk, she got behind the wheel and looked at the directions she had written down and quickly started south, heading deeper into the overgrown wild. After about thirty minutes Aria checked the address twice before she pulled down a long dirt road. The cabin was not at all what she had expected. It was actually more of a proper family sized home than the modest dwelling she had been expecting. She noticed the road went off deeper into the woods past her property and she briefly wondered who lived up the hill.
Aria had to pinch herself to make sure she was not dreaming. She could have never afforded anything so nice on her bartender salary at home, and now she could live here in this big place – and all rent free. The estate even had the fees and taxes paid off for years to come. It had all been worked into the will. She didn’t have much in her pocket, but she knew that she would find something to do out there that would pay for food and her meager expenses. The first thing was to settle in.
Her hands touched the large support beams in the main room. They looked like they had been made from tree trunks they were so thick. Every log was cut perfectly to fit and though there didn’t seem to be any electricity running to the house from the outside, she had seen several solar panels on the roof. She was digging the Alaskan self-sufficiency already. The place was fully furnished and though it was not of her taste exactly, it was perfect for the setting, and she wasn’t about to be ungrateful. Aria suspected her tastes would be changing. She actually imagined she would be doing some changing herself. In fact, she already felt different, she realized.
Aria put her bag down in the bedroom, her bedroom, she reminded herself, and grabbed a blanket off the couch to cover her shoulders. There were a couple of rocking chairs out on the front deck, and the deck was high enough that she could see the ocean in the distance. She sat there for some time, knowing that her great aunt Martha must have sat there doing the very same thing many times. Her cheeks were beat red and her teeth chattering by the time she finally tore herself away from the view and went in to start a fire.
No Alaskan home was complete without a raging fire she decided, and Aria was satisfied that she had successfully started her first fire all by herself in the small fire place. That was the first time she had put her Girl Scout training to use in years, but it all came back to her pretty easily. She started off towards the kitchen and was happy to find several days-worth of groceries still in the cupboards. It looked like her great aunt relied heavily on canned goods, so for the most part she didn’t have to worry much about cleaning out food that had gone bad. She started a mental list of things in her head that she needed to pick up when she made her first run into town. The list quickly became too long though, and she was soon searching for a pen among the many kitchen drawers.
In the third drawer she opened, she noticed a strange drawing on the bottom of the drawer. It looked like a strange star with many points and weaving lines that ran through it. Her fingers touched the drawing and she realized that it was burnt into the thin wood.