The Last Annual Slugfest by Susan Dunlap

the bathroom window rattled ominously. When I had bought this house two years ago, I knew it would need some repairs. I made a list, hired one of Chris’s cousins to deal with the foundation problems that couldn’t wait, hauled the firewood, and lowered myself precariously to the edges of the steep roof to clear the gutters, not daring to look at the fifty-foot drop to the ground down the hillside. I assumed that when everything I had planned was finished, the work would be done, and I would relax and enjoy my snug home. I didn’t realize that when that list was taken care of, there would be a new list. And another list after that.
    With a forty-year-old house on a steep hillside, only constant hauling, hammering, and shoveling kept it standing. That window was one of the items that had been on this year’s list since last summer. It rattled more vigorously with each storm. But I noticed it only when I was in the tub, right before I went to bed. And when I got up in the morning, and had time to deal with repairs, I would invariably forget it.
    The rattling was worse than I could remember. I did the only sensible thing. I pulled the bathtub plug, dried off, and went to bed.
    When I woke, it was cold and barely light. I snuggled down under the electric blanket. It was five minutes, ten minutes, perhaps even half an hour before I realized that I was still cold. I reached for the control, wondering why it hadn’t occurred to me to turn the blanket up sooner. The control was dark.
    “Damn!” I muttered. The electricity was off. Outside, it wasn’t raining, but the sky was dark and the wind was still blowing the branches of the redwood near the house. They scraped against the window. I wondered if one of the higher redwood branches or a branch from one of the laurels in front of the house had blown down on the electric wires, or if the outage was not limited to my house. A tree could as easily have fallen on a power main. I pulled on my bathrobe and headed downstairs to the bathroom. A shower would warm me up. But I was only halfway down the stairs when I remembered that there would be no hot water. The thought of a warm cup of coffee flickered through my mind, but, of course, the electric stove wouldn’t be working either. The problem with electricity outages here in the Russian River area was that, unlike most of California, we were not hooked up to the natural gas lines. When the electricity failed, not only was there no light, but no power for cooking, and no hot water. When the outages lasted three or four days, as they did at least once per winter, I spent my evenings huddled next to the fire, with greasy hair hanging down my neck, eating tuna fish on crackers, facing another day of reading meters for customers who stormed out of their dark, cold homes to demand answers I didn’t have.
    But now the problem could be handled easily. I dressed, and drove down to the café for breakfast.
    Weekends are big sales times in Henderson, as in all resort areas. But March is not yet tourist time. And at nine o’clock on a cold, windy morning, there were few people on North Bank Road, and fewer in the café.
    Marty, the weekend waiter, waved at me as I walked in. I had been there so often that I was a regular, and my eggs, kraut, and chorizo sausage went onto the grill before I sat down. The vinegary smell of sauerkraut floated across the room and I noticed the woman at the next table—obviously not a sauerkraut lover—wrinkling her nose. While I waited, I picked up a copy of the local paper. I expected to find an account of Edwina’s murder on the front page, but there was no mention of it. The paper must have gone to press before she’d swallowed the poison. But there was the weekly burglary report, and an account of the chamber of commerce’s fight to have the summer dams put in the river before Memorial Day, and the fishermen’s opposition to anything that threatened to block the movement of the steelhead and