just a short I wrote some time ago

Killer Find

Where was that excuse for a main road?  All those impossible twists and turns for the last half hour and she still hadn't come across anything that looked like a killer find.

This back country lane looked like all the others she had been down, single car width, broken dirt edges.  What gravel might once served as paving was long scattered or pounded in.  The bar ditches, a good two or three feet deep, snaked along side, exposing sandstone and an occasional tree root.  Powder fine dust gritted on every surface, inside and out, of her ice blue Mercedes.

Had the old bat who told her about this place gotten the directions wrong?  Marilyn hated having to hunt up farm houses in the middle of god-forsaken-middle-nowhere.  The only saving grace was that if the place was so hard to find, she could probably score some real money out the forgotten junk left to rot.

Delicated tinted lips wrinkled into a smile as Marilyn remembered that find she made a week ago.  The oak dresser cost one hundred dollars but she made that back on the antique buttons she ripped off the yellowed lace dress. 

But the real prize, a pair of silver picture frames, wedding pictures still mounted, she found in the bottom drawer, wrapped in the dress.  The pictures were useless so she trashed them.  If she'd said anything to the old lady selling the dresser, the dress, frames and all would have been claimed by the crinkly faced hag.   She'd already wasted enough of Marilyn's time anyway, blathering on about family dreams and nonsense like that.

So what if grandma used that glass bowl to serve grandpa his favorite jelly?  If it sold for a good price, good.  Memories have no value.  Dead is dead.

But a good hunter knew the value of letting old biddies gas on. Still Marilyn was surprised when this one told her about an abandoned house, still full of furniture, just going to ruin. By the glint in those vacant eyes, Marilyn would have guessed the woman didn't like her.  Not that it mattered.

Marilyn turned up the air conditioner, hoping to blow some of the dust out. Grit rasped between her teeth, making her grimace.

No one ever so much as asked about her life, or understood the trouble she went to, finding, pricing and carting out junk, just so people who wanted antiques could have the stuff.   A heartfelt sigh oozed out.  This house had better be worth all the trouble she was going to, that's all she could say.

Spotting a rock outcropping along side the road up ahead near a flat space, Marilyn slowed to a cautious stop. The road widened at the crest of the rise like an altar top.

She shook herself. The old lady's comment about those places being meant for sacrifice crept across her mind with cold toes. A pile of rocks stood just off the road. Climbing to the top might give her some idea of a way out of this rural hell.