“I have no idea what I was treating her for,” he said.

She wrote other manuscripts and short stories, and, of course, there are the tales she told the few visitors she invited inside her house.

Image Barry Martin oversaw construction that surrounded Edith Macefield, and he befriended her. She revised her will to give Mr. Martin, shown in her house with a photo of her, control of her estate. Credit... Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Ms. Macefield constructed her stories while the city surrounding her rushed to construct itself, while the new condos rose even as the big seagoing fish processors still sounded their horns on their way to Alaska, while the coffee shops became espresso shops and the bars became clubs.

She lived on a street whose other houses had been torn down decades ago. Not only did she have no real neighbors, but she also had no known family. Born in Oregon, she told people she had moved to Seattle from Europe as an adult to care for her mother. Her mother died many years ago, apparently in the house that Ms. Macefield refused to sell.

For years Mr. Peck was the person closest to her. They both loved music. He was a divorced father without much money when he met her in the 1980s. Soon he was driving her to appointments, helping get her groceries. He bought her the word processor that still sits on a desk in her house. She became like a grandmother to his sons.

“She was a really curious person, but she was always fun,” Mr. Peck said.

By the early 1990s, he said, Ms. Macefield had made him the beneficiary of her estate through a living trust. Now that she is gone, he said he has hired a lawyer to determine his rights. Not that Ms. Macefield had much beyond well-positioned real estate. All Mr. Peck said he knew was that she worked decades ago making deliveries for the Washington Dental Service.

In the fall of 2006, as developers were pressing Ms. Macefield, Mr. Peck tried to convince her to sell. She was in the hospital after having fallen and broken some ribs, he recalled, and the sale would have paid Ms. Macefield about $1 million, as well as help her move to new housing.

“She just pulled out, right there, at the last minute,” said Mr. Peck, 63. “She didn’t trust them. It really hurt our relationship, too, because she thought I was in bed with these guys.” Mr. Peck has since moved to another part of the state.