The Serpents Trail Page 12

  “You okay, Missus?” he asked.

  I had suspected he would never be able to call me Maxie.

  After reading the new copy of the will, which told me nothing that solved any problems or answered questions, I felt informed enough about Sarah’s wishes to drive out and spend the rest of the afternoon confirming arrangements with the Callahan-Edfast Mortuary in a kind of apology and penance for my anger. I had thought to make this particular visit with Alan, but he had made no effort to contact me and I had no wish to be the target of abuse similar to what I had received in Westover’s office.

  “Originally, Mrs. Nunamaker said she didn’t want any kind of funeral service or viewing,” the manager, a Mr. Blackburn, told me. “She didn’t even want it called a funeral, but a gathering of friends and family. She was very plainspoken.”

  “Said she didn’t want people weeping and wailing over a shell in a box, didn’t she?” How like her. I smiled, having heard that particular phrase from the woman herself more than once, along with the idea that we are not our bodies, they are only on loan to us.

  A little uncomfortably, he agreed that that was exactly how she had worded it and told me that they had come to an agreement that a gathering of family and friends was to be held just before her cremation.

  “No flowers,” he said. “She didn’t want flowers, either—she wanted the family wine served. It’s a bit unusual, but her family winery made very good wine, you know. I’ll let them know to send some in.”

  I did know—for she had once taken me on a tour of the winery that her father had established in Palisade, a community a few miles east of Grand Junction.

  Well, Sarah, I thought, you may have your family wine, but flowers are one thing you can’t control.

  “I’d have a vase or two available just the same,” I suggested. For I knew that I could never allow my dearest friend to depart without at least a few of her favorite blossoms, and suspected others would feel the same.

  Everything else was already planned and paid for, as Attorney Westover had indicated, down to a short obituary with notice of the gathering for the local paper, lacking only the date and time. I scanned the brief obituary Sarah had left, thought about adding a few of the things I would have chosen were it up to me, but finally respected her wishes and left it as written.

  I left the mortuary feeling comforted. There is something about following the established custom and ritual of the benchmarks of life—christenings, graduations, weddings, funerals—even gatherings—that has that effect. They are occasions for the living, and not just the person, or persons, for whom they are observed. I realized that, until I walked through it, the door of the mortuary had been another that held unanswered questions. Answering them was one of the things I had needed to do to accept the fact that Sarah was gone—one of the stages of grief—and she had helped me through it by providing some of the answers ahead of time. I hoped I would remember to be as wise when my turn came.

  Thank you, Sarah.

  Now—what do I do about your daughter—if she is your daughter? More than that, how can I figure out who would dare to attempt your murder? Using the word murder stopped me cold for a moment.

  First you unlock that door in the basement, she said quietly in my mind’s ear, and I suddenly remembered the key I had found in the secret compartment of the desk in the living room alcove.

  It was where I had returned it to the box at the back of that one desk drawer. I plucked it out, went down the stairs from the kitchen, walked straight to the utility shelves, swung them away from the wall, and slipped the key into the lock. It turned easily and the door opened silently on well-oiled hinges into a narrow room hidden behind what had appeared to be the solid cement of the basement wall.

  Well done, Sarah. Double guard: hide the key for a hiding place in a hiding place of its own.

  For this one, however, she must have had help. Some unknown workman, possibly Bill, I supposed, had constructed it long ago, for all but one of the shelves that lined two walls were thick with the dust of years. That single shelf was neither dusty, nor empty. Two banker’s boxes stood side by side upon it, one of them labeled J. S. Stover in Sarah’s easily recognizable handwriting, the other unlabeled.

  I took the heaviest, the J. S. Stover box, remembering what Jamie had said about Sarah giving her the S as middle initial. Carrying it out to the workbench, I swept a space clear of tools with one arm, and set it down. Overhead was a shielded light bulb that turned on with a jerk of the dangling string.

  The box was full of papers in file folders and a smaller box that held a collection of photographs, which I examined first. They were pictures of Jamie in reverse-chronological order, from what must have been only a year or two ago, for her hair was longer that it had been when she walked across the lawn to meet me, and going backward to the time she was born. Turning them over, I found a date on the back of each one and an indication of her age at the time the picture was taken. In order in this collection, I saw Jamie as an infant, in a sandbox at three, in a swimming suit at seven, graduating from high school at eighteen, and from college at twenty-two. I found her standing by a Christmas tree, holding a Fourth of July sparkler, and dressed as a butterfly for Halloween. There were two of her wedding to a husky young man who looked uncomfortable in a dark suit. One of these included what appeared to be the parents of the bride and groom. Later, one or two pictures showed her with a baby that must have been the son she had mentioned to me. There were more pictures of him, sitting on the front steps of a house, alone in a sandbox, but more often with her, as he grew. Oddly he never seemed to smile or turn his face to the camera. They abruptly stopped when he was nine years old, leaving five years unaccounted for. The handwriting style of the dates on the photos was consistent but unfamiliar, so someone other than Sarah had written them—whoever had sent the pictures, I surmised. Someone had known that Sarah cared about the child she had given up—someone who had been close enough to take pictures of Jamie had made sure Sarah was kept informed of her daughter’s life. Who?

  The adoptive mother was, at first, highest on my speculative list of possibilities. But the handwriting on the most recent photo of Jamie matched the others and the date was May 2001. Jamie had told me her parents had been killed in 1998, so it couldn’t have been the mother who had kept in touch with Sarah for over forty years. Stymied, I returned the pictures to their box and took out the first file, which was also labeled 2001. In it, and the rest, dated and going back year-by-year like the pictures, I found letters about Jamie from someone who had signed them only “Your friend.” There were no envelopes, no postmarks, no return addresses—just the letters full of news about Sarah’s daughter as she grew older; all details a mother would like to know.

  I sat down again on that tall stool beside the workbench and wondered if Sarah had ever known the identity of her benefactor. She must have, I reasoned. Why else would she get rid of the envelopes and their postmarks to make sure that not one identifying scrap of evidence remained? What a secret to keep for all this time—even from me. It was so stultifying that I found myself on overload, without a brain cell left able to analyze the situation. I simply sat and, going through the photographs again, knew how Sarah must have treasured them.

  This time I began to notice details of the various backgrounds.

  The house in which Jamie had grown up remained the same—a brick residence on a pleasant tree-lined street. It had a neatly landscaped front yard and a large grassy space in back that, when she was small, held a swing set with a slide. Inside it was like most similar homes. There was comfortable furniture and the normal evidence of a family that read books, watched television, ate and lived together contentedly.

  From a sign on a building in another, she had gone to East High School, so the house she lived in must have been somewhere near where it was located. I didn’t recognize it from pictures of Jamie taken there, standing proudly in her cap and gown on the occasion of her graduation.

  How
careful Sarah had been to keep the secret of her daughter. Why was that concealment so important to her? I could understand how it must have been at first. Girls the age we had been in college simply didn’t get pregnant—it was a disgrace of major proportions. So Sarah had kept her secret, even from me, had her child adopted and moved on without a word. But was that caution necessary later, after she had married Bill and they had adopted Alan? She must have felt it was, though she might have confided in Bill. Intuition told me that Alan, conversely, had known nothing of this sister.

  I returned to the folders, which I found all had dates that matched those on the back of the photos, and which held details of Jamie’s life that a picture couldn’t tell. Almost, I took them back to go through and read that evening, but changed my mind and left them in the box. Now that I had the key, they were probably safer where they were than in the Winnebago with me and I absorbed about all I was capable of for the time being.

  Carefully, I put everything, except for that last, most recent photograph of Jamie, back into the box and returned it to the hidden room. Before I left, I lifted the lid of that second box and found it empty, except for a single five-by-three index card in the bottom. Carrying the card back to the light, I found an unfamiliar name recorded on it: Mildred Scott. Beneath the name was a Salt Lake address. Slipping it into a pocket of my skirt with the photo, I locked the door and swung the utility shelves back into position. This time the key would not go back into that hidden space in the desk drawer. I would keep it in my own hiding place in the Winnebago. Dropping it in my pocket with the picture and card, I climbed the stairs into the kitchen, thinking hard.

  As I moved toward the back door, the cell phone I had dropped into the other pocket stopped me with its demanding summons and I found Ed Norris on the line with another invitation to dinner.

  “I have a different rental car,” he announced, when I offered to pick him up.

  “Okay, but no drives to the Monument this time,” I told him adamantly.

  He laughed and agreed.

  So I accepted his invitation with relief at the idea of leaving the confusion of the day behind me.

  As I readied myself for his arrival, I wondered just how much of what the day had held I should reveal. Would he accept and adjust to the idea that what he had assumed was a son had turned out to be a daughter? Should I tell him at all? I could tell him about the plans Sarah and I had made for her gathering, however—and would. The rest I could play by ear and intuition, knowing there would be time later, if necessary.

  If in doubt, leave it out is a rule I have followed most of my life and usually find advisable in the long run. You can’t unsay something. It works better to keep it to yourself until you’re sure, than to regret saying it later.

  The other thing I would try to do that night was keep a close eye on Sarah’s house, in case Jamie returned under cover of darkness. It was, I supposed, possible—depending on what else she hadn’t told me.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “SO, YOU HAVE ANOTHER CAR. WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU done with your day?” I asked Ed as we drove west out of the central section of Grand Junction in a new rental car toward a Red Lobster restaurant.

  “Not much,” he told me. “I spent two hours this afternoon with the rental company straightening out everything that needed to be done concerning what was left of their car. Can’t say they were happy about it, but it all worked out okay and the insurance will cover it. I was glad the police report stressed that it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Good. It certainly wasn’t. Still gives me chills remembering how far I was looking down the side of that cliff for a moment or two there.”

  The memory made me wonder again if he had been right about Alan being at the wheel of the car that had tried to drive us off the road. It was something I hadn’t thought of that day. Alan’s anger in Westover’s office had been enough to add to my suspicion that it could have been, so I told Ed about it.

  “I’m amazed my name didn’t come up in his list of resentments as well,” he commented wryly, when I had finished relating the details of the incident.

  “He was focused completely on calling both Don Westover and me thieves and venting anger at not being allowed to execute his mother’s estate.”

  “Just as well he left me out of it. You don’t need more complications in taking care of the things the way Sarah wanted.”

  Once again, I found that enlightening him just then about the complications that—one way or another—seemed to be resulting from Sarah’s wishes for some reason made me uncomfortable, though I didn’t know exactly why. So I kept my own council on the appearance of Jamie that afternoon. We made casual conversation over a relaxed and welcome seafood dinner, though I had a small guilty thought or two for Doris Chapman’s casserole languishing in the refrigerator of the Winnebago. Ed expressed an interest in where and how I lived in Alaska, so I told him about my pleasant summer in Homer. By the time we had reached after-dinner coffee, I was describing the arrangements for the gathering Sarah had planned.

  He chuckled. “So she wanted no sepulchral sermons or spooky music—and wine instead of flowers,” he said. “We could have anticipated that, I guess, couldn’t we? Whatever she wanted is fine with me—all but the flowers. She’ll have her usual pink roses from me.”

  Usual? And pink? I had thought Sarah hated pink. Interesting, but I didn’t ask questions.

  Instead I offered my agreement on the subject of flowers and made a mental note to double check with Callahan-Edfast on the subject.

  When Ed suggested a walk by the river after dinner, I was sorry I had left Stretch at home, knowing he would have enjoyed the outing.

  The confluence of the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers is located south of downtown Grand Junction and along its banks the city has wisely set aside not only space for parks, but trails for walkers and hikers that run through wetlands, cottonwood groves, across islands, and around small lakes for miles to the east and west of the rivers’ intersection. Riverside Park on the north bank of the Colorado provides access to at least two of the trails, Audubon and Blue Heron, as well as playground equipment in a grassy area, shaded by beautiful trees. How could a name like Blue Heron Trail not beguile anyone into a visit, when it calls to mind one of the most graceful and dignified of birds?

  Ed parked his replacement rental car and we walked across onto the lawn, where I immediately took off my shoes to go barefoot in grass damp from a late afternoon watering. He grinned and did the same, rolling up the bottoms of his pants a turn or two and wiggling his toes. The scent of the grass wafted up from under our feet and a nearby robin ignored us in favor of a tug-of-war with a reluctant worm that had surfaced as a result of the watering and was being stretched like a rubber band by the determined bird. The sun had set behind the Colorado National Monument, so the park lay in its cool shadow, though there was still a reflected red-gold glow from the top of the Book Cliffs to the north.

  Like a couple of kids, we took advantage of a set of swings, coating our feet with dust from the spaces beneath them that had been worn free of grass by past swingers. It had been years since I set one in motion and it was fine to be airborne. I remembered how, as a child, I used to love making a swing go higher and higher, until I felt I could almost fly—and once sprained an ankle when I couldn’t resist leaping out at the top of the arc. This was not a temptation at sixty-three, with bones that are far more brittle than those of an eight-year-old. Still, it was delicious to swing, especially with the resulting breeze cooling your bare toes. I found myself humming an old tune, some of the words echoing in my memory: Come Josephine, in my flying machine . . .

  I wondered as I pumped myself back and forth why so many people neglect doing things that give them pleasure just because they have advanced in years. Acting old just makes you feel old, in my estimation. Going up so high . . . touch the sky . . .

  “Sarah and I used to swing in Seattle,” Ed said suddenly, and I noticed he had given up the effort and had
let his swing die to a stop. “We found a park close to the university where we’d go sometimes on our bicycles and spend time talking and swinging. I’d almost forgotten that. All day I’ve been remembering things I thought I’d forgotten.”

  As I allowed my swing’s momentum to die as well, I looked across and saw, in the twilight, that his cheeks were wet with tears.

  “What am I going to do without her, Maxie?” he asked, turning his face away from me to stare unseeing at the riverbank in the distance. “I’ve always loved her, you know?”

  I did know—had always known—and thought about it carefully for a moment or two before answering.

  “Then I think it was good that you were able to spend time together in the last few years,” I said finally. “I know it must have been comforting and a great pleasure for her to have you there after Bill died. She cared a lot for you, too, Ed.”

  “Not enough,” he said in tight voice, and I sensed the years of dissatisfaction that had accompanied his affection for Sarah. “I would have been a better husband to her. I knew her better.”

  How could he think so? I was taken aback by the vehemence in his voice—had never realized how much he begrudged caring that was never returned the way he wanted it. Enough to take revenge? Surely not. What purpose could it serve now, especially so late in their relationship? He hadn’t even been in Grand Junction the day Sarah went to the hospital—had he?

  Why did I unexpectedly feel that he was carefully noting my reaction to his expression of pain? Was I, in the knowledge that someone had murdered Sarah, beginning to see everything and everyone with suspicion?