The Serpents Trail Read online

  “What the hell is this idiot doing?” Ed asked in alarm and annoyance, knuckles white as he clutched the wheel.

  I had started to turn to look back when we were hit again and the dark hood of another car swung out and came into view in the left rear window. Accelerating till it was alongside, it swerved into us, forcing our car to the right, wheels off onto the sandy shoulder between the pavement and that low stone barrier. The car rocked violently as Ed tried to force both cars back onto the pavement and was shoved again by the other driver, against the wall this time, and suddenly I was looking down—a long, long way down. At least a hundred feet below me I could see the road we would have been traveling in another few minutes and had no desire to reach by this shortcut.

  “Hold on, Maxie,” Ed yelled.

  I had, as usual, fastened my seat belt. Ed, I suddenly noticed, had neglected to buckle his, but there was no time to correct that oversight. He was shouting and struggling to pull away as the other vehicle maintained contact with ours in a clear attempt to force us over the edge.

  I had shoved Stretch off my lap and onto the floor on the passenger side, where the swerving rolled him over onto his back. With visions of Thelma and Louise, and a long silent drop into the canyon in my mind, I braced both my hands against the dashboard and ducked my head. Tires squealing in protest at the extremity of Ed’s defensive maneuvers, I felt the tires on the left leave the ground and there were long terrifying screams of metal against stone as everything seemed to happen at once and, at the same time, in infinitely slow motion. The tires thumped back down again, jarring us, and there was a loud report on Ed’s side as the exterior mirror snapped off, caught by some part of the other car as its driver gave up and pulled past and away from us. Toward the front of our car there was a crunch of impact, as its rear fender struck us for the last time, broke free, and was gone.

  As Ed swung away from the stone guardrail and braked to a stop in the road, everything was exceedingly silent, except for Stretch whining at my feet. I sat up and, before laying a comforting hand on his head, took a look at the small dark vehicle that braked before disappearing around the curve a short distance ahead of us.

  One taillight was a different color red than the other.

  I recognized that particular configuration as one I had seen before—on the car that had turned a corner and vanished before I could get a look at the driver—in Chipeta Avenue, the night I had arrived and surprised an intruder searching Sarah’s house.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IT WAS ALMOST NINE O’CLOCK BEFORE WE WERE finally ushered into a booth at Gladstone’s restaurant and had ordered a couple of stiff drinks—Jameson for me, a double martini for Ed—to assist in the settling of our nerves before dinner.

  Making sure that the car was still drivable, we had eased our way along to a small pullout a short distance ahead that had parking space for no more than four or five cars at most. There we flagged down a passing motorist who called the park service emergency number for us on his cell phone. It wasn’t long until lanky park ranger Stanley arrived and climbed out of his pickup to express concern and take our report of the incident.

  While we waited, I had examined Stretch carefully for injury and found him shaken, but thankfully whole. For a few minutes directly after the accident, frightened by the noise and violent motion of the car, he had curled shivering in my lap. Allowed out on his leash, he was soon back to his normal examination of new surroundings, including an attempt to chase a pair of ground squirrels that immediately ran off in opposite directions, leaving him torn by frustrated indecision.

  “What is this pullout?” I asked Ed, wanting to talk about something else—anything but our close call.

  “The beginning of the Serpents Trail,” Ed told me, still pale and unsettled. “The early settlers needed a road for people with farms and ranches to get down to Grand Junction, so they built one. Now it’s just a hiking trail that goes down to the road again near the Devil’s Kitchen picnic area.”

  Hiking would certainly be better and more fun than driving, I thought—if driving included whoever it was who had tried to force us off the road. That car had disappeared so rapidly that neither of us had been able to identify the make or get a license number.

  “But I’d be willing to bet it was the same car that almost hit us earlier, as we left the Book Cliffs viewpoint,” Ed told the ranger, who was scribbling details on a clipboard report. “He must have pulled over and waited for us to come along.”

  At the time of that earlier incident I hadn’t noticed the discrepancy in the color of the taillights, but the driver had been accelerating, not applying his brakes, so they hadn’t lit up. It could have been the same vehicle. I couldn’t be sure.

  “And you didn’t get a look at the driver?”

  “Ah—nope.” Ed glanced away to watch a jay flutter onto a branch of nearby pinion pine, then shook his head and frowned. “He was going too fast and I was too busy to do anything but try to keep from going over the edge.”

  There was something odd in the way he denied recognition of the driver that made me suspect that he was holding back.

  Before I could examine that thought, the ranger turned to me for confirmation.

  “I had my head down,” I told him. “If we were going over the edge, I had no desire to watch it happen. If the windows broke, I didn’t want glass flying into my face.”

  He nodded and told us, in an apologetic tone, that considering our inability to identify our assailant, and without more evidence, there was slim chance they’d be able to locate him. “Not that we won’t try, of course, but it may have been a tourist smart enough to leave the area. We might get lucky, though, and find him locally. He left some black paint on your rear fender, but it’s not much to go on—a lot of cars are black—and no one else witnessed the accident.”

  “He left his passenger side mirror,” I hastened to inform him. “We found it, along with the one from our driver’s side, in the road back there.”

  “Mirrors project from a vehicle—probably hit each other,” he said. “Impossible to match up unless—maybe until—we find the vehicle. Like having the bullet that shot somebody—but no gun to match it.”

  He turned back to Ed, whose hands, I noticed, were still trembling slightly.

  “My report will help you in settling insurance claims with the rental company. It’ll establish that you were the victim of a hit-and-run. The passenger’s side of the car, where you scraped along the wall, is pretty much of a mess. The black paint on the driver’s side shows that this accident was clearly not your fault—without it as proof someone hit you it would have been iffy.”

  I thought it was anything but an accident. But why would anyone try to deliberately run us off the road in a place where, except for luck and Ed’s skillful driving, we might easily have gone over that wall into the depths of the canyon? We would probably have bounced off a couple of rocks and come down on the road below, scaring some motorist half to death. It didn’t make sense. But, then, neither did a few other things in the last two days that seemed now to be less coincidence and more threat. The mental list left me puzzled.

  It did make sense that I should drive us down from the Monument and back to Grand Junction. When I suggested as much—Ed’s shaky hands in mind—he agreed to ride shotgun, we traded places, and with Stretch riding once more in the backseat, proceeded slowly in the partially wrecked car. Leaving the parking space at the top of the Serpents Trail, a bit farther on we passed the Devil’s Kitchen with its picnic area, and from there it wasn’t far to the east entrance. The ranger at the kiosk gave us a sharp look upon seeing the damage to the car, but allowed us to proceed when he knew we had reported the accident. I had a few ideas of how the rental agency would react when they got a good look at the smashed passenger’s side, for the lower half of it was crushed and deeply gouged from the encounter with the rock retaining wall. The door would open—I had been able to get out through it—but it refused to close tightly, s
o, glad the weather was warm, we traveled with the wind whistling in around our knees.

  From the park’s entrance it was only a few minutes’ drive back into Grand Junction where we parked at Gladstone’s and received more attention from a patron on his way in.

  “What happened?” he asked, hesitating to take a good look.

  “Hit-and-run driver,” Ed told him.

  “Whew!” he said before walking on, shaking his head.

  I enjoy Jameson enough so that I never gulp it, feeling it deserves to be savored and appreciated, never spoiled with too much, too fast. While I was alternately sipping it and a glass of ice water, Ed tossed down his double martini as if it were painkiller and quickly ordered another. Though he had regained his normal coloring and was no longer looking pinched and pale around the mouth, the scowl on his face now appeared more concerned than shocked and angry. Something was bothering him.

  Time to clear the air, I decided.

  “Ed?”

  No answer.

  “Ed!”

  Startled, he dismissed his reverie and blinked his attention toward me. “Sorry.”

  “What’s going on, Ed? You’re worried about something. What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Like what?” he asked, carefully setting the martini glass gently, soundlessly down on the surface of the table in front of him.

  “Like—if I knew, I wouldn’t be asking, would I?”

  He gave me a long, silent look, considering my question.

  My thoughts went back to his odd behavior during the ranger’s questioning and how I had felt he was being less than truthful.

  “You recognized the driver of that car, didn’t you?”

  He stared at me, eyes narrowing. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because I’m not stupid. Did you?”

  He said nothing, glanced away toward the bar on his left, and I knew he was about to repeat the falsehood he had told to the park ranger.

  “Don’t lie to me, Ed. I might have gone over that cliff with you, you know. I think I’ve got a right to the truth. Who was it?”

  He heaved a great sigh and, nodding to the waiter who set his new drink on the table and collected the empty glass before turning away, took a sip before prevaricating.

  “I don’t know. I thought I might have recognized him, but it all happened so damn fast.”

  I wasn’t about to let him get away with that.

  “Who did you think it might have been?”

  He stared at me, cheek muscles tightening as he gritted his teeth, still reluctant to spit it out.

  “Who? Damn it, Ed! Who did you think it was?”

  “All right—if you have to know. I thought it was—Alan, that’s who.”

  “Alan? Sarah’s son, Alan?”

  My incredulity deepened his frown and straightened his spine in resentment at my lack of confidence in the statement.

  “Yes—Alan,” he snapped.

  The idea staggered me.

  “What gave you . . . ? Why . . . ? How can you think it was Alan?”

  Ed looked away again, considering answers, his brows nearly meeting over his nose with the depth of his frown.

  “It’s very complicated, Maxie. There are things you don’t know—about me—and about Sarah.”

  Ah—now we were getting to the heart of the question.

  “So I’d guess it’s about time you told me, don’t you think?”

  “Well, to begin with, Sarah and I’ve been seeing each other.”

  “I’d already figured that out.”

  “You had?”

  How dumb did he think I was, for lord’s sake?

  “Of course. For starts, why else would you be stopping through here often enough to have an annual pass for the Monument? How long have you been seeing each other again?”

  “Since shortly after Bill died.”

  “And what does that have to do with this? I know you don’t care much for Alan, but could he possibly think you’re trying to take his father’s place and resent you enough to try to kill you—and me along with you, by the way?”

  The idea struck me as far-fetched in the extreme. I finished my drink and drained the ice water as well.

  “Another?” Ed asked.

  “No, thanks. I’m starving, let’s order. But you haven’t answered my question.”

  He handed me one of the menus left handy by the waiter, who had gone past the booth twice, glancing over to see if we were ready, but not about to interrupt our intense conversation.

  Good man.

  “You’re making the wrong assumption. It’s possible that just the opposite is true,” Ed blurted out suddenly, dropping the menu and leaning forward with both elbows on it, in a sincere attempt to convince me of what he was about to say. “If I’m right, Alan is my son. And he’s convinced that I abandoned him. And I don’t dislike Alan—he hates me. I think he’s spoiled and resentful, but he’s my son.”

  There are times when you are certain that the person speaking to you has completely misplaced his marbles. As I leaned away in reaction I felt confident—in this particular restaurant booth, after a hair-raising afternoon experience that immediately followed the death of my best friend—this was one of those times and Ed had lost his. I stared at him with no idea how to respond. The idea was so preposterous that, for the moment, it defied rational thought. You’ve gone ’round the twist, my darlin’ Aussie, Daniel, would have told Ed. I almost said it for him.

  “What do you mean, ‘if you’re right’?” I finally got out.

  “Well, I don’t have proof. Sarah would never confirm it for me.”

  “I’m sure she would’ve denied such an outrageous idea. It’s not true,” I told him flatly.

  “She wouldn’t deny it, either. When I demanded to know, she’d just smile and change the subject.”

  I had to put a stop to his nonsense somehow.

  “Look, Ed,” I told him. “He couldn’t be your son. I happen to know—if you don’t—that after Sarah and Bill were married and found they couldn’t have children of their own, Alan was adopted—when he was three.”

  “I know that’s what she always said, but . . .” He retreated into thought and we sat silently staring at each other with a world of constrained information between us.

  The conversation was breaking new ground for me—raising questions about things I had been confident that I knew concerning Sarah. For Ed to even consider that Alan might be his son, he and Sarah had to have been much closer than I had ever suspected during our college days forty-plus years earlier. I remembered that she had dated him several times that I had assumed from her behavior were nothing but casual. We had told each other just about everything back then. If they hadn’t been as innocent as they appeared, why hadn’t she told me? Because she suspected I might still care about Ed? But that couldn’t be true. I had no doubt she had known when I recovered from my momentary infatuation. Some of her dates with Ed had occurred after Joe and I were happily engaged.

  I was still considering when the waiter materialized from behind me, ready to take our order. Distracted, I ordered a small steak and salad without further examination of the menu. Ed asked for something I didn’t catch, which later turned out to be some kind of pasta, and the young man slipped away as if relieved to escape the tense atmosphere of our booth.

  It was growing late, the windows were high and few, and it suddenly seemed very dark in the restaurant’s subdued lighting. I stared across at Ed, who took another sip of his drink and set it back down in front of him, carefully observing the glass and not meeting my eyes.

  “Look—” he started, just as I chimed in, “Why would you—”

  We both stopped, waiting for the other.

  He nodded at me. “You first.”

  “Okay. Why would you believe such a thing?”

  He leaned forward again with a sigh.

  “That’s part of what you don’t know,” he told me. “Alan is forty-three years old.”

&nbs
p; “Is he that old?” Was I?

  “He was forty-three last November. Do you remember when Sarah took a fall quarter off at the beginning of her junior year?”

  I thought back. “Yes—she stayed home to work. I roomed alone that quarter and she came back in January.”

  “She told you she stayed out to work. She was three months pregnant when she left in June for the summer.” He paused and ducked his head as he swallowed hard. “She didn’t tell me, either. I found out later,” he finished quietly.

  The statement rocked me, though I had felt it coming. How could I not have known? But was it true? It was. Somehow I knew it was. I remembered Sarah’s attitude when she had returned to school—despondent at times, almost manic at others. A couple of times I had heard her quiet crying in the night. Her grades had slipped from her normal As and Bs to Cs—the lowest, an English class that she should have aced. She had floated the idea of quitting, but we had talked her out of it and the next quarter she had seemed her old self again, academically and otherwise. Trouble at home, was all she had said in explanation, and I had assumed it the answer to her moods, for her mother had been ill.

  “So, she . . . ?”

  “Had the child and put it up for adoption,” he nodded. “But I think, when she and Bill decided to adopt, that she had kept track of, or located, Alan somehow. How she got him back, I have no idea. She would never talk about it.”

  Oh, Sarah, I thought sadly, you were too clever by half. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t I suspect? I’m so sorry.

  And what, I wondered, still staring at Ed, did it all matter now—or have to do with events of the last twenty-four hours? There were now even more things I didn’t know that made me decidedly—and for good reason, as it later turned out—uneasy.