The Serpents Trail

by Sue Henry

  “Maxie, I need your help—as well as your smiling face—need you to figure some things out for me. But it’s not telephone conversation and will keep till you get here. I . . .” Her words had faltered again and drifted to a halt. “Don’t worry, or drive that thing too fast. It’s not about my health. There are things I need to tell and show you. I need your advice on some important things—but they’ll wait. Just come.”

  Two days later, I had the Winnebago serviced and stocked, the neighbor who cares for my house when I’m away notified, the post office advised to forward my mail, and drove away from Homer on the first leg of the long journey, to Anchorage and points east and south. Early afternoon of the second day of driving had brought me to this high Canadian border, where not quite seventy miles and a river crossing would put me into Dawson City.

  I had enjoyed the previous winter in the Southwest and meant to spend this one in New Mexico. The previous June I had driven the long road north for the first time in two years to spend three months in my small house in Homer at the end of the road on the Kenai Peninsula.

  It had been a satisfying summer at home tending my garden, spending long afternoons in the hammock on the deck that overlooks the glorious Kenai Mountains that frame Kachemak Bay, and renewing the relationship with my extensive library. There had been congenial evenings with old friends gathered around my large dining table to enjoy good food and wine seasoned with a gratifying abundance of conversation and laughter.

  I had soaked in the pleasure of belonging and wandering the familiar rooms of the house built by my first husband, Joe. An early morning sun had caught fire in water droplets along each strand of a spider’s web and gilded each blade of grass in the yard as I stood on the deck with my coffee mug warm between my hands. One memorable mid-August night I had laid aside a book and gone out to watch a full moon rise like a five-dollar gold piece that laid a gleaming path of reflection across the calm waters of the bay. Above it gossamer wisps of the aurora borealis had slowly coalesced into a glowing point directly overhead, then cast pulsing arms of light stained green and red and blue to the horizon on all sides in an enormous star. Through this unusual formation had fallen a shower of the annual Perseid meteors, tripling the natural extravagance. I had laid myself down in the hammock and watched in awe until the aurora faded and my eyelids grew heavy.

  As always, I missed my late husband, Daniel. In the place we lived together, I find reminders of him everywhere, but five years have mellowed that specific grief from the sharp anguish of loss to a more lingering nostalgia. Remembrances of my second husband are welcome, for time has finally made memories more significant than absence.

  “We had six fine years before you nicked off, you stubborn old Aussie coot,” I said to him, fondly and aloud, a habit that I enjoy and have no intention of breaking. He is still good company.

  Daniel McNabb, Australian expatriate, is not the only husband I have cherished and outlived, however. At forty-five, I scattered the ashes of Joe Flanagan, my high school sweetheart and first husband, into the waters of the bay, after he drowned in the storm that sank his commercial fishing boat. Meeting and marrying Daniel years later was a surprising gift when I least expected it and considered myself a confirmed widow. From him I picked up bits of Aussie slanguage that frequently slip in to enliven my speech and, though I sometimes confuse their meaning a bit, the sound and rhythm is familiar and comforting to me and to Stretch, who was originally his dog.

  Alone again at sixty-three, I know I was lucky in both relationships, but have no inclination toward another. My independent spirit has finally won out over any desire for companionship.

  Daniel’s careful investments left me with no financial concerns. So I used some of the interest to buy a motor home, found a caretaker for my house in Homer, and took off to see parts of the world that, except during college years, I had missed by living in the far north. During the past summer, however, I stopped at a motor home show in Anchorage where I instantly fell in love with a Winnebago Minnie Winnie and traded in my Jayco for a new rig. It provides compact, comfortable room for us with hydraulically powered slide-outs for both the central space and bedroom, which gives me extra room when parked, and has enough storage for the limited cargo I find necessary for a snug existence on wheels.

  I’m a reasonably practical person, old enough to have learned not to waste time on nonsense or things I can’t control. I try to see the world and people around me as clearly as possible, good and bad, and keep my expectations at a realistic level. A sense of humor is important to me. I don’t bother to impress anyone, or fool myself or others, but rather take what’s positive, deal directly and as little as possible with the negative, and get on with it. Traveling and meeting new people have turned out very well. Sarah’s request made me sad, and leaving Alaska sooner than I had planned confused a few things, but I wasn’t sorry to get back to my nomadic lifestyle after a pleasant summer at home. Perhaps I’ve always been a gypsy in at least part of my heart.

  So, headed down the Canadian side of the Top of the World Highway that snaked along the ridges until it dropped steeply down to meet the upper reaches of the Yukon River, I was definitely getting on with it. Part of my mind was concerned with reaching Colorado, for it wasn’t like Sarah to be reluctant to talk about much of anything, at least with me. For the moment, putting whatever it was that my friend needed to share with me on hold, another part of me was delighted to be starting a trip on my own and relishing that feeling of playing hooky.

  I made it to the ferry in good order and into Dawson City on the other side of the Yukon River. There, I found an RV park in the middle of that historic site of the Klondike Gold Rush, followed by a sustaining shot of Jameson’s Irish before dinner at the Downtown Hotel on the corner of Second and Queen Streets, right where I expected it.

  A week later I fibbed my way across the Canadian border again, this time into Montana, and three days after that I was a few miles outside Grand Junction, Colorado, when the storm forced me momentarily off the highway.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AS I STOOD ON SARAH’S BACK PORCH, CONTEMPLATING the dark house and the open door, the breeze died into total stillness. Not a leaf moved in the aspen trees that had been ashimmer at the slightest breath of air from the end of Sarah’s garden. Retreating to the bottom of the porch steps, I looked up to make certain there really was a light in that second-story window. There was. I also noticed that a few stars had appeared overhead. They seemed to drift across the sky in an illusion created in opposition to the clouds that were quickly breaking up to slide away over the surrounding cliffs and plateaus.

  I now had two immediate questions: why the back door had been left ajar when other access to the house was closed and locked, and whether or not to go through it into the house in search of my friend Sarah. Where was she, after all? The situation made me uneasy enough to consider going back to the motor home to dig out my shotgun. I told myself not to allow paranoia to gain a hold on my thinking, and gathered resolve.

  Crossing the porch to a window beside the open back door, I cupped my hands around my eyes to close out residual light and peered into what I knew from prior visits was the kitchen. Beyond the dark contours of the table and ladder-back chairs of a breakfast nook, vague shapes of cupboards and the bulk of a refrigerator were silhouetted against a single beam from a streetlight that found its way through from the front of the house. All was shadows. Nothing moved.

  Inside there would at least be a telephone through which to transmit my questions and concerns to someone, find answers, and determine a course of appropriate action. Making up my mind, I pulled the door wide open and, stepping into the kitchen, closed and locked it quietly behind me. I had forgotten that Sarah had refused to have her old-fashioned push-button switches replaced with newer ones, so it took a minute for me to identify the fixture that my fumbling fingers found beside the door. Adjusting mental expectations back several decades, I pushed the one at the top and the kitchen sprang
to life in the light from a ceiling fixture.

  It was a long corridor of a room, clean and orderly, with the tall, mossy-green cabinets of an earlier age reaching to the ceiling above pale yellow countertops. Modern laborsaving influence was revealed in a microwave that had been installed under a vent hood over the stove and a dishwasher with a heavy chopping-block top that stood on rollers where it had been pushed out of the way into a corner. The room smelled faintly of toast, onions, and a hauntingly familiar flowery scent that wasn’t immediately identifiable but spoke to me of Sarah. The window behind the sink was open about an inch, enough to allow the dying breeze to gently stir a pair of green and yellow striped café curtains that I remembered.

  Hesitating by the door, I listened carefully and, though there was nothing but silence, there was an inexplicable atmosphere that made me feel, uneasily, that I might not be alone in the house. Something about the place didn’t seem empty—some shift of air, a sound beyond my ability to hear inspired the sensation that someone else was present and listening. Ever practical, I shrugged off the impression as imagination, but it made me wary, so when I moved across the kitchen toward the door to the dark dining room on the opposite side, I moved with caution. Perhaps Sarah was home after all. She could be sleeping so soundly in that back room upstairs that she had not heard the racket I had made at the front door. But the feeling was unsettling just the same.

  Passing the white porcelain sink, I noticed a single mug in one of its deep double sides and leaned close enough to examine it. A small amount of what appeared to be tea had pooled in the bottom and had not yet evaporated to a dry residue. Taking Grand Junction’s late-summer, ninety-degree temperatures into account, it meant that someone had been in the house to set it there sometime earlier in the afternoon.

  As I stood frowning down into the mug, from somewhere in the house above my head came a hint of muffled sound, like a quiet footstep on carpet. It was only a suggestion, almost a vibration in the air, but it caught my already edgy attention. Freezing in place, I listened intently to identify the location of any repetition, visualizing the arrangement of upstairs rooms that opened off a hallway at the top of stairs that went up from the vestibule inside the front door.

  Almost convinced I had imagined it, or that the sound had filtered into my ears from somewhere outside, I tiptoed toward the door that led to the dining room, still listening. Within an arm’s length of the door a board beneath the dark green tile of the floor squeaked a protest under my right foot. Response came instantly in several succeeding thumps that were definitely footsteps in the upper hall. Staring at the ceiling, as if it could become transparent and reveal the identity of the walker, I tracked the thuds across that ceiling to what I knew was the landing. They rapidly began to descend, creating a slight echo in the vestibule with its uncarpeted floor and high ceiling. Who was this? Sarah could not have moved so quickly.

  “Hello,” I called out, giving up the attempt at stealth and moving forward into the dark of the dining room. “Who’s there?”

  The only answer was an increase in the speed of the descending footsteps, muted by a carpet runner on the stairs.

  Reaching to the right of the doorway I found nothing but an empty wall and quickly ran my hand along the left side in anxious search of another push-button switch. Instead, my wrist struck something that tipped over, rolled along some kind of shelf, and fell off to shatter with a crash into unseen fragments on the floor below. Too late I recalled that the switch was on the kitchen side and a sideboard hugged the dining room wall just inside the doorway on the other. It had contained a pair of ornate crystal vases. One of them, to my regret, was now history.

  The sound of hurried footsteps reached the vestibule, and I heard the snap of a deadbolt being released before the front door was flung wide enough to thump against the wall and allow someone to dash through. I gave up on reaching back to the kitchen switch. Hoping the dining furniture had not been rearranged since my last visit, I moved forward around it and through another doorway into the living room, where I immediately stumbled over an ottoman, cracked an elbow on an end table in the process, regained my balance, and finally reached the vestibule—too late. The pounding feet made it across the wide front porch and down the front steps as I swore and felt my way through the dark to the now open front door.

  I caught a glimpse of a running figure just disappearing around the rear of the motor home that I had parked on the street and heard Stretch begin to bark warnings at the person he believed had come too near his residence. Out of sight beyond the Winnebago, a car door slammed, an engine growled to life, and a dark vehicle of some small, economical variety sped away down the street, leaving no way to ascertain its make, license number, or the identity of the driver.

  I stood watching, helpless, in the doorway, cradling my smarting right elbow in my left hand. There was a flash of brakes, and before the taillights vanished around the nearest corner, I noticed that one of them was a different color red than the other, as if it had been replaced sometime in the past.

  If the open back door had held questions, the one in which I now stood held several more.

  For a few frustrated minutes I stayed, looking out into the soft shadows of the calm summer night with a sense of unreality and confusion, and listened until Stretch stopped barking and dropped back out of sight in the motor home. It was very quiet. Somewhere in the dark beneath the shrubbery that surrounded the porch a cricket chirped—the sound as foreign to my Alaskan ears as the situation in which I unexpectedly found myself. A bit of breeze, reluctant to follow the vanished storm, sighed gently around a corner of the dark house to stir the leaves on the trees that lined the street and set a mosaic of shadows in motion on the front lawn. They were large shade trees—elms perhaps, or sycamores—well established and still green, their shape unfamiliar compared to the birch and spruce I was accustomed to at home.

  There was light in a house diagonally across the street, and through a large front window I could see into a living room. A man relaxed there in a large chair, his feet propped on a hassock, watching a television set that was just out of sight to the right. Behind a thin curtain the changing patterns of light it created flickered in that unmistakable blue that nothing else creates. It seemed odd that he had heard none of the sounds that had occurred in the last few minutes, but I realized that none of them, even the crash of the shattered vase, had been loud enough to carry much beyond the walls of Sarah’s house—definitely not across the street and through the window. For a second or two I felt unheard and invisible, as if none of it had really happened.

  But I was there and, heard or not, the noises had all been very real. It was time to find out about that light in the rear bedroom. The complete lack of any other sound on the upper level now raised my concern for Sarah’s welfare.

  Turning, I closed the front door, shutting out the street and the night, and thumbed the button beside the front door. The resulting illumination of the vestibule brought reality back and left me blinking in the brightness as my eyes adjusted. The light that hung from the high ceiling on a long chain shone on the lower two-thirds of the stairs and the rail that accompanied them down to end in a curl of polished wood at the bottom. Slightly faded burgundy carpeting in an oriental pattern rippled its way up the tall flight, a few inches of similar wood visible at either edge. There was a dusty smell in the air as I started the climb, probably created by the pounding of the intruder’s feet as he fled.

  Who had he been, anyway? And why had he run? One hand on the rail, I hesitated slightly as a new thought crossed my mind. Had it been a he? I had seen the escaping figure only from behind. Could it have been a woman? I would not have bet on it either way.

  It was dark at the top of the stairs, and once again I couldn’t remember where to find a switch for the hallway. Far at the other end I could see a pale line of light leaking out from under a closed door on the left—Sarah’s room. Carefully venturing forward, with no desire to cause another bumbl
ing disaster similar to that of the vase in the dining room, I walked slowly down the center of the shadowed hall, noticing that, as remembered, it had four doors that faced each other across it in pairs. Three of them were open, but the interiors all were dark. The only evidence of light came from the one I had identified as Sarah’s.

  Reaching it, I turned the old-fashioned oval knob, pushed the door slowly open, and walked through it—into chaos.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE ROOM WAS SARAH’S BEDROOM, AS I’D REMEMBERED. But, my friend, the soul of neatness, would never have allowed it to have fallen into the wild disarray I found.

  Items of clothing lay everywhere, the contents of drawers that had been jerked from two chests and dumped onto the floor. The closet door gaped open and more wearables had been yanked from hangers and thrown out, shoes pitched after them. A round hatbox appeared to have been crushed underfoot with Sarah’s favorite garden hat still inside, its straw brim broken as well. A square blue box that had clearly held a cherished collection of photographs and letters was empty, all it had contained flung out to flutter down over the bright fabrics of dresses, slacks, and blouses.

  Pictures in frames had been snatched from the walls and hurled across the room to land near an antique vanity that had been swept clear of lotions, perfumes, and other grooming items that lay, some broken, on the floor between it and the rear window. A book, facedown next to an overturned wastebasket, was minus the pages that had been ripped from between the covers. The bed had been stripped of linen and its mattress shoved aside to reveal the box springs underneath, both slashed open with some sharp blade. On a bedside table, a lamp with a beaded satin shade had been tipped over, probably when the drawer had been pulled out and upended. The telephone had been torn from the wall and lay halfway across the room, next to several plastic pill bottles and a box of facial tissues. Feathers from Sarah’s prized down pillows covered everything, several still floating, disturbed by the wave of air I had caused in opening the door.