The Serpents Trail

by Sue Henry

  In the quiet comfort of my familiar house-on-wheels, I considered the events of the day and the unexpected situations I had found upon arrival. Briefly, I wondered about the person I had surprised in Sarah’s house, and felt disgust and resentment at the turmoil of the upstairs room. But it was Sarah’s sudden hospitalization that was most troublesome.

  A time or two during the long drive from Alaska I had allowed myself to consider that, because of Sarah’s heart condition, I was about to lose one of my oldest and dearest friends. Anticipating that we would have several weeks of the enjoyment of each other’s company and time to develop a mutual level of acceptance, that I would be able to make the passing easier for Sarah, I had set it aside. Now, as the new reality of the circumstances and their inevitable result swept over me, I put both elbows on the table and dropped my head into my hands as a wave of grief and anger filled my eyes with tears. It wasn’t fair. But a lot of things aren’t, I tried to remind myself. It didn’t help much.

  Sarah and I had been friends since our freshman year in Seattle, when we found ourselves roommates in a University of Washington dormitory. Though I have developed many friendships through the years, none have been closer, or as enduring. Those four undergraduate years cemented our relationship into something nearer a sisterhood than a friendship. Though weeks, even months, have at times gone by without contact, when we were separated by distance and occupied with busy lives and raising families, the thread of connection had continued true and deep, allowing us to pick up where we left off, as if there had been no time lost. Time had never been a part of the equation.

  “We are each other’s memories,” Sarah had told me once with a smile. “What I forget, you remember, and vice versa. You have one half and I have the other.”

  Knowing that all I’d soon have was memories, I wondered sadly how I would cope with losing her half of them. I retrieved a tissue from a pocket to wipe my eyes and blow my nose, glancing down at Stretch, who had come to stand looking up at me, puzzled. I seldom allow tears—try to be practical and optimistic.

  Enough, I told myself sternly. There were many other things to be concerned about. Sarah was still alive and needed me. I would deal with mourning later. We might—just might—have a little time, if she could recover from this setback.

  One of the things that concerned me was that it might not be possible now for Sarah to communicate the important things she had mentioned on the phone—things she had clearly felt a need to share. Not prone to exaggeration, Sarah would not have said they were important if they weren’t. Were those things connected to the reason Sarah had changed her will and made me the executor? It was a surprising and odd alteration. Her son, Alan, was a much more likely choice for that job. For that matter, I suddenly wondered, where was Alan? He had his own place and it was, of course, possible that in arriving after visiting hours I had missed him at the hospital. Don Westover would know, and I wished I had remembered to ask him. Considering use of my cell phone to find out, I glanced first at my watch. It was already too late to disturb the attorney again on this night. I would have to wait until the next day.

  It would all have to wait until morning, I decided, finishing the last of the Jameson, then the ice water.

  “What do you think, lovie?” I asked Stretch.

  He had curled up under the table, muzzle comfortingly resting on my right foot. At the sound of my voice, he stood up, padded into view, and cocked his head to look up at me questioningly.

  “Yes, it’s you I’m yabbering at, as usual,” I told him, leaning to give him a pat. “Time to go out before bed, you think?”

  Another phrase that he recognized inspired him to pad across and wait by the coach door, looking back over his shoulder. Well? he seemed to say.

  Amused and glad to have him for company, I found a flashlight and went to open the door. We stepped out together and walked around to the backyard, where, after a bit of what he considered the essential exploration of any new place, Stretch made his selection and piddled at the base of a tall lilac near the house.

  In less than ten minutes, we were both back inside and I had tossed aside the quilt that covered my bed in the rear of the Winnebago. The rain had cooled the air, but it would still be too warm a night to require much in the way of covers. I dislike the constant sound of the air-conditioning, and opted for cracking open a couple of windows and starting a quiet fan in the galley to keep the air moving. Changing into my lightest nightgown, I brushed my teeth and washed my face before turning out the lights and finding a comfortable position in the bed. Stretch came to lie down beside it in his padded basket, where in just a bit I could hear him snoring softly in the dark. In minutes we were both asleep.

  When the lights had been out and nothing had been heard from the motor home for over an hour, a dark human shape stepped out from behind a large tree near the back fence of Sarah’s yard. Moving cautiously across the grass between the tree and the porch, shadow among shadows, this figure silently climbed the steps, testing each one, reached to the back door handle and found it locked, as expected.

  A key was retrieved from a pocket, inserted carefully into the lock, and slowly turned, allowing the door to be quietly opened and closed as the figure slipped into the kitchen that Maxie had entered earlier. A shielded beam of light preceded progress through the house, but there was no one to see. A few soft scrapings and shiftings would only have been evident to someone listening very closely, but there was no one to hear.

  An hour before daylight, the back door silently opened and the figure slipped out again, using the key to lock it before flitting quickly across to leave the yard through a gate in the back fence. Left behind, as well, was another question in the doorway, though it was now securely closed and would remain so for the time being.

  I was up with the sun and making a mental list of things to be done as I filled the coffeemaker and set it to burbling cheerfully while I dressed. First on the list was transportation. I would need a car in which to get around and the easiest place to rent one was the local airport. As soon as I had fed breakfast to Stretch and myself, I used my cell phone to call a taxi and had the driver take me straight there.

  The area north of the city, around the Walker Field Airport, was a sudden reminder that the trees lining the streets of Grand Junction were the result of a need for shade in desert country, which the local juniper and pinion pine did not provide. Its residents have planted most of the elm, cottonwood, and other large trees in the central area. The airport, on the other hand, lies in surroundings that are closer to how original settlers found them: an arid land of few trees, and grasses that are briefly green in spring, but which summer annually toasts to a sun-burned tan. Above this area, to the north, rises the high rippling wall of the Book Cliffs, so named because John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Colorado River, thought they resembled the edges of bound volumes on a library shelf—a concept I have always found appealing.

  Grand Junction lies on the western edge of the state, where the Gunnison River joins the Colorado for its long run across the Colorado Plateau, which includes the Grand Canyon, then on down to empty into the Gulf of Mexico. Between the Rocky Mountains to the east and the Great Basin to the west the Colorado Plateau encompasses a huge part of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. It is a country carved directly from the stone foundation of the earth by centuries of wind, ice, and water escaping to lower altitudes and, bit by bit, wearing away the rock and sculpting spectacular cuts, canyons, mesas, turrets, arches, and other indescribable formations. Erosion of sedimentary stone by what became the Colorado River cut a canyon that left the Book Cliffs standing more than a thousand feet above the valley floor and far from the current course of the river. Framing Grand Junction to the north, they remain, gradually crumbling into dust, pebbles, and rocks that pile up and flare out in graceful forty-five-degree angle-of-repose skirts of debris at their bases.

  The previous day’s storm had hidden the cliffs in curtains of rain and hail as I
drove into town. Now I hesitated just enough to take a long look at them before heading into the airport terminal. There is something hauntingly attractive about the stark lines and glorious red, brown, purple, and blue hues of this country and that of the rest of the plateau to the southwest. The basic horizontal shapes and lines bare of trees always remind me of Alaska’s far north, especially during the frozen months of the year above the Arctic Circle, though there are few of the reddish colors there. The blues and purples of the cliffs, however, are similar in tone to the shadows cast by the thin winter sun into the lee of snow-drifts and low rolling hills.

  It took only a few minutes and a credit card at the Hertz counter to rent a compact car that would easily serve my purposes in getting around the local area. From the clerk, I also obtained a detailed street map of Grand Junction and took time before leaving to have her point out the location of Don Westover’s office near the downtown area.

  Getting to the hospital was simple. The short trip took me southwest on Horizon Drive, which soon angled left into Seventh Street near the hospital. I was eager to visit Sarah, hoping she would be more lucid after a night’s rest.

  Pulling into the St. Mary’s parking lot, I found my way through the reception area and hallways to the cardiac intensive care unit, where I was startled to see the same nurse raise her head from behind the counter. Must be about to go off shift, I thought.

  Seeing me coming, Miss Tolland stepped out to intercept me with a concerned look.

  “Mrs. McNabb, right?” she asked.

  “Yes, how is Sarah doing this morning?”

  The nurse’s expression deepened to a combination of sympathy and reluctance that told me everything I didn’t want to know.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. McNabb. We did everything we could. She died in her sleep about five this morning. We had no way to reach you.”

  For a long minute, I simply stared at her without moving and didn’t realize there were tears on my face until the nurse held out a box of tissue that she reached behind the counter to obtain. I took one automatically and used it to wipe my eyes. It was such a shock that I couldn’t think for the enormous sense of loss that all but took my breath. Like a wooden puppet, I reached toward her with one hand.

  “What happened? She was supposed to have more time.”

  Miss Tolland nodded, sadly. “I know. But sometimes it’s like that—unexpected. At least it was peaceful and may have saved her a bad time later, you know? She may have just given up.”

  Suddenly it was all I could do to swallow my flash of anger at what seemed a gratuitously patronizing statement. How would you know? I wanted to say, but didn’t. Sarah was a fighter. She wouldn’t have given up to save herself anything later.

  “Where is she,” I asked instead, straightening my shoulders and resolving that, for the moment at least, there was nothing to be but practical.

  “They’ve already taken her down. I tried to call her son, but no one answered the number he left us. Will you contact him, or should I keep trying?”

  Where was Alan? I wondered again, focusing my annoyance on his absence, then realized it wasn’t really Alan or the nurse with whom I was angry—and I was angry. That would have to wait until later as well.

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to keep trying.”

  “There was someone else here to visit Mrs. Nunamaker,” the nurse remembered thoughtfully. “A tall, older man. Didn’t give his name, but asked if someone would be in this morning. When I told him you had said you would, he asked where he could wait. He may still be in the lounge. There.” She pointed in the direction from which I had come. “Would you like me to check?”

  “No,” I told her. “I’ll go. Thank you.”

  It was something to do, though I couldn’t imagine who the someone could be—probably someone local that I wouldn’t know or want to see just then.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong—or more surprised at the identity of the tall man who unfolded himself from a low chair as I stepped into the lounge.

  “Maxie?” The rumble of his kindly bass voice was memorable and instantly familiar, though I hadn’t heard it in years. He held out both hands as he stepped toward me.

  “Ed? Ed Norris? Oh, Eddy, you darlin’ man.”

  He swept me into a bear hug and I burst into a veritable flood of unexpected and uncharacteristic tears.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “WHERE DID YOU SPRING FROM? HOW DID YOU KNOW?” I asked Ed Norris, stepping back out of his sympathetic hug of greeting and quickly wiping away my tears again with the now soggy tissue.

  “Came in from Portland on an early plane. No one answered my knock at her house, so I hunted up a neighbor, who told me she’d been hospitalized yesterday. Didn’t know she was gone until I found my way here. Guess I should have expected to find you wherever I found Sarah,” he said, smiling a bit ruefully.

  We stood looking silently at each other for a moment as our mutual loss and the past came sweeping in a wave of nostalgia.

  For me, as for Sarah, Ed Norris had always been irrevocably linked to our memories of youthful college days in Seattle. One of six or eight of us who had grouped together socially, he had fallen deeply in love with Sarah during his junior and her sophomore year. To complicate matters, though she had not reciprocated, I unfortunately had, by falling for him at the same time. Thinking neither of them knew of my fascination, I casually pretended not to care. For a few months, until I realized it was merely an infatuation, the situation had been an unspoken, agonizing secret. Eventually I recognized that my true affection lay with my high school sweetheart, Joe Flanagan, who, happily for us both, later became my first husband. Meanwhile, except for her few dates with Ed, Sarah and I had gone everywhere, done everything, together, discouraging his inclination to be more than friends, keeping all three of our relationships on an even keel.

  I had long since lost track of Ed—knew he had eventually married, moved to somewhere in Oregon, then divorced, if memory served me. As we stood staring at each other in that hospital lounge, I suddenly recalled that Sarah had once or twice mentioned him, so they must have kept in touch, at least infrequently. Couldn’t have been too important if she had never told me about it, though.

  Age had added a few smile crinkles around his eyes and mouth, and two deep frown lines between his brows, but I would have recognized him anywhere. At a couple of inches over six feet, he was almost as thin as ever, perhaps a bit thicker through the waist. His dark hair was streaked with gray. Those beautiful blue eyes seemed somewhat faded, but they held the familiar gleam of humor that I remembered, under lashes still so long they were almost girlish. I’ve at least always had good taste, I thought in wry amusement.

  He had glanced toward the nursing station, thoughts turning back to Sarah’s death, and spoke thickly, tears welling when he looked back again. “I didn’t get here in time, did I? She’s really gone, Maxie, and it’s a smaller world without her in it.”

  I wondered how he had known Sarah was so ill. Time to ask.

  “How did you . . .”

  “Are you . . .”

  We both chimed in at the same time—stopped, each waiting for the other.

  “Oh, hell. Let’s get out of here,” he suggested, turning abruptly to retrieve a suitcase next to the lounge chair in which he had been sitting. “There’s nothing for us here now.”

  Bag in one hand, my elbow firmly in the other, focused on escape, he hustled me through the corridors and out the front door. There I learned that he was without transportation, having taken a taxi from the airport to Sarah’s, then to the hospital. In my rental car, we headed out of the parking lot.

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t care,” he shrugged. “Anywhere else, I guess. There’ll surely be a service of some kind, so I’ll find a place to stay and get some transportation of my own. Not just now, though. Have you eaten? I could use some breakfast. Coffee on the plane was abysmal—if you could call it coffee.”

  I had eate
n, but assured him I could tolerate more caffeine, so I took a left out of the lot and headed for Horizon Drive, where I recalled a collection of both hotels and coffee shops.

  Ed leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes.

  “Where’s Alan?” he asked without opening them.

  “I don’t know. The nurse said she hadn’t been able to reach him.”

  He sighed, shook his head in what appeared to be discouragement, and sat up again. “That kid! I don’t understand why he thinks the world, or Sarah, owes him something. He’s disappointed and taken advantage of her for years. He’ll be forty-four in November. Time he grew up and took responsibility for himself.”

  Clearly, Ed and Sarah had stayed more closely in touch than I realized. Casual holiday cards would have been my guess. Learning that they had seen each other enough over the years for Ed to be familiar with her son was a surprise. I kept my interest to myself, my eyes on the road, and asked about Alan instead.

  “You and he don’t get along, I take it.”

  “Not so you’d notice,” Ed told me, scowling at the windshield. “The times I’ve stopped to see Sarah, he made a concerted effort to stay away, which didn’t hurt my feelings any.”

  Having never been particularly fond of Alan’s self-indulgent personality myself, I understood what he meant. His assessment seemed a bit strong, even for a close friend, but I decided that it could be the shock of Sarah’s passing that exaggerated his contempt and let it lie with no further questions—for the moment.

  Halfway along Horizon Drive, we found Coco’s, a bakery and restaurant next door to a Holiday Inn, which simplified Ed’s need for a place to stay. He went in to register while I parked, found a table in a corner of the bakery next to a window, and ordered coffee for both of us. While I waited, I decided to call Don Westover and cancel our afternoon meeting, feeling no inclination to review Sarah’s will at the moment. It could wait at least another day.