by Sue Henry
We hiked on along the lower side of the Z, where I soon found that this time it went farther away from the dangerous drop at the edge of the cliff to swing out around a low sandstone butte. The stone, higher than my head by several feet, was a kind of boat shape, longer than it was wide. When the trail turned back and headed once again for the cliff’s drop, I could see that its length was lined with huge stones too tall to see over to the upper parts of the trail.
Once again I heard a scrambling somewhere uphill, closer now as if something larger than a squirrel were making its way over the field of large rocks and boulders that ended beside the trail where I walked. I stopped and listened, but the sound, once again, had stopped.
We walked on and in a few minutes reached another sharp turn in the Z. This time it had no retaining wall and the outside edge of the trail went right out to where the cliff fell away into the canyon. A little nervous of the height and long drop to the talus below, I was about to make the turn without stopping to look down and take the lower section of trail safely away from the edge.
But someone not far behind me spoke my name.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
HEARING YOUR NAME WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT IT and think you are alone is startling. To whirl toward the sound and find that someone you know, but certainly didn’t anticipate, creates a combination of relief and uncertainty. There is relief, because it is someone you know—but how and why they came upon you without your knowledge creates uncertainty.
Mixed with this, for me, were identifiable amounts of resentment for the interruption, confusion about the reason behind such a sudden appearance, and a growing suspicion that I had been followed down the Serpents Trail and that Ed had carefully picked this spot to confront me for some definite reason. He had evidently cut across over the rocks I had walked around and hidden until I went past, then stepped out of a space between two large rocks that I could now identify from where I stood. Otherwise, I would have heard him coming behind me on the rough surface of the trail.
First things first.
“How did you know I was here?” I asked.
“I followed you. I watched your place all night, so you couldn’t slip away from me again, and I’ve been following since you left this morning.”
Slip away again? What was he talking about? But I now knew why he hadn’t answered his phone the night before.
“Whatever for?”
“Because it’s a perfect place for you to explain to me why you and Westover are conspiring to cut Alan out of Sarah’s will—and why you keep insisting that he is not my son, when you know he is.”
This pronouncement stunned me, almost to silence.
“You aren’t serious.”
“I am deadly serious and ready to expose your conniving, whatever that takes.”
Ed stepped closer, almost hissing at me, and I could see he was more than just angry. There was a fury about him that suggested a man as close to his emotional edge as I was close to a vertical one.
I took a step backward and glanced back to see how much space there was between the cliff and my feet.
“This is no place to discuss anything. Let’s go down to my car, where we can sit down and talk it over rationally.”
He took another step toward me—clearly uninterested in that suggestion.
“Not a chance. You’re going to tell me now how you’ve got it all fixed up—so I can put a stop to it. You can’t get away with it. I have evidence, you know.”
The rocks on the uphill side formed a complete barrier. Over the downhill side of the trail was a rubble of fallen stones that made it an impossible escape route.
“What evidence?”
But I knew what it was before he reached into a pocket to retrieve the letter he had stolen from my bag.
“This, for starts,” he shook it at me. “What are you paying this Jamie for her cooperation? And how did you fake Sarah’s writing? She was supposed to be your friend, but you’ve always hated her, haven’t you? It’s because I loved her—not you, isn’t it? That’s the basis for all of this. Admit it.”
I realized that there had always been something obsessive about Ed’s singular focus on Sarah. Maybe she had known it, too. If so, it was probably why she had never told him the truth about the twins; her real children—and his. She had been protecting them. Probably his obsession had ruined his marriage—set his wife running from him.
“You stole that from my bag. It doesn’t belong to you.”
“It does now. It’s proof.” He moved another step toward me.
I cautiously took one away from him and closer to the edge of the cliff that was making me extremely nervous. Stretch was staying very close, all but huddled, tail between his legs. He’s courageous, but not stupidly so. This was more than he could handle and he knew it, but I could hear his low growl just the same.
As I stepped back, Ed suddenly lunged forward, grabbing my arm, wrenched me around to face the drop-off at the cliff’s edge.
“Tell me!” he demanded through clenched teeth. “Tell me, or I’ll make sure you never tell anyone anything again.”
I could feel an unyielding pressure and tension as he used his furious strength to force me toward a sickening fall.
“All right,” I said, trying not to struggle and accidentally pull us both over. “Whatever you want. Just let me go.”
It would be better to try for another chance by telling him lies than to insist on what I saw waiting for me in the debris of the talus and the curve of the new road far below.
“Not until you tell me.”
Then, as I was frantically trying to think of what to say, his grip on my arm and shoulder suddenly eased slightly and his snarl of words turned to a howl of pain.
I looked down and back to see that Stretch had sunk his teeth deep into Ed’s leg just above the ankle.
We all three struggled on the edge of that precipice, as Ed danced and tried to kick Stretch loose without letting go of me. We almost went over. I was looking straight down in panic and clutching at air when, unexpectedly, someone was yelling and I was yanked back from the edge as Ed’s grip fell away.
A scuffle was going on behind me and I whirled to find the man I had seen with Jamie the day before forcing Ed to his knees and holding him there, Stretch still determined to remain attached to his ankle.
Behind them, Jamie watched, ready to help if necessary. When she could see her assistance wasn’t needed, she came quickly around the two men to me.
“Are you okay?” she asked anxiously.
I assured her I was—or thought I would be—and went to make Stretch let go, which he did, reluctantly, before Jim—as I later found he was called—took his belt and wrapped it tight around Ed’s forearms.
“Who the hell are you?” Ed yelled at him furiously. “And what do you think you’re doing?”
Jim looked down at him with a look of distaste and regret.
“I—God help me,” he said quietly, “am your son. And this,” maintaining a grip on Ed, he laid his other arm around Jamie’s shoulders to pull her forward, “is your daughter.”
I blame myself for not having put it all together much sooner, for all the hints were there had I only looked more closely at them—asked more questions. With what I knew, an outsider probably would have attached much more significance to the narrow focus of Ed’s obsession with Sarah and the doggedness of his assertion that Alan was his son. But one often tends to be blind to the faults of old friends, accepting them as you remember them, not necessarily as they have become. My face-value acceptance of Ed was based on lingering assumptions from those long-ago college days. One phone call to the Holiday Inn would have told me that he had not arrived in Grand Junction when he said he did, but several days earlier. The discovery of that single lie might have set alarm bells ringing in my mind. I suppose that old saying about spilled milk should be some part of the equation now, but my inattentiveness still bothers me some.
Had it not been for Jamie and her
newly found brother, Jim, my lack of awareness might well have proved fatal, to me and, possibly, to Ed as well. As I found later, the two of them had come to the house on Chipeta Avenue the night before to set everything straight with me. But, as they were walking from where they had parked, they had come up behind and noticed Ed watching the Winnebago from his car and didn’t like the look of it. So they had spent the night watching him in turns from inside Sarah’s house, then followed him following me and, thankfully, wound up on the Serpents Trail in time to save my life.
With Jim keeping a close hold on Ed, we walked the rest of the way down the trail to the parking lot where I had left my car. Before we started down I used my emergency cell phone to call the police, bringing both Soames and Bellamy so fast they were almost there to meet us. As we waited the few minutes before they pulled in to take charge of Ed, I noticed a descriptive signboard in the lot—the kind you find in many national parks—with the story of the Serpents Trail. It was titled “The Crookedest Road in the World,” which seemed appropriate for more than historical reasons.
Soames came with the news that the partial print on the threatening page belonged to Ed. They took him off to jail, where he later broke down and confessed that he had not only followed me to Salt Lake, but also sent all three of the threats. The day before I arrived in Grand Junction, while Jamie was away from the house, he had also made the attempt on Sarah’s life so she couldn’t change her will and leave Alan less than everything she owned, not knowing she had already done so.
Alan, who hated Ed enough to have tried to drive him off the road on the Monument, and me with him, had always known he was not the son Ed wanted so badly for him to be. Alan had been the intruder I surprised on the night I arrived. He had torn Sarah’s room apart hunting for her will. I wondered if Ed would ever really believe that, for, though he admitted smothering Sarah, when I left Grand Junction two days later he was still adhering to his twisted vision of plot and conspiracy between myself and Westover.
When Soames and Bellamy had driven away with Ed, I took Jamie and Jim to the parking lot at the top of the Serpents Trail to retrieve their car and we all went back to Chipeta Avenue, where I found us something for dinner. We talked late into the evening, getting to know each other, asking questions and getting answers, and I learned enough to fill in all the blanks and more.
Jamie had found her brother shortly after she located her mother and brought him to Grand Junction with her when she came to care for Sarah. Sadly, it was the only time he and Sarah were able to meet each other, but he had come back for her gathering.
“She was so happy to have us here,” Jamie said. “She had lost track of Jim when he was adopted, so it pleased her more than you can imagine to be able to see us both, alive and well, before she died. I will always be thankful for that. I stayed, but Jim had to go back to work in Salt Lake. Besides, his wife was taking care of Billy for me and needed his help.”
“Tell me about your boy,” I asked her, thinking of the pictures I had seen.
“His name is William Marvin. The Marvin is for my adopted father, but we call him Billy, which is a little bit odd, because it was Sarah’s husband’s name—Bill. He is autistic, which is ultimately what broke up my marriage—his father couldn’t handle a less-than-perfect child. But he is very sweet and is doing quite well.”
I asked about that first trip to meet Sarah.
“You both stayed here in her house?”
“Yes, for those two days Jim was sleeping on the sofa. That’s why I took the quilt and pillow to the attic, though I guess it wasn’t necessary.”
“Sarah had kept track of you all your life, Jamie,” I told her. “Mildred Scott, your next-door neighbor sent her pictures and letters about you.”
“I know,” she said, looking a little embarrassed. “We found them in a hidden basement room. Jim had to kick open the door to get in.”
“Oh, good. I was afraid it was Ed and, since they wouldn’t fit his version of things, he probably would have destroyed them. Don’t worry about the door. It’s your house, after all.”
“I guess it will be,” she said, remembering.
I had told them about Sarah’s last changes to the will, seeing no reason to keep it a secret.
“Family money aside, Sarah left Jamie the house, but nothing specifically to you,” I said to Jim.
“She knew I don’t need it and Jamie does,” he told me. “Billy’s needs are more than she can handle on her own, and I have a good job that brings me a good living for my family.”
“You have children?”
“Two and a half,” he grinned. “Twin boys—rascals, both—and my wife’s about to have another—a girl this time. I think we’ll name her Sarah.”
“It would please her.” As it pleased me.
Jamie had the letter that Ed had stolen from my bag and I had given Jim the one I had accidentally kept safe in Sarah’s secret space in the bookcase. It was what they had been searching for in the house.
“She told us she was leaving letters, but as far as we knew they were never found. We didn’t know you had them.”
We would never know what Sarah wrote to Ed in her letter, though we could pretty much guess what was in Alan’s. I doubted that Ed would have believed anything she told him anyway, and now his rejection of it didn’t matter. Alan would not be unhappy to know that he was right and Ed was—as Alan always claimed—“not my father.”
Before the two of them left, I suddenly remembered Sarah’s jewelry, so, taking them upstairs to her bedroom, I showed Jamie the moveable molding in the closet and explained to her how the tradition of secret hiding places had started when Sarah and I were in college together.
“Clever!” Jim said, echoing my own thoughts.
Jamie was overwhelmed by the jewelry.
“I’ve never had anything so nice. I’d be afraid to wear these.”
“Don’t be. Sarah didn’t believe in having things she couldn’t wear. I remember her wearing each of these, and often. She would want you to wear them.”
When Jamie came to the child-sized locket on its small gold chain, she looked at it for a minute and handed the box to Jim.
“You must have this for your new Sarah,” she told him.
“I’ll give it to her and tell her all about her grand-mother when she’s old enough,” he promised.
“Will you come to live here?” I asked Jamie, as Stretch and I walked them to their car.
“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s appealing, but Jim is the only family I have now and I think I want to be in the same community. Maybe I’ll rent it, so I can have time to make up my mind.”
“Not a bad idea.”
But I couldn’t help wondering what Sarah would have thought about breaking the four-generation line of people to live in the house.
It’s only a house, Maxine, I heard her whisper, and knew that she would have approved of whatever Jamie decided to do with the old Victorian.
If yesterday’s gathering had been a line I crossed, then Sarah must have crossed it with me, for there she was, reminding me of things.
I watched her children drive away and knew neither of them would be lost again.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” I promised Sarah aloud, and went back to the Winnebago, where I slept very well, thank you very much.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
TWO DAYS LATER, OVER SEVENTY MILES SOUTH OF Grand Junction, I had parked the Winnebago, walked to a lookout point on the south rim, and stood feeling the breeze in my hair and clutching a guardrail to look down at the tiny thread of a river 2,250 feet below in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
I had left early to drive in the cool of the morning, so I could have the windows open as long as possible, and reached Montrose about an hour later, where I took a few miles detour east in order to take a look at this new national park. I was glad I had, for it was, not as I expected, similar to the Colorado Plateau, but remarkably different.
Instead of red sandstone, dark rock made up the walls that for two million years had been carved by the Gunnison River. They were what geologists call “basement rock,” part of the metamorphic foundation of the earth’s crust that had been subjected to and altered by unimaginable heat and pressure. At more than 1.7 billion years, they were some of the oldest on earth and included schist that shone with polishing and glittered with mica and garnets, and grayer gneiss that held chunks of pale quartz.
From where I stood, I could look directly across to the famous Painted Wall, its sheer cliff of dark rock marbled with streaks of pink granite like a road map, and hear the calls of the fearless acrobatic swallows in the air. There was plenty of time to appreciate this spectacular side trip, for I had decided on an easy day’s drive with Durango as a destination, just over a hundred miles farther toward New Mexico.
Being able to freely follow my interests was a relief from the restrictions of the last few days. That I was once again on my own and pleasing no one but myself was satisfying, but I knew that, without Sarah to draw me there, I probably wouldn’t go back to Grand Junction for some time to come.
I had left Stretch in the motor home, so I soon turned and went back to resume the trip that would be a more leisurely one than my drive from Alaska to Colorado.
Before leaving Grand Junction, Don Westover had assured me that all was well with the processing of Sarah’s will—that Alan had accepted sharing and would not contest it.