The Serpents Trail

by Sue Henry

  CHAPTER NINE

  I SLEPT LATE THE FOLLOWING MORNING, RISING JUST IN time to ready myself for the scheduled visit to Attorney Donald Westover’s office at nine o’clock.

  After dinner with Ed Norris, I had returned to the Winnebago with relief that lasted at least as long as his battered rental vehicle was in sight before it turned the corner of Chipeta onto Seventh. When I switched off the lights and went to bed, my mind was still revolving like a carousel with unanswered questions and speculations. After an hour of similar, but physical, revolving in my bed, I gave up, got up, and made myself a cup of tea.

  From the hiding space where I had stashed them, I retrieved the envelopes and pages I had found in the hidey-hole of Sarah’s bookcase and spread them out on the table. Between sips of tea, I examined them, for a second time sorely tempted to open those three sealed envelopes, but once again resisting the impulse and shoving them to one side. Who, I wondered again in the process, was Jamie Stover?

  The family history sheets told me nothing more than they had at first assessment.

  It struck me suddenly that what I had found did not square with what Sarah had said in the hospital.

  At the house, Maxine . . . I wrote it all down. You can read it, she had told me, then mentally wandered off to that silly childhood game.

  Nothing in the pages I held fit that wrote-it-all-down description, did it? Unless it lay within one or all of the three envelopes that were not addressed to me. From her words I had had the impression that she had written whatever it was expressly for me. If so, that had to mean I hadn’t found it yet.

  I am not normally inclined toward late-night activity—or getting up absurdly early, for that matter. Some people are crack-of-dawn sorts—up with, or before, the sun. Of course, for the winter half of the year in Alaska this comes very late in the morning and means they get up facing several hours of darkness. The other half of the year is the opposite—in June the sun rises as early as three-thirty and sets as late as ten-thirty. This means that those who go to bed early have it still shining brightly in their windows. On the Fourth of July, we have to wait until almost midnight if we want to be able to see our fireworks. Other people are night owls, whatever the amount of light or darkness. We all learn to live with it, though it bothers some more than others at both times of the year.

  I belong to neither crowd in particular. If I can’t sleep I find something to do until I can, or until I resolve the issue that is keeping me awake. Answers to the questions that were keeping me awake just then might be in what Sarah had written to me—if I could find it. So the thing to do seemed to be to go and look again.

  Not bothering to fully dress, I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, took a flashlight and the keys Westover had provided, and went around to the back of the house, Stretch trotting along companionably.

  Unlocking the back door, I went in, used the push-button switch to turn on the lights, and carefully locked the door again behind me. No surprises tonight, thank you.

  The kitchen looked the same as it had the night before. Nothing had been disturbed, though the silver-ware drawer was slightly open. Then I noticed that the three mugs I had left in the sink had been washed and left to dry on a towel. Had I washed them without thinking? I didn’t remember doing so, but I periodically do everyday jobs almost automatically when I’m considering something entirely different—keeping my hands busy when my brain has gone somewhere else. Who, besides me, could it have been? No self-respecting burglar would do household chores.

  Crossing the room, I turned on the dining room light, careful this time to use caution in locating the switch without knocking over another vase—though it was a bit like locking the proverbial barn door, I thought, ruefully remembering the crystal shards I had swept up earlier that afternoon.

  There are many types of hiding places, as Sarah and I had learned in our game of secrets so many years ago. Part of the idea is to suit the hiding place to the thing you want hidden. The more value—and not necessarily monetary value—the item has, the more important the security of the hiding place becomes. Anybody can stash money: in a sugar bowl, wrapped like hamburger in the freezer, or in a sock under a mattress—easy places where any burglar would look. Another part of the idea is to consider what type of searcher may be hunting for what you want to hide. A quick in-and-out thief, for instance, wouldn’t trouble with the kind of search that could be mounted by a professional law enforcement team that was trained to take a place apart. You couldn’t call Sarah and me really trained, but we had probably learned more in our games than most people. She was always better than I was at this sort of thing and would probably have borne that in mind in hiding something for me to find, so it should be in a place she knew I would be able to figure out.

  Glancing around the dining room, I quickly resolved that it would be low on Sarah’s possible choices of a serious stash. It would be more likely that she would hide anything she had written to me in a place where she, and I, could reach it easily. Lately, given her illness, that could mean somewhere on the second story—in her bedroom, or one of the others down the hall, perhaps. I went up, deciding to start with the most feasible, and work my way through those rooms hoping one would prove productive.

  Two-thirds of the way up the long flight that rose from the vestibule, Stretch tired of the effort, stopped, and sat down. I scooped him up and carried him to the top, where I set him down in the hallway, reminding myself that it would be wise to carry him back down. He padded after me along the hall and into Sarah’s bedroom, where I switched on the light and stared in astonishment.

  The room that had been strewn with the results of the ransacking it had received was now almost normal.

  The slashed mattress had been heaved back onto the springs and used to hold some of the clothes that had not been hung back in the closet. Personal items that had been scattered across the floor had been put there along with pill bottles, pictures, and the telephone. The bedside lamp and shade had been straightened and all the scattered photographs and letters collected and arranged neatly in the blue box. In the wastebasket, which had been placed by the door, things too damaged to save had been deposited—a book and its pages, broken glass from a perfume bottle, the crushed hat box and hat. Feathers from the ruined pillows still lay around the room and a few floated when I cracked a window to let in some fresh air against the still pungent scent of spilled perfume, but the space was orderly again.

  Someone had come in while I was away and cleaned it. Did Sarah have a cleaning woman I didn’t know about? Was that who Doris had seen going into the house? That couldn’t be right, for she had told me she had seen a woman in the yard before I left.

  Whoever it had been, it was enough for me to gratefully turn to my search without the effort of organizing.

  Recalling Sarah’s comments about the game of Sardines, I went first to the closet, remembering the back wall that we had fallen through into another room. Shoving the clothing that had been replaced aside, I began to go over the inside of it almost inch by inch, keeping in mind what I was looking for: the pages of a letter, possibly folded in an envelope like the three I had found in the bookcase. First I proceeded to go over the back wall of the closet to make sure it wasn’t falsely backed up to a matching closet in the room next door. It was not. I then inspected the sides for hollow spaces. These were solid, but upon careful examination of the molding that ran along the bottom of one side wall, I found a moveable section, behind which lay a black box about five inches wide by twelve long and three inches deep.

  In this box were several smaller boxes that held Sarah’s most valuable, or treasured, jewelry: pearls inherited from her mother, a pair of diamond earrings, an antique jade ring and matching bracelet, a child-sized locket on a small gold chain, and a few more odd bits. In one blue cardboard box I found a pin that I remembered sending her for a birthday years earlier—two female figures constructed of beads and wire, holding hands, one dressed in purple, one in blue, one
with hair as dark as mine had once been, one as blond as a young Sarah. Worth little, it had reminded me—and reminded me now—of what she had said about the two of us back then: “We are sunshine and shadow, positive and negative—opposites—and better together than apart. Everything is better with contrast.”

  Suddenly loss swept over me again and the image of the pin in my fingers swam in my tears. Swiping at my eyes with the back of one hand, I gave myself a mental shake. The pin had meant something only to the two of us. Unwilling to leave it to Alan, or whoever, I slipped it into the pocket of my sweats, refused to feel guilty over the petty theft, and returned the rest of the jewelry to the larger box. The space was empty of anything else, so I slid the box back inside and replaced the moveable molding for safekeeping.

  The remaining parts of the closet yielded nothing, but it was heartening to know I was evidently on the right track. She had continued her old habit of creating hiding places. I simply had to find one that held the communication she had mentioned writing.

  From the door of the closet, I looked around the bedroom for any other hiding place. The lamp with the beaded pink satin shade caught my eye and I picked it up to take a look at the base, but it was small and had room for nothing letter-sized to be inserted into the hollow brass from underneath. The dressing table held no hidden spaces. The rest of the moldings were all solid.

  I turned my search to the hallway and the three other rooms along it.

  As I glanced at their open doors, deciding where to go next, I noticed a narrow door in the shadows at the far end of the hall. A linen closet? Opening it, I found a steep flight of steps that led upward—access to an attic Tomas and I had missed in our search that afternoon. A switch inside the stairwell turned on a dim light somewhere overhead that shone on the steps and allowed me to climb them without using my flashlight, Stretch tucked under my arm.

  The residue of the day’s heat grew as I went up the narrow stairs and the smell of dry dust filled my nose. The space into which I stepped was cross-shaped and as large as the house was wide, with dormered windows at each of three ends, stairway at the fourth. The flooring was made of unpainted wooden planks laid down and nailed to the joists that formed a partial ceiling for the rooms below. The space was full of the accumulation of years, as I had half expected. At one end two stacks of boxes that had been piled atop each other near a chair with a broken back. One of the piles had evidently fallen over, scattering an assortment of papers and other unidentifiable objects onto the floor. A baby-buggy, old picture frames, three floor lamps—only one with a shade, bent—and two old trunks inhabited another corner. A third section held skis, two sleds, and a torn umbrella. A pair of ice skates and several tennis rackets hung from nails in a rafter, along with a guitar without strings and a battered, tarnished bugle. Everything was covered with a layer of dust—almost everything, anyway. As I stood there at the top of the stairs, I could see a scuffle of footprints that led across to that fallen pile of boxes and another to the trunks.

  Still holding Stretch, who was now wriggling to be put down, I used the flashlight to examine the prints more closely before allowing dachshund paws to muddle them. There were two distinct sizes and types. Flat-soled shoes had made the ones to the boxes, on large, probably male feet—and recently. I could see that these also went across to the trunks and mixed with them were smaller prints with a patterned tread—not running shoes, but something with a rubber sole. Did either of these belong to the intruder I had startled? Were there two intruders? A police officer? Not the latter, I thought. An officer looking for a burglar would not have found it necessary to cross to that pile of boxes in order to see that no one lurked in the attic.

  I put Stretch down and he immediately padded across and began his assessment with a sniff at the edge of a quilt that had been folded and laid over one of the trunks. Leaving him to it, I followed the larger footprints to the toppled tower of boxes. Four of them, banker’s boxes with separate lids, had fallen from the initial pile of five. The top two had spilled part of their contents into the dust on the rough wooden floor—old records, from the look of them, along with the sort of items you toss in with them and neglect to sort out later—pencils, a box of paper clips, a roll of Scotch tape, a plastic box of pushpins. I flipped quickly through the cascade of pages and bits of paper on the floor as I righted the box and replaced them. There was nothing but the sort of thing everyone saves to calculate their taxes: bills, receipts, file folders. Each of the five boxes contained two or three years’ worth of the same kind of thing. I piled them back up and checked the other pile, with the same result. Short of sorting through each and every item in all ten of those boxes, there was no way I could learn if Sarah had used them to hide what she had meant for me. It didn’t seem likely that she would have wanted me to go to so much trouble, or leave her writing open to any searcher determined to go through every page. Deciding to take a stab at them later, if I didn’t find what I was searching for elsewhere, I turned to the trunks that Stretch had been investigating.

  “Hey, galah. You find anything I should know about?”

  He trotted over for a pat, then lay down.

  “No luck, huh?”

  Muzzle on paws, he watched me without comment from those irresistible liquid-coffee eyes and the next time I looked he had gone to sleep. It was, I realized, with a yawn and a glance at my watch, growing very late.

  I removed the quilt from the trunk and found a pillow under it with a clean pillowcase. Neither of these items belonged in the attic. Both were in good shape, not dusty, and should have resided with the rest of the linen downstairs. Sarah had taken good care of the quilts she made and this, I recognized, was one of them. The pillowcase was slightly creased, as if someone had slept on it lately. Didn’t make sense with at least four beds directly below the attic and three of them unoccupied before Sarah had been taken to the hospital. I laid them in the baby-buggy and considered the trunk.

  It was unlocked and full to the brim with clothing carefully preserved in plastic or between layers of tissue paper. On top I found Sarah’s wedding dress in its original box and remembered her looking remarkably pale in all that white satin and lace, her mother’s pearls around her neck, creamy roses and lily of the valley in her hands. “I look like a damn ghost,” she had remarked as we waited together for the wedding music to begin, and her father had chided her for swearing in a church. As maid of honor, I had worn moss green and held that bouquet for her while she pledged herself to Bill and they exchanged rings. Even “obey” was part of the ceremony back then, I thought with an amused smile of memory. As if anyone could ever require Sarah to obey if she disagreed with an idea in question.

  Returning the cover to the box, I laid the dress aside and searched the rest of the trunk’s contents, though I knew there would be nothing there to solve my dilemma. I had a similar trunk at home in my basement and neither of us would have thought it a worthy hiding place for anything really important—too easy.

  There was nothing to find in the other trunk, either, though I dutifully looked through its collection of memorabilia—dried corsages, high school and college annuals, photographs, programs from formal dances—and made a quick appraisal of the rest of the attic. Was I fooling myself? Had Sarah only imagined that she wrote something for me? I didn’t think so. There were still those other rooms just below to be searched, possibly the basement.

  Not tonight. I decided, resolved to finish the task in tomorrow’s daylight, woke Stretch by picking him up, went down both flights of stairs, and locked the back door on my way out. Finding my way back to my bed in the Winnebago, I went almost instantly to sleep, not to wake until I had to hurry to arrive in downtown Grand Junction for my appointment with Don Westover.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A FIVE-MINUTE DRIVE TO DON Westover’s office had I not miscalculated the two hundredth block of Sixth Avenue and wound up traveling the four blocks of Main Street to find my way back. This was not an unpleasan
t mistake, for Main Street slows traffic by winding crookedly back and forth between areas of parking, trees, shrubbery, and a plethora of tempting shops and cafes. For those who stroll its sidewalks it is also an outdoor sculpture gallery thanks to Grand Junction’s Art on the Corner program. Catching glimpses from a moving vehicle is decidedly unsatisfactory, but I did see a humorous representation of a locomotive welded of rusted found objects, a graceful dancer balanced on one bronze foot, and a buffalo made entirely of chrome, and vowed to go back and see what else was displayed in the mottled shade along the street. Already late, however, I turned north on Sixth, found a parking space on Rood Avenue, and, clipping Stretch’s leash to his collar, hurried us both around the corner and up the stairs to Westover’s second-floor office.

  A secretary in a striped blouse looked up as I came through the door and greeted us. Red-framed glasses on a chain around her neck swung as she rose and came around her desk smiling a welcome.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m June. You must be Mrs. McNabb.”

  “And this is Stretch.”

  Her smile widened at the name—a not uncommon reaction—and, bending, she gave him a pat. “Hi Stretch.”

  Knowing an admirer when he found one, he wagged his tail and licked her hand before she straightened to tell me, “Mr. Westover is ready for you. This way.”

  Interesting, I couldn’t help thinking, that secretaries are often known by their first names, while some of their bosses remain Mr. or Mrs. If it was okay with her, who was I to object?

  She rapped gently on the door to the right of her desk, waited till she heard a response from within, and leaned through to announce, “Mrs. McNabb to see you, Don—and Stretch.”

  Don? Well! That would teach me to make assumptions about other people’s office relationships, wouldn’t it? I’ve always liked the fact that Rocky Mountain people can be as professional as anyone, but most seldom fuss about it, or make judgments based on the casual approach they usually employ.