The Serpents Trail

by Sue Henry

  “Did Sarah tell you who your father was?” I asked.

  “No. Did she tell you?” I thought that, though it was asked rather sharply, there was a trace of wistful longing in the question.

  I shook my head. “She didn’t even tell me you existed, let alone who your father was. I only had a few minutes with her in the hospital before she died and she wasn’t making much sense.”

  Was it regret in Jamie’s sigh, as she glanced out the window into Doris Chapman’s yard? For a second the idea that it had been relief flitted through my mind to be instantly dismissed. Of course it was regret. What child wouldn’t want to know both parents?

  Jamie turned back.

  “So, you don’t have any idea at all who he might have been? I’d really like to know.”

  What I had said was true—Sarah hadn’t told me she had a child. I would not tell this woman lies, but saw no reason to go into Ed’s suppositions, which could only add confusion to circumstances. What if he wasn’t her father?

  “Jamie, I wouldn’t want to speculate,” I said carefully. “I’ll think about it, okay?”

  She sighed again, a little frustration in it this time.

  “Why would she tell you? She didn’t even tell you about me, did she? And she said she was going to—as soon as you got here. That’s why I waited a couple of days before coming to see you. I’d been checking with the hospital by phone, so I knew when she died.”

  “No, Jamie, she didn’t tell me. I’m sorry. But you have to understand that she never had a chance. But she said she had written something down for me and left it in the house. I’ve been searching, but I can’t find it. Do you have any idea what and where it might be?”

  She sat up straight and her eyes opened wide in shocked response.

  “Did you tear her room apart looking? That was an awful thing to do just to find some letter,” she accused.

  “No! Dear me—no. I found her room like that the night I arrived,” I assured her.

  “So—who did it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  If Jamie knew about the disaster of Sarah’s room, then more people than I assumed had been coming and going from the house. I remembered that the room had been straightened when I saw it late the night before.

  “Did you clean that bedroom, Jamie?”

  She nodded. “I couldn’t stand to leave it that way. So when I saw you go away with that man in his car I went up and took care of it while you were gone.”

  “Went up?”

  “I was in the house. I had been taking care of Sarah for several days before I found her unconscious.”

  “You found her? I thought it was probably the visiting nurse.”

  “No, I did. I’d been out for groceries. I found her when I came back and called the ambulance. The nurse only came twice a day. But I saw you leave yesterday from the living room window.”

  “You have a key.”

  Another nod. “Sarah gave it to me.”

  Other pieces fell into place.

  “You washed the mugs in the sink and left the quilt and pillow in the attic.”

  “Oh—yes.”

  “Who knew you were there?”

  She shifted in her seat and shrugged her shoulders.

  “Just Sarah—and the nurse who came to give her the medicine she needed.”

  It occurred to me that she might not know that Doris Chapman was often watching from next door who came and went from Sarah’s house. Doris hadn’t mentioned a woman, but I decided to ask her later.

  “So you were staying—sleeping in the house.”

  “Yes—in the bedroom across the hall.”

  Not the attic, but a room I had not yet searched. Why had she hidden and not let me know she was there the night I arrived? Was it really to give Sarah time to tell me about her daughter, as she had said? After Sarah died, why hadn’t Jamie revealed herself? She must have been in the attic when I was searching Sarah’s room and the downstairs, for she left the pillow and quilt there.

  There were so many questions for which I didn’t have answers—so many things I wanted to know that might not fit. But she shifted restively and looked a little uncomfortable, so I gave up the interrogation for the moment and turned hostess instead.

  “Are you hungry? Have you had anything to eat?”

  A little shyly she agreed she was. I was about to find something to hold her till dinner, which I assumed we could have together, when I heard the summons of my cell phone. Opening the bag I had carried downtown earlier, I retrieved and answered it to find Westover on the line.

  “I have some bad news, Maxie,” he told me. “I just had a call from the hospital with the lab results.”

  With everything else that was going on I had all but forgotten about it. “Yes?”

  “Sarah didn’t die naturally of her heart condition. They believe someone tried to smother her in her bed at home and, though it didn’t succeed at the time, the stress was too much for her heart. Someone made sure she’d have hours left, not weeks.”

  Aside from the visiting nurse, Jamie had admittedly been with Sarah in the house, I thought instantly. But she had said she found Sarah unconscious and called an ambulance for her. Would an attempted killer do that? I didn’t want to think so, but it was not impossible. Would she have wrecked the house looking for something? If so, what? She said she had cleaned Sarah’s room. But there had been someone else, I remembered—someone who made those larger footprints in the attic, who thoroughly went through the house hunting for something and left evidence of that search in scattered belongings.

  The fact that someone had deliberately attempted to kill Sarah upended everything and left me in a state of shock and dismay. Who and why? Neither of us had mentioned Alan. He didn’t know about Jamie and I couldn’t tell him with her sitting right there in front of me.

  “You still there?” Westover asked.

  “Yes, I’m here. What should be done?”

  “Nothing, for the moment. The hospital must legally report it, and already has. I’ll check and let you know if there’s anything, okay?”

  I agreed and he hung up.

  Having heard the tone of my voice, Jamie was frowning in concern as I dropped my phone back into the open bag with shaking hands, feeling sick.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I told her.

  “I knew it! I knew there was something wrong when I found her. One of her pillows was on the floor, but I thought she had probably shoved it off the bed,” she said, distressed and angry. “She said we had plenty of time to get to know each other and set things straight before—before . . . I finally found my real mother and there just had to be something to screw it up, didn’t there?”

  When I got over my surprise at her anger, I heated some of Doris’s casserole, which Jamie ate hungrily. Then we talked for a while and some of my questions were answered. At least I thought they were. I may have overlooked things in my misery over the way Sarah had evidently died. That knowledge hit me harder than it seemed to hit her daughter. But I had known Sarah for most of my life and loved her like a sister. Jamie had only recently discovered she even had a mother other than the one she had grown up trusting. The time she and Sarah had spent together had barely been enough to accept each other, let alone engender closeness, hadn’t it?

  Jamie said she had been adopted by the Stovers, a local couple, soon after she was born in Salt Lake, Utah—where Sarah had said she spent the summer and fall of her pregnancy. This made sense, to me, looking back to the moral climate of the time, that Sarah would go away from home to avoid embarrassment for both herself and her parents. Jamie had been an only child and had never been told of the adoption. When both her parents had died in a car accident in 1998, she had found evidence of her adoption along with other family records she had inherited. But that evidence did not include the identity of her birth mother—or her father.

  Working through an agency that helps people who have been adopted to find their parents, Jamie s
aid she had finally unlocked her mother’s name and tracked Sarah to her family home in Grand Junction.

  “After I found Sarah, she sent me some information about her family, because I had to start searching all over again for my new—real—family records,” she said with a rueful smile. “For obvious reasons, I had been completing a search of the Stover family lines that my mother started years ago. Then I found out it wasn’t mine at all.”

  “You’re interested in genealogy?” I asked, thinking of the family group sheets that I had found in Sarah’s bookcase hiding place.

  “I’m LDS and we all search our family histories. I sent Sarah some of mine.”

  I remembered hearing that church members did that and knew also that there was a huge amount of genealogical information that had been collected for years by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Family History Library I had reached by phone in Salt Lake. Should I show Jamie the family group sheets I had found? Giving myself time to consider it, I moved to another related question.

  “It must have taken some time to locate Sarah,” I ventured, wondering how long it had taken. “When did you find her?”

  “Well, at least she wasn’t living somewhere clear across the country,” she told me. “When I knew who she was, and figured out where, I looked up her phone number and called—about three months ago. It was an incredible phone call. We talked for almost an hour that first time and several times since. We had planned to meet this fall, when I could take time from my job. Later, when I found out she was so sick, I knew I couldn’t wait, so I quit my job and drove down here to be with her. That’s when she told me who you were and that you were coming from Alaska. She was looking forward to seeing you—a lot.”

  So was I, I thought sadly.

  Behind her in Salt Lake, Jamie had left a fourteen-year-old son—with a friend, she said. She had taken back what she believed was her maiden name when she divorced, which explained the Stover.

  Jamie had not gone to the hospital in the ambulance with Sarah because she assumed that, without proof of relationship, they wouldn’t allow her access to Sarah, but would have called Alan, who had no more idea of her existence than I had had—still hadn’t, as far as I knew.

  As Jamie told me the story, I began to have an idea why Sarah might have made changes in her will and remembered that I hadn’t yet read it. Whatever it contained could not be shared, though. That would have to wait till later, when Westover and I called the beneficiaries together for a formal reading in his office.

  I was just going to reach for the copies of the family group sheets in my bag to ask if they were the ones Sarah and Jamie had exchanged, when I heard a call from the yard next door. Looking up I saw Doris Chapman waving from her kitchen window, which she had raised halfway. “Yoo-hoo, Maxie,” she called again and, when she saw me looking, gestured for me to come around to the front porch.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Jamie and stood up with an amused smile to answer the summons.

  “What does she want?”

  “Probably to feed me again, though I still have half that casserole she gave me yesterday and part of a loaf of her home-baked bread. I can’t say no. It’s what she wants to do. She’s missing Sarah, too.”

  Jamie nodded and poured herself a little more tea from the pitcher I had set on the table.

  “Stay here, Stretch,” I told my dachshund, who had risen to accompany me. “I’ll only be a minute—I think.”

  I met Doris on her porch and, sure enough, she had more food—a sheet cake with chocolate frosting to offer me this time.

  “This is much too much, Doris,” I told her. “Give me half.”

  “Oh, no. You can share it with your friend,” she insisted, so I had no choice if I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I had to smile to myself at the confirmation that she was very attentive to comings and goings next door.

  “Did you find out when there will be a service for Sarah?” she asked, as I was about to turn away after thanking her.

  “I don’t know, Doris,” I told her. “But it’s on my list and I’ll let you know as soon as I do.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  As I walked back to the Winnebago, I thought about that. There would have to be some kind of service—at least a gathering for the people she had known for years who would want to pay their respects. I definitely must soon examine the arrangements she had made with the funeral home to see what she wanted.

  “Hope you like chocolate cake,” I said as I opened the door and stepped back into the motor home. “There’s enough here for an—”

  The glass from which Jamie had been drinking tea sat on her side of the table, ice melting in the bottom, but her place on the bench was vacant. For a second or two I thought she might be in the lavatory at the rear of my rig, but the door was open and I could see it was empty.

  I set the cake on the counter in the galley and stood looking around as if I had simply missed seeing her somehow. I had not. She was gone.

  A glance at the bag I had left sitting open when I took out my phone told me something else was gone, as well. My wallet and the cash in it were untouched, so she was no snatch thief. But the papers I had brought from Westover’s office—the family group sheets and, worst of all, my copy of Sarah’s will—had vanished with her daughter—if it was her daughter.

  I suddenly wondered if I had sold myself on what I wanted to find in Jamie—who at the moment seemed just a little too good to be true.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I IMMEDIATELY SEARCHED SARAH’S HOUSE AGAIN, every room of it this time—even the attic and basement—but Jamie Stover was nowhere to be found and I doubted that she would be back. Disappointed and annoyed that I had been made to feel duped, I called the attorney’s office to request another copy of the will and family papers, and drove down to pick them up, both Stretch and I glad that I had parked in the shade this time and the car was less than oven temperature.

  Don Westover met me at the door to his office to ask what had happened.

  When I related the appearance and disappearance of Jamie Stover and who she had claimed to be, he seemed at a loss.

  “Sarah never mentioned a daughter,” he said slowly. “She did make some changes to the will that seemed unnecessary, but when I asked her about them she just smiled and said it seemed a good idea. She had a book—one of those general guides to making wills and settling estates. I sort of assumed she’d been reading it and was just being meticulous. Did anything seem remarkable to you?”

  I was forced to admit that I hadn’t had a chance to read the will before it vanished. “You said Sarah made changes two weeks ago? That would be after Jamie said they talked on the telephone, but before she came here from Salt Lake. What changes did Sarah make, exactly?”

  He spread out the original pages and went through them line by line with an index finger. “There were only a few and they were all similar to this one,” he said pointing. “This originally had Alan’s name as the only child beneficiary. Adopted children automatically inherit with or without a will, but she wanted him named. She changed it to read that any child of hers, natural or adopted would inherit.”

  “Sounds like she had Jamie in mind, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe. Illegitimate natural children should inherit automatically from their mother, if not always from the father. This is getting a little complicated, isn’t it?”

  It was—and seemed to be becoming more so.

  With the second set of copies, I went back to Chipeta Avenue, my mind awhirl with conjecture, and spent the rest of the afternoon once again minutely examining Sarah’s house from top to bottom in search of whatever it was she had said she had written for me—to no avail. I found a false top on a chest of drawers in an upstairs bedroom, but nothing but dust and a small empty jewelry box occupied it. The medicine chest in the bathroom lifted out of the wall to reveal a space large enough for a diary that inspired optimism, but it was years old and told me nothing I
didn’t already know.

  Then, in the basement, where I wound up last, a whole freestanding set of utility shelves full of old paint brushes, empty cans, wallpaper remnants, and cleaner, suddenly released on the same principle as the edge of the bookcase upstairs when I leaned against it. It swung out on hinges to reveal a door behind it—locked.

  I backed away and sat down on a tall stool next to a workbench cluttered with tools and stared at that heavy—solid—locked door in a ferocity of frustration. After a pleasant, restful summer at home and an invigorating motor home trip, the last two days had been full of more emotional disturbance and heartache than I had experienced since the death of my husband, and it all suddenly came together in unexpected anger combined with my grief. I swore at both of them for leaving in general, then at whoever had killed Sarah, and finally, ridiculously, at her for dying before she could talk to me—for leaving me only a useless part of a letter and hiding the rest somewhere I either couldn’t find, or couldn’t get into. I pounded an ineffectual fist on that workbench until a pair of pliers bounded off to jangle on the cement floor below, startling Stretch away into a corner.

  “Sarah—thanks a lot!” I howled. “Why couldn’t you wait for me? I’m sick and tired of secret hiding games. I wish we had never started this stuff back then—not to mention that you kept it up. What the bloody hell were you thinking, Sarah? If you want me to do something about this mess, then for heaven’s sake give me one damn clue that I don’t have to fight for.”

  With that out of my system, I dried my eyes, shoved the utility shelves back to cover the door, apologized to Stretch, and carried him upstairs to the kitchen and out the back door—cobwebs in my hair, smudges on my face, filthy hands and clothes—intending to get my shower bag and spend a considerable length of time under the soothing hot water of the upstairs shower.

  I turned from closing the back door to find Tomas— the once-a-week gardener, rake in hand, still obsessed with the condition of Sarah’s yard—observing me in openmouthed astonishment from the bottom of the steps. Behind him the gate into the alley was half-open. Either he had left it so—for I could see what must be his pickup parked beyond it—or someone else, Jamie perhaps, had gone through and left it open in her haste to be gone.