Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) (18 page)

 The bookmobile chugged slowly
along the winding, maple-lined road through the famed waterfall-area of the
Gorge. Gracefully arching, mossy concrete railings and rock retaining walls
lined the narrow, historical highway. Built in the early part of the century,
it was the first road along this once-remote stretch of the Columbia River.
Earlier, travelers navigated the river by paddlewheeler.

The three riders fell silent as
they passed Wahkeena Falls, the first lovely cataract visible from the road.
Hester reflected how different the falls looked compared to when she was last
here, on a summer picnic with two librarian friends. Now, banks of old snow
framed the falls in shadowy places the sun never hit.

In another 10 minutes, they
approached the largest falls in the Gorge, Multnomah Falls, with its charming
stone lodge, designed by the same architect who designed Grand Central Library.

Ahead, Hester spied the large
parking lot on the left of the narrow highway, directly across from the lodge’s
front door. Only a few RVs and a dozen cars dotted the lot, unlike in summer
when traffic on the scenic highway barely squeezes through the glut of tourist
vehicles, not to mention the camera-toting families crossing the road like
gaggles of geese.

On the right behind the lodge and
recessed in a deep, shadowy cleft of the gorge wall, as high as a 60-story
building, the waterfall’s plume spilled spectacularly toward the Columbia.

As Ralph slowed to turn into the
lot, flashing blue lights suddenly appeared from around a bend ahead. A
black-and-white Oregon State Police cruiser skidded to a stop to block the
narrow bridge crossing the stream 100 yards in front of them.

At the sight, Paul Kenyon hunched
next to Hester and again crushed the gun barrel to her ribs.

“Ouch!” Hester squirmed. “That
hurts!”

“Just be quiet, Hester!” Paul
whispered, as if that might keep the pursuers from noticing the magenta bus.
The hand that didn’t hold the gun nervously fluttered through his lush hair,
making it stick out uncharacteristically like jackstraws.

“Turn around,” he ordered Ralph. “Now!”

Ralph hesitated. Impatient, Paul
lunged and shoved the steering wheel over. Books flew from shelves as the bus
wobbled and groaned in a tight u-turn that Hester wouldn’t have thought
possible in old No. 3. The turn ended with a brief screech of metal as the
bookmobile’s rear bumper skimmed the fender of a parked Winnebago.

“Now floor it!” Paul commanded.
Perspiration beaded on the driver’s forehead as he struggled with the
bookmobile’s balky gear shift, trying to coax speed from a vehicle designed to
corner sedately at 5 mph.

The roadway that they now
retraced was clearly part of the original 1917 highway: barely 15 feet wide,
with a steep, rocky wall rising on one side. Opposite that, an unyielding stone
railing hugged the highway to the hillside, like a skinny leather belt trying
to contain a fat man’s belly.

Harry Harrington, on the radio
with the state cruiser, had just braked to a stop at the narrowest part of the
roadway. There was little room to maneuver, but he turned the Caprice so that
it sat broadside to block the bookmobile. He was just reaching for the door
when the bus’s massive front bumper crumpled his fender, shattered a headlight
and simultaneously blew out a front tire with a report resembling a shotgun
blast.

The car spun against the rock
wall. The sound of tortured metal was like a thousand fingernails on as many
chalkboards as the bookmobile barreled between the rock rail and the blue
Chevy. Harrington, stunned, watched the big bus disappear in a billow of sour
exhaust toward Wahkeena Falls.

Inside the bus, Paul jumped up
and down like an excited schoolboy. The gun barrel bobbed by Hester’s ear. Her
eyes were wide.

“OK, straddle the centerline,”
Paul ordered Ralph. “Nobody can get past us on this road.”

That might be true, Hester
thought. Eventually, more help would come from ahead now that the police had
somehow gotten wind of their plight. But then what would happen?

Meanwhile, the bookmobile was
setting no speed records. Ralph, his face frozen in grim fury, drove with his
foot pressed to the floor. But every time the highway rose, Hester watched the
wavering orange needle on the big round speedometer dip to 35, then 25, then
20. Ralph battled through the gears.

As they rounded a bend a
quarter-mile before Wahkeena Falls, blue lights flashed in the big rear-view
mirror outside Ralph’s window. Paul could see the state police cruiser, which
had stopped just long enough to pick up Harry Harrington, closing fast behind
them.

“Damn, damn, damn!” he shouted.
It occurred to Hester that she had heard Paul swear more in the past hour than she
ever had before.

The bookmobile weaved to avoid a rock
outcropping that overhung the highway. Paul turned and peered into the other
mirror. With his face inches from hers, Hester saw something else new. The
corner of his right eyelid suddenly jerked back as if trying to touch his ear.
Hester hadn’t noticed the tic before.

“This can’t be happening,” he
moaned. Then a look of decision flashed across his face, and Paul turned and
ran to the rear of the bus. Hester watched in amazement as he pushed open the
door on the right rear side of the bookmobile and leaned out.

She heard, rather than saw, the
gun fire.

“Oh my God, Ralph, he’s
completely off his nut!” she hissed to the driver.

Ralph rolled his eyes and nodded,
stealing a glance to the rear of the bookmobile.

“Ralph, now’s our chance. We’re
coming up to Wahkeena. See the old snow piled from when they plowed the parking
area, there on the right? It’s slushy enough, it shouldn’t be too hard. We can
jump out the front door!”

Ralph nodded.

“With his head out the back, he’s
not going to see us,” Hester continued. “Aim us next to the snow bank. When I
say go, I’ll get the door open and leap for it. You be right behind me.”

Ralph didn’t have time to argue.
Another gunshot sounded, this one more distant. Were the police firing back?

Ralph twisted around, saw Paul
leaning out the door again, then looked ahead to the wide spot at the side of
the road. He whispered to Hester, “Here we go!”

He edged the bookmobile to the
shoulder. The speedometer needle dipped to 30, then 25.

“Now!”

Hester leapt from her seat,
wheeled and grabbed for the door handle. As the door crashed open, she glanced
back and saw Paul Kenyon staring at her from the rear of the bus. He looked...
puzzled?

Hester jumped. All she felt was
the shock of cold as she rolled out of control in mushy, wet snow. She had a
fleeting, blurry impression of the bookmobile’s big rear wheels passing within
inches. Then a 220-pound weight knocked her breath away.

A loud “Oof!” came from Ralph as
he tumbled off Hester and into a 10-inch deep puddle of slush. After a second,
he raised his head.

“Oooh,” he groaned. “Let’s never
do that again.”

The driverless bookmobile almost
stalled. But it kept moving, like a drunk staggering toward a closed door. A
stone bridge abutment, built when Woodrow Wilson was president, stood in its
path.

Leaping from the back of the bus,
Paul skidded on the linoleum floor, then wrenched the steering wheel just in
time to avoid disaster. The bridge rail took a layer of magenta paint off the
entire right side of old No. 3.

Sliding into the driver’s seat,
Paul grappled with the oversized gear shift. He winced as the transmission made
a sound like a fork caught in an eggbeater. Finally, gears clicked. The bus
once again lumbered on its way, the engine roaring like a wounded beast.

Five miles away, Nate Darrow
gripped a radio mike and coordinated the emergency response. A uniformed
officer next to him guided their blue-and-white Ford as it rocketed up the
steep road toward Six Tepees Over Oregon.

“Harry, are you sure the driver
and Ms. McGarrigle are OK?”

Harrington, in the passenger seat
of the state police cruiser, turned and cocked his head at Hester and Ralph,
wrapped in blankets in the back seat.

“I’ll be fine,” Hester said.

“Just catch that S.O.B.,” Ralph
added, nursing a cut lip.

Harrington thumbed the mike.

“She’s scraped up, and he should
have a couple X-rays. We’ll get them to the E.R. at Gresham for a look-over.
But they say to keep moving.”

“So where’s the bookmobile?”
Darrow’s voice came from the radio.

“The postmistress in Bridal Veil
said he headed uphill, definitely did not get on the freeway. We’re probably
less than two miles behind him. We ought to be seeing him any time now. We’re
not tailing an Indy car, trust me.”

“Harry, he’s going to be heading
for the casino, he’s got friends up there,” Darrow responded. “I want to meet
him halfway. Just keep on his tail until Crown Point. Give me that far. Don’t
press him. More units will be joining you.”

As Darrow spoke, Harrington saw a
green cruiser from the Multnomah County sheriff’s office barrel around a bend
behind them, followed by another state police car.

“That’s affirmative. They just
arrived. Nate, I’ll wave them ahead of us, since we’ve got passengers. We’ll
bring up the rear. See you at Vista House.”

Hester sat numbly as the
procession sped around twists and turns of the old roadway built for Model Ts.
The strobing red and blue lights atop each car played eerily on the
almost-black needles of low-hanging fir boughs. Rare glimpses of the sky showed
brooding thunderheads.

Just as they accelerated through
the flats past the old Bridal Veil Falls roadhouse, now a bed-and-breakfast,
rain spatters turned to a downpour.

Hester tried to think as she
watched the scenery whiz by, now smeary through the car’s foggy windows. Had
she dreadfully wronged Karen in all this? Was it really all Paul Kenyon’s
doing? And how had Duffy gotten involved? Surely she hadn’t been embezzling,
too? Hester was certain the self-appointed Goody Two-Shoes hadn’t a larcenous
bone in her dried-up, self-righteous old body.

The cruiser slid sideways on
rotting leaves as it rounded a curve, throwing Hester against the door in a
rude reminder of her bruises. Ralph groaned. She sank back in the seat and gave
up trying to think as they shot past the lovely natural grotto at Shepperd’s
Dell. The little falls there, just a fleeting glimpse of white, seemed to blend
with the cascade of water now pummeling the Gorge from above.

As Nate Darrow’s car topped the rise
into Corbin and turned toward Crown Point, two Troutdale Police cruisers pulled
out at the intersection and followed. Ahead on the right, the garage door at
Fire District 41’s cinder-block station slid up, and as the procession passed,
a volunteer fire unit pulled in behind.

The hand-cranked siren moaned and
a revolving light like a maraschino cherry slowly flashed from atop District 41’s
1958 Seagrave ladder truck. Shopkeepers, school teachers and farmers, all in
yellow slickers and big black helmets, clung to the rails and waved to curious
neighbors as if on the way to a town picnic.

“So much for keeping this quiet,”
Darrow grumbled to his driver. “But a couple of those fellows are EMTs, and we
can use that truck.”

As they passed the casino
turnoff, a sign pointed ahead to Crown Point: 3 miles.

Aptly named, Crown Point was the
crowning glory of the Columbia Gorge Highway, where the road snaked from river
level to the top of one of the Gorge’s most visible promontories.

Visionary highway designers marked
the point with a unique octagonal visitor center, the Art Nouveau-design Vista
House, built of stone when the historic highway was completed. Alone on the
rocky point, 725 feet above the gorge floor and the interstate, Vista House
commands breathtaking views of the river and mountains. It is the scenic area’s
most-photographed landmark.

Because the highway circles
steeply up from below in a blind curve that skirts a sheer rock wall, it is
also a perfect place for a roadblock.

Runoff coated the roadside in
muddy rivulets as Darrow’s parade reached the Vista House pullout. The parking
lot was empty.

“Thank God it’s closed for
winter,” he said, nodding his driver to pull over.

Darrow ran back through
punishing, wind-whipped rain to wave the fire truck into position, blocking the
narrow uphill highway. The other police cruisers lined up in the parking lot,
facing the top of the blind curve where it rounded a rock wall at the base of
Vista House.

Darrow dashed to the parking
lot’s edge. Careful not to outline himself against the sky, he peered over a
rock railing. A gale roaring up from below flailed at his yellow poncho
emblazoned across the back with POLICE.

Darrow glimpsed the smoking,
magenta bookmobile winding upward from a quarter-mile below.

The old bus was managing maybe 20
mph up the 5-percent grade, straddling the center line. A string of police
cars, their strobing lights a colorful blur through the deluge, followed
politely 100 yards behind. A cynical grin crossed Darrow’s face with a fleeting
thought: It was the most ridiculous thing he’d seen since O.J. Simpson’s “slow-speed”
freeway chase.

The highway was blissfully empty
this dreary February day. Surprise might help them stop Paul Kenyon without
anybody getting shot.

Darrow grabbed a bullhorn from
his trunk. The other cops pointed shotguns, shielding themselves behind their
cars. The firefighters peeked over their truck, heads bobbing like
shooting-gallery targets. It was too late to scold them.

A sudden flash of magenta
roofline rounding the curve announced the bookmobile’s arrival.

As the windshield rose into view,
Darrow saw Paul Kenyon’s eyes widen between smeary swishes of the bus’s wipers.

For a long moment, the action
seemed to freeze. Only noises came through the storm. Windshield wipers squeaked
across the glass. The diesel coughed. Rain boomed down on the bookmobile’s long
metal roof.

Darrow had just raised the
bullhorn to speak when Paul Kenyon pulled a final surprise.

Instead of braking to a halt, he
swung the wheel and the big bus swerved into a driveway that encircled Vista
House. Darrow caught a blurry glimpse of Kenyon, laughing and wild-eyed.

The bookmobile careened around
the building. On completion of the futile circle, the bus swung in a wide,
lumbering turn back downhill.

“Damn! Damn! Damn!” Darrow
shouted. As if on cue, a lightning bolt shot from the sky to the Vista House
roof, with a crash of thunder that might have registered on the Richter scale.
Here, high on treeless Crown Point, the winter weather that had only toyed with
Oregon in recent weeks now turned positively Wagnerian.

Darrow and the other officers
crouched and ran toward the rock railing. One of the Troutdale cops stood long
enough to blast a shotgun at the bus’s tires. One of the rear duals exploded as
the big bus disappeared around the curve. Across the Gorge, the storm boomed in
answer.

Darrow slid to a stop at the
overlook. He looked down at the narrow ribbon of encircling highway that was
the only outcropping between Vista House and the Gorge floor far below. Mopping
rain-soaked hair from his eye, he saw Kenyon’s escape thwarted by two of the
pursuing cruisers. One after another, they sat crosswise, blocking the road.

Still, Kenyon wouldn’t surrender.
The bookmobile’s engine roared once more as the bus rammed the front fender of
the sheriff’s cruiser. The deputy in the driver’s seat wildly fired his
revolver at the oncoming behemoth as it shoved his cruiser against the other.

But instead of tossing the cars
aside, the sputtering and overheated bookmobile, one rear tire flapping, wedged
between the skidding cars and a cement curb on the outer edge of the hairpin
curve.

Kenyon wrenched the wheel in an
effort to break free. With a blast of black smoke, the bookmobile suddenly
jumped the curb. Like a wild creature thrashing in a trap, the dented magenta
bus lurched against a low stone guardrail. Sparks soared on the gale.

With a screeching that seemed the
voice of the storm itself, the old guardrail began to disintegrate. Round
stones shot from it like cannonballs. Old, weathered mortar crumbled. The 12-ton
bus slid along the rail as if on a banister.

Slowly, unavoidably, the
bookmobile began to tilt, then dip.

 A hundred feet down the road,
the third cruiser skidded to a halt. Hester threw open the rear door and leaned
out, horror on her face, as Bookmobile No. 3 disappeared over the edge of the
abyss, leaving behind only a cloud of choking haze amid the steaming downpour.