Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb Read online

  Table of Contents

  Out on a Limb

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Out on a Limb

  A Smoky Mountain Mystery

  By Carolyn Jourdan

  © 2013 Carolyn Jourdan

  This is a work of fiction.

  For safety reasons, locations and routes described herein

  have been intentionally altered to preclude retracing.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechanical, photographic (photocopying), recording, or otherwise – without prior permission in writing from the author.

  ISBN – 13: 978-0-9885643-3-6

  Layout and conversion by Cheryl Perez

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover photograph by Donna Eaton

  © 2013 All rights reserved

  www.donnaeatonphoto.com

  Chapter 1

  Ivy Iverson knew what she was doing was extremely dangerous. She’d been warned time and again by her friends and family. They’d cautioned her about going out into the wilderness alone, and making these high ascents alone. They’d begged her to at least tell someone where she was going.

  But she preferred to do things her own way.

  She was going way out on a limb, and she loved the feeling more than anything in the world. She stood over a hundred feet high on a branch near the top of a leviathan hemlock in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

  It was sunrise and patches of white mist slowly rolled by as she reconfigured her climbing gear. She stopped to watch the surreal mist creep through the upper branches of the old-growth tree, each wisp looking like a ghostly form fleeing the rising sun. The chill of the early morning damp caused a shiver to race down her spine.

  Shrugging off the cold, she clipped on a temporary safety line, hauled up the long dangling ropes she’d used to get where she was, and prepared for the next segment of her ascent. A climb this high had to be done in stages or else the rope would be too heavy for her to handle. She scanned the canopy until she saw another limb about fifty feet overhead that looked sturdy enough to bear her weight, and then braced herself against the tree trunk while she reloaded her crossbow.

  When she was ready, she took a couple of deep breaths, turned around, and paced carefully backwards along the swaying limb. She moved gracefully, like an acrobat on a high wire. When she got a clear shot, she stopped and balanced herself as well as possible.

  Holding the crossbow snug against her right shoulder, she fired a perfect shot. The bolt, trailing lightweight cord in its wake, soared over the limb and dropped onto the other side, falling neatly in front of her.

  Ivy tied the thin cord to the end of her orange and yellow climbing rope and teased and tugged until the climbing rope had replaced it across the limb above her. This would be the final segment of the climb, so she wouldn’t need the crossbow again this morning. She used the long cord to lower it to the ground. When it touched down gently next to her backpack, she let go of the cord and it fell so it lay with the rest of her gear at the base of the tree. With the ease of long practice, she re-rigged her harness and connected it to the climbing ropes.

  Then she checked the exotic knot on which her life depended. It was a Blake’s hitch, a knot commonly used by arborists to climb trees. The knot could slide upwards easily, but wouldn’t allow any downward travel unless it was held in a particular way with continuous pressure. When she was satisfied that all her gear was configured correctly, she began to climb again.

  Her shoulders were unusually muscular for a woman. They’d been honed by working out six days a week and climbing trees in all her free time, so it didn’t take her long to reach her goal. Her formidable expertise in scaling trees had earned her the nickname Ivy.

  When she reached the limit of her rope there were no big limbs nearby to stand or sit on, so she remained seated in her harness, swinging. She took in the view while she got her breath back. She was in the higher elevations of the Smokies at over 5,000 feet, plus the 150 more she’d just climbed, amid an incredibly lush and diverse forest that was an International Biosphere Reserve.

  She was off-trail in a remote area of the park that could be identified only by GPS coordinates. But this was typical for her. Most of the really big trees were hard to get to, or they would never have escaped the greedy saws of loggers in the early 1900’s.

  The climbing made her hot, so she unzipped her jacket and took off her helmet. She ran a hand through her sweaty sun-streaked blond hair, then clipped the helmet to her harness while she enjoyed her surroundings. Her shoulder muscles were burning from exertion and her hands chafed inside her gloves.

  She was in paradise. Her vantage point was atop a thick blanket of clouds that totally concealed the undulations of the blue-green ridges below her. The only part of the Appalachians she could see were the tips of the tallest peaks. They looked like islands rising above a turbulent white sea.

  The sunrise was casting a pink, gold, and orange glow onto the ever-present, ever-changing, clouds and fog that gave the Smoky Mountains their name. It was a perfect time of year to be in the park. When the cloud cover burned off she’d be able to enjoy one of the early fall days when the mountainside reflected three seasons simultaneously: lush green of summer at the lowest elevations, gaudy fall color in the middle, and austere bare branches of winter on the mountaintops.

  It was almost too beautiful to bear. The peace of the vast forested wilderness was complete. The only sounds were made by birds and leaves rustling in the breeze.

  Now that she’d stopped exerting herself, she became aware of the pervasive dampness and the places her harness was cutting into her legs. The best way to ease the pain and restore circulation was to carefully rotate her body until she was hanging upside-down with her feet pointed toward the sky. A couple of minutes like that were all she needed and all her heart could tolerate, but it really helped refresh her.

  As she upended herself several birds burst into flight as though startled by something nearby. Ivy squinted, wondering if a bear might be making its way along the forest floor. A bear was the only creature in the Smokies that could present a serious threat to a person in a tree.

  It was rare for a bear to eat meat. They preferred a vegetable diet, but they were called opportunistic eaters. In certain circumstances they could turn predatory to other animals and even humans.

  She’d seen the jumbled piles of bare, crushed bone fragments left from a bear kill and the b
ear scat with bits of bone in it. She thought of them as bear bones even though they were anything but that.

  Peering down through the layers of branches, she caught sight of something large lumbering in her direction. The critter, whatever it was, raised up on its hind legs, and she caught her breath.

  It wasn’t a bear, it was a man.

  Someone stood below her with his head tilted back, staring straight toward her as she swung upside-down in her harness. That was odd. Ivy hadn’t told anyone where she was going this morning. But now, someone was staring at her from behind a ski mask and it wasn’t really cold enough to warrant one.

  Blood was rushing to her head and her heart was pounding from being upside-down. She suddenly felt nauseous.

  “Hello?” she called out, hoping for a friendly reply.

  The mysterious hiker remained silent and turned his attention to something he was holding. Whoever he was, his intentions were not benign, for Ivy realized with a shiver that he was holding her crossbow. Then he lifted it and aimed it squarely at her.

  Chapter 2

  Phoebe McFarland exhaled and watched the plume of her breath fade slowly in the cold morning air. She stood alone on a ridge in the pre-dawn darkness, facing a landscape that was corrugated like a washboard. At this early hour the twilight panorama was the color of tarnished silver and pencil lead.

  The Smokies always looked so peaceful. But Phoebe knew it was dangerous to underestimate what you were looking at. Beauty could be used as bait for something unpleasant, while treasures were often concealed behind the plainest of façades. Some people figured this out early, others stayed foolish about it their whole lives.

  She had a hard day to get through and didn’t know how she was going to make it. Sean’s funeral was at noon. His sudden death three days ago had been a hard blow to Phoebe. She wasn’t yet used to the idea that he was gone.

  Phoebe had never married. Sean was the latest in a long string of boyfriends that stretched back nearly forty years. He would be the last, Phoebe thought. This clinched it. No more men, even good ones like Sean.

  As the night reluctantly yielded to the dawn, tints of inky blue and evergreen were revealed. The view was sublime. With no cars, houses, or manmade objects of any kind in sight, or in earshot, there was just the dawn and the marvelously varied greens and blues of the Smoky Mountains stretched out before her, easing her heart as she knew it would.

  She was grateful that no matter what else was going on in her life, she always had these beautiful, lumpy old mountains for solace. They were the one constant in her chaotic world. She knew the Smokies hadn’t always looked this way. Geologists claimed that millions of years ago they’d been higher than the Himalayas after being thrust up from an ocean bed in an immense collision of the super continent Pangaea.

  For eons afterwards, towering walls of rock more than five miles high had weathered down to nubs. Then they’d been teased up high again when Africa crashed against North America before the continents settled into the places they currently occupied. These days, the hunchback ridges were thought to be in their third decline, brought low by two hundred and fifty million years of erosion.

  That was the cycle of life, Phoebe thought, youthful exuberance meeting wear and tear. Standing up and getting knocked down, over and over again. The ancient mountains presented a deceptively soft and gentle appearance. Just like a lot of people as they aged. But looks could be deceiving, whether it was people or landscapes.

  In fact, looks were nearly always deceiving in one way or another, Phoebe mused. This was especially so in the southern Appalachian highlands. Outsiders tended to see whatever they wanted to see, The Beverly Hillbillies, Deliverance, or Mayberry. In truth, this was home to a vastly underestimated and misunderstood people. If a medical analogy could be made, the regional culture would be called a syndrome, a cluster of odd symptoms that might seem unrelated unless you were smart enough to correctly identify what you were looking at.

  In this case, the distinctive constellation of characteristics were that the inhabitants were tough as boot leather, wildly emotional on the inside while struggling to appear stoic on the outside, deeply spiritual, and possessed with an irrepressible, zany sense of humor. Phoebe had been born and raised here, so she was one of them, but she’d spent many years living in large cities like Miami and Washington as an adult, so she had some insight into how the local eccentricities were viewed by the rest of the world.

  She’d driven up to Poplar Ridge before starting her workday because it was the place she liked to come when she was troubled. The view from there never failed to work on her like a tonic. Of course, one person’s medicine was another person’s poison. Phoebe wasn’t sure what made her think of that ancient warning, but she whispered the Latin phrase like an incantation to ward off evil, Quod medicina aliis, aliis est acre venenum.

  Phoebe was familiar with death, she was a nurse after all. But Sean’s death had been so mysterious. He’d died on a hiking trail from a head wound. The coroner’s best guess was that he’d slipped and fallen and hit his head on a rock.

  But Sean didn’t hike. He liked to fish, but Phoebe had never known him to go hiking. It was unsettling. She wondered if outsiders were right and these mountains were somehow ominous. Maybe the smoke concealed evil, or a powerful kind of bad luck.

  Well, even if it’d been a mistake to come back to East Tennessee, what was done, was done. She stood shivering in the cold, lingering for a few more minutes until the sun finally burst above the mountains in a glorious flare of gold and pink. That was what she’d been waiting for. Phoebe let the solar fire burn her eyes until she felt able to get on with her life. It was amazing how a bit of warmth and light was often all a person needed.

  She made her way back to her car. Now that the sun was up, she could see the last of the tall summer wildflowers rising out of a ground-hugging mist, brilliant yellow goldenrod and deep purple ironweed. A knobby-kneed elk with an oversize set of antlers stepped out of the woods and looked around. He reminded Phoebe of a showgirl trying to prance around gracefully while wearing a preposterous headdress. He looked toward her and sniffed the air, his breath creating clouds of condensed water vapor around his head.

  She got into her Jeep, a little hospital on wheels that served her faithfully as she ran the mountain roads on her rounds as a home health care nurse. As she drove away, calmed by the apparent serenity of the wilderness, she didn’t realize another cataclysmic collision was taking place deep in the forest. Not a prehistoric collision of continents this time, but a violent collision between two people.

  Chapter 3

  The attacker had been waiting patiently for just this moment, for the girl to remove her helmet and invert herself. It presented a clear shot at her head.

  Ivy barely had time to register the enormity of the situation before the first arrow hit her. But even if she’d seen it coming, hanging upside-down, she had little chance to avoid the blow since there was nothing to hide behind, or to kick against, to propel herself out of the way.

  The bolt hit her in the right thigh and the shock of the impact made her drop her legs so she was jerked upright. Luckily she was at the extreme range of the crossbow and her bolt had a padded, practice tip. A sharp hunting point was far too dangerous to use as a rope launcher. Still, the arrow hit her with the force of a hammer, sending pain jangling up and down her right side, and set her spinning wildly.

  She knew she’d be safer if she could climb higher, or get on top of a big limb, but she’d never make it onto the branch she was dangling underneath. She was hurt and in pain. There’d be too much scrambling involved to climb onto it from her position. She could descend and swing over onto a limb below her, but that would send her closer to her assailant. No, she decided she’d try to move around to the other side of the tree trunk, like squirrels did when they were being chased.

  As Ivy swung, she flailed her arms and legs, trying to grab hold of something, anything, that would help her control her
trajectory, but the small tips of branches she was able to reach tore off in her hands, and panic bloomed in her mind at the very real possibility she might die out here far away from any help, totally alone.

  No, no, no, she thought. Ivy kicked to widen her swing, hoping she was making a more difficult target, but it felt like precious little protection when she saw her attacker had retrieved the arrow and was reloading the crossbow.

  When the weapon tilted up toward her again, she lifted her legs and put her face to her knees in an inverted jackknife that presented her butt as the biggest target. That would shield her as well as possible.

  The second shot slammed into her back, at the top of her left hip. The savage blow forced her to let go of the rope and drop her legs again. The lower half of her body was paralyzed with pain.

  She hung, limp as a ragdoll, helpless to save herself, and watched the dark figure reel in the cord for another shot.

  “Stop!” she shouted, “I’ll do whatever you want. Please stop!”

  There was nothing she could do to evade the third shot. The bolt slammed into the side of her head with enough force to penetrate her skull had it been carrying a metal tip. As it was, the impact of the arrow was hard enough to knock her unconscious. Her body flopped into a boneless backbend, swinging and spinning.

  Ivy would have fallen out of the tree if the Blake’s hitch hadn’t fulfilled its function as dead man’s switch and held her aloft. Even if she’d been conscious, though, her erratic movements and upside-down perspective would’ve made it impossible for her to follow the movements of her attacker, let alone defend herself.

  Luckily, her body’s gyrations made it equally difficult for the shooter to notice what was happening, preoccupied as he was with reloading the crossbow. Ivy’s slumped posture and rotation had upended the canvas equipment pouch that was clipped to the waistband of her harness and was spewing its contents. Announced by only a faint metallic jingle and zing, a hail of shrapnel made of spare carabiners, pliers, a buck knife, a folding saw, and a small hammer plummeted fifteen stories in a brutal metal rain.