Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb Page 2

  Even the most mundane object could become deadly when dropped from a hundred and fifty feet. The folding saw tore a gash in her attacker’s scalp, while the pliers, and buck knife cut and bruised his face and shoulder. The slender bolt took a direct hit from the hammer and snapped in two, making the crossbow useless.

  Her assailant was stunned by the blows to his head and fell to his knees. With a broken arrow and no rope, he had no way to reach Ivy. He had no means to inflict further harm on her. The lowest limb of the hemlock and the trailing end of her rope were more than eighty feet off the ground. Nobody could get to her now without a lot of climbing gear.

  Enraged, he removed the broken pieces of the arrow and tossed them away. Then he crawled to the base of a tree a few yards away, slumped against the trunk, and tended to his wounds as best he could, wary of anything else that might fall.

  Ivy’s body danced high overhead, gradually losing momentum in its swing and spin. Her attacker waited and watched for a long time, alert for the slightest indication that she might still be alive.

  He was mightily frustrated not to be able to retrieve her body, but the more he thought about it, the more confident he became that it would never be found. The park was huge and the terrain was extremely rugged. Fortunately for him Ivy had a habit of going out alone wherever her whims took her and not telling the Park Service or anyone else where she was headed or when she’d be back.

  She was well off any trail and hidden among the tree canopy. Even when the leaves were gone, it was unlikely she’d ever be spotted. Off-trail hikers didn’t look up while they walked. They kept their eyes on the ground because of the treacherous terrain and the very real possibility of poisonous snakes.

  The encounter hadn’t gone the way he’d planned. He’d set out intending to talk to her, or at worst threaten her. But then he’d seen her lower the crossbow to the ground.

  It was impulsive to use it, but the improvisation saved him a lot of wrangling. He pondered the situation and realized it was a perfect crime.

  The wind blew, leaves rustled, and the rope creaked softly as Ivy swayed. Finally, satisfied that if she wasn’t already dead, she soon would be, the attacker gathered up her gear and purple backpack and walked away, leaving her hanging there like a circus performer frozen in mid-act, forever stranded between heaven and earth.

  Chapter 4

  Blissful ignorance was great while it lasted, but if you had any brains at all it was impossible to remain clueless forever. Phoebe knew everybody went through rough patches, but this had gone too far. Nothing in her life was working out like she’d pictured.

  Early in her career she’d wanted to experience the wider world beyond the Smoky Mountains, so she’d moved away. She’d been shocked to find herself in places where people didn’t want to know, much less care about, their neighbors. For years she’d made good money as a nurse and worked her way up the ladder. But it bothered her to see affluent and cultured people congregating in picturesque enclaves from which they displayed the same haughty disinterest in their neighbors as they did the beggars sleeping on grates less than a block away.

  That was no life for Phoebe. She loved people, all kinds of people. A person with her open and friendly ways couldn’t bear to live her whole life in a disconnected urban environment. So, six months ago, when she’d heard that the local doctor needed to retire and no one was willing to take his place, she’d ditched her career, moved back home to White Oak, Tennessee, and taken a job with the beleaguered rural health care agency that served the area. A good home health care nurse could take up a lot of the slack in a community that lost its doctor.

  Finally she was back where she’d grown up, where she knew everyone and they knew her. But in all her imaginings of what it would be like to return to the quirky mountain community she’d been raised in, she’d never envisioned this particular scenario.

  When it should’ve been impossible for her day to get worse, it had gotten much, much worse. Instead of being on the road to Sean’s funeral, she was cowering in a bathroom at the Talley’s home trying to escape Wanda Talley, the diabetic from hell.

  A couple of minutes earlier Wanda had abruptly stopped screaming threats and pounding on the door and shuffled away in the distinctive gait of a person with peripheral neuropathy. Now she was back and eerily silent. Phoebe could hear her breathing heavily on the other side of the door and making metallic scratching noises near the knob.

  Wanda was a 375-pound housebound diabetic who was out of control in more ways than one. When Phoebe had tested her that morning, Wanda’s blood sugar was sky-high and she complained that she’d lost all the feeling in her feet. Wanda had gone from being able to regulate her disease with pills to needing multiple insulin injections every day.

  Phoebe hated to stand by and watch someone eat herself into an early grave. So she decided to take extreme measures to save Wanda’s life. She made a sweep of the premises and discovered a stash of doughnuts under the bed as well as half a bag of Double Stuff Oreos. Then she found a family-size pack of Peanut M&Ms hidden behind a roll of toilet paper underneath the bathroom sink. She’d seized the forbidden items and naively attempted to walk out the front door with them. But Phoebe failed to anticipate the magnitude of Wanda’s sugar addiction and thus the violence of her reaction to the confiscation of her guilty pleasures.

  In a matter of seconds Phoebe was suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, running for her life. But that brought her only as far as the bathroom. Now she was trapped in there with the carbs.

  Phoebe was genuinely concerned for Wanda. She had to find a way to help her get control of her diet and lose weight. If not, Wanda’s diabetes was going to land her in the middle of a dirt sandwich. And soon.

  “Wanda,” she said, loud enough to be heard on the other side of the door, “have you ever tried tapping?”

  There was no response aside from an increased intensity in the scraping at the lock.

  “It’s an alternative type of therapy that works well for a lot of people. It’s sorta like acupressure-meets-psychotherapy. It’s free, you can do it yourself, you don’t need any equipment, and there’s no drugs involved. Why don’t we give it a try?”

  Phoebe waited, but Wanda’s persistent scratching continued.

  She soldiered on, gamely, “In tapping, you try to discover whatever’s really botherin you, the thing that’s makin you overeat in the first place. You tap on a series of acupressure spots and say things like, ‘Even though I eat too much, I totally love and unconditionally accept myself.’”

  Again, Wanda said nothing.

  “The idea comes from the Carl Rogers School of psychotherapy, you know, the unconditional positive regard fellow? This is a kind of do-it-yourself version of his thing, plus clearing the Chinese energy meridians at the same time.”

  The only reply was Wanda’s ongoing lock picking efforts.

  “Let’s tap on ourselves, okay?” Phoebe said, trying to sound brave, knowing full well that Wanda intended do a lot more than tap on her when she got through the door.

  “First you tap on the center of your eyebrow with the middle finger of your dominant hand.”

  Phoebe went through the first couple of steps of the tapping process, alone. Then she gave up. She needed to try something else. “Okay, forget tapping. There’s lots of different approaches that work, like meditation and centering prayer. Those techniques can be really effective, too. The training for Trappist monks, the ones who don’t talk, is very similar to the 12 Steps. Did you know that?”

  Obviously Wanda had a pretty strong ability to maintain focus, but unfortunately it was on sugar instead of the Lord or world peace. Phoebe looked around for an exit. The window was the only possibility. She briefly considered trying to flush the armload of junk food she’d confiscated, but didn’t want to clog up the toilet.

  Wanda needed some time to climb down from her sugar high and cool off. And Phoebe needed to get away.

  She unlocked the window and heaved up o
n the bottom sash. It shuddered slowly upward. She clicked the little latches on the screen and moved it out of the way, too. She was scooping up the contraband she’d dumped onto the vanity when Wanda succeeded in picking the lock and burst through the door ready to wreak havoc.

  Phoebe dropped the sweets and lunged awkwardly out the window.

  Fortunately it was only three feet off the ground. She regained her footing and made a mad dash for her Jeep, ripped the door open, flung herself inside, and raced away in a hail of flying gravel without looking back.

  There were some people in this world that you couldn’t reason with.

  Chapter 5

  The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was the most popular national park in the country. It was visited by nine million people a year, twice as many as went to the Grand Canyon and three times as many as toured Yosemite.

  But because the Smokies was mostly a steep, trackless wilderness bisected by a single road, and because people generally didn’t wander more than fifty yards from their cars, the park was experienced by most tourists as a gigantic drive-thru forest. The place was filled with vegetation so lush, if there actually was a place on earth where you couldn’t see the forest for the trees, this would be it.

  It was probably a good thing that the millions of people didn’t venture very far out into the woods. What looked pretty from the car could easily turn into a death trap to the unwary or unprepared. The propensity of outsiders to underestimate the park was highlighted by the world’s most famous travel writer, Bill Bryson, in his bestselling book A Walk in the Woods. Bryson set out to hike the 2,174 mile Appalachian Trail and started at the southern terminus in Georgia , walking north. But shortly after entering the 72-mile stretch of trail that passes through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, he changed his mind and abandoned his plan.

  Even a modest taste of the park forced a world-renowned professional traveler to give up his dream, call for a cab, and flee to the nearest airport. Every day all sorts of adventures were begun, or ended, in the nation’s most beloved patch of woods.

  In the span of a single day, the park might host events covering the entire span of a human life – birth, birthday party, romantic liaison, engagement, wedding, honeymoon, vacation, anniversary, reunion, accident, injury, illness, death, funeral, and burial. A vast array of activities took place year round, some accidental, some intentional, some legal, some not.

  Several times a year a nonprofit research organization, Discover Life in America, known as DLIA, set up conferences for the All Taxa Bio-Inventory project in the Smokies. During these gatherings, dozens of scientists with expertise in biology and botany congregated in the national park for a few days to survey designated plant, animal, and insect species. Each scientist led a gang of volunteers, referred to as Citizen Scientists, who combed over selected areas of the park looking for the species chosen for study.

  This week there were several DLIA surveys taking place simultaneously. Each of the teams needed volunteers, so the surveys were given enticing names like Fern Foray, Karst Quest, or Beetle, Butterfly, and Bat Blitzes.

  Only three of the events were restricted to participants with special skills: the karst and bat surveys and the search for leviathan trees. All three of those required climbing and rappelling skills. The karst and bat work was done in caves. The tree searches were carried out in places so remote and arduous to traverse that only a few ultra-hardy and ultra-cocky souls ever attempted to participate.

  In the search for the tallest trees, even among the experienced hikers who were the fittest people imaginable, most of them ended up bailing in shame after an hour or two of attempting to wade through rhododendron and mountain laurel thickets. The extreme sport of trying to move through the tangled shrubbery, called hells by the locals, was referred to as rhodo surfing. It was an activity that only a handful of people in the world enjoyed.

  Most of the surveys took place within a yard or less of well-known hiking trails since off-trail hiking, or even walking more than ten feet off a well-trod path, in the Smoky Mountains was considered suicidal. A mountainous jungle was not a place you wanted to get lost in. So, for a few days a couple hundred people would crash around in the undergrowth, then go home sunburned, bug-bitten, slashed by briars, happy to have had a productive adventure in nature.

  ***

  Luckily for Ivy’s attacker, the scientists were focused very narrowly, so there wasn’t much chance any of them would notice him or Ivy.

  He’d been tracking Ivy’s excursions for over a month, and he’d learned how to enter and leave the groves of old growth forest without becoming lost. There were a couple of hiking trails that swathed through the corridors of ancient trees, but the places Ivy was interested in were well away from those.

  If you had basic orienteering skills there were techniques for maintaining your bearings in any wilderness setting. The main thing to know about the Greenbrier area of the park was that from the air, the topography looked like a hand with the fingers spread out. The fingers were the ridges and the spaces between them were the valleys. He could keep track of his position by counting the finger hollows he traversed.

  With the help of a detailed topographical quad map from the U.S. Geological Service, he knew which streams branched off where, and which ones would eventually lead back to the road. It wasn’t easy, but practice made perfect. After several expeditions, the trip had become routine.

  This time, however, he needed to exercise extreme caution. It wouldn’t do to be noticed in the area. Although he doubted Ivy would be found for a long time, if ever, it was conceivable that a hiker might stumble into the area. In winter, when the leaves were off, it was possible that someone might spot her, and then questions would be asked about who might’ve been seen in the area.

  He needed to get away without being noticed and he needed to do whatever he could to make sure her body was never found. That meant he had to lay a false trail for searchers. He could use her backpack for that. Then he’d move her car.

  People who knew Ivy knew how she loved to spend time in the park. He could use that to his advantage. He’d leave the backpack where it would be discovered, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near Greenbrier. He’d take it to the far west side of the park and leave it in the busiest area, Cades Cove.

  That way the search and rescue team would scour the wrong place. When her disappearance was noticed, there’d be a massive search, but after several days or a week of coming up empty-handed, the efforts would diminish. Ivy would become just another sad entry in the long list of people who’d vanished in the Smokies.

  He neared the edge of the woods and the road a few hundred yards from his car. He stopped to listen for any vehicles coming. The only sounds he heard were of the wind sighing through the trees, birds calling, and air heaving in and out of his lungs. It hurt when he peeled off his ski mask. And he had to concentrate to take longer, deeper breaths to calm himself.

  He touched his head gingerly where Ivy’s folding saw had struck him. His hand came back smeared with blood. He felt the scrapes and bruises on his face and shoulder and his split lip. She got what she deserved, he thought.

  Although he’d been toying with the idea of somehow getting rid of her, the fact that he’d actually done it was just now hitting home. He had killed a person. He’d terminated the earthly existence of a human being.

  A weaker man might break down at this point or waver in his resolve. But he wasn’t squeamish. Now that the deed was done, he found he wasn’t a bit sorry. And he realized it would be easy to do it again if need be.

  The thought was oddly freeing, then downright exhilarating. He’d crossed a line that put everything in a whole new context. He wadded up the ski mask and shoved it into his pocket. He waited until he was sure no cars were coming in either direction, then he stepped out onto the road.

  Chapter 6

  Leon Lowery was standing in the middle of the road looking like a character in a low-budget redneck horror movie wh
en Phoebe clapped eyes on him. He appeared to have been gargling blood and then spit it up all over himself. He’d taken off his ragged t-shirt and was using it to wipe himself off, but his efforts weren’t very effective. He was mostly just smearing the blood around.

  Phoebe drove right up to where he was standing and got out. She took a quick look at his pale skin and tall bony frame draped in threadbare blue jeans and canvas tennis shoes with holes in them. He didn’t seem to be hurt very bad. The blood was coming from a busted lip and a superficial laceration on his head.

  “Leon, I swear,” said Phoebe, with an encouraging smile and a comforting voice, “if it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

  She walked around to the back of her Jeep, opened the door, and rummaged around in her supplies. She opened a cooler, filled a baggie with ice cubes, and zipped it closed. Then she wrapped the homemade cold pack in a clean cotton towel and gave it to him. “Hold this against your mouth, honey. It’ll keep the swelling down.”

  Leon mumbled thanks and placed the ice carefully against his swollen lip.

  “Sit down before you fall down,” she said, indicating he should sit on the edge of the cargo area. She removed his baseball cap and mirrored sunglasses and set them carefully to one side while she made a closer inventory of his injuries.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Wrecked,” he mumbled. “Dog in the road.”

  Leon didn’t like to waste words.

  “Anybody else hurt?”

  He shook his head. “Dog’s fine.”

  “Well,” said Phoebe, “that’s good. Now close your eyes.”