Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb Page 6

  “I’m surprised you got out of that alive,” Bill said, only half-joking. “I wouldn’t go back over there until the others get here.”

  “I can’t believe some of those people,” Phoebe said, as she dabbed at cuts and scratches on Henry’s forearms. “That was uncalled for.”

  He looked at her and grimaced. “I’m embarrassed you saw that.”

  “Henry, this mornin I had to leave a house call through the bathroom window. I was runnin from a woman who wanted her doughnuts back. And I thought I had it rough.”

  He winced as she cleaned a scratch on his face with peroxide.

  Two more National Park Service vehicles pulled up, followed by a couple of volunteers in a low emission vehicle sporting a huge pair of elk antlers mounted over the windshield. Henry quickly made his way over to them with Phoebe and Bill in tow and briefed everyone on the situation.

  “We need to take the bears to the wildlife building and hold em til we can figure out what’s happened,” he said. “If nobody’s been hurt, we can bring em back and release em to go about their business.

  “But first, we need to get that crowd dispersed, and second, we need to get that backpack.”

  ***

  Dispersing the crowd and tranquilizing the cubs with a dart pistol didn’t take long. When Henry was able to examine the remnants of the mangled backpack he agreed with Bill that it had what appeared to be dried blood on it, which was not a good sign.

  “I’m so sorry to have gotten you into this,” Henry said, looking back at Phoebe. “I hope you’ll give me another chance on that trip to Cataloochee.”

  “It’s no problem,” said Phoebe, “I’ve seen more than enough for one day.”

  “Where’s your car?” Bill asked her.

  “At the parking lot for the old McBride graveyard,” Phoebe said. “Do you know how to get there? I’m so turned around I have no idea where it is from here.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Thanks Bill,” Henry said, “and Phoebe, I’ll be seein you later.”

  “Okay Henry. Be careful.”

  Bill and Phoebe began picking their way across the trampled trash-filled grass. “What a mess,” Bill said. He leaned down to pick up a partially-eaten biscuit and put it in the bear proof dumpster. “The people who did this were upset about how the bears were being treated, but now the Park Service is gonna have to send rangers to clean up all this right away or more bears’ll be comin down here to eat the garbage they left.”

  “I’ve seen people like this before,” Phoebe said. “I used to work in Washington.”

  “You did?” Bill said, looking at her with surprise. “You sound local.”

  “I am local,” Phoebe said, smiling. “I left here after college, chasin a dream I got from watchin too much television. Took me a long time, but one day I woke up and realized I wanted to come back home. Anyway, you meet a lot of activists in Washington. They’re usually angry people. When you fix one issue, they immediately switch to another. It’s endless. No satisfaction can ever be had. They’re chronically enraged and looking for a place to vent it.”

  “Psychologists call that projection I believe,” said Bill. “How do you know Henry?”

  “We grew up together,” Phoebe said. “Hadn’t seen each other in thirty years til we ran into each other a coupla hours ago. When we figured out who each other was, he was kind enough to offer to let me ride around with him for the rest of the day.”

  “He’s a good man,” said Bill. “Those people have no idea that the man they’re throwing things at is the very last person in the world they should be mad at. Ignorance is not pretty. The guy’s a legend around here.

  “He’s a martyr to the wildlife in the Smokies. The Park Service forces rangers to rotate to different parks so they don’t get attached to any particular place, but Henry refused to do it.

  “He loves it here too much to leave. Unfortunately the NPS is run like a military organization and Henry’s too strong-minded to follow rules that don’t make sense. So he doesn’t get along very well with the Park Superintendent. His refusal to knuckle under means he’s always on the verge of getting court-martialed. So he’s been kept in a subsistence-level job for most of his career.

  “There’s not much money allocated to wildlife management, but everybody knows Henry so they’ll call him and he’ll go out all hours of the day and night if an animal’s in trouble or causing problems anywhere in the park. He’ll go find it and take it to the vet hospital or move it to a safer area. He’s been living like that for most of his life. Not many women would put up with that, which is probably why he’s never gotten married. He’s married to his job.”

  Chapter 14

  Ivy’s attacker moved her car, then he backtracked a few miles and recovered his own vehicle. Next on his to-do list was searching her apartment. He mused about what an unexpectedly action-packed and exhausting day it was turning out to be.

  Ivy lived in a low-rise building in Sequoyah Hills. The place was popular with students, and there were sufficient comings and goings to render one person more or less unremarkable, he hoped. He carried a crowbar tucked up into the sleeve of his jacket, and a pair of gloves in his pockets.

  He got in quickly without being seen, but the manner of his entry meant the latch wouldn’t work anymore. Once he was inside he had to prop a book against the door to hold it closed while he searched the place.

  Ivy wasn’t much of a housekeeper, but even in the messy state she’d left the apartment, it was obvious after a few minutes that what he was looking for wasn’t there.

  That was unwelcome news, but not totally unanticipated. Fortunately there was another place to look.

  ***

  It was mid-afternoon when Bill dropped Phoebe off at her car, but she still wasn’t ready to go home, so she went back to Hamilton’s to sit with her friend Jill. She knew at this time of day Jill would be sewing.

  Jill made wearable art for women in a spare room she’d converted into a studio. Over the past few years, she’d built up a clientele on Etsy.com and now sewing was her primary source of income. Her sweater coats were highly sought-after, particularly by middle-aged women. The reconstructed clothes were metaphors for their lives. Jill took clothes other people had thrown away, cut out the worn and damaged places, salvaged the best parts, and reconfigured the leftovers into something practical and pretty.

  Her designs were a modern retooling of an Appalachian icon, like Joseph’s coat of many colors or Dolly Parton’s homemade coat made famous in a country song. What had been an embarrassing necessity for the very poor, making recycled clothes out of scraps, was now the province of fiber art collectors and had been renamed upcycling or eco-couture.

  Jill’s intention was that her creations be unique and cheerful talismans for women going through menopause, divorce, illness, or any other life situation when resurrection by bootstraps was required.

  Phoebe knocked on the doorjamb and said, “Can I come in?”

  “Sure, you can help me sort these pieces. I’m trying to coordinate the colors and group them into bundles.”

  “These are t-shirts!” said Phoebe, delighted.

  “Yeah, I don’t have enough business from Australia and New Zealand yet to keep me busy during our summer, so I’m expanding into a new lightweight line,” Jill said. “They’re gonna be longer than regular t-shirts, more like tunics or dresses, and have lettuce-edges and asymmetrical hems.”

  She pointed to one of her dress forms where she had a t-shirt tunic pieced together with pins, “Whaddya think?”

  Phoebe went over to get a closer look. “I love it,” she said. “How fun, and what a flattering alternative to a boring old t-shirt.”

  She pulled a fall-colored cardigan off a shelf and held it against herself. “This one would probably sell better in LaLa Land, though.”

  “That’s Sumac,” said Jill. “And the other one’s Wild Turkey.” Her designs relied on color palettes inspired by Smoky Mountain flora and
fauna.

  Jill sold a few pieces a week through the boutique in Cloud Forest, the exclusive 5-star dude farm near the park. The world famous resort was called LaLa Land by the locals. It was a lucrative concept – a cleverly reversed version of The Beverly Hillbillies where the rich people paid to leave their exclusive gated enclaves for a vacation in the sticks. They could visit Green Acres without having to live there.

  In a tiny cove that had been a subsistence farm until recently, the urban rich could pay $1,000 a day to sit in rocking chairs and watch other people perform farm labor. It was a canny twist on the venerable Tom Sawyer fence-painting con, but you didn’t dare let any of the city people actually touch live animals or farm machinery.

  Although they found Cloud Forest absurd, the people of White Oak were grateful for decent jobs close to home. As employees of the fake farm all they had to do was walk around in their regular clothes and talk to each other in their normal speech, while the well-heeled spectators took it all in as part of an elaborate historic reenactment. Although it felt odd to be watched while working in what amounted to a human version of an ant farm, it paid better than the hotels and restaurants in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, and at Cloud Forest they got to work outside in a beautiful place.

  Phoebe looked out the large window and saw another flash coming from the same place she’d seen earlier. Jill noticed her worried look and said, “Are you still seein something out there?”

  Phoebe nodded, then she said, “It’s probably nothin.” But she didn’t look convinced.

  Chapter 15

  When he had the mother bear and her cubs safely housed at the wildlife building, Henry upended the torn backpack onto his desk. Then he carefully checked each of the separate compartments and emptied them.

  He examined every item in the pack, looking for clues. There was nothing to identify the owner, but he did find something interesting. It was a brass key with code numbers stamped into it. The numbers were GSM-147.

  It was an official Department of Interior key. The GSM meant Great Smoky Mountains and the numbers identified a particular lock on the roster of buildings under the stewardship of the park. Henry didn’t know where lock number 147 was, but he knew somebody who would.

  He walked over to the maintenance compound to talk to Jimmy Helton, a machinist and the park key maker.

  Henry stuck his head into Jimmy’s shop. Jimmy was welding, but shut off his torch and raised his mask when he saw Henry. “Hey Jimmy,” Henry said, handing him the key. “Sorry to bother you, but I was wonderin if you could tell me what this is for?”

  “Let’s see,” he said looking at the number stamped into the brass. “Not off the top of my head, but we have our ways. Follow me.”

  He led Henry over to his key making department, a tiny, metal-filled cubbyhole, where he used two dirty index fingers to peck at the keys on his computer.

  My how park rangering has changed, Henry thought.

  “It’s to the little lodge up on Laurel Ridge.”

  Henry tried to picture the place in his mind’s eye, but had only the vaguest recollection of it.

  “I can understand why he’d want you to have emergency access to it,” Jimmy said. “It’d be a tolerable place to hole up in if you got stuck out on the ridge, but I hope he told you it hasn’t been repaired yet.”

  “It hasn’t?” said Henry, hoping he sounded like he understood what Jimmy was talking about.

  “No, he hasn’t scheduled a work detail since he reported it uninhabitable. This is a spare key I made for him, but the cabin is out of service. It’s off limits for VIPs or visiting scientists, even for rangers. He asked me take it off the building roster, but I just marked it as inactive.”

  “Oh,” said Henry. He peeked at the screen over Jimmy’s shoulder and saw the name associated with the key. It was Fielding, the Park Superintendent.

  “I’m sure our fearless leader has more important things on his mind than some old cabin that’s fallin in.”

  “I hear ye,” agreed Henry. He thanked Jimmy and left, taking the key with him.

  Talk about your rock and a hard place. Henry decided not to mention the key to anybody else. His priority was to track down the owner of the backpack. Establishing a connection between a shredded backpack, the Superintendent, and a broken down cabin was more than he cared to undertake. He’d have to pursue that part of his investigation discreetely since he stayed in enough trouble with his boss as it was.

  ***

  Despite his reservations, late in the day, when Henry’s tasks took him close to Laurel Ridge Lodge, he decided to swing by and take a look.

  The cabin was one of the original buildings left from the days before the park was created when the land was privately owned. He saw why it was referred to as a lodge. This cabin was built in a place so steep, it couldn’t have been associated with a farm. It must’ve been used for camping or hunting or as a family getaway.

  From the outside the building appeared to be in good shape. The shake roof and log walls were perfectly intact. He tried the key in the lock and it turned easily, leaving a gray residue on his fingertips. He looked at the stain more closely. It was graphite. Someone had serviced the lock recently.

  The door swung back soundlessly on its hinges. The one-room cabin was simply furnished in yuppie rustic. It had a red enamel woodstove for heating and cooking, a small scrubbed pine dinner table, a couple of hickory stick chairs with the bark still on them, a bed made with rope springs and a simple mattress. The flannel sheets and Hudson Bay blanket were from L.L. Bean.

  The cabinets in the kitchen area were stocked with coffee, tea, hot chocolate, packets of ramen noodle soup mix, water purification gear, a few dishes and mugs, some flatware, a small assortment of pots and pans, and cooking utensils. Everything was clean and neat. The place wasn’t dusty or musty. Someone had to be using it regularly.

  Henry searched the room methodically. It wasn’t until he got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed, however, that he located a clue to the cabin’s occupant. He found a tiny metal pine cone. He examined it carefully. Actually it was a sequoia cone. It was one of the ornaments that decorated a National Park Service hatband.

  Over the years, the cones had been made of various metals, the most recent ones being gold-plated. But hatbands could be transferred from one hat to another because the bands tended to last longer than the hats themselves. Occasionally a collector might have an antique band with sterling silver ornaments or a high-ranking park official might even wear a vintage band as a status symbol.

  Fielding was a bit of a dandy. He wore a very rare hatband with ornaments made of nickel. The cone Henry held in his hand was also made of nickel. He sighed and sat down in the floor holding the incriminating cone. He rubbed his eyes, as if that would make the thing go away.

  He tried to focus on the good news. At least there was no dead body in the cabin, no blood anywhere, and no signs of a struggle. He’d never liked his boss, but he couldn’t see the guy murdering anyone. His 72-hour workday just kept getting worse. He tilted his head back against the bed to try and figure out what to do next, but was too tired to formulate a plan. With his eyes closed it took less than a minute for him to drift off to sleep.

  Chapter 16

  Phoebe sat up suddenly, roused from a nightmare with a huge rush of adrenalin. She threw off the light blanket and flopped back down, laying with her arms flung out, bathed in sweat, waiting for the nausea and dizziness to pass.

  She dreaded these dreams. She used the front of her shirt to blot the sweat off her face, and tried to recover from the horrible image of the blond-haired girl dangling helplessly in the tree.

  Phoebe always tried to look on the bright side of life, but at times like this it was hard to find one. Precognitive dreams were simply a fact of life for the women in her family. She usually didn’t know who the person in the dream was or where the scene would be played out, but she could be certain it would happen just the way she saw it.


  When the phone rang, she was grateful for the interruption. “Hey girl!” said a loud and perky voice, “What’er ye up to?”

  “Takin a nap. What time is it?”

  “It’s late.”

  “Then why are you callin? Is Bruce makin you hound people at their homes now?”

  “Heck no, you know Bruce can’t make me do anything I don’t want to. I’m just checkin to be sure you’re okay.”

  At first Phoebe was confused and wondered how Waneeta could possibly know she’d had a bad dream, but then she shook off the fog of sleep and realized it was still the day of her boyfriend’s funeral.

  “Yeah,” Phoebe mumbled, “I’m okay.”

  “Well, don’t worry about anything, honey, if you wanna take some time off I’ll find somebody to cover for you.”

  “You don’t have to do that. I’d rather stay busy.”

  Phoebe’d learned long ago that taking care of other people was the best way to keep her mind off her own problems.

  “Well, if that’s what ye want,” Waneeta said. “I’ll be thinkin of ye. Call if ye need anything.”

  Phoebe thanked her and hung up the phone. She laid on the couch for a few more minutes offering a brief heartfelt prayer for Sean and for the girl she’d seen in her dream. Then she got up and went into the kitchen to make dinner.

  The sun was setting as she scrambled a couple of eggs and ate them on thin slices of whole wheat toast. As she chewed she stared longingly at the little gallery of Nikola Tesla photos on the refrigerator.

  There was a formal portrait and also a couple of pictures of him at work. They were all in black and white. Tesla had such a handsome face. Phoebe was in love with him.

  They’d never met, because he’d died more than a decade before she was born, but she loved him anyway. She stared at the photo of him sitting calmly reading, while beside him an electrical monstrosity threw out sparks and lightning bolts every which way.