Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (12 page)

As he continued on his regular patrol, he contemplated events of the night. Bears and hogs weren’t stupid. They didn’t enjoy making life hard for themselves, so if there was a convenient trail, they took it. Seventy-two miles of the
Appalachian Trail
, known as the AT, ran through the park, following the highest ridgeline in the
Smokies
. As he walked the trail, his feet straddled the boundary between
Tennessee
and
North Carolina
. At night, the narrow rutted track was an interstate for critters through the national park.

He marveled that although he was moving away from a stretch with the highest altitudes in the entire 2,178 mile-long
Appalachian Trail
, there were no majestic vistas because the path ran through dense forest. Hiking it in the middle of the night like he did, there was even less of a view.

For all the heart-warming imagery built up around being a park ranger he sometimes felt like he was simply a paid poacher. He roamed the most densely trafficked areas, stealthily murdering hairy critters in an effort to hold back the surging tide of wildflower-eating, trail-plowing pigs that were spoiling things for tourists, hikers, and the indigenous plants and animals that had the right to call this place home. The stinking invaders were strong and clever and had endless appetites.

The events of this evening made it clear that he’d killed so many hogs on the AT, to protect clueless hikers like the ones he’d just encountered, that the bears had learned to recognize the sound of his suppressed rifle. He’d created Pavlov’s bears. For them, the distinctive muffled crack was now serving as a dinner bell. The bear tonight had gotten to him awfully quick, so they must have started to trail him while he was hunting.

Henry suspected he’d have nightmares about the huge bear hooting and bouncing downhill toward him. He shivered at the thought.

Fall was crunch time for the bears. They turned into eating machines, desperate to consume as many calories as they could so they’d have a good chance to survive the winter sleep and the first few weeks of spring when there weren’t many edible plants available. The bears’ focus on food meant they were less prone to abandon their eating and run away when they saw people, thus allowing aggressive photographers and other types of idiots to get closer than normal while they were foraging.

Things were a lot more likely to go wrong when people crowded the bears. Because of this, during the fall, Henry worked as close to 24/7 as he could. So after just a few hours of sleep, he resumed his search for the owner of the backpack. He dropped by his subterranean cubbyhole of an office in the National Park Service Headquarters building at The
Sugarlands
, an impressive stone structure built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s. He called around to all the ranger stations and visitor centers to see if anyone had reported an incident with a bear or the loss of a backpack.

There were the usual
DUIs
, car wrecks, heart attacks, and sprained ankles that had to be dealt with, but nothing had been reported that seemed related to the backpack. Each of the people reported missing on trails during the previous week had been found and returned to their vehicles in good enough condition to drive home on their own. Next, he checked the master schedule of events in the park and saw that nearly a dozen flora and fauna surveys were in full swing. He headed for the Twin Creeks Science and
Education
Center
to see if any of the survey participants were missing or had lost a backpack.

Twin Creeks was the command center for Discover Life in
America
,
DLIA
, and its All
Taxa
Bio-Inventory activities. The building was a striking bit of green architecture built on an open plan, with gigantic wooden beams cut from trees harvested from the building site, a foundation of rounded stones gathered from a creek that ran alongside the building, glass walls, and plenty of skylights.

He arrived during the morning briefing before the
forayers
,
questers
, and
blitzers
dispersed into the field for the day’s work. Henry politely interrupted the speaker and held up the ominously shredded backpack. “I’m trying to find the owner of this backpack. Do any of you recognize it?”

 Several people came forward for a closer look. Two men were especially intense in their examination. The younger of them said, “I think I know who this belongs to. This purple is pretty distinctive. I think its Ivy’s.
Ivy Iverson’s.”

“What’s your name?” Henry asked.

“Tim Cardwell.”
“
How do you know Ivy?”

“She’s my girlfriend,” Tim said, and then he shot an angry look toward the man standing next to him and said, “My
ex
-girlfriend.”

“Are you from this area?” Henry asked, noting the man’s orange and white t-shirt.

“Yeah, I’m a Ph.D. candidate at U.T. in
bryophyta
.”

“What’s that?” Henry asked.

“Mosses and liverworts.”

“What can you tell me about Ivy?”

“She’s at U.T., too.
In mycology.”

“Do you know how she might’ve lost her pack?”

Cardwell shook his head. “I haven’t been in touch with her recently.” He shot the other man another hard look as he said it. “Where’d you find it?”

“Cades Cove,” Henry said. “Does she go there a lot?”

“No,” said Cardwell, “never. The trees there aren’t the kind she’s interested in.”

“What kind of trees is she interested in?” Henry asked.

“Big ones,” said Cardwell. “The tallest ones she can find. She climbs for fun, and for research.”

Cardwell looked at the ripped pack with growing dismay and asked, “Did a bear do this?”

“Probably,” Henry said, “most of it anyway.”

“Did the bear hurt Ivy?”

“I don’t know,” Henry replied. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. We haven’t located her yet. Do you have any contact numbers for her?”

Cardwell nodded and then gave Henry Ivy’s home and cell numbers. Henry immediately dialed her home, got no answer, and left a brief message asking Ivy to call him as soon as she got his message. He repeated the process with her cell number.

“Is she participating in any of the
DLIA
surveys?”

Cardwell shook his head. “She didn’t even sign up for the
Myxo
Madness event, and that’s her field of study. I checked and she wasn’t on the list. That doesn’t make any sense. Nothing she does lately makes any sense to me. But even if she wasn’t going to the
myxo
event, she was probably in the park yesterday, somewhere, climbing.”

“Any idea where?”
Henry asked.

“No, like I said, I haven’t talked to her in awhile.”

Henry took down a description of Ivy: 24 years old, 5’ 8”, green eyes, straight blond hair.

“If you hear from her,” Henry said, “please let me know right away. Okay?”

Cardwell nodded and took Henry’s card.

“And you sir?” Henry asked the other man.

“
Alexandre
Molyneaux
,” he said, then spelled both names for Henry, using the French pronunciation for the letters of the alphabet, which meant he had to repeat himself several times.

Cardwell took a last look at the mangled backpack,
then
turned to go, shoving past
Molyneaux
with unnecessary force.

Henry looked at
Molyneaux
with a questioning look.

“He is young,”
Molyneaux
said, dismissively. “This bag, it
belong
to Ivy. This,” he said wiggling a stub of black plastic dangling from a
carabiner
clipped to the pack, “it is part of a lighted magnifying tool that I give to her. The glass is missing now. It has been broken.”

“Do you have any idea where she is?

Molyneaux
shook his head.

“Any idea where she was yesterday?”

“I, too, believe she may have been climbing in this park. These trees of majesty in the
Smokies
are the reason she chose this place for her studies instead of her home state of
New Mexico
. Such trees do not grow in this desert. But I do not know where she was climbing.”

“Do you study the same thing as Ivy?” asked Henry.

“No, I study the butterflies,” he said. “I am
Professeur
au
Département
de
Biologique
at
Université
de Loire. La
Société
Geographique
Francaise
pays for my visit in this place.”

“How do you know Ivy,” Henry asked.

“She enjoys
to look
at my butterflies,” he said smiling. “We have friendliness. That is all.”

Henry took down
Molyneaux’s
contact information, gave him a card, and thanked him.

It looked to Henry like Cardwell was a jilted boyfriend who was jealous of whatever was going on between Ivy and the Frenchman, if anything. Henry wasn’t sure he believed in a friendship based on mutual appreciation of butterflies either.

Before he left, Henry moved to the middle of the room and addressed the group again. “Excuse me,” Henry called out in a loud voice, “I need to ask you all a couple of questions. It’ll just take a minute.”

The chatter subsided and people turned toward him to see what he wanted.

“Have any of you seen Ivy Iverson recently?”

There was a low buzz in the room, but no one spoke up.

“Please keep your eyes peeled. If anybody sees her or hears from her, please let me or any of the park rangers know immediately. It may be nothing, but we’re just being cautious in case she might be out there somewhere in need of assistance.”

Henry looked around at the group to get an idea of what kind of people they were. They divided fairly evenly between male and female. Most of them were very fit, tan, many of them were sporting scratches, cuts, and bruises consistent with a struggle. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. The terrain in the park was very rough.

Next Henry made his way to the administrative offices near the center of the building. He explained the problem to Janet Stevens, a ranger and Chief Biologist for the park, and she made him a copy of the roster of participants and maps indicating where the various surveys were taking place.

Henry scanned the list of activities, and asked. “So yesterday and the day before a lot of these people were out in the park?”

Janet nodded, “A couple of hundred volunteers and about a dozen leaders.”

“Anybody come back hurt?”

“Sure, the usual stuff, sprains, that sort of thing, but nothing serious that I know of.”

“Anybody missing?”