Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (20 page)

She made a face that expressed something she hoped looked like
poor baby
but she was faking it. She was upset by what he’d told her. She’d thought of him as a sort of wild animal groomer, but a lot of his job involved killing. It was like a veterinarian having to put so many people’s pets to sleep.

“Hey, I
wanna
show you
somethin
else,” Henry said, sort of excited.

Phoebe wanted to make a smart-alecky retort, but she was too tired.

            “I’m
gonna
warn you, with the night vision you’ll be
seein
all sorts of different things out there in front of you, things you’ve not been able to see before. Sometimes you can’t interpret the picture right away. This’ll be one of those
kinda
things. Follow me and do what I say, but no
talkin
. Be as quiet as you possibly can.”

He led Phoebe down a game trail for a hundred yards and then pointed at a stump and indicated she should sit down on it. Then he pointed to something else. She didn’t see what he was pointing at and shook her head. He put his hands on her shoulders to hold her in place and flipped the night vision loupe down over her eye. Then, sure enough, if he hadn’t been restraining her, she would’ve lurched out of her seat.

A pair of glowing eyes was floating through the air a few yards in front of her. Henry held her still and in a few moments she realized there were several pairs of eyes. Just glowing
eyes,
and nothing else. The eyes were bobbing up and down in total silence. Phoebe stared and stared, but couldn’t see what the eyes might be attached to.

She was freaking out. She looked up at Henry sending him a telepathic scream asking
what is
that
?

He reached down and lifted the eyepiece out of the way. Then Phoebe couldn’t see anything at all. The eyes disappeared. There wasn’t any sound being made either. She had no idea what she’d been seeing.

Henry kept one hand on her shoulder and used the other to move the night vision loupe up and down a couple more times and it was always the same. With it down, there were several pairs of eyes floating in the air and with it up, nothing.

The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. She looked up at Henry again and he whispered, “Night-hawks.”

“Birds?”
Phoebe asked.

“Yep,” Henry whispered. “They’re not really
hawks,
they’re more like Whip-poor-wills.”

Phoebe looked again, less afraid now. The eyes belonged to night birds which were popping up into the air and then fluttering slowly to the ground. They did it over and over. It was apparently a little flock of them, all jumping up into the air and then floating down.

“That is the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” she whispered.

After a couple more minutes, Henry tightened his hand on Phoebe’s shoulder and said, “I’ve
gotta
work tomorrow. And I need to get some sleep between now and then.” So they walked back to the Explorer.

“Your
job’s
rough enough during the daytime, I don’t understand why you work nights, too.”

“Cause that’s when the animals are active and the tourists aren’t.”

“Oh.”

“That’s the whole problem with animals in the
Smokies
. This park is stuck in a choke hold, ringed by fast food drive-
thrus
, outlet malls, and rental cabins. The poor critters are all caught in a trap that’s slowly closing in on
em
. More and more people are coming closer and closer to
em
all the time,
wavin
food or cameras in their faces. I’m just trying to help keep
em
all as safe as possible.”

“You got a hard job.”

Henry nodded.

 “Open the tailgate, will ye?”
Leon
asked Jill. He bent over and, as gently as possible, he sat the unconscious woman down on the tailgate of his pickup,
then
carefully laid her on her back. “I need to
borry
that flashlight again,” he said.

He stooped to take another look at the woman’s eyes. “She’s had a hard lick on the head,”
Leon
said, “but she’s already lived through the worst of it.”

Jill looked at the woman with concern.

“Where to now?”
Leon
asked.

“Should we should take her to the hospital down in
Knoxville
?” Jill asked.

“Ordinarily I’d say yes, but somebody is
tryin
to kill this girl. Maybe they think they already have. But if we take her to the hospital it’ll get in the news and they’ll know she’s still alive. “

Jill looked at the unconscious girl with concern.

“The cops don’t have any jurisdiction in the park,”
Leon
said, “and the Park Service won’t
git
anywhere
investigatin
somethin
like this. Nobody around here will tell
em
anything.

“We’ve got a better chance of
findin
out what’s
goin
on than they do. She’ll be safer with us
til
we
git
things figured out.”

“Well, I can keep her at my place,” Jill said.

Leon
drove them to
Hamilton
’s, carried the girl in, and placed her on a day bed in Jill’s studio.

“She’ll be okay,” he said.

“How can you tell?”

“Her
breathin
and color are good, better than they
was
when we found her, and her heart’s strong.” He lifted a corner of her jacket and said, “Her clothes are wet, but it hadn’t rained. She’s been up there for hours to collect that much moisture.
Prob’ly
overnight.
So she’s strong. All anybody can do at this point is just keep her warm and wait.”

Jill deferred to
Leon
because she knew he’d had the special first aid training. She sent
Leon
out of the room while she undressed the woman, bathed her, examined her for injuries, and put her into a clean nightgown. She tucked her under a pile of warm covers, then called him back in to tell him what she’d found.

“She’s got the head wound, some scratches on her hands, and two awful bruises on her body, one on the back and another on a thigh. The only other marks on her are chap marks from the harness straps around her legs and waist.”

He nodded,
then
sat down in a chair next to the bed, saying, “I’ll watch her.”

“Who do you think she is?” Jill said.

“No idea,”
Leon
replied.
“Could be from anywhere.”

“Clothes look American.”

“Well, that narrows it down,”
Leon
said.

“Do you reckon it was an accident?”

“No. You don’t leave a person stranded with a head wound unless you mean business.”

 “Maybe she had someone with her who went for help and got lost,” Jill said.

“I don’t think that’s what happened. Like you said, where’s her stuff? And surely if
anybody’d
been with her,
they’d’ve
tied a rag on the tree or marked the place in some way. If you didn’t leave some sort of sign in a place like that, you might not be able to find her again. It’d be hard enough to find her again, even if you did.”

“Surely
there’s
not very many people who can climb like that,” Jill said. “So maybe she’s in some sort of club. They might be able to tell us who she is.”

“I better tell Phoebe about this,” she said as she dialed the phone, but there was no answer. “What should we do now?”

“We better be careful who we talk to,” said
Leon
. “Why don’t you go on to
sleep.
I’ll stay with her. I promise I’ll come get you if anything changes.”

***

Leon
watched over the unconscious woman throughout the long night.

He sat beside her bed until it was almost morning. When he heard Jill moving around, he went to knock on the door to her bedroom and said softly through the door, “Jill, it’s time for me to take off. She’s still
sleepin
. There hadn’t been
no
change.”

Jill dressed and went to see for herself that the woman was sleeping peacefully, tried to call Phoebe again, but her phone was still going directly to voice mail. Then it was time to start making breakfast for the regulars. She baked biscuits, boiled grits, and fried up hash browns, bacon, and sausage patties. She made gravy with the grease left from frying the pork. Then she put on her game face and unlocked the door for the first customers of the morning.

***

When Doc came in to get his usual breakfast of grits and scrambled eggs, Jill leaned in close as she filled his coffee cup and said, “Before you go, there’s
somethin
I’d like to ask you about.”

“Sure,” he said.

By the time Doc finished his meal most of the breakfast crowd had already cleared out. Jill had him follow her into the back. She closed the door between the store and her private area, saying, “There’s somebody I’d like you to take a look at. He nodded and went into the studio with her.

“Yesterday I went
lookin
to see what that was flashing over in Greenbrier and I found a woman
sittin
way the heck up in a tree, passed out.
Leon
got her down and brought her here last night. Her color’s been good and her
breathin
seems fine, but she hadn’t
woke
up yet. She didn’t have
no
identification on her.”

Doc examined the mystery woman.

“You and Leon have done just fine,” he said. “The only thing a hospital could’ve added to what y’all have already done would’ve been to run a drip of lactated Ringer’s solution by IV, but that’s not strictly necessary.”

He adjusted the blankets and said, “Is there a reason you didn’t take her to the hospital?”

“
Somethin
waddn’t
right,” Jill said. She showed him the broken arrow and said, “The way she was when I found her, it didn’t look like an accident. She didn’t have a blessed thing with her except what she had on and the gear she was tied into. Not even some of the things she
woulda
needed to get up there where she was. Somebody had
took
them.”

“And left her trapped up there,” Doc said
,
“to die.”

Jill nodded.

“Well, thanks to you and Leon, it doesn’t look like they’re
gonna
get their wish.”