Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (26 page)

“Henry’s been real worried about the girl. He’s afraid she might be hurt or lost out there in the park somewhere.”

“Come with me,” Doc said, standing up, “I’ve got something to show you.”

He led Phoebe into the back to Jill’s studio and opened the door, saying, “We don’t know her name.”

Phoebe saw a young woman lying in bed with a bandage on her temple.
“Oh my Lord!
Is that her?” she asked, incredulous. It was the girl in her dream.

Doc nodded. “Jill tried to call you. She knew you were worried, so she went over to Greenbrier toward where you saw that flash and found her up in a tree, unconscious from a head injury.
Leon
fetched her down and brought her here.”

“Has she told you what happened?”

“Some of it, but she’s
only been
conscious briefly. She doesn’t have any idea who shot her. Apparently they used a crossbow that’s part of her climbing equipment. Left her hanging in a tree, thinking she was dead or soon would be.”

“She’s lucky to be alive,” said Phoebe.

“She sure is,” said Doc. “That’s why Jill and Leon didn’t tell anybody. They wanted to protect her
til
they figured out what was going on.”

“Do you care if I tell Henry?” she asked.

“No, go ahead. This will all have to come out eventually. But be careful, especially
til
you know for sure who’s behind all this and what’s at stake.”

Phoebe stepped out of the room and dialed Henry’s cell phone. He didn’t answer. She left a message saying Ivy was alive and at
Hamilton
’s and asked him to call her as soon as he got her message. Then she returned to the makeshift hospital room.

Doc was sitting beside the sleeping girl. He leaned forward to check the IV drip he’d decided to run to keep her from getting dehydrated and to give her the calories she needed to get well.

He saw Phoebe’s worried look and said, “She’s
gonna
be fine. When she was conscious, she was able to speak and remember what happened, so there’s no damage to her brain. She just needs to rest now. She was out there a long time before Jill found her.”

They backed out of the room and closed the door. “
Killin
a kid so you can steal credit for
savin
lives,” Phoebe murmured. “What a world we live in.”

Doc snorted.

“And to think a valuable medicine was out there all this time, growing wild.”

“Modern people have gotten confused about where medicine comes from,” Doc said. “Drugs have only recently begun to be concocted in a lab. Until very recently, they were
all
harvested in nature.

“It’s fascinating how things used to be done. We’ve lost the old ways, like The Doctrine of Signatures. People make fun of it because they don’t understand it. I’ve been reading up on it.
Leon
’s
grandmaw
was skilled at reading plants. For example, one of the most promising cancer drugs,
Iscador
, is an extract of mistletoe.”

“I had no idea mistletoe was good for anything except Christmas decoration,” Phoebe said.

“Mistletoe is a strange plant,” Doc said. “It was sacred to the Druids. It grows opposite to the way other plants do. It never touches the ground. It can only grow on the branches of certain kinds of trees.

“It thrives suspended between heaven and earth. It happens that cancer patients need this same ability. That floating quality is what cancer cannot tolerate. Cancer is a dark thing, a heavy, earthbound thing.

“
Iscador
lifts the patient up so the cancer goes away. There’s a company in
Europe
that cultivates mistletoe on apple trees to treat breast cancer and on oak trees to treat cancers in men. Sounds crazy, but it works.”

“Is it expensive?”

“That’s the other thing,” said Doc. “Plant-based medicines are cheap. The people who make
Iscador
want everyone to be able to have it, so it’s sold at a price anybody can afford. Pharmaceutical companies have gone crazy synthesizing exotic manmade medicines and then gouging sick people for profits, but
Weleda
, the place that produces
Iscador
, hasn’t done that.”

“It’s a terrible thing when sick people can’t afford medicine,” said Phoebe. “There’s no excuse for it.”

Doc nodded, frowning, and said, “When I was a kid, I got real sick once. Sick enough to die. The doctor came every single day for over a month to check on me, even though my parents had nothing to pay him with.
Nothing
, not even food.

“Old Doc Greene not only bought my medicine and paid for it out of his own pocket, but he left a dollar under my pillow every day, so my family would be able to afford to eat.

“He didn’t have much cash money himself. Nobody around White Oak had any cash to pay him with. And he knew better than to try to hand cash to my family. He was a good man and he didn’t want to humiliate my parents, so he slipped that money under my pillow to get them to take it. I decided that if I got well, I’d try to be a doctor when I grew up. I wanted to be like Doc Greene.”

Phoebe smiled at him and said, “And you are.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Doc, embarrassed.

***

In the afternoon Doc decided to make a visit to the
Esso
station.

“Gentlemen,” he said, inclining his head toward Lester and Fate.

“Hey, Doc,” Lester said. “Can I offer
ye
a drink? I’ve got some of Blake Hamilton’s finest, cured in a charred oak cask for
more’n
a year. Prettiest amber color you ever did see.”

The ultimate moonshine for connoisseurs was not white, but was cured in a charred oak cask, so it had a reddish brown color like commercially-made whiskey.

“I’d appreciate that, thank you,” he said, then took a sip of the high proof liquor as soon as it arrived.

“I need to ask you gentlemen for a favor. “

Lester nodded, indicating it was alright for him to go ahead and ask.

Doc dropped into dialect because it was so much easier to communicate subtle matters via the local patois. The sing-song tones permitted a range of nuance that was not possible in
standard
English.

“There’s a feller who’s not from around here
tryin
to cause some problems for a lady
visitin
over at Jill’s place.”

Lester nodded.

“He’s a professor from over at the university.
Mid-fifties.
A big feller.”

“That
orta
make him easy to spot,” said Fate.

“I’d consider it a kindness if you’d keep an eye out for him and be sure he doesn’t get up to anything in White Oak and especially make sure he don’t get anywhere near Hamilton’s Store.
Just for a day or two.”

“That won’t be
no
trouble at all,” said Lester. “Happy to help out, Doc. You’ve always been a good friend.”

Everybody loved Doc. It was widely known that he never turned away any patient for any reason. And these men knew that although it was required by law, he’d never gotten around to reporting any of the gunshot or stab wounds he’d treated over the years.

“The man’s likely to be in a desperate state of mind, so he might
be
wantin
to have his own way pretty bad,” Doc warned.

“That’d be a
turrible
mistake for him to make,” Lester said. “Don’t give it another thought, Doc. We’ll keep him
outta
mischief.”

“Let me
git
ye a refill,” said Fate, reaching for Doc’s glass.

“No thanks,” said Doc, “I need to
git
goin
, but you’re right, tell Blake that’s the best moonshine I’ve ever tasted.
Even better than his Daddy’s.
It’s
mighty
smooth.”

Fate winked.

***

In the late afternoon, the weather began to turn.

The first sign was when the normally playful breeze petered out. There was an ominous stillness to the air that dampened the sounds that normally carried for miles, echoing off the valley walls so everybody in a hollow could hear what everybody else was doing. In the stagnant humidity, hair frizzed and moods fell flat.

Tall dark grey clouds moved in from the northwest. And warm air, moist from the
Atlantic Ocean
, butted up against the tallest obstacle it had run into so far, the
Appalachian Mountains
. It rose to go over the ridges in a phenomenon called
orographic
lift, but as it did, the warm air cooled and the moisture it carried as humidity began to condense.

Visibility grew increasingly poor as the fog thickened. When the air got high enough and cooled, it would begin to drop the moisture first as a fine mist, then gentle rain, building toward lashing torrents that would cause flash floods.

People who noticed the darkening sky and cloying atmosphere drifted toward home to get their outdoor chores done, bring the animals into shelter, and batten down the hatches.

A couple of hours later the wind was whipping up clouds of dust and flinging it about in a stinging fury. The weather prediction was that by nightfall it could easily reach hurricane force at the higher elevations of the park, with ferocious, forest toppling gusts lower down.

Phoebe stood next to Jill and looked out the window.

“You reckon it’s
gonna
storm?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Jill said. “And I think it’s
gonna
be a bad one.”

“When it gets like this, I always try to remind myself that , even though I can’t see it right now, the sun is still shining just as bright as ever and the sky’s the same pretty blue, right on the other side of the clouds.”

Jill remained silent.

“Yeah, it
don’t
always work to cheer me up either.”

The girl had been missing for three days now. If she was still alive, if she was lost, injured, or hiding somewhere in the park, Henry knew the odds for her survival went down precipitously with each additional day. And now there was a storm brewing.

If Ivy was at high elevation, she could well die from hypothermia tonight. Time had run out. He had to find her.
But to do that he needed to have another chat with the Professor.
And this time he had to get the truth out of him, one way or another.

It had been a very long day by the time he topped the ridge, drove past the split rail fence, and came into view of the house. He arrived at sunset as he had the day before. The place was awash in the ethereal golden glow of late afternoon autumn sun. What a beautiful place this was. It was a genuine paradise. But just like the original
Paradise
, this one had a pesky snake in it, too. Henry didn’t like snakes, but he wasn’t afraid of them. He steeled himself to have a down and dirty talk with this one.

He pulled into the gravel parking area next to the house. And just like yesterday, there was only a single car in the lot, Professor Whittington’s absurd black
Geländewagen
. He punched in the access code, shoved the door open, and stepped into the living room. There sat the Professor, in the middle of one of long low couches that were positioned to take advantage of the splendid view.