In The Forest Of Harm (3 page)

Still looking at the map, Joan took a long drag on her cigarette. “You come back here a lot?”

“Not since my mother died.” Mary's words fell flat on the sunny air. She closed her eyes and concentrated fiercely on the pungent smell of Joan's menthol-laced smoke. When she opened them, Joan was scowling.

“I don't think I've ever known what your mother died of, Mary.”

For a long moment no one spoke; then Mary replied, choosing her words with care. “My mother didn't die of anything, Joan. My mother was raped and murdered.”

“Oh, jeez.” Joan shrank back in the seat. “How awful. I don't know what to say. I didn't realize it was anything like that—”

“That's okay. It's old news.” Mary kept her eyes straight ahead.

“Hey, Mary. Tell us again where we're going.” Reliably, Alex booted the conversation back up onto happier ground.

Mary cleared her throat. “A spring called Atagahi. Not many people know about it. My mom took me there a lot as a child. We used to soak in it like a hot tub. The Cherokees think it's visible only to those who need it. If you wash in Atagahi's waters, your wounds will be healed.”

“Cool,” said Alex. “You can jump right in and forget about the State of Georgia versus Calhoun Whitman, Jr.”

“I can hardly wait,” Mary replied, the hate-filled faces of Cal Whitman and his brother Mitchell flashing before her.

They sped on through the cooler, pine-scented air. The foothills grew steeper, and overall-clad farmers whittled beside Chevy pickups laden with mountain apples and sourwood honey for sale. Twice they had to stop to let Joan's queasy stomach calm down. Then Mary pointed down a gravel lane that sloped off the paved highway. “Turn left, Alex. There's a place I need to visit down there.”

Alex turned the Beemer down the lane, gravel popping under the wheels of the car. The road skirted the base of a mountain, then crossed a shallow creek and broke into a meadow bright with goldenrod. On the far side of the field stood a small clapboard church.
Horton's
Chapel U.M.C., read a hand-lettered sign by the front door.

“Gosh!” Alex gazed at the bright white church sparkling against the golden meadow and dark green pines. “This looks right out of Norman Rockwell.”

“Park over there,” Mary directed. “Near the cemetery.”

Alex circled the church, pulling the BMW under a sprawling oak tree with a tire swing dangling from its lowest limb. Mary pointed at a split-rail fence halfway up the hill. It enclosed a number of white tombstones that erupted like jagged teeth from the thick grass. “My mom's buried up there. I'd like to have a look at her grave.”

Alex glanced at her friend, trying to divine the expression in Mary's smoky hazel eyes. “Should we come, too? Or would you rather be alone?”

“No. Please come.” Mary smiled. “I'd like you both to see it.”

They got out of the car and walked up the hill, Joan and Alex following Mary through a cemetery that could have been in any churchyard in America, except for the names on the tombstones. Where most places you'd find Joneses or Smiths or Johnsons, here lay Owles and Saunooks and Walkingsticks and Crows. The three young women threaded their way through the graves. At a simple granite slab, Mary stopped.

Martha Joy Crow
, the inscription read.
1948–1988
. Joan's eyes filled with tears. “Gosh, Mary. Your mom was only forty.”

Mary looked down at the gravestone. Alex had heard this story a thousand times. Joan had never heard it. Mary swallowed hard and began to speak.

“My mother died in the late afternoon on April eleventh. She was working in Norma Owle's store. Someone came in and did the Big Three—robbery, rape and murder.” Mary rattled off her official version of her mother's death. She'd learned long ago that if she said it fast, it tasted not quite so bitter coming out of her mouth. “Not an uncommon crime for most of America. But a very uncommon crime for here.”

“Did they ever catch her killer?” Joan spoke in a whisper.

“No. They scoured these mountains for weeks, but they never caught anybody. Finally they decided it was just some drifter who needed money for drugs. Nobody could ever explain why he needed to rape and kill my mother, too.” Mary's eyes flashed. “Most of the money had spilled out of the cash register and was left behind on the floor. The only thing I saw missing was her Saint Andrew's medal.”

Joan frowned. “Don't you mean Saint Christopher?”

“No. Saint Andrew. It was my father's. His grandfather had given it to him, and he'd worn it the whole time he was in Vietnam. They sent it back with his body. A knight, fighting a dragon. My mother put it on just before his funeral. She never took it off.”

“Jeez, that's terrible.” Impulsively, Joan wrapped her arms around Mary. “I'm so sorry. I can't imagine living through a hell like that.”

Mary hugged Joan back. “It was awful,” she agreed quietly. “But it's history, now.” Over Joan's shoulder she smiled at Alex, remembering all the nights they'd lain awake in the dorm, Mary going over each detail of the murder scene and the hunt for her mother's killer a thousand times, Alex listening with unlimited patience and a diminishing pile of PayDay candy bars. Mary knew that without Alex, she wouldn't have survived the first week at Emory, much less the ensuing twelve years.

She squeezed Joan, then relaxed her embrace. “Alex pulled me through the worst of it.”

From the pocket of her jeans she withdrew a plastic bag filled with six smooth, speckled stones. “The old Cherokees honored their ancestors with things of the earth,” she explained. “I picked these stones from the little creek that runs behind my apartment in Atlanta.”

Mary knelt down and kissed each small stone. Their grainy coolness against her lips brought that long-ago spring day rushing back—Reverend Hunt reading from his Bible, the redbud tree sending tiny magenta stars up against the darkening sky, the mourners huddling in raincoats around the dank hole in the ground that would embrace her mother for eternity. She'd felt like a murderer herself then. If she had just gone straight home that afternoon, this wouldn't have happened. She would have been there. She would have stopped whoever had done this.
Don't go, Mama
, she'd cried silently as they'd lowered the simple coffin into the earth.
Please don't
leave me
.

Mary made a small pile of the stones just beneath her mother's marker. “
Sudali
, Mama,” she whispered. “Six. Six stones for six convictions.” For Hance Jordan, who poisoned his young wife to collect her insurance; for Wayne Creech, who fatally stabbed his girlfriend for not wearing a bra; for four more beyond them. One more, and she could place the seventh stone on her mother's grave. Seven. The number her people regarded as magical and redemptive as any plunge in a Baptist pool. One more stone, and Mary Crow would be at peace.

She stared at the little pile of six stones for a moment, then she rose and looked at her friends.

“Okay,” she told them. “I'm done.”

“Are you sure?” Alex asked. “We can stay longer if you want—Joan and I can wait for you in the car.”

“No.” Mary smiled as a shadow passed from her eyes. “I'm done. Let's go eat an early lunch, ladies. We've got a lot of mountains to climb before dark.”

FOUR

SOMEWHERE IN THE NANTAHALA FOREST,
OCTOBER 2000

Death has a stink to it. It's blood and kum and the sea and the sour scent of a man humiliated, pleading for his life. It's sticky on your hands, and if you cram your fingers in your mouth and suck them like chicken bones, all that sweet death-marrow
goes straight to your brain and makes you feel like God.

Henry Brank laughed as he pulled the knife from the rabbit's neck. “This is a real piece of luck, Buster,” he said to the snake that lay coiled inside the bag he'd carried over his shoulder all morning. “I thought for sure we'd only have cornbread tonight.”

The snake made no response. Brank tied the rabbit's back legs together with a piece of rawhide and slung it, along with the sack and his shotgun, over his left shoulder. He wiped the blood from his knife, stuck it in his boot and continued climbing up the slippery, pine-straw-covered switchback that would eventually take him to the top of Cowcamp Ridge. He'd walked east since dawn, and the once-warm sun had disappeared into a thick gray cloud bank that seemed to float up from the mountains themselves.

“We'll check the weather at the top of this ridge, Buster,” Brank huffed, his legs burning from the near-vertical climb.

They crested the ridge just as the wind began to whip raw and sting his face. Out of breath, Henry dropped his gear next to a rotting log and looked out over the acres of forest spread below. Only the dark tops of pine trees poked up from the thick white stew of fog.

“Shit. Whited out.” He turned northward and sniffed the wind. The sharp-iron smell of cold tingled his nostrils. Winter was coming, and soon. In a couple of weeks these gold mountains would turn a sullen brown, then pale blue snow would dust them like sugar. Right now, though, opaque clouds bloated with water swirled down from the sky, obscuring everything from trees to entire mountaintops.

He shifted the sack to his other shoulder. “We gotta find us a place fast, Buster. We don't want to get lost in the Hell.”

Since midmorning Brank had skirted Godfrey's Hell, a huge tangle of laurel named for a long-ago bear hunter who'd once followed his dogs into the monstrous coil and had never been seen again. When Brank heard that story, all he could picture was a frantic man forever careening through a viney maze with a pack of frothy-mouthed dogs, and he'd given the Hell an extra-large dollop of respect ever since.

He squinted at the ground. A finger of a trail beckoned through the fog—nothing more than a dark track through the mist. He followed it carefully, keeping the ridge on his left, the Hell on his right. If he could just find a cave, or even an overhang to hole up and build a fire in, then he and Buster could wait out the weather.

He trudged on. He despised picking his way down a mountain like this, with clammy vapors icing your bones and putting blinders on your eyes. When he'd first come into the woods he thought whiteouts fun, like walking through giant swirls of cotton candy. But he'd been younger then, and losing yourself in a cloud was not a problem when lost was what you badly needed to be.

Suddenly he stopped. A noise, off to the right, coming up from the Hell. He sank to his knees and shouldered his shotgun. Maybe it was Trudy. He'd tracked her all the way from Nova Scotia, catching sight of her at dusk, slinking like a tawny scarf through the trees, at night screaming like some caterwauling demon. He'd been able to follow her by the remnants of what she ate—gnawed-out Holstein calves in Pennsylvania; mangled little shoats in Kentucky. These days she fancied fawns and feral pigs. Every place he'd tracked her though, she'd been too canny for the special trap he'd designed, and he'd never been able to draw close enough to get a shot off.
Shit
, Henry thought in disgust, aiming into the white nothingness.
You've wandered up and down these mountains for thirty
years and you still can't beat Daddy's little girl.

He listened, peering into the mist, but he heard nothing more. “Musta been a troll,” he muttered, rising to his feet. Immediately his father's voice boomed through his head.
Der Kobold will come and pluck out your eyes, he said.
Then he laughed that jouncing, beer barrel laugh. Hohohoho.
Poor little sissy Heinrich. All these years and still scared of goblins.

Brank shook the mocking voice from his head. His father was dead now, surely. His mother, too. All the Branks of western Pennsylvania were gone. All except him and Trudy.

He picked his way down the ridge, testing each step, careful not to veer off the trail and plunge headlong into the Hell. At a small gap the fog thinned, and he spotted a shallow limestone niche that a spring had eroded from the mountainside. He wouldn't be able to stand upright inside, but he could at least crouch away from the cold wind.

“Here we go, Buster.” He flung his sack into the damp crack. “I'll build us a fire and we'll roast Thumper here for lunch instead of dinner.”

It took him a while to find enough dry tinder beneath the damp leaves, but soon he had a small pine blaze built on the edge of the rock.

With four quick strokes of his knife he beheaded and eviscerated the rabbit. He pulled the skin off, then cut a green hickory branch from beside the spring and suspended the body over the now hot fire. Small droplets of oil began to bead up on the rabbit's flesh. Brank grinned. Rabbit had always been his favorite.

He stretched out his legs and pulled Buster out of his sack. The mud-colored snake was a yard long, the pattern on its back similar to that of a rattler. It twisted angrily in Brank's hand, annoyed at being plucked from its warm bed and thrust into the cool air. “Just get off your high horse, Buster,” Brank warned the writhing reptile. “You've been sleeping on a hundred and twenty-seven primo coon skins all day. Not many snakes can say that.”

The fire sent up wisps of thin gray smoke that carried the aroma of roasting meat. Brank put Buster back down on top of the sack and absently began to pluck the beggar lice that clung to his pants. Tomorrow, if the whiteout lifted, he would reach the Little Jump Off Post Office. There, people would ship his pelts to Michigan and sell him coffee and magazines. A shiver of anticipation ran through him.

The rabbit's juices began to drip down into the flames. The smell made Henry's stomach wrench with hunger. He smiled. Rabbit had been the first thing he'd learned to kill in the woods.

He was sixteen when he fled down here from Pennsylvania. He'd hung around the edges of small mountain towns, hungry for the sound of talk, finding thin comfort in the neon-lit windows of roadside bars. Even though he had his shotgun, the woods still terrified him and he lived on the sodden french fries and half-chewed steak bones that he dug out of restaurant trash bins. But what he had left behind at home had scared him even more and at night he always retreated into the woods where no one could find him. He would curl up beneath some tree, where every slithery sound the forest made sent a bolt of stark terror straight through him. Most nights he stayed awake, trembling, praying that God would arrange some kind of dispensation that would allow him back into civilization. Then, one morning while he shivered under a log on the north side of Big Stone Gap, a man appeared out of a locust grove. He wore a battered felt hat pulled down over his blind right eye and carried a shotgun with silver scrolling on the stock.

“Hidy, boy,” he said, smiling an odd smile. “You look to be in a fair amount of discomfort.”

That was how they met. Fate Lyons was a Vietnam vet from West Virginia who, in exchange for certain favors, taught Henry Brank tracking and trapping and the million other things he needed to know to survive these mountains. Though Fate's unrestrained appetite for boys eventually led to their parting, Brank still thought of him often, and with gratitude. He doubted he could have survived long without Fate Lyons's tutelage.

He wiggled the rabbit's haunch. It moved freely away from the body, golden-brown and glistening. He pulled the whole carcass from the spit and bit into the shoulder, putting a small chunk of the inside meat in front of Buster. The tiny forked tongue sniffed with interest.

“That's good stuff, Buster,” Brank said, biting off a chunk of the meat. “Rabbit à la Fate.”

He ate until he'd sucked the bones dry, then he threw the delicate skeleton into the fire and looked out into the thick wet cotton that surrounded him. There was no point in going further today—in two hours he'd lose what little light he had. If he continued down the ridge, he might find himself plunging headlong into the Hell like poor Godfrey and his hounds. It would put him behind schedule, but he'd do better to wait out the fog here.

With a deep sigh he took off his belt and unbuttoned his damp shirt. Icy wisps of mist chilled his flesh. He spread his shirt out close to the fire to dry, then turned, bare-chested, to his sack, from which he pulled a bottle filled with clear liquid. He uncapped it and took a long drink. As always, the first swallow scorched his throat and teared his eyes, but in a minute an easier, more pleasant heat radiated through him, turning him jocular and expansive.

“Damn, that's good,” he whispered. He removed his boots and socks, and stood up, unzipping his pants and laying them beside the shirt. His body bore the marks of years of a hardscrabble mountain existence. Though he was half a foot taller than when he'd first come here, no fat covered his bones. Pale white skin stretched over a sinewy skeleton; the veins in his hands formed a bas-relief over the taut muscles of his arms. Scars from bites and scratches decorated him like tattoos. Five of his teeth had rotted away and a mis-set bear trap in Maine had nearly snapped off his leg. That day he thought he might die, in fact, prayed he would die, but he didn't. He'd bound his mangled shin and crawled off to chew up some pills he'd stolen from a hiker. After a month of fever dreams punctuated by a torturous thirst, he could walk again, though never as straight or as fast as before.

He crouched by the fire nude, his penis shriveling in the crisp air. He held his arms out to the thick white murk, as if to implore the weather to cease. In the firelight his pale body looked like a long sycamore branch come suddenly alive, and his beseeching motions linked him to an older time, when all men sat around fires and invoked the gods for good fortune.

When the whiskey had turned his frozen-up muscles warm and limber, he pulled another knife from his sack. He placed this one at the end of one log, then slowly, with inward-gazing eyes, he spread his fingers and felt inch by inch the skin of his skull, then the skin that lay beneath his dark, matted beard. “Good!” he grunted when he reached the point of his chin. “Nobody home.”

He did the same thing to his neck, then his shoulders, then his chest. He stopped suddenly, half an inch below his left nipple. “Ha!” he muttered, parting the thick hair that grew there. “Here's one little bastard trying to suck my tit!” Pressing his long thumbnails together, he wedged underneath the spot on his skin and plucked out a tick the size of a dime. He held the creature up to the air, then he licked it with his tongue and placed it on the now-warm blade of his knife. The tick did not move.

Carefully he resumed his procedure, going down both legs, searching between his toes, then ending with the coarser hair that curled around his genitals. He leaned back and sighed with pleasure, as his fingers searched that damp, familiar territory. He had begun to think that maybe today there would be just the one when his right hand felt a bump between his penis and scrotum.

“Damn!” he said with delight. “It's always the sweet meat!” He took a deep breath, then jerked the tick out. He sat up and peered at his crotch. A single drop of blood had spattered against his thigh.

He stared at the squirming bug between his fingers. “You're gonna go dancing with your buddy,” he announced, placing it next to the other tick on his knife. “It's not nice to suck people's blood.”

He curled around the fire and placed the knife over a lapping tongue of flame. The ticks were oblivious to it. They would be at first. Then the blade would heat up and they would begin to crawl faster and faster, searching for a way off the red-hot blade, only to find that their only way off was into the fire itself. Brank chuckled as he settled down to watch the show. He loved tick dances. He held them most every night.

When the ticks finally plunged into the fire with a sizzle and a sputter he put Buster back in the sack and wrapped up in an old wool blanket. He wondered if he wasn't getting too old for all this damp cold. His leg ached every night and there was a stiffness in his shoulders that no longer went away. Maybe now was the time to head south. He'd read that living was easy in Florida if you could get past Disney World. 'Course there were alligators and coral snakes down there, but it was warm, and the Everglades were, to his knowledge, without cold and frost and the specter of his sister. He sighed. If he could just kill Trudy once and for all, heading south would be exactly what he would do.

He pulled his shotgun close beside him, curled himself around the fire and stared out into the cottony haze. Not being able to see anything made him edgy—his nose and ears had never been as good as Fate's. And who knew what madness Trudy or the trolls might do if they snuck up on him unawares? He hugged his rifle close and sighed. Maybe they couldn't see him, either. Anyway, there was nothing he could do about it now.

“Don't borrow trouble,” Henry Brank chided himself as he settled down to rest. To hike these pelts to Little Jump Off without getting lost in the Hell or eaten by Trudy would be trouble enough of its own.