Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (2 page)

As the night reluctantly yielded to the dawn, tints of inky blue and evergreen were revealed. The view was sublime. With no cars, houses, or manmade objects of any kind in sight, or in earshot, there was just the dawn and the marvelously varied greens and blues of the
Smoky
Mountains
stretched out before her, easing her heart as she knew it would.

She was grateful that no matter what else was going on in her life, she always had these beautiful, lumpy old mountains for solace. They were the one constant in her chaotic world. She knew the
Smokies
hadn’t always looked this way. Geologists claimed that millions of years ago they’d been higher than the
Himalayas
after being thrust up from an ocean bed in an immense collision of the super continent Pangaea.

For eons afterwards, towering walls of rock more than five miles high had weathered down to nubs. Then they’d been teased up high again when
Africa
crashed against
North America
before the continents settled into the places they currently occupied. These days, the hunchback ridges were thought to be in their third decline, brought low by two hundred and fifty million years of erosion.

That was the cycle of life, Phoebe thought,
youthful
exuberance meeting wear and tear. Standing up and getting knocked down, over and over again. The ancient mountains presented a deceptively soft and gentle appearance. Just like a lot of people as they aged. But looks could be deceiving, whether it was people or landscapes.

In fact, looks were nearly always deceiving in one way or another, Phoebe mused. This was especially so in the southern Appalachian highlands. Outsiders tended to see whatever they wanted to see,
The
Beverly
Hillbillies,
Deliverance,
or
Mayberry
. In truth, this was home to a vastly underestimated and misunderstood people. If a medical analogy could be made, the regional culture would be called a
syndrome
, a cluster of odd symptoms that might seem unrelated unless you were smart enough to correctly identify what you were looking at.

In this case, the distinctive constellation of characteristics were that the inhabitants were tough as boot leather, wildly emotional on the inside while struggling to appear stoic on the outside, deeply spiritual, and possessed with an irrepressible, zany sense of humor. Phoebe had been born and raised here, so she was one of them, but she’d spent many years living in large cities like
Miami
and Washington as an adult, so she had some insight into how the local eccentricities were viewed by the rest of the world.

She’d driven up to Poplar Ridge before starting her workday because it was the place she liked to come when she was troubled. The view from there never failed to work on her like a tonic. Of course, one person’s medicine was another person’s poison. Phoebe wasn’t sure what made her think of that ancient warning, but she whispered the Latin phrase like an incantation to ward off evil,
Quod
medicina
aliis
,
aliis
est
acre
venenum
.

Phoebe was familiar with
death,
she was a nurse after all. But Sean’s death had been so mysterious. He’d died on a hiking trail from a head wound. The coroner’s best guess was that he’d slipped and fallen and hit his head on a rock.

But Sean didn’t hike. He liked to fish, but Phoebe had never known him to go hiking. It was unsettling. She wondered if outsiders were right and these mountains were somehow ominous. Maybe the smoke concealed evil, or a powerful kind of bad luck.

Well, even if it’d been a mistake to come back to
East Tennessee
, what was
done,
was done. She stood shivering in the cold, lingering for a few more minutes until the sun finally burst above the mountains in a glorious flare of gold and pink. That was what she’d been waiting for. Phoebe let the solar fire burn her eyes until she felt able to get on with her life. It was amazing how a bit of warmth and light was often all a person needed.

She made her way back to her car. Now that the sun was up, she could see the last of the tall summer wildflowers rising out of a ground-hugging mist, brilliant yellow goldenrod and deep purple ironweed. A knobby-kneed elk with an oversize set of antlers stepped out of the woods and looked around. He reminded Phoebe of a showgirl trying to prance around gracefully while wearing a preposterous headdress. He looked toward her and sniffed the air, his breath creating clouds of condensed water vapor around his head.

She got into her Jeep, a little hospital on wheels that served her faithfully as she ran the mountain roads on her rounds as a home health care nurse. As she drove away, calmed by the apparent serenity of the wilderness, she didn’t realize another cataclysmic collision was taking place deep in the forest. Not a prehistoric collision of continents this time, but a violent collision between two people.

The attacker had been waiting patiently for just this moment, for the girl to remove her helmet and invert herself. It presented a clear shot at her head.

Ivy barely had time to register the enormity of the situation before the first arrow hit her. But even if she’d seen it coming, hanging upside-down, she had little chance to avoid the blow since there was nothing to hide behind, or to kick against, to propel herself out of the way.

The bolt hit her in the right thigh and the shock of the impact made her drop her legs so she was jerked upright. Luckily she was at the extreme range of the crossbow and her bolt had a padded, practice tip. A sharp hunting point was far too dangerous to use as a rope launcher. Still, the arrow hit her with the force of a hammer, sending pain jangling up and down her right side, and set her spinning wildly.

She knew she’d be safer if she could climb higher, or get on top of a big limb, but she’d never make it onto the branch she was dangling underneath. She was hurt and in pain. There’d be too much scrambling involved
to climb
onto it from her position. She could descend and swing over onto a limb below her, but that would send her closer to her assailant. No, she decided she’d try to move around to the other side of the tree trunk, like squirrels did when they were being chased.

As Ivy swung, she flailed her arms and legs, trying to grab hold of something, anything, that would help her control her trajectory, but the small tips of branches she was able to reach tore off in her hands, and panic bloomed in her mind at the very real possibility she might die out here far away from any help, totally alone.

No, no, no
, she thought
.
Ivy kicked to widen her swing, hoping she was making a more difficult target, but it felt like precious little protection when she saw her attacker had retrieved the arrow and was reloading the crossbow.

When the weapon tilted up toward her again, she lifted her legs and put her face to her knees in an inverted jackknife that presented her butt as the biggest target. That would shield her as well as possible.

The second shot slammed into her back, at the top of her left hip. The savage blow forced her to let go of the rope and drop her legs again. The lower half of her body was paralyzed with pain.

She hung, limp as a
ragdoll
, helpless to save herself, and watched the dark figure reel in the cord for another shot.

“Stop!” she shouted, “I’ll do whatever you want. Please stop!”

There was nothing she could do to evade the third shot. The bolt slammed into the side of her head with enough force to penetrate her skull had it been carrying a metal tip. As it was, the impact of the arrow was hard enough to knock her unconscious. Her body flopped into a boneless backbend, swinging and spinning.

Ivy would have fallen out of the tree if the Blake’s hitch hadn’t fulfilled its function as dead man’s switch and held her aloft. Even if she’d been conscious, though, her erratic movements and upside-down perspective would’ve made it impossible for her to follow the movements of her attacker, let alone defend herself.

Luckily, her body’s gyrations made it equally difficult for the shooter to notice what was happening, preoccupied as he was with reloading the crossbow. Ivy’s slumped posture and rotation had upended the canvas equipment pouch that was clipped to the waistband of her harness and was spewing its contents. Announced by only a faint metallic jingle and zing, a hail of shrapnel made of spare
carabiners
, pliers, a buck knife, a folding saw, and a small hammer plummeted fifteen stories in a brutal metal rain.

Even the most mundane object could become deadly when dropped from a hundred and fifty feet. The folding saw tore a gash in her attacker’s scalp, while the pliers, and buck knife cut and bruised his face and shoulder. The slender bolt took a direct hit from the hammer and snapped in two, making the crossbow useless.

Her assailant was stunned by the blows to his head and fell to his knees. With a broken arrow and no rope, he had no way to reach Ivy. He had no means to inflict further harm on her. The lowest limb of the hemlock and the trailing end of her rope were more than eighty feet off the ground. Nobody could get to her now without a lot of climbing gear.

Enraged, he removed the broken pieces of the arrow and tossed them away. Then he crawled to the base of a tree a few yards away, slumped against the trunk, and tended to his wounds as best he could, wary of anything else that might fall.

Ivy’s body danced high overhead, gradually losing momentum in its swing and spin. Her attacker waited and watched for a long time, alert for the slightest indication that she might still be alive.

He was mightily frustrated not to be able to retrieve her body, but the more he thought about it, the more confident he became that it would never be found. The park was huge and the terrain was extremely rugged. Fortunately for him Ivy had a habit of going out alone wherever her whims took her and not telling the Park Service or anyone else where she was headed or when she’d be back.

She was well off any trail and hidden among the tree canopy. Even when the leaves were gone, it was unlikely she’d ever be spotted. Off-trail hikers didn’t look up while they walked. They kept their eyes on the ground because of the treacherous terrain and the very real possibility of poisonous snakes.

The encounter hadn’t gone the way he’d planned. He’d set out intending to talk to her, or at worst threaten her. But then he’d seen her lower the crossbow to the ground.

It was impulsive to use it, but the improvisation saved him a lot of wrangling. He pondered the situation and realized it was a perfect crime.

The wind blew, leaves rustled, and the rope creaked softly as Ivy swayed. Finally, satisfied that if she wasn’t already dead, she soon would be, the attacker gathered up her gear and purple backpack and walked away, leaving her hanging there like a circus performer frozen in mid-act, forever stranded between heaven and earth.

Blissful ignorance was great while it lasted, but if you had any brains at all it was impossible to remain clueless forever. Phoebe knew everybody went through rough patches, but this had gone too far. Nothing in her life was working out like she’d pictured.

Early in her career she’d wanted to experience the wider world beyond the
Smoky
Mountains
, so she’d moved away. She’d been shocked to find herself in places where people didn’t want to know, much less care about, their neighbors. For years she’d made good money as a nurse and worked her way up the ladder. But it bothered her to see affluent and cultured people congregating in picturesque enclaves from which they displayed the same haughty disinterest in their neighbors as they did the beggars sleeping on grates less than a block away.

That was no life for Phoebe. She loved people, all kinds of people. A person with her open and friendly ways couldn’t bear to live her whole life in a disconnected urban environment. So, six months ago, when she’d heard that the local doctor needed to retire and no one was willing to take his place, she’d ditched her career, moved back home to White Oak, Tennessee, and taken a job with the beleaguered rural health care agency that served the area. A good home health care nurse could take up a lot of the slack in a community that lost its doctor.