Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (3 page)

Finally she was back where she’d grown up, where she knew everyone and they knew her. But in all her imaginings of what it would be like to return to the quirky mountain community she’d been raised in, she’d never envisioned this particular scenario.

When it should’ve been impossible for her day to get worse, it had gotten much,
much
worse. Instead of being on the road to Sean’s funeral, she was cowering in a bathroom at the Talley’s home trying to escape Wanda Talley, the diabetic from hell.

A couple of minutes earlier Wanda had abruptly stopped screaming threats and pounding on the door and shuffled away in the distinctive gait of a person with peripheral neuropathy. Now she was back and eerily silent. Phoebe could hear her breathing heavily on the other side of the door and making metallic scratching noises near the knob.

Wanda was a 375-pound housebound diabetic who was out of control in more ways than one. When Phoebe had tested her that morning, Wanda’s blood sugar was sky-high and she complained that she’d lost all the feeling in her feet. Wanda had gone from being able to regulate her disease with pills to needing multiple insulin injections every day.

Phoebe hated to stand by and watch someone eat herself into an early grave. So she decided to take extreme measures to save Wanda’s life. She made a sweep of the premises and discovered a stash of doughnuts under the bed as well as half a bag of Double Stuff Oreos. Then she found a family-size pack of Peanut M&Ms hidden behind a roll of toilet paper underneath the bathroom sink. She’d seized the forbidden items and naively attempted to walk out the front door with them. But Phoebe failed to anticipate the magnitude of Wanda’s sugar addiction and thus the violence of her reaction to the confiscation of her guilty pleasures.

 In a matter of seconds Phoebe was suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, running for her life. But that brought her only as far as the bathroom. Now she was trapped in there with the
carbs
.

Phoebe was genuinely concerned for Wanda. She had to find a way to help her get control of her diet and lose weight. If not, Wanda’s diabetes was going to land her in the middle of a dirt sandwich.
And soon.

“Wanda,” she said, loud enough to be heard on the other side of the door, “have you ever tried tapping?”

There was no response aside from an increased intensity in the scraping at the lock.

“It’s an alternative type of therapy that works well for a lot of people. It’s sorta like acupressure-meets-psychotherapy. It’s free, you can do it yourself, you don’t need any equipment, and
there’s no drugs
involved. Why don’t we give it a try?”

Phoebe waited, but Wanda’s persistent scratching continued.

She soldiered on, gamely, “In tapping, you try to discover whatever’s really
botherin
you, the thing that’s
makin
you overeat in the first place. You tap on a series of acupressure spots and say things like, ‘Even though I eat too much, I totally love and unconditionally accept myself.’”

Again, Wanda said nothing.

“The idea comes from the
Carl
Rogers
School
of psychotherapy, you know, the unconditional positive regard fellow? This is a kind of do-it-yourself version of his thing, plus clearing the Chinese energy meridians at the same time.”

The only reply was Wanda’s ongoing lock picking efforts.

 “Let’s tap on ourselves, okay?” Phoebe said, trying to sound brave, knowing full well that Wanda intended do a lot more than
tap
on her when she got through the door.

“First you tap on the center of your eyebrow with the middle finger of your dominant hand.”

Phoebe went through the first couple of steps of the tapping process, alone. Then she gave up. She needed to try something else. “Okay, forget tapping.
There’s
lots of different approaches that work, like meditation and centering prayer. Those techniques can be really effective, too. The training for
Trappist
monks, the ones who don’t talk, is very similar to the 12 Steps. Did you know that?”

Obviously Wanda had a pretty strong ability to maintain focus, but unfortunately it was on sugar instead of the Lord or world peace. Phoebe looked around for an exit. The window was the only possibility. She briefly considered trying to flush the armload of junk food she’d confiscated, but didn’t want to clog up the toilet.

Wanda needed some time to climb down from her sugar high and cool off. And Phoebe needed to get away.

She unlocked the window and heaved up on the bottom sash. It shuddered slowly upward. She clicked the little latches on the screen and moved it out of the way, too. She was scooping up the contraband she’d dumped onto the vanity when Wanda succeeded in picking the lock and burst through the door ready to wreak havoc.

Phoebe dropped the sweets and lunged awkwardly out the window.

Fortunately it was only three feet off the ground. She regained her footing and made a mad dash for her Jeep, ripped the door open, flung herself inside, and raced away in a hail of flying gravel without looking back.

There were some people in this world that you couldn’t reason with.

The
Great Smoky Mountains
National Park
was the most popular national park in the country. It was visited by nine million people a year, twice as many as went to the
Grand Canyon
and three times as many as toured
Yosemite
.

But because the
Smokies
was mostly a steep, trackless wilderness bisected by a single road, and because people generally didn’t wander more than fifty yards from their cars, the park was experienced by most tourists as a gigantic drive-thru forest. The place was filled with vegetation so lush, if there actually was a place on earth where you couldn’t see the forest for the trees, this would be it.

It was probably a good thing that the millions of people didn’t venture very far out into the woods. What looked pretty from the car could easily turn into a death trap to the unwary or unprepared. The propensity of outsiders to underestimate the park was highlighted by the world’s most famous travel writer, Bill Bryson, in his bestselling book
A Walk in the Woods
. Bryson set out to hike the 2,174 mile
Appalachian Trail
and started at the southern terminus in
Georgia
,
walking north. But shortly after entering the 72-mile stretch of trail that passes through the
Great Smoky Mountains
National Park
, he changed his mind and abandoned his plan.

Even a modest taste of the park forced a world-renowned professional traveler to give up his dream, call for a cab, and flee to the nearest airport. Every day all sorts of adventures were begun, or ended, in the nation’s most beloved patch of woods.

In the span of a single day, the park might host events covering the entire span of a human life – birth, birthday party, romantic liaison, engagement, wedding, honeymoon, vacation, anniversary, reunion, accident, injury, illness, death, funeral, and burial. A vast array of activities took place year round, some accidental, some intentional, some legal, some not.

Several times a year a nonprofit research organization, Discover Life in
America
, known as
DLIA
, set up conferences for the All
Taxa
Bio-Inventory project in the
Smokies
. During these gatherings, dozens of scientists with expertise in biology and botany congregated in the national park for a few days to survey designated plant, animal, and insect species. Each scientist led a gang of volunteers, referred to as
Citizen Scientists
, who combed over selected areas of the park looking for the species chosen for study.

This week there were several
DLIA
surveys taking place
simultaneously.
Each of the teams needed volunteers, so the surveys were given enticing names like Fern Foray,
Karst
Quest, or Beetle, Butterfly, and Bat Blitzes.

Only three of the events were restricted to participants with special skills: the
karst
and bat surveys and the search for leviathan trees. All three of those required climbing and rappelling skills. The
karst
and bat work was done in caves. The tree searches were carried out in places so remote and arduous to traverse that only a few ultra-hardy and ultra-cocky souls ever attempted to participate.

In the search for the tallest trees, even among the experienced hikers who were the fittest people imaginable, most of them ended up bailing in shame after an hour or two of attempting to wade through rhododendron and mountain laurel thickets. The extreme sport of trying to move through the tangled shrubbery, called
hells
by the locals, was referred to as
rhodo
surfing
. It was an activity that only a handful of people in the world enjoyed.

Most of the surveys took place within a yard or less of well-known hiking trails since off-trail hiking, or even walking more than ten feet off a well-trod path, in the
Smoky
Mountains
was considered suicidal. A mountainous jungle was not a place you wanted to get lost in. So, for a few days a couple hundred people would crash around in the undergrowth, then go home sunburned, bug-bitten, slashed by briars, happy to have had a productive adventure in nature.

***

Luckily for Ivy’s attacker, the scientists were focused very narrowly, so there wasn’t much chance any of them would notice him or Ivy.

He’d been tracking Ivy’s excursions for over a month, and he’d learned how to enter and leave the groves of old growth forest without becoming lost. There were a couple of hiking trails that swathed through the corridors of ancient trees, but the places Ivy was interested in were well away from those.

If you had basic orienteering skills there were techniques for maintaining your bearings in any wilderness setting. The main thing to know about the Greenbrier area of the park was that from the air, the topography looked like a hand with the fingers spread out. The fingers were the ridges and the spaces between them were the valleys. He could keep track of his position by counting the finger hollows he traversed.

With the help of a detailed topographical quad map from the U.S. Geological Service, he knew which streams branched off where, and which ones would eventually lead back to the road. It wasn’t easy, but practice made perfect. After several expeditions, the trip had become routine.

This time, however, he needed to exercise extreme caution. It wouldn’t do to be noticed in the area. Although he doubted Ivy would be found for a long time, if ever, it was conceivable that a hiker might stumble into the area. In winter, when the leaves were off, it was possible that someone might spot her, and then questions would be asked about who might’ve been seen in the area.

He needed to get away without being noticed and he needed to do whatever he could to make sure her body was never found. That meant he had to lay a false trail for searchers. He could use her backpack for that. Then he’d move her car.

People who knew Ivy knew how she loved to spend time in the park. He could use that to his advantage. He’d leave the backpack where it would be discovered, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near Greenbrier. He’d take it to the far west side of the park and leave it in the busiest area, Cades Cove.

That way the search and rescue team would scour the wrong place. When her disappearance was noticed, there’d be a massive search, but after several days or a week of coming up empty-handed, the efforts would diminish. Ivy would become just another sad entry in the long list of people who’d vanished in the
Smokies
.