Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (10 page)

Jill sold a few pieces a week through the boutique in Cloud Forest, the exclusive 5-star dude farm near the park. The world famous resort was called
LaLa
Land
by the locals. It was a lucrative concept – a cleverly reversed version of
The Beverly Hillbillies
where the rich people paid to leave their exclusive gated enclaves for a vacation in the sticks. They could visit
Green Acres
without having to live there.

In a tiny cove that had been a subsistence farm until recently, the urban rich could pay $1,000 a day to sit in rocking chairs and watch other people perform farm labor. It was a canny twist on the venerable Tom Sawyer fence-painting con, but you didn’t dare let any of the city people actually touch live animals or farm machinery.

Although they found Cloud Forest absurd, the people of White Oak were grateful for decent jobs close to home. As employees of the fake farm all they had to do was walk around in their regular clothes and talk to each other in their normal speech, while the well-heeled spectators took it all in as part of an elaborate historic reenactment. Although it felt odd to be watched while working in what amounted to a human version of an ant farm, it paid better than the hotels and restaurants in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, and at Cloud Forest they got to work outside in a beautiful place.

Phoebe looked out the large window and saw another flash coming from the same place she’d seen earlier. Jill noticed her worried look and said, “Are you still
seein
something out there?”

Phoebe nodded,
then
she said, “It’s probably
nothin
.” But she didn’t look convinced.

When he had the mother bear and her cubs safely housed at the wildlife building, Henry upended the torn backpack onto his desk. Then he carefully checked each of the separate compartments and emptied them.

He examined every item in the pack, looking for clues. There was nothing to identify the owner, but he did find something interesting. It was a brass key with code numbers stamped into it. The numbers were GSM-147.

It was an official Department of Interior key. The GSM meant
Great Smoky Mountains
and the numbers identified a particular lock on the roster of buildings under the stewardship of the park. Henry didn’t know where lock number 147 was, but he knew somebody who would.

He walked over to the maintenance compound to talk to Jimmy Helton, a machinist and the park key maker.

Henry stuck his head into Jimmy’s shop. Jimmy was welding, but shut off his torch and raised his mask when he saw Henry. “Hey Jimmy,” Henry said, handing him the key. “Sorry to bother you, but I was
wonderin
if you could tell me what this is for?”

“Let’s see,” he said looking at the number stamped into the brass. “Not off the top of my head, but we have our ways. Follow me.”

He led Henry over to his key making department, a tiny, metal-filled cubbyhole, where he used two dirty index fingers to peck at the keys on his computer.

My how park
rangering
has changed
, Henry thought.

“It’s to the little lodge up on
Laurel
Ridge
.”

Henry tried to picture the place in his mind’s eye, but had only the vaguest recollection of it.

“I can understand why he’d want you to have emergency access to it,” Jimmy said. “It’d be a tolerable place to hole up in if you got stuck out on the ridge, but I hope he told you it hasn’t been repaired yet.”

“It hasn’t?” said Henry, hoping he sounded like he understood what Jimmy was talking about.

“No, he hasn’t scheduled a work detail since he reported it uninhabitable. This is a spare key I made for him, but the cabin is out of service. It’s off limits for VIPs or visiting scientists, even for rangers. He asked me take it off the building roster, but I just marked it as inactive.”

“Oh,” said Henry. He peeked at the screen over Jimmy’s shoulder and saw the name associated with the key. It was Fielding, the Park Superintendent.

“I’m sure our fearless leader has more important things on his mind than some old cabin that’s
fallin
in.”

“I hear
ye
,” agreed Henry. He thanked Jimmy and left, taking the key with him.

Talk about your rock and a hard place. Henry decided not to mention the key to anybody else. His priority was to track down the owner of the backpack. Establishing a connection between a shredded backpack, the Superintendent, and a broken down cabin was more than he cared to undertake. He’d have to pursue that part of his investigation
discreetely
since he stayed in enough trouble with his boss as it was.

***

Despite his reservations, late in the day, when Henry’s tasks took him close to Laurel Ridge Lodge, he decided to swing by and take a look.

The cabin was one of the original buildings left from the days before the park was created when the land was privately owned. He saw why it was referred to as a lodge. This cabin was built in a place so
steep,
it couldn’t have been associated with a farm. It must’ve been used for camping or hunting or as a family getaway.

From the outside the building appeared to be in good shape. The shake roof and log walls were perfectly intact. He tried the key in the lock and it turned easily, leaving a gray residue on his fingertips. He looked at the stain more closely. It was graphite. Someone had serviced the lock recently.

The door swung back soundlessly on its hinges. The one-room cabin was simply furnished in yuppie rustic. It had a red enamel woodstove for heating and cooking, a small scrubbed pine dinner
table,
a couple of hickory stick chairs with the bark still on them, a bed made with rope springs and a simple mattress. The flannel sheets and
Hudson Bay
blanket were from L.L. Bean.

The cabinets in the kitchen area were stocked with coffee, tea, hot chocolate, packets of ramen noodle soup mix, water purification gear, a few dishes and mugs, some flatware, a small assortment of pots and pans, and cooking utensils. Everything was clean and neat. The place wasn’t dusty or musty. Someone had to be using it regularly.

Henry searched the room methodically. It wasn’t until he got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed, however, that he located a clue to the cabin’s occupant. He found a tiny metal pine cone. He examined it carefully. Actually it was a sequoia cone. It was one of the ornaments that decorated a National Park Service hatband.

Over the years, the cones had been made of various metals, the most recent ones being gold-plated. But hatbands could be transferred from one hat to another because the bands tended to last longer than the hats themselves. Occasionally a collector might have an antique band with sterling silver ornaments or a high-ranking park official might even wear a vintage band as a status symbol.

Fielding was a bit of a dandy. He wore a very rare hatband with ornaments made of nickel. The cone Henry held in his hand was also made of nickel. He sighed and sat down in the floor holding the incriminating cone. He rubbed his eyes, as if that would make the thing go away.

He tried to focus on the good news. At least there was no dead body in the cabin, no blood anywhere, and no signs of a struggle. He’d never liked his boss, but he couldn’t see the guy murdering anyone. His 72-hour workday just kept getting worse. He tilted his head back against the bed to try and figure out what to do next, but was too tired to formulate a plan. With his eyes closed it took less than a minute for him to drift off to sleep.

Phoebe sat up suddenly, roused from a nightmare with a huge rush of adrenalin. She threw off the light blanket and flopped back down,
laying
with her arms flung out, bathed in sweat, waiting for the nausea and dizziness to pass.

She dreaded these dreams. She used the front of her shirt to blot the sweat off her face, and tried to recover from the horrible image of the blond-haired girl dangling helplessly in the tree.

Phoebe always tried to look on the bright side of life, but at times like this it was hard to find one. Precognitive dreams were simply a fact of life for the women in her family. She usually didn’t know who the person in the dream was or where the scene would be played out, but she could be certain it would happen just the way she saw it.

When the phone rang, she was grateful for the interruption. “Hey girl!” said a loud and perky voice, “
What’er
ye up to?”

“
Takin
a nap.
What time is it?”

“It’s late.”

“Then why are you
callin
? Is Bruce
makin
you hound people at their homes now?”

“Heck no, you know Bruce can’t make me do anything I don’t want to. I’m just
checkin
to be sure you’re okay.”

At first Phoebe was confused and wondered how
Waneeta
could possibly know she’d had a bad dream, but then she shook off the fog of sleep and realized it was still the day of her boyfriend’s funeral.

“Yeah,” Phoebe mumbled, “I’m okay.”

“Well, don’t worry about anything, honey, if you
wanna
take some time off I’ll find somebody to cover for you.”

“You don’t have to do that. I’d rather stay busy.”

Phoebe’d
learned long ago that taking care of other people was the best way to keep her mind off her own problems.

“Well, if that’s what ye want,”
Waneeta
said. “I’ll be
thinkin
of
ye
. Call if ye need anything.”

 Phoebe thanked her and hung up the phone. She laid on the couch for a few more minutes offering a brief heartfelt prayer for Sean and for the girl she’d seen in her dream. Then she got up and went into the kitchen to make dinner.

The sun was setting as she scrambled a couple of eggs and ate them on thin slices of whole wheat toast. As she chewed she stared longingly at the little gallery of
Nikola
Tesla photos on the refrigerator.        

There was a formal portrait and also a couple of pictures of him at work. They were all in black and white. Tesla had such a handsome face. Phoebe was in love with him.

They’d never met, because he’d died more than a decade before she was born, but she loved him anyway. She stared at the photo of him sitting calmly reading, while beside him an electrical monstrosity threw out sparks and lightning bolts every which way.

To Phoebe’s way of thinking Tesla was the perfect man. He was beautiful, brilliant, and geeky. He loved animals and lived off crackers and milk. He could’ve been the world’s first billionaire, but he wouldn’t take the time to sign the paperwork because he didn’t want to be distracted from his work.

For the similar reasons he’d chosen to be celibate and unmarried. People who didn’t understand him said all kinds of goofy things about him, but his work spoke for itself. Some of the most famous scientists and inventors in history had stolen their best stuff from him, Edison for one. Tesla was the guy who was actually responsible for electricity and radio.

Nikola
was possibly one of the reasons Phoebe had never married. She didn’t dare tell anyone, though. They wouldn’t understand. Sometimes she thought she might be in contact with his spirit because whenever she thought of him for more than a few seconds, it made her dizzy and she could see visions of rainbows shaped like doughnuts and other things that didn’t actually exist as far as she knew.