The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (33 page)

I was just turning to look downriver when three things happened at the same instant: A brief flash lit the shadowy lacework of a hemlock sapling on the near bank; the air ripped and zinged beside my left ear; and a sharp crack reverberated within the narrow gorge of the stream. By the time my brain realized that I’d just been shot at, my body had already begun reacting instinctively, ducking and darting across the swaying I-beam toward the far side of the stream. The crack of another shot mingled with the clang of a bullet slamming into the steel bridge. As I reached the far bank, a third shot chipped the rocky embankment beside my head, sending shards of stone into my face and neck. Jesus,I thought,the TBI’s shooting at me. Then I thought,No, that can’t be. I’m a TBI consultant. I’ve worked with them for years. They might want to arrest me—they surely want to question me—but they can’t possibly want to kill me.

But someone obviously did.Sinclair, I thought, but then,How can it be Sinclair? The FBI arrested him yesterday. A fourth shot whanged into the rocks.I guess he got out, I decided. I ran, chased by a fifth shot.

I couldn’t have said how far I ran; all I knew was that I ran, up and up the twisting trail, until I stopped to vomit from the exertion. My gasping breath was interrupted by the heaves of my stomach—heaves that left me gasping even harder for air. The edges of my vision began to go black, and I dropped to my hands and knees, fighting to control my panic and desperate breath. Once my heaves dried up and my breath slowed down, I took stock of my situation, and I didn’t like what I saw. Somewhere below me was a person who had a gun and a wish to kill me, so heading back down the trail didn’t seem to be the path of wisdom. I recalled two other trails in this section of the park—the West Prong Trail, which began at the point where Tremont Road turned from pavement to gravel, and Bote Mountain Trail, which the West Prong Trail hit at a T junction. It seemed possible, or even likely, that this trail would intersect one of those two trails and lead me safely to the road.

I stood and continued up the trail, shakily at first, then with more strength and confidence. Judging by the direction of the sun, I was heading southwest—the general direction of the Bote Mountain Trail, if my memory was correct. But judging by the angle of the sun, I didn’t have much daylight left in which to find it. I checked my watch: It was four-thirty, and that meant I had an hour, maybe ninety minutes, before darkness would catch me in the mountains.

I hiked for half an hour, hoping to hit the intersection with the Bote Mountain Trail. As the trail continued to climb, the sun continued to drop; so did the temperature, and gradually my breath began to fog. Soon the trail snaked up a shaded slope through a patch of snow and ice—not a good sign. Off slightly to my right, perhaps ten miles away and thousands of feet below, I caught a glimpse of Cades Cove, a bowl in the mountains that had been settled and cleared in the early 1800s. Seeing Cades Cove gave me a better fix on my location, but the knowledge was unsettling. The trail, I realized with a sinking feeling, was taking me up to the crest of the mountains—probably up Thunderhead Mountain, the highest peak in the western part of the Smokies. The clothes I was wearing were fine for a warm afternoon in the sun, but not for a night on Thunderhead at five thousand feet.

Would anyone come looking for me—anyone besides Ray Sinclair? Nobody from the Anthropology Department, surely. Miranda had resigned. No one else would have given a thought to my early departure, and no one else would expect to see me before Monday. My one hope—the one silver lining to being suspected of committing fraud and theft—was that the TBI might somehow follow my trail to the mountains. But how? I’d told no one where I was heading, and I doubted that the TBI considered me worthy of an urgent manhunt.

I had two other options, as I saw it. One was to backtrack, hoping that whoever had been shooting at me had given up and gone away. The other was to bushwhack: to cut directly down the mountainside, then follow the small stream I could hear churning far below. I felt certain that the stream fed into the West Prong of the Little Tennessee River; I could even, in my mind’s eye, picture the very bridge where the West Prong flowed beneath the highway. I decided to bushwhack. Veering off the trail, I began scrambling—half running, half falling—down the mountainside. But could I reach the highway by dark?

I could not. Twilight caught me at the confluence where the small stream joined the West Prong. The river gorge had darkened sooner and faster than the higher slopes, and the terrain was steeper and rockier along the water. My side of the river, the south bank, appeared rugged as far as I could see, with stone bluffs and thickets of rhododendron. The north bank looked more passable, but getting to it would require crossing the river. I scanned the stream for a narrows where I might be able to rock-hop across, but I didn’t see one, and I was running out of time to search. Sitting down on a boulder at the water’s edge, I shucked off my shoes, socks, pants, and underwear, then waded in, clutching my rolled-up clothes above my head and wearing my shoes draped around my neck by the laces, like a primitive tribal token of victory over some L.L. Bean–shod academic rival.

The water was cold—gaspingly, achingly cold, so cold that my feet felt as if they’d been clamped in a vise. Within seconds, though, the pain gave way to numbness, which was better but also worse, making it difficult to feel the slippery rocks underfoot. Twice I nearly fell, when my numbed feet stumbled; both times I nearly lost my grip on my precious bundle of clothes. The water was deeper than I’d expected, too. It knifed its way above my knees and up my thighs. “Ow,crap, ” I said as the cold stabbed at my crotch.

By the time I reached the other side—probably only a minute or so—I was shuddering. Sitting on a chilly rock, I used my hands to squeegee the water down my legs, then rubbed my feet briskly with my socks to dry them and to restore circulation and feeling. I dressed as quickly as my shaking hands and quaking limbs allowed, then set off downstream.

As the darkness deepened, so did the growl of menace I heard rumbling in the water. Both sides of the gorge got steeper, the rocks became mossy, and the footing grew treacherous. The second time my feet slid out from under me, I decided to seek higher, drier ground. I could still follow the river’s course by ear, I reasoned, but I’d be safer if I didn’t need to negotiate every riverside boulder and ledge in the darkness. Overhead, in the wedge of night sky, I found the Big Dipper and the North Star, which confirmed that I was indeed headed westward, toward the highway. That knowledge was reassuring, but the absence of moonlight was disheartening.

Gradually the terrain I was crossing steepened, and soon I was reduced to side-crawling on all fours, scuttling blindly across the slope. Judging by the leaves beneath my hands, I was in deciduous forest of some sort—maybe tulip poplars, maybe oaks and maples. The leaves were dry; the winter snows that had fallen on this south-facing slope had long since melted.

The leafy soil under my hands and feet had just given way to bare rock when I took a step sideways and suddenly felt myself sliding off a ledge. Instinctively I flung out my arms, and as my legs and then my hips crossed the brink, I managed to catch hold of a small tree rooted in a crevice. Clinging to it, I prayed that it would hold, and I carefully hauled myself up onto the ledge. In the darkness I couldn’t see the cliff that nearly claimed me, nor could I see the tree that saved me. Guided only by the sound of the river and the feel of the mountainside, I groped onward.

The feel changed abruptly in the space of one sideways step, and the mountainside grew loose and crumbly beneath my left hand and left foot. I stopped and swept my hand across the ground in an arc, from my foot up to shoulder height and above. I felt no trees, no twigs, not even dead leaves—nothing but crumbling soil and loose rocks.My God, I thought,a landslide. How wide is this, and how unstable, and how in the world do I cross it?

I crossed it by inches, feeling for handholds and footholds before committing to a move. After half a dozen such moves, I came to a rock the size of a watermelon, half buried in the loose slope to the left of my head. As I edged beneath it, the rock tore free in my hands. I ducked my head, shifted to the left, and dug my left toe and left hand into the loose soil, praying that they’d hold. Sparks sprang from the mountainside as the rock crashed down—fifty feet, eighty feet, a hundred or more. It clattered to a stop on the heap of earth and rock and trees that had recently sheared off and slid down the slope. By the time I’d traversed the slide zone and reentered the forest, I was exhausted. I couldn’t see my watch in the darkness—I couldn’t even see my hand in the blackness—but I guessed it must be midnight or later, and my strength was gone.I need to sleep for a little while, I thought. Bracing my feet on a large tree, I lay down, though I was actually as near to standing as I was to reclining. Raking dead leaves from the dirt around me, I created a nest to retain whatever body heat I could. Just as I began to doze, I was awakened by my body’s shivering, mild at first, then violent. As long as I’d kept scrabbling across the slope, I’d felt tolerably warm in my thin shirt, except for the cold seeping into my hands. But with my internal engine now idling—and sputtering at that, given my lack of food and water—I couldn’t withstand the cold. I had to keep moving.

But I was growing seriously dehydrated. There was water, and in abundance, only a few hundred feet below me. I was reminded of its presence, and its power, as I crept blindly past each roaring rapid. Reluctantly, fearfully, I began edging downward, relinquishing my buffer from the wet rocks and the churning water.

Soon the unseen stream filled my ears, only a few feet to my left. Now all I had to do was find a safe place to descend the bank and drink. Would it be safer—and sap less body heat—to scoop up handfuls of water or to lie on my belly and drink like a wild animal? My hands were already going numb, so I felt inclined to lie flat and put my face in the stream.

I was just beginning to anticipate the taste when I took a small step with my left foot and—for the second time that night—found nothing there. Odd: I’d been shuffling along, feeling my way with excruciating slowness, yet even so, the earth dropped away beneath me. I felt myself toppling, free-falling, and then landing in frigid water. Just below the surface, my left side hit a rock, and I felt a sharp pain in my ribs. But it was the gasp-inducing frigidity of the water that imperiled me. If my head had been submerged, I would surely have inhaled a lethal lungful of water. As I struggled to gain my footing on the slippery rocks, I realized how little time I had. I was already on the edge of hypothermia; the frigid water would surely push me over the brink swiftly. And for the first time, as I began to shiver violently, I wondered if I should give in, simply surrender to the cold and the exhaustion and the pain. Hypothermia was said to be a relatively swift and pleasant way to go, after all. If I remained in the water, or even crawled onto a rock and lay still, perhaps I’d drift off painlessly after only a few moments of cold. Would that be so bad, really, given the turns my life had taken lately? Jeff wouldn’t answer my phone calls, Miranda despised me, the TBI wanted to interrogate me, UT would surely fire me, Ray Sinclair wanted to ruin or kill me, and a federal fugitive was carrying my child. How much easier it might be to let go than to keep struggling and striving.

The river’s current washed me onto a small, rocky beach, and I crawled out and lay on my back so I could see the sky before my eyes closed. The Big Dipper had shifted dramatically from its position at nightfall, rotating a quarter turn around the North Star. The great wheel of life and fate would continue to spin long after I was gone. I found that comforting and hoped that life would bring abundant happiness to those I cared about: to Jeff and Jenny and their boys, to Miranda and Art, to the struggling Garcias. I even wished some form of peace to Isabella, wherever she was.

But as I lay there, sending benevolent wishes to the universe on behalf of those people, a small realization forced its way into my slipping consciousness. My death would not bring abundant goodness to my family, friends, and colleagues; in fact, it would surely bring deep sadness. When I was three, my own father had killed himself, and although that act had ended his own inner pain, it had created untold pain in those he left behind. If I simply gave in to the cold right now, instead of fighting for life with everything I had, wouldn’t that be a halfhearted, cowardly version of suicide? Did I want to let myself die instead of trying harder to live for the ones I loved?

I shook my head to clear it. I rolled onto my right side, then onto my stomach, and took a deep drink of the ice-cold water—the drink I’d come down to get, before my fall. Then I found a gnarled rhododendron branch snaking down the high, steep embankment, grabbed it with both hands, and pulled myself upward.

I found the pole star again, low above the opposite ridge. It was on my right as I turned downstream. That meant I was still heading west. Still heading for the highway. Still heading for life. I scrabbled uphill as quickly as I could, putting some distance between myself and the stream’s treacherous gorge, and as I did, the effort gradually took away some of the chill.

Eventually I felt, rather than saw, an opening ahead of me. I still couldn’t see my hand in front of my face unless I held it up to create a five-fingered silhouette against the starry sky. But the blackness ahead was suddenly less black than it had been. It seemed like open, empty blackness rather than forested blackness. Grasping a tree branch for safety, I used a foot to probe the ground ahead. It turned rocky, and then it turned to empty air. I was on the brink of another cliff, though I had no way of knowing if it was ten feet high or a hundred. If I turned slightly left, I could continue along what felt like the edge of the precipice—but that would be heading south, not west. Had I come to a sharp bend in the river gorge, or was this a side canyon, carved by a lesser tributary? If it was, then following it would take me back up into the mountains, and that would be disastrous. I had to stop until daylight. I hoped I could make it until daylight.