Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (32 page)

“That would be best, Evelyn,” I said.

“My daughter has been missing since July.” She opened her purse and took out a picture of a pretty young girl, soft brown hair like her mother’s, and young, happy eyes. “Her name is Amy. She was a freshman at East Tennessee State, and she went rafting with three of her friends on the Nolichucky. They all got separated by the current. When the other three met up farther downstream, they got out and went looking for Amy, but there was no trace of her. She hasn’t been seen since.”

“They dragged the river, I reckon.” Rock-studded mountain rivers are bad for keeping bodies snagged down where you can’t find them.

“They dragged that stretch of the Nolichucky for three days. They even sent down divers. They said even if she’d got wedged under a rock, we’d have something by now.” It cost her something to say that.

“Well, she’s a grown girl,” I said, to turn the flow of words. “Sometimes they get an urge to kick over the traces.”

“Not Amy. She wasn’t the party type. And even supposing she felt like that—because I know people don’t believe a mother’s assessment of character—would she run away in her bathing suit? All her clothes were back in her dorm, and her boyfriend was walking up and down the riverbank with the other two students, calling out to her. I don’t think she went anywhere on her own.”

“Likely not,” I said. “But it would have been a comfort to think so, wouldn’t it?”

Her eyes went wet. “I kept checking her bank account
for withdrawals, and I looked at her last phone bill to see if any calls were made after July sixth. But there’s no indication that she was alive past that date. We put posters up all over Johnson City, asking for information about her. There’s been no response.”

“Of course, the police are doing what they can,” I said.

“It’s the Wake County sheriff’s department, actually,” she said. “But the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is helping them. They don’t have much to go on. They’ve questioned people who were at the river. One fellow claims to have seen a red pickup leaving the scene with a girl in it, but they haven’t been able to trace it. The investigators have questioned all her college friends and her professors, but they’re running out of leads. It’s been three months. Pretty soon they’ll quit trying altogether.” Her voice shook. “You see, Mr.—Rattler—they all think she’s dead.”

“So you came to me?”

She nodded. “I didn’t know what else to do. Amy’s father is no help. He says to let the police handle it. We’re divorced, and he’s remarried and has a two-year-old son. But Amy is all I’ve got. I can’t let her go!” She set down the paper cup, and covered her face with her hands.

“Could I see that picture of Amy, Mrs.—Johnson?”

“It’s Albright,” she said softly, handing me the photograph. “Our real last name is Albright. I just felt foolish before, so I didn’t tell you my real name.”

“It happens,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening to her apology. I had closed my eyes, and I was trying to make the edges of the snapshot curl around me, so that I would be standing next to the smiling girl, and get some sense of how she was. But the photograph stayed cold and flat in my hand, and no matter how hard I tried to think my way into it, the picture shut me out. There was nothing.

I opened my eyes, and she was looking at me, scared, but waiting, too, for what I could tell her. I handed back
the picture. “I could be wrong,” I said. “I told you I’m no miracle worker.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Oh, yes. Since the first day, I do believe.”

She straightened up, and those slanting lines deepened around her mouth. “I’ve felt it, too,” she said. “I’d reach out to her with my thoughts, and I’d feel nothing. Even when she was away at school, I could always sense her somehow. Sometimes I’d call, and she’d say, ‘Mom, I was just thinking about you.’ But now I reach out to her and I feel empty. She’s just—gone.”

“Finding mortal remains is a sorrowful business,” I said. “And I don’t know that I’ll be able to help you.”

Evelyn Albright shook her head. “I didn’t come here about finding Amy’s body, Rattler,” she said. “I came to find her killer.”

I spent three more Dixie cups of herb tea trying to bring back her faith in the Tennessee legal system. Now, I never was much bothered with the process of the law, but, like I told her, in this case I did know that pulling a live coal from an iron potbellied stove was a mighty puny miracle compared to finding the one guilty sinner with the mark of Cain in all this world, when there are so many evildoers to choose from. It seemed to me that for all their frailty, the law had the manpower and the system to sort through a thousand possible killers, and to find the one fingerprint or the exact bloodstain that would lay the matter of Amy Albright to rest.

“But you knew she was dead when you touched her picture!” she said. “Can’t you tell from that who did it? Can’t you see where she is?”

I shook my head. “My grandma might could have done it, rest her soul. She had a wonderful gift of prophecy, but I wasn’t trained to it the way she was.
Her
grandmother was a Cherokee medicine woman, and she could read the
signs like yesterday’s newspaper. I only have the little flicker of Sight I was born with. Some things I know, but I can’t see it happening like she could have done.”

“What did you see?”

“Nothing. I just felt that the person I was trying to reach in that photograph was gone. And I think the lawmen are the ones you should be trusting to hunt down the killer.”

Evelyn didn’t see it that way. “They aren’t getting anywhere,” she kept telling me. “They’ve questioned all of Amy’s friends, and asked the public to call in for information, and now they’re at a standstill.”

“I hear tell they’re sly, these hunters of humans. He could be miles away by now,” I said, but she was shaking her head no.

“The sheriff’s department thinks it was someone who knew the area. First of all, because that section of the river isn’t a tourist spot, and secondly, because he apparently knew where to take Amy so that he wouldn’t be seen by anyone with her in the car, and he has managed to keep her from being found. Besides”—she looked away, and her eyes were wet again—“they won’t say much about this, but apparently Amy isn’t the first. There was a high school girl who disappeared around here two years ago. Some hunters found her body in an abandoned well. I heard one of the sheriff’s deputies say that he thought the same person might be responsible for both crimes.”

“Then he’s like a dog killing sheep. He’s doing it for the fun of it, and he must be stopped, because a sheep killer never stops of his own accord.”

“People told me you could do marvelous things—find water with a forked stick; heal the sick. I was hoping that you would be able to tell me something about what happened to Amy. I thought you might be able to see who killed her. Because I want him to suffer.”

I shook my head. “A dishonest man would string you along,” I told her. “A well-meaning one might tell you what you want to hear just to make you feel better. But all I can offer you is the truth: when I touched that photograph, I felt her death, but I saw nothing.”

“I had hoped for more.” She twisted the rings on her hands. “Do you think you could find her body?”

“I have done something like that, once. When I was twelve, an old man wandered away from his home in December. He was my best friend’s grandfather, and they lived on the next farm, so I knew him, you see. I went out with the searchers on that cold, dark afternoon, with the wind baying like a hound through the hollers. As I walked along by myself, I looked up at the clouds, and I had a sudden vision of that old man sitting down next to a broken rail fence. He looked like he was asleep, but I reckoned I knew better. Anyhow, I thought on it as I walked, and I reckoned that the nearest rail fence to his farm was at an abandoned homestead at the back of our land. It was in one of our pastures. I hollered for the others to follow me, and I led them out there to the back pasture.”

“Was he there?”

“He was there. He’d wandered off—his mind was going—and when he got lost, he sat down to rest a spell, and he’d dozed off where he sat. Another couple of hours would have finished him, but we got him home to a hot bath and scalding coffee, and he lived till spring.”

“He was alive, though.”

“Well, that’s it. The life in him might have been a beacon. It might not work when the life is gone.”

“I’d like you to try, though. If we can find Amy, there might be some clue that will help us find the man who did this.”

“I tell you what: you send the sheriff to see me, and I’ll have a talk with him. If it suits him, I’ll do my level best to find her. But I have to speak to him first.”

“Why?”

“Professional courtesy,” I said, which was partly true, but, also, because I wanted to be sure she was who she claimed to be. City people usually do give me a fake name out of embarrassment, but I didn’t want to chance her being a reporter on the Amy Albright case, or, worse, someone on the killer’s side. Besides, I wanted to stay on good terms with Sheriff Spencer Arrowood. We go back a long way. He used to ride out this way on his bike when he was a kid, and he’d sit and listen to tales about the Indian times—stories I’d heard from my grandma—or I’d take him fishing at the trout pool in Broom Creek. One year, his older brother Cal talked me into taking the two of them out owling, since they were too young to hunt. I walked them across every ridge over the holler, and taught them to look for the sweep of wings above the tall grass in the field, and to listen for the sound of the waking owl, ready to track his prey by the slightest sound, the shade of movement. I taught them how to make owl calls, to where we couldn’t tell if it was an owl calling out from the woods or one of us. Look out, I told them. When the owl calls your name, it means death.

Later on, they became owls, I reckon. Cal Arrowood went to Vietnam, and died in a dark jungle full of screeching birds. I felt him go. And Spencer grew up to be sheriff, so I reckon he hunts prey of his own by the slightest sound, and by one false move. A lot of people had heard him call their name.

I hadn’t seen much of Spencer since he grew up, but I hoped we were still buddies. Now that he was sheriff, I knew he could make trouble for me if he wanted to, and so far he never has. I wanted to keep things cordial.

“All right,” said Evelyn. “I can’t promise they’ll come out here, but I will tell them what you said. Will you call and tell me what you’re going to do?”

“No phone,” I said, jerking my thumb back toward the shack. “Send the sheriff out here. He’ll let you know.”

*  *  *

She must have gone to the sheriff’s office straightaway after leaving my place. I thought she would. I wasn’t surprised at that, because I could see that she wasn’t doing much else right now besides brood about her loss. She needed an ending so that she could go on. I had tried to make her take a milk jug of herb tea, because I never saw anybody so much in need of a night’s sleep, but she wouldn’t have it. “Just find my girl for me,” she’d said. “Help us find the man who did it, and put him away. Then I’ll sleep.”

When the brown sheriff’s car rolled up my dirt road about noon the next day, I was expecting it. I was sitting in my cane chair on the porch whittling a face onto a hickory broom handle when I saw the flash of the gold star on the side of the car door, and the sheriff himself got out. I waved, and he touched his hat, like they used to do in cowboy movies. I reckon little boys who grow up to be sheriff watch a lot of cowboy movies in their day. I didn’t mind Spencer Arrowood, though. He hadn’t changed all that much from when I knew him. There were gray flecks in his fair hair, but they didn’t show much, and he never did make it to six feet, but he’d managed to keep his weight down, so he looked all right. He was kin to the Pigeon Roost Arrowoods, and like them he was smart and honest without being a glad-hander. He seemed a little young to be the high sheriff to an old-timer like me, but that’s never a permanent problem for anybody, is it? Anyhow, I trusted him, and that’s worth a lot in these sorry times.

I made him sit down in the other cane chair, because I hate people hovering over me while I whittle. He asked did I remember him.

“Spencer,” I said, “I’d have to be drinking something a lot stronger than chamomile tea to forget you.”

He grinned, but then he seemed to remember what sad
errand had brought him out here, and the faint lines came back around his eyes. “I guess you’ve heard about this case I’m on.”

“I was told. It sounds to me like we’ve got a human sheep killer in the fold. I hate to hear that. Killing for pleasure is an unclean act. I said I’d help the law any way I could to dispose of the killer, if it was all right with you.”

“That’s what I heard,” the sheriff said. “For what it’s worth, the TBI agrees with you about the sort of person we’re after, although they didn’t liken it to
sheep killing
. They meant the same thing, though.”

“So Mrs. Albright did come to see you?” I asked him, keeping my eyes fixed on the curl of the beard of that hickory face.

“Sure did, Rattler,” said the sheriff. “She tells me that you’ve agreed to try to locate Amy’s body.”

“It can’t do no harm to try,” I said. “Unless you mind too awful much. I don’t reckon you believe in such like.”

He smiled. “It doesn’t matter what I believe if it works, does it, Rattler? You’re welcome to try. But, actually, I’ve thought of another way that you might be useful in this case.”

“What’s that?”

“You heard about the other murdered girl, didn’t you? They found her body in an abandoned well up on Locust Ridge.”

“Whose land?”

“National forest now. The homestead has been in ruins for at least a century. But that’s a remote area of the county. It’s a couple of miles from the Appalachian Trail, and just as far from the river, so I wouldn’t expect an outsider to know about it. The only way up there is on an old county road. The TBI psychologist thinks the killer has dumped Amy Albright’s body somewhere in the vicinity of the other burial. He says they do that. Serial killers, I mean. They establish territories.”