by Beth Hoffman
On my way back to bed, I noticed a faint glow from beneath my brother’s closed door. “Josh,” I whispered, tapping my fingernail on his door. When he didn’t answer, I turned the knob and stepped inside, closing the door silently behind me.
He was sitting in a chair facing the window, his feet propped on the sill. On his desk a candle flickered from inside a jelly jar. Two feathers, one white and one black, lay crossed over each other to form an X. Arranged in a half circle below the feathers were three stones, a dried thistle, and a disintegrating monarch butterfly. It was a shrine of sorts, the place where my brother ceremoniously placed nature’s gifts.
Though his eyes were set on the window, they were focused inward. He was still wearing the bloodied flannel shirt, and the soles of his boots were caked in dirt from Buddy’s grave.
I knelt at his side and lightly touched his shoulder. “Josh?”
Though I’d seen him like this a few times before, disappearing into a dark spiral set off by an atrocity he’d heard about on the news or seen in the woods, I had the feeling this time was the worst.
Leaning forward, I rested my head on his arm. “Josh, please don’t shut me out. It scares me when you go so deep that I can’t reach you.”
I remained in that position and waited for my brother to acknowledge me. I waited until my knees ached, but still my brother never moved, nor did he speak. Reaching out, I slid my hand beneath his fingers. I felt a wave of relief when he gave me a gentle squeeze. But still he said nothing.
“All right,” I said, rocking back on my heels. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
Stepping to his desk, I ran my fingers over the butterfly’s wings, then cupped my hand around the candle and blew out the flame.
The following morning I woke feeling sweaty and raw. When I flipped back the covers and sat up, I saw a folded piece of paper shoved beneath my door.
I rose from the bed, the wooden floor cool against my feet as I stepped across the room. Reaching down, I picked up the paper and opened it. Taped by its quill to the center of the page was a slender feather, shiny and pitch black. Beneath it my brother had written the words:
When shadows take flight
and the moon turns away from the stars,
the raven delivers divine law
Every nerve in my body snapped when I read the five words my brother had written at the bottom right-hand corner:
Don’t come looking for me.
I raced to Josh’s bedroom and exploded through the door. His bed hadn’t been slept in, and the closet door hung open. More than half the hangers were empty.
Barefoot and still in my pajamas, I thundered down the stairs and through the kitchen, where Mama and Grammy were preparing breakfast.
“Teddi! What in the world?” Mama said as I flung open the back door.
I flew down the porch steps and raced toward the barn. From behind me I heard Daddy call my name, but I just kept running as fast as I could go. Into the barn and past the tractor I went, screaming, “Josh. Josh!”
I darted toward the storage room, gasping for air. The padlock hung open. Reaching out, I gave the door a push.
My brother’s camping gear was gone.
Daddy was coming across the yard when I ran back toward the house. “Teddi, what’s wrong?”
“Josh is gone!”
For the first time in my life, I saw fear spark in my father’s eyes. He turned and bolted into the house. As I climbed the porch steps, my bare feet freezing and so winded I couldn’t catch my breath, I heard Daddy yell, “Franny, call the sheriff’s office, tell ’em to get over to the Hickson place! Now!” He pushed through the door with his shotgun in his hands. “Teddi, go in the house and stay there.”
As Daddy’s truck roared down the driveway in a flurry of dust and flying gravel, I stood on the porch and prayed, Please, keep my brother safe. Please, please . . .
TWENTY
When I finished telling Olivia what had happened, her face was pale and expressionless. She tightened the afghan around her shoulders and shuddered. “My stomach is tied in knots. Your brother went after that bastard, didn’t he?”
“I suspect he did. But what he didn’t know was that Jeb had already arrested Sheedy.”
“Sheedy?”
“That was the guy’s name, Creighton Sheedy. He wasn’t home when Jeb and Walt first went to his house on Thanksgiving night, but a few hours later they went back and he was there. He got belligerent when they tried to talk to him. Jeb said he gave them plenty of cause to haul him to jail, so they did. By eight-thirty that night, Sheedy was sitting behind bars. So that eliminated him as a suspect in any foul play.”
This was the first time I’d ever told anyone the whole story, and the same burning sensation I’d experienced the day my brother disappeared now spread across my chest. I unbuttoned the top of my blouse and ran my fingertips along my collarbone.
“We all thought Josh was just so angry that he needed time alone to cool off. But when he’d been gone for two days, Daddy talked with Jeb and the park rangers. He was worried that Josh had gone deep into the woods, slipped, and was lying out there with a shattered leg. Or worse. Even though Josh was eighteen and had clearly left of his own volition, Jeb and the rangers organized a search. They even brought in dogs that tracked his scent all the way to Clifty Wilderness, but they lost it when they came to a cliff. The following morning a group of experienced climbers rappelled down the cliff, but they didn’t find a thing. That’s when I got busy and made up flyers with a picture of Josh. They were handed out to visitors at Daniel Boone National Forest and Red River Gorge, and all the fishing and hiking shops posted them, too. But days turned into weeks, and nobody came up with a single lead. It was as if the wind came and blew my brother clean off the map.”
Olivia’s forehead was creased with tension. “Oh, my God. This is more awful than anything I imagined. They found nothing? Did they comb the entire area?”
“Daniel Boone National Forest has more than seven hundred forty thousand acres.”
When the magnitude of that number sank in, Olivia’s lips parted.
“And let me tell you, a lot of the terrain is impassable. All sorts of theories floated around. Most people thought Josh was climbing and fell to his death into a crevice, and a few people said a bear got him. A group of campers swore they’d seen the shadowy figure of a teenage boy walking high on a ridge with a bird flying over his head. They claimed they called to him and he looked in their direction, but then he and the bird vanished into a blue mist. We all knew it was just campfire talk fueled by too much beer, but it wasn’t long before my brother had become something of a legend. Some of the locals referred to him as the ‘Invisible Boy.’”
Olivia shook her head. “Oh, Teddi. I can’t imagine how distraught your family must have been . . .”
I squeezed my hands between my knees and thought, No, there is no way anyone could imagine.
The long days of unbearable tension followed by sleepless nights filled with the whys and what-ifs. And then came the arguments. Who to blame? Who to crucify?
Mama blamed me.
“This is your fault!” she cried. “Look what you’ve done. If you’d minded your own business and not driven to the Hickson place, this never would have happened!”
The fury of her words scorched my cheeks, and when I couldn’t take it anymore, I turned and walked outside. Standing in the frigid night air, I watched my breath leave my body in small puffs of white. As much as they hurt, my mother’s words were no surprise. I blamed me, too.
From inside the house, I heard Mama yelling at my grandmother. When I turned and looked in the window, she was shaking her finger in Grammy’s face. “This all began with YOU! Taking my children into the woods and feeding them wild stories!”
One morning while Mama stood at the stove stirring oatmeal and laying into me a
bout Josh’s disappearance, Daddy brought down his hand on the kitchen table so hard that the breakfast dishes jumped. “Franny June! That’s enough. If there’s any blame to be had, it’s mine and mine alone. You understand?”
Mama clamped her mouth shut and never uttered a word of blame again. In fact, she stopped talking altogether.
But the abrupt end to the blaming and yelling ushered in something far darker—a silence so thick that we began to suffocate. Words clotted in our throats. We kept our eyes cast downward at the supper table. The sound of forks scraping across plates was unbearable, as was the thunder created when Daddy stomped snow off his boots on the back porch. A sheet of paper towel being torn from the roll was startling.
These things became the language of a family ripped apart.
The calendar on the kitchen wall hung unnoticed. When December came, no one turned the page. Time at the Overman farm had come to a halt. One day we were a family holding hands around the Thanksgiving table, next thing we knew, my brother’s picture had been stapled to telephone poles.
As the wordless months of winter gave way to spring, life slowly seeped back in, revealing itself with a simple gesture of kindness or an unexpected smile. One evening during my visit home in April, Daddy glanced up from his supper plate and said, “Franny, these scalloped potatoes are mighty fine.”
Mama’s face flushed, and she looked down at her hands and whispered, “Thank you, Henry.”
That was when I knew my family, as broken and battered as we were, would try to mend the ragged hole my brother’s departure had left behind.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Olivia said, her voice piercing my private thoughts. “Did everyone just presume Josh was either a runaway or dead?”
I had been squeezing my hands so hard between my knees they’d gone numb. I pulled them free and looked at Olivia. “No. Not everyone. After Christmas nearly a hundred climbers and hikers volunteered to do another search. Three of them came all the way from Colorado. They gathered with the rangers for a meeting over at Hemlock Lodge. The local TV station even filmed the meeting for the evening news. Mama couldn’t take it anymore, so she didn’t go. But Daddy, Grammy, and I went.
“Ranger Jim taped two giant maps on the windows in the dining room, one of Daniel Boone Forest and another of the heart of the Gorge. When I saw all those determined faces studying the maps, I broke down and cried. Daddy was so choked up he couldn’t talk, and Grammy hung her head. You should have seen it, Olivia. Church ladies brought in all sorts of food. Farmers set up extra beds to house the searchers when they came off the mountain. It was a huge event, especially for these parts.”
My chest heaved when I looked at Olivia. “But even while everyone was searching, deep down I knew they wouldn’t find Josh.”
She tilted her head. “Why?”
“Because he didn’t want to be found. I think my brother set off to do what he believed was his destiny.”
“Which was?”
Shifting on my hip, I slid the newspaper clipping from my back pocket. Without saying a word, I unfolded the paper and offered it to Olivia. She held it to the lamplight, her face draining of color as she read:
Naked Man Found Bound to Tree in Clifty Wilderness
Yesterday afternoon three hikers made a startling discovery on the south side of Clifty Wilderness. Alex Bell, Doug York, and Byron Jennings, all from Tennessee, were heading back to their campsite when they heard muffled moans and detected a stench. What they came upon was shocking. A man, naked and in great distress, was taped to a tree. A red fox, still snared in the illegal trap that had killed him, was tied around the man’s neck.
During questioning, the man, identified as Arnold G. Paddick, 43, admitted he had been unlawfully trapping animals. After setting several traps on Tuesday, he returned on Wednesday to check them. Paddick claims that as he reached the trap with the fox, a roll of duct tape flew through the air and hit him in the shoulder. He turned to see a man wearing dark clothing and a mask made of mud and leaves appear from behind a stand of trees.
Paddick alleges that the man aimed an arrow at his face and demanded he remove all his clothing. Paddick stripped and was then ordered to tape his feet together. The masked man bound Paddick to the tree and gagged him. He then tied the trap holding the dead fox around Paddick’s neck.
According to Paddick, the masked man pointed the arrow at his nose and said, “You’re going to remember what you did to this fox for the rest of your worthless life. Don’t come back here again. If you do, I’ll hunt you down.”
For nearly two days, Paddick tried to free himself while the stench of the rotting fox carcass grew so unbearable that he claims to have lost consciousness.
Paddick was cited with five counts of poaching. Following treatment for exposure and dehydration, he was released from Clark Regional Medical Center.
Olivia looked at me, stunned. “No! You think the masked guy in this article is your brother?”
“I don’t know what to think. But Daddy must have thought it was Josh. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been any reason for him to have cut out the article.”
“Teddi, why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”
“I didn’t know about it until today. I found the clipping hidden in Daddy’s desk. I can understand why Mama didn’t mention it. Over the years there have been plenty of strange occurrences in the mountains—murder victims dumped in the wilderness, campers robbed, poachers beaten up. If Mama saw the article or heard about it, she wouldn’t have thought it had anything to do with Josh. By that time she was positive he was dead. But I don’t know why Daddy didn’t tell me.”
Olivia glanced out the window. “Maybe he wanted to protect you, Teddi. Maybe he was worried it would reopen old wounds.” She moved closer to the lamp, read the article again, and then handed it to me. “So was Josh a marksman with a bow and arrow?”
I folded the article and pushed it into my pocket. “Not that I ever knew. But I’ve come to accept there’s a whole lot about Josh I didn’t know.”
Olivia took a sip of coffee, which had long since gone cold. The smudges of blue beneath her eyes were deepening with the late hour. “And what about that son of a bitch Sheedy? What happened to him?”
“Turns out he was part of a dogfighting ring. In exchange for a reduced sentence, he exposed the other members of the ring and pled guilty to lesser charges. He was sentenced to fifteen days in jail and had to do some community service. Hardly a punishment for what he did to Buddy. Even after Sheedy served his time, Jeb and his men rode him real hard. Jeb said Sheedy wouldn’t be able to take a leak for the rest of his life without them knowing about it. It must have been true, because Sheedy moved away.”
Olivia tilted her head and studied me. “What is it, Teddi? What makes you believe that your brother is alive? Other than the possibility that he was the guy in the article, has there ever been any trace of him?”
“No. Nothing.” I closed my eyes and rubbed the headache that was forming at my temples. “I just have this feeling.”
For the next several days, Olivia and I worked from morning till night, our hands reddened and chapped as we sorted and cleaned. Hour after hour the sharp squeal of packing tape being run across the tops of boxes echoed through the house. Soon the dining room was jammed with items to be given to charities or sold. Everything else we tossed out. By Monday afternoon we’d gone through all the rooms on the first floor.
We were exhausted.
“C’mon, let’s get out of here for a while,” I said, looking up at Olivia. She was standing on a ladder in the pantry, wiping down shelves with vinegar water.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I’m not telling, but I need you to drive, since we haven’t tied down the things in the van yet.”
She threw me a quizzical look, grabbed her truck keys, and off we went. Within a few minutes, we’d tur
ned on a road nearly hidden by trees. Olivia grinned when she pulled in to the parking lot and cut the engine. “I was wondering if I’d get to see the Gorge.”
We walked to the ticket house, and when I opened the door, I saw that Norma Higgins was working behind the counter. The gray hair I remembered was now pure white, but her smile was the same as always when she tottered around the counter to give me a hug.
“Teddi!”
I introduced her to Olivia, and she reached up and gave her a hug, too. That was Norma, ninety pounds of kindness. We talked for a few minutes, and then she pointed to the corkboard mounted on the wall. A glove here, a pair of sunglasses there, a pink flip-flop, a baseball cap—dozens of items lost by tourists and hikers. But when I saw what she was really pointing toward, words dissolved in my mouth and blood roared in my ears. Thumbtacked to the upper right corner was a faded flyer inside a clear plastic sleeve.
“I’ll never take it down,” Norma said, patting my hand and turning to look at my brother’s face. “There’s always hope, honey.”
I could do nothing but nod.
Olivia paled when she looked at the flyer, but she rallied quickly and changed the subject. “You sure work in a beautiful area, Norma,” she said, gazing out the window at the mountain.
“Oh, yes. I’ve worked here since the Sky Lift opened back in ’67. Never tire of the scenery. You girls goin’ up?”
“Yes. Two tickets, please.”
I pulled money from my pocket, but Norma waved it away. “On the house,” she said with a wink. “You came on a good day. The weather’s nice and cool, and we haven’t had but a handful of visitors. I imagine you’ll be alone on the mountain.”
While Olivia and I walked to the Sky Lift platform, she took hold of my arm. “Wow, talk about being blindsided. Are you all right, Teddi?”