Blood on Copperhead Trail

by Paula Graves

  He grinned at her. “You got a good report from the hospital this morning.”

  Her grin morphed into consternation. “How do you do that?”

  “Like you’d be playing haunted trail guide with me if things weren’t better with your sister?”

  She smiled. “If her vitals continue looking good, she’ll go home tomorrow.”

  “Any progress on her memory?”

  “Not so far. But my mom says she’s a lot clearer about the things she does remember.” Her smile faded as she looked up the mountain. “Uh-oh.”

  He followed her gaze, seeing only a pervasive mist that swallowed the top of the ridge. “What?”

  “See that cloud?” She pointed toward the mist.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not a cloud.” She pulled her jacket more tightly around her. “Hope you like hiking in the snow.”

  Chapter Five

  “Should I call off this search until the weather improves?”

  Laney looked behind her. Doyle had been smart enough to bring a cap with him in his pack. It was keeping the snow off his head, though his uncovered ears blazed bright red from the raw cold. His weatherproof coat was covered with snow, and he looked cold, miserable and worried.

  “We were assigned one of the highest points on the mountain, so we’re the ones getting the snow. Most of the other parties are below the snow line. They’re just getting mist and rain.”

  “Are you still okay? Warm enough?”

  He seemed genuinely concerned rather than asking after her comfort as a way to express his own discomfort. She decided to show him some mercy and dug a spare set of earmuffs out of her pack. “Here. Put these on.”

  He looked at the bright green earmuffs for a second, his thought processes playing out candidly in his conflicted expression. On one hand, he wanted warm ears. On the other hand, sticking bright green fuzzy earmuffs on his ears would be an egregious assault on his masculinity.

  Comfort won out. He took the earmuffs and put them on, replacing his cap. He looked ridiculous but warmer.

  “Smokin’ hot,” she said under her breath.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  He gave her a suspicious look.

  She turned back to the trail, grinning to herself.

  As they neared the Cherokee boneyard, she decided to keep that fact to herself. He wouldn’t be able to see much from the trail with snow falling this hard. They were already struggling to stick to the trail as it was. They were in near whiteout conditions, and she was beginning to think he had been right to question the wisdom of trying to search the mountain in this much snowfall.

  “Maybe we should go back,” she said, turning to look at him.

  But he wasn’t behind her.

  “Doyle?” She started back down the trail, her boots slipping on the snow-covered path. She couldn’t see Doyle’s tracks behind hers for several yards. Then she spotted a churned-up disturbance in the snow near a short drop-off.

  She edged carefully to the lip of the drop and saw Doyle flattened out against the steep incline, inching his way back up to the trail. Had he called out to her when he’d fallen? The whistle of the wind and the sound-deadening effects of her earmuffs must have hidden the sound of his mishap. She took the offending ear protectors off.

  “Doyle!” she called to him, wondering if the wind was carrying her voice away before it reached him below.

  But he looked up at her, relief evident in his expression. “There you are!”

  “Are you okay?”

  He had his earmuffs hanging around his neck, she saw. Colder for his ears but better for hearing. “I’m not hurt, but climbing back up there is harder than it looks. The snow’s got everything as slippery as a catfish.”

  “You’re almost there.” She crouched carefully near the edge. “Just a few more feet.”

  He inched upward, taking his time to get good footholds and handholds. Soon he was close enough for her to flatten out on the ground and reach down to help him up the rest of the way. He dropped heavily on the snowy ground beside her, breathing hard. “Thanks.”

  “What happened?”

  “I stepped on a stone and turned my ankle, which sent me toppling sideways.” He pointed to the slanted stretch of ground where she’d spotted the disturbance in the snow. “I couldn’t catch myself, and once I hit that patch, momentum drove me over the edge.”

  “Is your ankle okay?”

  “Yeah, no harm done. But my radio’s somewhere down there.” He waved toward the drop-off.

  “We’d better go back.”

  “We can try,” he said doubtfully. “But I remember some pretty steep inclines on the way up, with drop-offs a lot scarier than that one. Going back down that way will be like skating downhill on a balance beam in places.”

  He was right. If she’d known how hard and fast the snow would fall up here, she wouldn’t have agreed to the hike. But the weather reports had seemed fairly confident that the snow would be light.

  What was falling now was more like a blizzard than anything the forecasters had discussed.

  “Okay, we can’t go back down the way we came.”

  “Is there another way to go?”

  “We can keep going up. The trail tops off about a mile from here, and then there’s an easier downhill stretch that’s not nearly as steep or treacherous.”

  Doyle peered up the mountain, even though the snow was falling so hard that it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead of them. “What if we can’t make it down that way?”

  “Then we’re in serious trouble.”

  * * *

  THEY WERE IN serious trouble. He could see the anxiety in Laney’s blue eyes and the tense set of her jaw as they reached the peak and paused at the top of the trail, gazing down at what little they could see through the thick curtain of snowfall.

  “Trees are down all over the place,” he said aloud.

  She nodded.

  “It’ll be worse downhill, won’t it? We won’t be able to see what we’re heading into.”

  She nodded again. “Any luck getting a phone signal?”

  He checked his phone again. “Nope. I just wish I’d held on to that radio.”

  A glance at his watch told him they had already been on the trail for five hours. He was in better physical shape than anyone around here seemed to give him credit for, but he was fast reaching the limit of his stamina.

  “Where’s the next shelter?” he asked. “I could use a rest break.”

  “Me, too,” she said, “but there’s not a shelter for another six miles, and it’s way downhill from here. If we want to rest, we’re going to have to go off the trail.”

  He looked at her, alarmed. “Off the trail? Will we be able to find our way back?”

  She opened her backpack and pulled out a stack of slender orange vinyl strips with black plastic clips on the end. “Trail markers. They’re reflective, so we can even find them in the dark if need be.”

  He hoped they wouldn’t still be here by dark.

  Laney looked around her as if she could actually tell what was out there in the fathomless wall of white that surrounded them on all sides. She headed to their right, which should be east. At least, he thought it must be east. Truth be told, he didn’t have any idea.

  The land flattened out a little, making for an easier hike, though the snow cover—already three inches and piling up thicker by the minute—obscured a lot of what lay underfoot. Laney marked the trail every twenty yards or so, making sure the last marker was still visible before she attached the next one to bushes and thin outcroppings to guide their way back.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “There’s an old cabin out the
re near the summit. It should be about a half mile ahead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well, it was still there last year when Jannie and I hiked up here. We just have to hope none of these trees have come down on it.”

  “Yeah, let’s hope.” He followed her forward, sticking close. They’d both left their earmuffs off, cold ears be damned. Better than one of them tumbling off a ledge again without the other one hearing.

  When the cabin came into view, it seemed to simply appear, a hulking log-and-mortar structure sprawling like a slumbering bear in the middle of a snowy void. It was clearly old, but most of the mortar between the logs looked solid, and the logs were weathered but intact.

  “How old is this place?” he asked as she climbed the one shallow step up to the porch. He followed, relieved to find the porch sturdy enough to hold their weight.

  “About a hundred and fifty years old, but it’s been shored up since. The Copperhead Ridge Preservation Society weatherizes it once a year.”

  “So we’re about to shelter in a historical monument?”

  The door didn’t appear to be locked; all she did was pull the latch and the door creaked open with little effort. They hurried inside and closed the door against the snow.

  The cabin was appreciably warmer, despite the lack of heat. Just getting out of the wind was a huge relief. With the grimy cabin windows blocking out most of what daylight remained, all Doyle could make out in the gloomy interior were blocky shapes he assumed to be furniture. As he reached into his pack to pull out his flashlight, Laney beat him to it, her flashlight beam scanning across the room to take in their surroundings.

  “No critters,” she said.

  He wouldn’t feel completely sanguine about that pronouncement until they had a chance to look beneath some of the furniture. But at least there was some furniture. Down in the gulf marshes where he’d grown up, old structures tended toward ruin rather than preservation, unless there was a pressing historical reason for keeping a structure from falling apart under the unrelenting pressures of humid salt air, hurricane-strength winds and adolescent vandalism. Anything like furniture would have been stripped away long ago by scavengers.

  When he mentioned that fact to Laney, she laughed. “It happens like that everywhere. The only reason this cabin is still standing is that it was built by George Vesper, one of the town’s founders. His great-great-granddaughter Anna Vesper Logan is the head of the Copperhead Ridge Preservation Society. You don’t cross Anna Vesper Logan and live to tell it.”

  “I like her already.”

  “This woodstove should still work.” She examined the cast-iron potbellied stove carefully, looking for obstructions or anything else that might prevent them from using it. “If there’s any wood already chopped, it’ll probably be in the bin on the back porch.” She waved toward the door at the other end of the room.

  “And if there’s not?”

  “Then I hope you know how to swing an ax.”

  Grimacing, Doyle tried the knob. Like the front door, it was unlocked. “Seriously, Anna what’s-her-name notwithstanding, how do you keep thieves and vandals from stripping this place clean?”

  “It’s too high up the mountain,” she answered. “Thieves and vandals are too lazy to hike up this far to scavenge some old furniture. Serious hikers tend to respect the history of the place.”

  The back porch was sheltered by a thin wooden overhang, but the blowing snow had whipped right through the opening, building a drift big enough to make opening the back door difficult. He shoved the snow out of the path of the door and looked around the back porch, spotting a wooden box a few feet away. Opening the lid, he was relieved to find several pieces of dry wood inside.

  “How many pieces you need?” he called back into the cabin.

  “Five pieces should be plenty,” she answered. “Do we have enough?”

  He brought in twice that amount, in case they’d need to refill the stove later. He handed her five pieces and put the rest where she directed, in a bin beside the stove.

  “There should be some oil lamps in that cabinet over there.” She waved toward a large pine armoire against the side wall. He opened it and found three hurricane lamps, all in good condition, along with a full bottle of lamp oil.

  “God bless Anna what’s-her-name.” He filled and lit a lamp, spreading a warm, golden glow across the small one-room cabin.

  Laney had the wood fire going by then, an answering glow radiating from the glass-front door of the cast-iron stove. “This place will warm up in no time, as small as it is.”

  “Now we should get naked and huddle for body heat,” he suggested.

  The look she threw his way made him grin. Her own lips curved, finally, in response. “You’re not like any chief of police I’ve ever known.”

  “I like to think I’m an original.”

  “I suspect you like to think a lot of things.” She softened the zinger with a widening smile, tugging off her gloves and splaying her fingers out in front of the stove. “Ooh, warm.”

  He pulled off his own gloves, laying them on the square table next to hers and joining her at the stove. The radiating heat felt like heaven. “How long do you think the snow will last?”

  “The weather forecaster said the front would pass pretty quickly.”

  “We’ve been trekking through snow for almost five hours, and last I looked, it wasn’t letting up.”

  “‘Quickly’ is relative. I’d say it’ll be over before dark.”

  “And then we go back down the mountain?”

  She shot him an apologetic look. “Not after dark. Way too treacherous. We’ve got enough wood to keep us warm. We can stay here until daylight.”

  Looking around the room, he spotted one narrow bed. “And sleep where?”

  She looked at the bed and back at him. “You were saying something about body heat?”

  His heart flipped a couple of times.

  She grinned at him. “We can take the bedding off the bed and pull it up here by the fire. Huddle for warmth.”

  “Like a couple of refugees.”

  “Literally.”

  He crossed to the narrow wood bed, eyeing the construction. Good ol’ Anna had apparently taken care to keep the cabin true to the time period. The bed was an old-fashioned rope cradle on a wooden frame, with a down-filled mattress covered with old quilts. The quilts were dusty and showed some wear and tear—they must be replicas, he realized. Not even a stickler for history would leave old quilts to molder up here on the mountain.

  “The quilts aren’t really valuable,” Laney said, as if reading his mind. “The historical society holds a quilting bee every year or two to replace them because they don’t hold up well to the elements. Let’s lay them down on the floor and put the mattress on top of them. It’s not authentic to the period, either, but it’s a lot harder to clean.” She crossed to the armoire and opened one of the drawers in the bottom of the cabinet, revealing more quilts stored inside. She pulled out a couple, handing him one to lay atop the down mattress while she unfolded the other and held it in front of the woodstove to warm.

  “Does the historical society care if you use this cabin for shelter?”

  “Not as long as we leave it more or less how we found it,” she answered, stripping off her jacket and folding it neatly over the seat of a nearby ladder-back chair. She looked back at Doyle, nodding toward his jacket. “You should take your jacket off. Or you won’t feel warm in the morning when we go back outside.”

  He followed her lead, stripping down to the long-sleeved T-shirt he’d layered under the jacket and a heavier cable-knit sweater. His jeans were damp from his fall, but the woodstove was already beginning to dry them. He pulled off his boots and damp socks, laying them on another chair to dry, and replaced them with a dry pair of socks he’d st
ashed in his pack.

  He looked up to find Laney doing the same thing. She met his gaze and grinned. “Boy Scout?”

  “Girl Scout?”

  She grinned. “Camp Fire Girl, actually. So your profiling wizardry can only take you so far, huh?”

  “Far enough to know that your competitive streak makes you downright giddy that you were able to stump me.”

  She made a face and turned toward the glowing window of the woodstove, holding her hands out to the heat. “Temperatures up here may go down into the low twenties tonight. I wish this place were a little better insulated.”

  “It’s not too bad, considering how old it is.” The cabin was drafty, but not egregiously so, and the rusted roof overhead was solid enough to keep out the snow. “How much snow do you think will fall?”

  “From what the weatherman out of Knoxville was saying, it’s hard to predict how much will fall in any given place, because a cold core upper low will do what it wants where it wants and without a whole lot of warning. So some places around here could see next to nothing, and other places could get several inches.”

  He pulled his knees up to his chin and scooted closer to the stove. “As you might imagine, my experience with snow is pretty limited.”

  “Don’t see a lot of it on the Gulf Coast?”

  “Not a lot. Though we probably see more snow than you see alligators, so there’s that.”

  She chuckled. “Now who’s being competitive?”

  They fell silent for a few minutes, listening to the whisper of snow fall against the cabin windows. Doyle must have dozed off, because when Laney spoke again, her voice sent a jolt through his nervous system.

  “Five inches,” she said.

  He roused himself and shot her a halfhearted leer. “Is this another competition? Because I can beat that.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I meant the snowfall, hotshot. I’m predicting five inches. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s cold and I’m hungry, and I ate my last protein bar about three hours ago. You’re a mountain girl. Can’t you go out there and kill me a possum for dinner or something?”