by BJ Bourg
“What about me?” Brett asked. “Do I get a can?”
“Did you pack underwear and a toothbrush?” Charlie wanted to know. “Or was I supposed to bring that for you, too?”
I dug in one of the smaller pouches. When I felt the cold blade of the knife I’d made for Charlie, I smiled. “Close your eyes, Charlie.”
He eyed me with suspicion. “Why?”
“So I can punch you in the face without you seeing me.” I shook my head. “Just close your eyes and hold out your hands.”
Frowning, Charlie obeyed my command. I pulled the knife from my bag and placed it into his hands, careful not to lop off a finger. “Okay, open your eyes.”
Charlie opened his eyes, slowly at first, and then they widened. “What is it?”
“Be careful. It’s really called a push dagger, but I prefer to call it a punch dagger,” I said. “It’s six inches of pure punching evil.”
Charlie made a fist around the handle of the knife and let the six-inch blade extend between his ring and middle fingers. “Wow, this is a mean-looking blade. Did you make it with your bench grinder?”
I nodded. “If a bear comes at you, just punch it right in his chest.”
“That’s insane,” Brett said.
Charlie threw a couple of wild punches into the air with the knife and then executed a clumsy uppercut to the underside of an imaginary bear’s jaw. “You think the bears are scared of me now?”
“I don’t know, but they’ll definitely be scared of Jezebel.” I reached deeper into my bag.
Charlie stopped admiring his knife and looked up at me. “I didn’t know you had a new girlfriend.”
I pulled out the knife I’d been working on nonstop for nearly two months—ever since the moment I’d found out about Joy. It had helped me stay busy and kept my mind off the bad thoughts I was having.
“Holy smoke, that’s cool.” Brett reached out a finger to touch the edge of the blade, but I pulled it back.
“It’s razor sharp.” It was a double-bladed knife with the handle positioned in the middle. I’d paid twenty bucks for a piece of 440C stainless steel from a knife-making store out of Texas that I’d found online. The original piece of steel was twelve inches long, a quarter of an inch thick, and two inches wide. I had begun by cutting a four-inch handle from the center of the steel and then I shaped out identical blades on either side, each of them four inches in length. I’d taken my time on this knife, shaping the blades and polishing them to perfection. I knew I would need it.
“You call it Jezebel?” Charlie asked.
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“It just sounds evil,” I said. “Like that woman in the Bible.”
Brett looked from Charlie to me, frowned. “Do I get a knife?”
“I don’t think so.” Charlie was still staring in awe at my blade. “You might hurt yourself.”
“I can stab straight up or down and slash upward or downward with it, all without changing my grip.” I scanned the area, spotted a tree about twenty yards behind us. I waved for Charlie and Brett to stand beside me. I grabbed one of the blades and lifted the knife to my ear. After setting my feet, I threw Jezebel with all of my power. She shot through the air, tumbling end over end, and came to rest with a solid thump in the tree. The blade vibrated solidly in place. We jogged over, and Charlie whistled when he saw how deep she had embedded into the tree.
“That’s scary,” he said.
I had to wriggle Jezebel for several seconds before I could free her from the grips of the tree. “I could probably kill a bear with this.”
“No kidding.” Charlie nodded in agreement. “How far can you throw it?”
“But what about me?” Brett asked. “Do I get a knife?”
Ignoring Brett, I said, “I can probably throw it fifty yards, but I can only make it stick consistently at twenty-five, thirty yards.”
Charlie suddenly frowned. “How’re you going to carry it without stabbing yourself?”
I dug in my bag and pulled out a makeshift sheath that I’d fashioned from an old leather belt I’d found in the attic. It was one of my dad’s old belts from when he was a kid, and it was wider than any belt I’d ever seen. The sheath extended from my belt down the right side of my leg and was solid except for an opening where the handle was located. I secured the knife in the sheath by pushing one of the blades upward into the top slot, sliding the other blade into the bottom slot, which was open at the front, and snapping it in place with a leather strap. “Like this,” I said, after it was in place.
“Nice.” Charlie held up the punch dagger I’d made for him. “What about this one?”
I dug deeper into my small pack and found a sheath I’d made for his knife. “It straps to your belt and the knife shoves straight down into it.”
Charlie took it and immediately slid it onto his belt. “Dude, I really appreciate this. It’s the coolest thing anybody’s ever given me.”
“That’s because I’m the coolest person you know.”
“No,” Charlie said. “I’m the coolest person I know.”
“What am I?” Brett wanted to know. “Bear bait?”
I smiled, fished a butterfly knife out of my bag, and tossed it to him. “You can have this one. My dad bought it for me as a Christmas present two years ago.”
Brett’s eyes widened. “This is awesome! I’ve never held one in real life.”
“Don’t cut your fingers off.” I turned away as they admired their blades. My mind was off down the trail, wondering what we would find. I pulled out the posters and studied them. The first disappearance site—the one that started it all—was a bit up the trail. Jillian Wagner had been a nineteen-year-old from South Carolina. One day she’d had her whole life ahead of her, and the next day she was gone—disappeared into thin air. I stared at the dark shadows around us and shuddered. We needed to get this done so we could get out of the mountains before dark.
I pulled my rucksack back on and waved for Charlie and Brett to saddle up. They did, and we scrambled over the downed tree and continued down the narrow path. According to the poster, we’d have to walk two miles to get to the place Jillian vanished. I counted my steps so we would know when we got close to it.
The smell of pine clung to the cool morning air as we walked. We didn’t talk much, but when we did, it was in whispered tones. I don’t know why—it’s not like there were people around. When we weren’t talking, the only sound we could hear was the muffled crunch of our shoes against the bed of needles that coated the ground beneath us.
I had paced off about a mile when we heard a branch snap off to the right of the trail. We all stopped immediately. I turned to look at Charlie and Brett, who’d crept up close to me.
“You think that was a bear?” Brett asked.
I shook my head, as I strained to penetrate the shadows of the dense forest with my eyes. Another branch snapped, and I thought I saw a dark shadow move somewhere in the distance. “Keep walking,” I whispered.
We picked up the pace. I stared constantly toward the right, but didn’t hear the sound again. After pacing off another mile, I raised my hand, and we slowed to a stop. “This is two miles,” I said. “It should be right around here.”
There was a large rock beside the trail, and Charlie dropped his rucksack onto it. “This has to be the spot.”
“Yeah, I doubt there’re two trees like this.” It was a large pine and it looked like it had grown right up through the rock. The roots stretched like gnarled fingers from under the rock and extended across the trail. “How could that happen? How does a tree grow right through a solid rock?”
“I don’t know, but this is definitely the spot.” Charlie grabbed the camera from his bag and snapped a picture of the tree.
After I dropped my rucksack beside Charlie’s bag, I pulled out the map I had downloaded at home. I also read the poster that detailed Jillian Wagner’s disappearance and compared it to our surroundings. It was spot on. “Okay, accor
ding to Jillian Wagner’s boyfriend, she was last seen walking off the trail near this rock. She went off to relieve herself, but never returned.”
Charlie moved about twenty yards down the trail and looked back to where I stood. “The boyfriend walked about this far and then waited. Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he go with her?”
“First off, no girl wants her boyfriend standing over her while she’s peeing. Second, he told the park rangers he wanted to make sure no one came up the trail while she was peeing.” I paused, looked around. Something seemed odd. Birds chirped, leaves rustled, and tree branches groaned above us, but there were no other signs or sounds of life. No movement whatsoever. It dawned on me then. “Hey, did you realize we haven’t seen a person since leaving the Tipton Bluff Trail?”
Brett, who had wandered off the trail to throw rocks in a creek, turned and looked back toward me. He suddenly didn’t like that there was a distance of twenty yards between us. He quickly retraced his steps and stood beside me, scanning our surroundings. “It’s kind of eerie out here.”
“I know.” I pointed deeper into the forest behind the rocky tree and asked Charlie, “How far do you think Jillian went off to use the bathroom?”
“You mean the tree.”
“What about the tree?” I asked, confused.
“There’re no bathrooms out here, so she had to use a tree,” Charlie said.
“Whatever.” I set off into the forest at a ninety-degree angle to the trail. I realized Brett was so close to me I could almost hear his heart beating. I kept looking behind us toward Charlie until I reached a point in the forest where I was sure I couldn’t be seen from the trail. “She must’ve been at least this far, so she couldn’t be seen from the trail.”
We walked around the area, searching for—what, exactly? Dozens of searchers had combed this mountainside seven years ago searching for any sign of Jillian, and they had turned up nothing. The ground was mostly covered in oak leaves and pine needles, with a smattering of green leafy plants, and if the search party had missed anything, it was buried under six years of leaves and needles. I squatted against a tree and surveyed my surroundings, imagining I was a nineteen-year-old girl all alone in that particular area.
“What happened to you, Jillian?” I asked out loud. If I could figure out a link between these six strangers and Joy, it might lead me to her—or to what happened to her.
“What do we know about this girl?” Charlie had joined me and Brett.
I glanced at the poster, refreshing my memory. “She was from a small town in South Carolina, had wrapped up her second year of high school, and was on vacation with her boyfriend of two years.”
“Oh, I remember reading about her in that article. Some of her family suspected foul play.” Charlie pulled out his phone, held it up, and walked around.
“No reception?” Brett wanted to know.
“Nope, but I think of everything,” Charlie said, his chest rising with pride. “I took screen shots of the article.” After fiddling with his phone for a while, he nodded. “Yeah, they suspected her boyfriend, Ted. He was three years older than her, and her family thought she’d found a new boyfriend in high school and he found out about it.”
“They think he killed her?” I asked.
“He denied it, but they did accuse him of killing her,” Charlie mumbled as he read. “Nope, it wasn’t him. He took a polygraph and passed.”
“You think the polygraph can be beaten?” I asked Charlie.
He shrugged. “I suppose.”
“Holy crap,” Brett blurted out. “I know what he did!”
Charlie and I both turned to him. He just stood there smiling.
“Well?” I asked.
“The boyfriend killed her somewhere else and hid the body really well, then came out here to the mountains and made up a story about her going missing. If they’re looking for her here, they won’t be looking where her body really is.”
“That could work.” I nodded, liking it. “That would explain them not finding her body.”
“Except he passed the polygraph,” Charlie reminded us.
“Right, there is that.” I stood and walked in an ever-widening circle, trying to penetrate the needles and leaves with my eyes. “There must’ve been something. Some sign she was here. They had to have missed it. People don’t just vanish into thin air.”
“Unless she was abducted by a UFO,” Charlie said. He began taking pictures of the area, as though he were a detective on a crime scene.
“Keep talking like that,” I said, “and you’ll find yourself in a straightjacket, with a side of electrotherapy.”
“They’ll have to catch me first.” Charlie pointed to something white on the ground. It was partially obscured by some leaves. “What’s that?”
I picked up a small stick, bent close, and moved the leaves away. A rancid smell immediately rose up and gagged me. I jumped back and tossed the stick down. “Are you kidding me?”
“What is it?” Brett tried to see around me.
“Someone took a crap out here and left the dirty toilet paper behind.” I kicked some pine needles and leaves over the stained toilet paper and turned away. “They must’ve not read the article on toilet use.”
Charlie chuckled. “I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to carry my own crap around for hours until I found a garbage can. I mean, where would I keep it? Brett’s pocket?”
“They don’t expect you to carry your crap in your pocket,” I said. “The pamphlet says to bury feces in a six-inch hole and pack out any toilet paper you use.”
“You see, Charles, you don’t have to carry out your smelly crap—only your crap-covered toilet paper.”
“You’ll be needing toilet paper to pick up the crap I kick out of you if you call me Charles again.”
I moved back toward Cherokee Trail. “Let’s head to the next site. I think if we hurry we can get there within the hour.”
“Isn’t it two miles?”
I nodded. “It’s near that camp called Oliver’s Bald.”
Charlie shut off his phone. “I hope we don’t need nine-one-one for anything.”
I thought I detected a hint of uncertainty in his voice and was suddenly questioning our decision to be out here. We had traversed miles and miles of swampland back home, but we had always had cell service. We had always been one phone call away from rescue if we ever got in trouble, and that was always a soothing thought. But out here, we were on our own. Completely. And we were moving deeper into the wilderness and farther away from civilization.
CHAPTER 6
We returned to the hybrid rock-tree and continued on the Cherokee Trail. None of us said much as we walked, as the enormity of the situation started to set in. Sure, it was only a day hike, but the rough ground, steep cliffs, and raging rivers could turn on us at any moment. One wrong move on the uneven ground and we could become instantly incapacitated. Even if only one of us got hurt, we’d be screwed. Two of us might be able to carry the other for a ways on a normal day, but I doubted we could go a hundred yards without stopping over this rough trail. If one of us did get hurt, it would take too long to hump out of here and we’d end up stuck out here at night. I shuddered at the thought and changed the subject in my mind. I decided to focus on counting my paces so I would know when we reached the next disappearance site.
We made decent time ascending and descending the mountain trail—walking over downed trees and occasionally stubbing our toes on protruding rocks. When I had paced off almost two miles, we saw a splintered stick with two wooden slats attached to it that marked a fork in the trail. The slat that was parallel to our path had “Cherokee Trail” and an arrow pointing straight ahead carved roughly into the faded wood. The other slat pointed toward our left and had “Oliver Ridge Trail” carved into it. The slats had seen better days and some of the letters were chipped away, making the name of the trail almost impossible to read. Had we not studied our maps, it would’ve been easy to take a wrong turn.
“We’re supposed to take Oliver Ridge Trail, right?” Charlie asked.
“Yep. Looks like it’s a half mile to Oliver’s Bald.” I stuffed the map into the back pocket of my cargo shorts and shifted my rucksack. While it wasn’t very heavy, it was starting to pull on my shoulders and the muscles in my neck ached. The back of my shirt was also starting to feel sticky. Although it wasn’t very hot on the shadowy trail, I was sweating.
We turned onto the Oliver Ridge Trail and immediately felt smothered. The trail was nothing more than a foot-wide patch of packed earth that cut through the thick grass and trees like a slender snake. It was too narrow to walk side-by-side, so I took the lead. The grass on the edges of the trail tickled my legs as I walked and made them itch. Occasionally, I had to turn my shoulders sideways to fit between encroaching trees on either side of the path, and my rucksack snagged on the branches two or three times, forcing me to lurch forward in order to wrench it free.
“You sure this is right?” Brett asked.
“You saw the same sign we saw.” Charlie’s voice came from some distance behind us.
“I know, but I can’t imagine anyone actually walking along this trail,” Brett said.
A low-lying tree limb loomed ahead. When I reached it, I had to squat at an awkward angle to pass under it without bumping the top of my rucksack. “I guess that’s why they call this the back country.”
“You know if a bear attacks us we’re dead,” Brett said. “We’re like a mouse in a trap.”
“I doubt a bear could fit in here.” I had to step around and dip under so many trees that it was difficult to count my paces. “I’m not sure how far we’ve come.”
“We should see the shelter through the trees before we get to it,” Charlie said.
“What happened up there?” Brett asked. “Who disappeared?”
“Some seventeen-year-old kid from Detroit named Dave Burke,” Charlie said. “The missing person poster described him as a ghost hunter wannabe—or was that the other guy? Anyway, he should’ve been a magician because he just disappeared into thin air.”