by BJ Bourg
I slowed to step around a leaning tree and felt something slam into my back.
“Sorry about that,” Brett said.
I paused and turned to look at him. “You feel okay?”
Brett looked around, then turned back to me. “You know, this sounded like a good idea while we were back in Louisiana, but now I’m not so sure.”
I nodded my understanding and looked past Brett at Charlie, who was bringing up the rear. “Charlie, you do realize Dave Burke disappeared along this trail while lagging behind his friend, right?”
Charlie scoffed. “I ain’t worried.”
I smiled when I saw him shoot a quick glance over his shoulder and quicken his step. I remembered reading that Dave’s friend said he was within eyesight of the shelter at Oliver’s Bald when he turned around and realized Dave was gone. That had been two years earlier, on June 23, 2011, and he was the last one to go missing until Joy…
I cringed at the thought of Joy out there all alone. She didn’t like the woods as much as I did and bugs scared her. I shook my head. There was no way she ran off to commit suicide through nature. Something happened to her—something bad.
“Why’d we stop?” Brett asked.
I leaned over, waved him past me. “Why don’t you go ahead and take the lead for a while.”
Brett hesitated, chewing on his bottom lip. “But…”
I reached for my sheath and palmed Jezebel. “I’ve got the rear—just in case.”
Brett nodded his thanks and slipped by me. I waved Charlie on, too. Brett looked back to make sure we were right behind him and then began pushing his way through the gauntlet of hostile branches that struck out at him, and Charlie and I followed. I was vividly aware I was in the same position Dave Burke had been in when he disappeared. Of course, Dave didn’t have Jezebel. As I clutched the handle of my knife with whitened knuckles, I wondered if the evil that Dave had encountered on this same desolate path had been a physical being. If not, what good would Jezebel be?
A branch suddenly snapped behind me, and I whipped around, my heart racing. I pointed Jezebel at the sound, flexing my hand over the handle. Had I really heard the noise? Or was my imagination playing tricks on me? “Hey!” My voice was a mere hiss. “Did y’all hear that?”
When they didn’t reply, I turned around. They were not there. They’d been swallowed up by the thick forest. My throat tightened. I lunged forward, ignoring the sting of the branches against my face. “Charlie! Brett!” I was yelling now. “Where are y’all?”
“Shush!”
I heard the sound off to my right. I jerked to a stop and peered through the thick trees and underbrush. Charlie was standing several feet to the right of the trail, his back pressed up against a thick oak tree. Brett was beside him and they were staring down the trail, eyes wide. I turned my head slowly and saw a black bear about the size of a large German shepherd. I chuckled. By bear standards, it was a baby.
“What’re y’all so freaked out about?” I asked.
“Don’t get any closer,” Charlie warned. “Where there’s a bear cub, there’s a mom.”
The bear was down on all fours and blocked our passage forward. It didn’t seem to notice us as it stared into the forest toward our left. Its rounded ears were perky and its brown snout lifted to the wind, as though trying to decide if it was safe or not. After several seconds of sniffing the air, it gingerly finished crossing the trail and disappeared behind the trees. We waited for at least five minutes, scanning the area carefully in search of solid black fur. Finally, I turned to them.
“Y’all think it’s safe to pass now?” I asked.
“How should I know?” Charlie asked.
Still holding onto Jezebel, I stepped forward. “I’m getting out of here, with or without y’all.”
“Why don’t we just wait a little longer?”
I shook my head and continued walking. “If something wanted to attack us out here, we’d be helpless. It could be on top of us before we even knew what hit us. We’d never see it coming. Besides, I heard something back there, and I don’t want to find out what it was.”
I didn’t need to look back to know Charlie and Brett were right on my heels.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “The sooner we get to the shelter the better.”
“I can easily understand how Dave Burke went missing. Heck, I turned for a second earlier, and when I looked back, y’all were gone”—I snapped my fingers—“just that quick.”
My burning thigh muscles told me the trail was rising. It curved right, then left and then straightened for a short distance. Just as I reached the end of the straightened portion of trail, I caught sight of sunlight reflecting off a sliver of metal roof. I stopped suddenly and spun around to make sure Charlie and Brett were still there. They were. I sighed. “I can see the shelter through the trees. Dave must’ve disappeared right around here.”
Brett pointed to the shelter. “Let’s hurry and get to it before the bear and his momma decide to come back.”
I pushed my way through the thick grass and brush at the edge of the trail and entered a small clearing where the shelter was located. The structure was backed up against the mountainside and consisted of a roof, two large tree posts, and a chimney on the right side. I pulled out my map. “This is definitely the shelter at Oliver’s Bald.”
Charlie moved up beside me. “This is not what I envisioned when I read about this shelter.”
“Yeah, I thought it was supposed to be a real cabin,” Brett said.
There was a bench fashioned from a felled log under the outer edge of shelter’s roof. Centered under the roof was a roughed-out picnic table with two other log benches. Charlie pulled off his rucksack. After tucking Jezebel back in her sheath, I followed his lead. A chill ran over my back when my rucksack fell to the ground and the cool mountain air hit my wet shirt. I reached back and tried to pull the shirt away from my skin. I began to wish I’d brought a change of clothes.
Brett had walked all around the shelter, testing the strength of the support planks. He finally dropped his pack on the picnic table. “You really think people sleep in here?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “There’s absolutely no protection from wild animals.”
We began to look around the shelter and saw a fire ring just outside the covering to the right. There were some blackened and partially burned tree branches at the edges of the ring.
Charlie squatted beside the ring. “These are old.”
“Oh, yeah?” I challenged. “How do you know that, mountain man?”
“Because they’re cold.”
“No joke. We haven’t seen a soul all day.” I dug through my rucksack and pulled out the posters. I stared at Dave Burke’s picture. “Out of all the cases, this’ll be our best chance of finding something that will help us solve Joy’s case,” I said. “He’s only been missing two years, so there’s a chance we could still find something. Maybe some of his gear, bones…something.”
“What—are we detectives now?” Brett wanted to know.
“Two years is a long time.” Charlie kicked at the ground and sent a pile of dead leaves flying into the air. “You know how much of this stuff has fallen since last year? If there is anything out here, it’s probably buried under all this crap. It’ll be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“The Battle of Lafourche Crossing was fought in 1863 and I found a couple of lead bullets under the bridge when I was a kid.”
“Yeah, you told me that story before,” Charlie said. “At the time, I didn’t have the heart to tell you the truth, but I think it’s time you learn.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Your dad planted those lead balls to make you think you were something special.”
“He really did?” Brett asked.
“Whatever.” I started to walk off. “Y’all coming or not?”
“I am,” Brett said, sticking to me like glue.
They followed me back up the trail to wher
e we thought Dave’s friend had stood when he first realized Dave was missing. We searched one side of the trail first and then the other, sifting through the leaves and tall grass, hoping for even the slightest sign of Dave Burke’s passing.
At one point, Charlie stopped digging to look up at me. “How do we know if we’ve dug deeper than one year’s worth of leaves?”
Not knowing the answer to that question, I ignored it. “Just keep looking,” I said. “If we find something that belonged to him, we’ll know it.”
“Hey, that article listed all of his property!” Charlie fished his phone out of his pocket and tossed it to me. “Check it out while we dig around.”
I caught the phone with one hand and accessed the touch screen. A quick scan of the article proved Charlie right. Dave’s mother had provided a long list of gear and personal property he had taken with him. According to the friend, Dave was wearing his backpack at the time of his disappearance and everyone found it strange that the backpack was never recovered.
“Surely,” one expert had speculated, “even if wild animals had devoured Mr. Burke’s entire body, they certainly would not have eaten the backpack, so we’d have eventually found it. This small detail lends credence to the young man’s theory that ghosts and spirits make their homes deep in the Blue Summit Mountains National Forest.”
“This was the ghost hunter,” I told Charlie. “Some FBI guy said this was a ‘hoax perpetrated by two attention-seeking ghost hunters who wanted to garner attention for their cause.’” I scrolled farther through the paragraph. “And then there’re those who thought the absence of the backpack proves he meant to return to nature. They say if you don’t want to be found out here, you won’t be.”
“Still doesn’t explain the lack of a body,” Charlie said from his perch on the ground. “I read in one of those articles that the rangers watch the buzzard activity when someone goes missing. They said it usually leads to the dead person.”
Whatever had happened to Dave Burke, we didn’t find a shred of evidence telling us he had been here. For that matter, outside of the cold, charred branches in the fire pit, we didn’t find a shred of evidence that anyone had been in this area ever.
“Did you really expect to find something?” Charlie asked. “Hundreds of people scoured this very same mountainside looking for Dave. If they couldn’t find anything right after the disappearance, we definitely won’t find anything two years later.”
We looked up and realized we had ventured out of eyesight of the shelter. “We’d better get back before something happens to our gear,” Charlie said.
I nodded.
“What could happen?” Brett asked. “You worried a bear might steal your backpack and charge up your credit card?”
We trudged through the thick leaves—sometimes sinking to our ankles in the soft blanket that covered the rough mountain floor, and sometimes tripping over stumps and rocks hidden beneath the vegetation. We eventually returned to the shelter to find our rucksacks on the log benches, undisturbed.
“Want to get moving?” I asked. “We should be able to make it to the spot where Mable Bragg disappeared within the hour and then we can eat lunch.”
“Where’d she disappear?” Brett asked.
“Right where this trail intersects with Betham Creek Trail.” I scanned our surroundings, swallowed hard. “I can’t help but wonder if Joy is out there right now—cold and hungry, waiting for someone to rescue her. What if we find nothing? What if we have to return home empty-handed?”
Charlie slapped my back. “We’ll figure it out. For now, let’s get out of here. This place really freaks me out. I don’t know what it is, but I keep getting the feeling we’re being watched.”
I slowly scanned the area. “I wonder if that momma bear is out there somewhere stalking us.”
“I don’t want to stick around to find out.” Charlie pulled his rucksack onto his back and set off down the Oliver Ridge Trail without even waiting for us.
“Hold up,” Brett said, dipping his shoulders into the harness of his rucksack. “Unless you want to end up like Dave Burke.”
“Dave was bringing up the rear, remember?” Charlie called.
Brett quickly caught up to Charlie, then glanced over his shoulder. “Hurry up, Abe. We can’t get separated out here.”
I shook my head and joined them on the trail. We labored on, and the deeper into the backcountry we traveled, the more strenuous the hike became.
CHAPTER 7
“Where’s that Betham Trail?” Charlie asked, without turning around.
I pulled the map out of my pocket and stared at it as I walked. “It should be coming up to the left.”
Charlie shook his head. “You said that twenty minutes ago, Abe.”
Brett looked from left to right. “Are we lost? Please don’t tell me we’re lost out here!”
Several minutes earlier we had passed a faded path that broke off to the right and, according to the map, Betham Creek Trail was supposed to be just up ahead. I began to worry we had drifted off the trail. There were a few spots where the path was overgrown from lack of foot traffic and we’d had to venture out at several different angles until we picked the trail up again. “The trail’s so faint…I guess it is possible we set off on an animal path.”
“An animal path?” Brett stopped abruptly, and I almost crashed into him. “You mean we could be walking down a bear path? So, we’re completely lost and we’re walking straight to certain death!”
“Stop worrying so much.” I gave Brett a shove to get him moving again. I hoped my own nervousness didn’t bleed through in my voice. With over half a million acres of wilderness surrounding us, we could die of starvation if we ventured off course. “If we don’t run up on it within the next few minutes, we’ll double back and—”
“Never mind, navigator,” Charlie called. “We’re there.”
I ducked under a collapsed pine tree leaning against an ancient oak and followed Charlie and Brett to the sign pointing toward Betham Creek Trail. It was more worn than the last sign we’d encountered and I wondered if the trail was even more desolate than the Oliver Ridge Trail. The path was wider where the two trails intersected, and we stood staring at the ground.
“Is this the spot?” I asked.
Charlie pulled out his phone and scrolled through the article. “It says Mable Bragg was last seen at the intersection of Betham Creek and Oliver Ridge Trails. This is the intersection.”
I frowned. The poor girl had been sixteen when she disappeared—the second youngest of the missing persons. She was a redhead and looked a lot like Charlie’s little sister, Tabitha.
“What’s the four-one-one on her?” Brett asked.
“Dude, don’t ever say ‘four-one-one’ again.” Charlie looked away from Brett and glanced over the article. “Um, let’s see…she’d been camping with her mom, dad, two brothers, and some family friends. While the grownups were barbecuing at a campsite twenty yards away, the teenagers decided to play hide-and-seek. Mable was ‘it’ and stood at the intersection to count to a hundred. The teenagers who were in earshot of Mable said she suddenly stopped counting at sixty-four—”
“At this very intersection?” Brett asked.
I nodded. “It’s weird to be standing right where someone disappeared.”
“Anyway,” Charlie continued, “the other kids were all hunkered down in hiding spots by then and assumed she was coming out early to find them. They’d been hiding for about thirty minutes when they got bored and started coming out one by one to meet at the intersection.”
“Mable was gone when they got here,” I said.
Charlie nodded. “They figured she’d pulled a fast one on them and was already eating a plateful of barbeque while they were stuffed into uncomfortable positions waiting for nothing to happen. They went back to the campsite, but Mable wasn’t there. The rest is history.”
“How long did they search for her?” I asked.
“Um…it says hundreds of
people searched for several weeks. They don’t say exactly how long.”
“She was having problems at home?” I asked.
Charlie nodded. “It says they all had some sort of problems at home, which was why the cops thought they all wanted to go missing.”
I turned my head and began searching for the campsite. According to the article, it was due south of the intersection and was marked by a metal barbeque pit and a few primitive tables and benches. I walked in that direction and paused, trying to penetrate the shadows of the thick trees. In the distance, I thought I detected some sunlight filtering through the trees. I pointed toward the spot. “That’s got to be it.”
“Good,” Brett said. “I’m hungry.”
If there was a trail leading to the tiny clearing, we couldn’t find it. Most of the walk was clear of underbrush, but we encountered a thick patch of briars. I pulled out Jezebel. “Stand back.”
Charlie and Brett got behind me, and I started chopping at the branches on the briar bushes. Each swipe of the blade only pushed the thick branches and wouldn’t slice through them. Because of the thorns, I couldn’t grab the branches to hold them in place to cut. I scanned the area. “There’s got to be a way around this crap.”
I walked around and finally found a lane in the bushes just wide enough for us to slide through sideways. I led the way, moving slowly so as not to get stabbed in the exposed legs by the inch-long thorns on the branches. The briars tugged at my rucksack as I moved, and I had to give an occasional jerk to break free.
“I’ve never seen pickers this long,” Charlie said.
“They’re not called pickers here, my little Cajun friend. They’re called thorns.” I paused to wipe blood from a spot on my right calf when we’d made it to the other end. “I didn’t realize I got stuck.”
Brett had walked off ahead of us and was standing in the clearing. “You guys, this is an excellent spot to stop.”
I strode over to the picnic table made from split logs and shucked my rucksack from my shoulders. As advertised, there was a metal barbecue pit and some benches. The pit was rusted, but appeared solid. It was anchored solidly to the ground. Just beyond the picnic table, a stream flowed by and I headed straight for it. When I reached the stream I stepped out onto one of the rocks. “This is awesome.”