“Wow! That was a real cool escape, Mom!” Jack exclaimed.
Olivia swept her fingers through her hair, squeezed her eyes shut, and took a deep breath before she answered, “That Greta person kept clamoring about closing the park, and I bet it’ll be all over the television news tonight. We have to solve this mystery so that we can keep the park open. What I really need is to interview that girl, Heather McDonald. And I need to get to her now!”
CHAPTER TWO
Blue and Yonah managed to slide into their own car and race after the Landons. As they caught up, Blue honked his horn to signal that he was passing, then swung ahead on the left as Yonah yelled through his passenger-side window, “Follow us to the hospital.”
“Thank heavens for Blue!” Olivia exclaimed. “I never got a chance to find out where the hospital’s located.”
Both cars slowed down to head out on the long drive. As their parents talked quietly in the front seat, Jack and Ashley stared out the rear windows at the sights. And there were a lot of sights to see, especially when they reached the town of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Streets that looked like an amusement park were lined with tourist attractions, one after the other, competing for the attention of passersby. Jack sat up straight when he realized that there actually was an amusement park, a real one, hardly more than a stone’s throw beyond the main highway.
Ashley beat him to it. She shouted out, “Dollywood! Look, there’s a sign for Dollywood. It says rides and a water park. Mom, can we go there?”
“Probably. Eventually. After we’ve taken care of the bear problem.” Jack noticed his mother biting the edge of her thumbnail and figured she must be seriously worried. He’d never seen her bite her nails before. “At the hospital, kids,” she added, “we’ll be meeting a ranger named Kip Delaney. Kip is the park’s expert on the elk restoration program, but he’s also a black bear expert. I’ve talked to him on the phone in the past hour, and we’re both thinking there could be some remote tie-in between the bear attacks and the elk. I mean, that’s really just a guess, but Kip and I want to investigate it.”
Kip Delaney. These park guys have funny names, Jack thought. Blue, Yonah, Kip….
Fifteen minutes later they pulled into the hospital parking lot in a town called Sevierville. Kip Delaney was outside waiting for them, motioning them into a space he’d saved. Like Blue Firekiller, Kip Delaney was tall and dark-haired, but Kip had fair skin, and his shoulders were so broad that when he reached out to shake hands, his gray, park ranger shirt pulled tight across his chest.
“Looks like everyone’s here,” Kip said.
Yonah and Blue had arrived just ahead of the Landons, and Blue was saying, “We need gas. The gauge is nearly on empty.” Holding out the car keys, he told Yonah, “Here, take Jack and Ashley with you, gas up the car, and then buy yourselves some burgers if you’re hungry. Come back in about half an hour.”
Hearing that, it was Steven, not Olivia, who began to look worried. “Yonah has his license?” he asked, as if he didn’t really want to trust his kids to a 16-year-old he’d just met that afternoon.
“Sure. I’ve been legal for a whole month,” Yonah told him confidently. “Don’t worry, Mr. Landon, I’m a very careful driver. I promise I won’t go over 80. Just joking. Anyway, the gas station and burger place are only two blocks from here.”
Ashley giggled a little at Yonah’s joke, but Jack shook his head and said, “I’m not hungry.”
“Well, I’m starving!” Ashley declared, shooting a look at Jack.
“Since when are you not hungry?” Steven asked him. “The last time you weren’t hungry, you were eight years old and had chickenpox.”
The truth was, Jack already didn’t like Yonah very much and would rather not be stuck with him for half an hour. Besides, if he stayed around the hospital, he might learn more about Heather McDonald and the bear encounter. That would really be interesting.
“If you stay, you’ll have to wait in the hall,” Olivia told him. “You can’t go into the room.”
“Fine. No problem.” Jack didn’t bother to wave as Yonah and Ashley took off.
“Let’s go, then,” Kip said, and led the rest of them toward Heather McDonald’s hospital room. Blue entered first, followed by Olivia, Steven, and Kip. As they went in, Jack tried to get a glimpse inside, but with all those adults filling the door frame, he couldn’t see a thing. Then Kip shut the door tightly behind him.
“Perfect!” Jack grumbled sarcastically. He glanced around the hall and saw some empty chairs. A small square table held a few magazines, but he had no desire to read Quilter’s Digest or Healthy Aging or Cooking for Vegans. He sprawled on one of the chairs, resting the back of his head against the wall. A nurse who happened to come out of Heather’s room did not shut the door tightly. After she disappeared down the hall, Jack jumped to his feet and moved toward the door, which had swung open a couple of inches. That was enough.
Staying back a little so he wouldn’t be quite up against the opening, Jack peered first at the girl in the hospital bed. Heather’s eyes looked wide and shadowed, her face pasty pale, and her colorless lips quivered as the adults questioned her.
“…with our church group,” she was saying. “I went out to the cemetery because my dad told me some of our ancestors are supposed to be buried there. I wanted to find the tombstones.”
“Were your parents with the church group?” Olivia asked gently.
“No, they stayed home. In Morganton. That’s where we’re from—Morganton, North Carolina. It’s about 150 miles from here. But my mom’s here now.” Heather’s lips trembled even more as two tears slid down her cheeks.
Heather’s mother, sitting somewhere Jack couldn’t see, said, “I came as soon as they called me this morning.”
The sad-looking girl in the hospital bed was about 16, Jack guessed, the same age as Yonah. Her bandaged leg lay on top of the bedding, but the rest of her thin body stayed beneath the white hospital sheets. Greta, the TV newswoman, had claimed that a pound of flesh had been torn from Heather’s thigh, yet there was no way to tell how deep the wound was because of those thick bandages covering Heather’s leg from her hip to below the knee.
Jack’s father must have been standing in a corner behind the door. Jack couldn’t see him but heard him ask Heather’s mother, “Do I have your permission to take a few photos for the park reports?”
Mrs. McDonald murmured, “Yes,” and there was a sudden flash from Steven’s camera. Heather blanched as the camera flashed two more times.
“So you found the tombstones, Heather,” Olivia went on, “and then what did you do?”
“I put down my backpack—”
“Did you have food in your backpack?” Olivia interrupted.
“Uh-huh. I had a chicken sandwich on a wheat bagel. And some potato chips.”
Jack could see his mother exchange a glance with Kip, but Olivia asked only, “What happened next, Heather?”
“Well, I started to take pictures of the tombstones. With my digital camera. It’s over there in the drawer, if you want to see it.”
“Maybe later,” Kip said. Then, raising his hands to his face as though holding a camera, he continued, “When you took the pictures, did you have the camera up like this? Near your face?”
“Well, yes, I was holding it up to see the little screen—you know, that shows what the picture will look like? I guess, I suppose…it was in front of my face.”
Kip took a deep breath. “Then this might be what caused the attack. The bear probably thought you were eating something, Heather. First, he smelled the food in your backpack. Bears have a powerful sense of smell,” Kip explained to Heather’s mother. “Even from way back in the woods, bears can smell food a mile away. When he came close and saw you holding your camera up near your face, he thought the camera was food, and he wanted it. So what did you do then?”
“Well…I…” Heather glanced down, glanced away, ran her fingers through her tangled brown hair. “I guess I
did something really stupid. I took pictures of the bear.”
“Oh…my!” Blue breathed. He’d been writing in the small notebook, but now he paused, his pen raised, as he looked over at Heather.
“Like I said, it was stupid…a huge mistake. Huge!” Heather cried, her voice breaking as she began to sob. “I know that now! Because the bear came at me and he tried to grab the camera and I started hitting him with it and he bit me on the leg. I screamed, but he kept biting me, and I kept screaming, and then this man came and—”
“It’s all right, Heather, we know the rest of it from the report you gave to Ranger Delaney.” Olivia pressed her hand lightly against the girl’s cheek, trying to soothe her. “And we talked to the man who saved you.”
“Excuse me!” The words came from right behind Jack and made him jump. He whirled around to see a white-coated woman with a stethoscope sticking out from her pocket. “I need to get in this room,” she said.
“Oh, sorry!” Jack moved out of the way as the woman pushed through the door, leaving it even farther ajar.
“I’m Dr. Graham. You wanted to talk to me?” she asked Kip.
Kip nodded and moved back so the doctor could come closer to Heather’s bed. “We’ll need a description of Heather’s wound for our report, Doctor. Can you tell us about it—in layman’s language, please, so Ranger Firekiller here knows how to spell the words?” Kip threw a quick grin at Blue.
The doctor didn’t smile at all. In a clipped voice that sounded as though she had other emergencies waiting for her and she couldn’t spare too much time, she said, “I anesthetized the wound and examined it to see how deep it was. Then I debrided it.”
“De-breed?” Blue asked, raising his pen from the pad and scrunching up his brow. “What does that mean?”
“It means to cut away some of the damaged tissue.”
“You cut away more tissue?” Now Blue’s eyebrows lifted way up. “She already had this big hole in her leg. Why didn’t you just stitch it up?”
Impatiently the doctor said, “It’s difficult to stitch animal bites. By definition they are contaminated. Making sutures—you call them stitches—would be like leaving foreign bodies inside the wound—a perfect place for infection to localize. Bear saliva is very germy. But we were able to check for rabies, and the results came back negative. No rabies, so that’s good news.”
The doctor’s tone changed as she leaned over Heather to ask, “Feeling any better, honey? The pain pills and antibiotics ought to be helping.” Then, straightening, the doctor turned toward Olivia. “She’ll need plastic surgery to repair the wound, but her mother prefers to take her to the family’s own physicians in North Carolina, isn’t that right, Mrs. McDonald? Heather will be fit to travel by tomorrow.” Giving Heather’s hand a squeeze, the doctor told her, “I have to go now, sweetie, but I’ll back to check on you later, after all these people are gone.”
“Thanks for your time, Doctor,” Kip said.
“You’re welcome. By the way, who is that boy lurking around the door?”
Busted! Jack backed off fast, but not fast enough. It was Blue who came out to tell him, “Look, Jack, we’re still going to be here for a while, and you shouldn’t be out here—what did the doctor call it? ‘Lurking?’” Blue lowered his dark eyebrows in what could have been a frown, except that the corners of his mouth twitched in a little smile.
“Sorry,” Jack muttered.
“Anyway, I need you to do me a favor,” Blue said.
“Sure!” Jack exclaimed, glad that Blue didn’t seem angry. “What can I do for you?”
Motioning Jack to walk down the hall away from Heather’s room, Blue explained, “There’s a boy who’s been living at our house for a few days because he needs a place to stay. This boy’s mother is a real good friend of my wife, and the mother was in a bad car wreck last week. Really serious. She’s right here in this hospital, room 234. I need you to go to that room and tell Merle we’ll be ready to leave in a little while, and I want him to meet us in the parking lot so I can drive him back to our house.”
“Merle?” Jack asked. “Is that his first name?”
“Yeah, Merle. His last name’s Chapman. His mother is Arlene Chapman. She’s the patient in room 234, in the next wing over that way.” Blue pointed. “Tell Merle I’ll call his mother’s room when we’re ready to go. You stay there with him ’til the call comes.”
“OK.” That didn’t sound like anything Jack would really want to do, but at least he wasn’t getting slammed for eavesdropping. Blue turned to go back into Heather’s room, this time closing the door tightly behind him.
CHAPTER THREE
Arrows at the end of the hall pointed the way to rooms 220 through 240. Jack didn’t hurry. He was not anxious to go inside a hospital room where he’d have to look at a woman who’d been badly hurt in a car wreck. Heather McDonald’s leg, bandaged from hip to knee, had been disturbing enough to see. This Merle guy’s mother might look a whole lot worse.
But as he came close to room 234, Jack heard laughter and the chatter of female voices. For a minute he wondered if it was the right room. When he peered inside, he saw a boy standing at the foot of a hospital bed, holding a guitar straight up by the neck as it rested on the mattress. Sitting next to the guitar was a woman wearing a pale blue hospital gown dotted with darker blue flowers. The boy must be Merle, and the woman his mother. They might have looked alike if her face hadn’t been covered by two strips of tape that stretched from her forehead to her cheeks, crossing over her nose in a big X.
“Don’t make Arlene laugh,” a woman in a nurse’s aide uniform warned two other women. “She has a tube in her chest because of that punctured lung. Laughing hurts her. I mean, it doesn’t do any damage, it’s just painful.”
“Ooops! Sorry!” exclaimed one of the women, who was actually somewhere in between a woman and girl. Thin and pretty, she wore a nametag pinned to a green sweater, but she didn’t look like a nurse’s aide. Next to her, an older woman in a blue work shirt and jeans stood facing away from Jack so he couldn’t see her too well, but in her back pocket he noticed a pair of garden clippers.
“Uh…are you Merle?” Jack asked from the doorway.
“Yeah,” Merle answered. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Jack Landon. My mom is helping Ranger Firekiller investigate today’s bear attack. He said to tell you he’ll be leaving here pretty soon.”
Merle started to speak, but his mother held out her hand and said, “Pleased to meet you, Jack. I’m Arlene, and that cute young thing there is Corinn, and the hard-workin’ lady reachin’ out to shake your other hand is Bess. Poor Bess’s been havin’ to work twice as hard now that I’m not taggin’ around after her in Dollywood, like I usually do. Bess and Corinn came here to see if I was makin’ any progress. Wasn’t that nice?”
Arlene Chapman looked like she needed a lot more progress. Beneath the X- shaped bandage, her nose was black and blue. Her eyes looked even more bruised, and she panted a little when she spoke, probably from that collapsed lung with the tube in it.
Speaking up again, Merle told Jack. “I gotta be at my job in Gatlinburg by 5:30. Bess said she’d drive me there tonight, and my boss will drive me back to the Firekillers’ house after work.”
Bess, the woman wearing work clothes, spoke up, “But you gotta pay me back, Merle. For the ride, I mean.”
“How, Bess?” he asked.
“Sing one more song before we go.”
The nurse’s aide had left the room, but she poked her head around the door again, saying, “I heard that! Is Merle going to sing again? Sing loud, Merle, so I can hear you from the nurse’s station.”
So Merle was a singer? He didn’t look more than a year older than Jack. In fact, he looked something like Jack, only taller and stockier, with hair a little redder than Jack’s blond color and eyes more gray than blue.
Plucking a few strings on his guitar, Merle announced, “I’ll sing this one ’cause Mom likes it best.”
He waited just a moment, strummed a chord, then began to sing:
Downtown by the neon lights
Where trouble runs and the young men fight
There’s a woman singin’ slow
Her voice is rough and low
And when she steps to the microphone
The songs she sings are all her own….
Jack straightened in surprise. Merle was good! Really good! The song went on:
Now I might seem as far apart
From Mona’s world as day from dark
But Mona sings her soul to me
And all her songs, they set me free
She makes me feel I’m not alone
She sings for me as if I was her own.
The women in the room applauded, yelling “yay’” and “whoo hoo.”’ By then Jack wasn’t just surprised, he’d zoomed all the way to astonished! Merle was as good as any singer Jack had ever heard on the radio or on television.
“That’s my favorite of all the songs Merle ever wrote,” his mother was saying, as she smiled and nodded her head.
“You wrote that song? Yourself?” Jack stammered.
“Yes, he did,” Arlene answered proudly. “You know, we named Merle after the country singer Merle Haggard. When he grows up, Merle’s gonna be just as famous as Merle Haggard.”
Who was Merle Haggard? Jack had never heard of him.
Bess asked, “You used to sing, too, Arlene, didn’t you? Back a ways?”
“Well, yes, I did. When Merle’s daddy was alive, we sang together. We wanted to be another Johnny Cash and June Carter, can you imagine?” She laughed a little at that, then clutched her chest, saying, “Ooh, that hurts!”
Johnny Cash! Jack knew about Johnny Cash. “I worked on a Johnny Cash CD cover,” he said.
Night of the Black Bear Page 2