Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Of course, the police are doing what they can,” I said.

  “It’s the Wake County sheriff’s department, actually,” she said. “But the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is helping them. They don’t have much to go on. They’ve questioned people who were at the river. One fellow claims to have seen a red pickup leaving the scene with a girl in it, but they haven’t been able to trace it. The investigators have questioned all her college friends and her professors, but they’re running out of leads. It’s been three months. Pretty soon they’ll quit trying altogether.” Her voice shook. “You see, Mr.-Rattler-they all think she’s dead.”

  “So you came to me?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t know what else to do. Amy’s father is no help. He says to let the police handle it. We’re divorced, and he’s remarried and has a two-year-old son. But Amy is all I’ve got. I can’t let her go!” She set down the paper cup, and covered her face with her hands.

  “Could I see that picture of Amy, Mrs.-Johnson?”

  “It’s Albright,” she said softly, handing me the photograph. “Our real last name is Albright. I just felt foolish before, so I didn’t tell you my real name.”

  “It happens,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening to her apology. I had closed my eyes, and I was trying to make the edges of the snapshot curl around me, so that I would be standing next to the smiling girl, and get some sense of how she was. But the photograph stayed cold and flat in my hand, and no matter how hard I tried to think my way into it, the picture shut me out. There was nothing.

  I opened my eyes, and she was looking at me, scared, but waiting, too, for what I could tell her. I handed back the picture. “I could be wrong,” I said. “I told you I’m no miracle worker.”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, yes. Since the first day, I do believe.”

  She straightened up, and those slanting lines deepened around her mouth. “I’ve felt it, too,” she said. “I’d reach out to her with my thoughts, and I’d feel nothing. Even when she was away at school, I could always sense her somehow. Sometimes I’d call, and she’d say, ‘Mom, I was just thinking about you.’ But now I reach out to her and I feel empty. She’s just-gone.”

  “Finding mortal remains is a sorrowful business,” I said. “And I don’t know that I’ll be able to help you.”

  Evelyn Albright shook her head. “I didn’t come here about finding Amy’s body, Rattler,” she said. “I came to find her killer.”

  I spent three more Dixie cups of herb tea trying to bring back her faith in the Tennessee legal system. Now, I never was much bothered with the process of the law, but, like I told her, in this case I did know that pulling a live coal from an iron potbellied stove was a mighty puny miracle compared to finding the one guilty sinner with the mark of Cain in all this world, when there are so many evildoers to choose from. It seemed to me that for all their frailty, the law had the manpower and the system to sort through a thousand possible killers, and to find the one fingerprint or the exact bloodstain that would lay the matter of Amy Albright to rest.

  “But you knew she was dead when you touched her picture!” she said. “Can’t you tell from that who did it? Can’t you see where she is?”

  I shook my head. “My grandma might could have done it, rest her soul. She had a wonderful gift of prophecy, but I wasn’t trained to it the way she was. Her grandmother was a Cherokee medicine woman, and she could read the signs like yesterday’s newspaper. I only have the little flicker of Sight I was born with. Some things I know, but I can’t see it happening like she could have done.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing. I just felt that the person I was trying to reach in that photograph was gone. And I think the lawmen are the ones you should be trusting to hunt down the killer.”

  Evelyn didn’t see it that way. “They aren’t getting anywhere,” she kept telling me. “They’ve questioned all of Amy’s friends, and asked the public to call in for information, and now they’re at a standstill.”

  “I hear tell they’re sly, these hunters of humans. He could be miles away by now,” I said, but she was shaking her head no.

  “The sheriff’s department thinks it was someone who knew the area. First of all, because that section of the river isn’t a tourist spot, and secondly, because he apparently knew where to take Amy so that he wouldn’t be seen by anyone with her in the car, and he has managed to keep her from being found. Besides”-she looked away, and her eyes were wet again-“they won’t say much about this, but apparently Amy isn’t the first. There was a high school girl who disappeared around here two years ago. Some hunters found her body in an abandoned well. I heard one of the sheriff’s deputies say that he thought the same person might be responsible for both crimes.”

  “Then he’s like a dog killing sheep. He’s doing it for the fun of it, and he must be stopped, because a sheep killer never stops of his own accord.”

  “People told me you could do marvelous things-find water with a forked stick; heal the sick. I was hoping that you would be able to tell me something about what happened to Amy. I thought you might be able to see who killed her. Because I want him to suffer.”

  I shook my head. “A dishonest man would string you along,” I told her. “A well-meaning one might tell you what you want to hear just to make you feel better. But all I can offer you is the truth: when I touched that photograph, I felt her death, but I saw nothing.”

  “I had hoped for more.” She twisted the rings on her hands. “Do you think you could find her body?”

  “I have done something like that, once. When I was twelve, an old man wandered away from his home in December. He was my best friend’s grandfather, and they lived on the next farm, so I knew him, you see. I went out with the searchers on that cold, dark afternoon, with the wind baying like a hound through the hollers. As I walked along by myself, I looked up at the clouds, and I had a sudden vision of that old man sitting down next to a broken rail fence. He looked like he was asleep, but I reckoned I knew better. Anyhow, I thought on it as I walked, and I reckoned that the nearest rail fence to his farm was at an abandoned homestead at the back of our land. It was in one of our pastures. I hollered for the others to follow me, and I led them out there to the back pasture.”

  “Was he there?”

  “He was there. He’d wandered off-his mind was going-and when he got lost, he sat down to rest a spell, and he’d dozed off where he sat. Another couple of hours would have finished him, but we got him home to a hot bath and scalding coffee, and he lived till spring.”

  “He was alive, though.”

  “Well, that’s it. The life in him might have been a beacon. It might not work when the life is gone.”

  “I’d like you to try, though. If we can find Amy, there might be some clue that will help us find the man who did this.”

  “I tell you what: you send the sheriff to see me, and I’ll have a talk with him. If it suits him, I’ll do my level best to find her. But I have to speak to him first.”

  “Why?”

  “Professional courtesy,” I said, which was partly true, but, also, because I wanted to be sure she was who she claimed to be. City people usually do give me a fake name out of embarrassment, but I didn’t want to chance her being a reporter on the Amy Albright case, or, worse, someone on the killer’s side. Besides, I wanted to stay on good terms with Sheriff Spencer Arrowood. We go back a long way. He used to ride out this way on his bike when he was a kid, and he’d sit and listen to tales about the Indian times-stories I’d heard from my grandma-or I’d take him fishing at the trout pool in Broom Creek. One year, his older brother Cal talked me into taking the two of them out owling, since they were too young to hunt. I walked them across every ridge over the holler, and taught them to look for the sweep of wings above the tall grass in the field, and to listen for the sound of the waking owl, ready to track his prey by the slightest sound, the shade of movement. I taught them how to make owl
calls, to where we couldn’t tell if it was an owl calling out from the woods or one of us. Look out, I told them. When the owl calls your name, it means death.

  Later on, they became owls, I reckon. Cal Arrowood went to Vietnam, and died in a dark jungle full of screeching birds. I felt him go. And Spencer grew up to be sheriff, so I reckon he hunts prey of his own by the slightest sound, and by one false move. A lot of people had heard him call their name.

  I hadn’t seen much of Spencer since he grew up, but I hoped we were still buddies. Now that he was sheriff, I knew he could make trouble for me if he wanted to, and so far he never has. I wanted to keep things cordial.

  “All right,” said Evelyn. “I can’t promise they’ll come out here, but I will tell them what you said. Will you call and tell me what you’re going to do?”

  “No phone,” I said, jerking my thumb back toward the shack. “Send the sheriff out here. He’ll let you know.”

  * * *

  She must have gone to the sheriff’s office straightaway after leaving my place. I thought she would. I wasn’t surprised at that, because I could see that she wasn’t doing much else right now besides brood about her loss. She needed an ending so that she could go on. I had tried to make her take a milk jug of herb tea, because I never saw anybody so much in need of a night’s sleep, but she wouldn’t have it. “Just find my girl for me,” she’d said. “Help us find the man who did it, and put him away. Then I’ll sleep.”

  When the brown sheriff’s car rolled up my dirt road about noon the next day, I was expecting it. I was sitting in my cane chair on the porch whittling a face onto a hickory broom handle when I saw the flash of the gold star on the side of the car door, and the sheriff himself got out. I waved, and he touched his hat, like they used to do in cowboy movies. I reckon little boys who grow up to be sheriff watch a lot of cowboy movies in their day. I didn’t mind Spencer Arrowood, though. He hadn’t changed all that much from when I knew him. There were gray flecks in his fair hair, but they didn’t show much, and he never did make it to six feet, but he’d managed to keep his weight down, so he looked all right. He was kin to the Pigeon Roost Arrowoods, and like them he was smart and honest without being a glad-hander. He seemed a little young to be the high sheriff to an old-timer like me, but that’s never a permanent problem for anybody, is it? Anyhow, I trusted him, and that’s worth a lot in these sorry times.

  I made him sit down in the other cane chair, because I hate people hovering over me while I whittle. He asked did I remember him.

  “Spencer,” I said, “I’d have to be drinking something a lot stronger than chamomile tea to forget you.”

  He grinned, but then he seemed to remember what sad errand had brought him out here, and the faint lines came back around his eyes. “I guess you’ve heard about this case I’m on.”

  “I was told. It sounds to me like we’ve got a human sheep killer in the fold. I hate to hear that. Killing for pleasure is an unclean act. I said I’d help the law any way I could to dispose of the killer, if it was all right with you.”

  “That’s what I heard,” the sheriff said. “For what it’s worth, the TBI agrees with you about the sort of person we’re after, although they didn’t liken it to sheep killing. They meant the same thing, though.”

  “So Mrs. Albright did come to see you?” I asked him, keeping my eyes fixed on the curl of the beard of that hickory face.

  “Sure did, Rattler,” said the sheriff. “She tells me that you’ve agreed to try to locate Amy’s body.”

  “It can’t do no harm to try,” I said. “Unless you mind too awful much. I don’t reckon you believe in such like.”

  He smiled. “It doesn’t matter what I believe if it works, does it, Rattler? You’re welcome to try. But, actually, I’ve thought of another way that you might be useful in this case.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You heard about the other murdered girl, didn’t you? They found her body in an abandoned well up on Locust Ridge.”

  “Whose land?”

  “National forest now. The homestead has been in ruins for at least a century. But that’s a remote area of the county. It’s a couple of miles from the Appalachian Trail, and just as far from the river, so I wouldn’t expect an outsider to know about it. The only way up there is on an old county road. The TBI psychologist thinks the killer has dumped Amy Albright’s body somewhere in the vicinity of the other burial. He says they do that. Serial killers, I mean. They establish territories.”

  “Painters do that,” I said, and the sheriff remembered his roots well enough to know that I meant a mountain lion, not a fellow with an easel. We called them painters in the old days, when there were more of them in the mountains than just a scream and a shadow every couple of years. City people think I’m crazy to live on the mountain where the wild creatures are, and then they shut themselves up in cities with the most pitiless killers ever put on this earth-each other. I marvel at the logic.

  “Since you reckon he’s leaving his victims in one area, why haven’t you searched it?”

  “Oh, we have,” said the sheriff, looking weary. “I’ve had volunteers combing that mountain, and they haven’t turned up a thing. There’s a lot of square miles of forest to cover up there. Besides, I think our man has been more careful about concealment this time. What we need is more help. Not more searchers, but a more precise location.”

  “Where do I come in? You said you wanted me to do more than just find the body. Not that I can even promise to do that.”

  “I want to get your permission to try something that may help us catch this individual,” Spencer Arrowood was saying.

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to give some newspaper interviews. Local TV, even, if we can talk them into it. I want to publicize the fact that you are gong to search for Amy Albright on Locust Ridge. Give them your background as a psychic and healer. I want a lot of coverage on this.”

  I shuddered. You didn’t have to be psychic to foresee the outcome of that. A stream of city people in colorless cars, wanting babies and diet tonics.

  “When were you planning to search for the body, Rattler?”

  “I was waiting on you. Any day will suit me, as long as it isn’t raining. Rain distracts me.”

  “Okay, let’s announce that you’re conducting the psychic search on Locust Ridge next Tuesday. I’ll send some reporters out here to interview you. Give them the full treatment.”

  “How does all this harassment help you catch the killer, Spencer?”

  “This is not for publication, Rattler, but I think we can smoke him out,” said the sheriff. “We announce in all the media that you’re going to be dowsing for bones on Tuesday. We insist that you can work wonders, and that we’re confident you’ll find Amy. If the killer is a local man, he’ll see the notices, and get nervous. I’m betting that he’ll go up there Monday night, just to make sure the body is still well-hidden. There’s only one road into that area. If we can keep the killer from spotting us, I think he’ll lead us to Amy’s body.”

  “That’s fine, Sheriff, but how are you going to track this fellow in the dark?”

  Spencer Arrowood smiled. “Why, Rattler,” he said, “I’ve got the Sight.”

  You have to do what you can to keep a sheep killer out of your fold, even if it means talking to a bunch of reporters who don’t know ass from aardvark. I put up with all their fool questions, and dispensed about a dozen jugs of comfrey and chamomile tea, and I even told that blond lady on Channel Seven that she didn’t need any herbs for getting pregnant, because she already was, which surprised her so much that she almost dropped her microphone, but I reckon my hospitality worked to Spencer Arrowood’s satisfaction, because he came along Monday afternoon to show me a stack of newspapers with my picture looking out of the page, and he thanked me for being helpful.

  “Don’t thank me,” I said. “Just let me go with you tonight. You’ll need all the watchers you can get to cover that ridge.”
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br />   He saw the sense of that, and agreed without too much argument. I wanted to see what he meant about having the Sight, because I’d known him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and he didn’t have so much as a flicker of the power. None of the Arrowoods did. But he was smart enough in regular ways, and I knew he had some kind of ace up his sleeve.

  An hour past sunset that night I was standing in a clearing on Locust Ridge, surrounded by law enforcement people from three counties. There were nine of us. We were so far from town that there seemed to be twice as many stars, so dark was that October sky without the haze of streetlights to bleed out the fainter ones. The sheriff was talking one notch above a whisper, in case the suspect had come early. He opened a big cardboard box, and started passing out yellow-and-black binoculars.

  “These are called ITT Night Mariners,” he told us. “I borrowed ten pair from a dealer at Watauga Lake, so take care of them. They run about $2,500 apiece.”

  “Are they infrared?” somebody asked him.

  “No. But they collect available light and magnify it up to 20,000 times, so they will allow you excellent night vision. The full moon will give us all the light we need. You’ll be able to walk around without a flashlight, and you’ll be able to see obstacles, terrain features, and anything that’s out there moving around.”

  “The military developed this technology in Desert Storm,” said Deputy LeDonne.

  “Well, let’s hope it works for us tonight,” said the sheriff. “Try looking through them.”

  I held them up to my eyes. They didn’t weigh much-about the same as two apples, I reckoned. Around me, everybody was muttering surprise, tickled pink over this new gadget. I looked through mine, and I could see the dark shapes of trees up on the hill-not in a clump, the way they look at night, but one by one, with spaces between them. The sheriff walked away from us, and I could see him go, but when I took the Night Mariners down from my eyes, he was gone. I put them back on, and there he was again.