Outcast In Gray

by M. Glenn Graves

  When I returned to the main trail, I used my signal-less cell phone to take a picture of the place where I left the trail and journeyed into the thick places.

  “Remember this spot,” I said to Sam.

  I watched him sniff both the main trail and then the side path that Dog and I had created with our exploration. After a few minutes of inhaling whatever it was he was inhaling, he looked at Dog and barked a couple of times as if relaying a translation of what I had said. I laughed to think that such was even possible, but since I had been with Sam for several years, he had seldom acted as if he were a dumb animal. On the contrary, his skills were legend with me. If only I could tell people some of the chapters of his life stories. Then I would run the risk of making him more famous than he needs to be and I would lose him to another career altogether. I chose to maintain my silence regarding his exploits and to provide him whatever favors he might demand once we were out of the woods and back in more pleasant surroundings. I had no plans to ever divulge my strategy to him, so he was never the wiser as to my selfishness in matters of his possible career choices which would never come his way.

  8

  Starnes was waiting in the warm house sitting by the fireplace and reading some manual pertaining to rural police work.r

  “Can I get you some tea?” I said as I entered the living room from the kitchen after I had come through the back door with both dogs.

  “No thanks. I had coffee in Asheville. Where have you guys been traipsing around? You’re wet.”

  “It’s raining a bit,” I said.

  “Not a fit day for man or beast.”

  “You ready to get wet?”

  “Not on my to-do list at the moment.”

  “Found some more bones.”

  “Woods are full of bones,” Starnes said.

  “Skeletal remains. Most likely they’re human. I think you should come with us and delight us with your expertise in detailing our find,” I said from the guest bedroom while I deposited my wet coat and changed into a dry shirt. I retained the jeans since they were only partially saturated. That means they were soaked from the knees on down. I rolled up my pants’ legs giving the appearance of a Tom Sawyer wading the streams of Missouri.

  “How far away is it?” Starnes asked.

  “Through rain, sleet, or snow, we detectives must vigilantly go,” I rhymed.

  “Pathetic. Don’t you think a trek into the wild can wait till the downpour abates?” she said. “Besides, I’m not a detective. I’m an officer of the law.”

  “I’d hate to have someone or something come along and destroy our find as well as your possible crime scene. Say, do you have an extra old coat I could use since mine is soaked?”

  “Out here,” she gestured to me when I poked my head through the doorway. “You really think it’s a crime scene?”

  “It’s suspicious, that’s all I’m willing to say. I need your wary eye to view the place and inform me with your trained and fully developing opinion,” I said as I slipped on an old jacket that was at least two sizes too big despite the fact that sleeves stopped just a few millimeters south of my elbows.

  “Complete skeletal remains?” she asked.

  “Head is missing, but there were lots of bones remaining to indicate a human form. I’m not the expert you are when it comes to constructing an anatomical figure from scattered bone fragments lying about the ground.”

  “Wow.” Starnes did not sound impressed with my flattery.

  “Don’t be impressed. I need your eyes. Come on,” I said and headed towards the backdoor. The two dogs followed me. I looked back before I left the warm house to see that Starnes was putting on her coat and mumbling to herself. The luxury of friendship and tenacity. The woman loves a mystery almost as much as I do.

  I started to tell her to grab her camera when I noticed that it was hanging from her shoulder.

  “I don’t think that this is your old coat,” I said as I walked through the backyard.

  “You couldn’t fit into anything I might have worn or wear. Belonged to Spud.”

  “Your daddy had short arms,” I commented as I held up my arms to demonstrate the length for her.

  “He had those specially made. He never liked his sleeves to touch his wrists.”

  “Specially made, huh?”

  “Yeah. He took a knife and cut them off, then my mama sewed them up so he could wear the coat out in public.”

  “I bet that was her idea and not his.”

  “Bingo,” she said.

  The rain had slowed to a slight drizzle. The temperatures were still too cold to suit me, but with my new wardrobe, it was almost bearable. Spud had some old gloves in his coat pocket, so I put them on to squelch more of the cold and damp that was chilling me.

  In the excitement of getting Starnes to follow me to what I suspected to be a crime scene, I had forgotten to grab something to eat for lunch. I was two hours past hungry. The rain had all but stopped, but the wind had picked up once we got to the crest of the mountain where my markings informed us of the direction to the bone field.

  “The fun is over. The rest of the way is an endurance test even for the very best mountain girls,” I said.

  “I think I can manage the terrain.”

  We found and followed my rock markers. They led us to the tree limbs I had neatly arranged along the way to what was left of the skeleton.

  “Which way?” Starnes said from her lead position after we had walked several yards through the brush.

  “Keep following the markers.”

  “I see no markers.”

  “No more tree limbs?” I said.

  “Nary a one. I assume you left more?”

  “Yeah. It was a big tree fall. I had more branches than I could use at the time”

  “Maybe you placed them in another location.”

  “Don’t think so,” I said as I walked past her searching in vain for my other tree branches.

  My tree limbs disappeared completely as if someone had found my markings and had taken them. Everything I had laid out was gone. We looked around to see if the non-existent trail might be in another direction just in case I was mistaken. My lack of familiarity with the surroundings could easily explain what I thought were missing markers. Starnes went left and I walked right. Dog and Sam followed me. I guess they assumed I knew where I was going.

  We found nothing. If I had left some tree branches in this section, they were gone now.

  Starnes and I returned to the place where we had split company after several minutes of searching for my supposed markers.

  “Ask Sam,” Starnes said.

  “About the markers?”

  “I was thinking of directions to the place where the bones are or were.”

  Sam looked at me as if I had actually asked him something, barked a dog-code in the direction of Dog, and then scurried off with Dog in the lead heading through the thick underbrush. They were quickly out of our sight.

  We followed as fast as we could. The thicket was rough going. I could hear the dogs, but we had no visual on them. Several more minutes passed before we spotted the dogs. They had led us to the remains. That is, they found what was left of the skeleton, came back to encourage us as we were both crawling through the bushes, high grass, and briars by that point.

  “It would help if we were four legged,” I said.

  “If wishes were horses,” Starnes said without finishing the old rhyme. “Hey, stop a minute. Look at this,” she pointed to something hanging from one of the briars.

  I crawled over to her and we both sat staring at some type of hair hanging from a bush full of prickly thorns. The hair was gray mixed with some black and a smattering of brown. Starnes took out a plastic bag and gently picked the hair from the bush and put it inside the bag.

  “Can you identify it?” I said.

  “Looks like a coat from … a dog. Could be a coyote or anything else with fur.”

  “But it was hanging more than three feet off of
the ground,” I said.

  “Yeah, I noticed that.”

  “Rules out some varmints.”

  “Unless they jumped along as they ran through here.”

  “Let’s assume they didn’t,” I said.

  “Okay. That means that whatever it was that came through here, was just a tad tall.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Would be a fairly good sized coyote.”

  “Understatement,” Starnes said. “I’ve never seen one that large.”

  “Other possibilities?”

  “I’d rather not say until I have it checked out.”

  “But you’re thinking of something,” I said.

  “I’d rather not say until I have it checked,” she repeated.

  9

  Starnes brought enough plastic bags to cart home a small elephant. It took us a couple of hours to package and to label our finds. Starnes photographed the area where Sam and Dog had discovered the bone collection as well as the surrounding area of our approach from the main trail. It’s the wonders of digital photography that permit one to shoot some six hundred photos in a matter of minutes.

  We made it back to the warm house before five o’clock.

  I stayed in front of the fire while Starnes poured over our newest collection of bones separated into plastic bags of various sizes. Starnes had photographed the sparse bone remains our canines had led us to not far from the Ivy River. When we got back to her place after our lovely visit to Ponder’s Store and that delightful old man, she printed out her new photo collection of bones. Now she had real bones from our most recent discovery plus the photographs for her to study. Study she did.

  “You agree they’re human bones?” I said.

  She nodded without speaking.

  “Are we going to eat something or fast through the night?’ I said.

  She sat cross legged in the floor of the living room with the transparent plastic bone bags surrounding her from our latest find. I watched her methodically lay out the eight by ten prints made from the sparse bone fragments which were being studied in Asheville by the lab. She was closely examining the new bones the dogs and I had discovered alongside of her photographs of the bones from the initial collection.

  Sam, Dog, and I were basking close to the fireplace. The dogs were asleep. I was warm, dry, and hungry. Too hungry to sleep. I had food on my mind rather than bones, photographs, and mysteries.

  “You want me to fix something for us?” I said.

  Starnes looked up at me and laughed. She then went back to her study of the plastic bags and the photographs.

  “Hey, that’s no way to treat a guest,” I said.

  “Then don’t say funny, stupid stuff like that if you don’t want me to laugh at you.”

  “I can cook…a little. Wait, I have an idea,” I said remembering that farro recipe I had torn out of the magazine before I left Norfolk.

  “This could be frightening,” Starnes said.

  “Let’s go to Asheville and find some farro.”

  “I have no idea what that is,” Starnes said.

  “Me either, well, not really. I came across a recipe for it back in Norfolk. Let’s go on an adventure and discover something unique together.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Come on. Where’s your spirit of adventure?”

  “At present, it is focused upon bone fragments and photos of bone fragments.”

  “You need to broaden your horizons.”

  “Not with anything named farro.”

  “That’s not fair to the dish,” I pleaded.

  “Not interested in fairness.”

  “So, you want me to prepare us something instead?”

  Her stare spoke volumes.

  “You’re a funny, funny person, Clancy Evans.”

  “Is that an insult?”

  “Simple candor. Tell you what, you relax. I’ll fix us something. You can hold your rapturous recipes for another time. You never know, we might be stranded on some desert island someday. Might need your kitchen expertise.”

  “You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” I said.

  “Won’t miss your cookin’,” she said as she stood and walked into the kitchen to prepare our supper.

  We ate in front of the fire as did the dogs. Starnes fixed spaghetti with a meat sauce. It was really good, but after she had insulted my culinary skills I refused to compliment her on the delicious meal. Wounded pride and ego.

  I was gulping down my second large helping while the dogs were back at the business of sleeping once again close to the fire. Starnes was back studying the photographs and the real bones. I brought my plate into the living room and sat down in Spud’s favorite old chair. Starnes was on the floor in front of me.

  “Anything strike you?” I said while chewing.

  “Yeah.”

  “Wanna share?”

  “One is sparse and the other more plentiful.”

  “I noticed that,” I said.

  “Markings on the bones are interesting.”

  “What does interesting mean?”

  “Means that they were made by something with a large mouth,” she said.

  “Like…”

  “Like a dog … or a coyote.”

  “You have wild dogs around here?”

  “Sure we have wild dogs. We have coyotes, too.”

  “I detect a but in your answers,” I said before I shoved another fork-full of spaghetti into my mouth.

  “A but?” she said looking at me instead of the bone inside the plastic bag.

  I held up my hand while I finished chewing my mouthful. I needed time to chew and swallow before speaking.

  “Yeah, a direction different from where the conversation was going.”

  “You’re using grammar rules again, right?”

  “You’re thinking something is strange about the markings on the bones. What do you think?”

  “I think that if a wild dog or a coyote did this, and the same wild dog or a coyote killed our friend Rufus several miles away from this side of the county, then we have something to write home about.”

  “Because coyotes and wild dogs don’t usually attack human beings, right?” I said after I had swallowed my last bite of pasta and sauce.

  “Not unless they are provoked or cornered or sick,” she said.

  “Rabid beast?” I said.

  “Crossed my mind.”

  “Anything else cross your mind?”

  “Yeah.”

  I waited but she said nothing.

  “You gonna share?”

  “I was wondering why you didn’t tell me supper was good,” she said while she was staring at me. I was busy chewing and swallowing.

  “You ate two giant helpings as if you liked it,” she continued. “No compliment forthcoming?”

  “You insulted my cooking abilities. I didn’t think you deserved to be complimented.”

  “But you are engulfing your second rather large plate of my Italian cuisine.”

  My mouth was full once more so I couldn’t speak. I nodded in agreement.

  “Precious, I didn’t know you had cooking abilities,” Starnes said.

  It was Tuesday of the next week before the lab in Asheville sent word to Starnes that the bones we had found over in the Ivy River area of the county were, in fact, the remains of Rufus Ramsey, the hermit who had lived in the small cabin a mile or so from the river.

  Starnes was on the phone with Mandy Schuler of the Asheville lab seeking clarification to something that was stated on the report that was sent to Starnes. I was lounging on Starnes’ faded but comfortable 1950’s couch nursing my umpteenth cup of coffee for the morning. Sam and Dog were outside doing whatever dogs do on the first day after the rains had ceased. The front had obviously moved on and the sunshine was a welcomed stranger once again. I was pondering how unseasonably warm it was for early February when Starnes’ side of the conversation with Mandy found its way into my consciousness.

  “What does ‘ab
normally large’ mean exactly?” Starnes said.

  Silence. Starnes was listening.

  “Got that. What is normally large?”

  Again, silence. More listening.

  “And you determined this how?” Starnes said.

  Starnes continued listening while Mandy, I assumed, answered her query. I was listening too, but having to make up the answers which Mandy might have been giving to Starnes’ vague questions. I managed to crawl out of the much too comfortable couch, which was no small feat, and took the lab report out of Starnes’ hand while she was preoccupied with Mandy.

  Starnes frowned at me but said nothing.

  “You an expert on canines?” Starnes said.

  We both waited on the answer. I was now involved in the conversation despite my severe disadvantage.

  I found the place on the report where Starnes had quoted the two words “abnormally large.” It was a reference to the teeth marks on one of the bones. Apparently Mandy had determined the size of the teeth that had left the mark. Starnes apparently wanted to know what was Mandy’s differentiation between abnormally large and normally large. I was guessing, but I knew I had to be close to what my friend was after. Living with Sam the last several years had provided me with a kind of canine education on many fronts. That included teeth. I hardly knew it all, but I could have offered an opinion concerning Starnes’ queries on the subject at hand.

  “How large do you think?” Starnes said.

  Starnes listened. I waited. I made up an answer in my head since I was assuming what the two of them were discussing.

  “I understand that, but you can fathom a guess.”

  Mandy was a scientist and scientists do not like to guess. They rely upon data. Starnes, being a scientist herself, knew that. She was pushing the young intellect the way I often push her.

  “Okay, okay. By the way, I have more bones for you to study.”