Around 4:30, Glen began to get worried. He hung a BE BACK IN A JIFFY sign in the store window and walked down the road to the graveyard behind the church. He found Dale where he expected to: sitting cross-legged in front of his mother’s grave, studying the lettered stone in the same distant gaze as he always did. It pained Glen to see his son taking the loss so hard. Glen could handle the grief—or he thought he could—but Dale was just a child. The boy still had hard lessons to learn about the unfairness of life and death.
Dale continued staring at the granite marker, even when his father crouched and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I miss her, Dad,” he said. “I miss her so bad it hurts.”
“I know, son,” said Glen. “I miss her, too.”
“It just doesn’t seem real. I look at this dumb tombstone and it’s like she ain’t even buried here. It’s like someone’s pulling a stupid joke on us.”
Glen was amazed at how closely Dale’s emotions mirrored his own. “Yeah, it does seem that way, but we both know that it’s for real. We shouldn’t grieve over your mother’s death, son. We should see it as a blessing. She suffered for so very long and now she’s with God, happy and healthy. She won’t ever be in pain again.”
Dale turned his eyes to his father, regarding him with a sadness that Glen knew all too well. “I know that. But God had no right to take her. We needed her a lot more than He did.”
“We can’t go blaming the Lord, Dale. That kind of bitterness will only keep the hurt unhealed. We’ve got to try and thank God for giving your mother the peace she deserved and hope that He allows us to be with her someday.”
Even as he spoke the words, Glen felt as if he was being dishonest to the boy, offering a philosophy that he himself had a hard time swallowing. Many a lonely night since Liz’s death, he had wept into his pillow and cursed God for all he was worth. He knew it was wrong and that it served no practical purpose whatsoever, but he still slipped up sometimes and cried out angrily into the darkness when he reached for her side of the bed and found the sheets cool and empty.
He ruffled Dale’s hair with a fatherly hand and drew a smile from the boy. “Come on, pardner. Let’s head on back to the ranch. Won’t be long before its suppertime. What are you hungry for tonight?”
“Burgers and fries,” piped Dale. He gathered up his schoolbooks and tucked them under his arm.
“You always want burgers and fries,” laughed Glen. “Don’t you want something nutritious for a change? Maybe liver and okra? Or maybe some wild game? How does possum stew or squirrel pie sound?”
“Gross!” said Dale with a grimace of repulsion.
“Okay, I get the message. Burgers and fries tonight. But tomorrow we’ll have to start working on a new menu. Your mom wouldn’t like me feeding you meat and potatoes every day of the week.”
They stopped at the town hall on the way back. The Tucker’s Mill post office shared space with both the county clerk’s office and the police station. Glen was getting his mail when Deputy Homer Lee Peck came in to feed change to the vending machines.
“You’re going to ruin your appetite, Homer,” Glen told him as he reached into his box and extracted a wad of letters and junk mail.
Deputy Peck checked the watch on his fat wrist and shrugged. “It’s a whole hour till suppertime, Glen. I could starve to death before then.”
Glen watched as Homer popped the top on a Mountain Dew and tore the wrapper off a Baby Ruth with his teeth. You could live off that blubber of yours for a year, he was tempted to say, but decided not to. It wasn’t good to get the overweight deputy riled up. Not because he was threatening in any way, but because he tended to hyperventilate and get all red in the face. To insult the tubby lawman was to risk giving him a coronary on the spot.
“I saw we had some visitors roll into town today,” said Homer, staring out the glass panes of the door. The tan Land Rover with the canoe on its roof could be seen parked in the driveway of Compton’s boardinghouse. “Urban dwellers down for a taste of the great outdoors?”
“Yep,” replied Glen. “Said they were businessmen getting away from the rat race for a few days. Going to be doing a little fishing and canoeing.”
“I reckon you didn’t catch their names, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. But I’m sure Miss Mable will be glad to fill you in on their life histories if you give her an hour or two. “
Homer chuckled. “Yeah, I wouldn’t doubt that one bit. See you around, Glen. I gotta get back to work. The sheriff’s got me stuck on the damned files again.”
“Be careful, Homer. You could get a paper cut on your trigger finger and have to give up your entire career.”
The hefty officer scowled and walked back down the inner hallway to the jail, devouring his snack as he went.
Outside, Glen found Dale trying to climb the flagpole without success. The boy would get about three feet off the ground, then lose his hold and slide back down. “I’ve got some mail for you, Cheetah. Looks like your pictures are back from the photo lab.”
“Really?” Dale grabbed the bulky envelope from his father’s hand. He was about to tear it open when he remembered the contents of that particular roll of film. Instead, he tucked it inside his history book.
“Aren’t you going to check them out?” asked Glen.
“I will when I get home.”
The storekeeper found that kind of strange, especially for Dale. “Okay, but remember I want to see them after you do. I’d like to see what sort of neat animals you captured on film.”
Yeah, thought Dale. I bet you would.
Glen unlocked the market door and took the sign out of the window. “Go on upstairs and wash up. I’ll get some ground beef and frozen fries out of the cooler, and some lettuce and tomato out of produce.”
“And Ding Dongs for dessert?”
“Sure…you dingdong.”
Dale laughed as he bounded up the stairs to the second floor of the old store and the rooms they called home. He slammed the door of his bedroom behind him and sat down at his desk, wasting no time in tearing the photo envelope open.
The first photos were of everyday mountain critters he had caught on his way up the western face of Pale Dove Mountain. Some were out of focus, but most were pretty good. With each photo he discarded, Dale could feel his heartbeat grow faster in anticipation of the photos he really wanted to see. They’re not even gonna be there, he kept telling himself. You just imagined the whole thing.
Then he flipped to the fourteenth print and there was the albino frog with the bulging pink eyes. Several shots of the white toad, in fact. He tossed the photos aside in a frenzy until he reached the first one of the triceratops. It was so clear and lifelike, that Dale experienced the same sensation of bewilderment that he had felt when he first laid eyes on the creature. All was as it had been last Saturday—the leathery black hide, the jutting gray horns, and the shiny tar pit eyes.
He sifted through the others of the dinosaur until he found the shots of the pterodactyl. The great winged reptile was flying away from the camera, the frog-turned-dove cradled tenderly in its toothy jaws. Then there was a shot of the creature grinning at him and another of both birds, large and small, winging their way up the rocky cliffside to the top of Pale Dove Mountain.
Dale examined each photo carefully and a plan began to form in his mind. He knew that he couldn’t show them to his father. Even after seeing the proof, his dad still wouldn’t believe his incredible story. Dale would show him the pictures of the blue jays and the sleeping possum just to satisfy his curiosity, but there was only one person Dale could think of who might actually take the other photographs seriously.
He went to his bookshelf and took down his favorite dinosaur book, The Encyclopedia of Prehistoric Life by Professor A. D. McCray. Dale checked the brief biography on the inside leaf of the dust jacket and found what he was looking for. It said that McCray was a professor of paleontology and anthropology at the University of Colorado. There was no photo o
f the author, but the boy could imagine the professor well enough—a gaunt, gray-bearded man in his sixties who had a fondness for pith helmets and khaki clothing.
“Hey, Dale!” called his father from downstairs. “Your burgers are going to be as tough as shoe leather if you don’t get on down here!”
“Coming, Dad!”
Dale planned on writing the good professor after supper, giving a detailed account of what he had seen on Pale Dove Mountain, along with a few of the photographs to back his story. Hopefully the expert would be able to tell that the shots were genuine and not some clever hoax constructed of papier-mache or modeling clay.
When the boy had made his narrow escape from the horrors of Pale Dove Mountain, he had vowed never to return again. But after seeing the photos, Dale Tucker thought that he might risk going back…if he had his hero Professor McCray there beside him.
And together, they would make the discovery of the century.
Chapter Eight
Fletcher Brice was repairing the roof of his cabin the next morning when he heard the sound of a vehicle climbing the road from the direction of Tucker’s Mill. He closed his eyes for a second and listened. It had the same grinding roar as Glen Tucker’s four-wheel drive, but was a tad different in tone. He finished hammering a square of tin into place to seal a hole that had rusted through, then walked to the far end of the roof to do a little patching around the stone chimney.
A minute later, the four-wheel drive appeared around the bend in the road and braked to a halt in his front yard. He had never seen the vehicle before. It was a Land Rover with a green canoe lashed to the roof with nylon rope. Neither had he ever seen the three gentlemen who rode inside. He watched them from the corner of his eye as he continued with his work. They were tall, dark-haired men who looked as though they would have been more comfortable in expensive suits than sport shirts, fishing vests, and faded jeans. Fletcher thought about Vincent Russ and the way he had seemed ill fitted, but in the opposite way. Suddenly, he knew they weren’t just tourists who had made a wrong turn on the way to the river.
“Are you Mr. Fletcher Brice?” asked the largest of the three, a sturdy, balding man with a thick mustache.
“That’s me,” said the old man, regarding them warily. “And I reckon you fellas are from that Eco-Plenty Company.”
The fellow seemed surprised. “What makes you think that?”
“Wild guess,” grumbled Fletcher. He spit a stream of tobacco juice off the edge of the roof. It hit the ground in a wet glob, splattering the man’s brand new hiking boots.
“My name is Smith,” said the spokesman, frowning at his stained footwear. “And these are my associates, Mr. Jones and Mr. Brown.”
“Ya’ll look like you’re kin to each other to me. Could pass for brothers.”
Smith ignored his remark. “Our client just wanted us to come up and try to change your mind about their previous offer. Perhaps Mr. Russ wasn’t persuasive enough.”
“Oh, he was persuasive, all right,” corrected Fletcher. “Enough to be a dadblamed nuisance. And I reckon you boys are gonna take up where he left off. Just how much are you offering me this time?”
Smith reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a large, official-looking check. “One hundred thousand dollars for all property registered in your name.”
Fletcher expelled a harsh laugh. “Hell, that’s what that brown-noser offered me the last time, and I turned him down flat. Looks like you made a long trip for nothing.”
The check was held up for his inspection. “We thought you might change your mind if you saw the money in the flesh, so to speak.”
A mischievous grin split the elderly man’s stubbly face. He let loose with another spritz of juice, hitting the check square in the center. An ugly brown stain soaked into the green paper, as well as the big fellow’s fingertips. “That answer your question?”
Smith’s face reddened. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to do, Mr. Brice.”
“I’m through with being nice,” Fletcher said, shaking his ball-peen hammer at the three visitors. “I gave my answer before and it was final.”
“Nothing is final, Mr. Brice. Our client is set on having this deal consummated. He sent us up here to bring back the deed to Pale Dove Mountain and that is what we intend to do…one way or another.”
Fletcher’s face grew livid with rage. “Are you threatening me, boy? If you are, then you’d best take care, ’cause this old mountain man can whup ass with the best of ’em. So I suggest ya’ll get back to where you came from and not come bothering me again. If you do, I’ll take that old scattergun from over the hearth and teach you three the Rocksalt Boogie.”
“We will be talking to you again, Mr. Brice.” Smith calmly folded the tobacco-stained check and returned it to his pocket. “Very soon.” Then he and the others, who hadn’t uttered a single word, climbed back into the Land Rover.
Fletcher was about to lash out with an angry retort, but decided against it. These fellows were in a different league than that sniveling flunky Russ. The threat of being shot at hadn’t even phased them. Nary a speck of fear or apprehension had shown in their dark eyes. Smith, Jones, and Brown—or so they called themselves—were men who meant business. And he had an uneasy feeling that they were dangerous men, too—the kind you didn’t trifle with.
The elderly man tried to work off the anger the three had brought on. He labored a while longer, then climbed down off the hot tin roof. He wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a bandanna as he sat in his rocking chair on the front porch. Damn them for trying to hornswoggle an old man like him! Didn’t they know the history behind Pale Dove Mountain? Didn’t they check things like that out? Didn’t they know that generations of Brices had fought every threat imaginable to keep possession of that wooded peak? Apparently not, since they were hell-bent on hounding him until he finally broke down and sold out.
Well, they could wait till hell froze over, for all he cared. The mountain was not for sale and that was the last freaking word on the subject…thus proclaimed Fletcher Brice.
He figured such a stern proclamation deserved a toast. He reached beside his rocker, lifted a loose board in the porch floor, and withdrew a quart mason jar from the dust and cobwebs underneath. He unscrewed the lid and took a swig of sour mash. He drank the clear liquor and waited for the jolt to come as it hit the pit of his gut. He grunted in satisfaction as his belly burned with the warmth of the alcohol.
As Fletcher sat and drank, a sad feeling gripped him. He thought of how life on the mountain had been in his younger days. It had been a life with a wife and a daughter and a real honest-to-goodness purpose. But those times were long since past. Hell, nowadays he didn’t even have a dog to keep him company.
He thought of Jenny and the sorry way he had treated her during her childhood. He had provided her with no creature comforts—no electric lights to read by, no indoor plumbing to even take a decent bath with. No, he had burdened her with his stupidity and shackled her with strict rules that would have hardened the heart of any youngster. Back then, Fletcher had thought that reigning with such an iron hand was necessary—both for his family’s well-being and that of the creatures who made Pale Dove Mountain their home. He had even been so foolish as to think that Jenny would stay on the mountain and carry on the Brice legacy. But his stubbornness had caused the opposite effect. Because of his harsh and inflexible ways, Jenny was practically gone from his life altogether.
A great loneliness washed over him. He would have liked nothing better than to be able to talk to his daughter at that very moment. Blast him for being too hardheaded to put a telephone in! And what if he had one? He didn’t even know how to use the dadburned contraption. He couldn’t write her a letter either. Fletcher had only had a few years’ schooling. Despite his poor education, he had once been an avid reader as a boy, but he had never quite gotten the hang of writing. The only handwriting he could manage never went beyond ciphering the price he got for ginseng, or
signing his own name.
But there was one way he could get a message to her. Knowing his aversion to correspondence, Jenny had given him a battery-powered tape recorder once, in hopes that he would take the time to dictate a letter every so often and keep her up to date on how he was doing. He had never used the recorder or the addressed envelopes she had left him to mail the tapes in. He had thought the idea to be pure nonsense back then, but now it didn’t seem that way at all.
Fletcher went inside and set his jar on the kitchen table. He searched through a drawer of the china cabinet and found the tape recorder. Sitting at the table, he fumbled with it for five minutes before figuring it out. Then he slipped a cassette into the deck and punched the record button.
His words were nervous and stumbling throughout the recitation, mainly because he felt awkward talking into a danged machine. When he finished with what he had to say, Fletcher rewound the tape, ejected it, and slipped it into one of the manila envelopes. Then he went into the bedroom and rummaged through his wife’s sewing box, finding some loose stamps. He hoped it would be enough postage to deliver his message from Tucker’s Mill, all the way across the state to Memphis.
Fletcher strolled down to the mailbox at the edge of the road and placed the envelope inside, raising the red flag on the side to signal the mailman for a pickup when he came around that afternoon. He would have liked to have mailed it in town and found the time to talk to Gart Mayo about the three trespassers, but decided not to. He felt kind of guilty about lying to the sheriff the other day when he came up asking questions about Dwight Lovell. Fletcher had denied knowing anything about the poacher’s whereabouts. He had not told the constable about the gunshot in the dead of night, or the horrifying screams that followed. To do so would be to risk the secret he had kept for seventy years—the secret of the albinos who resided in the streams and forests of Pale Dove Mountain…and the Dark’Un who watched over them.
When he got back from his trip to the mailbox, Fletcher thought about Smith’s parting words. A cold feeling gripped his ancient bones. Yes, he had a feeling—an overpoweringly bad feeling—that they would be back. And the next time they wouldn’t be so courteous.
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