In The Forest Of Harm

by Sallie Bissell

  “Jesus!” Brank whispered, blinking at the mist where the ghost had loomed above him moments before. “It’s been practicing something new.” His heart pounding, his fingers still wrapped around his gun, he waited. Minutes passed, but nothing more happened. He lowered the gun into his lap, and the mountaintop’s sad, sighing emptiness returned.

  When his breathing became normal he started to reach in his pocket again for the picture, but changed his mind. The ghost would probably only come back to distract him, and he’d have the movie star for another two weeks. Instead he took another slug of whiskey and rolled up in his blanket, hoping for a slow easy slide into unconsciousness. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, allowing the night sounds that kept most men awake to lull him to sleep. His muscles relaxed, warm and heavy. Dark colors danced on the inside of his eyes. He’d almost drifted away when suddenly he sat up, wide awake, staring into the darkness.

  He heard something—a sound that did not belong, a noise that fit nowhere. It was not Trudy’s low growl, nor the silly natterings of the ghost. This was something else entirely.

  His pulse quickened as he listened to the dark. Had it been a dream? He could hear nothing now but the hiss of the wind over the mountaintop. He continued to listen, straining to catch whatever it was. There. He heard it again.

  Quick as a shadow he was on his feet, shotgun in hand. He hurried over to the west edge of the bald and peered out over the mountains beyond. The night pressed close against his face. He squinted into the thick darkness, once more hearing nothing for so long he wondered if this might not be some new bit of nonsense the ghost had dreamed up. Then, the noise came again. If he cocked his head when the breeze blew from the northwest he could hear it, crisp as a snapped twig. It was the sound of women. Laughing.

  He pulled at his left ear. This was not possible. Women would not be out here in this wilderness, miles from any civilization, thousands of feet above the nearest settlement. It must be some freakish television signal, bouncing around the sky. He gazed out into the blackness and willed his eyes to open to everything.

  At first he saw just a million dark, sleeping trees and the night animals that scurried among them. Then, slightly to the left of his center of vision, he saw it. A tiny dot of flickering light suspended between forest and sky. All at once he knew what it was. Women were camping in the fissure of Big Fodderstack Mountain.

  His heart drummed in his chest. Women. Catching Trudy was one thing; catching women was quite another.

  He gulped, and opened his eyes to the wavering light. Soon they appeared, swirling before him, shimmering like Loreleis. Their flesh was pale, their eyes reflected the orange of the fire, and their lips were moist and red. They threw back their heads and their breasts bounced with the laughter that bubbled up their throats. He could see the blood flowing in their veins, the quivering hearts that pumped the blood, and further down the viscera—the food in their stomachs, the sludge in their guts, the eggs in their ovaries waiting to ripen.

  Saliva flooded his mouth as if he’d just licked a lemon. He lowered his gun as another tinkle of laughter reached him, and stared at the flickering light. Women were a different sport from sisters. Far less exciting to track, but infinitely more gratifying when caught. He chuckled as he turned away and headed back toward his bedroll beneath the tree. What a gift! Fate must still be looking out for him!

  Grinning, he looked up into the nighttime sky. In just a few hours morning would bring sunlight and the women and maybe even Trudy again. He’d better get to sleep fast. Who knew what kind of prey he might run into tomorrow?

  TEN

  Do you guys remember the day we met?” Joan studied Mary and Alex across the fire. The flames gave her face the look of an eerie pumpkin.

  “I do.” Mary sat on the lip of the fissure, the moon rising huge and yellow behind her shoulder. “Dr. Walker’s section of Constitutional Law. Mondays at nine.”

  “You sat beside that blond guy from Indiana who wore a coat and tie.” Alex grinned. “You always borrowed his notes. Mary and I used to wonder if you had anything going with him.”

  “No,” said Joan. “He was gay.” She shot Alex a dark look. “But I always wondered if you were sleeping with Mark Holcomb.”

  “Mark Holcomb?” Alex crinkled her nose. “Dopey Mark Holcomb? I’d rather go to bed with a personal appliance.”

  “You’d probably have more fun,” Mary chuckled.

  “Which brings me to you, Mary Crow,” Joan said, scooting closer to the flames. “I want to ask you a question.”

  “Okay,” replied Mary. “What?”

  Joan hunched her knees up close to her chest. “Tell me about you and Jonathan Walkingstick.”

  Alex cleared her throat loudly, as if to signal Joan to shut up, but Joan ignored her and kept her eyes on Mary.

  Mary swirled her brandy under her nose, allowing the sweet, potent aroma to fill her head. “Not much to tell, really. Rings, proms, the whole high-school sweetheart thing.” She glanced at Alex, who was looking at her with a hesitant smile.

  “Oh, come on,” Joan nudged. “My amore genes are picking up vibes. There’s a lot more to you two than just high-school sweethearts.”

  “Joan!” This time Alex glared at Joan across the fire, but again Joan ignored her.

  Mary watched a charred pine log collapse into the embers, throwing up a shower of fiery sparks. Up to now she’d trusted only Alex with this story, but Joan had long been a close friend, too. Maybe it was time to let her in on the secret as well.

  “Jonathan was my first friend here. In grade school the other girls considered me odd—light skin, no father, a mother who’d married a rich white boy, then come back a widow and tried to weave tapestries for a living. They called me Crazy Crow. Old Crow. Scarecrow.

  “Jonathan, though, didn’t care how much the other kids teased me. He lived up the mountain. The two of us and Billy Swimmer played together every day. Our yard was a thousand acres of forest. We blazed trails and swung on grapevines and pretended we were Robin Hood and Tarzan.”

  “You didn’t play cowboys and Indians?” Joan’s voice rose in surprise.

  Mary shook her head as she took a sip of brandy. “Nobody was ever willing to be the cowboy. Anyway, when we got to high school, Jonathan and I began to date. We were just as happy as a couple as we had been as friends. We never went out with anybody else.”

  He looked at her di ferently that day on the school bus. New eyes—hungry, questioning eyes probed her as if she were some fresh creature invented just for him that very morning. Her palms grew damp. In a way he scared her. In another way, she didn’t want to ever leave his side. “Save my seat,” he’d whispered as he got up to go borrow someone’s science book. She’d never forgotten the way those words rang in her head.

  “So what happened?” Joan hunched forward eagerly. “Why did you guys break up?”

  Mary held the cup of brandy against her cheek and closed her eyes. Here comes the hard part, she thought.

  “Jonathan and I were together on the afternoon my mother was killed.” She stared at a gray rind of ash along one sooty log. “It was the first time we’d made love—the first time I’d made love with anybody.”

  It’s Thursday night, and they’d dawdled their way home from band practice, unwilling to leave the heady spring evening for the rigors of geometry homework. They sit on an old moss-covered log, laughing about Mr. Mooney, the band director. Jonathan removes his shirt. His chest is sculpted and hairless, and reminds Mary of the torso of Hermes in her World History book.Though she knows she shouldn’t, she reaches over and touches him. His skin is tight and warm; she can feel the rapid drubbing of his heart. Suddenly his hand is under her blouse, and electricity jolts through her and then they are behind the log, discovering each other in that sweet April air.They do not speak. He is warm and heavy and smells clean, like new grass.The first time she flinches at the small sting of pain.The second time she figures out to rise and meet him and togethe
r they ride away on a velvet horse of their own invention.

  “I got back to the store about a minute after my mother was murdered,” Mary said. You heard footsteps and you couldn’t even go to the window to see who was walking away. Her old coward mantra started ringing in her head. The years had not dimmed its power to condemn. Suddenly she felt herself shrinking, the strong muscles in her body withering as she sat there.

  “Oh, my God!” Joan’s eyes were dark pools in the firelight. “How awful!”

  “I used to think that if I’d just come straight to the store that afternoon, nothing would have happened.” Mary fought to keep her voice even. “Sometimes I still think that might be true.”

  Joan reached over and squeezed her leg. “Don’t—you think like that, you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

  Mary looked back into the fire and thought of the stones at the base of her mother’s grave, and of the six men she’d hungrily convicted of murder. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m not crazy already.”

  “Don’t go there, Mary,” Alex said. “You’re no crazier than the rest of us.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve seen Jonathan since your mom’s death?” Joan’s question floated above the fire like a wisp of ash.

  “Oh, I saw him at her funeral. He was as horrified as everybody else. He and Billy ditched school for a week to search for her killer.” Mary leaned over and rearranged a half-charred log. “I saw him alone only once more, then my grandmother came and took me to Atlanta.” She looked up. “And what could I have said to him, anyway? ‘Hey, Cherokee-boy, if we hadn’t been fucking, my mom might still be alive’ ?”

  Suddenly a single thunderous boom shattered the air above them. Then that sound was replaced by a high, piercing scream that wavered somewhere between human and not.

  “Jeez!” Joan leapt to her feet, her collapsible cup tumbling to the ground, spilling brandy onto the rocks. “What the hell was that?”

  Mary stood, too, and stared into the blackness. The first sound she recognized—the simple deep report of a shotgun. The second noise she couldn’t place. No animal she’d ever heard up here made a cry like that.

  “Oh, it’s probably just some juiced-up hunters trying to scare each other.” She tried to make her voice light.

  “What would anybody be hunting in the dark?” The flames deepened the hollows underneath Joan’s cheekbones.

  “Bears, maybe. Somebody could be poaching red wolves. They’ve reintroduced wolves to the forest and a lot of people don’t like it.”

  “Isn’t it illegal to hunt at night?” Alex looked up at her.

  “Not necessarily.” Mary shrugged. “And anyway, who’s up here to write them a ticket?”

  “Gosh, they won’t hear us and think we’re red wolves, will they?” Joan rubbed her arms as if she were cold.

  “No. Wolves are smart, but they don’t drink brandy around campfires at night.” When Joan did not laugh, Mary answered more seriously. “They’re probably miles away. The sound travels funny up here.”

  “Everything travels funny up here, if you ask me.” Joan fished in her pocket for her cigarettes.

  They huddled around the fire, that old fighter-of-night that the Cherokees regarded as a living spirit who both kept their secrets and revealed their dreams. When the low, shimmying flames had warmed them again, Joan spoke.

  “Mary, I’m sorry for making you dredge up all that old stuff about your mom. It seems like every rock you turn over in this forest, something nasty crawls out.”

  Mary gazed into the fire and thought of the Old Men. “That’s just quid pro quo for the mountains. If they give you something, they always expect something in return.”

  They poured another round of brandy, then Alex started folding herself into a yoga position called the Crow.

  Mary laughed as Alex’s long arms and lanky legs stuck out like pipe-straws, but even as she laughed, she kept one ear tuned to the forest. That scream had unnerved her more than she was willing to admit. If something strange was roaming around out there she wanted to know about it before her friends did. She peered past Alex into the darkness beyond, waiting for whatever it was to shriek again, but everything remained silent; their own voices were the only noises in the glittering black stillness of the autumn night.

  They talked on, the familiar chatter of her friends comforting her. Alex carped on about how there were only three people in Atlanta who could give you a decent haircut; Joan’s accent took on a decidedly Brooklyn edge as she complained that the shoe sales at Saks almost never included size five. When the embers had burned down into mere pinpoints of orange, Mary was calm again—the gunshot and the strange, inhuman cry had receded into just another odd memory of a forest night.

  She got to her feet. “I’m hitting the tick, ladies.”

  “You’re what?” Joan exclaimed, horrified.

  “Going to bed.” Mary laughed as she pulled her sweatshirt over her head. “That’s mountain speak. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m whipped.”

  “Me, too,” said Joan. “My legs feel like concrete.”

  “Just wait till tomorrow,” Alex warned. “They’ll feel like concrete underwater.”

  Inside, the cave was dark and smelled of dry dust. Zipping themselves into their tent, Alex stripped down to her long johns and jumped into Charlie Carter’s arctic sleeping bag while Joan took off her boots and curled up in her new bag. Mary climbed into her old flannel bedroll between them.

  “Anybody need to pee?” Alex asked, her hand on the lantern’s switch.

  “Not bad enough to leave this tent,” answered Joan. “It’s too long and cold a walk in the dark.”

  “I’m okay, Alex,” Mary replied.

  Alex started to switch off the light, then she grinned and made a face above the lantern. “Anybody want to tell ghost stories? I know some good ones.”

  “No, Alex. You ask that every time we sleep in the same room. Nobody wants to hear any ghost stories. Spending the night in this cave with you is scary enough.” Joan tugged her sleeping bag over her head. “I’ll see you guys in the morning.”

  “Good night, Alex,” Mary said, laughing at the crestfallen look on Alex’s face.

  “Good night,” Alex sniffed, turning off the lantern. “And sweet dreams to all who deserve them.”

  Darkness enveloped them like a glove; then in a little while Mary felt a soft tug on her sleeping bag.

  “Mary?” a voice whispered. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.” Mary smiled knowingly in the dark. Joan always saved her most troublesome questions for last.

  “Do you really think those hunters are miles away?”

  “Absolutely.” Mary snuggled into her sleeping bag, breathing in its woodsy, cedar-chip smell. “If they’re locals, they know not to try this trail at night. If they’re not locals, then they couldn’t find this trail even if they wanted to. Don’t worry. We’re safe.”

  “I hope so,” Joan replied through a yawn. “Goodnight, then. Buona notte.”

  “Goodnight.” Mary turned on her side and closed her eyes. At first she saw nothing, then Cal Whitman’s face and her mother’s slain body floated before her. Footsteps echoed, walking away. She shuddered. Too bad Joan hadn’t let Alex tell her ghost story. A mythical monster would be preferable to the real ones that roamed through her dreams.

  ELEVEN

  Lou Delgado had just taken his second bite of warm pecan pie when a shadow fell across the sunny table. Coffee sloshed over the rim of his cup as someone jostled his booth. He looked up. Mitchell Whitman slid into the seat across from him.

  Whitman tapped the Rolex on his wrist. “It’s eight o’clock, Saturday morning, Mr. Delgado.”

  Lou forced down his pie, its sweetness suddenly a sticky, sodden lump in his mouth. “I got what you wanted.”

  Whitman folded his hands and waited, as if expecting to be dealt a lucky hand of poker. “And?”

  Lou picked up a manila envelope from the seat beside him and plopped
it down on the table. “These just came from the darkroom.”

  Whitman opened the envelope. Inside was a photographic contact sheet—36 tiny black-and-white pictures all on one piece of paper. Turning the sheet sideways, he looked at the images. Three women loading camping gear into the trunk of a BMW, the car traveling down a gravel road, the three again coming out of some hayseed general store. The final picture showed the Beemer parked in some forest.

  He looked at Lou. “So Mary Crow’s gone camping?”

  “Sure has. Somewhere between East Bumblefuck, North Carolina, and Nowhere, Tennessee. It’s written on the back of the sheet.”

  Whitman turned the page. “Little Jump Off Trail?”

  “Hillbilly country.” Lou winked at Paula, the morning waitress, as she freshened his coffee. “Where the feds managed to piss off the locals so bad they lost that Rudolph guy.”

  Whitman’s eyes darted up at Delgado. “Who?”

  “Eric Rudolph. The guy who allegedly blew up that abortion clinic in Birmingham. He got his ass up in those mountains and the cops haven’t seen him since.” Delgado chuckled.

  Whitman shrugged, disinterested, as he began to re-examine each picture. When he looked up again, his lips drew back in that awful smile. “Mr. Delgado, you’ve just opened a whole new realm of possibilities for me.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lou sat back in the booth and stirred his coffee. “Possibilities for what?”

  “Like I told you before. Mary Crow knows too much. I intend to see that she has nothing more to do with the prosecution of this case.”

  “Look, kid, there’s something you don’t understand. The DA’s office is like a real deep baseball team. Mary Crow gets benched, another lawyer’ll step up to the plate. Stopping Mary Crow ain’t gonna stop this case. Your brother’s already been convicted.”