In The Forest Of Harm

by Sallie Bissell

  The trail snaked upward through hemlocks and cedars. The morning air was heavy with moisture and his breath came in white puffs, as if he were smoking a pipe. This would have been a hard climb for women unused to the woods, he thought, as a thorn branch snagged his pants leg. Higher and higher he pushed. By the time the dawn had turned the color of a pale egg, the armpits of his shirt were ringed with dark circles of sweat. Three more turns, fifty feet on the trail, the big maple tree, and he reached the rocks above Atagahi. Finally he was there. He looked down at the spring.

  “Oh, God,” he cried, his voice raw as an open wound.

  THIRTY-ONE

  He leapt down the boulders, his feet barely touching one rock before they thrust him onto the next, his gun banging against his shoulder blades. Should’ve come down here loaded, he thought as he slid and nearly fell on loose gravel. But there was no time now to shove any buckshot into his gun. He jumped over the last rocks and threw off his pack. The air from Atagahi rose warm and moist against his face; faraway he heard the warning caaaawww of a crow.

  The body floated facedown in the green water. Hair clung like dark tar to the skull, the hands bobbed outstretched, as if beseeching someone beneath the water.

  “No,” Jonathan said under his breath.

  He shrugged off his gun and knelt by the spring. Leaning out over the water, he could just touch the right ankle with his outstretched fingers. He grabbed the leg, then an arm, then he hoisted the body out of the spring. Maybe he wasn’t too late . . .

  Billy had not yet bloated or stiffened, but his skin looked like unmelted paraffin and felt like a well-chilled steak. Blood and water oozed from the dime-sized hole in the middle of his stomach.

  Jonathan’s brain went numb. All he could do was cradle Billy’s head in his lap and stare into his face. Billy’s mouth seemed to gape open more in surprise than terror, an expression Jonathan had seen often on his friend in high school, after they’d been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom.

  Billy’s hands bore no signs of struggle. The knuckles were unsplit and the fingers hung limp, frail as the bleached bones of a dead bird. They would coax no more music from horsehair and gut.

  “Oh, Billy,” Jonathan said thickly. There was a hard angular lump in the pocket of Billy’s sweatshirt. Jonathan reached in and pulled out a small harmonica. It was waterlogged, but untouched by any bullet. Jonathan lifted it to his lips. He blew a cluster of sad, tinny notes into the air, then he buttoned the harmonica in his own breast pocket. He would give it to little Michael. The boy was too young to understand now, but someday they would sit on the porch at Little Jump Off and Jonathan would tell him about his father—that he had been a good man and a fiddler like no other.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jonathan moaned, wishing he could speak the words in Cherokee. He pressed his forehead against Billy’s. He held him for a moment, then he examined the bullet hole more closely. The orange fabric of Billy’s sweatshirt was charred around the edges, and a thin smear of blood trailed along the rocks for almost twenty feet. Whitman, the stranger who’d lured him up here with the promise of a thousand dollars, had shot him in the gut from point-blank range. Ever the Cherokee, Billy had spent his last moments trying to crawl to the healing waters of Atagahi.

  The sharp taste of anger rose in Jonathan’s throat. If Whitman had already killed Billy, then he might well have murdered Mary, too, and now be on his way back to civilization. But Jonathan had passed no one on the trail; he hadn’t seen the slightest trace of anyone heading east. Could Whitman still be here, in the forest, waiting?

  Quickly, he laid Billy on the ground and picked up his shotgun.

  He loaded two shells and circled the pool, trying to stay inside the deep purple shadows cast by the rising sun. He peered into the small crevices between the boulders, his ears keen for the scratch of a pebble or the cock of a gun’s hammer. When he found nothing but the same blank boulders that had stood there for the past ten thousand years, he climbed up into the bigger surrounding rocks, steeling himself to find more bodies, but hoping to find anything that might give him some kind of clue. Again, the rocks revealed nothing. He crouched beside a boulder. Could Mary and her friends have gotten lost in the Ghosts? Did the three women even make it this far? If that was the case, why did Whitman kill Billy here?

  He turned that over in his mind as he searched the rest of the rocks. He’d just crept past one huge boulder that protruded upward from the others when he heard a whimper.

  “Mary?” he called out, his voice lifting with hope.

  He heard another, sharper cry. Under a small outcropping of sandstone, a familiar face peered up at him. Dark brown eyes, floppy ears alert for danger.

  “Homer!”

  The dog whimpered as he leapt into Jonathan’s arms. Wagging his tail like a buggy whip, he plastered Jonathan’s face with sloppy, ardent kisses. The weight of sixty twisting pounds of joyous hound pushed them both backwards into the dirt.

  “Homer, what happened?” Though Homer wiggled with delight, Jonathan could feel his rangy muscles shivering. Whatever had transpired before Billy’s death was still terrifying his dog.

  A bloody gash creased the top of the animal’s head, the result, Jonathan surmised, of a poorly aimed bullet. Other than that, Homer was okay, though there was an edginess about him that Jonathan had never seen before. He scratched Homer underneath his chin, then got to his feet and shouldered his gun.

  “Come on, old boy. You can help me out here.”

  He searched the remainder of the clearing, Homer at his heels. No one else, dead or alive, was hiding anywhere at Atagahi that morning. More puzzled than ever, Jonathan climbed back down and sat beside Billy. Homer nudged Billy’s hand once with his nose, then nestled close beside Jonathan and again started to shiver.

  Jonathan stared at the hole in Billy’s gut as he considered different scenarios. Had Whitman killed Billy, then killed the three women and left them somewhere else? Had he buried them? Why bury three victims and leave the last floating? And why not kill Homer, too? Surely a man who would gut-shoot another man would have no qualms about dispatching a dog. If—he had just begun to postulate a third possibility when he noticed two dark splotches on a boulder beyond the spot where Billy’s bloody trail began. He jumped to his feet and ran to get a closer look.

  Two chalk markings decorated the sandstone. The lines and loops looked like they could have once formed words, and it seemed to him a single line was scribbled at the bottom of each block. Just like two separate letters with two signatures. He traced the edges of them, as if that might tell him what happened here, then he touched one block itself. It was dry. He leaned over and licked it. The bitter taste of burned wood stung his tongue.

  He frowned. There must be something else here, something he’d missed. He surveyed the spring again, this time softening his focus, allowing his gaze to absorb everything.

  Halfway through a slow scan of the area, he saw it. A narrow, trampled trail through the grass that led past the willow and up into the mountains, weeds bent along both sides, wide enough for one person to walk. A dot of color caught his eye. A yellow fleck dotted the old willow.

  He hurried over to the willow and touched the lemon-colored spot. It felt sticky; a bit of yellow came off on his finger. He sniffed it. Oil paint. Mary. She had come up here to paint, and she’d left this dot of yellow pigment five feet up the tree. Why? Because she had to go into woods she didn’t know, and she was marking a trail to lead her back here.

  “Okay, Homer,” he murmured as he scanned the trees up the mountainside, searching for more dots of yellow paint. He saw none, but surely there must be more. Mary wouldn’t have marked one tree and then quit. “We might have the start of a trail here. Now we’ve just got to find the rest of it.”

  He began to move quickly. Homer followed at his heels as he pulled a tarp from his pack and spread it beneath the willow. Then he walked back to the spring and gathered Billy in his arms. His body felt lighter than he�
��d expected. Jonathan carried him to the tree, remembering all the sweet summer evenings Billy’s fiddle had sung at weddings and wakes and barn dances, for free, just because he loved to see hard-knuckled farmers and their taciturn wives jumping like crickets to his music. As he thought of that, Billy’s body grew leaden in his arms, and he felt as if he were carrying some dead part of himself as well.

  Homer watched, ears pricked, as Jonathan laid the corpse squarely in the middle of the tarp, then turned it so Billy’s head pointed west. He knelt there, trying to call up some Cherokee prayer that would send Billy off, but he couldn’t remember any Cherokee words. Suddenly a dark, hot rage shot through him. Some rich white fucker in a rented Ford had killed his oldest friend, and he hadn’t been able to do a thing about it.

  He stuck two fingers of his right hand into the wound in Billy’s stomach. He pulled them out, dark with clotted blood, then closed his eyes and smeared the blood across his cheeks and nose. A single stroke, left to right, as he once read the great Tsali had done; then he looked up at the sky. Though he knew it was crazy, at that moment he felt just like one of the old warriors—hot and strong and utterly without limits.

  “I don’t know if the old ones did it like this, Billy, but I swear to you that you shall have the heart of the one who killed you.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Shit!” Mitch Whitman spat as he threw himself up the steep trail. A dense fog had arisen suddenly from the ground, clutching at his legs with wispy fingers. In ten minutes the world had gone from a clear, dark green to a nebulous gray.

  Pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead, he peered through the swirling mist until his eyes stopped on the next yellow-dotted tree. He climbed up the trail till he reached the tall pine, then he collapsed beneath it, happy to sit and let his lungs refill with air. It was only when he closed his eyes that everything came rushing back.

  He hadn’t meant to kill the Real Life Cherokee. But before he could stop himself, he’d burst out laughing when he read Mary’s note scrawled on the rocks. From then on, things had gone downhill fast.

  “What’s so funny?” The Indian had turned to him, his dark eyes flashing with suspicion. “Mary’s note says she’s in big trouble.”

  Mitch took a step back and tried to explain. “I’m laughing because Mary’s so brave. It would be just like her to try and rescue her friend.”

  “But she and her friend got hurt.” The Indian’s eyes bored into him. “Can’t you tell how scared they are?”

  “The great Mary Crow wouldn’t be scared of a little rapist,” said Mitch. “She deals with scum like that all the time.”

  “Bullshit,” the Indian replied. He reached down as if to re-tie his boot, then, quicker than Mitch would have dreamed possible, the Real Life Cherokee pulled a hunting knife and was pressing the sharp, cold point into the hollow of his throat.

  “Turn around, Mr. Keane. I’m not sure what all you’re about, but your guided tour of the Smoky Mountains has just ended.”

  Mitch froze as the damned hound began growling behind him, then, cautiously, he began to inch his hand toward the Beretta nestled under his arm.

  “Move it, Keane,” the Indian said softly. “Me and Homer got you covered.”

  “Fuck you, Tonto.” Mitch pulled the Beretta out and shoved it into the Indian’s gut, squeezing the trigger twice. Two muted pops sounded. For an instant, the Indian looked astonished, then his eyes focused inward and he crumpled to his knees. Mitch winced as the damned dog started licking the blood that gushed from his master’s wound.

  The Indian groaned. With his knife still clutched in his right hand, he began to crawl toward the spring.

  “I don’t think you’re in any shape for a swim,” Mitch taunted as the wounded man inched forward, leaving a slug-trail of shiny blood on the rocks. The dog yapped and ran circles around them. Mitch watched, amazed, wondering where the Indian intended to crawl with half his stomach blown away. He seemed determined to get to the spring, but just as he stretched out his hand toward the green water, the knife fell from his fingers and his legs lost their strength, merely twitching when they should have been pushing him forward.

  “Tam?” said the Indian, his voice no more than a husky echo.

  Mitch could not look away. Though he’d seen game dying in the field, this was the first time a man had bled out at his feet. Like a passerby who stops to gawk at some grisly accident on the highway, he could not pull his gaze away from the Indian’s quivering legs or his strange, mumbled words that could have been either curses or prayers.

  Then as always, whether it was a moose fallen on the ground or just some dumb deer, there was that tingle that started in Mitch’s scrotum and made him weak with desire. He enjoyed the prickly warmth that spread through his loins, but it left as swiftly as it had come, rendering him angry and unfulfilled.

  “Oh, come on,” he said gruffly, acting on his own discomfort. “Let’s put you out of your misery.”

  He stuffed the gun back in his holster and walked over to the Indian. Grasping him by the seat of his jeans and the collar of his Tennessee Vols sweatshirt, he picked him up and flung him into the spring. He floated facedown, blood seeping into the water like ink from an overturned bottle.

  Under the pine tree, Mitch opened his eyes. “Actually, not such a bad way to go,” he decided. “Certainly more heroic than poor old Sandy Manning.”

  What had the Indian’s name been? Billy or Willy or something. Poor dumb fucker. He’d babbled on about his kid’s ears and his hocked fiddle, truly believing that a thousand dollars was going to turn his life around. Mitch chuckled. A thousand bucks might punch up your weekend, but turn your life around? Shit. Anyway, it didn’t matter now. For the Real Life Cherokee, getting his life turned around was no longer an option.

  The damp, humid air had left a film of moisture on Mitch’s clothes that looked like dew. Around him, all he could see were tree trunks, poking up black through the mist like ghostly pikes on some medieval battlefield. Of all the places he’d hunted, this sodden, foggy country was the strangest. All these trees, all these mountains, and he’d only seen one owl and some kind of lizard. Not a rabbit or a chipmunk or even a squirrel. It was as if they had sensed his coming and just ceded him the whole half-million acres. Maybe it was just as well, he thought, remembering that turd-looking thing he’d shot the night before. Animals were not what he was hunting today, anyway.

  He hadn’t done as well with Homer as he had with the Indian. At first he thought he might bring the dog with him, but when the Indian hit the water the hound started barking like crazy. Mitch had tried to call him, but the damned animal snapped at him every time he came within a few steps. That was the trouble with dogs. Kill their masters and they turned against you. Immediately and forever. Mitch had finally taken the Beretta out again and aimed at Homer’s head. Blood spurted after he fired, but the old dog didn’t fall. Instead, he bounded up into the rocks, bleeding and screaming like something mad. Stupid hound, Mitch thought. Though he knew it was unsportsmanlike, he decided to let Homer bleed to death on his own. “After all,” he chuckled, his warm breath vaporizing in the cool air, “who needs a coon dog when you’re out hunting crow?”

  He considered Mary Crow and smiled. At last, she’d made her first mistake. Before he’d washed those messages scribbled on the rock away, he’d found out exactly what had happened to her and her friend and exactly what they were going to do about it. They’d even marked their trail, in case somebody came looking for them.

  “You finally fucked up, Mary, girl,” he said as he unwrapped one of the food bars in his pack. “And you fucked up big-time.”

  He finished eating and pushed on through the fog, finally breaking out of the thick woods into a narrow, level plain that seemed to have once been a kind of road. The feathery heads of pampas grass swayed from a field punctuated by small cedar trees that stuck up like exclamation points. A path of trampled weeds crossed the sward, then vanished into the forest above it. If h
e squinted, he could see a bright yellow dot on a tree about ten feet above the roadbed. Shifting the pack on his shoulders, he smiled. If the trail kept going as easily as this, he could probably have Mary Crow and company dead before breakfast.

  “And what were you doing when Mary Crow was killed?” he mimicked aloud, parodying one of the last questions she’d hurled at him on the stand. “Hiking through the woods, your honor,” he replied. “Experiencing firsthand how the fittest survive.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Mary and Joan had followed Alex’s trail all day, easily threading through the tall trees above the roadbed. They had just come to a clearing edged by dark green hemlocks when suddenly Mary stopped.

  “Something’s happened,” she said softly.

  “What?” Joan was concentrating so hard on trying to walk as silently as Mary that she almost stumbled into her.

  Mary pointed down to the roadbed. “Alex has quit marking her trail.”

  Joan’s old terror instantly reawakened. “But why?”

  Mary rubbed her eyes, as if that might make Alex’s bent thistles and stalks reappear. “I can’t tell. It looks like she walked to the edge of those hemlocks, then stopped.”

  “What should we do?”

  “I don’t know.” Drumming her fingers softly against her paint box, Mary studied the clearing. Finally, she spoke.

  “I’ll go down and look around. Maybe the trail picks up past those trees.”

  “But what if it’s a trap?” Joan plucked at the sleeve of Mary’s sweatshirt. “What if Barefoot knows we’re following him, and now he’s down there, waiting?”

  “We can’t help that. Wait for me right here. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”