In The Forest Of Harm

by Sallie Bissell

  “I just tried to make my case, Mitch.”

  “But you didn’t, did you?”

  “Not then. I bet I could now.”

  “Tell me how you figure that, Miss DA.”

  Mary glanced at Jonathan. Though he had no bow, he was staring at Whitman with the same look he wore just before he let an arrow fly.

  “I figure Sandra belonged to you, until your handsome brother came along. Then Sandra switched brothers and that made you mad. Both you and Cal were at her place the night she died, but you were the only one who was sober. Cal’s blood showed traces of every drug cooked in the past fifty years, and Sandra’s wasn’t much cleaner. Something, probably something sexual, pissed you off to the point that it felt good to knock one of Sandra’s teeth out. And it felt even better when you pushed her into that fireplace and broke her neck.”

  “Don’t stop now, Ms. Crow.”

  “Then, I imagine Cal passed out—all those free-range pharmaceuticals in his system could have killed an elephant—and you had your big chance.”

  “My big chance?”

  Mary nodded. “To get rid of your pesky little brother who was handsomer than you, infinitely more charming than you, but who was, and always would be, a weak fuck whose messes you’d had to clean up all your life. Murder investigations can dig pretty deep, Mitch. We learned all about your and Cal’s history.”

  “So how did I get away with this frame-up?”

  “You hadn’t had sex with Sandra that night, so you knew you were safe from DNA tests. You stole the sheets and wiped your prints off everything you’d touched. Why you left the water running in the kitchen I have no idea.”

  “Chamomile tea,” Mitch chuckled.

  “Anyway, you sneaked out the back of Sandra’s apartment while the cops came in the front. They found her dead and your brother so stoned he couldn’t even zip his pants up when they arrested him.”

  “Even if he was stoned, don’t you think he’d remember if he’d beaten a woman to death?”

  “Cal’s not nearly as bright as you, Mitch. And your little mind games had confused him.” Mary shrugged. “Or maybe he remembered everything, and your father decided to let his loser, drug-addicted son take the fall. Big Cal’s no fool. Why lose two of his boys when one would do?”

  “How’d you come up with this fairy tale?” Mitch taunted.

  “Because I’m good. I know how expensive defense attorneys work. And I’ve read enough evidence files to put all the little loose ends and jagged edges together. What I can’t figure out is how you found us. Nobody but Cherokees and mountain men know the way up here.”

  “I can tell you that,” Jonathan interposed. “He drove up from Atlanta looking for you. When he couldn’t find the Little Jump Off Trail by himself, he offered Billy Swimmer a thousand dollars if he’d lead him to you. Claimed he worked in your office. And Billy believed him. He took him as far as Atagahi, then I’m not sure what happened, but Billy wound up with two slugs in his belly, floating facedown in the spring.”

  “Billy’s dead?” Mary murmured, stunned.

  “This man killed Billy Swimmer.” Jonathan’s eyes locked with Mitch’s. “Billy figured it out, didn’t he?”

  “He pulled a knife on me.” Mitch shrugged. “I had no choice.”

  “You’ve got a choice now,” Mary told him. “Even if you’ve killed Billy Swimmer and Sandra Manning, put that gun down, and you’ll live. I promise you.”

  Mitch grinned. “And what are you gonna do? Make sure I rot in the same cell as my idiot brother?” He gave a sharp bark of laughter. “No thanks, Ms. Crow. I’ve got a happier life plan in mind.” He cocked his head toward the door. “Both of you put your hands behind your head and walk outside, slow. It’s time for you to join your friends.”

  With a swift glance at Jonathan, who nodded at her, Mary did as she was told. Jonathan lifted his hands and followed behind her.

  When they walked around the cabin, Mary gave a sharp cry. Joan and Alex sat under the leafy yellow maple, bound and gagged with duct tape, in a hunched-over posture like prisoners of war. Above the silver tape, their eyes looked wild and wide with fear.

  “Subduing those two was like shooting fish in a barrel,” Mitch chuckled, behind her. “I practically had to wake them up to tie them up.”

  Turning, Mary searched his face for any hint of mercy or remorse. “Let them go, Mitch,” she said, desperate to strike a deal. “Take me wherever you want, but let them go. They’ve done nothing to you.”

  “Come on, Miss Deckard County DA. You know it doesn’t work like that.” Mitch poked his gun in her back. “You two Indians sit down beside your buddies. I need to decide who I’m going to kill first.”

  Jonathan sat down beside Alex, Mary beside Joan. All watched as Mitch towered in front of them, a thin, raw smile creasing his soot-streaked face.

  “Let’s see.” He aimed the Beretta at each of them in turn. “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. I say Crow is last to go.”

  “Mitch, it doesn’t have to be like this,” Mary tried again.

  “Sure it does,” Mitch snarled, angered by her calm. “If I let you get back to Atlanta, you’d have me in jail before dinner. Anyway, there’s a little question you raised on the witness stand that I want to address.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Remember how you asked me if I knew what sexual intercourse was?” Mitch’s dark eyes blazed. “Remember how that question just cracked up everybody in the courtroom? And how they showed it about sixty times on the news that night?”

  Mary gave a sad nod, sickened.

  “Well, after I get rid of your pals, here, I’m gonna show you exactly how much I know about sexual intercourse.” Mitch laughed. “You might be surprised.”

  He grinned at Mary for a moment, then his gaze fell on Joan. “I think my mother told me to choose you.”

  Whitman aimed the pistol at Joan’s head. Joan shrank against Mary, squirming frantically, screaming something unintelligible behind the duct tape. Mary leaned over, trying in vain to shield her with her own body. She knew this was the end of their hike. They’d all be dead soon.

  But Jonathan was watching Whitman like a tiger about to pounce. Suddenly, with his hand moving so fast she thought she’d imagined it, he grabbed Ribtickler from his belt and hurled the knife forward, end-over-end in a single, fluid motion. It hurtled through the air, silvery as a trout, finally landing deep in the flesh an inch below Whitman’s collarbone. Whitman yelped, then Mary heard the deafening pop of his gun. A wave of agony gripped her left shoulder as Whitman’s bullet tore into it. In a haze of shock and pain she saw Jonathan spring forward and leap at Whitman’s throat.

  Jonathan hit Whitman hard, knocking him on his back. The two men rolled on the ground, Jonathan trying to pry the gun away from Whitman’s huge hand. Whitman struck out with a roundhouse left that smacked into Jonathan’s jaw. Punching furiously, he shook the blow off. In a tangle of legs and fists they fought, thrashing like infuriated boys on a playground, moving ever closer to Ulagu’s snake pit.

  “Jonathan!” Mary called, trying to struggle to her feet. “Inadu! Don’t forget the Inadu!”

  She couldn’t tell if he’d heard her as they rolled in the dirt. The whole side of her body was on fire. Blood spurted down her arm as she watched, helpless.

  She knew she had to do something. Heedless of the pain, she forced herself upright. The whole world spun as she drew her left hand up into a fist, her fingers slick with blood.

  A weapon. I need a weapon. She’d stashed Wynona and the palette knife in the pocket of her sweatshirt, but both would be useless at this range. She needed something else. Something heavy. She looked around desperately. Both men struggled for the gun, rolling closer to the pit, Whitman pummeling Jonathan relentlessly with brutal jabs to the throat and ribs. Do something, Mary told herself. Do something now.

  Suddenly, Alex fell over on her side and began squirming to the other side of the tree. She flopped like a fish on dry land
, and for a moment Mary was distracted. Then Mary saw what she was moving toward. On the grass beneath the tree lay the log she’d intended to use on Brank.

  That was it! Alex had figured it out. Mary scrambled over behind the tree.

  She grabbed the log Alex had carried from the porch with her right hand. Fierce tendrils of pain shot up her arm when she tried to swing it. Could she do any real damage with a shattered and bleeding shoulder? As she saw Whitman’s fist again crashing down into Jonathan’s face, she knew she would have to try. Jonathan needed her now more than he had ever needed her before.

  Jonathan turned his head. One eye was already swollen shut and his upper lip was gashed and bleeding. Both men were within a yard of Ulagu’s pit.

  Jonathan called out something she didn’t understand, then she watched in horror as Whitman wrenched the gun away, and suddenly Jonathan was grasping nothing but air. Whitman smacked the butt of the pistol down viciously on Jonathan’s forehead, then scrambled to his feet.

  “Told you you were fucked, Squanto.” Mitch laughed down at Jonathan, aiming the gun between his eyes.

  “Not quite, he’s not,” Mary said.

  Whitman jumped, distracted. As he started to turn, she lifted the log above her right shoulder, like a baseball batter at the plate. Ignoring the pain that blazed along the left side of her body, she tried to focus on her target. Help me, Wynona. Guide my arm. Gulping air, she concentrated all her strength and swung. Hard and high, the log slammed into Whitman’s skull. His legs crumpled like pipe-straws, dumping him on the edge of the snake pit. He teetered for a moment, struggling to regain his balance. Without another thought, she ran forward and rammed the log deep into his chest. A groan escaped from his lungs, and he plunged backward. One muffled cry of surprise grew into a scream as Mitchell Whitman’s long fall ended, headfirst in the writhing nest of Ulagu’s rattlesnakes.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Whitman’s screams had stopped by the time Jonathan wrapped Mary’s shoulder in a bandage. “Do you think he’s dead now?” Mary asked as they huddled together in the sudden, strange silence.

  “I hope so, for his sake. Can you imagine getting hit by a dozen snakes?” Jonathan grimaced. “Too bad the fall didn’t break his neck.”

  “At least that awful screaming has stopped,” Joan said.

  Jonathan unfolded himself from the ground. “I’m going to check out what Whitman brought with him. He might have something we can use.”

  The three women watched as Jonathan walked over toward the cabin, then suddenly, Alex began to cry.

  “I can’t stand this anymore,” she sobbed, tears rolling down both cheeks. “This was supposed to be a fun weekend. Now every time I open my eyes there’s some man in fatigues with a gun!”

  Joan put one arm around Alex’s shoulders, while Mary crawled over and sat on the other side of her. They held her while her huge wet sobs gave voice to all the rage and terror that she’d kept hidden from Henry Brank. As her tears finally subsided into a low, inarticulate weeping, Jonathan reappeared.

  “Hey,” he called. “Guess what I found? Whitman had a VHF radio in his backpack. I called the Santoah Ranger station. Most of the law enforcement officers in western North Carolina and east Tennessee will be landing here in about an hour.”

  “Will they take us home?” Joan’s voice rose with hope like a child’s.

  Jonathan nodded. “They’ll take you to Robbinsville or Tellico Plains, anyway. Until then, you might enjoy some of these.” From his own backpack he dug out a red plaid blanket, a handful of candy bars and a carton of Virginia Slims.

  Snuffling, Alex took the blanket and candy while Jonathan offered Joan the smokes. She looked at them a long time, then shook her head.

  “No thanks,” she said, touching the swollen mass of her nose. “It sounds crazy, but after all that’s happened, just breathing plain air is good enough, you know what I mean?”

  Jonathan smiled. “Actually, I do.”

  Suddenly Alex spoke. “Are there telephones in Robbinsville?”

  “Yes.”

  Tears welled again in her eyes. “Then I’d like to call Texas. I’d like to ask my mother if she’s put up any Mayhaw preserves.”

  Mary started to laugh. “I don’t think that will be a problem, Alex.”

  Jonathan helped Mary stand and the four of them hobbled over to the cabin. They sat on the porch and stretched their legs out in the late-day sun, letting the warm light bathe their cuts and bruises and soothe their exhausted muscles. Jonathan brought Homer out from the woods, and soon the dog lay sprawled at their feet, his tail thumping the ground. Alex held him close, burying her face in his soft coat and feeding him peanuts from her candy bar.

  They sat like that until the distant hum of a rotor floated in on the breeze. As they watched, a North Carolina police helicopter came into view and lowered to the meadow, flattening the weeds as it landed. Two men with a gurney jumped out, followed by the sheriff and half a dozen patrolmen. Alex and Joan scrambled to their feet as a second chopper full of Tennessee state troopers landed nearby.

  “Come on, Mary,” Alex urged, wrapping the blanket around her. “Let’s go home.”

  Mary smiled. “You two go on ahead. I’ll catch up in a minute.”

  She watched as Alex and Joan limped eagerly toward the waiting officers, Homer bounding after them. In that moment, she had never loved any two people so much in her life. Joan, who had managed to kill Ulagu when she could barely walk, and Alex, who’d taken on Henry Brank so that Mary could crawl out of a snake pit. What terrific friends they were. War Women, both of them.

  “Mary?”

  She turned away from Joan and Alex, now safely in the care of the troopers. Jonathan sat beside her, grinning despite his split lip and blackening eye. “I’m just fine,” she told him, reading his mind as she always had. “How are you?”

  He rubbed his bruised jaw and chuckled. “Hoping the next guy I fight is some old, ninety-eight-pound geezer who’s terrified of guns.”

  Mary smiled. “You did okay, Jonathan. In fact, you did better than okay.” She gazed into the sunny meadow, watching as a Monarch butterfly bobbed on a bloom of Queen Anne’s lace. “I’m awfully sorry about Billy,” she added softly. “He was a good friend.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “I still can’t believe he’s dead. I’ll have to go back up to Atagahi and bring him home.”

  “I’ll call Tam as soon as I can. I’m sure there’s something I can do to help,” Mary said.

  Jonathan smiled at her, then they sat in silence, watching as the police jabbed at a topo map and argued over whose jurisdiction this was. After a while the Tennessee cops got back in their helicopter and flew off, leaving the North Carolina troopers to take statements from Alex and Joan and to haul Mitchell Whitman’s body from the snake pit. Only then did Jonathan speak.

  “Here,” he said, tossing a small rock in Mary’s lap. “I found this over by the snakes. Isn’t your birthday January fifteenth?”

  Mary nodded. “Dunolutani. The middle of the Month of the Cold Moon.”

  “Then those red flecks are your birthstones.”

  Mary looked at the rock. It was a piece of quartz the size of a buckeye, sparkling with chips of blood red garnets. “I’m amazed you remembered,” she murmured, smiling.

  “I remember a lot.” He leaned closer. “What do you remember?”

  “Everything,” she said. “And I always wish things had turned out differently.”

  “Me, too.” He took the quartz from her palm and looked down at the garnets, glittering in the sun. “Do you think things ever could be different? I mean, do you think we could change them now?”

  She sensed his gaze on her face, searching, probing. Suddenly she wanted to touch him. A fountain of words and colors exploded inside her head, but when she tried to answer, her voice came out hesitant, as if she were trying to speak a language she was no longer fluent in.

  “We can’t change the past.” She searched for the r
ight word, but all her soft ones were rusty from disuse. “But the future, maybe.”

  He moved closer. She could smell his skin, feel his warmth radiating toward her.

  “Mary, I . . .”

  “Walkingstick!” A voice boomed through the air like a cannon.

  They both jumped. Sheriff Stump Logan stood at the far end of the meadow, motioning to Jonathan.

  “Oh, shit.” Jonathan handed the quartz back to her. “It’s that asshole Logan. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

  Jonathan strode down the porch toward the tall figure in a cowboy hat. They conferred with troopers and the paramedics, then Jonathan helped them maneuver the heavy gurney through the narrow cabin door. As the sheriff came to take her statement, a sudden chill slithered down Mary’s spine. For an instant she was eighteen again, back at Little Jump Off the afternoon her mother died.

  Stump leaned over and put one hand on her unbandaged shoulder. “Hello, Mary,” he said. “I hear you’ve got a swing like Mark McGwire.”

  Mary smiled as she looked up into Stump Logan’s familiar face. Time had grayed his hair and flabbed his belly, but to her he looked the same—handsome, rough-hewn features shaded by a white Stetson hat; a pack of chewing tobacco stuffed in the pocket of his khaki shirt. Though his wide mouth stretched in a smile, his gray eyes bored into her, as intense as they had been twelve years ago, when he questioned her about her mother.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” he asked now, just as he had then.

  He sat beside her and took notes on a little spiral pad while she told of tracking Alex and finding this cabin. The sheriff shook his head when she described what happened when Ulagu threatened her with his razor. When she finished up with Mitchell Whitman and the snake pit, he took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a big white handkerchief.

  “Mercy,” he drawled, spitting a dollop of brown juice on the ground. “You gals have had quite a time.”

  He put his pad back in his hip pocket and looked at her, studying her face so long it made her uncomfortable. She looked down and smoothed the jacket that was tied around her waist. Could Stump Logan possibly think she was making all this up?