Could Miguel have headed to this old and forgotten house in the middle of nowhere? If so, what would drive him to such a place? There were too many questions, and nothing in the way of answers.
As he approached the town of Gatlinburg, passing more signs than he could count advertising skiing, resort hotels, and restaurants for the vacation minded, he fought to stave off a growing dread that was descending on him. This strange sense of urgency, this irrational sense that something was wrong, that time was short, made him want to scream.
It wouldn’t go away, no matter how much he fought. He struggled to remember the way to the cabin, pulling out maps and engaging his GPS, overcoming the frustrations of old southern roads that were poorly documented in the navigation systems. Despite all the activity, this feeling only grew, refusing to be ignored. He found himself pacing his breathing as he approached the turn to the driveway of the cabin. The stone walls marking the overgrown roadway stirred memories. They mixed roughly with the untamable adrenaline coursing through his veins.
The car hopped and skipped over the rocks and holes in the old roadway, the path badly neglected. No one’s been here for years. He laughed out loud, almost nervously, as if part of him didn’t believe his own reasoning. Of course, this was a stupid goose chase. There was no way Miguel would be here.
Except that he was. Lopez slowed the car as the road opened up, revealing a clearing. In the center of the clearing was his family’s cabin, the layout and geometry suddenly meshing with the faded outlines of memory. But he saw immediately that this was not an abandoned cabin as he had supposed.
It was new looking, renovated, and maintained. After more than twenty years of supposed neglect, he expected to find a rundown home desperately in need of work. But work had been done. The cabin was clearly very well cared for and even modernized in many places. Recently. Did it belong to someone else now?
His question was quickly answered when he saw his brother’s SUV parked off to the side of the cabin. Miguel Lopez was here. He felt all the carefully constructed lines of deduction collapse in his mind as he stared at the sight. Miguel was here in a newly renovated and outfitted cabin. His brother had obviously put this work in motion some time ago, and yet had kept it secret. It was to this place that he had come when something frightened him enough to abandon his family.
The terrible anxiety in his stomach reached a fevered pitch now, and he looked down to find his hands shaking. Damn! Couldn’t he keep his feelings and fears under tighter control? So, Miguel had come here — so what? Perhaps it was an escape, a retreat he needed to rethink his life. There was no reason to think anything else. No reason to assume something dark and sinister was at work.
Lopez noticed that smoke was rising from the other side of the house. The chimney. The memory was warm and clashing badly with the anxious feelings coursing through him. He focused on the chimney. A fire in the fireplace! Miguel was there and he was all right. He shook his head and smiled. How I hate overreacting. He stepped forward and began to walk around the cabin. Even in early May, it was cool as evening approached in the mountains. He wouldn’t mind sitting by the fireplace. Talking to Miguel. Finding out what all this was about.
Turning around the corner of the house, Father Lopez walked into a nightmare.
He came slowly to a stop as the back side of the cabin came into view, his feet becoming rooted to the earth, his arms dangling at his sides. His mind struggled to make sense of the scene presented to him by his eyes, but the shock of it, the absurdity of it, defied him. The rosary he had subconsciously grasped fell onto the ground beside his shoes.
Roughly a third of the cabin wall — a wall made out of solid timbers, and, from what he could see, reinforced inside by thick steel rebar — was gone. Not removed. The charred and fragmented edges testified that something horrific and violent had ripped the wall apart. Part of his mind noted that the smoke he thought was from the chimney gushed from the smoldering remains of whatever had caused the explosion in the first place. It was amazing that the entire structure had not burned to the ground.
Shards of glass and splinters of wood littered the ground around him, crunching loudly under his shoes. As his eyes passed over these remains, he also noticed metallic pieces. Bright shells in the dirt and grass. Lopez had hunted with his father in his youth. He was familiar with ammunition casings from several rifles and some handguns. These were larger. He assumed military grade. There are so many. It was as if a war zone skirmish had been picked up from some other part of the world and dropped recklessly into Tennessee. At his parents’ old cabin. Near his brother’s car.
Some detached part of his mind signaled that he could be in danger, but at that moment, it didn’t register with the rest of him. He moved deliberately into the cabin through the smoldering hole blown through the wall. The signs of violence were everywhere. The well-tended wooden interior was pocked with remnants from the explosion, as well as large imprints from the bullets that had been housed in the casings he saw outside. Furniture was overturned, lamps smashed. He followed the train of destruction from the entry area and living room into the kitchen and bedrooms. Blood was splattered on portions of the walls and floor, a red handprint on the side of a doorway. Miguel’s?
He followed the trail of destruction along the floor, his eyes pausing on a shattered glass case, the shards piled around a small triangular object made of stone. The Cherokee arrowhead. The ancient markings of the Indian warrior were still visibly etched in the sharp rock. The arrowhead pointed forward to the back bedroom. To a human shape on the floor.
“Oh, God.”
The glass crunched under his feet as he entered the death chamber. It looked as though his brother had fought off his assailants for some time, finally being pushed into this corner of the cabin. It was here that he had put up his last stand. Here that his time on Earth had ended.
“Oh, Miguel.” Father Lopez fell to his knees beside his brother’s body. He wept.
11
Lopez sat on an old stump near his car, blood clotted on the inside of his palm from the sharp edges of the flint rock. He still gripped the arrowhead tightly.
His mind seemed to be unable to settle between the past and the present. One moment he would be talking to the officer, the next, seeing his brother’s body, and then the next, recalling the day long ago that as children they had found the Cherokee artifacts.
“I was too small, too scared to climb the cliff,” he whispered, his gaze distanced. “Miguel brought it down to me. I’d forgotten we’d left it out here.”
“I’m sorry, sir?” The officer looked perplexed.
Lopez shook his head. “Nothing. I’m sorry. What did you say?”
In the midst of his emotional fog, he was surprised at how fast the police arrived. Or was it that he could no longer track time properly, his brain misfiring, his body misfiring, just as his legs hardly seemed able to carry him? Yet, they were here, seemingly instantaneously after he called them, and he had to function, had to give logical facts and coherent statements. He had to be rational in hell.