Cam spent the rest of the day dropping by the various guide and expedition shops in the towns of Lore and Trailwood, learning little. That evening, he went for a short walk to exercise the dogs. It was short because darkness came suddenly and the temperature dropped right along with the light. He fed the dogs, left them in the cabin, stoked the woodstove, and went back into town around seven o’clock to find something to eat. The obvious central attraction was a log cabin lodge affair with wraparound porches. The place advertised mountain cooking, whatever that meant.
Inside, the place was divided into two main rooms, separated by the kitchen area. The smaller room was for dining and the larger contained a well-attended bar. There were two people in the dining room, but more like twenty in the bar, men and women. It was complete with jukebox, tables for two and four, a small dance floor, a place in the corner for a live combo, and a forty-foot-long polished hardwood bar. Cam took a stool at the bar, looked over the surprisingly good scotch selection, and ordered a Maccallan on one rock from one of the very busy bartenders.
He finished his scotch, covered his tab, and headed for the dining room. As he did so, three Park Service rangers in uniform came through the front door, and one of them was the lovely Dr. Goode. She smiled and waved in his direction as they headed for the bar, causing one of the young men with her to give him a suspicious once-over. He waved back and then let the waitress take him to a table.
As he was finishing dinner, the rangers left. A few minutes later, Mary Ellen Goode came back in and headed over. He started to get up, but she waved him down and slipped into a chair.
“Had dinner?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ll eat later.” She looked around for a moment to see if anyone was watching them. “Look, I’ve been thinking about your inquiry. Is this serious stuff?”
He told her about the chair, and then said only that a suspect had mentioned the term cat dancers as being somehow connected to the executions.
“Connected how?” she asked.
“Don’t know. Didn’t know what the term actually meant until the lady at the store told me. But since there aren’t any lions, I guess I’m going to declare defeat and go home.”
“Well,” she said, staring down at the table for a moment. “That is the official Park Service line. But…”
He finished eating, wiped his face, and pushed his plate and silverware aside. “Go on.”
“A ranger I used to date two years ago told me the same story once. In fact, he was thinking of opening a file on it, except he thought headquarters would laugh. He thought that it might be real, and that the people doing it were dangerous.”
“I saw a ranger packing a belt and a gun last night,” he said. “We don’t associate our national parks with dangerous people. You know, park rangers are all about warm and fuzzy bunny lectures.”
Her face clouded. “We have a lot of sworn officers now,” she said. “Two years ago, some bikers from Atlanta came up into our park and set up a crystal-meth lab in a camper. Two of our rangers went to investigate the smell, and the bastards gunned them down when they knocked on the door. One of them was Joel Hatch, my fiance.”
“Oops,” Cam said. “Sorry.”
“Well, bad things happen to good people, don’t they? The good news is that an Atlanta field office special team caught up with them in a bar in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Apparently, there was ‘resistance.’”
Cam nodded. “Resistance is good,” he said. “Saves everyone a lot of time and effort. But I’m sorry for your loss.” He wanted to tell her about Annie, then decided to let it go.
“Thank you,” she said automatically. “Anyway, I’d forgotten all about the mountain lion business until you asked today. I’d never heard that term- cat dancers -however.”
“Know a guide named White Eye Mitchell?”
“Only by reputation. Supposedly, he found a missing hiker five years ago, after everyone else had given up.”
“‘Supposedly’?”
“Well, we think he’d guided the man in. Rumor was that they’d argued, and Mitchell left him out there to calibrate his thinking. There was no proof of that, of course, and the rescuee wasn’t talking, for some reason.”
Cam nodded. “Could I ask you to pulse your sources up here, see if you can find out anything more?”
She looked at him. “You’re leaving some things out. Am I right?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I can assure you that my case is as serious as a heart attack.”
“Does our local sheriff know you’re here?”
“Yes, he does. I checked in with him first thing. But he doesn’t have the whole picture, either, and I was able to convince him that that was a good place to be right now.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll ask around. How long will you be up here?”
“Don’t know,” Cam said. “Until I find something.”
“Or something finds you,” she said softly.
It was his turn to stare at her. “What’s that mean, exactly?” he asked.
“I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “But the truly wild parts of this country seem to attract all kinds of edgy critters these days.” She shook her head, as if trying to dislodge a bad thought. “Don’t mind me,” she said with a smile. “Too much time alone, I think.”
“I can actually relate to that,” he began, but then two men came into the dining room from the bar and called hello to Mary Ellen. She excused herself and went to join them. Cam paid his bill and went outside. It was cold but clear, and he felt like taking a walk. The night sky was so filled with blazing stars that he actually stopped in the parking lot to look up at them.
When he got back to his truck, he found a small note stuck into the driver’s side window.
“I get off duty at 2300,” it said. “We need to talk.” This was followed by a cell phone number, and the signature was “M.E.G.”
39
When he got back to the cabins, he noticed there’d been a dusting of snow in the area-nothing serious, but enough for the headlights to show that a vehicle had driven down the line of cabins sometime after the snow and then back out. Before he turned into the parking space by his cabin, he got out of his truck to see if the vehicle had stopped, but it didn’t look like it. Straight tracks; big tires, like his own. He squatted down and fingered the edges of the tracks, which, had this been the movies, should have told him how old they were. Instead, the bits of snow and mud melted in his hand and told him absolutely nothing. Indian scout you are not, he decided.
The snow leading up to his cabin, on the front steps, and frosting the edges of the porch was undisturbed. He let the dogs out and watched them to see if they focused on anything near the cabin, but Frick just ran around, nose down, tail up, while Frack made the trees afraid. He checked the little back deck, where a rusty barbecue on wheels lived, but there were no signs that anyone had been back there, either-unless, of course, they had come before the snow. Enough of this paranoia, he said to himself, and went inside to see if he could raise Bobby Lee Baggett. As he expected, he got voice mail. He left his name and cell number and then went to retrieve the dogs.
As he started a fire in the woodstove, he remembered that he’d left the gun in the glove compartment. He went back out to the truck to retrieve it and took another look around. His was still the only cabin that appeared to be occupied. The only other light on was up at the office at the top of the lane. The sky was partially overcast now and the air smelled as if there was some more snow on the way. There was no wind to speak of, and the only sounds were coming from the truck’s engine as it cooled down in the frosty air. He tried to imagine a mountain lion padding silently around the cabins, green eyes glowing in the darkness. He heard a clump of snow fall out of a pine tree behind him and caught a glimpse of a big gray night bird, bent on murder, gliding soundlessly down into the ravine behind the line of cabins. The surrounding foothills were indistinct dark shapes. The cabin park was too low for him to be able to see the Smokies, which began their humped stretch west to Tennessee only about five miles away. He shivered in the night air, called in the dogs, and went back into the cabin, where the woodstove was already producing an agreeable heat. He broke out his Shelby Foote and settled in to read about Grant’s expedition against Fort Donaldson on the Tennessee River.