Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

“They dragged the river, I reckon.” Rock-studded mountain rivers are bad for keeping bodies snagged down where you can’t find them.

“They dragged that stretch of the Nolichucky for three days. They even sent down divers. They said even if she’d got wedged under a rock, we’d have something by now.” It cost her something to say that.

“Well, she’s a grown girl,” I said, to turn the flow of words. “Sometimes they get an urge to kick over the traces.”

“Not Amy. She wasn’t the party type. And even supposing she felt like that-because I know people don’t believe a mother’s assessment of character-would she run away in her bathing suit? All her clothes were back in her dorm, and her boyfriend was walking up and down the riverbank with the other two students, calling out to her. I don’t think she went anywhere on her own.”

“Likely not,” I said. “But it would have been a comfort to think so, wouldn’t it?”

Her eyes went wet. “I kept checking her bank account for withdrawals, and I looked at her last phone bill to see if any calls were made after July sixth. But there’s no indication that she was alive past that date. We put posters up all over Johnson City, asking for information about her. There’s been no response.”

“Of course, the police are doing what they can,” I said.

“It’s the Wake County sheriff’s department, actually,” she said. “But the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is helping them. They don’t have much to go on. They’ve questioned people who were at the river. One fellow claims to have seen a red pickup leaving the scene with a girl in it, but they haven’t been able to trace it. The investigators have questioned all her college friends and her professors, but they’re running out of leads. It’s been three months. Pretty soon they’ll quit trying altogether.” Her voice shook. “You see, Mr.-Rattler-they all think she’s dead.”

“So you came to me?”

She nodded. “I didn’t know what else to do. Amy’s father is no help. He says to let the police handle it. We’re divorced, and he’s remarried and has a two-year-old son. But Amy is all I’ve got. I can’t let her go!” She set down the paper cup, and covered her face with her hands.

“Could I see that picture of Amy, Mrs.-Johnson?”

“It’s Albright,” she said softly, handing me the photograph. “Our real last name is Albright. I just felt foolish before, so I didn’t tell you my real name.”

“It happens,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening to her apology. I had closed my eyes, and I was trying to make the edges of the snapshot curl around me, so that I would be standing next to the smiling girl, and get some sense of how she was. But the photograph stayed cold and flat in my hand, and no matter how hard I tried to think my way into it, the picture shut me out. There was nothing.

I opened my eyes, and she was looking at me, scared, but waiting, too, for what I could tell her. I handed back the picture. “I could be wrong,” I said. “I told you I’m no miracle worker.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Oh, yes. Since the first day, I do believe.”

She straightened up, and those slanting lines deepened around her mouth. “I’ve felt it, too,” she said. “I’d reach out to her with my thoughts, and I’d feel nothing. Even when she was away at school, I could always sense her somehow. Sometimes I’d call, and she’d say, ‘Mom, I was just thinking about you.’ But now I reach out to her and I feel empty. She’s just-gone.”

“Finding mortal remains is a sorrowful business,” I said. “And I don’t know that I’ll be able to help you.”

Evelyn Albright shook her head. “I didn’t come here about finding Amy’s body, Rattler,” she said. “I came to find her killer.”

I spent three more Dixie cups of herb tea trying to bring back her faith in the Tennessee legal system. Now, I never was much bothered with the process of the law, but, like I told her, in this case I did know that pulling a live coal from an iron potbellied stove was a mighty puny miracle compared to finding the one guilty sinner with the mark of Cain in all this world, when there are so many evildoers to choose from. It seemed to me that for all their frailty, the law had the manpower and the system to sort through a thousand possible killers, and to find the one fingerprint or the exact bloodstain that would lay the matter of Amy Albright to rest.

“But you knew she was dead when you touched her picture!” she said. “Can’t you tell from that who did it? Can’t you see where she is?”

I shook my head. “My grandma might could have done it, rest her soul. She had a wonderful gift of prophecy, but I wasn’t trained to it the way she was. Her grandmother was a Cherokee medicine woman, and she could read the signs like yesterday’s newspaper. I only have the little flicker of Sight I was born with. Some things I know, but I can’t see it happening like she could have done.”

“What did you see?”

“Nothing. I just felt that the person I was trying to reach in that photograph was gone. And I think the lawmen are the ones you should be trusting to hunt down the killer.”

Evelyn didn’t see it that way. “They aren’t getting anywhere,” she kept telling me. “They’ve questioned all of Amy’s friends, and asked the public to call in for information, and now they’re at a standstill.”

“I hear tell they’re sly, these hunters of humans. He could be miles away by now,” I said, but she was shaking her head no.

“The sheriff’s department thinks it was someone who knew the area. First of all, because that section of the river isn’t a tourist spot, and secondly, because he apparently knew where to take Amy so that he wouldn’t be seen by anyone with her in the car, and he has managed to keep her from being found. Besides”-she looked away, and her eyes were wet again-“they won’t say much about this, but apparently Amy isn’t the first. There was a high school girl who disappeared around here two years ago. Some hunters found her body in an abandoned well. I heard one of the sheriff’s deputies say that he thought the same person might be responsible for both crimes.”

“Then he’s like a dog killing sheep. He’s doing it for the fun of it, and he must be stopped, because a sheep killer never stops of his own accord.”

“People told me you could do marvelous things-find water with a forked stick; heal the sick. I was hoping that you would be able to tell me something about what happened to Amy. I thought you might be able to see who killed her. Because I want him to suffer.”

I shook my head. “A dishonest man would string you along,” I told her. “A well-meaning one might tell you what you want to hear just to make you feel better. But all I can offer you is the truth: when I touched that photograph, I felt her death, but I saw nothing.”

“I had hoped for more.” She twisted the rings on her hands. “Do you think you could find her body?”

“I have done something like that, once. When I was twelve, an old man wandered away from his home in December. He was my best friend’s grandfather, and they lived on the next farm, so I knew him, you see. I went out with the searchers on that cold, dark afternoon, with the wind baying like a hound through the hollers. As I walked along by myself, I looked up at the clouds, and I had a sudden vision of that old man sitting down next to a broken rail fence. He looked like he was asleep, but I reckoned I knew better. Anyhow, I thought on it as I walked, and I reckoned that the nearest rail fence to his farm was at an abandoned homestead at the back of our land. It was in one of our pastures. I hollered for the others to follow me, and I led them out there to the back pasture.”