Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (21 page)

He shooed her with his hands and said “Go on and do whatever you need to be doing. I’ll sit with her.”

He settled himself comfortably in an old overstuffed armchair and propped his feet on the edge of the bed. “Go on!” he said, “Leave this to a professional for a change.”

Jill gratefully left him sitting there and went to get the café ready for the lunch bunch.

Later, when the café had cleared out again, she came back to relieve him, bringing him a grilled cheese sandwich and some banana pudding. The girl was still unconscious. “Don’t worry, she’ll wake up when she’s ready,” Doc said. “In the meantime, after I polish this off, I’ll go get Todd and we’ll fetch your car back.”

Only then did Jill remember she’d left it up on the mountain.

As she drove to her morning calls Phoebe should’ve been tired from staying up so late the night before, but she felt surprisingly refreshed and peaceful. She found herself musing about the difference between saints and sinners. Often there wasn’t much. In her experience everyone was a mixed bag, switching roles from minute to minute.

Phoebe’s train of thought was brought on by the fact that she was on her way to Nerve’s place again. A fine mist of rain was falling when she arrived, but it wasn’t enough to bother with a raincoat. She parked and walked up a path toward the house. She was met halfway by a couple of skunks slowly waddling in the opposite direction, browsing. The cute duo made her smile. She stepped off the path and stood admiring their beautiful coats as they passed by. Skunks were among God’s most striking critters, in more ways than one.

The skunks glanced at her briefly with nearsighted curiosity, not particularly concerned, and certainly not afraid. Of course they didn’t need to be worried. The world didn’t hold many dangers from a skunk’s point of view. The only potential predators were large owls with hardly any sense of smell.

Phoebe pondered the fact that skunks were born with a bomb strapped to their rear ends. Fortunately they weren’t irritable. They were gentle creatures who always gave plenty of warning before deploying their weaponry. They’d raise their tail, prance around, and stamp their feet, trying every way in the world to warn you off. They didn’t enjoy spraying. If you’d leave them alone, they’d leave you alone.

Unfortunately, your average human was not as merciful as your average skunk. Phoebe wondered why it was so hard for people to leave each other alone. She’d always felt sorry for people who went out of their way to kill spiders or wasps whether they were bothering anybody or not. Or people who enjoyed humiliating others or advocating extreme political views they knew were likely to be offensive to their audience. Or spammed masses of women with ads for unseemly products they knew none of them could use or want. Some people always had to be attacking something.

Most days Nerve was one of
em
.

Teresa, Nerve’s oppressed daughter-in-law, let Phoebe in. “How’s she
doin
?” Phoebe asked.

“Quiet,” said Teresa.
“Hasn’t said a word all day.”

The women raised their eyebrows at each other. They both knew better than to think that would last.

Phoebe went back to Nerve’s room and sat down in the chair opposite Nerve’s rocker without saying anything. She thought she’d just sit with her awhile and keep her company. That was another thing that was hard for some people to do, to sit with anyone in companionable silence. But Phoebe had learned that sitting quietly with a peaceful mind, just listening, whether the patient was talking or not, was deeply healing to both people.

To Phoebe’s way of thinking, friendly listening without having any opinions about anything was the ultimate healing gesture. It wasn’t easy to do, though. In fact, it was the hardest thing in the world. You had to shut yourself up first. Almost nobody could do that, or if they did, they went to sleep.

This one thing,
wait with me
, was all Christ had asked the disciples to do for Him the night before He died, but even the best men in the whole world had let Him down. Of course they’d all been men. The women around Him never let Him down. The women were always first in and last out, and seemed to have the only understanding of what was going on at all the crucial moments, but precious few bible scholars ever seemed to notice that.

Nerve’s eyes suddenly opened. She looked at Phoebe and said, “There’s evil a-
stalkin
.”

Phoebe maintained eye contact with the old lady. Nerve’s expression was clear and lucid. “Who’s it
stalkin
?” she asked.

“The good people.”

“Just the good people?”

Nerve laughed. “The
devil don’t
need to waste no time
foolin
with the ones who’s already
workin
for him.”

 Phoebe thought about that. It made perfect sense and explained a lot of life’s injustices. “What
kinda
evil is it?” she asked.

“There’s not but one kind,” said Nerve.

Phoebe waited for her to explain. After a long silence, she continued.

“No matter what ye
wanna
call it, it all comes down to the same thing … because there’s only once place it
can
come from.”

“Where’s that?” said Phoebe.

“Selfishness.
Self-centeredness.”

That wasn’t what
Phoebe’d
expected to hear. She’d thought the older woman would say that evil came from the devil. “What about the devil?” she asked.

“There
iddn’t
no devil,” Nerve said. “Not really.
At least not on the outside of us.
He’s
in
us. Just like the Lord Himself can’t work ‘
cept
through our hands, neither can the devil.”

Nerve closed her eyes and seemed to drop off to sleep after making this last pronouncement so Phoebe had plenty of time to spend in contemplation of the insight. Gradually, she came to realize that this was probably the most profound truth she’d ever heard uttered by anyone on any topic.

It was possibly a Comprehensive Theory of Everything, the Holy Grail the physics people were always running around looking for. She wondered if she ought to put Nerve up for a Nobel Prize. But then she had to admit to herself that Nerve would be a long shot to win. Nobody ever won for an idea this important, this cosmically significant.

They gave Nobel Prizes for technical or political things.
Things that made money for some corporation somewhere.
Stuff the man on the street wasn’t likely to be able to apply in his own daily life, as if that was a good thing, way better than something practical that everybody could use.

It was also problematic that the person who’d uttered this primal wisdom was certifiable, and in fact had been comprehensively certified and documented to be in the late stages of senile dementia, incapable of managing her own affairs. Nerve was a danger to
herself
and possibly even the surrounding woodlands should she attempt something as simple as boiling water or heating up a can of soup.

This did nothing whatsoever to diminish Nerve’s achievement in Phoebe’s eyes. What difference did it make if the wisest person in the world was confused about today’s date by fifty years or so? The fact that Nerve didn’t sweat the small stuff was probably what freed up her heart and mind for the really heavy lifting.

Phoebe remembered a movie where Russell Crowe won a Nobel Prize even though he had a bunch of imaginary friends. So maybe Nerve wouldn’t get automatically disqualified purely on account of being insane. Maybe there was some fairness in this Nobel Prize after all.

A tolerance for oddballs and always looking for the best in people was what made Phoebe so good at her job. Of course it was a lot easier to take care of annoying people when they weren’t part of your own family. That was another of life’s great truths. Families were world experts at pushing each other’s buttons. An outsider could handle cantankerous people without taking any of it personally or getting all wound up over it.

Phoebe was grateful to be in the presence of a soul as wise as Nerve and she didn’t want to waste the opportunity. She decided to work on a song right then, hoping to draft on Nerve’s genius. Maybe if she thought up some good lyrics she could convince
Leon
to set them to music. And maybe
Leon
could get Tim McGraw to sing her song.

Phoebe smiled to herself. Life could be such an adventure if you could just manage to stay optimistic.

Phoebe left Nerve sleeping peacefully in her chair, waved goodbye to Teresa, and went back to in her Jeep to look over her schedule and see what was next. There wasn’t a single thing that she really needed to attend to. That was a peculiar sensation. That’s when she realized her cell phone was dead. She plugged it into a charger.

Her curiosity about the backpack mystery was strong, so she decided to call Henry for an update.

“Hey Henry,
it’s
Phoebe.”

“Hey girl,” he said sounding pleased to hear from her despite fierce growling noises in the background. Phoebe wondered if he was wrestling a wild animal while taking her call. She decided to talk fast and keep it simple.
“Any news about the girl?”

“If you
wanna
play a detective,” he said, “meet me at Twin Creeks in an hour.” Then he shouted, “Quit that!” and hung up, or was disconnected. Phoebe wondered if maybe the critter had eaten his phone.

Now that the phone was charging, she saw she had several messages, but decided she’d rather meet Henry than listen to them. If she didn’t hear them, she’d have what
Waneeta
called
plausible deniability
.

***

Many of the foray volunteers hung out at the
Twin
Creeks
Science
Center
between events, because it was one of the few places in the park with couches, heating, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing. Phoebe arrived before Henry and decided to wait for him in the lounge area. From where she was sitting, she could hear a guy entertaining a group of
forayers
with an impromptu lecture on frogs and toads interspersed with bursts of mimicking the different species he was talking about.

He did a Copes Gray Tree Frog by trilling with his tongue, a Green Frog by making loud
gonk
swallowing noises like the ones you imagined everyone could hear when you were nervous and tried to swallow. The Upland Chorus Frog sounded to Phoebe like he was raking his thumb along the teeth of a plastic comb. Seconds after she had the thought, he pulled a comb out of his pocket to demonstrate an easy way for his listeners to produce the sound.

“Who
is
that guy?” she asked a man sitting nearby.

“Dr. Walter Van
Landingham
, he’s a biology professor at Appalachian State.”

“He’s
amazing
,” said Phoebe.

The man nodded and smiled his agreement.

When Henry showed up, Phoebe tore herself away from the frog man and whispered, “This place is cool.”

Henry agreed.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

“I’m
hopin
some of these people will know about slime molds.”

He walked toward the center of the room and asked in a voice loud enough to be heard by the group, “Is there anybody here who can tell me about
Myxomycetes
?”