Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (4 page)

He neared the edge of the woods and the road a few hundred yards from his car. He stopped to listen for any vehicles coming. The only sounds he heard were of the wind sighing through the trees, birds calling, and air heaving in and out of his lungs. It hurt when he peeled off his ski mask. And he had to concentrate to take longer, deeper breaths to calm himself.

He touched his head gingerly where Ivy’s folding saw had struck him. His hand came back smeared with blood. He felt the scrapes and bruises on his face and shoulder and his split lip.
She got what she deserved,
he thought.

Although he’d been toying with the idea of somehow getting rid of her, the fact that he’d actually done it was just now hitting home. He had killed a person. He’d terminated the earthly existence of a human being.

A weaker man might break down at this point or waver in his resolve. But he wasn’t squeamish. Now that the deed was done, he found he wasn’t a bit sorry. And he realized it would be easy to do it again if need be.

The thought was oddly freeing, then downright exhilarating. He’d crossed a line that put everything in a whole new context. He wadded up the ski mask and shoved it into his pocket. He waited until he was sure no cars were coming in either direction,
then
he stepped out onto the road.

Leon Lowery was standing in the middle of the road looking like a character in a low-budget redneck horror movie when Phoebe clapped eyes on him. He appeared to have been gargling blood and then spit it up all over himself. He’d taken off his ragged t-shirt and was using it to wipe himself off, but his efforts weren’t very effective. He was mostly just smearing the blood around.

Phoebe drove right up to where he was standing and got out. She took a quick look at his pale skin and tall bony frame draped in threadbare blue jeans and canvas tennis shoes with holes in them. He didn’t seem to be hurt very bad. The blood was coming from a busted lip and a superficial laceration on his head.

“
Leon
, I swear,” said Phoebe, with an encouraging smile and a comforting voice, “if it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

She walked around to the back of her Jeep, opened the door, and rummaged around in her supplies. She opened a cooler, filled a baggie with ice cubes, and zipped it closed. Then she wrapped the homemade cold pack in a clean cotton towel and gave it to him. “Hold this against your mouth, honey. It’ll keep the swelling down.”

Leon
mumbled thanks and placed the ice carefully against his swollen lip.

“Sit down before you fall down,” she said, indicating he should sit on the edge of the cargo area. She removed his baseball cap and mirrored sunglasses and set them carefully to one side while she made a closer inventory of his injuries.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Wrecked,” he mumbled.
“Dog in the road.”

Leon
didn’t like to waste words.

“Anybody else hurt?”

He shook his head. “Dog’s fine.”

“Well,” said Phoebe, “that’s good. Now close your eyes.”

She dabbed gently at the blood on his face and neck and hands until she had him cleaned up, then she disinfected his wounds the best she could. Fortunately, he didn’t need any stitches. As Phoebe began to pack up her gear, he slipped his sunglasses and hat back on and, in iconic redneck style, lit a cigarette. That was
Leon
, smoking with a split lip that had to hurt like the dickens.

Phoebe guessed it was part of his artistic lifestyle. He was a bluegrass musician. He could play anything. Even as a kid he’d been able to sing and
clog like
a professional.

Nobody had been surprised when he’d moved to
Nashville
. He’d made a good living as a studio musician and eventually been offered his own record deal, and that didn’t surprise anybody either. But one day something happened to him, and he walked away from it all.
From the money, the fame, everything.

There were widely differing accounts of what had happened, but everyone agreed that he came back home a different sort of person than he’d been before. He was reclusive now, and much more somber. And he’d started hanging around with a bad crowd.

“Is your truck drivable?” Phoebe asked.

He shook his head.

“Where’d you leave it?” Phoebe asked.

“Side road.”

“Is it insured?”

“I
ain’t
worried about the truck,” he snapped. Then, realizing he’d sounded sharp he mumbled, “I
‘
preciate
yer
help.”

Phoebe offered to drive him home, but
Leon
said he’d rather walk. As he ambled off, she finished repacking her supplies, disposing of the sharps and biohazards in their respective containers. Then she got back into her Jeep and set out again.

Ivy Iverson regained consciousness at mid-morning. She found herself splayed in a backbend with her head and feet below the level of her waist. Her head was killing her.
And her back.
She tried to sit up, but failed because she didn’t have much strength. The effort caused the world to spin in a way that made her sick. She threw up, barely able to turn her head enough so as not to choke. Her situation was dire, even deadly. She needed to concentrate.

She could tell it was daylight, but her vision was so blurry, that was about all she could be sure of. Her body was a mix of agonizing pain and numbness. She reached around her, grasping only air. After a few panicked moments she remembered where she was and stopped thrashing.

She felt horribly sick and weak. She had no idea how long she’d been hanging there, but she knew if she didn’t get her head up soon, she’d die. Somehow she had to sit up. That was her first priority.

She bent her arms and tried to fold them across her stomach. Her shoulders and hands were on fire with pins and needles, but her knuckles bumped against something that had to be the rope.

While she waited for some feeling to come back into her fingers, she tried to bring her feet together and cross her ankles, but she’d lost the ability to coordinate her leg movements. For long painful minutes, she flexed and relaxed her hands gently until she could feel the main climbing rope, then she took hold of it. Slowly, she raised herself by scooting her fists up until her shoulders were higher than her knees. This way she transferred her weight to the part of the harness that wrapped around her legs.

Once she was sitting upright, she leaned her face against the rope, feeling herself sway. Then, without any warning, she vomited again. Now she was wearing the contents of her stomach all over herself, but in the state she was in, that was the least of her problems.

It took many tries, but eventually she was able to clumsily work the zipper of her jacket and fasten it around both herself and the rope. This would hold her upright. She tried to raise her hood, but couldn’t lift her arms higher than her chest. Before she could wonder about who wanted to kill her and why, she grew faint.

Her last conscious thought was that her personal paradise had gone to hell and she had no idea if she’d be able to make it out alive.

The
Smokies
landscape lay like a rumpled rug some giant had tripped on. No matter where you were going, you had to climb over ridges and then dip down into hollows, over and over again. Cell phone service in the hollows was spotty to say the least. Phoebe would be out of range of a tower for awhile, but when she crested a ridge she might enter an area with service. When this occurred several calls would come in at once.

Sure enough, as Phoebe topped Walnut Ridge, her phone chirped. She put the Jeep in park so she wouldn’t lose the signal while she returned a batch of calls. They were all from
Waneeta
.

Waneeta
was the dispatcher at Southern Appalachian Home Health Care where Phoebe worked.
Waneeta
was a lovely person burdened with a name her mother liked the sound of, but had no idea was spelled J-u-a-n-
i
-t-a. Terrible spelling was pretty common in White Oak,
Tennessee
.

She dialed her office.

“Hey there, sister,” Phoebe said.

“Where are ye?”
Waneeta
asked.

“Walnut Ridge.”

“What’re ye
doin
there
?”

“I just escaped from Wanda’s house. I mean that literally. We had a serious difference of opinion over her course of treatment.”

Waneeta
laughed.

“Then I found Leon Lowery in the road and I had to patch him up.”

“They,”
Waneeta
said, using the local dialect’s gentle substitute for an expletive and drawing the word out, but then her diction and topic made a sudden U-turn.

“What color is the discharge? Does it have a foul odor? Well here’s what you need to do, get a real sharp….”

Phoebe wasn’t bothered by the
non sequitur
, knowing this sort of monolog meant Bruce, their boss, had come out of his office and
Waneeta
was employing a favorite tactic to make him go away.

Waneeta
, four times married and divorced, was a world-class manipulator of men and Bruce was notoriously squeamish. It was child’s play for her to send him running with explicit talk about body fluids, private parts, or surgical procedures. The only reason a man like Bruce could become a health care executive was because health care had gone corporate and was now run by accountants and computer geeks. Doctors, nurses, and patients were little more than an unruly nuisance to the management of Appalachian Health Care, Inc.

Lucky for Phoebe and the people of White Oak,
Waneeta
was an equally wily manipulator of the health care system. She was a genius at the art of medical coding, knowing the right number to use to identify a diagnosis and treatment so as to get a reimbursement for the patient. Insurance companies wouldn’t cover an expense unless the right hoops were jumped through. The system was not logical or reasonable, but
Waneeta
was smart, ruthless, and extremely determined. Getting reimbursement for legitimate services, whether the system was set up to provide it or not, was like a sport to her.

There was a high demand for good coders in the medical system, but, like Phoebe,
Waneeta
preferred the challenge of trying to take care of her own humble community rather than making three times more money working for a ritzy orthopedic surgery group in a city.

Then, just as suddenly as the conversation veered off course, it veered back again,
Waneeta
said, “So what happened with Wanda?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Phoebe said. “Let’s just say we’ll need to wait a
long
time before scheduling any follow-up.”

“That bad?”
Waneeta
sighed. “Well, don’t worry about it, honey. I’ll think of
somethin
.”

***