Honestly, I've had worse experiences at airports.
TSA checked my hard case and my duffel, but as soon as they saw the ID, they backed off for the most part from the most invasive search routines.
I took a medium flight from Norfolk down to Atlanta, and then hopped a puddle jumper to come back up and land at Crowsburg, which is always a terrifying experience, hitting the patches of turbulence as the wet wild winds of the Midwest crest the Appalachians and jump the rain shadow below, crashing down in a tsunami of wet air ready to dampen the more amenable regions.
With a new appreciation for life and being on the ground, I strode out the doors of the Crowsburg airport, donning a pair of sunglasses now that it was late enough for that to be a need, with the sun high in the sky. I'd made good time, from getting my ticket right around 4:30 to landing at 11:30.
I looked around and saw an all-too-familiar sight that I was impressed still existed.
A '79 Ford Bronco was sitting on the asphalt of the pickup lane, with an impressively preserved paint job, forest green sinking into the warm gradients of red, orange, and yellow in the wide stripes down both sides of the truck, its chrome grille polished as the day it rolled off the lot.
Next to it, blowing into his hands as he took in the sights of travelers going back and forth, was Ryan Thompson.
My best friend since childhood, and singular officer of the Deep Springs Police Department for the last 10 years, since Joe Miller retired back in 2014. He was decked in a T-shirt and jeans, with a flannel casually worn open on his thin frame. He was not a very tall or imposing presence, standing 5'5" and weighing in at 150-ish pounds, but I knew him to be as tough as any of the six-foot shipmates I'd ever served with, and he gave a doozy.
Ryan lifted a palm upward as he caught sight of me, a duffel bag slung over my shoulder with my hard case tucked away inside it.
"Hey buddy, talk about turnaround times. Luckily, the flights worked out in my favor. I just got away long enough ago to get down here."
Deep Springs and the scene were about 45 minutes northwest of here, and I suspected that Ryan was being generous on his estimation of not having to wait for me.
I opened the door of the old Bronco and felt greeted as if by an old friend.
As obscenely garish and green as the truck exterior was, its interior gave a good fight for top dog. Green carpets and wood paneling stretched across the flat dashboard, and a meticulously cared-for green bench seat stretched across both driver and passenger sides of the vehicle, with a band of patterned green cloth in the center where the original manufacturer expected occupants.
We'd spent many days riding this monster between Tennessee, Crowsburg, and home.
I reached over the seat and tossed my duffel in the back as Ryan clambered into the driver's side. I noticed a manila folder sitting in the passenger seat, grabbing it up as I slid in, shut the door, and fastened my seatbelt.
"So. How bad is it still up there?"
"Well, right before I left, they had carted the last of the bodies off the trail and sent them on the way to Jewel Hill to get autopsies done."
Typical with animal attacks, but it also made sense with some of the unknowns of what Ryan had told me. They would want, depending on whatever agencies were already involved in the mess, to identify the animal they thought might be responsible for the attack. That meant tooth and claw identification at the Medical Examiner's office, probably, from what Ryan described, a fair amount of shell casing identification and attempting to track what they were shooting at and when. Definitely forming a timeline of the attack, and trying to ascertain what happened when.
Ryan started the truck and pulled away from the airport terminal, and
I looked at the folder in my lap.
"Is this-" I prompted.
"Yep. The photographs that we took from the scene, some initial ideas of what might have transpired when."
Ryan's voice took on a monotonous, hollow tone, one familiar to me from someone who'd seen a whole lot of violence over a very small window of time.
I flipped open the folder and began rifling through the photographs, and
I could see why.
The gore was intense.
Intense might have been a mild word for what had happened to these people. Severed arm, a few torn throats, crushed bones, crushed torso and smashed skulls, and a head cleared clean from its body. A notable image I stopped at, a pretty redhead in a blood-soaked cream knit sweater, her throat separated and her eyes staring blankly to the left of frame over a mess of cascading, tangled hair, caused my stomach to drop.
My eyes narrowed looking at the close-up photos of the wound.
"Ryan, this wound here."
He glanced over to see what photo I was on as he started to accelerate up the winding mountain highway.
"Ah. Yeah. Pretty clean for claws or teeth, huh?"
His tone was knowing, a gentle lilt hidden in it, prodding me to keep looking.
I obliged, curious myself, and seeing what he was probably referring to: a photograph of words written in a dark crimson in the dust of the trail.
"II PROTECT?"
I felt my eyes turn to dinner plates.
I looked out of the window in thought. She did mean something by writing that, but I had no way to know what. Also, what were the first two characters exactly? She'd done the rest of the word in a, for what she was going through, very clean and distinct all caps, so if they were Ls, they'd have the bend. So my money was on two Is.
But why? Like Roman numerals? What would that have to do with anything?
"One of the victims or an assailant?" I asked aloud.
"Victim. The linguistics prodigy Doctor Margaret Jones. Apparently in for a nice tour from Ireland itself."
His tone was neutral, but the forced calm made me think he was shaken by the young lady's death.
"She had a mixture of dirt and blood on her fingertips. Apparently literally held her throat together long enough to leave a message. Hence the additional craziness."
"What does this mean? Is this referencing some sort of group in the area?"
"Not that I'm aware of. Stratton's pretty small to be running a protection racket." Ryan said it dismissively, prompting me to move on in the questions.
"Are the Feds there?" I asked, still looking at the photo of Dr. Jones, and noting the sad irony that she'd never have an adventurous life like her incidental fictional namesake.
That was at least the train of thought I chose to focus on under the direct questions with Ryan, since the rest of my brain screamed about the implications this had with my father's fate.
Was he off the trail and away from the group when the attack had happened?
If not, why was he the only one not present?
More questions, fewer answers.
"...so between the guns, the cryptic message written in blood, the federal land, and what all, I called the Forestry Service. They said they sent the Law Enforcement and Investigation unit, but they never showed. Called the FBI in Lincoln City. Same thing. Then we got a count of bodies and called the SBI while we waited, since there's no way Morrison down in Jewel Hill will handle all of this by himself. So SBI is sending some people up as well, but they weren't there when I left. So we called Sam Evans over in Jewel Hill. He's the Chief of Police over there. Had him and his boys and some more guys from over in Whisper Point come help take pictures and collect parts to take to the morgue."
Ryan finished.
I blinked as I noticed something out of the window.
"Uh. Didn't you say the bodies were down in Jewel Hill?"
"Mmmmhmmm." Ryan hummed pleasantly, as if I had asked if the sky were blue.
"So... we aren't going there?"
My tone was confused, but laced with the beginnings of suspicion.
This was going to be like the notebook all over again.
"Nope. Bigger fish first. Then we can start in on the mystery of it."
Blackmail.
"Oh no. Come on. We don't have time for-"
"GODDAMNIT, JUDAH."
Ryan roared.
The tension in the cab jumped suddenly to be comparable to the pressure around the Titanic, and I felt an overwhelming dryness in my mouth. I noticed that I could feel the cool temperature of the mountain air outside against my shoulder, where I had jumped and pushed away from the outburst, not expecting it out of him.
He went quiet and cleared his throat.
"Sorry. But. We're going to town, and you are going to get settled. There's an order that this should be done, because I, for one, am not letting your skinny ass skitter away as fast as you can just because you think you've solved the puzzle. We are going to be opening a lot of wounds for everyone involved, us included, and you are going to be an ADULT MAN and deal with it."
I, as a rule, am a person who does not deal with things.
Things happen, or they don't. Things that have happened have happened, and there's nothing to do but press forward.
But that's only half a mind of how I am, because in the dark corners, I'm raging. I'm screaming, and I'm not letting that come to the surface to flail in futility.
"I-" With a false start,
I tried again, swallowing against the dry mouth as the atmosphere of the car felt like warm custard you could cut with a knife.
"I'm willing to try?"
I managed that, which was more commitment than anyone had gotten out of me outside of the Navy for working with my family dynamic.
"You'd better."
Ryan, as I had said previously, was not someone of intimidating stature, and normally not one of intimidating demeanor. However, his energy was frightening in such a small space. He had taken this as a life mission that I was going to see through a family reconnection, good or bad, to the end.
I harrumphed and settled back into the seat.
"Yes, Dad," I said finally, attempting to relieve some of the tension.
"If I was Dad, I'd already have beat you with the belt."
"Oooh, Daddy promise?" I said playfully, and that time he did start going for the belt.
After several more minutes of driving, Ryan and I bumped over the hill and through a train intersection, the familiar brownstone, two-story brick buildings of the main street coming into view, with the cardboard cutouts of various neer-do-wells pasted on the inside of the upper windows to show that it was both a jail and police station.
The building stretched down the main road and off the side road, creating an impenetrable wall of town administration and capitalism right as you came off the bridge over the French Broad.
We passed the intersection, the buildings standing over us as silent, stoic sentinels that had seen the town through the better part of a century, and where I'd anticipated Ryan to pull off and stop at the police station, conveniently on the corner as you entered town, he continued down the strip, revealing even more changes, revealing a town I had so much connection to, but barely even knew at this point.
My muscles started to tense and ache as a desire to get out of the car increased, and I started to eye Ryan suspiciously as we turned right, starting up the highway again, the one that would eventually lead to Newport, but I knew we weren't going there.
"So, do not pass go-" I said, realizing that he meant to drop me off at the one place I wanted to be least in the world with this situation, my father's.
"Do not collect $200." He nodded. "I was given specific instructions this morning that you're to be dropped off at Isaac's and'll be staying there."
The glint in his eye betrayed his amusement at my predicament.
Staying at my father's meant staying with Temperance, who, in addition to being his live-in research assistant, was my also-apparently-angry-at-me sister-in-law. I also had a suspicion on who might have given these "specific" instructions.
I swallowed again, remembering the terror that Temper Bennett could be. I felt the tension begin to run up my back as I became increasingly uncomfortable with this idea of jumping in feet first.
"I don't think that's a good idea. You know how she gets and-"
"-and there's a lot of reason why someone might be angry with you after 20 years of up and disappearing. I'm glad you see her line of thought."
The bastard was practically merry about what was happening here.
Cruelty.
He must have read my face and growing irritation out of the corner of his eye, because he sobered steadily and said,
"Look. I get that you don't want to get involved in it. It's done. It's too late to do anything about it. You've always been like that, even when we were kids. However, she'll know probably the most about what was going on with Isaac up to him taking this trip, and the sooner you two make nice, the sooner she'll be less of a pain to be around while we all-"
He emphasized. "-all try to get your dad back in one piece and try to figure out what happened up there. So it's time to pull up the big boy pants and deal."
"Aafo," I said in a deadpan. He was right and I didn't care for it.
"Bless you?" Ryan said, a curious note to his tone.
"It's Somali for 'calamity.' It's just kind of hung around since I was stationed in Bahrain," I said glumly, looking at the passing structures and mountains and not making eye contact with Ryan.
"Well, isn't that Temper to a tee. Besides, she's expecting you, so if we don't show up, she'll find us anyway."
Ryan said that as we crunched into the gravel of my father's driveway, the tires crushing the rocks into each other, grinding them away much like my hopes for a remotely peaceful morning to reflect on the information that I'd amassed since getting off the plane.
The Bronco swayed ever so slightly on the uneven surface as Ryan locked it into park and killed the ignition.
I raised an eyebrow to him, and he held the keys outstretched to me.
"I'll use the Jeep while you are here. Just... try not to wreck the old girl. I've had it for a long time, you know."
I sighed. "Yeah, I guess it has been a long time, huh?"
Everyone was convinced then that it wasn't a good fit for Ryan, but then again, at the time everyone was convinced that I was a great fit for him despite our mutual protests.
Funny how things work out.
Ryan slid out of the seat and stretched, and I did the same, taking in a lungful of the now even more crisp mountain air. We'd properly transcended into the Smokies coming from Cedarville, and now, even at noon, there was a sharpness to the chill in the air.
I stopped and looked at my father's home.
It had been built by his grandfather and father, who'd ordered it from a Sears catalog. Back, I guess, when you could order such a thing from a big-box store. It had seen some changes since I'd left the last time. New exterior, new roof, solar panels, but on the inside, in the bones, it remained the same old place, ordered from that same catalog. And really, what did that mean for anything actually changing here, outside of the superficial?
"Well, I'm off. I need to get the Jeep and then head into the office. Got to pick up the last details from what we got sent from the LEI this morning, and then I'll come back and maybe save you if Temperance isn't done with you by then."
Ryan laughed at the thought and turned, heading down the road toward his house, whistling like he hadn't a care in the world.
Lucky bastard.