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“Stop,” I said, my face scrunching into an involuntary grimace. “I’m sorry I asked.” If I hadn’t been driving, I’d have put my hands over my ears. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
“We’re anthropologists,” she said matter-of-factly. “We study humans—their civilizations, their rites, their rituals, their behaviors.”
“Cultural anthropologists study that stuff. We’re physical anthropologists, remember?”
“We were also talking about physical attributes,” she said, way too cheerfully.
“You were, not me,” I pointed out. “Were. Past tense. End of discussion.”
“No problem,” she said. “Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Or . . . insecure.” She snickered as soon she said the last word.
“Ha ha. Very funny, Miss Smarty-Pants. You should do stand-up comedy, after your dissertation gets blown out of the water.”
“Not gonna happen,” she said. “Did I mention that harsh grading is a surefire sign of SPS?” She was grinning now, I noticed out of the corner of my eye. She was a smarty-pants, and she was funny, and she did know how to bait me, no doubt about it. Mercifully, she changed topics. “So what’s that pipe sticking up above the cab of the WaylonMobile? Not the two chrome ones—even I recognize those as exhaust pipes—but that weird black one, on the right?”
I glanced at the truck’s roofline. “I think that’s a snorkel.”
“A snorkel? Like, for scuba diving?”
“Basically, yeah,” I said. “So the truck can ford streams—hell, probably rivers and lakes, tall as that thing is—without the engine drowning.”
“So Waylon’s truck is also a submarine? Does it have a periscope, too?”
I shrugged. “Knowing Waylon, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
She was silent for a moment—I fervently hoped she wasn’t considering turning “periscope” into a bad joke—then she said, “You know how people and their dogs resemble each other?”
“Sure. My high school chemistry teacher, Miss Walpole? She had an English bulldog—short, fat, wrinkly, snuffly. Damned thing looked exactly like her, except for the strings of drool. Walked just like her, too.”
“That truck is Waylon on wheels. Almost like a vehicular reincarnation.”
“Don’t you have to be dead to be reincarnated?”
“Correct as usual, Professor Pedant,” she said. “Okay, let me rephrase that. Waylon’s truck is like a vehicular, parallel-universe avatar of him. Is that better?”
“Much,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure what an “avatar” was, but given our previous conversation, I was too skittish to ask.
We followed the French Broad past Del Rio, former site of the massive cockfighting arena, then continued along the river for another five miles or so. At that point, the asphalt and the water parted company, the road turning uphill away from the river. A few miles later, we turned off the highway and onto a woodsy gravel route marked Wolf Creek Road. It began promisingly enough, a lane and a half wide, but over the next few miles it gradually narrowed to a single lane, then became nothing but a pair of tracks, sometimes surfaced in gravel, sometimes in dirt, mostly in leaves. Trees crowded in from both sides and overhead, the branches slapping and clawing at Waylon’s supersized truck, whose massive cab and bulging rear-wheel fenders bulked it up to a full two feet wider and at least a foot higher than the UT pickup Miranda and I were in. But if Waylon was bothered by the damage to his paint job, he didn’t show it in his use of the accelerator pedal, bulling his way through the branches as if they were nothing more than clouds of gnats.
He stopped just beyond a fork in the “road”—a Y where the two faint tracks split and became four, like a backwoods version of a chromosome unzipping and replicating. Waylon had taken the right-hand arm of the Y, so I pulled a short ways up the left-hand arm before stopping. As we got out, Waylon lumbered up beside me. “Doc, snug right on up behind me, if you don’t care to.” His phrasing—using “don’t care to” to mean “don’t mind”—brought a slight smile to my lips. His next line almost made me laugh out loud: “Best not to be blockin’ traffic.”
“Traffic? Here?” I asked the question with the closest thing I could manage to a straight face.
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Never know.” He pointed in the direction my truck was facing. “This here connects up with Round Mountain Road, and Max Patch is up yonder way. Might be somebody’ll be headed up thataway, or coming back down.”
I nodded. I wasn’t familiar with Round Mountain, but I knew Max Patch: a high, grassy bald just across the state line in North Carolina—a popular spot for Knoxville hikers and picnickers. I pointed ahead of Waylon’s truck. “And that way?”
He snorted. “Ain’t nothing thataway. Not now, leastwise. Used to be—eighty, hunnerd years ago—this here was Wasp. We’ll go past what’s left of the school and the post office. But ain’t nobody lived here since the 1930s, when the Forest Service bought ever’body out and let the trees grow back. It’d been logged, ya see, and the land was all warshin’ away, ever time it rained. ’Bout the only people goes up thisaway anymore is hunters. Them’s who found it and called us.”
“How far to the death scene?” I asked him.
“Hunnerd yards, give or take. Straight up thataway.” He pointed past his truck. “What all you want to take up there, gear-wise? I’ll help you tote it.”
“If it’s that close, I’ll just take the camera, for now,” I said. “Once we’ve had a look, I’ll know what we need.”
He nodded and headed up the track, bending and snapping branches as he squeezed past his truck and the sheriff’s SUV—a much smaller Jeep that was parked twenty feet farther up the hill, in the last gasp of wha
t had once been the road, eight decades before. As I reached the front bumper of the sheriff’s Jeep, where the route narrowed to a single-track footpath, I noticed a set of crumbling, moss-covered stone steps notched into a low embankment to my left, and—on a level shelf of forest floor a stone’s throw beyond—a rotting wooden building and a small cluster of gravestones. “So that must’ve been the church,” I said, pointing at the collapsing walls.
“It was,” Waylon confirmed. “And yonder’s the schoolhouse.” He pointed to the right, where I saw another crumbling structure, similar to the church in size, shape, and ruination, but lacking the tombstones, and standing—or, rather, leaning—rather closer to the path. “A few houses here and there, too,” he added, waving a hand in a vague arc, “but they’s kindly off the beaten track.”
“Wait,” said Miranda. “You’re saying we’re on the beaten track?”
“Yes, ma’am. Relatively speaking, that is.” He stopped and cupped his hands around his mouth and called ahead, in a booming voice, “Sheriff? We’re here. Hold your fire.”
“I will,” answered a quiet, amused voice, so close to us that I jumped. Jim O’Conner stepped out from the ruins of the schoolhouse. “I was just doing a little amateur archaeology here, while I waited. Dr. Brockton, Miranda, good to see you again. Thanks for coming.”
He strode toward us, his hand extending while he was still ten feet away. He was at least a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than his deputy, but there was no doubt who was in command here. I’d seen other men his size carry themselves like bantam roosters: all puffed up, preening and strutting. O’Conner carried himself easily, with quickness, grace, and wiry strength—more like a bobcat than a rooster, I decided. Ever the gentleman, he shook Miranda’s hand first, then mine, with a grip that seemed somehow to be simultaneously easy and yet powerful.
