Graveyard Fields Read online

“I’m just about ready to start chapter one.”

  * * *

  The Blue Ridge Parkway runs for almost five hundred miles along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains, connecting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina to the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. The land adjacent to the parkway is owned by the National Park Service, which means the two-lane road is surrounded by forests and waterfalls rather than homes and businesses. The parkway is one of America’s best escapes. It’s also a time machine, revealing the scenic landscape early settlers in this area enjoyed before the days of junkyards and dollar stores.

  The scenic overlooks that adjoin the parkway are small parking areas with picnic tables and hundred-mile views. Some are the starting points of trails that range in difficulty from “no problem” to “you might break your ankle.” The overlook near where 276 meets the parkway offers a view of Cold Mountain, but from the overlook’s elevation the mountain is nothing more than a rolling hill. The view from the cabin deck is much more awe-inspiring.

  Dale and I headed north on the parkway toward Mount Pisgah, a 5,700-foot peak topped with a red-and-white TV transmission tower owned by the local ABC affiliate. At night the tower was a glowing beacon rising from a dark, imposing mountaintop. During the day, it looked like a swizzle stick poking out of the top of a bran muffin.

  We pulled into the parking lot of a ranger station that sat next to the Mount Pisgah trailhead. When we walked inside, a ranger dressed in green pants and a brown button-up shirt stood behind a glass-topped counter covered with maps, pamphlets, and brochures. The station looked more like a gift shop than an official Park Service office. There were racks of postcards and a display of stuffed black bears alongside shelves of caps, stickers, and T-shirts. HIKERS DO IT OUTDOORS, one read.

  “Hello, Terry,” Dale said to the ranger.

  “Deputy Johnson,” the ranger replied. It was more of a statement than a greeting.

  “This here’s Davis Reed. He’s renting my cabin and found these keys yesterday over at Black Balsam.”

  I said hello and put the keys on the counter.

  “He thought they might belong to one of you’ns,” Dale said.

  Terry picked up the keys and studied them. “I don’t recognize these,” he said. “Joanne, could you come out here?”

  A door behind the counter opened and a female ranger appeared. I guessed her to be in her late thirties. She couldn’t have been over five feet tall and was dressed in the same uniform as Terry. She was a bit on the heavy side, and the buttons of her shirt strained against her breasts. I now understood why Dale had offered to be my chauffeur.

  Terry held up the keys.

  “Have you seen these before?” he said.

  Joanne took the keys and weighed them in her palm. “Now that’s a handful.”

  “That’s what she said,” Dale muttered.

  Joanne rolled her eyes and sifted through the keys. She picked one out and held it up. It was flat and stubby, with the letters BMW stamped on the head.

  “I don’t know who they belong to, but I do know what this key is,” she said. “It’s for a BMW 2002.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “My ex-boyfriend had one and I drove it for a few weeks when my 4Runner broke down. I hated that car; it was as slow as Christmas.”

  Dale walked over to a beverage cooler with a sign taped to the door that read Cold drinks, $2.

  “I didn’t know Travis had a BMW,” he said.

  “This was before Travis,” Joanne said. “And it’s none of your business anyway.”

  Dale smirked and popped open a fresh Mountain Dew.

  “But that’s what the key looked like?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it looked just like this. There’s a 2002 over in the Graveyard Fields parking lot. At least it was there yesterday morning.”

  Terry cleared his throat. “We’ll keep these here in case someone comes looking for them.”

  Dale strolled back to the counter.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to put you out none. We’ll see if that car’s still parked over there. Find the owner. Hell, maybe there’s a reward.”

  Dale threw an open palm toward Joanne. She let the keys dangle for a moment, then dropped them into his hand.

  “You ever get lonely up here, you give me a call,” Dale said with a sleazy wink.

  Joanne shook her head. “You’re a pig, Dale.”

  “Literally and figuratively,” I said.

  We were almost to the door when Dale suddenly turned around. “By the way, how’s Terry Junior getting along? He keeping in line?”

  Terry straightened some of the papers on the counter. “He’s fine.”

  Dale pointed a finger at Terry. “Well, you be sure to let him know I was asking after him.”

  * * *

  When we were back in the car, I looked over at Dale.

  “Did I sense a little static between you and Ranger Terry?”

  “Shit, Terry’s just wound too tight,” Dale said. “Last summer I picked up his son doing forty-five in a thirty. Now, the sheriff’s department don’t normally worry about speeders. We leave that shit for town police and highway patrol, but this little sumbitch had been warned before. He back-talked when I pulled him, which pissed me off royally, so I dragged him out of the car and searched it. Found a little bag of weed under the driver’s seat. I gave him a talking to, then wrote him a ticket for speeding and put the weed in my pocket. I heard later that the dumb fuck told his daddy about the ticket and about the weed. Now Terry can’t figure out if I was doing his kid a favor by not reporting the weed or if I’m the kind of guy you can’t trust to work by the book.”

  “What did you do with the pot?” I asked.

  “I gave it to daddy. It keeps him from drinking all my beer.”

  “The life of a rural deputy.”

  Dale raised his Mountain Dew. “It has its benefits.”

  4

  There were two cars in the Graveyard Fields parking lot when we arrived: a blue Land Rover Discovery with a large cargo box bolted to the roof and a red BMW 2002.

  “Thins out this time a year,” Dale said. “During the summer they’s cars lined two hundred yards up the road on either side of this lot.”

  We got out of the patrol car, and Dale walked over to the BMW while I took in the view. I’d driven past Graveyard Fields a few times since coming to Cruso but had never stopped. There was a sign at the edge of the parking lot:

  A natural disaster occurred here 500 to 1000 years ago. A tremendous “wind-blow” uprooted the spruce forest. Through the years the old root stumps and trees rotted, leaving only dirt mounds. These odd mounds gave the appearance of a graveyard, and the area became known as Graveyard Fields.

  The sign went on to say that the forest had eventually regrown but was destroyed again, this time by fire, in 1925. The area didn’t look like a graveyard to me, just a wide rolling meadow spotted with spindly gray trees and the outlines of a few walking trails. I’d read online that one of the trails eventually led to the peak of Cold Mountain and that it was a long and strenuous hike. The Black Balsam trailhead, where I’d found the keys, was a half mile west of Graveyard Fields. That trail also led to Cold Mountain, and although it started out flat and well marked, I’d read that the last few miles were steep and difficult to follow.

  Because of the book I was trying to write, I felt compelled to stand on top of Cold Mountain. But with my leg injury, I wasn’t able to walk more than a couple hundred yards without stopping in pain. Unless I was lowered from a helicopter, I doubted I would ever step foot on the peak of that mountain.

  * * *

  “Now that kind of shit really pisses me off,” Dale said.

  He was standing behind the BMW, and I walked over to take a look. The car was beat to hell. The quarter panels were beginning to rust, and the doors and hood were full of dings and dents. The rear of the car was covered with bumper stickers: COE
XIST (the letters written out in the symbols of various religions), BERNIE 2016, WE ARE ALL IMMIGRANTS, SCIENCE IS NOT A LIBERAL AGENDA, HATE IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE.

  “Why would somebody ride around with all that shit on the back of their vehicle?” Dale said.

  “Joanne told us the car was here yesterday,” I said. “Do people camp out here overnight?”

  “Yeah. And this is the best time of year to do it. Too cold for bears and snakes but not cold enough to stop you from getting it on in a sleeping bag.”

  I couldn’t imagine a sleeping bag large enough to hold Dale, much less him and the size of woman he was partial to getting it on with.

  Dale pointed to the car’s Florida license plate. “It don’t look like this piece of shit could make it all the way up here from Florida.”

  “Is that place around here?” I asked, pointing out several stickers on the back of the car that read LONG BRANCH BREWERY.

  “It’s over in Waynesville,” Dale said. “Down in Frog Level.”

  “Have you been there?” I asked.

  “Yeah, a couple of times,” Dale said. “Good beer; they got a restaurant with some decent food. And the girl that owns it’s hot as shit. I think her name’s Beth.”

  I walked over to the end of the parking lot, where a set of stone steps led down to the trailhead.

  “I ain’t going down there, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Dale yelled. “I ain’t chasing no tree hugger across the mountains just to ask him if he lost his keys.”

  I went back to the patrol car and took the key ring off the dash. I found the key Joanne had shown us and put it in the lock in the BMW’s driver’s side door.

  “Ten bucks says it don’t work,” Dale said.

  I turned the key clockwise, and the lock clicked open with a thump.

  “Shit,” Dale said.

  “Mind if I look inside, Deputy? Maybe find the name of the owner?”

  “Do you think I give a rat’s ass?”

  I opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat. The car’s inside was just as ragged as its exterior. The seats were torn and marked with what looked like cigarette burns. The floorboards were full of discarded food wrappers, mostly Chick-fil-A and Hardee’s. The odometer on the dash read 96,452, but I assumed it had already rolled over at least once. I popped the glove box open to reveal a few trail maps and a digital tire pressure gauge but no insurance or registration information. I reached under both seats and found a few empty Ziploc bags and a bottle of something called kombucha. I got out of the car and folded down the driver’s seat. There were two receipts crumpled on the back floorboard. One was from a Home Depot store in Asheville for a shovel, ax, pick, tarpaulin, and spade—someone must have been planning on doing some heavy-duty yard work. The other was for two growlers of beer called Dark Secret IPA from Long Branch Brewery.

  I turned to Dale and held up the BMW’s key. “Mind if I pop the trunk?” I said.

  “Be my guest. It’s probably full of tofu and bongo drums.”

  I tried to put the key in the trunk lock, but it wouldn’t fit. I turned the key over and tried again—same result. The trunk lock wasn’t centered properly, and I figured maybe it had been replaced. I shuffled through the keys, looking for one that might open the lock. I tried a couple but they didn’t work. I gave up and turned to Dale, who was shaking his head.

  “Are you done?” he asked. “ ’Cause I got shit to do.”

  I held up the key ring. “So what do we do with these?”

  “Hell, leave ’em on the seat.”

  “I’m not going to leave them here; someone could steal the car.”

  Dale laughed. “You seriously think someone’s gonna steal this thing?”

  “Just take me home. I’ll come back up later and give the keys to Terry. I should probably talk to him about Cold Mountain anyway, get some background for the book.”

  Dale raised his eyebrows.

  “You just wanna talk to Joanne, don’t ya? Get yerself another look at them Smothers Brothers she’s lugging around.”

  “You really are a pig,” I said.

  Dale beamed at the compliment.

  * * *

  Dale dropped me back at the cabin a little before eleven. I took a pill, poured a beer, and spent some time on the laptop researching BMW 2002s. I learned they had been produced between 1966 and 1977. While they had always been popular with BMW aficionados, they had recently become a favorite of the hipster set—those twentysomethings who liked beards, vinyl records, and for some reason Pabst Blue Ribbon. I also researched the long silver key etched with black markings. After about half an hour of going down multiple Google rabbit holes, I felt pretty sure the key belonged to a brand of gun safe manufactured by a company called Steel Freedom. The company’s website was plastered with images of eagles, American flags, and rattlesnakes with DON’T TREAD ON ME printed underneath. The gun safes the company offered ranged in price from $1,500 to over $3,000. We sell serious safes to serious people, the website noted at the top of the home page. It seemed that whoever owned the beat-up red BMW was more “serious” than the car’s liberal bumper stickers suggested.

  As I sat behind the laptop, it was hard not to not check my email in hopes that Laura had decided to reach out. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t check it until tomorrow morning.

  I kept that promise until the fifth beer kicked in, which was just a little past noon. The fifth beer is the one I can count on to finally break its way into my prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls decision making and willpower. The prefrontal cortex is where beer goggles live.

  I clicked the GET MAIL icon, then deleted all the spam, including an email from a Nigerian prince who needed my help getting $12 million into the United States. He would give me half the money if I would be so kind as to send him my bank account number and credit card information. My beer goggles weren’t that hazy.

  There was one email from my friend Perry, a senior detective with the Charleston PD and the man I’d been trying to call right before I took a seven iron to Greg’s neck. Perry had been my field training officer during my short-lived law enforcement career and was now in charge of the investigation into who shot me. It was also a robbery investigation, since no cases of drugs or cash had been found at the storage unit. When I’d given Perry my statement at the hospital, he’d promised to get to the bottom of what Greg was into. He’d also suggested, since whoever shot me was still at large, that I find a secluded place off the radar to go to recuperate. I figured I had Perry to thank for being in Cruso.

  Perry’s email said Greg was still in a coma and the investigation was ongoing. I was confused about Greg’s condition. I’d beaten the shit out of him, but it was hard to believe I’d put him in a coma. I felt proud for standing up for Laura but ashamed that I’d lost my temper. Pride was a new feeling for me. Ashamed was one I had plenty of experience with.

  * * *

  I had every intention of driving back up to the ranger station to hand over the key ring and talk to Terry or Joanne about Cold Mountain, but in the end I spent the rest of the day on the deck, riding a nice pill-and-beer buzz until the sun dropped behind the trees, dragging the temperature down with it. It was only eight PM when I limped into the bedroom and crawled under the covers. I didn’t normally go to bed at that hour, but to be honest it had been a long time since I’d done anything normally.

  I closed my eyes and thought about Laura sitting at Greg’s bedside at the hospital. I imagined her staring at the tubes snaking across his body, the mazes of plastic feeding air into his lungs and fluids into his veins. I wondered if he would make it, and wondered more what would happen if he didn’t.

  Before I left Charleston, Perry had told me everything would be okay. Along with his promise to get to the bottom of the situation, he’d promised to keep the fact that I’d beaten Greg a secret. The story he was going with was that whoever had shot me was the most likely person to have injured Greg.

  But it was a
secret I couldn’t keep from Laura. I’d told her what I’d done in that storage unit. But I didn’t tell her why. Perry had ordered me not to, and I trusted him. So Laura didn’t know Greg was dirty. She didn’t know he’d pulled a gun on me. All she knew was that her rage-filled brother had beaten her husband into a coma because of an alleged affair.

  If I was a praying man, I would have begged God’s forgiveness and asked for Greg’s health to be restored. I would have prayed for clarity. I would have prayed for insight. I would have prayed for the comfort of knowing everything would be okay.

  Instead I took two more pills and let a nice heavy fog roll over my brain.

  5

  The next morning, sunlight streamed through the bedroom window and I could hear birds chirping in the trees behind the cabin. Some squirrels scampered across the roof, their feet clicking frantically as if winter might set in any second. As far as I was concerned, winter could hold off indefinitely. My Charleston blood was pretty thin, and I could use all the time on the deck I could get.

  I stayed in bed for a while, trying to calculate how hungover I was. My head felt like a sponge soaked in motor oil and my stomach rolled and gurgled. This was nothing new. I was always a little queasy, sometimes a little more little, sometimes a little less little. It was what my mother used to call a nervous stomach. My beer consumption certainly didn’t help the condition, but the pills seemed to even things out. They didn’t necessarily settle my stomach, but they sure helped me forget that it hurt.

  When I finally summoned the energy to get up, I walked to the bathroom and took the Xanax bottle from the back of the sink. I poured the contents into my palm and counted twenty pills—they would get me through the next three, maybe four days if I was careful. I put the bottle in my pocket and made a mental note to call Dr. Landry’s office for a refill when I was somewhere with cell service. I could always count on the good doctor to keep me numb, and numb was what I was after. Not stoned, not bombed, just agreeably numb.