Mysteries in Our National Parks: Night of the Black Bear: A Mystery in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

“So you found the tombstones, Heather,” Olivia went on, “and then what did you do?”

“I put down my backpack—”

“Did you have food in your backpack?” Olivia interrupted.

“Uh-huh. I had a chicken sandwich on a wheat bagel. And some potato chips.”

Jack could see his mother exchange a glance with Kip, but Olivia asked only, “What happened next, Heather?”

“Well, I started to take pictures of the tombstones. With my digital camera. It’s over there in the drawer, if you want to see it.”

“Maybe later,” Kip said. Then, raising his hands to his face as though holding a camera, he continued, “When you took the pictures, did you have the camera up like this? Near your face?”

“Well, yes, I was holding it up to see the little screen—you know, that shows what the picture will look like? I guess, I suppose…it was in front of my face.”

Kip took a deep breath. “Then this might be what caused the attack. The bear probably thought you were eating something, Heather. First, he smelled the food in your backpack. Bears have a powerful sense of smell,” Kip explained to Heather’s mother. “Even from way back in the woods, bears can smell food a mile away. When he came close and saw you holding your camera up near your face, he thought the camera was food, and he wanted it. So what did you do then?”

“Well…I…” Heather glanced down, glanced away, ran her fingers through her tangled brown hair. “I guess I did something really stupid. I took pictures of the bear.”

“Oh…my!” Blue breathed. He’d been writing in the small notebook, but now he paused, his pen raised, as he looked over at Heather.

“Like I said, it was stupid…a huge mistake. Huge!” Heather cried, her voice breaking as she began to sob. “I know that now! Because the bear came at me and he tried to grab the camera and I started hitting him with it and he bit me on the leg. I screamed, but he kept biting me, and I kept screaming, and then this man came and—”

“It’s all right, Heather, we know the rest of it from the report you gave to Ranger Delaney.” Olivia pressed her hand lightly against the girl’s cheek, trying to soothe her. “And we talked to the man who saved you.”

“Excuse me!” The words came from right behind Jack and made him jump. He whirled around to see a white-coated woman with a stethoscope sticking out from her pocket. “I need to get in this room,” she said.

“Oh, sorry!” Jack moved out of the way as the woman pushed through the door, leaving it even farther ajar.

“I’m Dr. Graham. You wanted to talk to me?” she asked Kip.

Kip nodded and moved back so the doctor could come closer to Heather’s bed. “We’ll need a description of Heather’s wound for our report, Doctor. Can you tell us about it—in layman’s language, please, so Ranger Firekiller here knows how to spell the words?” Kip threw a quick grin at Blue.

The doctor didn’t smile at all. In a clipped voice that sounded as though she had other emergencies waiting for her and she couldn’t spare too much time, she said, “I anesthetized the wound and examined it to see how deep it was. Then I debrided it.”

“De-breed?” Blue asked, raising his pen from the pad and scrunching up his brow. “What does that mean?”

“It means to cut away some of the damaged tissue.”

“You cut away more tissue?” Now Blue’s eyebrows lifted way up. “She already had this big hole in her leg. Why didn’t you just stitch it up?”

Impatiently the doctor said, “It’s difficult to stitch animal bites. By definition they are contaminated. Making sutures—you call them stitches—would be like leaving foreign bodies inside the wound—a perfect place for infection to localize. Bear saliva is very germy. But we were able to check for rabies, and the results came back negative. No rabies, so that’s good news.”

The doctor’s tone changed as she leaned over Heather to ask, “Feeling any better, honey? The pain pills and antibiotics ought to be helping.” Then, straightening, the doctor turned toward Olivia. “She’ll need plastic surgery to repair the wound, but her mother prefers to take her to the family’s own physicians in North Carolina, isn’t that right, Mrs. McDonald? Heather will be fit to travel by tomorrow.” Giving Heather’s hand a squeeze, the doctor told her, “I have to go now, sweetie, but I’ll back to check on you later, after all these people are gone.”

“Thanks for your time, Doctor,” Kip said.

“You’re welcome. By the way, who is that boy lurking around the door?”

Busted! Jack backed off fast, but not fast enough. It was Blue who came out to tell him, “Look, Jack, we’re still going to be here for a while, and you shouldn’t be out here—what did the doctor call it? ‘Lurking?’” Blue lowered his dark eyebrows in what could have been a frown, except that the corners of his mouth twitched in a little smile.

“Sorry,” Jack muttered.

“Anyway, I need you to do me a favor,” Blue said.

“Sure!” Jack exclaimed, glad that Blue didn’t seem angry. “What can I do for you?”

Motioning Jack to walk down the hall away from Heather’s room, Blue explained, “There’s a boy who’s been living at our house for a few days because he needs a place to stay. This boy’s mother is a real good friend of my wife, and the mother was in a bad car wreck last week. Really serious. She’s right here in this hospital, room 234. I need you to go to that room and tell Merle we’ll be ready to leave in a little while, and I want him to meet us in the parking lot so I can drive him back to our house.”

“Merle?” Jack asked. “Is that his first name?”

“Yeah, Merle. His last name’s Chapman. His mother is Arlene Chapman. She’s the patient in room 234, in the next wing over that way.” Blue pointed. “Tell Merle I’ll call his mother’s room when we’re ready to go. You stay there with him ’til the call comes.”

“OK.” That didn’t sound like anything Jack would really want to do, but at least he wasn’t getting slammed for eavesdropping. Blue turned to go back into Heather’s room, this time closing the door tightly behind him.

CHAPTER THREE

Arrows at the end of the hall pointed the way to rooms 220 through 240. Jack didn’t hurry. He was not anxious to go inside a hospital room where he’d have to look at a woman who’d been badly hurt in a car wreck. Heather McDonald’s leg, bandaged from hip to knee, had been disturbing enough to see. This Merle guy’s mother might look a whole lot worse.

But as he came close to room 234, Jack heard laughter and the chatter of female voices. For a minute he wondered if it was the right room. When he peered inside, he saw a boy standing at the foot of a hospital bed, holding a guitar straight up by the neck as it rested on the mattress. Sitting next to the guitar was a woman wearing a pale blue hospital gown dotted with darker blue flowers. The boy must be Merle, and the woman his mother. They might have looked alike if her face hadn’t been covered by two strips of tape that stretched from her forehead to her cheeks, crossing over her nose in a big X.

“Don’t make Arlene laugh,” a woman in a nurse’s aide uniform warned two other women. “She has a tube in her chest because of that punctured lung. Laughing hurts her. I mean, it doesn’t do any damage, it’s just painful.”

“Ooops! Sorry!” exclaimed one of the women, who was actually somewhere in between a woman and girl. Thin and pretty, she wore a nametag pinned to a green sweater, but she didn’t look like a nurse’s aide. Next to her, an older woman in a blue work shirt and jeans stood facing away from Jack so he couldn’t see her too well, but in her back pocket he noticed a pair of garden clippers.

“Uh…are you Merle?” Jack asked from the doorway.

“Yeah,” Merle answered. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Jack Landon. My mom is helping Ranger Firekiller investigate today’s bear attack. He said to tell you he’ll be leaving here pretty soon.”

Merle started to speak, but his mother held out her hand and said, “Pleased to meet you, Jack. I’m Arlene, and that cute young thing there is Corinn, and the hard-workin’ lady reachin’ out to shake your other hand is Bess. Poor Bess’s been havin’ to work twice as hard now that I’m not taggin’ around after her in Dollywood, like I usually do. Bess and Corinn came here to see if I was makin’ any progress. Wasn’t that nice?”

Arlene Chapman looked like she needed a lot more progress. Beneath the X- shaped bandage, her nose was black and blue. Her eyes looked even more bruised, and she panted a little when she spoke, probably from that collapsed lung with the tube in it.

Speaking up again, Merle told Jack. “I gotta be at my job in Gatlinburg by 5:30. Bess said she’d drive me there tonight, and my boss will drive me back to the Firekillers’ house after work.”

Bess, the woman wearing work clothes, spoke up, “But you gotta pay me back, Merle. For the ride, I mean.”

“How, Bess?” he asked.

“Sing one more song before we go.”

The nurse’s aide had left the room, but she poked her head around the door again, saying, “I heard that! Is Merle going to sing again? Sing loud, Merle, so I can hear you from the nurse’s station.”

So Merle was a singer? He didn’t look more than a year older than Jack. In fact, he looked something like Jack, only taller and stockier, with hair a little redder than Jack’s blond color and eyes more gray than blue.

Plucking a few strings on his guitar, Merle announced, “I’ll sing this one ’cause Mom likes it best.” He waited just a moment, strummed a chord, then began to sing: