The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,41
two hikers hadn’t lingered to investigate further. They ran down the path in the moonlight, back to the beer joint to call the forest ranger.
A body?he’d said, a little disbelieving. It wouldn’t be the first time anyone tried to play a telephone prank on a forest ranger. Where?
In the woods at the edge of a field, they told him. Just down from the Appalachian Trail, across the dirt road from the white frame church. The snake handlers’ church.
Yes,he told them. He knew the place. It wasn’t a snake handlers’ church, of course, but the trail has its own mythology, and it wasn’t important that he should correct their theology. He knew the place they meant. Would they wait for him in the parking lot and lead him to the scene of the accident? No point in calling it murder, yet. It wasn’t his call anyhow. If the hikers had described the site correctly, that clearing was a couple of hundred yards west of the Appalachian Trail, not federal land. It was in Wake County.
He got in his truck and drove to the roadhouse. The hikers were easy to spot. They were slender young men in their early twenties, huddled together in a pool of light beneath an electric pole, shivering in flannel shirts, although the night was warm. When he parked in the gravel lot and began to walk toward them, they backed away, darting glances toward the open door of the roadhouse, where jukebox music spilled out into the darkness. At last they noticed his ranger’s uniform, and they rushed toward him, both talking at once. We’re not armed,they told the ranger. Whoever did that might still be there.The ranger nodded. He showed them his pistol and told them that there was a shotgun in the truck. They could bring it along if it would make them feel any easier. Then they were willing to lead him to the site. They were trained to handle emergencies, and they were already getting over the shock of their find.
Willis Blaine took his flashlight out of the truck and followed them down the road to the church, and then up the dirt road, past the field, and into the woods.
When he aimed the spotlight at the clearing, his mind registered several things at once. Homicide. Not a
fight or a failed robbery, this one. A very sick individual was loose out here. Young adult victims, one female, one male—their clothing indicated that they were probably hikers from the trail, but they were no longer on it.
I have to secure this crime scene,he told the young firemen. They nodded. They knew about crime scenes. You need to go back to the roadhouse and make another call. Wake County Sheriff’s Department. Tell them Willis Blaine sent you. Tell them where I am. Tell them it’s murder.
Spencer remembered the call. He wasn’t supposed to be in the office at all, because they were a two-man department in those days, and after eleven, calls were forwarded over to Unicoi County, whose sheriff’s department had twenty-four-hour patrols. But Spencer was a hotshot in those days. He would have worked twenty-hour days if Nelse Miller had let him, and that night Nelse Miller wasn’t there to send him home. Where had the sheriff gone? On vacation to Wrightsville Beach? To a bureaucrat’s meeting in Nashville? To a cousin’s wedding in Ohio? Spencer couldn’t remember anymore. The whereabouts of the sheriff was not a detail included in the official report on the case, but it was duly noted that the officer in charge of the investigation was Wake County sheriff’s deputy Spencer Arrowood.
He had been sitting at the oak desk in the darkened office. Only the paperwork and a white china coffee mug were illuminated by the desk light. He had been up since six, and he was so exhausted that the letters were beginning to wiggle on the page, so that he could no longer make out what he had just written. He might lay his head down on the desktop and catch an hour or two of sleep before finishing the reports. The soothing monotony ended with the ringing of the telephone. A calm steady voice with a Deep South drawl delivered the message with only a tinge of emotion shading the words. The fireman told him where they were and what they had found. Spencer made the caller say it twice so that he could be sure he had heard him right.