NIGHT OF THE BLACK BEAR

A MYSTERY IN GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK

GLORIA SKURZYNSKI AND ALANE FERGUSON

To Jacob Matthew Ronald Ledesma,

the newest member of our family.

Text copyright © 2007 Gloria Skurzynski and Alane Ferguson

Cover illustration copyright © 2007 Jeffrey Mangiat

All rights reserved.

Reproduction of the whole or any part of the contents is prohibited without written permission from the National Geographic Society, 1145 17th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

For information about bulk purchases, please contact National Geographic Books Special Sales, ngspecsales@ngs.org

Map by Carl Mehler, Director of Maps

Map research and production by Sven M. Dolling

Black bear art by Ruthie Thompson, Thunderhill Graphics

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to living persons or events other than descriptions of natural phenomena is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on request.

ISBN: 978-1-4263-0976-2

Version: 2017-07-07

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors want to thank Steve Kemp,

the Interpretive Products & Services Director for

Great Smoky Mountains Association;

Kent Cave, the Interpretive Media Branch Chief at

Great Smoky Mountains National Park;

Kim DeLozier, the Supervisory Wildlife Biologist at

Great Smoky Mountains National Park; and

Jan Skurzynski, who wrote the songs

Merle sings in this book.

The man liked to stack bills neatly. Ten-dollar bills on top of tens, their edges in a straight line, with separate stacks for the twenties and the fifties and the hundreds. Tonight there were seven hundred-dollar bills—pretty good earnings, he thought, in spite of the TV report that had scared some of his clients. Scared them, but excited them at the same time—five new clients had made reservations for tomorrow night. His pile of money would grow fatter still.

He’d begun to count the twenties and tens when his phone rang, and he hesitated. To answer, or not to answer? It was after hours, so the business was supposed to be closed for the night, but it could be another client, which meant more crisp bills to add to his pile.

“Yeah,” he spoke briskly into the phone. “Oh, yeah, Mr. Cabelli, I’ve been watching the reports. She wasn’t killed, just sliced and diced a bit. No, she was bloodied up, but that’s all. Don’t worry about our end. All systems are go.”

Through the window he saw a car edge into the parking lot near his office. A white car, with the words PARK RANGER and a green horizontal stripe above the front fender. It eased past the window like a shark gliding through water. Probably meant nothing, but—

“I gotta go, Mr. Cabelli.”

Quietly the man put down the phone and switched off the office lights. Then, with nothing but the soft glow of his watch to guide him, he placed the money in a bulging blue bag and zipped it shut.

Blood or no blood, he had work to do. He slipped out the side door of his office, locked the bag in the trunk of his black Town Car, and drove away into the night.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AFTERWORD

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CHAPTER ONE

Jack was stunned to see the blood on the ground. Deep red, it had seeped into the tall grass behind one of the tombstones, arcing like a fan until it sank into a bare patch of earth. A small, trench-like depression showed where the bear had dragged the girl. Jack had heard that a tourist scared away the bear, making it run off into the trees beyond the cemetery. The girl, the bear’s victim, had been lucky to escape alive. Sometimes a black bear will hold on so tight that nothing can make it drop its prey.

It seemed really weird to have a cemetery in a U.S. national park—as far as Jack knew, this was the only one. But long before Great Smoky Mountains National Park came into existence, people had lived here. They farmed and hunted wild turkeys, deer, and black bears. When they died, they were buried right where Jack was standing.

Walking carefully, he tried not to step on any of the blood. Some drops still clung to the leaves of the yellow lady’s slippers that reached up like tiny cupped hands toward the midday sun. He leaned closer, his fingers cautiously touching the tip of a bloody leaf to see if the blood was still wet. It was! Grimacing, he wiped his fingers on his khaki cargo shorts.

From around the side of the white-walled Cades Cove Methodist Church his sister Ashley called out, “Mom says Heather’s going to be OK.”

“Who’s Heather? Is she the girl the bear attacked?”

“Yes, Heather McDonald is her name,” Ashley answered him. “Anyway, she’s going to be all right. Mom talked to the park ranger at the hospital, and he told her Heather will probably be discharged tomorrow.” She squinted up at Jack. “What’s the matter? You look—grossed out or something.”

“Nothing’s the matter. I’m fine,” Jack told her, regretting that he had wiped his fingers on his shorts, which were now stained with a bloody reminder of the bear attack.

“OK, well, Mom said she’ll be just a bit longer, and then we can go.” Ashley zipped up her pink hoodie, shivering a little. Though it was nearly May, the air felt a bit chilly.

Jack glanced across the churchyard toward his mother. Olivia Landon was a wildlife veterinarian, who frequently was called to various national parks as a consultant whenever there were strange, unexplained happenings with the animals. A small woman with curly dark hair—Ashley got her looks from their mother—Olivia was deep in conversation with a uniformed park ranger, Blue Firekiller, a tall, muscular man with black hair and skin the color of pale copper. They were questioning a bald-headed man who had witnessed the attack. As they spoke together, Ranger Firekiller wrote in a small notebook while the man waved his hands and gestured toward the trees.

A little farther away, Jack’s father, Steven Landon, changed the film in his camera, while talking to a tall boy who had the same skin tone and black hair as Ranger Blue Firekiller. “Who’s that kid over there with Dad?” Jack asked Ashley.

With a slight smile, Ashley answered, “That’s Ranger Firekiller’s son. His name is Yonah. He told me he’s a Cherokee, and Firekiller is a real Cherokee name. So is Yonah.”

There was something about Ashley’s smile and the way she said “Yonah” that caught Jack’s attention. “What’s so special about him?” he asked.

“It’s just—you know how I always collect Native American legends at every park we go to. Yonah was telling me all about the bear trouble today, and he said something I can really connect to. He said he understood what the bear was feeling.”

“What the bear was feeling? You mean the bear that attacked the girl right over there? This Yonah sounds kind of weird to me, like he’s been reading or something.”

Defiant, Ashley glared at her brother, redness creeping into her cheeks. Little wisps of hair curled from her dark braids, tiny as threads, and in the light they seemed to spark in aggravation. “Jack, I’m 12 years old—almost!” she hissed. “Do you think Yonah would be telling me fairy tales like I was a little kid? We had a serious conversation. Just because I’m two years younger than you doesn’t mean a 16-year-old guy won’t talk to me about serious things.”

“I know what the bear was feeling, too,” Jack told her. “He was feeling hungry.”

“Shut up!” Ashley punched him in the arm.

Jack narrowed his eyes to study Yonah, who was tall and wiry, with biceps that bulged as he stood with his arms across his chest. Yonah seemed to be listening intently to the talk between the three adults while at the same time paying attention to what Steven was doing with his camera.

“Anyway, I’ll introduce you to him,” Ashley told Jack, making it sound like a big favor. “Hey, Yonah!” she called, waving her arm to catch his attention. “Can you come here a minute? My brother wants to meet you.”

“Not,” Jack muttered.

Yonah glanced from his dad to Olivia to Steven, shrugged, then sauntered to where Jack and Ashley were standing. Through holes in his blue jeans, his knees looked like flickering eyes as he walked, and his thick bangs hung to his eyebrows in a line so straight it might have been drawn with a ruler. “Yeah?” he asked.

“This is Jack,” Ashley said. “Jack, this is Yonah. I was telling Jack what you said about the bear, Yonah, but I thought you could say it better.”

“How do you spell Yonah?” Jack asked.

Yonah paused after each letter, as though Jack might not be swift enough to catch it. “‘Yonah’ means ‘bear.’”

“So that’s how you know what bears are thinking—you are one!” Jack started to laugh at his own little joke, but no one else was laughing. Yonah’s face stayed expressionless. His dark eyes skimmed over Jack’s blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin with a look that told Jack he could never qualify as a Cherokee.

For some reason that silent stare flustered Jack. He found himself doing the thing he chided his sister for—he began to talk too fast. “My mom – she’s Olivia Landon, the wildlife veterinarian. She’s over there with your dad. She came here to confer about the elk, and then this bear thing happened, so now she’s helping them figure out the science of why the bears have gone haywire.” Jack rushed on, “We were driving from the airport this morning when we got the phone call about this attack, so we came straight over here. My mom nearly freaked out when she heard there’d been a total of three bear incidents in the past four weeks. This is a really serious situation. She said—”

“Two,” Yonah interrupted.

The tone stopped Jack cold. “Excuse me?”

“One of the attacks was in Gatlinburg, which is outside the park. Heather McDonald is only the second victim in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It’s important to keep the facts straight, especially if the media show up.”

Feeling quashed, Jack stood silent, unsure what Yonah meant. Overhead, a magpie cawed, and beyond that he could hear a car rumble past on Cades Cove Loop Road, a good distance beyond the thick stands of trees that ringed the wide green meadow around the Methodist church. He felt stupid standing there without answering, but he didn’t know what to say.

“Do you really think the news people will show up, Yonah?” Ashley asked.

“You can pretty much count on it. They like to ask questions that make things sound worse than they are.” Although Ashley had questioned him, Yonah directed his answer at Jack. “My dad—he’s the ranger that got called in to investigate the attacks—he told me if we’re not careful, the media people might try to shut down Great Smoky Mountains National Park. So watch what you say. And how you say it. Don’t go blabbing stupid stuff.”

Jack found his voice and said, “Yeah, well, my mom’s more worried about somebody getting killed. She thinks that’s the bigger problem.”

“Black bears don’t kill,” Yonah replied. “Not unless they are provoked.”

“You mean like Heather provoked that bear by standing here in the cemetery?” Jack shot back. If he hadn’t been sure before, he was sure of it now—he didn’t much like this guy. Ashley stood to one side, glancing from one to the other of them anxiously as she rocked from foot to foot, her dark eyes wide.

“These attacks are very unusual,” Yonah continued. “It’s just a string of bad luck.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Especially for the people who get chunks of their thighs ripped open. That’s really bad luck.”

“Jack!”

“What?” Jack cried, whirling on his sister.

“Look! Over there.”

For an instant he thought she was telling him to cool it with Yonah, but instead, Ashley pointed to the road, where two vans, one with something like a radar scope on the roof, were turning onto the blacktop lane that led to the church. Within minutes the vans arrived and parked, then their doors flew open.

Three people got out and rushed toward the spot where Olivia, Steven, and Blue Firekiller stood talking to a bald-headed man. A young blonde-haired woman in a red blazer, short skirt, and knee-high boots led the group. A man beside her balanced a television camera on his shoulder. Another man behind them carried a long pole with a microphone dangling from it.

“I’m Greta Gerard from Channel 12 News,” the woman announced, as the man with the pole thrust the microphone a half dozen inches from Blue’s face. “We understand there’s been another bear attack in the park, this one almost fatal. Can you give us some details?”

Yonah had begun to hurry back toward his father, and Jack and Ashley followed in time to hear Greta Gerard ask, “What is the park’s position on these attacks, Mr….?” Then, peering at Blue’s nametag, “I mean Ranger…uh…Firekiller? Is that right? Firekiller?”

Suddenly, Yonah spoke up, saying, “Yes, the name is Firekiller. It’s Cherokee.”

“Firekiller, OK, got it,” Greta murmured, barely glancing at Yonah. “So, Ranger Firekiller, what does the park have to say about these attacks? Will you be forced to close the park to the public?”

Hesitating, Blue Firekiller answered, “A black bear did approach a girl visiting here in Cades Cove, but we’re happy to report that she’s doing fine.”

“‘Approach?’ That’s an interesting choice of words,” Greta answered. “I heard it was an attack. Some of the tourists I have talked to have asked if the bears in this park might have rabies. Do you think that’s possible?

An outbreak of rabies could threaten the public’s health and safety.”

“No. In the other incidents the tests all came back negative,” Blue replied as he frowned at Greta. His right hand twitched as though he wanted to brush away the microphone that kept inching closer to his face.

“Well, then, Ranger Firekiller, do you have any explanation as to why the black bears are behaving in such an unusual manner?” Greta signaled the cameraman to focus on her, rather than on Blue. “Our viewers will want to know, just how far will Great Smoky Mountains National Park go to protect the visitors who come here? After all, this is the most visited national park in the entire United States National Park System.”

“We have no evidence whatsoever that the bears are infected with any disease,” Blue told her, holding himself stiffly. “But we’re taking the situation very seriously. We’ve asked Dr. Landon, an expert on animal behavior who just happens to be visiting the park, to help us study every possible scenario.”

Suddenly the bald man, who’d been standing quietly through all this, stepped forward to announce, “I saw the whole thing. I’m the guy who saved the girl.” He pushed in front of Blue to be in line with the camera while he added, “That bear was acting crazy. I heard the girl yell, and I knew I had to save her. My name is William F. Jordan. That’s spelled J-o-r-d-a-n.”

“Are you the bear expert?” Greta asked him.

“Me? No.” He shook his head. “That lady over there—she’s the bear expert. Anyway, like I told the lady and Ranger Firekiller here, I heard the girl screaming, and I ran over to her. I’d just come out of the church ’cause my wife left her scarf there this morning, and—”

“The bear,” Greta prompted him, “tell us about the bear.”

“Well, I ran over there, and I yelled and clapped my hands, then I picked up a rock and threw it. My pitching arm is still pretty good. The rock hit the bear right on his head. Bonk! He kind of roared, like he was gonna come after me, but then he ran into the trees behind the cemetery. Seems like all the bears in this park have gone crazy. Three maulings already—”

“Two!” Yonah spoke up.

“They need to shut down this park to protect the American people,” Jordan insisted.

“Will that be the official park position?” Greta asked, ignoring both Yonah and Mr. Jordan as she turned back toward Blue. “To close the park?”

Olivia had begun to inch away from the camera while Greta’s attention focused on Blue, who pulled himself up to his imposing six-foot height before he answered, “We have no further comment. If you have any more questions, Miss, you’ll need to talk to the park superintendent.”

“But did you see the girl who was attacked?” Greta persisted. “I heard the bear ripped a whole pound of flesh out of her leg.”

“No comment!”

“Dr. Landon? What’s your opinion?”

“I can’t even begin to speculate until I go over the data,” Olivia said, signaling Jack and Ashley to head toward the Landons’ rental car. Ashley, fascinated by the television news team, barely moved, so Jack jerked her by the elbow to get her going. Steven followed, pulling out the car keys as he herded the kids forward, their feet scuffing against the asphalt. As if by magic, the car doors flew open, all four at once.

The camera zoomed in as Greta cried, “Dr. Landon, do you think it’s in the public’s best interest to shut down Great Smoky Mountains National Park?”

“Ranger Firekiller has already told you that you’ll need to discuss that with the park superintendent,” Olivia answered.

Steven had started the car and was easing it toward the TV crew, with the front passenger door still wide open. Suddenly, Olivia sprinted across the last ten feet that separated her from the car and jumped inside without saying another word. The engine roared as Steven shifted into reverse, spun in a curve and swung back onto the road, leaving Greta standing there, frustrated.

“Wow! That was a real cool escape, Mom!” Jack exclaimed.

Olivia swept her fingers through her hair, squeezed her eyes shut, and took a deep breath before she answered, “That Greta person kept clamoring about closing the park, and I bet it’ll be all over the television news tonight. We have to solve this mystery so that we can keep the park open. What I really need is to interview that girl, Heather McDonald. And I need to get to her now!”

CHAPTER TWO

Blue and Yonah managed to slide into their own car and race after the Landons. As they caught up, Blue honked his horn to signal that he was passing, then swung ahead on the left as Yonah yelled through his passenger-side window, “Follow us to the hospital.”

“Thank heavens for Blue!” Olivia exclaimed. “I never got a chance to find out where the hospital’s located.”

Both cars slowed down to head out on the long drive. As their parents talked quietly in the front seat, Jack and Ashley stared out the rear windows at the sights. And there were a lot of sights to see, especially when they reached the town of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Streets that looked like an amusement park were lined with tourist attractions, one after the other, competing for the attention of passersby. Jack sat up straight when he realized that there actually was an amusement park, a real one, hardly more than a stone’s throw beyond the main highway.

Ashley beat him to it. She shouted out, “Dollywood! Look, there’s a sign for Dollywood. It says rides and a water park. Mom, can we go there?”

“Probably. Eventually. After we’ve taken care of the bear problem.” Jack noticed his mother biting the edge of her thumbnail and figured she must be seriously worried. He’d never seen her bite her nails before. “At the hospital, kids,” she added, “we’ll be meeting a ranger named Kip Delaney. Kip is the park’s expert on the elk restoration program, but he’s also a black bear expert. I’ve talked to him on the phone in the past hour, and we’re both thinking there could be some remote tie-in between the bear attacks and the elk. I mean, that’s really just a guess, but Kip and I want to investigate it.”

Kip Delaney. These park guys have funny names, Jack thought. Blue, Yonah, Kip….

Fifteen minutes later they pulled into the hospital parking lot in a town called Sevierville. Kip Delaney was outside waiting for them, motioning them into a space he’d saved. Like Blue Firekiller, Kip Delaney was tall and dark-haired, but Kip had fair skin, and his shoulders were so broad that when he reached out to shake hands, his gray, park ranger shirt pulled tight across his chest.

“Looks like everyone’s here,” Kip said.

Yonah and Blue had arrived just ahead of the Landons, and Blue was saying, “We need gas. The gauge is nearly on empty.” Holding out the car keys, he told Yonah, “Here, take Jack and Ashley with you, gas up the car, and then buy yourselves some burgers if you’re hungry. Come back in about half an hour.”

Hearing that, it was Steven, not Olivia, who began to look worried. “Yonah has his license?” he asked, as if he didn’t really want to trust his kids to a 16-year-old he’d just met that afternoon.

“Sure. I’ve been legal for a whole month,” Yonah told him confidently. “Don’t worry, Mr. Landon, I’m a very careful driver. I promise I won’t go over 80. Just joking. Anyway, the gas station and burger place are only two blocks from here.”

Ashley giggled a little at Yonah’s joke, but Jack shook his head and said, “I’m not hungry.”

“Well, I’m starving!” Ashley declared, shooting a look at Jack.

“Since when are you not hungry?” Steven asked him. “The last time you weren’t hungry, you were eight years old and had chickenpox.”

The truth was, Jack already didn’t like Yonah very much and would rather not be stuck with him for half an hour. Besides, if he stayed around the hospital, he might learn more about Heather McDonald and the bear encounter. That would really be interesting.

“If you stay, you’ll have to wait in the hall,” Olivia told him. “You can’t go into the room.”

“Fine. No problem.” Jack didn’t bother to wave as Yonah and Ashley took off.

“Let’s go, then,” Kip said, and led the rest of them toward Heather McDonald’s hospital room. Blue entered first, followed by Olivia, Steven, and Kip. As they went in, Jack tried to get a glimpse inside, but with all those adults filling the door frame, he couldn’t see a thing. Then Kip shut the door tightly behind him.

“Perfect!” Jack grumbled sarcastically. He glanced around the hall and saw some empty chairs. A small square table held a few magazines, but he had no desire to read Quilter’s Digest or Healthy Aging or Cooking for Vegans. He sprawled on one of the chairs, resting the back of his head against the wall. A nurse who happened to come out of Heather’s room did not shut the door tightly. After she disappeared down the hall, Jack jumped to his feet and moved toward the door, which had swung open a couple of inches. That was enough.

Staying back a little so he wouldn’t be quite up against the opening, Jack peered first at the girl in the hospital bed. Heather’s eyes looked wide and shadowed, her face pasty pale, and her colorless lips quivered as the adults questioned her.

“…with our church group,” she was saying. “I went out to the cemetery because my dad told me some of our ancestors are supposed to be buried there. I wanted to find the tombstones.”

“Were your parents with the church group?” Olivia asked gently.

“No, they stayed home. In Morganton. That’s where we’re from—Morganton, North Carolina. It’s about 150 miles from here. But my mom’s here now.” Heather’s lips trembled even more as two tears slid down her cheeks.

Heather’s mother, sitting somewhere Jack couldn’t see, said, “I came as soon as they called me this morning.”

The sad-looking girl in the hospital bed was about 16, Jack guessed, the same age as Yonah. Her bandaged leg lay on top of the bedding, but the rest of her thin body stayed beneath the white hospital sheets. Greta, the TV newswoman, had claimed that a pound of flesh had been torn from Heather’s thigh, yet there was no way to tell how deep the wound was because of those thick bandages covering Heather’s leg from her hip to below the knee.

Jack’s father must have been standing in a corner behind the door. Jack couldn’t see him but heard him ask Heather’s mother, “Do I have your permission to take a few photos for the park reports?”

Mrs. McDonald murmured, “Yes,” and there was a sudden flash from Steven’s camera. Heather blanched as the camera flashed two more times.

“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:

Downtown by the neon lights

Where trouble runs and the young men fight

There’s a woman singin’ slow

Her voice is rough and low

And when she steps to the microphone

The songs she sings are all her own….

Jack straightened in surprise. Merle was good! Really good! The song went on:

Now I might seem as far apart

From Mona’s world as day from dark

But Mona sings her soul to me

And all her songs, they set me free

She makes me feel I’m not alone

She sings for me as if I was her own.

The women in the room applauded, yelling “yay’” and “whoo hoo.”’ By then Jack wasn’t just surprised, he’d zoomed all the way to astonished! Merle was as good as any singer Jack had ever heard on the radio or on television.

“That’s my favorite of all the songs Merle ever wrote,” his mother was saying, as she smiled and nodded her head.

“You wrote that song? Yourself?” Jack stammered.

“Yes, he did,” Arlene answered proudly. “You know, we named Merle after the country singer Merle Haggard. When he grows up, Merle’s gonna be just as famous as Merle Haggard.”

Who was Merle Haggard? Jack had never heard of him.

Bess asked, “You used to sing, too, Arlene, didn’t you? Back a ways?”

“Well, yes, I did. When Merle’s daddy was alive, we sang together. We wanted to be another Johnny Cash and June Carter, can you imagine?” She laughed a little at that, then clutched her chest, saying, “Ooh, that hurts!”

Johnny Cash! Jack knew about Johnny Cash. “I worked on a Johnny Cash CD cover,” he said.

For a few silent seconds, everyone stared at Jack in amazement. “You…you designed a Johnny Cash record cover? By yourself?” Merle asked.

“No! No, I mean…I never designed it for real. I just fool around with Photoshop. Like…I change pictures to make them look funny or scary. Then I post them to a blog.”

“Oh.” They all looked a little disappointed. “Well, let’s see your Johnny Cash cover then,” Corinn told him, pulling a small laptop from a briefcase near her feet. “I brought my computer today so we could go over Arlene’s Dollywood hospital insurance plan. Here, I’ll turn it on for you.”

Jack wished he’d never mentioned Photoshopping. He felt really stupid as he moved over to the computer Corinn set up on the bedside stand. Taking a deep breath, he signed into the blog and pulled up the picture he’d posted.

There it was, a CD cover of country music superstar Johnny Cash with his famous black shirt and pants all covered with one-dollar bills Jack had pasted on him digitally. “I call it ‘Cash on Cash,’” he said weakly.

Their reaction was a big surprise. Corinn, Bess, and Merle burst out laughing, and Arlene cried, “Oooh, let me see! That is so funny. ‘Cash on Cash!’”

Bess told Jack, “If you did a cover of Merle Haggard, you could make him look haggard—you know, all old and wore out.”

The others laughed even louder when Arlene said, “How ’bout Martina McBride in a weddin’ gown?”

Corinn, the younger one, must have sensed that Jack didn’t recognize those names. In a quieter voice she told him, “You’re not from around here, are you, Jack? This is the home of Dollywood and Nashville, the country music capital of the whole wide world. Every one of us Tennesseans grew up listening to country singers and country music, ’cause it’s all about us and who we are.”

Before Jack had a chance to answer, the phone rang, and Bess picked it up since Arlene couldn’t reach it. “It’s Blue,” she announced. “He says to come right down to the parking lot.”

After Jack said good-bye to the women, Merle told him, “I’ll walk you down the hall so I can tell Blue I already got a ride to Gatlinburg.” As they ambled slowly, Merle exclaimed, “You’re a real artist, Jack, to do stuff like that. How did you learn it? I wish I could do that, but I don’t have a computer at home.”

No computer? Jack didn’t know what he’d do without his own computer—it connected him to the world. He took a closer look at Merle, noticing that he wore a sweatshirt and stained pants that might have come out of a thrift shop. His shoes were pretty worn, with the rubber on the side of the soles discolored and cracked.

Merle’s mother had mentioned that his father was dead. “Your mother works at Dollywood?” Jack asked. “What does she do there?”

“She’s a groundskeeper. She goes around trimmin’ bushes and sprayin’ bugs and stuff. She won’t be able to work for a while, though. That punctured lung will take a long time to get better. That’s why I’m lucky I got this job.”

Lucky? It sounded like the only luck they had was bad luck. Just as Jack was about to ask Merle what kind of job he had, he noticed Yonah coming toward them down the hall, walking fast.

“Uh-oh,” Merle said, just before Yonah caught up to them. “Here comes Yonah the fire-spitter.”

“You mean Firekiller,” Jack corrected him.

“Wait ’til you know him better,” Merle said.

“What’s taking you so long?” Yonah demanded. “My dad’s been waiting in the parking lot.”

“Tell your dad he doesn’t have to wait for me. I got another ride to Gatlinburg. So back off, man,” Merle told Yonah. To Jack, he said, “It was good meeting you.

Real good. Your work is cooler than frost. I’d like to see more of it.”

With that, he was gone, and Jack had to follow Yonah. “Waste of time…coming after Merle,” Yonah was muttering, hotly.

Jack remembered that Yonah’s mother and Arlene Chapman were supposed to be good friends. Yet Yonah hadn’t even stopped in the room to ask Arlene how she was feeling. What a jerk! Why did Ashley think Yonah was so great? Jack was glad they didn’t have to ride home with him.

On the way back to their hotel in Gatlinburg, Jack talked excitedly to his parents about Arlene and Merle and Merle’s great singing until Ashley cried, “All right! We get it! He can sing. But Yonah doesn’t like him.”

“How’d you know that?” Jack asked her.

“I saw Yonah’s face when he told his dad that Merle wouldn’t be coming home with them. His dad told him to cool it, that it didn’t matter.”

“Yeah, well if I had to hold an election between Merle and Yonah, I know who’d win.”

“Enough!” Olivia called back. “Please be quiet for a while. I have a lot of thinking to do.” After a few minutes she said, “We need to watch the evening news to find out what that Greta will say about the bear attacks and the park. I don’t want to miss any of it, so I think we should have dinner in our rooms instead of going out to a restaurant.”

The Landons were staying in two connecting rooms at the Gatlinburg Lodge, which meant Jack had to share with his sister. Ashley didn’t like that at all, and Jack liked it even less because Ashley was always locking herself in the bathroom so she could mess with her hair. If Jack pounded on the door to make her come out, his mother or father would yell at him to stop.

That evening, while Olivia was pushing buttons on the remote to make sure she could find Greta’s TV channel, Steven brought all of them Philly cheese steaks and milk shakes he’d ordered from a fast-food place across the street.

“Here it comes,” Olivia announced just as Jack was licking his fingers after his meal. “The local news is on.”

And there they were. All four Landons on the television screen, right there in room 112 of the Gatlinburg Lodge.

“Look at me!” Ashley cried happily. “I’ve never been on TV before.” But it lasted only a few seconds before Greta’s face and voice dominated the program.

“Good evening, Channel 12 viewers. This afternoon our news team got right on top of a breaking story in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Sixteen-year-old Heather McDonald from Morganton, North Carolina, was mauled by a bear on the grounds of the old Methodist church in Cades Cove.”

On the screen was a photo of Heather, not all bandaged the way they’d seen her in the hospital, but smiling and pretty, probably from her high school yearbook.

“Heather McDonald suffered a severe trauma to her thigh,” Greta continued, “where a large portion of her flesh was ripped away from the bone by a black bear. The bear has not yet been identified or caught. This marks the third bear attack in three weeks, two inside the park, and one at the Gatlinburg garbage dump.”

“Oh, boy,” Steven breathed.

“Oh, yuck!” Ashley cried, as the screen filled with images of other attack victims whose stories Greta told in full detail. The camera zoomed in on a woman’s bloodied arm, and then shifted to a man holding up his ripped shirt as he pointed to four deep scratch marks that sliced his chest from the collar bone to his belt.

Jack yelled, “Look! There’s Mom!”

“Olivia Landon,” Greta’s voice-over told the viewers, “is a wildlife veterinarian from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who came to the park to confer with other wildlife experts. But Dr. Landon refused to make any statements about a possible reason for this sudden rash of bear attacks in our area.”

Next came the scene just as Jack remembered it—Greta following Olivia and asking, “Dr. Landon, do you think it’s in the public’s best interest to shut down Great Smoky Mountains National Park?” And Olivia, trying to escape that dangling microphone as she edged toward the car, answering, “Ranger Firekiller has already told you that you’ll need to discuss that with the park superintendent.” The picture zoomed to the Landons’ car driving out of the parking lot, with Jack’s and Ashley’s heads barely visible in the back seat.

Then came the bombshell. “Channel 12 has learned,” Greta said now, “that Dr. Olivia Landon is an expert on elks. Not bears, but elks. This reporter wonders why, when visitors may be in real danger from bears at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Dr. Landon is the person who’s investigating the bear attacks. After all, so far we haven’t been attacked by any elks.”

“What! What did she just say?” Olivia jumped up from her chair, her dark eyes blazing with anger.

“Take it easy,” Steven tried to calm her. “Don’t worry about it, honey. She’s just some news person who hasn’t heard about all the animal mysteries you’ve solved at other parks.”

Olivia wasn’t about to calm down. It wasn’t often that she lost her temper, but when she did, color rose to her cheeks and her five-foot-four height seemed to suddenly stretch by inches.

“I got called to this park to confer with Kip about elk rehabilitation,” she stormed. “We didn’t know there was going to be a bear attack….” Pointing to Greta on the TV, Olivia vowed, “You just wait! I’ll solve this mystery so fast and so completely that Channel 12 will have to apologize—on the air!”

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