The Last Family (2 page)

“Ten minutes, boys,” Ruth said. “If you need to relieve yourselves, please do it now. I suggest a rest before we continue. So sit quietly and talk among yourselves. Drink in the natural splendor.”

The two women sat and the boys split up into groups. Instead of resting they began to run about like escaped weasels; the blue uniforms and yellow kerchiefs seemed to be everywhere at once.

“Nothing will grow on that slope for a few years.” She laughed and pointed to a ridge where two scouts had arched their backs and were crisscrossing yellow streams in the air and laughing.

“I figure we’re about one mile away. This rock is the two-mile point. So figure six hours,” Ruth said. She looked over at a fallen tree where her son was collapsed in a state of imagined heat exhaustion. “I don’t know
how to motivate Andy. Maybe I could tie his Nintendo to a stick and dangle it in front of him.”

“Oh, we’re not in a hurry,” Sarah said. “It gives the others a chance to go slow and enjoy the trip.”

“Up ahead maybe half a mile there’s an overlook that is just mind-blowing,” Ruth said. Sarah had never been on this particular trail before. Ruth seemed to know every trail in the Smokies, because those she had not walked she had read about and studied on her maps, some of which were three-dimensional.

“There’s a guardrail but we’ll have to be very careful to keep them back. With the drop I don’t imagine any of them will get too close. It’s a spine tingle to look off that cliff, I can tell you.”

Ruth stood and blew the stainless-steel whistle that hung from a lanyard and rode between her breasts. The boys started wandering back up to the trail from three or four directions.

“We need to rest here awhile,” Andy said. “What do we have to eat?”

“Roots and berries,” Ruth said. She didn’t plan to use the apples except in an emergency. Stopping to eat would kill an hour. The idea of the hike was to let the children burn off some excess energy and build an appetite for lunch.

“I ain’t eating no roots and berries,” he growled.

“Andrew, a double negative becomes the positive. So you just said you are going to eat roots and berries. Aren’t you glad I didn’t say roots and grubs?”

“Gross!” Teddy Barnes said. Teddy was wearing his cap pulled down so that his ears were at right angles to his head. His thick lenses made his eyes look like blue tennis balls. “Or cat poop,” he said. Andy tried to strike Teddy with his worn Reeboks, but he was too slow.

“He said I eat cat poop!” Andy yelled.

“Well, you don’t, do you?” his mother said. “Sticks and stones. All here?” she said, standing. She had been fat until she had started hiking and eating right. Now her thick legs were defined with muscle and well tanned. Her husband and sons could sit and watch television, but
she had turned the garage into a gymnasium and spent her spare time on her program.

Ruth pointed at the little heads as they bobbed and weaved. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …” She stopped counting and held up two fingers to quiet the boys. “Be quiet. What’s this? Silence,” Ruth said.

“What’s this? What’s this sign?” Sarah added.

“Akela. The wolf!” several shouted. Soon the air was filled with small waving hands echoing the women’s “V” signs.

“And it means what, everyone?”

“Shhhhhhhhh—” It sounded as though all of the children had sprung air leaks.

“Okay.” Ruth started to count the heads again. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.”

“Fourteen?” Sarah said. “Who’s out?”

“Who’s missing?” Ruth asked. She turned 360 degrees, her eyes scanning the forest floor for a flash of yellow or a flesh tone amid the green, brown, and stone-gray.

“One, two, three, four,” Sarah counted as she pointed at each head until she got to the last scout. “Oh, dear God—who’s missing?” she said.

The children looked around at each other.

“George is,” a child said.

“George!” Ruth yelled out. “George Lee!”

“He musta went with that ranger man,” Timothy Buchanan said. Timothy was George’s best friend. “He left his hat, though.” The child pointed to a blue-and-yellow hat that was lying beside the rock.

“What man?” Sarah asked.

“He asked for George Lee,” Timothy said.

Panic threatened to close Ruth’s throat. She fought to maintain control in front of Sarah and the children.

“Yes,” Timothy said. “He said George Lee. And he’s gonna give us merit badges for these leaves. White oak and—”

“What in the world?” Ruth said.

“What did the man look like?” Sarah asked.

“He was big,” Timothy said.

“And he had a gun …,” another child added. “…  Like a cowboy. Silver with a black handle and silver diamond shapes on the handle.”

“In a holster,” the black child added. A slug’s-trail of mucus, which ran from his nostril to his lip, glistened. He wiped it onto his sleeve and inspected it in a shaft of filtered sunlight.

“And cowboy boots,” one said.

“But no spurs,” offered someone else.

“Where is he? When did he come up here?” Sarah asked.

“He was already here when we got here,” Timothy said.

“And was he wearing a uniform?” Ruth asked.

“Yes,” Timothy said. “Brown with a Smokey the Bear hat and glasses that showed you your face back.”

“He was tall like Michael Jordan,” another child said.

“Was he black like Michael Jordan?” Ruth asked.

“No, he was a ranger with a red beard on his lip.”

“They don’t have black rangers,” someone added.

The black scout objected. “They got African-American rangers, polices, cowboys, and silver war soldiers, too.”

“They did not!” another child said. “They were just cooks and cleaners.”

“Which way did they go?” Ruth asked.

“That way.” A scout pointed up the trail. “To his Jeep.”

“Well, no need to panic,” Ruth decided. “He knew George’s name and had a description and he was in uniform. It must have been some sort of emergency. It happens.”

“Isn’t his daddy a …?” Sarah started.

“A government official would certainly know how to get to his son if he needed him. He’s DSF, you know.”

“DSF?”

“Drug Strike Force. It’s a branch of the DEA or something,”
Ruth said. “I’m going to hurry on ahead—y’all can catch up.”

“We can’t go faster,” Andy whined. “My feet hurt—I’ll pass out—I’m starving—I’m all fuzzy-headed.”

Several scouts began laughing. Someone was mimicking his whines.

“Ah’m fat. Ah’m mooshy-headed. Ah’m stupid.”

“Uh-uh!” Sarah said. “We’re all one team. All for one, and one for all. We pull together or we’ll pull apart.” The double entendre was wasted on the children.

“Very well,” Ruth said as she lifted the pack. “Stay here all night, then. Come up at your own pace. And, remember, bears almost never attack if you simply play dead. Just lie up against a tree like you’re doing now and close your eyes, and no peeping even if she does bite you.”

“Den Six—line up!” Sarah yelled.

“Forget it!” Andy jumped to his feet. By the time the scouts were lined up, Ruth was already running far up the trail.

The ranger stopped at the overlook and placed George’s limp body on the railing that had been made out of foot-wide stone cemented into a wall stretching between two large rock facings. He looked off at the scenery for a few seconds, drinking up the natural splendor. He picked up a coconut-sized rock, placed it on the rail near George’s head, and shoved it out with a quick motion. It seemed as if four or five seconds passed before the canyon gave up the echoing sound of the missile landing on the rocks below. He contemplated the child for a few moments, as a man might stare at a car someone else owns, removed the hat and glasses so he could wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. “Well, George. Nothing personal,” he said as he placed his hands under the body and lifted.

He caught a flash of something through the trees moving up the trail. It was a scout leader. He watched behind her for the others but saw no one except the lone woman jogging toward him. Quickly he took a metal tube with a threaded end from his pocket and screwed it
into the barrel of a small black automatic, which he pulled from his right boot.

Ruth had run all the way to the overlook without stopping even once. She was thrilled when she saw the man leaning against the stone railing watching her over his right shoulder. She was trying to put a smile on when she realized that the man was alone.

“Sir, are you the ranger who came for George Lee?” She almost yelled it.
Maybe George was in the woods relieving himself or wandering ahead
.

The man straightened and his face softened in a smile. He had his right hand behind his back, the left propped on the top of the railing. There was something strange about his wearing dark glasses in such a shady place.

It’s all right, he’s a park ranger
. She looked around, still expecting to see the child.

She was closing the last ten feet between them with her right arm extended. “I was worried sick—” she started.

Then she saw the gun.

2

N
ASHVILLE
, T
ENNESSEE, WAS ORIGINALLY BUILT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE
of the Cumberland River. It was established as Fort Nashboro and a reconstructed facsimile with ramparts stands as a tourist attraction, a few short blocks down the hill from Nashville’s greater tourist attraction, the original Grand Ole Opry. That building is in turn a few blocks down the hill from the federal courthouse, where, sharing the floor with the federal prosecutor’s offices, the Drug Enforcement Agency is located.

Special Agent in Charge, Rainey Lee, had been a DEA agent since just after leaving college and had led the DEA/DSF for four years. The DSF was an elite branch of the agency, and its cloak of secrecy was a large part of the appeal it held for men like Rainey Lee. He had gone straight to work at the DEA when it was formed from several branches of the Justice Department. At six feet five Rainey Lee was the tallest agent in the organization,
and at forty-eight had packed sixty additional pounds around his basketball player’s frame since college, when he had played for Duke University.

When he received the call from the sheriff’s office in eastern Tennessee informing him that his son was missing, presumed abducted, he requisitioned an agency plane and was on site in the mountains ninety minutes later. He arrived still wearing his suit, though he had changed into a pair of boots he kept in the trunk of his car.

Forty searchers were already at Schooner Rock, where the scout and the leader had last been spotted. Twin bloodhounds and a small-framed German shepherd were dancing in place, twisting their nylon leads around each other. A deputy held George’s scout cap to the animals so they could separate the boy’s scent from the others’. After a few seconds the dogs circled wide and struck out up the trail.

The bloodhounds were kept on leads while the shepherd was allowed to run ahead, alone. They ran directly up the trail, often as not pulling the handler through dense brush beside the trail for half a mile, then stopped beside the shepherd, who was standing with his front paws on the railing of the overlook, barking at the sky. The bloodhounds moved a few feet on up the trail, then turned abruptly, agreeing with the shepherd, and sat shifting their gazes from the gathering of men to the open view and back.

Then the shepherd jumped back, looked around for a few seconds, investigated a large brown circle in the grass beside the path, and launched himself off into the woods. He stopped suddenly and barked. The rescue team ran toward the animal with Rainey leading, his gun drawn.

Ruth Tippet’s body was on its back, her face aimed at the sky. The leaves had been pushed out of the way where she had been dragged. The single bullet had entered her forehead above the open left eye and exited through the back of her head.

Rainey turned and ran back to the railing where the
handler was holding the bloodhounds. He leaned out over the railing but couldn’t see directly down because the overlook they were standing on formed a shelf out over the sheer rock wall.

“She smells the boy, all right,” a deputy offered.

Rainey’s heart dropped.

A thin deputy anchored himself by hooking a rope rig to a tree opposite the railing and extended, almost horizontally, out over the ledge. He gazed down at the large rocks piled at the base of the wall where something bright had been splashed in a wide circle. The emptied husk that had been George Lee was hardly more than the dark blue center of that stain.

“Sir,” the deputy said, “I’m real sorry. We’ll have to go in from below.”

The sheriff said, “I think you might want to return to the camping area. We’ll get him out. You can’t do anything more.”

Rainey Lee was among the first to scramble over the rocks to the body. After he had seen what lay there among the jagged edges and flat plates, he sat down on a nearby rock. He opened his mouth and, for what seemed to the deputies and rangers a long time, there was no sound. Then his scream dropped to a pitch they could hear. The noise was like the sound of an animal being eaten alive.

Doris Lee was in the kitchen thinking about her husband.

Rainey had been uncharacteristically silent since their daughter’s funeral three months earlier and wouldn’t speak to the minister or a psychologist no matter how Doris pleaded. She had done all she could. She had talked to her minister, the agency-approved psychologist, and a support group of grieving parents who met once a week at the Episcopal church. She was drinking half a fifth of vodka daily just to keep her nerves evened out She planned to quit drinking soon. Rainey, never overly religious, blamed God, she thought.

Her mind was on her husband and George. Because there had been a rash of accidental deaths of family
members in the DEA, Rainey had not wanted George to go on the trip, but she had insisted on it. She had learned from the other people in her survivors’ support group that it was irrational to let fear and the projecting of possible disaster rob them of the future. You couldn’t fold up your tent and hide from life, and it wasn’t fair to George to keep him under virtual arrest. Until George had gone on the trip with the scouts, until he had actually stepped into Ruth’s van and driven off down Maple, at least one of them had kept him in their sights at all times, except when they left him at school. She knew that it was because of the other deaths over the past few years. Accidents to other children. Wives of Rainey’s old associates. Eleanor’s death, surely an accident, had unleashed something in Rainey. He had changed in some basic way. It was as if someone different were possessing her husband’s body.