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

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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