Williams was a chatty guy and since he’d made a valiant effort on my behalf, I kept him company for a few minutes, talking about the weather and his work.
“We got twenty sites for RVs,” he related proudly. “Full hookups. And another dozen sites for tent campers.”
“Must keep you busy.”
“Busy enough. People drive in, stay a night or two, head off to another place. Easy to do when you’re driving a box filled with all the comforts of home.”
I saw a big recreational vehicle that had recently pulled in for the night; hooked to the towbar behind it was a Mazda compact.
“Do many people pull cars with them?” I asked, killing time.
“Sure. So they can move around locally with less gas. If a big RV is like planting your house anywhere you want, having a car is like bringing your garage along as well.”
“Are there many RV campgrounds in the area?”
“Depends what you mean. There’s maybe five or six real near the Gorge. Add another thirty miles to the circle and you get a bunch more. Plus some folks have acreage set up to hold a few RVs to make a little pin money.”
I studied nearby RVs, saw three more with towing packages. It hit me that the set-up was the perfect mobile hideaway, especially with props like bikes and boats and fishing rods. A recreational vehicle could be moved from campsite to campsite, hard to track. They offered a place to plot, to change disguise, to sneak in under cover of dark, tear a body apart, pack it with manure. There was also the image: recreational vehicles were the happy whales of the road, friendly and benign, filled with cheery families and retired couples. Mad killers drove rusty vans and dark, low-slung sedans with obsidian windows.
I recalled the words of Gable Paltry, the scruffy old voyeur who scanned the parking lot behind the funeral home where Tanner’s body had been stolen.
“I saw me a big a RV pull in … Stayed maybe ten minutes. Light color. Had bikes and crap roped to the back. A barbecue grill tied up top, too.”
I asked Williams if I could wander the campground and, sauntering from site to site, I looked at the bright machines, seeing families and children and several RVs with no one around, owners out hiking or kayaking the river or sightseeing.
When I left Pumpkin Patch, my mind was fixated on the possibility of RVs as hideouts – not just this case, but for future reference. I passed another such campground and pulled in to take a look. That led to a third such place, the Haunted Hollow Campground. The campground was up by Frenchburg, high on the northwest side of the Gorge area. The murders and bulk of the investigation had occurred on the eastern side.
I parked near the entrance and wandered past the twenty or so sites. The lot, thick with trees, was tucked back in a verdant hollow – haunted, presumably – with a small creek singing merrily alongside. It didn’t seem a place where a killer would tuck down and think murderous thoughts.
I scanned RV after RV, seeing occupants, or swimsuits drying on a line, or hearing voices from inside, doors open wide to accept the cooling air of dusk. At the end of the road was a huge cream-colored RV resembling a vacation on wheels, bikes parked against the rear wheel, man’s, woman’s, a couple kid’s bikes. Two short recreational kayaks were strapped atop the vehicle, plus a plane-sized inner tube for playing in the water. The tips of fishing rods pressed against a back window. The shades were drawn and no one seemed inside.
I wandered to the rear and saw the requisite bumper stickers: Smoky Mountains, Everglades National Park, the Ozarks, a dozen or so. The stickers looked new and I wondered if the vehicle’s owner or owners were recent retirees.
The vehicle had both a tow bar and a rack holding a Kawasaki dirt bike, a big one. The distance from the ground to the rack was twenty or so inches and I figured it took a couple people to grunt the motorcycle into the rack. Or one strong one.
Turning away, a motion at a rear window caught my eye, a curtain shifting perhaps. Or a motion behind it. I stared for several seconds and saw nothing, recalling a classic bumper sticker admonition:
Don’t Come Knockin’ When This Van’s A-rockin’.
Hoping my nosy wanderings hadn’t disturbed anyone’s merrymaking, I retreated to my car, shooting backwards glances at the RV and wondering if my imagination was running past the red line.
I started back to my cabin, but being cloistered with my thoughts seemed claustrophobic so, for a few minutes at least, I drove where the roads led me, restless, thinking that maybe if I gave Mix-up a little more time, he’d be at the cabin when I returned, nose-nudging his food bowl my way as though nothing had happened.
Dusk was thickening and I saw headlights behind me, but they dissolved into the distance. I drove westward, windows down, as night fell deep into the valleys. The road straightened for a moment and I saw the headlights again, closer, the vehicle moving at speed. To my left I saw a Forest Service road and pulled from the main road, wanting to find a bit of calm before returning to the cabin.
I heard a slow rumble through the mountains as I stepped from my truck and stretched my back. It was distant thunder, the promised front approaching. But for now the moonlight was bright enough to light the trail.
I started walking, right away stepping into a spider web. I brushed it from my face, recalling McCoy’s observation regarding a second traveler on the Rock Bridge trail. I was a half-mile down the trail when I heard a car door close somewhere to my right. My parking area was behind me, the other vehicle at another trail access; kids, I figured, kissing or sipping beer in the dark.
Two minutes later I heard a limb stepped on, the sound from my side quadrant. I gauged the distance as two or three hundred feet.
After a few seconds, I heard a second footfall. Then, a third.
I nearly called out a plaintive Hello, but stopped myself. If I could hear their footfalls, surely the other person had heard mine. It seemed odd that in the hundreds of square miles of the local forest, two people had chosen this section as a nighttime venue.
The night bloomed darker and I looked above to see a cloud covering the white face of the moon. The cloud sifted free and moonlight blazed so white as to feel hot on my neck. To my right I heard an odd sound, like tape being stripped from a roll.
I was craning my ear that direction when a bullet slapped a tree four feet to my right. I dove to the ground, heart racing.
At first, no sound. Then a voice in the dark.
“Here coppie, coppie, coppie,” it crooned, as if calling a dog, a high and metal-raspy voice. Another pop. The bullet sizzled past my ear.
The voice was unforgettable. I’d heard it once at a brief prison interview, once at a hypnosis session turned sour: Bobby Lee Crayline.
Bobby Lee Crayline?
For one horrible second it occurred that speaking of him recently, figuring out his escape in Alabama, had worked black magic, that I had conjured him into my life like a demon from hell.
I breathed away the irrational and started running low, tough enough when the moon was out, impossible when clouds passed between us. My feet snagged roots and vines, stumbled over rocks. I stepped on limbs that cracked like firecrackers, ran headlong into low branches.
Why is Crayline here? my mind kept saying. Why is he trying to kill me?
The clouds released the moon and I was spotlit on the trail. Another shot from Crayline. A rifle that sounded somehow blunted and dull.
“Here, coppie, coppie, coppie …”
The forest went black. I crouched and waited for the moon to light the path. It blazed and I moved forward, staying low, the trail a maze of shadows. I heard Crayline angling behind me. I had left my weapon tucked in a closet in the cabin. Sweat dripped from my forehead, my heart seemed to engulf my chest. I could find no