Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (5 page)

Phoebe consulted with a doctor about each of her calls. She was fortunate to be supervised by the local family physician who’d been her own doctor when she was growing up. Doc Coleman was in his mid-eighties now and retired except for his supervision of Phoebe.

On most weekdays they managed to have a meal together at
Hamilton
’s
Trading
Center
. It was the only place where the rural community could congregate.

A small group of regulars ate breakfast or lunch at the tiny café and deli that occupied a corner of the store, but sooner or later most of the rest of the inhabitants of White Oak dropped by to pick up groceries or catch up on gossip.

Hamilton
’s was an authentic country store that had been in the same family for more than a hundred years. It still had the original wooden floor, antique tiger oak display cabinets with ornate brass fittings, and deep floor-to-ceiling shelves that lined the wall behind a long polished oak counter.

The floors were severely warped and creaked with every step you took. The outside of the place hadn’t been spruced up in so long, the sign painted onto the side of the building had faded to illegibility. All sorts of things were stacked on the front porch, placed there by the current owner’s grandfather during the previous fifty years. But the old man had been much loved, so the family had never been able to bring themselves to throw any of it away.

Although it was less than a mile from the park, it wasn’t the sort of place tourists would stop at. That suited the people of White Oak just fine. The café regulars were a handful of mostly middle-aged or elderly farmers, Doc, Phoebe, and anyone else who happened to be passing by at mealtime.

The store owner, Jill Walker, cooked for the restaurant and deli and lived in the back. She was married, but her husband had left years ago and hadn’t been seen or heard from since.

Jill wasn’t a very good cook, but she could produce edible, local ethnic cuisine. She cooked more or less as a favor to the men who didn’t have anybody else to cook for them. The store and the restaurant brought in a modest income, but she made most of her money by sewing elaborate and beautiful crazy-quilted coats made from sweaters she bought on sale at thrift stores and Goodwill, earning her the nickname
Goodwill Jill
.

Doc always sat at a table in the corner and if she was able to be there, Phoebe ate with him. She’d ask his advice on tough cases and they’d swap stories.

When she was young, Doc had encouraged Phoebe to go to college and to pursue a career in health care. He’d even given her money for books and tuition when she ran short. So when Doc needed to retire on account of his
health,
and no doctor could be found to take his place, that was the final bit of motivation Phoebe needed. She came home to take over as much of his practice as she could.

Now they were happy to be able to catch a meal together every day or so and revel in the trials and triumphs of providing medical care in the southern Appalachian highlands.

“Hey Doc,” Phoebe said, as she pulled out a chair.

“Hello there girl,” Doc said. “How’re you
holdin
up?” Doc knew Phoebe was having a hard time and he searched her face for signs of the strain she was under.

“Pretty good,” she said.
“
Better’n
Leon
anyway.
I ran into him on the road this
mornin
. He’d had some sorta wreck and got his face all beat up.
Nothin
too serious.”

“That boy,” Doc said, shaking his head.

“I know people say all sorts of things about him,” said Phoebe, “but I don’t know, I just like him.”

“
Leon
’s a remarkable person,” Doc mused. “His grandmother was a real special lady, too.”

“I remember her,” Phoebe said.

Leon
had been raised by his grandmother. Not because his parents weren’t good people who loved him, but because he and his granny had a special bond so he’d preferred to stay with her most of the time.

She was a well-regarded herbalist. And everyone knew she had the second sight. It ran in
Leon
’s family. In fact, it was fairly common in the insular mountain community. Outsiders might scoff at the idea of being psychic, but the people of White Oak knew better. Phoebe suspected the mists in the
Smokies
conveyed not only earthly sounds, but also unearthly voices.

“He never seems to gain any weight, and I worry about that,” Phoebe said. “Of course he smokes like a stack. Please let me know if you think of anything else I can do for him.”

“I will,” Doc said. “But you’ve got to keep in mind that some conditions are more resistant to treatment than others. And some problems you can’t treat at all. But no matter what’s going on, everybody deserves good nursing care. Sometimes that’s all anybody can do, but often it helps more than anything else.”

Phoebe smiled. Doc had always told her that nursing was where the rubber really met the road. It was why she’d become a nurse in the first place.

“I’ve had quite the morning,” Phoebe said, sighing. “It’s only
11 o’clock
and I’ve already had to run for my life by way of the bathroom window.”

Doc laughed. “Some house calls are a lot rougher than others,” he said. “That’s why doctors quit making them. What’d you get into?”

“Wanda,” Phoebe said, and left it at that.

Doc nodded, “Diabetics are a different breed. It’s interesting. The disease isn’t just about blood sugar.”

Doc had accumulated all sorts of stray bits of wisdom from observing life so closely for so many years.

“Science doesn’t understand much about any disease process. Not really. We like to pretend we do, but all we actually know is how to treat some symptoms. Our science doesn’t give us much meaningful information about what’s actually going on.”

Phoebe nodded.

“What’s in a person’s soul matters more than anything else, and yet we don’t pay much attention to that. The simplest truth is that we’re all killing ourselves with our temperament. A person will tend toward being bossy, or high-strung, or depressed, or listless. And this has predictable physical consequences. If we don’t learn to become aware of our moods and take steps to moderate them, we’ll eventually die from our habits. This is where heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune problems come from.”

Phoebe loved it when Doc talked like this. He was a wonderful doctor with deep and wide experience.

“I’ve been reading up on plant essences and essential oil therapy,” he said. “It’s fascinating stuff. The idea is that we can use plants as templates to nudge the soul in the right direction. Either that or we can keep behaving the same way we always have and rely on mainstream medicine to try to cope with the symptoms.

“It’s pitiful really. The practice of medicine should focus more on the problems in people’s hearts and minds, before the problems work their way into the body. But I don’t suppose the drug companies wouldn’t like that.” He winked at her and added, “And we don’t dare cross
em
, do we?”

They sat in companionable silence and pondered the medical mafia. Phoebe’s glance was drawn to the window over Doc’s shoulder. She noticed a flash coming from a high ridge in Greenbrier. That was odd. It was a particularly remote, nearly inaccessible area.

Jill came to the table to refresh their drinks and Phoebe pointed and said, “Wonder who’s up there?”

“Nobody in their right mind,” said Jill, smiling. Then she turned and looked again, serious now, and saw the flashing, too. “Lord
help
anybody
tryin
to hike way up there.”

 “
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help
,” Doc quoted, “
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth
.”

Both Phoebe and Jill said, “Amen.” Then Phoebe stood and said, “Well, I’ve
gotta
be
goin
.”

 “You take care of yourself,” Doc said.

She went to the counter to pay for her meal, and Jill followed her to the register. She rang up Phoebe’s lunch on an antique oak cash register, pressing down hard on the tall brass keys. The two women were friends from childhood. They’d kept in touch sporadically during the years Phoebe had been gone and now that she was back, their friendship picked up again as if she’d never left.

“
You
hangin
in there?” Jill asked.

“Yeah,” said Phoebe.

Jill looked at her with sympathy, but didn’t press. “Well, call me or come by if you need anything.”

Phoebe nodded.

The bell on the front door tinkled as it opened and two men walked in. It was Lester and Fate, a two-man crime wave and the bosses of White Oak’s underworld. As they passed the cash register, Fate set a heavy brown paper grocery bag on the counter without saying anything,
then
joined his associate at their regular table beside the large front window. Jill looked in the bag. It was full of fresh tomatoes and carrots from somebody’s garden. No telling whose.

Leon
had been hanging around with them recently, but he wasn’t with them now. “Y’all
be
good,” Phoebe said in the general direction of the men and they nodded politely, without promising anything. Then she went out to her Jeep.

When she got in she noticed a white plastic trash bag in the passenger seat that hadn’t been there before. She peeked inside. It was full of exotic new antibiotics that were a week or so past their expiration date. It was thousands of dollars worth of pills and capsules.

God bless those hoods
, she thought, whichever of them it was who stole the medicine for her. She hoped they hadn’t hurt anybody to get it. Oh well, she didn’t have time right now to worry with imaginary problems, she had real ones to think about. She’d put it off as long as possible, but now she’d have to face one of them head-on.

She had to go to Sean’s funeral.

Phoebe had been dating for a very long time without ever losing faith that there was someone out there somewhere who was perfect for her. And she figured they were searching for her. But even the most optimistic people had their limits. Today she was seriously considering giving up on men altogether.

Neither she nor her most recent ex-boyfriend could be blamed for this current romantic disaster. She pondered whether at age fifty-four the entire concept of dating wasn’t downright unseemly. She asked herself this as she stood next to the grave of the man she’d been on a date with last Saturday, a mere four days ago. He was her latest, now
late
in the worst possible way, boyfriend Sean.

She couldn’t really take it in yet, still couldn’t feel much beyond numb shock, but she knew she’d miss Sean. He’d been a
character
, to use the local euphemism that covered a mind-boggling array of quirks, but he was kind and thoughtful and Phoebe had learned to value these qualities over looks and income-producing capacity.

In keeping with Sean’s distinctive personal style, his burial was taking place atop a high bald knob in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park amid half a million acres of wilderness. Getting there was no problem for Sean, but it made things tough on his mourners because the highest elevations of the
Smokies
were cloud forests and fog forests, places as damp as rainforests but at an altitude where the water tended to remain airborne. Today the endlessly playful sky was in exuberant form, bombarding Sean’s friends and family with alternating mist, fog, clouds, and light rain.