Because Aunt Mary had collected a substantial amount of money when her husband was killed in the logging accident, Katie was on her way to college. Aunt Mary had never said how much, only that it was more than enough to take care of her and Luke and Lottie and Katie for the rest of their lives. Katie was already enrolled at the University of Tennessee. She would start classes late in August. She was a year older than most of her classmates because she took a year off after her family was killed, but no one seemed to notice. Inspired by the beauty that surrounded her in the mountains, she was planning to major in horticulture and perhaps work for the forest service one day.
Aunt Mary had also given Katie another gift, the best she’d ever received. For Katie’s seventeenth birthday, Aunt Mary had accompanied her to Knoxville to a cosmetic surgeon. The surgeon had first placed a tissue expander beneath the skin where her breast should have been. Over the next few months, he pumped increasing amounts of water into the expander, stretching the skin and making room for a breast implant. When he did the surgery to install the implant, he’d also fashioned a nipple out of a small amount of skin he took from Katie’s rump, and he’d tattooed the nipple and surrounding skin pink to match the other breast. Then he’d injected a pigment to lighten the skin that covered the implant. It still wasn’t perfect-it was a bit darker than her other breast, and the skin was still numb-but for the first time in years Katie had begun to feel normal.
She swallowed another bite of trail mix and resumed her hike. Each year, Katie had ventured farther away from Roaring Fork and deeper into the park. She’d scaled Mount LeConte, visited the cabins and farms of the early settlers, and marveled at the beauty of Grotto Falls, Rainbow Falls, and the hundreds of species of plants and wildlife.
Katie had become an expert at orienteering and camping. It had taken her nearly a year to convince Aunt Mary that she was capable of staying out overnight in the park. Now she’d made at least a dozen overnight trips. She’d encountered bears and snakes and even the occasional wild boar, but she felt safe in the woods, especially with Maggie along.
Her plan for the weekend was to head east along the Grapeyard Ridge trail to Greenbriar Cove and then travel south, cross-country and off-trail, toward Laurel Top on the Appalachian Trail. She’d made good time to Greenbriar and was relieved to be off the beaten path used by an increasing number of tourists each year. Katie topped a ridge and checked her map. She’d make the trail by nightfall, no problem, and then hike back home tomorrow.
As she descended the other side of the ridge into a cove, Katie stopped suddenly. Something wasn’t quite right ahead. She peered through the branches of a rhododendron and could see that the forest had been cleared in the cove below and replaced by a vast field of… what was it? Whatever it was, it was a fluorescent green, almost glowing. She crept toward the break in the trees and reached into her pack for her binoculars.
The marijuana patch was vast, close to five acres, Katie guessed. The plants were at least four feet high and waved gently back and forth in the breeze. As Katie scanned with her binoculars, she saw two all-terrain vehicles at one end of the patch. At the other end, about a hundred yards to her right, she saw three men sitting on lawn chairs. They were eating. All three of them appeared to be Latino, probably Mexican.
Maggie must have caught their scent, because she started to growl.
“Hush, Maggie,” Katie whispered. She knelt down next to the dog and reached out for her collar with her left hand. Maggie’s ears were standing up straight, as was the hair on the back of her neck. She let out a weak bark.
“No, Maggie, no.” Katie took another look through the binoculars. One of the men was standing now, pointing in her direction. He’d seen her.
“Let’s go, Maggie.” Katie turned and started running as fast as she could back up the ridge. Maggie followed her but continued to bark.
When Katie reached the top of the ridge, she heard the sound of engines. They were coming after her. She veered left through a large area of Fraser fir deadfall, scrambling over tree trunks and branches, crawling beneath rhododendron. Even if they saw her in the deadfall, they wouldn’t be able to follow on the four-wheelers, and Katie felt confident she could outrun or outhike anyone in these mountains.
When she heard the engines top the ridge behind her, maybe three or four hundred yards back, she crouched behind a huge tree trunk, wrapped her hand around Maggie’s snout, and waited. About twenty seconds passed before she saw two men on four-wheelers tearing through the trees, heading in the direction she’d been going before she broke for the deadfall. They stopped at the edge of the deadfall, turned off the engines, and listened.
“Shhh,” Katie whispered as she clutched Maggie close to her. “Shhh.”
After an agonizing minute, the engines started, and the four-wheelers tore off up the ridge. As soon as they were out of sight, Katie started running due west. The sound of the engines faded with every step she took.
Katie kept telling herself she was safe now.
She was safe.
25
Katie arrived home after dark on Sunday. The route she took back after her run-in with the men at the marijuana patch had taken longer than she expected. The terrain was as difficult as any she’d encountered in the park. As soon as she walked through the back porch and into the kitchen, Aunt Mary appeared.
“Oh, Katie, are you all right?” Aunt Mary asked. She immediately embraced Katie.
“I’m fine.”
Aunt Mary stepped back and took stock of her.
“Look at you. You’re scratched all to pieces.”
Katie had debated much of the way home about whether she should tell Aunt Mary what she’d seen. Aunt Mary despised the “druggers,” as she called them. Every year in the fall, they hauled their harvest out of the mountains past the farm, led by a sheriff’s department vehicle. A couple of years after Katie moved in, Aunt Mary finally told her what the annual parade of trucks contained.
“They hide deep in the mountains where no one can see them, they do their business, and they pay off the sheriff,” Aunt Mary had explained. “Everyone’s afraid of them. It’s best to just let them be, but I swear it goes against my grain. They’re making millions of dollars illegally, and nobody’ll do anything about it.”
“Why are you so late?” Aunt Mary said. “We’ve been worried sick about you.”
Katie couldn’t bring herself to lie.
“I had to take a detour. A big one. It took a lot longer than I thought it would.”
“What kind of detour? Why?”
“I ran across something I wasn’t supposed to see. I was hiking cross-country toward Laurel Top. I came to a clearing in a cove and it was full of marijuana plants. There were some men there, and they chased me.”
“Oh my Lord!” It was Lottie, who had just walked into the kitchen. “Chased you? You mean they saw you, child?”
“I think they may have seen me from a distance,” Katie said. “They chased me on four-wheelers, but I ran and hid in some deadfall, and they didn’t see me again.”
“Thank God you’re all right,” Aunt Mary said. “I’ve told you to be careful in those woods.”