Mystery on Firefly Knob Synopsis

Erica Philips, a single, twenties-something Glen Ellyn, Illinois, antiques dealer who must soon vacate her store due to urban blight, receives a registered letter from Crossville, Tennessee, lawyer Charles Connors. He says her deceased father, Patrick Emerson, was killed while felling a tree on his property and has willed her a rustic cabin and two hundred acres atop the Cumberland Plateau’s Rymer’s Knob.

But wait—her father was Paul Phillips. And he was killed in an auto accident in Crystal Lake, Illinois, four years ago!

Erica drives to Connors’s Crossville offices, where she learns Emerson fathered her in high school, and her mother married Paul before giving birth. Connors gives her the cabin’s keys and a scribbled map and tells her a condo builder is interested in buying the property. She says she’ll sell it and use the money to acquire a new building for her antiques business.

When Erica arrives at her new property she finds a small 1930s log cabin and a decrepit carriage house overlooking Sequatchie Valley, eighteen hundred feet below her and stretching south for many miles. She’s surprised by Mike Cleverdon, a thirty-year-old college professor and Oak Ridge National Laboratories scientist who’s camping there to study rare “synchronous” fireflies, so named because they flash simultaneously. He’s agitated to learn she may sell the land to a condo builder, who would undoubtedly ruin the firefly habitat. She is defiant. “If I have my way, this place will be sold within the week,” she tells him. “And, Mr. Cleverdon, I will have my way!”

Condo builder Peter Donovan and his driver, Bruce Littinghouse, arrive that afternoon to discuss buying the property, and Mike interrupts their meeting. Miffed, Erica acts as if she’s signing a sales offer, while she’s actually only making whispered plans for the builder to take necessary core samples within two days. Later that day she visits Mike’s camp, and they discover a mutual attraction. He impulsively kisses her.

Erica thinks about that kiss the next day at lawyer Connors’ office, as she signs the papers to transfer the deed from her father’s estate to her. She returns to the Knob to find grad students installing cameras and scientific equipment. Mike says the fireflies will hatch in a week or two. Erica asks her antique shop assistant, via the Knob’s on-again, off-again cell phone service, to price a Glen Ellyn shoe store building as a possible new business site. She’s to run a March of Dimes 10K race there on Saturday and may make an offer then, pending the sale of her father’s property. When she and Mike view the felled tree with her father’s friend Paul Rothert, a retired New York City police detective, he points out clues which show her father might have been murdered. She and Mike visit the coroner’s office to pick up a coroner’s report and death scene pictures.

The next day Mike, resigned to losing the research site to condos, takes her on an impromptu picnic hike to the property’s original 1800s cabin site, situated on the steep cliff several hundred feet away from the current cabin. They discover a pioneer cemetery behind the old cabin’s stone foundation and feel very romantic—that is, until Erica reminds him of the imminent condo development sale. The bubble bursts, and he takes her back to her cabin.

Earthmovers invade the cabin’s clearing two days later and erect a derrick-like drill. Mike pleads with Erica to send them away before they change the fireflies’ patterns. When she explains they must take core samples before buying the property he realizes she didn’t sign that sales contract after all, that she was playing mind games with him. This was war! He storms back to his camp and makes several telephone calls.

Erica runs her foot race in Glen Ellyn that weekend and is confronted by a wire-service reporter who tells her a “fireflies” article on her property will appear nationally in Monday’s daily papers. That darned Mike! She realizes she must talk with her mom before she reads that article. She visits her mom, announces she knows Emerson was her father, and asks, “Momma—Momma, did Daddy know?” To her relief, he did. Her tearful mom explains both men loved Erica dearly; that Patrick vowed to stay out of her life but was always there in spirit; that he sent her anonymous gifts, attended many of her school functions, even talked a maiden aunt into hiring her summers to work in her antiques shop. The woman eventually left her antiques business to Erica in her will, at the behest of Patrick Emerson.

Erica returns to the Tennessee cabin, where Mike apologizes for his impulsive actions with a room full of flowers. But it’s too late to return the genie to the bottle, and the article appears in the papers the next day. Donovan makes another offer and Mike tops it; he’s started a “Dollars from Scholars” fund that encourages university faculty and students throughout the U.S. to pledge money to buy the property and establish a national “Firefly Knob” study site. Mike says he’ll ask his father, “Bull” Cleverdon, a former minor league sports personality and founder and longtime owner of a popular Knoxville sports brewpub, to provide interim financing until the pledges come in. He and his father are virtually estranged because, in his father’s eyes, Mike fell short of his high school and college athletic potential and became an “egghead” instead. His older brother, a star athlete until he was killed in an auto accident, remains his father’s favorite son.

Mike takes Erica to his Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) office that afternoon so she can use his Internet account to research her father online. Mike’s boss, Martin Sherman, tells her he plans to acquire her property for the government by eminent domain. Furious with Mike, who insists he didn’t know of that “eminent domain” plan, Erica makes him take her back to the Knob. They arrive at dark and she refuses to go up to the cabin on the back of his ATV; he goes up alone. When she attempts to jog up in the gloom she loses her footing and falls, breaking her leg and knocking herself unconscious. He finds her still unconscious the next morning and takes her to the Knoxville hospital, where she will spend the night.

Mike goes to his father’s brewpub to ask for interim financing, and his father turns him down. He tells Mike to not rock the boat; he has a good job, and he’s the obvious person to run the firefly program after the government takes over Erica’s property. Mike asks to borrow his mother’s wheelchair, gathering dust since her death from leukemia two years before.

The next day at the hospital Mike asks Erica to let him and his students care for her as she recuperates at the cabin; it’s impossible for her to drive home to northern Illinois, let alone take care of herself when she got there. He explains his father won’t loan him the interim money, but promises he will somehow keep his ORNL boss from taking her land by eminent domain. They return to the cabin, where she asks him to roll her wheelchair over to the downed tree that killed her father. There she looks at the site and the pictures from the coroner’s office and realizes, as Paul Rothert surmised, that the death was not an accident. “Mike, my father wasn’t killed cutting this tree down,” she says. “My father was murdered.”

As proof she points out her father was lying face up across the path of the fallen tree rather than parallel to it; if it were an accident, the tree would have fallen lengthwise on him. Also, there’s a smear of blood a foot from where his head was. After that tree fell on him there was no way he could have moved that foot’s length. He had to have been dragged at least that distance before the tree hit him. Her conclusion, after studying the coroner’s report, the death scene pictures, and her father’s computer appointment calendar? “Mike, the murderers are… Mr. Donovan the condo man and his driver Bruce Littinghouse!” She theorizes that Donovan couldn’t get him to sell the property and thought he’d have an easier time convincing his heir… her.

Mike agrees. Now they must find the murder weapon, or they have little chance of proving murder. Mike and his grad students scour the property for a thrown-away bloody club or other weapon, but find nothing. Thinking the weapon might be in the back of Donovan’s truck, they hatch an idea; while Erica stalls Donovan and his driver on the cabin’s porch on their next visit, Mike will search their truck. Shortly before they arrive, she calls lawyer Connors to tell him their theories and their plan to expose the murderers. He cautions her to be careful, just as her erratic cell phone service is interrupted. An hour later, at dusk, the condo people arrive.

Erica and Mike work their plan until Donovan’s driver hears Mike rummaging through the truck’s bed behind the cabin. He stalks around the building, followed by Donovan, and confronts Mike, who has found a bloody crowbar. Erica grabs an old flintlock rifle from over the fireplace, hobbles after them, and sees them approaching Mike. She points the useless weapon at them and tells them to stop. Two shots ring out, and both Donovan and his driver drop dead. Someone—a third party, unknown—has killed them!

Other shots ring out and Mike grabs Erica. He places her on the back of his ATV and starts down the Knob’s trail, hopefully to safety. Another shot is fired from down the hill. He pauses. His grad students would be in danger if he went their direction. He drives a third direction—to the original cabin site and its pioneer cemetery. He carries Erica across the open area and lays her among the old tombstones. Darkness is complete, except for an occasional glimmer from the moon as the clouds move. He inches back to his ATV as he hears the killer arrive on foot.

Erica is desperate to get help. She can’t open her cell phone for fear that its bright glow would give the killer a target. If she holds the phone tightly to her face to block the light, she can’t see her cell phone’s buttons and therefore can’t easily dial. But she realizes if she presses the “send” button twice—she can locate it by feel—it will dial the last number she’d spoken to. She punches the button, praying the intermittent phone service would work, and that lawyer Connors will pick up. After moments the phone rings… both in the cell phone she holds to her ear, and on the Knob itself. The implication hits her hard. She calls out. “Mike—Mike, that’s Mr. Connors shooting at us!”

Mike hears her shouted message just as he reaches his ATV. He revs its motor and turns on its headlights in time to see Connors, poised on the rocky ledge overlooking Sequatchie Valley, aim his pistol at Erica. Conners takes several quick shots at her, all the time sobbing and saying it was her fault, that if she’d just sold the property like she was supposed to and gone home, everything would have been fine… but she made him kill Donovan and Littinghouse so they wouldn’t implicate him in the Emerson killing, and now he had to kill her and Mike. The slugs careen off rocks and tombstones and into trees, dangerously close to Erica. As the clouds shift and moonlight briefly appears, he sets himself for a careful aim at her, now starkly evident in the little cemetery. Mike jams the accelerator and aims the ATV for Connors, who jumps back to avoid it, and falls backwards over the cliff into the Sequatchie Valley below.

Mike helps Erica to the old cabin’s foundation. They sit silently, where they had earlier picnicked, peering out into beautiful Sequatchie Valley and holding each other closely. She realizes how much she loves him. As they watch points of light which mark the little farm home windows below, she becomes aware of closer lights. Something blinks in the grass. Another blink, then another. Soon the area is awash with blinking points of light. As they watch, the independent blinks of newly-hatched fireflies meld into one, and the light moves in waves, up and down Rymer’s Knob. Within seconds, all the lights flash off and on in unison. Erica’s eyes tear, and she hugs Mike. She is overwhelmed by the moment’s beauty.

The next day at the main cabin, Erica tells Mike she has a surprise. They walk to the site’s decrepit carriage house, and she tells him that will be her new antique shop. She’s moving to the site, and will not disturb the fireflies’ habitat with massive earthmoving and building. She and Mike express their lifelong commitment to each other.

A year later, Erica drives her van up the newly surfaced road to the cabin site and parks. She follows the “Firefly Knob” arrow around the cabin on a plank walk and notes visitors at the cliff ’s edge, peering out at the spectacular view next to the “Sequatchie Valley Overlook” sign. She enters the busy Firefly Knob Antiques shop and learns from her assistant that Mike has just returned from his father’s house in Knoxville. Mike had bridged the gap between himself and his father, who had a heart attack and subsequently a change of heart, realizing his older son was a strong man in his own way. She’s pleased Mike’s home, since she has a surprise for him.

She finds him and leads him off the paved road to the original cabin site, which now features the brand new log cabin they’ve just moved into. She tells him they are having a one-year anniversary picnic in the rock foundation of the vintage cabin. As he goes into the house to get a blanket she walks to the pioneer cemetery a few feet away in the woods, where her father’s body was recently buried after being exhumed to prove he was indeed murdered. Her research had shown that the bare foundation was that of Edmund Rymer’s very own cabin, built in the early 1800s, soon after he moved his family to this wilderness outpost. This was his family cemetery. She had traced Emerson’s family tree—her family tree—back to Rymer. She kneels at her father’s grave. Her biological father was now near her. She returns to the picnic site, where Mike has just arrived, and says, “I have a surprise. I didn’t happen to mention this morning that I’d just learned I’m pregnant, did I?”

A stunned look appears on his face, and turns into one of joy. He pulls her down so she’s flat on her back, and tenderly kisses her. “You’ve just made my day,” he says. “No, make that my life.”

He kisses her again, and she glows as she returns it. Her father, her home, her husband, her baby… her life was finally complete.