Deep Down (I) (12 page)

She broke into a run, but skidded on acorns down a slanted part of the path. That sent six feeding grouse into the air with flapping wings. Trying to break her fall with both hands, she went down hard. Her trigger finger jerked; the pistol discharged, a sharp sound that shook her arm and soul.

She prayed Drew hadn’t heard that gunshot, or he’d be panicked. But he was surely too far away. Too far away…Her mother was so far away and never coming back and…

Scrambling to her feet, she retrieved the gun and hurried on. Limping slightly, she checked again to be sure she hadn’t lost the key. It was still here. She was doing well,
she tried to tell herself. She must be almost to the place they’d left Drew’s Cherokee. Yet the woods seemed endless.

Then she was sure she heard someone, something, panting, running hard in this direction, coming closer, faster.

Should she make a stand and get ready to fire the gun again? As if her life depended on it, Jessie ran.

12

F renzied…out of breath…trying to hold the pistol, Jessie sprinted for the edge of the trees where she’d find the road back to safety, to sanity. Except…except…if someone had killed her mother, would they want to kill her daughter, thinking she knew something, thinking she would just take over the sang counts? Precious sang. She needed it for her cancer work, so maybe she should stay here and fight for it, fight whoever did this…

Footsteps somewhere in the trees, coming closer, chasing her. Should she hide behind a tree? Had her mother hidden in that tree?

She stepped partly behind a tree trunk, turned and raised the gun, holding it with both hands to steady it. Her finger trembled on the trigger as she tried to stiffen her arms, and—

Tyler Finch ran out into the clearing. Had he been stalking her? Why hadn’t she seen him on the path? She’d almost fired at him, but lowered the gun and hid it behind her hip as she stepped out in view.

“Ms. Lockwood,” he said, out of breath. “I was trying to find you and the sheriff when I heard a shot. I think I got off the path—I must have passed you. I wanted to warn
you that I got a shot—you know, a photo—of something strange in the woods today. I think it was watching Cassie, Pearl and me.”

She was still so terrified that she had trouble grasping his words. “The sheriff and I found my mother’s body,” she blurted. “I’m going for help.”

Saying that, especially to a stranger, made it suddenly real. It was as if the whole forest, all of shadow-shrouded Snow Knob and Sunrise, fell on her.

“I can go for help,” he said, but it seemed his words came from a great distance. She locked her knees to stand.

“No. I’ll need to lead them to the sheriff and to—to her.”

She started walking again and motioned for him to come along. As he fell in beside her, they were both sweating and panting. “What about the photo?” she asked him. “Who’s in it? We’ll need every clue we can get about who was in the woods.”

“Not sure about the who, because it’s more like a what,” he explained, gesturing as if something were tall with a large head. “It may be nothing. I’m not sure, but it looks like a big bear. Cassie’s got the camera for safekeeping.”

Safekeeping, Jessie thought with a sigh of relief as Drew’s Cherokee and Tyler’s car came in view. But would these woods and mountains ever feel safe to her again?

Jessie was running on pure adrenaline as she led Sheriff Akers, a two-man paramedic team with a stretcher and the county coroner back into the woods after dark. As in many small towns or rural areas, Lowe County’s elected coroner was not a pathologist or even a medical man, but, in this case, the owner of the largest funeral home in Highboro. Tyler Finch was permitted to accompany them, too, with
his camera this time, because the Highboro Police Department photographer was not in town. High-powered flashlights and battery-powered lanterns lit their way into the forest. Only once did Jessie get them off the trail, but then right back on.

“You’re amazing,” Tyler told her. The gear in his backpack bounced rhythmically as he walked fast to keep up with them. “I wandered off this path right away, even in the light.”

Tyler dropped back to tell the sheriff about the strange “creature” in his photo. While he was waiting for the search party to form, he’d downloaded it to his laptop in Highboro and had cleared his camera, so he didn’t have it here. The sheriff kept shaking his head, whether in disbelief or amazement, she wasn’t sure.

All they needed to bring more chaos to little Deep Down, Jessie thought, was a bunch of thrill seekers trampling the woods, not only looking at a possible murder site but searching for some sort of monster, Appalachia’s answer to Bigfoot or the Abominable Snowman. The media could get hold of it and turn this entire area into a believe-it-or-not circus. Once Tyler got his photo enlarged, she was certain it would turn out to be just some strange juxtaposition of tree limbs. Or a large bear had wandered down from the heights for food. When they stretched to claw a tree, establishing territory, they could look much taller than they were. But in a crazy world where a potato chip that looked like the Virgin Mary could go for hundreds of dollars on eBay, who knows what Tyler would do with that photo.

“I’ll take a look-see of that when you get it blown up,” Sheriff Akers told Tyler.

Blown up—that’s how she felt. Her mother’s life had been obliterated, along with her own chance to say how much she had loved her. She wanted to thank her for giving her the best of Deep Down and of the outside world.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved her early days here—she had. Long wildcrafting walks with her mother, impromptu picnics in the woods. Lots of fun times running around with Cassie, too, church socials and school dances and hayrides when the harvest moon was full and her heart was, too. It wasn’t a wide world like Elinor had given her outside Deep Down, but it was a precious one to treasure always.

“I hear the creek,” she turned around to tell the men. “We’ll cross at a spot where there are some big rocks to walk. It won’t be far then.”

She prayed that Drew would be safe. Would he have lit a fire for warmth and to mark the site? What if whatever Tyler claimed was in that photo sneaked up on Drew in the dark?

Jessie was pleased she seemed to be thinking straight, recalling things, reasoning this out. If the coroner ruled it was a homicide, she had to convince Drew that she was stable enough to help him find whoever had murdered her mother. Of course, these men must look into the possibility that Mariah had hurt herself, but Jessie knew better. Her mother was sure-footed, and her health had always been good. So that meant someone—some human monster—had robbed her of the rest of her life and robbed Jessie of so much, too.

They carefully illuminated the rocks across the creek with all their lights, and everyone made it over the water. Talking was harder now because of the distant roar of the falls. With her big flashlight beam probing the night, Jessie strode a bit ahead, past the first sang site they’d found.

“Drew?” she called. “Drew! We’re here!”

He materialized from the night. Her light caught his rugged features from below, making it seem he wore a Halloween fright mask. Everything seemed unreal now, different in the darkness. She didn’t care what anyone thought, she ran to him and hugged him hard.

“Thank God, you’re safe,” he said, then set her back slightly to shake Sheriff Akers’s hand.

“Got us a paramedic team and the coroner, Drew.”

“Thanks for coming, men, and Mr. Merriman,” Drew said, nodding at each in turn. The coroner, Clayton Merriman, had a trimmed beard and mustache. Jessie had not met him before this evening, but he looked the part of an old-time undertaker, solemn, stiff and stern, as if he’d stepped out of an old Civil War tintype.

“I haven’t touched anything in the immediate area,” Drew went on. “It’s a bizarre scene, to say the least. We’ll need photos of three other nearby sites, too.”

The men moved toward the hollow tree. Jessie was sweating but shivering, too. At first she stayed put, hugging herself for warmth, then went slowly closer, keeping her flashlight beam pointed at the ground, while the men had theirs trained into the hollow trunk. She saw the coroner pull out a jar of Vicks and put some in his nostrils, then pass the jar to the other men. The scent of the scene staggered her; she took some, too. Then, for a moment, she just stared into the outer darkness, until the strobe from Tyler’s camera jolted her back to reality.

Longing to flee—to hide from this nightmare—she shuffled closer, listening to the crackle and swish of sang leaves as they carefully uncovered her mother’s body. As the glare of lights and Tyler’s flashes illumined the scene, she peered between the two sheriffs’ shoulders.

She gasped. Long, red-black cuts or scratches, like the patterns of the berries, marred her mother’s cheeks and forehead. Her long hair, streaked and matted with blood, had come loose, but that didn’t hide the fact her head was twisted at a terrible angle. Only that one arm, stretched out with her marriage band on the finger, seemed at all normal.

“It’s not an accident!” Jessie cried, louder than she meant to, louder than the whine of wind or rumble of the falls. “It’s murder!”

When Jessie woke, she wasn’t sure where she was. Oh, yeah, Cassie’s bed again. After the coroner had taken her mother’s body to Highboro for an autopsy, Drew would not let Jessie go home again. He wanted to question Seth first thing in the morning. Seth lived too close to her place for her to spend the night there alone.

Cassie’s bedroom was as black as the forest had been, and the wind moaned outside almost as bad as it did up on Shrieking Peak. A ghost floated into the room—Cassie in her long, white nightgown. Pearl had been sick to her stomach, but Cassie didn’t want to leave Jessie alone, so she slept here but kept getting up to check on Pearl.

“You awake, Jessie?” she whispered.

“I think the wind woke me. What time is it?”

“Somewheres around three.”

“How’s Pearl’s tummy?”

“Not much better, though I dosed her with feverfew and pennyroyal tea.”

“Not good, old sang?”

“Would you believe, she doesn’t like the taste of that?”

“Maybe she ate something from the gardens that made her sick.”

“I got anything toxic fenced off out there.” Her voice sounded contentious but then softened. “You want to talk? You ’bout collapsed when Drew got you here.”

“There’s not much to say until he tells us what the coroner learns from the autopsy. I’ve got to plan a funeral, and you can sure help with that.”

“I’d be honored. I loved her, too.”

“I know you did. We both had two mothers, didn’t we?”

Cassie got back under the covers on her side of the bed and reached over on top of the quilt to squeeze Jessie’s shoulder. “And sharing Mariah makes us at least half sisters, so anything I can do to help, I will.”

Jessie clasped Cassie’s hand before she pulled back. “I just can’t fathom anyone hating or fearing my mother enough to commit murder. Can you? Why would anyone want to take another life, ever?”

Cassie shifted so hard away that the bed bounced.

“Cassie, do you know someone who had it in for her?”

“No, ’course not.”

“Someone’s going to pay. I know Drew will work hard at it, but I will, too. I’m going to take a leave of absence from my work, or maybe bring some of it here with me. I want to try using sang leaves instead of the rare roots to slow the growth of cancer tumors.”

“It’s a good thing you’re doing—the lab work,” Cassie told her, but her voice came muffled now that she was turned away.

“I want to ask you about something, to see if you think it’s weird.”

“Tyler’s photo?”

“No. I’m thinking of using those ginseng plants that covered her body for lab work. Then something that was
with her at the end could be put to good use with the research. You don’t think that’s morbid, do you?”

“No. Waste not, want not. Mariah and I believed in putting things from the woods to good uses. ’Sides, lots of mountain women die from breast cancer, and it’s near impossible to convince them to get mammograms. Your research might help them. And something else. You want to help Drew find out who hurt Mariah, I got a suggestion.”

As Jessie leaned up on one elbow, she felt her poison ivy start itching again. Like her fears, it seemed worse at night. “Tell me,” she said.

“Try catching flies with honey and not vinegar. You know, ’stead of taking someone like Vern Tarver on, like you said Drew did, pretend to lean on him. Vern, I mean. ’Sides, I’m not going to work for him this fall like I did last, so maybe he’ll give you the job in the trade store, ’cause everyone who wants sang passes through there sooner or later. Peter Sung, that Brazzo woman, you name it.”

“I had thought of that—being nice to Vern, not working for him. But that’s a good idea. I could put out the word I’m buying the sang plants while he’s buying the roots. The leaves will just die back by winter anyway.”

Again, Jessie was pleased that she was thinking straight, because she felt so twisted inside. This was all real, this living nightmare.

“Cassie, one more thing, then I’ll shut up and let you sleep, because I know you’ve been up and down with Pearl all night. What did the thing in Tyler’s photo look like to you? He said you saw it, but I haven’t had a chance yet.”

“Looks like a cross between a black bear too tall for these parts and an old mountain man. ’Member those stories some of the old miners used to tell about dead,
trapped coal miners in those long-lost pioneer drift mines who emerged to take captives down below for company? They always wore some strange head covering and their skin and clothes hung real loose. I know, I know, just ghost stories, old haint tales. Emmy Enloe—works for Drew—was always one of the worst, telling those crazy yarns. She’ll take to this one big-time.”

“She’s got another kind of critter on her mind big-time lately, and it’s no monster. Some good-looking government surveyor named Ryan Buford’s back in town, and Emmy looks ready to sign up for an up close and personal survey. Cassie, what is it?” she asked when her friend threw the covers off and got out of bed. “Sorry for yakking on, but it just helps to—”