Deep Down (I) (15 page)

“On the Trail of Tears?” Tyler spoke up, startling Drew.

Seth nodded. “And now we have another trail of tears. Now, because I know this place, because of what I said about atalikuli taking the dead onward, upward, you think I killed her and put her there, but I did not.”

Drew put his hand on Seth’s shaking shoulder, but he couldn’t help picturing that unknown beast from the woods again. A buried memory stabbed at him. When he was really young, his father had told him a ghost story around a campfire. He’d said that, “Indians like Cherokee Seth could make monsters out of nothing, big, furry ones that like to eat kids like you.”

Back then, brave and cocky, Drew had shaken his head and laughed it off, but he wasn’t laughing now.

“I intend to hold a sitting up for her—a wake,” Jessie told the Merrimans as they led her into a large back room with caskets arrayed on the carpeted floor and on deep shelves.

“Why, sure,” Etta said. “My mother used to call that a settin’ up with the dead. Used to be better attended than weddings, if I rightly remember. Haven’t been to one of those for years, but then, we do encourage people to visit the deceased here where we can keep the casket proper.”

“She had one for my father years ago, so I couldn’t do anything less,” Jessie went on as if Etta hadn’t spoken. “I’ll have a closed casket because of those claw marks on her face, though,” Jessie added.

“You’ll be pleased how she’ll look,” Clayton said. “But under the circumstances—well, always the family’s choice. No other kin then?”

“None, but most of Deep Down will come by.”

Jessie surveyed the choices of caskets and immediately went to a plain-cut but highly polished curly maple one with the traditional flat top, wide at the shoulders and narrow at the feet with handles on the sides for the pallbearers.

She put both hands on its smooth surface. “I intend to bury her with ginseng plants instead of flowers in her hands,” she said.

“I just read the article about her work in the paper today. That will be right fine and proper,” Etta encouraged her. “We’ll have you fill out her information for a formal obituary before you leave today, and we’ll phone it into the paper.”

Jessie felt the formality of the rituals of death now, wrapping around her like a tight, heavy cloak. Just talking about the wake, seeing the coffin—it hurt but it helped.

“I’d like to see her now, please.”

“Suggest you’d wait till she’s ready to be laid to rest,” Clayton said with a slow gesture toward the coffin. “She’ll look more like herself then.”

“Yes, my dear,” Etta said. “I promise you, I’ll have her fixed up really lovely. How about you come early tomorrow and escort her back home in a little procession with the hearse. You can take all the time you want alone with her then, all laid out nice and proper.”

Nice and proper? Nothing was nice and proper about any of this, Jessie wanted to shout, but perhaps they were right. Besides, she should be home when Drew came back from the forest with Seth and Tyler. Emmy Enloe had phoned after Peter Sung had left to say that Drew had tried to call her. If she’d talked to him, she’d have insisted her take her, too.

“All right,” she told the Merrimans. “I’ll be back tomorrow midmorning and plan to accompany her back home. I’ve arranged for the funeral to be at the Baptist church in Deep Down the day after that.”

Would her mother’s killer be at the wake or funeral, she wondered as she left the silent room and went back into the office to help write her mother’s obituary. If so—or if not—she and Drew were going to find him.

“Look! Look, that’s the general place, I’m sure of it. I recall Cassie, Pearl and I walked here, along the creek!” Tyler said as the three of them bent their heads close over the photo, then looked up at the tree line again. “See, the trunks align, and that one boulder on the ground.”

“Looks like it,” Drew agreed and started toward the trees.

Seth came on silent feet behind him. Tyler, off to the side, made a lot of noise and new tracks, but what did that
matter now? With the rain and falling leaves shifting around, finding tracks would be a long shot.

“About here, I think,” Drew said. “Tyler, you’ve got the eye for this. Go on back out where you must have shot the photo—here, take it with you—and yell at us when we seem to be at the right place where this thing—this anomaly—must have been.”

Tyler looked as if he’d argue, but he nodded and tramped back out with the photo.

Seth, who had been silent since they’d left the hollow tree, said, “Good that you sent him out. He doesn’t want to take living things from the forest, but he wants pictures of it all—same thing.”

“I didn’t just send him out to get rid of him.”

“But I see the place already.”

“You do? I’m not sure from here, so—”

He thrust out his arm to keep Drew back. “Right here,” Seth whispered, pointing.

“How can you be sure? I thought we could triangulate the place from Tyler’s position and—”

“Because,” Seth said, as he bent close to the rough bark of a huge oak, “the bark has snagged pieces of fur here, high up, but I see no claw marks.”

Drew bent to view the bark at the same angle, his chin almost on Seth’s shoulder. “Yeah, I see it. So it was a big bear rubbing up against it to mark territory?”

Seth shook his head. “Like I told you, badger,” he muttered, plucking at pieces of gray and reddish fur, then sniffing at them. “Yes, a musky smell. But how can that be when they don’t climb but dig underground when they are endangered or chased?”

“As you said, that tall, furry-headed thing in the photo
is sure as hell no badger and not a bear, either. Maybe there’s no connection to Mariah’s death, because the animal she was killed by was definitely human.”

15

A knock on the front door jerked Jessie awake. The room lay in the grip of deep shadows. Where was she? Oh, that’s right. She was on the sagging sofa in her mother’s—her own—living room. Besides being emotionally bereft, she’d exhausted herself cleaning the house for the wake and then arranging the chairs and unpacking baskets of food two church deacons and their wives had dropped off. She’d merely sat down to rest but had fallen into a heavy sleep. She snapped on a light; her watch read 7:15 p.m.

She went to the front door, but, on second thought, peeked out through the porch window first. Drew. Thank God, it was Drew. She unlocked and opened the door.

“Pizza delivery, extra-large, pepperoni, peppers and mushrooms,” he said, flourishing a flat, white box. He had a big, brown envelope under his other arm.

“Are you planning to feed everyone at the wake tomorrow?”

“I’m starved from tramping through the woods,” he said as she let him in, “and you have to eat. I picked it up in Highboro after I talked to Clayton Merriman. I hear you did your own interrogation of the Lowe County coroner.”

Side by side at the big table, they ate pizza and drank cider by candlelight, telling each other about what they’d learned during the day. Drew told her nothing else from the coroner she didn’t already know. He was not pleased to hear that Peter Sung had been here, but listened avidly as she recounted everything he’d said, especially the unsettling customs of Chinese funerals. Jessie glanced nervously over at the carved tree trunk on the hearth; Mr. Sung’s flowers were still there, ghostlike in the dim room.

Drew told her he’d check into the nebulous timeline of Sung’s arrival in the area and that he’d question him as soon as possible. Then he gave her a basic rundown of his time with Seth—more than he’d told her about his interview with Vern Tarver. He described how Seth had claimed the claw marks on her mother’s face were made not by a bear but a badger.

“That’s crazy,” she cried. “Or could that crude drawing done with sang berries we saw in the woods have been a badger? None of this fits together. There’s something we’re missing.”

Drew held up his hand and went on. “Just before I dropped Seth back at his place, he admitted that the day before your mother disappeared he’d had an argument with her he felt guilty over—unlike Vern. He wanted her to come up with a low count of the ‘slow-growing, sacred sang’ so the government would halt its harvesting and it could replenish itself.”

“A mere government ruling would not stop poaching around here.”

“True, but it would stop Peter Sung from buying and exporting so much. Seth also admitted he had an argument with Beth Brazzo. He told her ginseng should not be dis
honored by use in power drinks for healthy athletes, but hoarded for medicines for those who were ill.”

Jessie heaved a huge sigh. “At least Seth would probably approve of my research. But I still don’t think he’d hurt my mother.”

“He said they’d argued on her front porch, but what if their quarrel actually happened out in the woods and got out of hand? Say that he accidentally hit her, shoved her—I don’t know—and the back of her head hit a rock. Then, regretful, grief-stricken, he tried to honor her with some sort of Cherokee custom, including claw marks and a ginseng burial.”

“And in the process intentionally made it look like he did it?” she challenged.

“I know, I know,” he said, raking his fingers through his hair. “I’m just using you for a sounding board. Besides, if Seth was angry enough to kill your mother, whom I think he admired, why not knock off big, bad Beth Brazzo, too?”

Jessie shook her head. “Probably because even Seth couldn’t catch her. She’s a walking—running—ad for her product. The woman said she jogs four miles a day, and she’s built like an Amazon. It would take a tough, fast man to even get a hand on her.”

Then, as if he’d been working up to it, Drew explained what he, Tyler and Seth had found in the woods where the weird photo was taken.

“Badger fur?” she cried. “So you now have evidence of badger fur and claws?”

He nodded and took a big swig of cider. “Of course, I guess badgers could climb a tree with their long claws. I’ll show you some Seth gave me in a minute. But they don’t climb with them, they burrow. And no way that was a
badger or even a bear in the background of Tyler’s photo—I’ve got that to show you, too.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” she asked, getting up. “Is it in the envelope? You don’t think it’s something Tyler Finch doctored up for his own reasons, do you? I don’t know the man.”

“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure I really know him, either. He seems to really care about Cassie, though. Which reminds me,” he continued as she came back to the table and handed the envelope to him, “have you ever heard her talk about a government surveyor named Ryan Buford?”

“You mean Emmy’s guy? Never. Why? You don’t think…”

“It’s probably nothing,” he muttered, so she knew darn well it was something. He shrugged and shook his head as he tipped the envelope so that two claw necklaces slid out onto the table. The moment she saw the photograph, concern for Cassie flew out of her head.

“Look at that!” she murmured, turning the picture toward the candlelight, then snapping on a lamp to see better. Fear shimmered through her. “Even bringing up a badger is laughable. It looks like a huge, furry man maybe wearing a coonskin cap!”

“I hadn’t thought of that. In other words, the ghost of ole Daniel Boone or his cronies might haunt these hills? All I know is, there’s something or someone out there, and Boone’s ghost makes as much sense as anything else right now.”

Straining to listen in case Pearl called for her again, Cassie sorted and tied her newly picked bittersweet into bunches at the table. As soon as Pearl got over what the nurse practitioner at the walk-in clinic had called a “virus
bug,” she’d have to take to the woods to harvest more, ’cause she had a big order for it this year. The child had a fever of one hundred and two, so she’d given her a cool bath before she put her to bed. So far the Tylenol had not brought the fever down, so first thing in the morning, she was planning to start her on the antibiotics they’d picked up at the Highboro drugstore.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when Pearl spoke right beside her.

“Ma, I saw Big Bear out the window.”

Cassie dropped the bittersweet and turned to her. Her nightgown was soaked again, and she held by one paw the tattered teddy bear Jessie had bought her ages ago. But Big Bear was the child’s name for an heirloom bear rug that Cassie kept in a trunk.

“Honey, we got to get you back in bed. And you didn’t see Big Bear out the window or anywhere. That’s just like a dream—the fever talking.”

“No, I saw him. A hundred times bigger than Teddy, looking in! I pulled the curtain back. He saw me and he waved.”

Cassie took her by her hot hand and led her back into her room. First Jessie’d said that someone tall was looking at the house, now this. Not to mention that crazy picture of Tyler’s. All coincidence, had to be. That moss drying on those breeze-blown lines looked like a big animal’s head out there, bobbing, swaying. That was all.

“Out there!” Pearl said, tugging her hand away and pointing at the back window when they got into her room. “Out by the moss. It was Big Bear, looking at me! It was!” she insisted and broke into tears.

Cassie sat on the side of her low bed and rocked the little
body in her lap, then when she quieted, took off her sopped nightgown and sponged her off with cool water again before pulling another cotton nightgown over her tousled head. She was going to have to start her girl on those antibiotics, though she didn’t trust fancy medicines like that. But her initial dosings of herbs and tonics hadn’t helped. At least Pearl was no longer vomiting.

“Don’t let him come back or get in,” the child pleaded, her eyes bright with fever and fear.

“It’s not Big Bear, and I’m going to prove it,” Cassie told her. “If you just let me take your temperature one more time, I’m going to show you that Big Bear is still where you and I put it away, since it used to scare you when it was on the floor.”

“Mr. Tarver has one, in his store, too,” Pearl said, rubbing her eyes with her fists, as if she could erase what she’d seen. “Maybe that’s his bear outside.”

“Come on now, Miss Pearl Keenan. You just let me check your temperature, and don’t you go biting down on this old thermometer.”

Cassie washed it with alcohol, then dipped it in water and put it carefully under Pearl’s tongue. She’d have to get one of the modern kind that you put in a child’s ear. This one was old as the hills, but it worked fine. Still, she was careful with it since mercury was poison, and in Cassie’s book, poison was only for people who deserved it for the deception and desertion of women and children. That’s why she intended to stay up late tonight, not just to keep an eye on Pearl or tie up bittersweet, but to get her mayapple leaves, ground-cherry and nightshade all chopped up and put into a couple of special tea bags. She might need them right soon.

“Still one-hundred-and-two degrees, honey, too hot, so I’m going to get you a real nice fruit drink.” It was the way the nurse had told her to give Pearl the dose of medicine.

“I want to see Big Bear’s in the box first,” she insisted, crossing her thin arms over her chest. “If he’s still there and still dead, then he can’t be outside.”

“Now, that’s right. You just wait there a second. He’s gonna smell though. You ’member how he smells from being stored away where the moths won’t get him.”

Regretfully, Cassie went into her cluttered back storage room and took mesh bags of drying sang roots off the old humpback, metal trunk. When she lifted the lid, the reeking smell of mothballs hit her right away. On top, wrapped in a sheet of plastic to separate it from the other items she had stored, was the bearskin rug from a huge black bear her granddaddy had killed—“kilt,” as he’d put it—in the woods not far from here. It had been on the floor before the hearth for years, but it was too moth-bit and smelly to be there now.

It was heavy as she hauled it out and rested its old paws over her shoulders to drag it in on her back to Pearl with its fang-barred jaws atop her head. Then, on second thought, because she didn’t want it to resemble the thing in Tyler’s photo, she shifted the weight of it so it rested over her arms and its feet dragged on the floor, its back claws scraping.

She knew more than one house around here had a moth-eaten bearskin in a trunk or even on the floor. Maybe Tyler would like a picture of one for his Fading Appalachia book. But, no, once she calmed Pearl down and got that dose of medicine in her, this was going back in its trunk, unless she needed it again.

“See, honey?” she asked Pearl as she hauled it into the room. Cassie exploded in a sharp sneeze at the dust from
it. “It was still in that trunk and whew-ee does it smell bad! After touching it, I’m gonna have to go take a bath, too!”

Pearl, still holding her teddy bear in one arm, reached out to pat the dark, matted fur. “I’m glad you showed me Big Bear’s still locked up,” she said. “I’m glad he’s still dead.”

They sat on the old sofa with its sagging, crooked pillows, talking. The wind howled outside, but Jessie felt safer than she had in days. Drew had volunteered to drive her into Highboro tomorrow, then back, following the hearse with her mother’s body.

“And I’ll be keeping close during the wake, funeral and burial, in my official capacity,” he assured her, resting his arm behind her on the back of the sofa, so that any time she turned her head her hair pulled along his shirtsleeve. “I think not only the way Mariah was admired, but also the circumstances of her death will bring out a lot of people.”

She turned to face him more fully with her legs drawn up on the cushions. “Including, maybe, her killer.”

“It’s been known to happen. Either the person feels guilty and responsible and tries to make up for the crime by attending and maybe mourning or—”

“Or he revels and gloats in what he’s done. Drew, with everything going on, I haven’t told you something else I decided for sure. I’m going to convert the sunporch to a makeshift lab and continue my work here, at least for a while. I’ve phoned a couple of friends who are going to bring some of my research supplies with them when they come to the funeral. And the woman who waters my plants while I’m away is bringing more of my clothes and books. I’m going to stay here, at least until I get some answers about my mother’s death. That’s what I wanted the ginseng
leaves for—my lab work. I’ve got to find out if the ginsenosides in the leaves will work as well as those in the rarer, expensive roots.”

“I’m glad you’re staying for a while, and not just because I can use your help. We need more time together when we’re not upset or grief-stricken or mad as hell.”

She nodded; their gazes snagged and held. They leaned closer together. He was so near she could see herself reflected in the pupils of his blue eyes.

“I brought as much of the ginseng from the hollow tree as Tyler and I could carry,” he said, his voice suddenly gone raspy. “Seth said it should stay where it is, so he didn’t carry any. I think the fact I allowed that without a comment went a long way with him for honoring his beliefs, even if I still defied him to bring the sang back.”

“I’ll put the leaves to good use in her honor.”