Deep Down (I) (22 page)

“And, again, those injuries were not from the fall to the ledge?”

“You find who’s doing this, and I’ll testify they weren’t.”

“Time of death?”

“Working on it.”

“Tyler says he talked to her on the phone about 9:30 a.m., but I don’t just want to go on that, so I’ll be anxious to hear what you come up with. Tyler’s contacted their office in New York, and they’re handling the notification of next of kin. So, could you tell from her position—lividity and all that—if she was pushed over or maybe posed? She looked almost alive, as if she was still running. Damn,” he said,
pressing his hands to his head as if he could feel a blow there. “A serial killer in Deep Down?”

“No offense, Sheriff, but you look bad. You need some rest. All this is getting to you.”

“And not to you? Two dead women with their heads bashed in?”

Merriman shook his head and shrugged. “Served in ’Nam. After the carnage there—not only our guys but enemy corpses, women, kids, too—guess I learned to cope. Sheriff, you want to lie down?” Clayton put a hand to his elbow, then withdrew it.

“No, thanks. I’ll be fine.” He shook the man’s hand and headed out. Admirable. Amazing. Despite Drew’s years as a marine, maybe he just couldn’t cope with all this, not with Mariah being found like that, and now a healthy, strong woman like Beth Brazzo, beaten, then thrown over the side of a cliff like so much trash.

If anything happened to Jess…She could have been killed when he took her with him to question Junior Semple. She’d hiked out of the area where her mother had been killed to bring help. She’d plunged into the forest again to help Seth. He’d asked her to help him with Vern, where she’d be facing the lion in his own den, right about now. He’d suggested she keep an eye on Peter, too. He wished he could lock her up until all this was over, but he needed her, needed her in all kinds of ways.

Staring at the prominent scratches on the side of his vehicle, Drew hunched his shoulders as the rain beat down on him. Lightning cracked; thunder rolled and reverberated. The storm in the mountains echoed the one in his head and heart.

He got in and closed the car door. Gripping the steering
wheel, he rested his head on his hands. He was so exhausted he could puke, but he had a lot to do. If he didn’t get a little shut-eye he’d be no good to anyone, except to whoever was murdering women in Deep Down.

22

J essie entered the dim, cavernous Fur and Sang Trader and put her umbrella in an old spittoon. The sweet, earthy smell of sang wrapped itself around her, making her miss her mother even more. Rain beating on the roof sounded like snare drums with the more distant accompaniment of bass drums from the thunder. Despite pools of light from hanging lamps, the gray day made it dark in here.

Vern looked up from dealing with a customer she didn’t recognize. “Glad you’re here, Jessie. Be with you in a bit,” he said and went back to loud dickering on prices.

She nodded, then began to look around. The Tarvers hadn’t traded big-time in furs since the 1960s, but Vern had never changed the name of the store, or much else. Though it seemed nearly deserted right now, this was a neighborhood gathering place, the complement to his V & T General Store next door. There, local women congregated; here, it was pretty much a masculine world, but, after all, the vast majority of sang sellers were men. She could hear someone in the back room, which had two pool tables and some video games.

Over the long, wooden sales counter hung a sign she re
membered Elinor fretting over. It had attracted her because it was a quote from a Jack London story: “I searched two seasons and found a single root of the wild mountain ginseng, which is esteemed so rare and precious.” “There’s more to that quote,” Elinor, in her best linguistic professor voice, had told Jessie and her mother. “It goes on to say, to paraphrase, ‘I could have lived a year from the sale of that one root, but I got arrested trying to hawk it.’” How amazing, Jessie thought, that there had always been those two yin-yang aspects of what Peter called jen-shen, the great reward and the danger of it, just like with life.

And even more amazing was how she heard Elinor’s voice even now, but not the way she’d sensed her mother’s voice when she first saw her in her coffin. It was different from the way she had somehow shared her mother’s thoughts, her fears, that day she felt threatened in Hong Kong when her mother must have been endangered, maybe even dying.

On the wall between two mounted deer heads, Jessie noted another sign, a typical in-your-face comment from a proud Appalachian who resented being pegged a hillbilly by outsiders: Don’t Worry. We Only Shoot Federal Agents and Relatives.

The bearskin rug on the floor was a classic: claws and fangs on display and some backwoods taxidermist’s version of a tongue hanging out. The fur itself looked antique and not well-preserved. It would be better off in the museum upstairs, but it did seem to balance the hanging stag and doe heads on the walls. The few times she’d been in here when she was small, she’d always felt a thousand eyes were watching. It was the same feeling she’d had as a kid at Seth’s place, only there, everything looked as dead
as it was. Here, the living dead had proudly held heads and moist-looking eyes, as if the rest of the animal would step through the wooden walls like in Jean Cocteau’s old silent French film Beauty and the Beast.

Vern and his customer kept arguing about the price and quality of the sang, which, her mother had said once, was standard procedure around here, part of the game. “You’re just lucky I’m willin’ to sell you this grade A stuff, Tarver,” the seller was saying. “It’s the real fine kind. I’d like to grind it up in my sausage mill and drop in some conversation juice, for a pick-me-up tonic with the ladies.”

Jessie knew “conversation juice” was moonshine. Vern said, “Marv, all you old sang hunters tell ’bout as many tall tales as a fisherman. Now, the price stands. Least you ain’t reamed out the roots and jammed BBs in there like one of your Cutshin Creek neighbors did last week.”

“Now, ain’t that a good one,” Marv said, slapping the counter. “Okay, sold for seven hundred and thirty dollars then. Hope them Chinese get a good jolt from it, since I can’t now.”

Jessie wasn’t certain if Peter had arrived yet, but his car wasn’t in front. Still, she’d heard he sometimes parked in back, as if he knew his black Cadillac stood out like an ebony-polished fingernail amidst the sore thumbs of the trucks. He could be upstairs in the apartment Vern let him use, next to the two-room museum. She’d always thought that letting the biggest sang dealer in the state stay above this store was like letting the fox into the henhouse.

Vern rang up the sale from his old metal cash register, though she knew his scales were digital and he kept a state-of-the-art safe in the back room. She’d never known him to have a cell phone, but then, they didn’t work consistently
around here. She’d heard he had a PC but kept it at home. Vern might seem to be clinging to the past, but he did well enough in the present as ginseng middleman. She wondered if the prices for Kentucky sang were still one thousand dollars a pound on the Asian market. It seemed she’d been in Hong Kong ages ago when she’d heard that price, but it had been less than two weeks. An eternity seemed to have passed since then.

She looked around the Trader a bit more. It made her think of a time capsule. The front room seemed untouched with its shelves of candy bars and a soft drink machine. Vern’s office shared the back of the building with a storage room and the game room, which boasted twin pool tables and the Nintendo and video games advertised in the front window. She wished she could search his storage and office areas for the rest of her mother’s sang notes. Whoever had those also had a lot of questions to answer.

Hearing the click-click of pool balls, she meandered back to glance inside the game room. To her surprise, Ryan Buford bent over one of the tables, playing solo billiards.

“Hey, how you doing?” he asked, evidently recognizing her at once, even in the muted lighting from the fake Tiffany lamp over his table. He straightened with a pool cue in his hand. “I couldn’t work in this rain, so I have a little downtime. I’m really sorry about your mother.”

“I appreciate that. I saw you at the funeral with Emmy.”

“Yeah. I didn’t think I should stay for the dinner, though, being an outsider.”

“You would have been welcome,” she said, walking closer. He was the only one in the room. He’d cleared the table of about half its colored balls. If she played her own game just right, she thought, maybe she could find out if
he knew Cassie, especially from the last time he’d been here. She could hardly just demand to know if he’d fathered Pearl and then deserted both of them. She recalled that Seth didn’t like this man at all. He’d said something about his killing trees, but deciding what vegetation stayed and what went must be part of a surveyor’s job. Maybe she should test the water with Seth first, then come around to Cassie.

“Did you hear about the fire at Seth Bearclaws’s place last night?” she asked.

“Yeah. Vern told me. He said it was ‘a bear’ to put out, but I thought that was a pretty sick joke.”

“Vern doesn’t think much of Seth.”

“Yeah,” he said, lowering his voice, “so I gathered. I hear the fire was arson, too. Makes you wonder who’d want to burn him out, but I’ve heard some murmurings that he might have had something to do with your mother’s loss.”

“Did Vern say that, too?”

“No. Maybe it was just something Emmy overheard.”

“She’s a very nice girl.” Jessie leaned her hips against the other table and spun the cue ball across it, where it bounced off the edge and came back. Like Cassie, she suddenly felt protective of Emmy, but she didn’t want to scold this man so that he clammed up.

“Yeah, her bright outlook on life keeps me going. But I’ve been told by her employer and self-appointed guardian, Sheriff Webb, to watch myself with her. He mentioned her trigger-happy father and brothers, but they seem nice enough to me.”

If he’d charmed that bunch, Jessie thought, he was even smoother than she thought. “You didn’t run into any of the Enloes when you were here last time?” she asked, still trying to get the conversation around to Cassie. He shook his head
and hit another shot; the ball he’d targeted bounced off the bumper twice and clunked into the pocket. “Well,” Jessie went on, “I guess Emmy herself would have been pretty young then. When was it you were through here last?”

“Five, six years ago,” he said. “Camped out and didn’t mingle much.”

“Didn’t you make any friends? You seem to have made them this time.”

“I try to get along wherever I’m sent. I move around quite a lot for work. It’s not only the military recruits who hear, ‘Uncle Sam wants you!’ Same goes for us government employees. You know, have government-issued surveying equipment, will travel.”

He was as skilled as Peter Sung at shifting topics. “I’m sure it’s much nicer at Audrey’s B and B,” she added, “than wherever you camped out last time.”

“Yeah. Good home cooking at the Soup to Pie, too. So, Emmy mentioned you’re going to pick up where your mother left off with the ginseng count.”

“For a while at least. I’m actually a scientist, working on a breast cancer cure that uses parts of the root to slow the growth of tumors.”

Bending low for another shot and squinting down the cue stick as if it were a rifle, he craned his head to look up. “No kidding? I had a friend died of that at home.”

“So, where is home?”

“Born in New Jersey but been living in south Florida for years. Man, the Everglades are a far cry from Deep Down. Here, I’ve been watching out for bears instead of gators or the Ape.”

“The Ape? What’s that?”

“Just what it sounds like,” he said, hitting a ball that
missed its mark. He straightened to rechalk the end of his cue stick. The sound of that gave her shivers, as if someone scraped fingernails across a blackboard. “Some locals claim to have seen a big ape with a terrible smell that lives in the swamps.”

“Florida’s answer to Bigfoot, the Yeti or the Abominable Snowman?”

“Exactly,” he said with a smile that flashed perfect teeth. “It can’t all be legend, not in so many places.”

“I suppose you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, too,” she said, but her heart was thudding so hard she was afraid he could hear it. Since he worked in the woods alone, should she tell him about Tyler’s photo? She’d better ask Drew first. He obviously didn’t trust this man, but was that only because he was protective of Emmy and didn’t want new roads for developments here? And Seth detested Buford, so she’d better just keep quiet for now. But what if something terrible happened to him, when she could have warned him?

“You’re away from home so much, you must not have a family,” she said.

“A rolling stone gathers no moss. Speaking of plants, I only deal with the tall ones that shade your ginseng, but I’ll let you know if I spot what looks like a patch you can count. Good luck with all that. With what happened to your mother, I’m sure you’ll have protection—a guard or weapon—when you go out there.”

He’d made a statement, but she had the strangest feeling he was asking a question: Would she be alone and unarmed? Maybe he was trying to get something out of her as she had him. No, that was her paranoia talking again. She was about to get the subject back to Cassie when Vern poked his head through the door.

“Hey, partner,” he called to her. The nickname surprised her; she felt as if he’d been eavesdropping when Drew called her that. “No one else’s out front but Peter, who just came in, so let’s go over some stuff out here, okay? It’s still raining outside, Ryan.”

“I can hear it on the roof,” he said and cracked another ball off two more and into a pocket. “I’m dying to get back out there, but it’s gonna have to wait.”

“Now you just mind your manners at Sarah’s house today, Pearl,” Cassie told her as they pulled up before the Castor family’s house two miles farther out of Deep Down than their own. Sarah was the nearest playmate with the closest age to Pearl. They’d be on the same school bus next year, and, hopefully, stay best of friends, just the way she and Jessie had, Cassie thought. “And don’t you go telling Sarah or her mommy what made you sick the other day.”

“I know,” Pearl said, but she was still pouting. “Only Aunt Jessie and Drew can know.”

“That’s right, ’less I tell you different. You sure you got to cart Teddy along today?” she asked with a frown at the tattered bear. “Won’t Sarah think you’re too old for that?”

“She has a doll she carries around. It’s all right,” the child said in such a mature, comforting tone that Cassie knew darn well she’d gotten that from Jessie.

With her old windshield wipers flipping water, Cassie maneuvered as close to the front steps as she could, then leaned over to open the door so Pearl could dash up on the porch without getting too wet. Thelma came out on the porch with Sarah—yep, she was holding a baby doll—and called, “Can’t you come in and set a spell, Cassie?”

“Sorry! Maybe when I pick her up. Been staying with Jessie lately and got me too much to do at home.”

“Don’t I understand!” Thelma called back, wiping her floury hands on her apron. “Those two are going to have to amuse themselves awhile today, but they’re two peas in a pod.” She waved as Cassie slammed her truck door and drove off. The delicious smell of fresh-baked, yeasty bread that had poured from the house, even through the curtain of rain, now seemed to fill the cab of the truck.

Thelma and Matt had a nice home and a strong marriage. Matt Castor worked way ’round Big Blue in the only coal mine remaining in the area, but he drove home every night rather than staying over in company cabins the way some others did. Thelma loved to do her own sewing and baking, just the way mountain women used to. She sold bread and cookies uptown to both the V & T General Store and the Soup to Pie.