Deep Down (I) (9 page)

“I finally figured out,” Jessie was saying, still sounding as if she was talking from a rain barrel, “that the breeze was just blowing the pieces of moss on the wires.”

“Yeah, that was probably it. Not to change the subject, but I just wanted you to know that Pearl and I are taking Tyler up by Bear Falls tomorrow. He loved Indian Falls and took a lot of pictures, but he wanted a waterfall he could get closer to. And now, since you said Junior Semple gave
you that hint that Mariah might have gone up that way, I’ll keep a special eye out for—for anything.”

“We won’t get in your way, but I think Drew and I are going up that way tomorrow, too. I know some patches Mother counted in that general area, but I’ll bet she had some secret ones there, too. She never mentioned or even hinted at a few spots like that to you, did she? It’s a big falls and a big area, the forest and valley southwest of Sunrise.”

“Not that I can think of offhand, but I’ll sleep on it.” Cassie thanked her again for the scarves she’d brought her and Pearl. When they said their goodbyes and hung up, Cassie peeked in to be sure Pearl was asleep in her own little bed. Then she pulled her old shawl around her shoulders and stepped outside into the blowing dark. Barefoot despite the chill in the air, she padded around to the side of the house. There lay her special herb garden, the spot she’d fenced off with wire so Pearl could not get near these plants.

She unhooked and went through the makeshift wire gate, then fastened it behind her. Jessie had to be wrong about someone being outside. And if it was him, she’d know it. But to calm herself, in the light from the sliver of moon and the dim window, she surveyed her poison garden.

This late in the growing season, only two kinds of these herbs were in bloom. The poison parsley most folks called hemlock had lacy leaves and delicate white flowers that looked like ghost moths in the dark. Though ground-cherry was a low, spreading plant, she’d trained it to climb a wire trellis, and its bell-shaped, greenish-yellow blooms stood out against its elongated, heart-shaped leaves. Like the nightshade plant, its leaves were highly toxic. Loss of balance, a sense of suffocation, dilated pupils, then heart problems before impending death…

Cassie collapsed as if her legs were water, right where her mayapple plants had been. All these plants had flourished here in the four years plus since her lover—her one and only lover—had mocked her and left her. It was a story older than time, but she’d fallen for it, for him.

“What do you mean, you’re pregnant?” he had shouted, turning from man to monster in that moment. “I know a lot of Deep Downers are a few cards short of a full deck, but you’re smarter than that, Cassandra. You think you can trap me into marriage or child support this way? How do I even know the baby’s mine?”

She had gaped at him, unable to catch her breath. “I didn’t mean…I thought we loved each other…”

“In this world, there are plenty of definitions of love and making love. I don’t intend to stay around here, and you sure as hell can’t play wife in my life, so—”

“So get out of here then! I just thought it was right and honest for the father of my baby to know, but I’ll—we’ll be fine, just fine…”

“You don’t have to turn toxic on me.”

Toxic. Nothing toxic could have brought forth that little angel sleeping inside. He was the poisoner. Even now, he made her terrified to trust or care about Tyler, the most tempting man she’d laid eyes on since he’d deserted her. But she’d show him toxic. The day he’d stormed out for the last time, he’d given her one last stab, just like driving a knife into her heart.

“If you really intend to rear a child here, Cassandra,” he’d said with a harsh glare, “you should get rid of all these hanging weeds. A toddler could make himself sick.”

Sick. Very sick, that’s what he was. She was going to make that fancy-talking, lying and deserting seducer even
sicker, whether he came back to see his child or whether she had to go looking for him herself.

Like last night, with a start, Jessie awoke from a deep, exhausted sleep. Had she heard something? Had a bad dream woken her?

Her heart thudding, she sat up in her mother’s bed. Oh, yes, she’d been dreaming about lab work, about looking through the microscope to find the ginseng breast cancer cure. But instead, through the lens, she’d seen her mother tumbling down a hill, then running, running from poison—poison gas shooting from a sharp knife, poison ivy closing in with its tendrils in a death trap.

What a screwed-up dream! Was it just poison ivy and a varmint stick spewing gas that had inspired the nightmare? She put her face in her hands. Surely, it had just been a dream and not some sort of vision like the one she’d had in Hong Kong about being trapped and feeling desperate to flee. Her mother had said that Jessie’s maternal grandmother, whom she had not known, only had the mountain sixth sense when another woman was in trouble. Her grandmother had been a granny woman, or midwife. When her patients went into labor, they didn’t even have to send someone to her for help, because she knew when their time had come and went to them. That sort of story had gone in one ear and out the other when Jessie was young, but it suddenly seemed of utmost importance to recall things her mother told her years ago.

She thought again of the carved stump with the ginseng plant Seth Bearclaws had done for her mother. The two protective hands above the plant—were they praying hands? Praying for mercy, for help? Jessie decided that
tomorrow she would roll it inside and put it by the hearth, a memorial to her mother until they found her.

“Mother, where are you? Where are you?”

Throwing the covers off, she got up. She decided to go through her mother’s treasure box for the third time, or at least its contents, since Drew had taken the box itself to dust for prints. He’d taken Jessie’s fingerprints, too, so he could eliminate them. But since the items in Mariah’s box had been disturbed, it had to mean something of import had been taken or still lay within the box or the house, didn’t it? Before she went to bed last night, Jessie had searched the drawers, closets and cupboards. She’d even looked inside Mariah’s shoes, under and behind every piece of furniture, under the heavy crocks in the back sunroom. She fanned through the pages of the family Bible and other books, looking for what, she didn’t know.

Now she pulled on her mother’s familiar flannel robe and turned on more lights, though it was still pretty dim in here. The old place made strange sounds at night, as if its bones were creaking. But she was not going to jump at each noise. The place was securely locked, and Drew had said she could phone him anytime and he could be here in ten minutes.

She soon became engrossed in the pile of her mother’s things she dumped on the bed. At first, she laid the old photos aside, but then studied them. Her parents had looked so happy together. What a tragedy her father had died so young. She used to call him Daddy, when she was her Deep Down self. That part of her past seemed separate from the woman she had become in Lexington and in her studies, work and travels. So was she really Jessie of Deep Down or Dr. Jessica Lockwood of Lexington?

She stroked the stiff, wax paper-entombed ginseng plant
her mother had saved for some reason, maybe because it was such an excellent specimen. It had originally been stuck in the envelope that held their marriage license, probably just because it got thrust in there when her mother pulled something out in a hurry and messed things up—or when someone rifled through the box, searching for something. Maybe the sang sites, just as she and Drew had.

But then it hit her: the preserved sang plant was not just saved because it was a prime plant. It was in the marriage license envelope for a reason.

She remembered something. Years ago, her mother had said that a secret sang spot up on Sunrise had provided enough roots for her parents to buy not only a marriage license, but that thin gold wedding band she still always wore and some items “so they could go to housekeeping.” Bed linens, kitchen ware or some such.

Jessie bent forward on the sagging bed and scrabbled through the other photos. She’d seen one here she needed, one that might be a piece of the puzzle. “Yes!” she said and leaned to the side of the bed so she could better study the small, faded color photo under the lamp.

It had evidently been taken up along Bear Creek with Snow Knob, a part of Sunrise Mountain, in the background. Her father was standing out on a big rock with the creek rushing all around him. Her mother had said once that’s where they’d decided to “get hitched up.” A far different place, she thought, from a Chinese restaurant in Highboro, if Vern had actually proposed to Mariah there. So did this giant, precious sang plant and its long-gone root come from near the site in this picture? Could it be where Mariah had one of her secret, almost sacred spots to count?

Jessie grabbed her wristwatch off the beside table. Five-
thirty in the morning, too early to phone Drew. It might be a shot in the dark, but if they could just match this photo with a specific place along Bear Creek, maybe they could find the nearby site her mother went to count that last day and never came back.

9

T he minute Jessie heard Drew’s voice on the phone the next morning, she blurted, “I have a general idea where we can look up near Sunrise, under Snow Knob. It may be a long shot, but…”

“Great. That’s the general area where a couple of hounds seemed to pick up Mariah’s scent but then lost it along the creek, so you may be on to something. But can you drive into town instead of me picking you up? Vern just dropped in to see how the search is coming along, so I’m going to question him now. You can wait in the outer office. I don’t want you going to Sunrise without me along.”

“Sure, I can drive in. But I also wanted to tell you that I got a call from Mother’s contact in Frankfort at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Frank Redmond, the man she sends the sang counts to. He wanted to know if he could pull some strings to send people here to look for her, but I told him that had been done and he should call you.”

“Did he have any clue about whether her counts would be high, normal or low?”

“I didn’t ask directly, but I think he was worried about it being low.”

“He took his time calling back, since I notified him the day after she went missing. He probably thought she’d just wander back in. The big bad city folk think us hillbillies just wander the hills and hollers all the time. I’ll call him again and tell him we’ll keep him apprised. See you soon.”

Jessie managed to tip Seth Bearclaws’s carving, then roll and shove it in through the front door to the hearth, though she couldn’t get it upright again on her own. Even here, in lesser light, the carved sang plant and the hands seemed to move. She had to give Seth credit: for a fairly crude work of art, it was awesome, almost eerie.

After locking up the house, Jessie drove into town and parked in front of the sheriff’s office. A tall, muscular but wiry woman was stretching her hamstrings, leaning over her raised legs, which she propped one at a time on the fender of a new-looking truck. She wore dark-green sweats and black running shoes. Even though traffic was relatively sparse around here, Jessie wondered why she’d want to blend in with the forests instead of standing out from them.

“Hi, Dr. Lockwood.” She greeted Jessie so quickly that Jessie wondered if the woman had been waiting for her. “Sorry to hear about your mother’s disappearance. I’m Beth Brazzo, publicity rep for G-Men and G-Woman health and power drinks,” she said and thrust out her hand, which Jessie shook. Brazzo’s grip was so strong she almost flinched.

“Thanks for your concern about my mother. So, what does the G stand for?” Jessie asked.

“Our initial ad campaign had a customer contest to decide that,” she said. Her voice was deep, almost mannish. “The top three winners came up with great, grand and glorious—not much of a stretch, but exactly what we
wanted. My colleague is the photographer Tyler Finch, who’s shooting some demo sites for ads,” she added.

“I haven’t met Tyler, but my friend, Cassie Keenan, is helping him scout the sites.”

“So I hear,” she said, now reaching back over one shoulder at a time to pull up her bent leg by the toes of her running shoes. She had a ring of keys on a chain around her neck. They jingled when she moved a certain way.

Beth Brazzo was a real physical specimen. Olive-skinned to begin with, she sported a deep tan. She looked as if she should be on that cable TV network where buff women bounced around on exercise mats to encourage the couch potatoes watching that they, too, could have bods like that. She had coal-black hair, lots of it, yanked into a high ponytail. Ms. Brazzo wasn’t beautiful, but striking, almost overpowering with her size and vitality. In comparison, Jessie felt exhausted and drained.

“Tyler told me he hired her,” Brazzo said. “He’s always working on his pie-in-the-sky book, too, so I’m sure he’s getting shots for that. But he’d better stick to business because I want to get a film crew and actors in here ASAP.”

“You can’t just use real people—locals, I mean?”

“Unions, actors’ guild and all that. But Tyler says your friend is a natural beauty, like she stepped out of a Botticelli painting.”

“She is a beauty, but I don’t think that comparison would mean much to her. Nice to meet you, but if you’ll excuse me…”

“I just wondered,” Beth said, falling into lockstep with Jessie as she headed toward Drew’s office, “if there’s any word on how your mother’s ginseng count was going. That is, if it was low enough that the government might step in
and halt the harvesting for a while. My company is really hot to have some of the local Deep Down ginseng for our products, since we believe in truth in advertising. We might even go with a ‘deep down satisfaction’ ad campaign.”

Jessie turned to look up into the woman’s mahogany-dark eyes. “I really can’t answer questions about her ginseng count, Ms. Brazzo.”

“Can’t or won’t? Hey, didn’t mean it that way,” she said with a playful punch at Jessie’s shoulder. “I’m just concerned for your mother, as well as for the ginseng, that’s all. Well, got to get my four miles in. I’m meeting Tyler and Cassie at her place before I head for the hills for a while.”

“Do you know where her place is? I don’t think Tyler’s been there.”

“I know most of the hollers and trails around here from my daily runs. Love this area to jog in. Please call me Beth—and call me if I can do anything to help.”

With a wave, she headed down the side of the highway toward Cassie’s, her keys jingling around her neck. Jessie thought Beth Brazzo was a bit abrasive, but then, she really didn’t know her yet.

She went inside the sheriff’s office. Emmy Enloe, whom Jessie remembered as a gawky child from the time she left Deep Down, sat in front of a computer screen with an earphone in one ear; this was obviously the sheriff’s 911 or call-in desk. But Emmy was not alone. A young man—well, maybe he was midthirties—swung around from talking with her, then stood. Emmy popped up, too, as if Jessie were a visiting VIP—or as if they’d been caught at something.

“Dr. Lockwood,” Emmy said. “Please come on back and sit down. The sheriff said he’d be out in a bit. I was just fixin’ to run down to the Soup to Pie during my
break, so could I bring you something back? And, oh, this here is Ryan Buford, a surveyor who works in these parts off and on.”

So this, Jessie thought, was the man Seth Bearclaws hated for his big vocabulary and the so-called dollar signs in his eyes for timber. After they exchanged greetings all around, Jessie took the third chair, she asked him, “You’re a surveyor for a timber company?”

His smile flickered but held. “Actually, I work for the Department of Transportation. Ever since the sixties when President Lyndon Johnson took an interest in poverty in Appalachia, we’ve been improving the roads. You know what they used to say about roads around here? They aren’t passable, not even jackassable.”

Emmy giggled as if he’d made the most clever joke. Jessie could see why the girl looked agog over this guy. Good-looking—if you liked the preppy, no-hair-out-of-place kind of guy—a sort of Ken doll. Then she silently scolded herself for judging him as quickly as she had Beth Brazzo. Just because Seth didn’t like the man didn’t mean he was the devil incarnate.

“I’ll be glad to sit here and wait for the sheriff, if you want a break, Emmy—both of you,” Jessie told them.

“Oh, thanks, Dr. Lock—”

“Jessie’s fine,” she told the girl. “Just Jessie.”

With a bat of Emmy’s eyelashes toward Ryan and a toss of her hair—body language from an interested female, if Jessie’d ever seen it—the two of them headed out, and Jessie moved into Emmy’s chair in case an important phone call came in. When the door closed and things got quiet, she realized that Vern’s and Drew’s voices could be heard out here. It was obvious that Emmy and Ken doll had
been interested in each other, rather than the conversation. Still, she’d have to tell Drew that he could be overheard.

“Yes, yes, all right!” Vern was saying. “I asked her to marry me and she said no. So what? You don’t think I had something to do with her disappearance, do you? Is that what you been circling ’round all this time?”

“I’m sure you understand I need to cover all the bases.”

“But I’m already at home plate, Sheriff. With my reputation, you’ve got no right to—Oh, hell, okay. I was shocked she turned me down, that’s all. Of course, I was upset—hurt, not angry. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll never set foot in a restaurant again where the staff is eavesdropping…spying…”

“So where were you the day Mariah went missing, say, after 10:00 a.m., when she was spotted walking along the highway?”

“You’re serious about my being under suspicion for something? Are you nuts? I don’t have to sit here and answer these questions from the likes of—”

“Then get a lawyer. Either level with me or get a lawyer, and we’ll go from there.”

“In this town? I get a lawyer and the rumor mill will be up and running. Okay, okay. All day I was either weighing and buying sang or in the museum above the store, starting to put things away for the cold season. Never get any visitors after Labor Day.”

“Did you get it all done?”

“Naw, Peter Sung called and we talked business.”

“Called from where?”

“From his home in Lexington, of course. If he was in this area, he’d drop in.”

“Are you sure he was in Lexington? Did he say so?”

“You got him in your lineup, too? I know he was in Lexington ’cause I could hear those fancy-bred hunt hounds in the background, all right? He never travels with them unless he’s going bear running with that club of his. Those crazy Chinese. You know he believes that bear gall and bile will reduce pain and cure a lot of ailments? Now, I’m convinced ginseng’s a panacea, but bear bile?”

Vern was trying everything to change the subject, Jessie thought. She was starting to feel the cold undertow of his tone toward Drew. Defensive, yes, but disdainful, too. She grasped more fully now what Drew had to face around here to be the embodiment of law enforcement with his rebel background. Like her, he, too, was dealing with the split between his past and present. It made her feel even closer to him.

She’d always liked and looked up to Vern Tarver, but she saw other chinks in his big-man-about-town armor now. As close as he claimed to be to Peter Sung, he seemed to look down on the Chinese, too. Maybe Vern was prejudiced against those with different ethnic backgrounds, because he’d never gotten along with Seth Bearclaws, either.

“So,” Drew’s calm voice drifted to her, “you were in the Fur and Sang Trader, either upstairs or down, the entire day Mariah went missing?”

“Hell,” Vern exploded, “where were you? Where was anybody who had a stake in her ginseng count staying high enough, so that we could all still benefit from the tradition of great wild sang around here? If there’s been foul play, you’d better interrogate everyone in the hinterlands around here, especially the ones who could be poachers she stumbled on. I hear you arrested Junior Semple. I don’t care if he grows his own sang, ask him where he was all that day!”

“I have, but now I’m talking to you. Besides being romantically rejected, you’re the middleman for most of the sang that changes hands around here. A low sang count would mean a huge financial hit for you, to put it mildly.”

“Now you listen up, Sheriff Drew Webb,” Vern said. Jessie could picture him leaning forward over the desk toward him, maybe pointing. “You want cooperation in searching for Mariah, you got it. You want a blow-by-blow of what I did that day, including sitting on the toilet, so be it. But you’d better find her first, or what happened to her. I love that woman and am convinced I could have brought her around to seeing things my way.”

“To marry you or pad the ginseng count?”

“That’s it! I’m outta here. I’ll have a complete schedule of where I was when, with corroborating witnesses, by supper time. Right now, I got me things to do.”

Jessie was convinced she might get more out of Vern than Drew’s frontal attack had. Just to be sure neither of them knew how much she’d heard, she got up and opened the front door, then pretended to be coming in as Vern stalked out of Drew’s office.

“Jessie,” Vern said only as he pushed past her and went out.

Drew’s expression was somewhere between frustrated and angry. “Give me a sec, and we’ll head out,” he said and went down the back hall. His words floated back to her. “I’m not going out there without some hardware.”

Bear Falls thundered down massive slabs of bedrock as if in giant steps. “Ooh,” Cassie cried, lifting her face to the cooling spray and holding tight to Pearl on the damp, mossy rocks beside the torrent. It had been a sunny, warm climb up here, so this felt mighty good.

“Hold that position, will you?” Tyler called to her from one level down. “Let me get a shot of you tilting your face up into the mist. Profile, just a bit to the left. Yes, good!”

“You taking Pearl, too?”

“I will in a minute. Don’t talk. Just great,” he called up to her, but his voice was almost drowned by the roar. “It’s like you’re fading into the mist—fabulous.”

Cassie had allowed Tyler to take pictures of her and Pearl today on their hike through the woods, then along Bear Creek where Pearl had skipped rocks, and now this. He’d told her he’d pay her extra for every shot of them he used for the book, but he was already paying her twenty-five dollars an hour—an hour!—for just taking him around. He was such a joy to be with that she didn’t think she’d take extra for the personal pictures. Besides, he promised he’d give her color five-by-seven copies of any ones she wanted, even get them framed for her walls, as if there was room with all her drying herbs. Though she’d been trying to keep her defenses up against the flood of her feelings for him, she couldn’t help liking and trusting Tyler Finch. At least Pearl’s father hadn’t ruined her outlook toward men in general.