Deep Down (I) (8 page)

“The men looking for the other poison sticks will look for signs of my mother in the forest, too?” she asked Drew.

“Absolutely. Both officers were on the earlier search teams. First thing tomorrow morning, you and I will head up toward Sunrise to see if you can recall any sang spots Mariah might have counted there. Meanwhile, I don’t want you talking further to the other persons of interest. Now that we’ve got Junior in custody, that’s Vern Tarver and Peter Sung.”

“Is Sung in town now?”

“Not that I know of. I’m gonna check with Vern soon. Did you hear me about not questioning people on your own?”

“Yes. All right.”

“I’ll call you and come out to be sure you’re okay when I get back from Highboro. Besides, I need some patching up, Doctor.”

“You know I’m not an M.D.”

“Look, Jess, we both need patching up deep down, and I don’t mean that as a pun. See you later.”

She hung up the phone. She had to do something, so she wouldn’t go crazy just sitting here waiting and agonizing. And Drew had not said one word about staying away from Seth Bearclaws.

It would do her good to exercise her sore muscles, Jessie told herself as she walked down the creek toward Seth Bearclaws’s place. She wore a pair of her mother’s jeans, though they were baggy on her, with a checkered blouse and denim jacket. She tried to keep herself from scratching her back, just below her waistline. Poison ivy from the tumble down the hill, she figured. She had twisted herself around to look in a mirror, then awkwardly covered the red rash with Neosporin and calamine lotion from her mother’s medicine cabinet. At least her mother had that; at Cassie’s, she would have found only healing herbs.

The old, familiar rattling of Slate Creek calmed her some. The clear water looked almost tinted orange with the combination of red Appalachian soil and golden sunlight. Its flow was perpetual, and the surrounding hills and trees seemed eternal, as if there was, indeed, nothing new under the sun. But everything had changed now. She was back in Deep Down, back with Drew. But what had happened to her mother?

She heard Seth, or at least his chain saw, from a distance. The buzzing, drilling sound seemed to echo through the trees. Yes, she saw him outside his one-story log house, bent over a tree stump, hefting the noisy saw to cut into the wood. Numerous tree trunks littered his front yard, some already cut, some intact, some upright, some on their sides. She realized she should be careful not to sneak up
on him, though that hadn’t done her and Drew much good approaching Junior Semple.

Jessie stopped to watch him, but, as she did, he turned and looked her way as if she’d screamed his name. He shut the saw off and put it down. He gestured for her to come closer, even as he picked up a long knife from the ground, then buried it in the stump where it quivered, darting off reflections from a shaft of sun.

“I wanted to thank you for the gift for my mother,” she called to him as she walked closer.

He nodded and gestured she should sit on another half-carved stump, this one with a bear’s head emerging from the rough wood. She was glad he didn’t ask her inside. Despite what had happened to her and Drew in the open forest today, Seth’s place had always made her nervous. His now-deceased wife, Anna, had made the place livable, but Jessie had been bothered by the strange things on the walls there. Cassie’s place might be festooned with green or drying herbs, but Seth’s walls displayed things he claimed were sacred to his tribe, things she thought were creepy as a kid: rattlesnake and copperhead skins, all dry and twisty; a ball of spiderwebs wound like thin yarn; old hornets’ nests, turtle shells, deer antlers and all sorts of animal skulls he’d found in the forests that peered at her with empty eyes.

“Any more news of Mariah?” he asked, making her memories vanish into the here and now.

“Nothing for sure. We do know she stopped at Charity and Junior Semple’s, then maybe headed for the Sunrise area. Can you think of any ginseng spot there she might have wanted to count?”

He frowned and shrugged. He’d sat down on the stump
beside the long knife he’d stuck there. It bounced sunlight onto his pant leg as he said, “It was under Snow Knob at Sunrise Mountain that my people were herded years ago, like cattle, to be driven westward on what was called the Trail of Tears.”

“Oh. When their land was taken from them.”

He nodded. “Nothing has changed. It is still taken from us one way or the other. Sacred sang, coal from the mines on the other side of the peaks, the very bones of the land—the trees.”

“At least this area hasn’t been logged for years.”

“It’s still scarred with all those old logging roads from when it was. And they will try again.”

“The government?”

Looking down at the blade, he shook his head. “Men with dollar signs in their eyes like in a cartoon I saw once. Men like Ryan Buford.”

“Who is Ryan Buford?”

“If you don’t know, a blessing. A snake in the grass. Supposedly a surveyor, but he looks at the trees with hungry eyes and uses words like weapons. I asked him once about a curve in the road and he said, ‘You mean an asymmetrical horizontal alignment?’ and laughed. He is the worst of those who pretend to walk the forest as a friend but would like to kill it.”

“Did he try to buy your land?”

Seth shook his head. “He doesn’t want my land, just the trees.”

“I’ve heard some do sell their trees off their properties—and some are taken, rustled by timber thieves. But not around here, not that I’ve heard about. You don’t mean that he has been here to try to—”

“I should not have mentioned his name, because I vowed
I would not. He just came to my mind when I thought of those who stole my people from this land in the Trail of Tears. I hope, Jessie Lockwood, that you find your mother safe and soon, and there will be no more tears for you.”

She was deeply touched. “Seth, if you think of anyplace she might have been, especially up near Sunrise, please let me know. Or if you know anything about anyone who would want to hurt her—stop her,” she said as she rose. Her voice snagged. Her view of him blurred to make two Seths, two tree stumps, two shining silver knives.

Raising a hand to him in farewell, she turned away and started home.

8

I t was almost dark when Drew phoned to say he was back in Deep Down. “If it’s okay, I’ll come out to debrief you on today,” he told her. “Besides, I have a bribe. After I got Junior a nice, snug jail cell, I got carryout Chinese from King Wah in Highboro, Peter Sung’s favorite place there. Since your trip to Hong Kong was cut short, I thought you might like some Szechuan.”

Jessie recalled that King Wah was one of the restaurants—the last one—her mother had listed on her calendar next to Vern Tarver’s name, so Drew might have an ulterior motive for stopping there.

“If you have half the cuts and scrapes I do,” she said, “as you said before, I can patch you up. Where are you now?”

“Turning onto your road. You’ll see my headlights in a minute. If you didn’t want a friend dropping by with dinner, I was just going to be the sheriff.”

“I’ll take both—and the Chinese,” she told him, before realizing she sounded almost as eager as he did. Or was that overeager?

She met him at the front door. “You clean up well,” he told her. “Sorry I’m still a mess. I just hope we didn’t roll
through a poison ivy patch or a chigger hangout because my back is itching like crazy.”

“Chigger bites take longer to show up, so I’m betting on P.I. Well, misery loves company.”

“You, too?”

She nodded. “Drew, did you stop at King Wah’s to check whether my mother and Vern Tarver went there on what may have been their last date?”

“You got it,” he said, looking impressed. “If I ever get the funds to hire a deputy, I’ll keep you in mind. Yeah, that was part of my motive, and to ask nonchalantly if Peter Sung had been around lately. It just so happens he was in Highboro off and on last week, but—supposedly—didn’t set foot in Deep Down.”

“Strange—so close and yet so far. Then, my mother could have seen him, or vice versa.”

“Yep. As for Mariah and Vern, the waitress I talked with recalled them because she knows Vern.”

“I guess everybody knows Vern.”

“You’d better sit down for the rest of this.”

They stood looking at each other as he handed her the warm sack of food. “Go ahead,” she said, not budging. “Tell me.”

“The waitress says they came in all lovey-dovey but had some sort of argument and were barely speaking when they went out.”

“Vern told me they didn’t see eye-to-eye on everything.”

“But the waitress thinks it was supposed to be a special night. He had flowers for her—store-bought ones—and took out a little box that maybe had a ring.”

“An engagement ring? I can’t believe that. She would
have said something about it to me if they were getting that serious.”

“Maybe he was, she wasn’t.”

“Her thinking of marriage would shock me. Nothing against Vern, big man about town that he is, but she just never showed the slightest inclination to get close to a man after my father died.”

“At any rate, though I’m still just grasping at straws, more than one lovers’ quarrel has turned ugly. And if he harmed her, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to then be the one who reports her missing as he did.”

She set the sack of food on the dining room table, then slumped in a chair, before looking back up at him. “I can’t thank you enough,” she said, “for all you’re doing to help find her. I know as time passes, it gets harder, beyond the golden window of twenty-four hours or whatever they call that.”

“In most places, law enforcement won’t even look for a missing adult for a week, maybe longer. But there’s no way she left Deep Down on her own. Jess, thank you for hanging in emotionally, so you can help. And for making it easy for us to work together after—after all this time. So,” he said, clapping his hands once, “I got the Kung Pao Deluxe and the waitress’s name in case we need her later.”

“To testify at a murder trial?” she blurted and jumped up to go out into the kitchen. “No, I’m not going to get hysterical. You can wash up out here, if you want, or use the bathroom.” Forcing herself to keep busy, she got plates and utensils out while he washed his hands at the sink. “Peter Sung’s favorite place around there, huh?” she asked, terrified to stop talking and moving, because she might collapse. She got out tall glasses and poured herbal tea over
ice cubes. “I’ve only met him once. He seemed a very happy, clever man, very much in charge.”

“Personable and generous,” he said as he carried the iced tea to the table and seated himself. “But then, he ought to be. By working through Vern, I figure he’s legally hauling hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of sang out of here every year for the New York-based Kulong family to export to China. So if he glad-hands locals with whiskey or gives out those lucky ginseng roots on a chain as if they were rabbit’s feet, it’s a small price for him to pay.”

“He hasn’t tried to get you on his side with gifts?”

“Yeah, can you imagine? I didn’t take the cut crystal decanter of whiskey—Scottish whiskey, no less. The guy has very diverse interests, most of them expensive. Vern says Sung’s hobby is raising Plott hunting hounds, the kind bred specifically to hunt bears. The dogs are worth thousands apiece, so he puts an expensive electronic collar on every one of the dogs when he hunts. But I suppose,” he added with a sigh, “Sung’s learned not to typecast me, either. When I turned down his offer of Scotch, I told him I drink only wine since my long stint in Italy.”

“If so, you’re the only nonbeer, nonrotgut drinking guy around. So, did he accept a turndown from you?”

“No way. He came back on the next trip with a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, which I also refused. I told him to give it to Vern Tarver. He stays in an apartment above Vern’s sang store when he’s not in Highboro or home in Lexington.”

“Is Audrey Doyle and her pretty little B and B place too fussy for him?”

She watched Drew shift in his chair; he frowned, though she wasn’t sure what she’d said wrong. He was actually squirming. “What about him—or her?” she asked.

“Nothing. My poison ivy, that’s all. Let’s eat. Actually, I would have liked to keep that wine because, when I don’t eat at the Soup to Pie, I like to cook Italian. Love the stuff, loved Italy.”

“I’ve never been but would like to go. So how often did you get home when you were stationed there? Do the marines get regular leaves? When have your brothers been back?”

She realized she’d asked for too much information at once, but she’d been dying to know if one of the Webb boys could have fathered Pearl. When he recited the times Josh and Gabe had been around, the dates didn’t fit when Cassie must have conceived. Jessie did not miss it that he hadn’t mentioned the times he’d been back in the area, but she didn’t want to raise his suspicions by asking again right now. After all, a sheriff and a former Marine MP must have interrogated enough people that he’d recognize when he was on the receiving end of pointed questions.

But if she thought being too nosy made her feel uncomfortable, it was nothing next to his hiking up his shirt after dinner to show her his poison ivy rash on his muscle-rippled back. “Poison ivy’s better than poison gas, but it’s driving me nuts,” he told her. “How about some relief, Doc? The part of it on my backside’s the worst.”

His backside?

“Mine’s right above my waistband,” she said. “Isn’t yours?”

“A little lower, too. Here, I’ll just slide my jeans down in back a bit. You sure it’s not chiggers? I remember once my mom used nail polish on those when Josh and me and a couple of friends got them in the Baptist cemetery.”

She tried to steady her hand as she stroked on the calamine lotion with a cotton ball. Facing away from her,
the man had unsnapped his jeans and lowered them about three inches to uncover firm, white flesh just above the swell of his trim buttocks. Yes, he had a redder rash there. What was the matter with her, that she felt all hot yet shivery? She was acting like a moony, silly kid again.

“Feels weird,” he told her as she dabbed it on.

“Just hold still. If we had Cassie here, she’d be insisting on the old-time cure of buttermilk and gunpowder. Actually, this pink lotion is a lovely shade on you.”

He snorted. She had to keep talking. “So how did you and some other guys get chiggers in the Baptist cemetery, of all places?”

“That was the time we got in trouble from sticking lightning bug bodies on our chests and faces so we almost glowed. Then we’d jump out from behind the tombstones as cars drove by and caught us in their headlights. Pastor Snell was so startled he drove into the iron fence, and then there was hell to pay—if you know what I mean.”

“There. Done. But you’d better stand still a second to make sure it’s all dry.” Her instinct was to bend down and blow on it, but no way was she doing that. She moved back to the table and screwed the top back on the lotion, then threw the cotton balls in the empty fried rice container.

“Jess.” He said her name so softly, then cleared his throat. “Thanks for the help here—with the P.I. and with finding Mariah. Maybe when this is all over—when we’ve found her and know what happened to her—we can clear the air about what happened to us.”

“Right. A good idea,” she said, starting to clear the plates. No way could she bear to get into that minefield of emotions right now. Her legs suddenly weak, she sat down at the table.

“One reason I really admire your mother,” he said, his voice raspy now, still facing the wall, “is that when I came back as sheriff, she was one of the few who really meant it when she welcomed me back. She could have actually had me arrested years ago. Granted, she sent you away, and I got in all kinds of trouble for making love to you, but her not bringing charges gave me a second chance. And so now,” he added as he hiked up and snapped his jeans before he turned to face her, “I want to find her for you, but for me, too.”

It was all too much. Making love to you, he’d said. She knew it wasn’t that, then, for him, even if it was for her. But having him here, so close, so kind, terrified her almost as much as her feeling something awful—fatal—had happened to her mother. She put her elbows on the table on their unused chopsticks and, though she tried to stem the coming torrent, burst into tears.

Drew came over, evidently unsure whether to touch her or not.

“Sorry,” she choked out, swiping her palms down her slick cheeks. “I’m not a weeper—honestly, because I know it doesn’t do any good. Well, maybe it lets some of the pain out. I’ll be all right.”

He knelt by her chair, then muttered something under his breath. He stood, picked her up, then sat back down with her sideways on his lap. She held to him and sobbed, soaking his shirt, shaking as he held her tight. Here she’d broken down in front of Cassie and now Drew.

“Sorry,” she repeated when her sobs quieted to mere hiccups. “It’s just so hard not knowing.”

“Know this,” he whispered into the mussed curls along her temple, his breath heating her already flushed cheek. “I will not give up, on finding her or on—or on our search.”

Jessie nodded and forced herself to sit up straighter, then to slide off his lap and stand. She was absolutely certain he had almost said, “I will not give up, on finding her—or on us.”

After Cassie got Pearl into bed—that child was so excited because she’d given her a dollar from the hundred Tyler had paid her for four hours of work today—she called Jessie to tell her friend about her day. Jessie filled her in on what had happened at Junior Semple’s, then blurted out, “Drew just left a while ago.”

“And either you caught a cold today, ’long with that poison ivy, or you been crying,” she told Jessie.

“I did kind of lose it again, this time in front of Drew instead of you.”

“You want to come on over here tonight, too? Love to have you.”

“Thanks, Cassie, but I need to stay here. I want to stay here. I feel closer to her.”

A pause. Cassie almost asked her if she meant something strange by that, like she was feeling that Mariah had passed on from this earth, but she just gave her a minute rather than pouncing on her like she had about her feelings for Drew.

“So,” Jessie said, “it worked out well with Tyler Finch?”

“Oh, yeah. A real talented gentleman, a rare and endangered breed around here.”

“You told me once Pearl’s father was real polite and bright.”

“But he’s not around here. Well, now you wormed that much out of me! Besides, he turned out to be a jerk, and I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Okay, try this. When I was sleeping in your room last
night, I heard some strange, scratching sound outside and peeked out toward the wires where you hang the moss.”

Cassie gasped. Was Jessie making some connection between Pearl’s father and the strange sounds outside? “And saw what?” she asked.

“Not sure. I actually thought I saw someone tall looking at the house over the top wire—”

“How tall?”

“I don’t know. However tall someone would have to be to look over the top wire, unless he was standing on something out there. Then he—or she—turned away. But since Pearl says you go out a lot in the dark, I figure it was you out there, working, maybe standing on something to pick moss or whatever.”

“Pearl says I go out a lot in the dark? That child’s mixing reality up with some funny dream she had,” Cassie insisted, but the hair on the nape of her neck prickled. Not only because Pearl knew she’d gone out a lot, but because Jessie, as upset and exhausted as she’d been, might have seen someone watching the place. More’n once, Cassie’d had the feeling the house was being watched, although not when she’d been out there in the early morning herself, working on her poisonous herbs. Yet what if someone was spying on what she was doing? What if he was back?