Deep Down (I)

  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.”

&nbs
p; 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.”

  “Jess—” he said fervently, then bit his lower lip.

  Feeling suspended, she hung on that single, whispered word. Of all her names and titles, that one from him thrilled her. When he said no more, she asked, “Why have you always called me Jess? No one else does.”

  He frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a way to show you’re special. Years ago, it was probably a desperate attempt to just pass you off as one of the guys, so I didn’t have to notice you.”

  “How could you notice skinny, little, bug-bit me with a hottie like Fran MacCrimmon wrapped around you most of the time?”

  “Hey, that makes it sound like you were stalking me.”

  “In a way, I guess I was.”

  “Jess, what was between us that last night just happened, but what we did—even then, I felt it was a happening.”

  “That sounds like a greeting card,” she said, her voice breathy, “one I would have saved pressed in a book of memories or a diary forever. I used to write things about you in a diary that Elinor gave me. Oh, sorry, too much information. You’re going to think I was nuts. Drew, I’ve been wanting to say that what happened that night—when we were found and…and separated—was my fault as much as it was yours.”

  “No, it was mine. If you’re to blame, it was only because that was the first night I took a good look at you—your warmth and concern for me as well as your beauty, the woman you had almost turned into. I was so broken, so down, and you reached out to comfort me…”

  He stopped talking and cocked his head as if listening to something in the distance. Except for the wind, knocking a tree limb against the porch roof, silence stretched between them. Had they said too much? Jessie wondered. Once again, had they gone too far, too fast?

  “And now,” she said, when he didn’t go on, “you are a comfort to me.”

  “There’s a lot I could say, but—”

  “But now’s not the time.”

  “Your deciding to stay will give us some time.”

  “I don’t mind waiting. First, we have to find who hurt my mother.”

  “Absolutely. If you’re willing, I’ll bring the two sacks of sang leaves in from the Cherokee now, and we can go through them together before you use them. We’ve got to be sure there’s no kind of clue mixed in.”

  “Yes, let’s. We’ll be so busy tomorrow and the next day.”

  He rose and gave her his hand to help her up. But he pulled her right into his arms in a hard hug.

  She clung to him, pressing her face against his shoulder, her hands clamped to the small of his back. He felt so solid, so strong. He brushed his lips against her tousled hair, dipped his head, and they were kissing. Moving together, tipping heads to miss noses and meld mouths. Breathing together.

  She slid her hands heavily up his back to caress the nape of his neck. The short, crisp hairs there tickled her palms. His hands on her waist, he pinned her hard against him, from thighs and knees to breast and chest. She felt his unbroken kiss clear down into the pit of her belly. The world was going to spin out of control again, she thought, trying to snatch at san
ity. Why had this man—the first man she’d ever wanted, the man who had haunted her for years even when she was with others—why had he remained the only one who could make her feel her inner power and yet lose herself?

  Their breathing quieted; she was sure he forced himself to let her go. “I actually just grabbed you, hoping that you’d scratch my back,” he said with a taut smile. “That poison ivy’s still bugging me. I’ll go out and get the sang. My mother used to say, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.’”

  “As if you used to listen to her,” she said, just to fill the awkward moment between them as he walked to the front door, shifted the curtain aside and looked out. She peered out over his shoulder. Pale moonlight sifted silver over the windy scene.

  “But I did hear her, even though I seemed to never be listening to her,” he said as he opened the front door and went out, digging his keys out of his jeans pocket.

  Leaving the door open behind her, Jessie followed across the porch and down the steps to his vehicle. Then both of them stopped and stared.

  She gasped; Drew swore.

  “I can’t believe it,” he cried, smacking his hands on his thighs. “Some bastard keyed my car out here!”

  “Keyed?” she said, staring at the long scratch marks that marred the entire driver’s side of the vehicle.

  “It’s usually done with a fist of car keys,” he said, not looking at her, but showing her what he meant with his own keys.

  Gooseflesh, not from the chill, peppered her arms and made the hair on the back of her neck prickle. She was certain someone—something—was watching from the darkness.

  “But this,” he whispered, his voice now more awed than angry, “looks like some giant beast has clawed it.”

  Chapter 16

  16

  D rew shook with rage. The scratches on the Cherokee were so similar to those on Mariah’s face that he almost didn’t need to try to make a match. Jessie stepped closer to him, but he put out an arm to keep her away.