Deep Down (I) (5 page)

She bent back down to her tightly packed suitcase and dug past her two business suits and the array of blouses she’d taken until she found the single pair of clean jeans and a long-sleeved sweatshirt that, unfortunately, was emblazoned with a Phi Beta Kappa key. Not that most Deep Downers would know or care what that was, but what had seemed so right for the conference was all wrong here. She decided she’d just wear it inside out and find something of her mother’s to wear later—if Drew let her touch anything in her house.

“You from the Highboro Herald or another paper?” Drew asked the blond guy with the expensive camera equipment. The stranger was leaning against Jessie’s car, in front of the police office, to steady himself while he took a picture down the street toward the bridge. He looked almost Nordic—like a Viking—with light blue eyes and white-blond hair.

Drew had been wondering if Mariah’s disappearance would attract any media. Unless he could find out she’d
been abducted and taken out of the area, he didn’t want them involved, but it was hard to keep the search low-key with so many people helping.

“Newspaper? Not me,” the man said almost defensively as he lowered the camera and turned to face Drew. “Officer, I plead not guilty to being part or parcel of the American media today.” Unlike most civilians, he did not hesitate to step forward and shake hands. “Tyler Finch,” he said. “I was just in the area, that’s all. I’m doing a photo book on Appalachia.”

“Sheriff Drew Webb. You just drive in this morning?”

“I stayed in Highboro last night at a B and B—my cousin’s place, actually—so I do know the basic area. My bread-and-butter job is as a site analyst for the advertising firm Bailey and Keller, in New York City.”

Drew observed he had a video camera as well, hanging behind his back on a shoulder sling. A notebook and pen stuck out of his denim jacket. Drew didn’t put it past a reporter to try to sneak in around here, but for some reason, he believed this man.

“We’ve got a missing person case ongoing here, Mr. Finch. That’s why I thought you might be media.”

“Sure, no problem. Besides my own stuff, my paying assignment is to shoot some possible scenes for future magazine and TV ads, but I’ll be sure to stay out of your way. Actually, I’m going to photograph what my boss calls the mecca of ginseng. Bailey and Keller’s going to do some ads for G-Men and G-Women new caffeine and ginseng drinks. Their company rep, Beth Brazzo, has already scouted some places, but I’m not very good at directions, even with notes.”

Drew thought of Mariah’s notes on her sang sites. He
hoped they weren’t missing. But he could hardly force this guy to stay out of the woods around here.

“I’ve met Ms. Brazzo,” he told Finch. “Tall, brunette.”

“That’s her. Look, I know you’re busy, but could you suggest someone who’d like to be my assistant—point out spots for shots?—I’d pay them.”

“I do have someone in mind. How about I meet you right here around eight-thirty and bring her along? Cassandra Keenan’s her name, and she’s what they call a wildcrafter, knows the hills well from gathering herbs and such.”

“That would be great. Let me know if I can do anything for you.”

After he drove away, Drew did think of something Tyler Finch might be able to do for him, besides providing Cassie and Pearl with some income to get them through the winter. If Drew and Jess found any evidence of foul play in Mariah’s disappearance, he might need a photographer faster than it would take Sheriff Akers or the highway patrol to get one in here. He had an old camera in the Cherokee, but he was lousy with it.

As he turned down Cassie’s bumpy lane, he shook his head as if to rid himself of the growing fear that something really bad had happened to Mariah. More than once, he’d wanted a case to prove himself around here, but not this one.

5

T hrough the front window, Jessie watched Cassie arguing with Drew outside. She wore her new scarf, tied around her like a thin shawl, and it fluttered in the breeze, snapping itself into an S shape.

The scarlet letter, Jessie thought. An edge-of-the-forest unwed mother who wouldn’t identify the father and an elfin child named Pearl, no less. Elinor would surely see some sort of portent or symbol in all that. In Hawthorne’s novel, the heroine was keeping the man who had fathered her child a secret because he was respected in the community. He turned out to be a Puritan minister, who had his reputation at stake.

Jessie studied Drew, then Cassie. Why had Cassie asked him to step outside when he’d told her he’d met a man who would pay her for advice about sites to shoot photos? Drew seemed very protective of Cassie and Pearl, but Jessie admired him for that. Maybe he knew who Pearl’s father was; it could be some friend of his. When, exactly, had his younger brothers left town to join the marines? Surely, Drew himself hadn’t been anywhere around Deep Down when Cassie fell in love with someone who left her pregnant.

She scolded herself silently as she moved away from the
window. It was just that she was so on edge that everything looked dark to her, everyone looked guilty.

As Jessie returned to listening to Pearl read aloud from a book of fairy tales—interspersed with her own babblings about buried treasure and magical spells—Cassie stormed in, untying her scarf. “We’re going into town, Pearl, to meet a man about a job.”

“In Drew’s big car?” the child asked.

“No, in the truck. Run and get ready now. Wear your jacket.”

They had all shared a peaceful breakfast until Drew had mentioned that he’d suggested Cassie’s name to Tyler Finch. Cassie had about choked on the next bite of pawpaw pancakes, so rich with huckleberries and walnuts it was almost like eating Christmas fruitcake.

“Not a job you like the sound of?” Jessie asked Cassie now as she grabbed her purse. Drew had already loaded Jessie’s bags back into his Cherokee.

“Grateful for the money, but don’t like Drew fixin’ me up with a stranger.”

“Oh. But it’s only a business deal.”

“Never you mind. We got to get going so you can go through Mariah’s house. Thought maybe I could help today if you’re not sure ’bout something there, but now I’ll be busy. I been in there more than you have since January. Pearl, shake a leg now!”

Jessie went out and climbed into the front seat. Drew started the engine but waited until Cassie and Pearl got in their old Ford truck and roared by.

“I ought to get her for speeding,” he muttered and followed them down the rutted lane toward the highway. “And ingratitude.”

Jessie was tempted to ask him when his leaves from the marines had been. She knew he’d been back to this area briefly off and on. But if he had secretly made love to Cassie, he would certainly have stepped forward to claim Pearl and her. Wouldn’t he?

Cassie couldn’t help it that she was fixing to have a conniption. Drew had more or less told a strange man she’d work with him—maybe go off in the woods with him. Did Drew guess she’d done that before, so reckoned she would again? Yes, she needed the money, but that’s how the other had got started. But this man would be business—only business. Everyone, including Sheriff Webb and Mr. Tyler Finch, would see that clear enough.

Was that the man, standing there outside the sheriff’s office? Tall and straight as an oak, hair like sunlight and with blue eyes?

“You just keep quiet now, Pearl, you understand? Your ma’s got to talk money with that man.”

She got out and pulled Pearl after her. Icicle-blue, that’s what his eyes were. Laws, she hadn’t thought a man had looked that good for—for nigh on about five years. She even felt those dangerous little butterflies fluttering in her belly.

“Cassandra Keenan, this is Tyler Finch, a professional photographer,” Drew introduced them. Jessie had stayed in Drew’s SUV. Pearl kept hold of a back pocket of Cassie’s jeans. She wasn’t shy back at the holler but about everywhere else.

“The sheriff says you know the area well,” Tyler said with a little nod as they shook hands and she sized him up. “I’d really appreciate some local expertise picking unique but
typical sites.” Wouldn’t you just know, the masculine pine scent of him reminded her of high, pretty places up on Big Blue, and his smile was dazzling as sunshine on the stream.

“I could do that,” she said, realizing this man was good with words and she was sounding like she couldn’t string more than two of them together. She cleared her throat. “If you need pictures or movies of meadows, trees, hollers—hollows—mountains, you name it.”

“Then you can name your price, Ms. Keenan. That is, if you wouldn’t mind doing a little modeling, too—just a distant shot or two with the wilds behind you, maybe with you walking away down a path.”

Cassie stared up into his eyes, ready to say no to that, money or not. Her gaze darted a moment as Drew said his goodbyes and started away. Vern Tarver was leaning in the window of Drew’s SUV, talking to Jessie. No way she wanted to work in that smelly fur and sang trading shop for him again this winter. Why, he’d made her dust all that old, dead stuff in his so-called museum upstairs and do that Chinaman’s laundry, too, when she’d always heard they were the ones with laundries.

“I’d need to cart Pearl along with me,” she told the eager-eyed Tyler Finch, “least most of the time.”

“I’d pay extra for a picture or two of her, maybe the two of you together, not a close-up but a shot with the scenery in the distance.”

“Then let’s talk turkey.”

“I’m so very, very sorry about Mariah—her going missing,” Vern Tarver told Jessie, as Drew came back and got in the driver’s seat again. Vern patted her arm on the ledge of her rolled-down window.

“Thanks, Vern. I know you two were keeping company off and on.”

He nodded solemnly, looking sad but nervous, too. “We were getting serious. Of course, we didn’t see everything eye-to-eye, but opposites attract. Listen, Jessie, I know you and Drew have a lot to do today, but just let me know if I can help in any way. I—I’m glad I realized she had gone missing so I could get folks looking for her.”

Vern Tarver was the closest thing Deep Down had to a mayor. He owned the V & T General Store, Tarver’s Fur and Sang Trader, and the so-called two-room historical museum above it. Vern seemed to make most decisions for the town, just as his father had before him. He ran the elementary school committee—children older than that went to the consolidated school between here and Highboro—and oversaw the tiny town park and the cemetery next to the Baptist Church, where he was an elder. Though most visitors roomed at Audrey Doyle’s, Vern took in an occasional guest in his big brick house on the edge of town. Peter Sung, the agent for the Chinese Kulong family that bought most of the ginseng exported from this area, had stayed in an apartment above Vern’s store for years.

In short, Vernon Tarver was Deep Down’s answer to Donald Trump. Jessie supposed that Vern even resembled “The Donald,” with his big build, pompadour of sandy hair and business suits, except they were old ones with wide lapels. Vern was probably the only man within a hundred miles of here whose uniform wasn’t jeans.

As he stepped away and she rolled up her window, Jessie told Drew, “If we need to make a list of someone who could have—have spirited my mother away, Vern
could be a lot of help. Sooner or later, locals and outsiders pass through his stores.”

“Good observation. And good observations are what we’re both going to need in your mother’s house this morning.”

“So, like I said yesterday, is Peter Sung in town? If my mother’s sang counts were low and the government stopped exports for a while, he and that Kulong family in New York he represents would stand to lose a fortune.”

“So he’d have to stop her somehow? Anything’s a possibility, but he hasn’t been around for over a week. Let’s not think the worst. We’ll case her place, look for clues to where to search the forests. If we find no help that way, I’m just praying you can recall some of her sites that were deep in.”

“I’m ready to do anything I can to find her.” Then she blurted out something she had admitted to no one—not Elinor, not Cassie, and, sadly, not her own mother. “I’m feeling guilty that I’m still upset she sent me away to live.”

He bit his lower lip, then nodded. “My fault.”

“No, it wasn’t—really. Mother and Elinor had been talking about my going to live with her when it came time for college—the impossible dream for a Deep Down girl. It just—it just happened earlier, that’s all.”

“It’s hell both loving and hating parents. I know that,” he said, almost in a raspy whisper. He reached over to touch her hand, then quickly put his hand back on the steering wheel as they turned into the hollow where Jessie had been raised.

The next statement hung between them, but neither of them voiced it: It was also hell both loving and hating what had happened to them in Deep Down twelve years ago. If he insisted, she’d find some way to talk about that later, but she wasn’t prepared to face all that today.

Neither was she prepared to see Seth Bearclaws sitting on her mother’s front porch, right under the yellow-and-black police tape.

As Seth stood to greet them, Jessie saw he’d brought one of his big carvings, unless it had been put there since New Year’s. A Cherokee, Seth was one of only a thousand tribal purebloods left, her mother had told her once. For years, besides hunting and trapping, Seth had made his living carving two-to three-foot tree trunks into local animals with chain saw, chisel and knives. At first, she couldn’t tell what was carved from this one, though. Not the usual bear or deer head.

“Sad to hear your mother’s missing,” Seth spoke first to her, then turned to Drew. “Any news of Mariah?”

“No, but with Jessie home we’ll have a better shot at finding her. That wasn’t here yesterday, Seth,” Drew added, gesturing at the carved tree trunk. “Did Mariah order that?”

“A surprise for her. I bring it now so when she comes home, she will have it.”

Tears in her eyes, Jessie bent toward it, but a shiver snaked up her spine when she saw what it portrayed. In the fragrant, reddish cedar wood were roughly hewn two hands above a ginseng plant, as if the hands were protecting it. “That’s really lovely, Seth,” she told him.

“Mariah and me used to argue over ginseng, her counting it, allowing it to be taken from the woods for money. It should be for cures right here, not in other countries, not for power drinks for runners,” he said with a sneer, eyes narrowing as he crossed his arms over his chest.

Seth Bearclaws was about seventy, though with his wrinkled, wizened face, he seemed either much older or
ageless. For some strange reason, looking at him, Jessie thought of the old woman in the ginseng shop in Hong Kong, but she shook off that foolish thought. Seth had tattoos all over his arms and even one on his chin, most of them of bear paws and claws, similar to the leather thong necklace dangling long, curved claws he always wore around his neck. Mariah had said the tattoos were not done with a needle but by pricking gunpowder under his skin, a Cherokee tradition from way back. Seth had lived here from way back, too, first with his wife until she died and then alone with his memories and tribal causes. In a way, Seth Bearclaws was the original eco-warrior around here.

Since he’d protested sang being sold for other things but the herbal cures his people valued, Jessie almost told him about her breakthrough in the lab. It looked as if the ginsenosides from ginseng roots might delay or halt the growth of cancer cells, even tumors, and that could benefit all mankind. But she kept quiet, hoping he might say something more about her mother.

“But,” Drew said, “this gift means you’re not angry with Mariah over her ginseng counts? That you’ve forgiven her now?”

Seth shrugged. “When she returns, she will know what this means. That she must be strong to tell everyone the plant count is too low. For years, I was telling her the old Cherokee saying that a person who deserves life must pass by three sang plants before taking the fourth one. Now she understands that, so I bring her this.”

“A person who deserves life?” Drew repeated. “Meaning what?”

“He means all plant life is sacred, don’t you?” Jessie put in. “My mother believed that, too, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be good uses for sang or herbs.”

“But some bad uses, too,” Seth said, walking past them as if the conversation had suddenly ended. He lived not far away, down the creek. Had he walked all the way here with this heavy wooden piece? He surely hadn’t carved it on site. And why had he been camped out on the porch, when he knew Mariah was missing?

“How could he have brought that heavy trunk here?” she asked Drew.

“I’ve seen him rolling them, but that would be too far for this. I’m sure not buying the superstitions about Seth around here, that he can call up mythical creatures to do his bidding. I’ll worry about him later. We’ve got to search the house, then get out to some of the sang spots others might have missed.”

Jessie took a last, long look at the rough carving of the two hands and the sang plant. She should have thanked Seth for her mother. Later, when there was time, she would go to see him and take care of that.