by Karen Harper
“What about her? Left my place just fine, so don’t you go trying to pin nothing on me. Went on up to Sunrise Mountain, she said. That’s where she must of gone.”
“I want the name of the man who sold you those poison sticks, Junior,” Drew demanded as Jessie turned back in her seat and snapped on her safety belt. “If someone misled you, was a bad influence on you, I need to know. Spit it out fast, because once word gets out you’re in the Deep Down jail—or the one in Highboro—some real bad boys are going to be looking for your sang.”
“Anything happens to that, it’s on your head—both of yourn.”
Jessie got goose bumps, but Drew seemed to ignore that threat. “And I want a map of where you pounded in each and every one of those varmint sticks,” he told Junior.
“Varmint sticks, that’s what they are. Not for human animals, no sir, not on my watch and land.”
“Here’s a news flash, Junior,” Drew said as he drove out of Semple’s lane onto the highway. “The forests of Appalachia, however close they are to your house, are not your land. Besides Mariah Lockwood, if anyone got hurt up there—even if it was a poacher—you’d be looking at big prison time, not just a few days in a town or county jail!”
Jessie drove her car home from where it had been parked in front of the sheriff’s office. Drew would not let her stay while he questioned Junior, who had gone as silent as a stone. He was going to drive him into Sheriff Akers’s jurisdiction in Highboro after he completed the paperwork and initial interrogation.
Again, it felt so strange to Jessie to be coming home without her mother here to greet her. No Seth Bearclaws on the porch this time. She felt as if someone were watching her, though she figured it was just the funny feeling Seth’s carved tree trunk gave her. It sat solidly by the porch, like a squat totem pole with its message to be read by passersby, though there were few enough of them back in the hollow. But in the shifting sunlight through the trees, the carving seemed to move with a life of its own, the sang swaying, the hands slightly moving. With a shudder, she wondered if his tree trunks, with deer and bear heads, seemed to come to life, too. She shook her head to clear it. This gift should just make her recall that she had wanted to thank Seth for it, that was all.
Jessie soaked her aching, bruised body in the bathtub, then unpacked her laptop and plugged it into the phone line. The dial-up connection was slow as molasses, but, of course, she’d been lucky to talk her mother into a modem so she could work here when she was home. She used Google to find the term varmint sticks and learned it was also called an M-44. The sticks sprayed two poisons, M-44 and sodium fluoroacetate, more commonly known as Compound 1080. She shuddered, then began to shiver. Several people had been injured or died when they got a direct blast of the poisons, and at least twenty thousand coyotes, foxes and wolves had been “relatively humanely eliminated” by the exploding, spewing cloud. Hundreds of dogs and other pets had been “unfortunately killed when they stumbled on the sticks.”
Jessie hugged herself hard. Had her mother stumbled on one of those and was Junior burying more than sang seeds in that rich, forest soil?
She shut down her laptop and phoned Drew to tell him what she’d learned about the varmint sticks. He said Junior wasn’t giving up his source, but was still ranting about his rights to protect his sang. Drew was going to drive him into the bigger jail at Highboro and fill out papers to keep him there, so they could pursue other leads about Mariah. He was sending back a couple of officers from Highboro to use Junior’s hand-drawn map to carefully dig up the other sticks. He was also going to talk to Charity Semple, who was visiting her mother in Highboro, to corroborate Junior’s story that Mariah had visited them the morning she went missing. He had already phoned the judge there for a search warrant and contacted a forensics tech to examine the Semple home for possible traces to show Mariah had been there, especially since they hadn’t come forward with that key information in timely fashion on their own.
“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 o
n 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.
Chapter 8
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.
