Deep Down (I)

by Karen Harper

  “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?

  “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.

  Chapter 9

  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.