Deep Down (I)

by Karen Harper

“I haven’t met Tyler, but my friend, Cassie Keenan, is helping him scout the sites.”

  “So I hear,” she said, now reaching back over one shoulder at a time to pull up her bent leg by the toes of her running shoes. She had a ring of keys on a chain around her neck. They jingled when she moved a certain way.

  Beth Brazzo was a real physical specimen. Olive-skinned to begin with, she sported a deep tan. She looked as if she should be on that cable TV network where buff women bounced around on exercise mats to encourage the couch potatoes watching that they, too, could have bods like that. She had coal-black hair, lots of it, yanked into a high ponytail. Ms. Brazzo wasn’t beautiful, but striking, almost overpowering with her size and vitality. In comparison, Jessie felt exhausted and drained.

  “Tyler told me he hired her,” Brazzo said. “He’s always working on his pie-in-the-sky book, too, so I’m sure he’s getting shots for that. But he’d better stick to business because I want to get a film crew and actors in here ASAP.”

  “You can’t just use real people—locals, I mean?”

  “Unions, actors’ guild and all that. But Tyler says your friend is a natural beauty, like she stepped out of a Botticelli painting.”

  “She is a beauty, but I don’t think that comparison would mean much to her. Nice to meet you, but if you’ll excuse me…”

  “I just wondered,” Beth said, falling into lockstep with Jessie as she headed toward Drew’s office, “if there’s any word on how your mother’s ginseng count was going. That is, if it was low enough that the government might step in and halt the harvesting for a while. My company is really hot to have some of the local Deep Down ginseng for our products, since we believe in truth in advertising. We might even go with a ‘deep down satisfaction’ ad campaign.”

  Jessie turned to look up into the woman’s mahogany-dark eyes. “I really can’t answer questions about her ginseng count, Ms. Brazzo.”

  “Can’t or won’t? Hey, didn’t mean it that way,” she said with a playful punch at Jessie’s shoulder. “I’m just concerned for your mother, as well as for the ginseng, that’s all. Well, got to get my four miles in. I’m meeting Tyler and Cassie at her place before I head for the hills for a while.”

  “Do you know where her place is? I don’t think Tyler’s been there.”

  “I know most of the hollers and trails around here from my daily runs. Love this area to jog in. Please call me Beth—and call me if I can do anything to help.”

  With a wave, she headed down the side of the highway toward Cassie’s, her keys jingling around her neck. Jessie thought Beth Brazzo was a bit abrasive, but then, she really didn’t know her yet.

  She went inside the sheriff’s office. Emmy Enloe, whom Jessie remembered as a gawky child from the time she left Deep Down, sat in front of a computer screen with an earphone in one ear; this was obviously the sheriff’s 911 or call-in desk. But Emmy was not alone. A young man—well, maybe he was midthirties—swung around from talking with her, then stood. Emmy popped up, too, as if Jessie were a visiting VIP—or as if they’d been caught at something.

  “Dr. Lockwood,” Emmy said. “Please come on back and sit down. The sheriff said he’d be out in a bit. I was just fixin’ to run down to the Soup to Pie during my break, so could I bring you something back? And, oh, this here is Ryan Buford, a surveyor who works in these parts off and on.”

  So this, Jessie thought, was the man Seth Bearclaws hated for his big vocabulary and the so-called dollar signs in his eyes for timber. After they exchanged greetings all around, Jessie took the third chair, she asked him, “You’re a surveyor for a timber company?”

  His smile flickered but held. “Actually, I work for the Department of Transportation. Ever since the sixties when President Lyndon Johnson took an interest in poverty in Appalachia, we’ve been improving the roads. You know what they used to say about roads around here? They aren’t passable, not even jackassable.”

  Emmy giggled as if he’d made the most clever joke. Jessie could see why the girl looked agog over this guy. Good-looking—if you liked the preppy, no-hair-out-of-place kind of guy—a sort of Ken doll. Then she silently scolded herself for judging him as quickly as she had Beth Brazzo. Just because Seth didn’t like the man didn’t mean he was the devil incarnate.

  “I’ll be glad to sit here and wait for the sheriff, if you want a break, Emmy—both of you,” Jessie told them.

  “Oh, thanks, Dr. Lock—”

  “Jessie’s fine,” she told the girl. “Just Jessie.”

  With a bat of Emmy’s eyelashes toward Ryan and a toss of her hair—body language from an interested female, if Jessie’d ever seen it—the two of them headed out, and Jessie moved into Emmy’s chair in case an important phone call came in. When the door closed and things got quiet, she realized that Vern’s and Drew’s voices could be heard out here. It was obvious that Emmy and Ken doll had been interested in each other, rather than the conversation. Still, she’d have to tell Drew that he could be overheard.

  “Yes, yes, all right!” Vern was saying. “I asked her to marry me and she said no. So what? You don’t think I had something to do with her disappearance, do you? Is that what you been circling ’round all this time?”

  “I’m sure you understand I need to cover all the bases.”

  “But I’m already at home plate, Sheriff. With my reputation, you’ve got no right to—Oh, hell, okay. I was shocked she turned me down, that’s all. Of course, I was upset—hurt, not angry. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll never set foot in a restaurant again where the staff is eavesdropping…spying…”

  “So where were you the day Mariah went missing, say, after 10:00 a.m., when she was spotted walking along the highway?”

  “You’re serious about my being under suspicion for something? Are you nuts? I don’t have to sit here and answer these questions from the likes of—”

  “Then get a lawyer. Either level with me or get a lawyer, and we’ll go from there.”

  “In this town? I get a lawyer and the rumor mill will be up and running. Okay, okay. All day I was either weighing and buying sang or in the museum above the store, starting to put things away for the cold season. Never get any visitors after Labor Day.”

  “Did you get it all done?”

  “Naw, Peter Sung called and we talked business.”

  “Called from where?”

  “From his home in Lexington, of course. If he was in this area, he’d drop in.”

  “Are you sure he was in Lexington? Did he say so?”

  “You got him in your lineup, too? I know he was in Lexington ’cause I could hear those fancy-bred hunt hounds in the background, all right? He never travels with them unless he’s going bear running with that club of his. Those crazy Chinese. You know he believes that bear gall and bile will reduce pain and cure a lot of ailments? Now, I’m convinced ginseng’s a panacea, but bear bile?”

  Vern was trying everything to change the subject, Jessie thought. She was starting to feel the cold undertow of his tone toward Drew. Defensive, yes, but disdainful, too. She grasped more fully now what Drew had to face around here to be the embodiment of law enforcement with his rebel background. Like her, he, too, was dealing with the split between his past and present. It made her feel even closer to him.

  She’d always liked and looked up to Vern Tarver, but she saw other chinks in his big-man-about-town armor now. As close as he claimed to be to Peter Sung, he seemed to look down on the Chinese, too. Maybe Vern was prejudiced against those with different ethnic backgrounds, because he’d never gotten along with Seth Bearclaws, either.

  “So,” Drew’s calm voice drifted to her, “you were in the Fur and Sang Trader, either upstairs or down, the entire day Mariah went missing?”

  “Hell,” Vern exploded, “where were you? Where was anybody who had a stake in her ginseng count staying high enough, so that we could all still benefit from the tradition of great wild sang around here? If there’s been foul play, you’d better interrogat
e everyone in the hinterlands around here, especially the ones who could be poachers she stumbled on. I hear you arrested Junior Semple. I don’t care if he grows his own sang, ask him where he was all that day!”

  “I have, but now I’m talking to you. Besides being romantically rejected, you’re the middleman for most of the sang that changes hands around here. A low sang count would mean a huge financial hit for you, to put it mildly.”

  “Now you listen up, Sheriff Drew Webb,” Vern said. Jessie could picture him leaning forward over the desk toward him, maybe pointing. “You want cooperation in searching for Mariah, you got it. You want a blow-by-blow of what I did that day, including sitting on the toilet, so be it. But you’d better find her first, or what happened to her. I love that woman and am convinced I could have brought her around to seeing things my way.”

  “To marry you or pad the ginseng count?”

  “That’s it! I’m outta here. I’ll have a complete schedule of where I was when, with corroborating witnesses, by supper time. Right now, I got me things to do.”

  Jessie was convinced she might get more out of Vern than Drew’s frontal attack had. Just to be sure neither of them knew how much she’d heard, she got up and opened the front door, then pretended to be coming in as Vern stalked out of Drew’s office.

  “Jessie,” Vern said only as he pushed past her and went out.

  Drew’s expression was somewhere between frustrated and angry. “Give me a sec, and we’ll head out,” he said and went down the back hall. His words floated back to her. “I’m not going out there without some hardware.”

  Bear Falls thundered down massive slabs of bedrock as if in giant steps. “Ooh,” Cassie cried, lifting her face to the cooling spray and holding tight to Pearl on the damp, mossy rocks beside the torrent. It had been a sunny, warm climb up here, so this felt mighty good.

  “Hold that position, will you?” Tyler called to her from one level down. “Let me get a shot of you tilting your face up into the mist. Profile, just a bit to the left. Yes, good!”

  “You taking Pearl, too?”

  “I will in a minute. Don’t talk. Just great,” he called up to her, but his voice was almost drowned by the roar. “It’s like you’re fading into the mist—fabulous.”

  Cassie had allowed Tyler to take pictures of her and Pearl today on their hike through the woods, then along Bear Creek where Pearl had skipped rocks, and now this. He’d told her he’d pay her extra for every shot of them he used for the book, but he was already paying her twenty-five dollars an hour—an hour!—for just taking him around. He was such a joy to be with that she didn’t think she’d take extra for the personal pictures. Besides, he promised he’d give her color five-by-seven copies of any ones she wanted, even get them framed for her walls, as if there was room with all her drying herbs. Though she’d been trying to keep her defenses up against the flood of her feelings for him, she couldn’t help liking and trusting Tyler Finch. At least Pearl’s father hadn’t ruined her outlook toward men in general.

  All three of them holding hands, they clambered down to the grassy edge of the pool where the crashing waters made waves before twisting into two separate streams, one that went in a series of smaller falls down the west side of Sunrise Peak and one that became Bear Creek.

  “So,” Tyler said as she took out the picnic flask and poured cider for all three of them, then produced huge oatmeal cookies she’d put dried fruit in, “are there bears around Bear Falls and Bear Creek?”

  “Used to be. Hunts drove them higher on the peaks, least most of them. Black bears in Kentucky got so rare they put a stop to hunting for now, though if you get special permission, your hounds can run and tree them. It’s s’posed to scare them so they don’t come ’round humans, though that’s hardly fair. I mean, just like the Cherokees, it was their land first. You want to shoot a bear legally these days, you got to go to West Virginia or Tennessee. Why? You’d like to shoot one for your book?”

  “I wouldn’t mind some pics of endangered wildlife, and some of deep forest ginseng, come to think of it. Yeah, that would all fit.”

  “Is it a book about saving the environment—staying green?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment, and she turned her head to look at him. “Well, spit it out,” she said, then silently cursed herself for not having said that better. But he knew by now she was no refined lady, and she figured that might be her appeal to him.

  “Cassie, my book is about things being lost—a way of life passing away around here. It’s called Fading Appalachia.”

  “So my way of life—my life—is history. Our ways are over and dead.”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m trying to make you understand—”

  “Tyler Finch, haven’t you heard that us li’l old hillbillies are a few cards short of a full deck?” she shrilled. She hadn’t meant to react so strongly, but he’d misled her. He was fixing to put her and Pearl in a book about a faded, colorless, dead-as-a-doornail—

  “Cassie,” he said, reaching for her wrist when she stood abruptly and pulled Pearl to her feet, who squawked until Cassie gave her arm a little jerk. “I wanted you to know and trust me before I explained all that,” he said, “so you wouldn’t take the title and my intent the wrong way.”

  “Trust you? My mistake. Yes, I need the money, but I’m not selling out to a man who waltzes in here with the idea of putting me and Pearl on display in a book that says we’re all fading away around here!”

  “Cassie, wait!” he protested as he scrambled to pick up his gear and follow her. “Let me just show you some of the photos, how achingly beautiful they are, how they speak for the beauty and the loss of a lovely way of life—”

  “It’s not lost, but you can just get lost, far’s I’m concerned. I’ll drive you back to town and you can pay fading-away me for the day, but that’s it!” she threw back over her shoulder.

  At least Pearl knew to keep her mouth shut. Maybe ’cause she could see her ma was crying.

  Chapter 10

  10

  J essie was surprised they didn’t see Cassie’s truck parked on the old logging road, but she could have parked somewhere else to hike up toward the base of Sunrise. She didn’t mention it to Drew; they were still getting caught up with each other’s news, though he had told her next to nothing about his talk with Vern, so she told him absolutely nothing about overhearing some of it. She did, however, give him her impressions of Beth Brazzo and Ryan Buford.

  “I’ve never spoken with the man,” Drew said as they got their gear out of the Cherokee. Drew not only had his pistol on his belt but held a rifle diagonally across his upper torso. “Buford must have come in after I took Vern into my office,” he went on, “maybe to see Emmy and not me. I hear he comes and goes, but he hasn’t been around for a while. I’m sorry to hear he’s sniffing around Emmy.”

  “You make him sound like a dog. Hope not, because she seemed pretty smitten.”

  At that, they fell silent. Jessie wondered if Drew was thinking of them, instead of naive, young Emmy and an older man, who no doubt had at least one other woman on his string—his leash.

  As they approached the fringe of forest, high above them, clots of clouds devoured the sun while the jagged peaks of Sunrise Mountain seemed to rip the bottoms right out of those clouds. Slightly off to the west, bald, bulbous Snow Knob, which they would use as a guide, glared down at them over the tops of the trees. Shadows lengthened; the sweep of wind stilled as if holding its breath. But Jessie had learned long ago that the forest itself was never really silent. As they plunged into its blue-green depths, leaves rattled, limbs creaked, twigs snapped. Their booted feet crunched along the leaf-littered path.

  She jumped when Drew, walking behind her, spoke. “The site in your photo looks familiar, but I’m afraid it’s because so many places along Bear Creek look that way. Even with Snow Knob above, we might have to search a large area.”

  “I know,” she said with a sigh. “But it’s a clear enough pict
ure of the rocks in the water that we should be able to find the spot, then look in the general area for sang—maybe even in a cove. She always said coves were the best.”

  “Coves along the creek or the lake up by the falls?”

  “No, country boy. A forest cove. You know, deltas of rich soil near the foot of a mountain slope. Loam gets deposited there by streams coming down toward the hollows. Lots of hardwood trees with the overhead shady canopy that ginseng loves—I’m sounding like my mother.”

  It helped to talk, she thought. Drew kept her inner darkness and fears a bit at bay. It was only because their mission was so desperate and solemn that she felt the trees had eyes. She tried to buck herself up, but for once the familiar forests seemed not friend but foe. Was her mother here somewhere? If so, Jessie had to face the fact she might not only be injured but—but gone.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen spots like that, hidden, some untouched,” Drew was saying. “I remember one cove over on Big Blue where we used to hide out in an old drift mine shaft. You know, I never thought about the possibility that Mariah took refuge from the rain that night in an old pioneer mine shaft. Maybe she hurt her ankle and crawled in there for cover.”

  “But if she didn’t have the strength to come back out, we might never find her.”

  He had nothing to say to that as the path got steeper. Now and then the clouds parted and the smothered sun shot shafts of light through the ragged canopy of old trees. Finally, they emerged in the long clearing that followed Bear Creek down from the falls above.

  “Deer tracks,” she told him. “I’ll bet a lot of animals come to drink here.”

  “Even a coyote,” he said, pointing. “Unlike dogs, they walk in a straight line. But with the heavy rain that first night Mariah went missing, I don’t think we’ll find her tracks.”

  They walked the south side of the creek, looking for the large rock Jessie’s father was standing on in the picture.

  “You inherited your father’s curly hair,” Drew said.

  “I wish I could remember more about him.”