by Karen Harper
“Stay back. There might be fresh footprints.”
“You won’t be going out there—after whoever did this?” she asked, still keeping close as he went around to the passenger side to unlock the doors and get a flashlight.
“It would be useless and stupid. Go inside, bring out our jackets and both of the claw necklaces. And another flashlight, if you have one.”
When she went in, he trained the flashlight on the long scratches. They were deep, not ones that could easily be buffed out and repainted. He went all around the vehicle, but the marks were only on the side he’d parked toward the house, the driver’s side. A double-edged message? A defiant threat to him or to Jess, since it was done here?
Damn, he’d been so proud of this Jeep Cherokee and had tried to keep it clean and shined. If it weren’t for the familiar pattern of the marks, he’d think it wasn’t even necessarily related to Mariah’s death. Several locals had admired the vehicle; Seth had been the only one who had disliked the use of the Cherokee name, refusing to ride in it, at least before today. Surely Seth hadn’t decided he needed to strike out at the vehicle. But he did live a short walk away through the woods. No, he wouldn’t do so many things to make himself look guilty.
Jess came back with his jacket, another flashlight and both leather-thong claw necklaces. He examined the claws, but he knew both kinds were spaced too close together to match these scratches. But, as he held up one of each kind of claw against the marred metal surface, it seemed to him the sharp, slanted tip of the badger claw looked about right for the width of the lines. Badger claws, badger fur—it didn’t make sense. Why a badger?
Of course, he reasoned, to badger someone meant to harass someone, but that kind of wordplay was too far-fetched, too complex a joke. He couldn’t picture anyone around here but Peter Sung thinking that one up. Had his hounds been hunting badgers, since killing bears was illegal in this state? And what did a man care about what was illegal if he’d murdered someone?
The vandal had dared to take his time, making one long track and then the next one, unbroken the entire length of the vehicle. He’d thought he’d heard a noise earlier, a kind of shuffling. If he would not have been so intent on Jess, he might have glanced out and all of this—Mariah’s murder, too—would be solved.
“You’re thinking,” she said, standing back from him and shining her flashlight on the ground as he started to look for tracks, “that those claw marks resemble my mother’s cuts. Do you have those photos here too?”
“In a brown envelope between the front seat and the console on the passenger side,” he said. Her clear thinking in a crisis surprised him again. “All the photos are there, including ones Tyler took of the sang berries arranged in patterns and the animal head. I showed them to Seth after we returned from the forest, and he didn’t bat an eye—again, he denied having anything to do with any of it. Watch where you step, but bring them around, please—Deputy.”
At another time they both might have laughed at his calling her that, but she just squeezed his shoulder and walked to get them. One hell of a woman, but then, this was getting to be one hell of a mess. Someone crafty and clever was playing with them, but this wasn’t a game.
Yes, footprints were here, but vague. Someone had shuffled along, blurring the size of their feet. Intentionally? He followed the tracks until they went onto the grass toward the forest. He backtracked where Jess was still standing by the vehicle, her hair washed by wan window light. She’d taken the photos out and was keeping off the tracks, bending toward the vehicle to compare the pictures of her dead, disfigured mother. She was brave, too, or else she was still so furious over Mariah’s cruel death that nothing was going to scare her off.
“Anything distinctive about the footprints?” she asked.
“It’s like the person lumbered along, dragging his feet the entire way.”
“Are you sure it’s a him?”
“Figure of speech. An educated guess from working with marines and sailors for years, a lot of drunk ones.”
“Are you sure it’s a person?”
“Jess!” he muttered and took the stack of pictures from her. “I’ll admit, because of Tyler’s one weird photo, I’ve nicknamed the figure in it The Thing, but, of course, this vandalism and Mariah’s murder were committed by a person. This isn’t some Stephen King novel, for heaven’s sake. You haven’t had some other strange vision, have you?”
“No, Sheriff. Sir, no, sir!”
He thought she’d like to smack him with the flashlight, but again, she directed her beam for him while he compared the pattern of marks on Mariah’s cheeks to those on the Cherokee. The perspective and spacing were different, of course. Still, he’d bet a year’s salary they were made by the same kind of claws. Badger claws. Could Seth have extra ones, or was someone else involved?
He remembered once betting fifty bucks with another MP in Italy about whether the Kentucky Wildcats or the Wisconsin Badgers would win a tournament basketball game back home. The guy had told him that the badger was such a brave and tough animal that it had been known to drive off a full-grown bear, if it invaded its territory. He’d said Wisconsin was called the Badger State, not because those animals were more common there than other places, but because the early miners were too busy to build homes. During the brutal winters, they were forced to live like badgers in holes they dug with their shovels into hillsides or abandoned mine shafts.
His mind seized on that. They burrowed in with shovels as if they were human claws…Had Mariah been hit in the back of the head by a sang spade like Junior Semple’s? Drew knew it wasn’t Junior who did this, because he was in jail in Highboro. But the numerous local sang diggers or poachers must have hundreds of homemade spades like Junior’s.
Vern had some he’d made for sale in his store and had said he had a collection of old, homemade ones in his pride-and-joy museum. The poor guy was always trying to get people to visit it, and they hardly ever did. Like Drew, most locals had never set foot up there, and tourists continued to be minimal—unless Ryan Buford’s roads opened things up or word of some feral beast loose in these woods brought in the media and others.
“Let’s go inside,” he told Jess. “As bold as it was for someone to do this on the side facing your house, when we could have glanced out, I can’t do anything else till daybreak. I’m not leaving you alone here tonight. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“You can sleep in my old bed in the back room.”
“I want to be where I can look out here, though the damage is done. He’s so brazen, he might come back. I’ll be fine on the sofa. Let’s go in.”
On the porch, she waited for him to lock the Cherokee and join her. He lit his way with his flashlight trained on the ground, the steps, then the porch floorboards.
“Drew, look!” she cried and seized his arm, turning her flashlight back on and pointing at some dirt she must have tracked in when he sent her back inside.
“No one’s gone in but you, even though the door stood open,” he tried to comfort her. Her boldness had disappeared; she’d gone white as a ghost. He watched her play her light along the porch on both sides of the doorstep, then back inside. Faint smudges of tracks were there, women’s tracks. Hers, of course, he thought. She was trembling again; her beam actually bounced.
“Jess, trust me on this. No one’s gone in, and I’m staying with you.”
“Yes. Yes, thanks. I’m just getting spooked by all this, that’s all.”
He put his arm around her shaking shoulders as they went in, and he shot the bolt behind them.
Jessie couldn’t sleep, and this time, it wasn’t her poison ivy bothering her. Trying to relax, to find a comfortable position, she kept telling herself that temporary insomnia was natural. She was mourning and frightened and furious. She should feel totally safe since Drew Webb, boy of her childhood dreams, man of her heart—and an armed sheriff to boot—was sleeping just on the other side of that door. She’d heard him get up from time to time and wa
lk around, on guard, on patrol.
But tomorrow she would see her mother’s body, publicly begin to face friends and neighbors in what the coroner’s wife had called “settin’ up with the dead.” The dead—that was what was really getting to her, the Chinese customs Peter Sung had told her about the dead.
As Drew had said, those were, no doubt, her own footprints in dirt and dust near the front door. But were her feet that narrow and could she have tracked that much soil in herself? Mr. Sung had said that the Chinese believed that the “spirit of the deceased” returned home about a week after his or her death. The mourning family often sprinkled flour or talcum powder at the front door, so they would know the spirit had come home.
She thrashed her bedcovers again, then sat up and put her head in her hands. A far cry, Mr. Sung had said, from Baptist beliefs, and that was true. Only the Lord could bring someone back from the dead: Himself, of course, and a young girl and His friend Lazarus who had been called out of his tomb after so many days that “he stank.” The scent of death had come from her mother, too. For some reason, despite the smells of the ginseng market that day in Hong Kong, she’d thought she had scented something besides the herbs, something fetid and yeasty, almost as sharp as mothballs.
More than once last night, while she and Drew had sifted through the ginseng leaves that had covered her mother, she thought she’d recognized that very smell. “Do you smell something besides sang here?” she’d finally asked him.
“These leaves were near a dead body for several days. But I didn’t bring the ones that were nearest to her.”
“So I wouldn’t see any blood?”
“I took some of those leaves for evidence the night we found her.”
“To have them tested to see if it was only her blood?”
“Yeah. Those leaves are in plastic evidence bags en route to Frankfort for testing. But it will take time, even if they put it on the fast track.”
“I know those tests are not done in a couple of hours like on TV forensic shows. Drew, have you ever investigated a murder before?”
He had nodded. “Besides a murder in Highboro I worked on, two in the service, both sailors. One was a guy who was dating an Italian girl whose previous boyfriend took offense and a hammer to him. Another, a knifing, the result of a barroom brawl. You know, as tough as that police work was since we were in a foreign country, turning over every rock in my hometown is one hell of a lot harder.”
She’d sympathized, but he wasn’t getting her off track. Finally, in the limp sang leaves she’d found some reddish-gray fur that smelled stronger of the scent that was haunting her.
“Smell this,” she’d told Drew, putting it in her palm and lifting it toward him.
He’d sniffed, frowned, but nodded. “I must not have the nose you do for it, but Seth says that’s badger fur. And the online encyclopedia I used to read about badgers said they have a strong musky odor.”
“You and I both know she wasn’t killed by the ‘attack of a giant badger,’ like some horrible Japanese monster movie! Maybe a badger climbed up that other tree where Seth found fur, and it was just a coincidence that Tyler got that weird picture. Then, maybe, by coincidence a badger scratched Mother’s face after she was put in the hollow tree.”
“Evenly, on both cheeks?” he challenged. “There’s no such thing as coincidence in good police work, Deputy.” She’d thought he was reaching for the badger fur, but instead he had taken her hand in his. A tingle had shot clear up her arm. “I—maybe we—will find him, sweetheart,” he’d whispered. “Promise.”
Jessie flopped back in the bed again. Drew had not just been teasing when he’d called her “deputy” last night; he had meant it as a compliment. But when he’d called her “sweetheart,” whether it had just been a casual term or he’d really meant it, she had been thrilled. Right in the middle of being obsessed with her mother’s murder, she was thrilled.
“Dr. Jessica Lockwood,” she muttered, “get hold of yourself.”
She was going to look like the living dead if she didn’t get some sleep. The wake would go all tomorrow night, although others would sit with her mother’s coffin to give her a rest. Still, she would probably be functioning on adrenaline and anger. In the back of the refrigerator she’d seen some of that G-Women power drink, probably given to her mother by Beth Brazzo, because she couldn’t picture her mother buying it. The stuff was loaded with caffeine and ginseng. Maybe she’d have one of those for breakfast—if morning ever came.
The next morning, Drew and the Merrimans left Jessie alone with her mother’s body in a private back room of the funeral home. When the door closed behind them, she walked over to the open coffin, steeling herself. Gazing at her mother’s still upper torso and placid face, gripping the edge of the coffin, she whispered, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” She sniffed back a sob. “Sorry that you died—how you died. I always meant to say I was grateful you gave me the world, not just Deep Down. I—I understand why you did it. I’m sorry I was so angry. And I’m so sorry it ended this way, but I’ll find out—I’ll try—Drew, too—to make it right.”
Tears blurred her eyes, making two bland, mute faces of her mother. It didn’t really look like her, despite the fact that Etta Merriman had done a reasonably good job with her appearance. Her graying hair was too smooth, her cheeks not smooth enough despite some beige cosmetic putty over the cut marks. The vitality, the very person was gone. No, she would not have an open casket at the wake or the funeral.
But the reality of loss comforted as well as tormented her. In that very second, Jessie decided she would do a sang count, at least a partial tally this year, in her mother’s honor. Her current sang notes had obviously been stolen from her backpack, but perhaps Frank Redmond, whom Mariah had reported to in Frankfort, had some sort of records that could be reconstructed so this year’s tally would have some basis for comparison. Her determination surprised her. She’d had no intention of actually doing the count until she stood here, so close to her mother’s body.
She pressed her stomach and hip bones against the side of the coffin, leaned closer and covered her mother’s folded hands with hers. Cool, waxy. She would place a spray of ginseng plants in them tomorrow. But had some speck of thought remained, hovering around the body? It was as if someone had whispered that she must finish the sang count.
“I’ll do it,” she whispered. “I’ll finish your sang count.”
Though she felt like a fool, Jessie leaned even closer and closed her eyes, trying to concentrate. She’d had a powerful insight in Hong Kong—the feeling that someone was chasing her, perhaps when her mother was in that very predicament. If only she could envision that again, could she possibly catch a glimpse of who had caused that fear—the fatal attack?
But, no. All she could see with her eyes closed was the picture Tyler Finch took of that strange, shadowy shape in the woods. Only she imagined it moving now, coming closer, snapping tree limbs and shuffling through the leaves…with—with something silver in one hand.
She opened her eyes and shook her head to clear the moving image. The picture in her mind had turned from still photo into a movie trailer. She couldn’t trust her own thoughts and fears. She had to bury them and face reality—the wake, funeral and burial, and then she must go on.
Jessie figured the word wake described the way the mourners stayed with the dead all day and night, as if to keep the deceased company. She was exhausted, so she kept dosing herself with G-Women power drinks or ginseng tea. That kept her alert as she greeted and spoke with a constant stream of neighbors and church members stopping by to express their condolences. As the day dragged on, Vern Tarver had stayed the longest.
“A fine woman,” he’d told her more than once, sometimes wiping under his eyes with a handkerchief, though Jessie wasn’t sure she’d seen tears. Finally, in a break from talking to others, she went over to where he’d planted himself at the foot of the casket, as if he were the grieving husband.
/> She took the folding chair next to his.
“I’ve decided to stay around for a while,” she told him. “For one thing, I’m going to finish the sang count for my mother.”
“That right?” he asked, stuffing his handkerchief in his back pants pocket. Unlike everyone else, who came in their workday clothes, Vern was more formally attired than the undertaker had been, in suit, tie, shiny shoes. “But she had so much of the count done—that’s the impression I got. And some of what she counted could be gone by now if you have to start over.”
“Her boss, Mr. Redmond, is going to have to make do with a partial, representative count and extrapolate from there. He’s coming to the funeral and church dinner tomorrow, so I’ll consult with him then.”
“You know, sometimes you still sound like a fancy scientist, Jessie—extrapolate and all that. But that’s great. I’m sure you’re gonna find the count high enough to tell that Mr. Redmond that Deep Down area sang is not endangered. ’Cause if it was, that’d be a disaster in all kinds of ways,” he said with his voice taking a new, sharper edge, as he leaned slightly closer.
If that was a subtle threat, she decided to ignore it. “I’ll be doing some lab work here, too,” she told him, “but I’m hoping I can take Cassie’s job at the Fur and Sang store, at least through your busy autumn season. Seeing what folks bring in to sell will give me an idea of what’s out there, too. Cassie’s picked up some extra money taking Tyler Finch around for his photography—both for his company and his book.”
“Glad to hear that for her. Yeah, Mr. Finch asked to shoot some photos in the store and the museum. Won’t that be great to get some extra folks coming in to see the artifacts I have there, the history of Deep Down?”
“That will be great. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them, either, but I’d like to.”
“You’re hired. Don’t pay much, but you’ll be easy to train since you been around sang all your life—well, mostly.”
