Deep Down. Karen Harper
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“I don’t want you getting hurt. You should be here, in case word comes about Mariah’s whereabouts.”
“You mean I’m allowed to stay here now?”
“Yes, but don’t make this—”
“Difficult? It is, Drew! I’m going with you. Please, or else you can just lock me up in your jail cell!”
He opened his mouth to say something else, then just shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. “All right. You just might be of help. But if Junior pulls anything, you do exactly what I say.”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
He cocked his big head and squinted down at her. “You been around marines, ma’am? Then you know the chain of command is not something to mock or ignore. Let me have that calendar,” he said, taking it from her and glaring down at it instead of her. “It may just be our first piece of evidence, not only because of Semples being listed here. Her crossing out of Vern Tarver’s name, after this long string of dates, looks really angry. And if she was upset, maybe he was, too.”
No one answered Drew’s “Hello!” or knock at the Semples’ one-story clapboard house back in Crooked Creek Hollow. Jessie hadn’t been here for years, but the place boasted a typical scattering of buildings—not as ramshackle as she recalled—with deep forests hunkered above. Actually, the house looked newly painted, so maybe raised sang had paid for that. Her eyes took in the chicken coop with no chickens, the old rundown, roofless barn, sturdy smokehouse, and a work shed, all strung up a narrowing valley. Tombstones like broken teeth guarded a small family graveyard, the kind not allowed anymore. She couldn’t read the dates on the mossy limestone markers, but the pioneers buried here had probably known Daniel Boone and Seth Bearclaws’s ancestors, when all of this territory was their hunting ground.
“You got any memories about where Junior’s sang patches are?” Drew asked her in a low voice. He kept shifting his narrowed stare, especially up into the deep shadows under the trees where a ragged dirt path zigzagged upward.
“No, but the patches will be on the northern exposure side of a gully, steep hillside or cove. Ginseng loves its privacy and leaf litter intact. Maybe in a woodlot with a beech or maple canopy overhead and maidenhair ferns and goldenseal to tip us off. I’ll spot it if we walk up in there a ways. See, you do need me.”
He turned and gave her a look that made her knees go weak. She hadn’t meant to goad him. Was he just ticked off, or was that fierce look something else? He put a finger to his lips to signal silence as they went on.
After about a five-minute walk, they heard something before they saw anyone. A thud, crunch, thud, crunch. Someone digging. Maybe digging sang. Though Jessie had been leading, Drew seized her wrist and pulled her back behind him.
“Me first, now,” he whispered as he unsnapped the holster on his belt and pulled out his gun.
Drew noticed a couple of .22 caliber casings on the ground, the choice of rifle shells around here. Junior was one of the few men in the area who didn’t keep coonhounds, so he was grateful they didn’t have to fend those off.
Up ahead, on the breeze, he heard the digging sounds again. Ever since they’d opened that old, black box of Mariah’s, stashed in her closet, he’d had a foreboding feeling that they hadn’t found her because someone had buried her. Talk about Jess maybe having a sixth sense on this! The only capital case he’d worked over in Highboro was when a man killed, cut up and buried his wife in cardboard boxes in about ten different places. That whole investigation still haunted him.
Drew realized whoever was making the noise would hear them soon. Too many dried leaves on the forest floor and this path now, even though the trees hadn’t shed this year’s bounty yet. He’d love to get the drop on whoever it was, but it was probably Junior. He didn’t want any trouble with Jess in tow, so he decided to sing out.
“Junior? You here’bouts? Drew Webb with Jessie Lockwood. Need a word with you!”
All was silent. Then Junior appeared to their side, not where the sounds had been. But Drew had seen many a mountain man move through the woods softer than a panther.
“Hey, now,” Junior said. He had a rifle in his arms, at ease, not cocked. “Don’t you know better’n sneaking up on someone like that?”
“That’s why I yelled for you, like we did down below.”
“Jessie,” Junior said with a nod of his worn, backward baseball cap as he shuffled out from behind the tree. “Any word on Mariah?”
“That’s why we’re here, Junior,” Drew said before she could answer. At least she seemed to be letting him take the lead. “Mariah had a notation on her daily calendar that she was coming up here the day she disappeared. So, did she get here—Tuesday, that is?”
Junior narrowed his eyes under his thatch of thick, gray eyebrows as if he had to consider his answer. Though he was probably about forty-five, his shaggy, salt-and-pepper hair made him look at least a decade older. He was tall and wiry but with big shoulders. He had a pronounced lazy eye, which always made it seem he was looking two places at once, both at you and past you, as if someone else might be sneaking up behind. Years ago, Drew and his brothers used to laugh about that cross-eyed look, but now it just made him nervous.
“Yeah, Mariah stopped by that day,” Junior finally said after he made both of them swear not to talk about his sang patches to others. “She always does a count of a patch of my raised-up sang. To compare almost wild to the real wild, she says.”
“So,” Drew said, holstering his gun slowly, but leaving its cover unsnapped, “where and when on Tuesday, the fourth?”
“Right after dinnertime, ‘bout one o’clock. Set a piece with Charity and me, had some Arizona iced tea Charity bought ‘cause it has sang in it that could be our’n. Then Charity went to see her mother in Highboro, so Mariah counted the spot where I was ready to dig.”
“Would you mind showing us that spot?”
“But I’m telling you, not to breathe no word of any of this layout. Got me a friend other side of Big Blue guarded his forest sang spot like the dickens, but the one weekend he went away all summer, poachers hit and cleared him out of a $200,000 plus harvest. Don’t trust no one,” he said and turned away to hack and spit behind him. “Still, I know you got to look for Mariah.”
Jess said, “We’re really grateful for your help, Mr. Semple. Did she say anything about where she was going next when she left?”
Looking uncomfortable again, Junior shrugged, then said, “Up by Sunrise, I think, but that’s a lot of land. Come on then, and walk behind me, right in my footsteps from here on up. Don’t want no one trampling a sang plant down.”
Drew knew enough about sang to see that there were no plants in this immediate area, so he wasn’t sure why Junior was so touchy. Likely it was just his nature. Drew had had a fair-warning talk with him the first week he’d gotten here because Junior had gone far beyond leaving scarecrows around to frighten off possible poachers. He’d put out word of haints—spottings of spirits or ghosts—and even hung ghostlike sheets in the trees to scare off teenagers who had done some poaching. What Drew really feared, though, was how quick with the trigger-finger Junior could be. Sheriff Akers had said he’d been in jail for a month a couple of years ago for rigging shotguns to go off if anyone crossed a trip wire near his sang patches. He’d been a terrible prisoner, went berserk in his jail cell and was always yelling to get out.
“So how has your crop been this year?” Jess asked him.
“So-so,” he said, though Drew could tell the patch they were approaching had three-and four-prongers, which were mature, valuable plants. But Junior had brought them to a very small, ragged patch, and he wondered if this really was the one Mariah had visited. What if Junior still had a shotgun or two rigged around here, and she’d gotten off the path and one discharged? Would he just bury her to avoid trouble—and a long