Deep Down (I)

by Karen Harper

  The scarlet letter, Jessie thought. An edge-of-the-forest unwed mother who wouldn’t identify the father and an elfin child named Pearl, no less. Elinor would surely see some sort of portent or symbol in all that. In Hawthorne’s novel, the heroine was keeping the man who had fathered her child a secret because he was respected in the community. He turned out to be a Puritan minister, who had his reputation at stake.

  Jessie studied Drew, then Cassie. Why had Cassie asked him to step outside when he’d told her he’d met a man who would pay her for advice about sites to shoot photos? Drew seemed very protective of Cassie and Pearl, but Jessie admired him for that. Maybe he knew who Pearl’s father was; it could be some friend of his. When, exactly, had his younger brothers left town to join the marines? Surely, Drew himself hadn’t been anywhere around Deep Down when Cassie fell in love with someone who left her pregnant.

  She scolded herself silently as she moved away from the window. It was just that she was so on edge that everything looked dark to her, everyone looked guilty.

  As Jessie returned to listening to Pearl read aloud from a book of fairy tales—interspersed with her own babblings about buried treasure and magical spells—Cassie stormed in, untying her scarf. “We’re going into town, Pearl, to meet a man about a job.”

  “In Drew’s big car?” the child asked.

  “No, in the truck. Run and get ready now. Wear your jacket.”

  They had all shared a peaceful breakfast until Drew had mentioned that he’d suggested Cassie’s name to Tyler Finch. Cassie had about choked on the next bite of pawpaw pancakes, so rich with huckleberries and walnuts it was almost like eating Christmas fruitcake.

  “Not a job you like the sound of?” Jessie asked Cassie now as she grabbed her purse. Drew had already loaded Jessie’s bags back into his Cherokee.

  “Grateful for the money, but don’t like Drew fixin’ me up with a stranger.”

  “Oh. But it’s only a business deal.”

  “Never you mind. We got to get going so you can go through Mariah’s house. Thought maybe I could help today if you’re not sure ’bout something there, but now I’ll be busy. I been in there more than you have since January. Pearl, shake a leg now!”

  Jessie went out and climbed into the front seat. Drew started the engine but waited until Cassie and Pearl got in their old Ford truck and roared by.

  “I ought to get her for speeding,” he muttered and followed them down the rutted lane toward the highway. “And ingratitude.”

  Jessie was tempted to ask him when his leaves from the marines had been. She knew he’d been back to this area briefly off and on. But if he had secretly made love to Cassie, he would certainly have stepped forward to claim Pearl and her. Wouldn’t he?

  Cassie couldn’t help it that she was fixing to have a conniption. Drew had more or less told a strange man she’d work with him—maybe go off in the woods with him. Did Drew guess she’d done that before, so reckoned she would again? Yes, she needed the money, but that’s how the other had got started. But this man would be business—only business. Everyone, including Sheriff Webb and Mr. Tyler Finch, would see that clear enough.

  Was that the man, standing there outside the sheriff’s office? Tall and straight as an oak, hair like sunlight and with blue eyes?

  “You just keep quiet now, Pearl, you understand? Your ma’s got to talk money with that man.”

  She got out and pulled Pearl after her. Icicle-blue, that’s what his eyes were. Laws, she hadn’t thought a man had looked that good for—for nigh on about five years. She even felt those dangerous little butterflies fluttering in her belly.

  “Cassandra Keenan, this is Tyler Finch, a professional photographer,” Drew introduced them. Jessie had stayed in Drew’s SUV. Pearl kept hold of a back pocket of Cassie’s jeans. She wasn’t shy back at the holler but about everywhere else.

  “The sheriff says you know the area well,” Tyler said with a little nod as they shook hands and she sized him up. “I’d really appreciate some local expertise picking unique but typical sites.” Wouldn’t you just know, the masculine pine scent of him reminded her of high, pretty places up on Big Blue, and his smile was dazzling as sunshine on the stream.

  “I could do that,” she said, realizing this man was good with words and she was sounding like she couldn’t string more than two of them together. She cleared her throat. “If you need pictures or movies of meadows, trees, hollers—hollows—mountains, you name it.”

  “Then you can name your price, Ms. Keenan. That is, if you wouldn’t mind doing a little modeling, too—just a distant shot or two with the wilds behind you, maybe with you walking away down a path.”

  Cassie stared up into his eyes, ready to say no to that, money or not. Her gaze darted a moment as Drew said his goodbyes and started away. Vern Tarver was leaning in the window of Drew’s SUV, talking to Jessie. No way she wanted to work in that smelly fur and sang trading shop for him again this winter. Why, he’d made her dust all that old, dead stuff in his so-called museum upstairs and do that Chinaman’s laundry, too, when she’d always heard they were the ones with laundries.

  “I’d need to cart Pearl along with me,” she told the eager-eyed Tyler Finch, “least most of the time.”

  “I’d pay extra for a picture or two of her, maybe the two of you together, not a close-up but a shot with the scenery in the distance.”

  “Then let’s talk turkey.”

  “I’m so very, very sorry about Mariah—her going missing,” Vern Tarver told Jessie, as Drew came back and got in the driver’s seat again. Vern patted her arm on the ledge of her rolled-down window.

  “Thanks, Vern. I know you two were keeping company off and on.”

  He nodded solemnly, looking sad but nervous, too. “We were getting serious. Of course, we didn’t see everything eye-to-eye, but opposites attract. Listen, Jessie, I know you and Drew have a lot to do today, but just let me know if I can help in any way. I—I’m glad I realized she had gone missing so I could get folks looking for her.”

  Vern Tarver was the closest thing Deep Down had to a mayor. He owned the V & T General Store, Tarver’s Fur and Sang Trader, and the so-called two-room historical museum above it. Vern seemed to make most decisions for the town, just as his father had before him. He ran the elementary school committee—children older than that went to the consolidated school between here and Highboro—and oversaw the tiny town park and the cemetery next to the Baptist Church, where he was an elder. Though most visitors roomed at Audrey Doyle’s, Vern took in an occasional guest in his big brick house on the edge of town. Peter Sung, the agent for the Chinese Kulong family that bought most of the ginseng exported from this area, had stayed in an apartment above Vern’s store for years.

  In short, Vernon Tarver was Deep Down’s answer to Donald Trump. Jessie supposed that Vern even resembled “The Donald,” with his big build, pompadour of sandy hair and business suits, except they were old ones with wide lapels. Vern was probably the only man within a hundred miles of here whose uniform wasn’t jeans.

  As he stepped away and she rolled up her window, Jessie told Drew, “If we need to make a list of someone who could have—have spirited my mother away, Vern could be a lot of help. Sooner or later, locals and outsiders pass through his stores.”

  “Good observation. And good observations are what we’re both going to need in your mother’s house this morning.”

  “So, like I said yesterday, is Peter Sung in town? If my mother’s sang counts were low and the government stopped exports for a while, he and that Kulong family in New York he represents would stand to lose a fortune.”

  “So he’d have to stop her somehow? Anything’s a possibility, but he hasn’t been around for over a week. Let’s not think the worst. We’ll case her place, look for clues to where to search the forests. If we find no help that way, I’m just praying you can recall some of her sites that were deep in.”

  “I’m ready to do anything I can to find her.” Then she bl
urted out something she had admitted to no one—not Elinor, not Cassie, and, sadly, not her own mother. “I’m feeling guilty that I’m still upset she sent me away to live.”

  He bit his lower lip, then nodded. “My fault.”

  “No, it wasn’t—really. Mother and Elinor had been talking about my going to live with her when it came time for college—the impossible dream for a Deep Down girl. It just—it just happened earlier, that’s all.”

  “It’s hell both loving and hating parents. I know that,” he said, almost in a raspy whisper. He reached over to touch her hand, then quickly put his hand back on the steering wheel as they turned into the hollow where Jessie had been raised.

  The next statement hung between them, but neither of them voiced it: It was also hell both loving and hating what had happened to them in Deep Down twelve years ago. If he insisted, she’d find some way to talk about that later, but she wasn’t prepared to face all that today.

  Neither was she prepared to see Seth Bearclaws sitting on her mother’s front porch, right under the yellow-and-black police tape.

  As Seth stood to greet them, Jessie saw he’d brought one of his big carvings, unless it had been put there since New Year’s. A Cherokee, Seth was one of only a thousand tribal purebloods left, her mother had told her once. For years, besides hunting and trapping, Seth had made his living carving two-to three-foot tree trunks into local animals with chain saw, chisel and knives. At first, she couldn’t tell what was carved from this one, though. Not the usual bear or deer head.

  “Sad to hear your mother’s missing,” Seth spoke first to her, then turned to Drew. “Any news of Mariah?”

  “No, but with Jessie home we’ll have a better shot at finding her. That wasn’t here yesterday, Seth,” Drew added, gesturing at the carved tree trunk. “Did Mariah order that?”

  “A surprise for her. I bring it now so when she comes home, she will have it.”

  Tears in her eyes, Jessie bent toward it, but a shiver snaked up her spine when she saw what it portrayed. In the fragrant, reddish cedar wood were roughly hewn two hands above a ginseng plant, as if the hands were protecting it. “That’s really lovely, Seth,” she told him.

  “Mariah and me used to argue over ginseng, her counting it, allowing it to be taken from the woods for money. It should be for cures right here, not in other countries, not for power drinks for runners,” he said with a sneer, eyes narrowing as he crossed his arms over his chest.

  Seth Bearclaws was about seventy, though with his wrinkled, wizened face, he seemed either much older or ageless. For some strange reason, looking at him, Jessie thought of the old woman in the ginseng shop in Hong Kong, but she shook off that foolish thought. Seth had tattoos all over his arms and even one on his chin, most of them of bear paws and claws, similar to the leather thong necklace dangling long, curved claws he always wore around his neck. Mariah had said the tattoos were not done with a needle but by pricking gunpowder under his skin, a Cherokee tradition from way back. Seth had lived here from way back, too, first with his wife until she died and then alone with his memories and tribal causes. In a way, Seth Bearclaws was the original eco-warrior around here.

  Since he’d protested sang being sold for other things but the herbal cures his people valued, Jessie almost told him about her breakthrough in the lab. It looked as if the ginsenosides from ginseng roots might delay or halt the growth of cancer cells, even tumors, and that could benefit all mankind. But she kept quiet, hoping he might say something more about her mother.

  “But,” Drew said, “this gift means you’re not angry with Mariah over her ginseng counts? That you’ve forgiven her now?”

  Seth shrugged. “When she returns, she will know what this means. That she must be strong to tell everyone the plant count is too low. For years, I was telling her the old Cherokee saying that a person who deserves life must pass by three sang plants before taking the fourth one. Now she understands that, so I bring her this.”

  “A person who deserves life?” Drew repeated. “Meaning what?”

  “He means all plant life is sacred, don’t you?” Jessie put in. “My mother believed that, too, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be good uses for sang or herbs.”

  “But some bad uses, too,” Seth said, walking past them as if the conversation had suddenly ended. He lived not far away, down the creek. Had he walked all the way here with this heavy wooden piece? He surely hadn’t carved it on site. And why had he been camped out on the porch, when he knew Mariah was missing?

  “How could he have brought that heavy trunk here?” she asked Drew.

  “I’ve seen him rolling them, but that would be too far for this. I’m sure not buying the superstitions about Seth around here, that he can call up mythical creatures to do his bidding. I’ll worry about him later. We’ve got to search the house, then get out to some of the sang spots others might have missed.”

  Jessie took a last, long look at the rough carving of the two hands and the sang plant. She should have thanked Seth for her mother. Later, when there was time, she would go to see him and take care of that.

  “First of all,” Drew said, “does anything look out of place—not just moved, but really disturbed?”

  From where they were standing in the front door, Jessie surveyed the place that was once her home. A white, wood-sided house with a shingled roof, it had hardly changed over the years, while she had changed so much. This front entry opened onto a living area, with a big hooked rug and a flagstone fireplace. Six worn, dark wood chairs surrounded a long wooden table that served as the dining area; a store-bought sofa and two hand-crafted rockers faced each other before the long front window looking out over the porch. A short hall led to a kitchen at the back left and two bedrooms on the right with a small bathroom between. Her mother had put modern plumbing in after Daddy died. A long, glassed-in sunporch stretched along the back of the house, a place for storage but a lot of living, too. That was still Jessie’s favorite room.

  It was so strange to be here without her mother’s presence. The place seemed too silent—haunted. “I don’t think anything’s out of place,” she said, going in to look around the main room and kitchen. She peered into the back rooms. “It’s as if she just stepped outside for something. But her denim jacket is gone from its peg by the back door and her favorite old, scuffed hiking boots aren’t here.” She heard a scratching sound and saw that Drew was taking notes.

  “Do you know where she kept her sang records?” he asked.

  “Some in her desk, some in a tin box in the closet—her idea of a filing cabinet.” She sat down at her mother’s pine desk in the front room, one her father had crafted with his own hands, jack-of-all trades that he was. Sliding different drawers open and gently rifling through things, she said, “Believe me, it took some convincing, from both me and Professor Gering—Elinor, to get Mother the sang counting job in this area. I made her take all the modern devices like a GPS and cell phone they offered, but she refused to e-mail her findings in on spreadsheets and snail-mailed them instead. Still, they knew she was the best person to find sang around here.”

  “As I said, we’re going to have to find her sang spots,” Drew said, hovering over her. “Anything about her counts there at all?”

  “No, though I can go through everything more thoroughly later. Let’s go check her lockbox.”

  “Will you need a key?” he asked, following her into the larger of the two small bedrooms. Mariah had made her bed; the familiar wedding ring heirloom quilt looked untouched, slumping into the shape of two human forms in the double bed her mother had once shared with her father and refused to replace.

  “Believe it or not, she seldom locks it,” Jessie said.

  She opened the closet door and the earthy, fresh aroma of the forest hit her with stunning impact. Jessie closed her eyes for a moment, breathing in the scent she most associated with her mother, wishing this were a magic entry into the forest, to the spot where Mariah must have met with some accide
nt. You’re being foolish, she scolded herself. Too many childhood readings of Alice in Wonderland or The Chronicles of Narnia from Elinor.

  Her mother’s closet looked small but roomy, compared to her own walk-in closet at home that was stuffed with clothes, but that made it easy to see what was on the floor. Hiking boots, walking shoes, only one pair of nice-looking flats, one extra purse. In the back right corner of the closet Jessie spotted the black metal tin box, despite the fact it was covered by a still new-looking Lands’ End backpack she’d bought her mother last year. Stubborn as ever, Mariah must still prefer her own, old, shoulder-sling pack.

  Jessie knelt and slid the box out into the room. Drew squatted down to help her. It was about two-feet square and a foot deep and as old as the hills. Sitting cross-legged, Jessie lifted the lid—yes, unlocked.

  “You mentioned about urging people to use locks,” she told Drew, “but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” To her surprise, the papers in the box looked in great disarray, as if someone had pawed through the contents.

  “Is it always that messy?” Drew asked, his shoulder bumping hers as he sat down cross-legged next to her.

  “I haven’t looked in it for years, but it’s not like her. This looks like it’s been stirred.”

  “Or ransacked. Let me carry it into the kitchen so you can go over it better. Don’t touch the lid again, in case we need to dust it for prints.”

  Jessie watched, wide-eyed, as Drew took a pair of latex gloves out of a packet from inside his jacket and pulled them on. That bright yellow police tape he’d had across the front door—now this.

  Her insides churned as a memory hit her hard. “Drew, when I was in Hong Kong visiting a ginseng shop, I had a panic attack.”

  Frowning, he snapped the gloves onto his big hands. “Tell me about it.”

  “I—I got suddenly claustrophobic, even though I’d been really looking forward to visiting such a shop. I couldn’t breathe, the smells got to me and I almost threw up. I’ve never had anything like that happen before,” she said as he hefted the box and bounced it once to get a better grasp.