by Karen Harper
“I wish I could forget more about my dad.”
Witch hazel bushes grew along the creek bottom, their tight buds almost ready to burst in their autumn show of gold and yellow blooms. Jessie worried that years of plant growth might make the spot they sought look completely different from the picture, but she didn’t say so. She didn’t want Drew to give up on this stab-in-the-dark idea.
“Look, early pawpaws,” she told him. “Mother and I love those.”
“I always thought they were too small and mushy to fool with.”
“You just never had someone fix them right for you, with cream, like custard. When we—when this is all over, I’ll show you.”
They could hear the distant thunder of Bear Falls. Jessie recalled what Seth Bearclaws had said about his Cherokee people being herded together like animals to be driven westward on the Trail of Tears. Then she saw the big rock.
“Drew—there!”
He nodded, looking out at it, then took the picture from her trembling hand to study it again. They shifted their position slightly, so the rocks were aligned just right. “It sure looks like it. There are enough flat rocks along here that someone could easily get out to it—walk on top of the water, so to speak.”
“Even if there was rain that first night, you said the hounds picked up her scent, then lost it. Maybe she walked along the creek for a while, then walked the rocks, and that’s where they lost the scent.”
“That could also mean she crossed the creek—that the sang site she sought was not necessarily on this side.”
“If it is in a cove, it probably would be on the other side. I hope the daylight and weather holds, so we can really look around.”
She put the picture in her backpack. Then, with Drew right behind her, their arms outstretched for balance, they went from rock to rock until they stood on the large one. “This is where he proposed to her, I’m pretty sure,” she told him as he craned his neck to look all around. “She told me once it was like their own little island.”
“So you think the spot they got the sang for money to get married is close to here?”
“I think we should look starting at the foot of the mountain where we might find a hardwood cove full of sang.”
Standing on her parents’ little island in a sudden slap of sun, their eyes met and held. He reached for her hand and squeezed it. Being with Drew gave her courage, but it was still what they hadn’t said that scared her.
Cassie couldn’t believe that Tyler had the nerve to return, after she’d told him to stay away. But here he came in that rental car of his, bouncing down the lane, driving right up and parking on the other side of the split rail fence where she was picking her early bittersweet crop she’d sell to craft stores. And what she hated most of all about his daring to come back, after just a couple of hours, was that she was glad to see him.
“Cassie, I know you’re still upset, but don’t run away,” he said as he got out of the car, hauling a camera with him. He didn’t even stop to close his car door.
“If you think I’m posing for more of your dead-way-of-life Appalachia pictures, you got another think coming!” she shouted.
“Just listen to me for a minute. I have to show you something in one of the photos.”
“You did show me the photos,” she told him, still madly snapping off the twigs of red-orange berries. “Real modern, how that digital camera can pop up all the pictures on its little screen. Why, it makes the old cameras we folks who are fading away use look like they—and we—are in the dark ages. How about a title like Dark Ages Appalachia?”
“Cassie, I’m sorry you took offense, but I’m serious about this. Look, please,” he said and thrust the camera at her over the fence.
“It isn’t something about Mariah, is it?” she asked, finally looking up at him.
“I don’t know. I can’t tell what it is.”
His brow was crumpled into a deep frown. As mad as she was at him, she wanted to reach out and smooth it. She put her ragged bouquet of bittersweet on the ground. Her fingers were dirty, but she wiped them on her jeans.
“All right, let me see it.”
“I thought you might know what it is,” he went on as he handed her the camera. “I can’t recall exactly where this was taken—before we got to Bear Creek and hiked on up?”
He was really distressed, but that was fine with her, she tried to tell herself, as she looked at the small photo on the screen. It was a picture of her and Pearl, holding hands, walking along Bear Creek before they went on up toward the falls. Tyler had taken the picture from the mountain side of the creek. The edge of forest was only about thirty feet behind them and full of shadows, but there was one really strange shadow, or tree trunk or…
“You mean that big, dark thing back in the trees?” she asked.
“Yeah. You said the bears are higher up.”
“Maybe it’s just a trick of the light. A large tree trunk mixed in with the others. The sun kept popping in and out.”
“I know, and the forest canopy made things look mottled, but…”
“It is really funny, isn’t it? I mean, not ‘ha-ha,’ but weird. Can’t be a person—too tall, with a strange-shaped head. What in tarnation?” she muttered as she continued to squint at it. She turned away, shaded the screen with her hand to see it better. “Black bears don’t stand that tall,” she told him. “This would be more like a Kodiak or grizzly, and we don’t have them around here. I—I guess it could be a really tall person, but wearing what—and why? Can you make this bigger?”
“I’ve already tried, but it gets too fuzzy to make out. It needs more resolution with the zoom—to be clearer, I mean.”
“Don’t talk down to me, New York City photographer. What about printing it out then?”
“Yes, yes, I will, but my laptop and printer are back in Highboro at my cousin’s place, and I might even need more enhancement equipment than that. You said the sheriff and Jessie were going toward Bear Creek today. Maybe they’ll see it.”
“Yeah, but if it is something weird, what if it sees them first?”
In the first hardwood cove, when Jessie saw the bony bundle on the ground, she screamed. Drew racked his shotgun with a loud clack-clack and rushed to her. She stood with her hands pressed to her mouth, staring at the thing sprawled in the leaves.
“A deer carcass, that’s all,” he said, throwing an arm around her shoulders and pulling her against his side. Her shoulder bounced his shotgun. His weapons had bothered her before. Now they made her feel a bit better.
She nodded but could not stop shaking. Yes, she saw what it was now, the deer skull and spine with tattered gray hide clinging to it. It made her sick to see that scavengers had scattered the leg bones. Predators had no doubt been gnawing at it…Her mind would go no further.
“Come on,” Drew coaxed and pulled her away. “Don’t let that get to you. Let’s keep looking. One cove down and more to go.”
“Seth would love to find something like that,” she told him as they walked away. “He loves to collect skulls from the forest.”
“I know. That cove had hardly any sang but the next one might.”
He was right. The next cove under Snow Knob had more sang than she could have imagined, nodding its stems and bounteous yellowing leaves at them, sheltered by the cool rock and the embrace of tall poplar, beeches and maples. Rich loam, leaf litter, water runoff—the perfect place for ginseng to flourish.
“Amazing,” she said. “I’ll bet this is what ginseng patches used to look like before everyone learned the value of it, medicinal and fiscal. If only there were places like this where I could get some roots—maybe leaves too—to test in my lab,” she said, walking through the nearly knee-high plants. “Either no one has found it for years, or it’s one of the places mother counted and told no one about. Drew, look. Over here! Someone’s dug out a part of the patch, and in a really strange way.”
He came over quickly. “It looks like some sort of pattern—a des
ign,” he said.
A curved spade or hoe had slashed the earth where sang roots must have been dug out. A hoe like Junior Semple had been using?
“Mariah didn’t mark her sites in any way, did she?” Drew asked.
“Not the few times I was with her, not that I recall. But look at the sang berries, too, carefully arranged. What is that pattern supposed to be?”
“Not sure,” he said, squatting down to examine the bloodred berries closer. “Spears? Long claws? Fangs?”
Jessie shuddered. The sight of that ravaged deer carcass jumped into her mind again. “I wish we had Tyler Finch with us,” she said. “If we had a photo of this design, maybe we could figure out something later.”
“You’re sure it couldn’t be related to your mother’s count? I mean, like she put the berries there to mark the number or the site. Or when she saw someone had dug here, she replanted?”
“Not like that. To replant, you just sling them, imitating the way the plants drop them.” She moved outside of the edges of the patch to view the berries from the opposite direction. Were they in the pattern of fence posts, meaning keep out? No, Drew was right. It did look more like teeth or fangs. But then she caught sight of something bright yellow on the ground beneath the yellowing sang and moved to it.
“Drew—a pencil,” she said, picking it up carefully by its eraser, a big one fitted on the end over the smaller one.
“Could it be hers?”
“It’s what she used—the extra eraser, too.”
He walked with her shoulder-to-shoulder as they searched the rest of the area, looking around and under the sang. “Jess, this area over here looks trampled,” he said, moving toward the other edge of the patch. It was on the far side, back toward the path they’d walked in on but in the other direction.
Jessie looked down where he pointed. “Could someone kneeling have made this?” she asked.
“Or someone fell here, or—I don’t know.”
“Let’s look both ways along the path from here.”
“You’d think, as late in the day as she must have been way up here,” he reasoned aloud, “she would not have gone farther into the forest. She must have been heading back the other way at this point.”
“Unless, when she was here, she thought she’d look around to see if there were more strange hoe marks or berries at another sang patch farther in—if these designs were made before she got here. I’m still praying she didn’t surprise poachers and run into trouble with them.”
Clutching the pencil as if it were a lifeline, keeping Drew in sight, Jessie started down the deeper forest path just behind him. He held his shotgun up as if he expected trouble. Her pulse pounded. Yes, there was another small patch of sang ahead, its autumnal leaves beckoning. Spotting it before he did, she started for it at a good clip.
“Drew, look, over there!” she called, pointing and cutting through the fringe of goldenseal that so often grew near sang. Again the deep, curved hoe marks, some dug sang and berries, this time arranged in a primitive bear head. And, radiating from that head were the strange lines again, but all pointing in the same direction.
“Are we looking at more of Sam Bearclaws’s art?” she asked. “Bear’s teeth, like he wears around his neck? Could the design be a warning?”
“I don’t know,” he muttered, frowning as they walked farther into the patch. He kept looking ahead, all around, instead of down. “I realize he didn’t like her counting the sang, but if the count was low, he should have wanted her to report it, so the government would protect it. You don’t think that carved tree trunk was some sort of atonement for his harming her?”
“You mean the hands protecting the ginseng could actually be his?” A shiver snaked up her spine. Just this morning, Jessie had brought that carved piece into the very heart and hearth of her mother’s home. What if Sam had actually meant it to be a sort of tombstone or memorial to her because he knew she was dead?
“He did tell me,” she said, “there’s a Cherokee saying that only one in four ginseng roots should be harvested, and I’m sure he’d want to replant.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“When I went to thank him for carving the tree trunk for my mother.” Drew shot her a stern look. “Well, you didn’t tell me he was a suspect. I can’t help it if he is now, maybe the number one suspect.”
“The sang does look ceremoniously harvested, but who knows what the Chinese customs are—or who would like to blame something on Seth,” Drew said. “Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
“Drew, her pack!” she cried when she spotted the big, old denim bag. On shaking legs, she rushed to it. “I bought her a new backpack this winter, but she must have still preferred this one. She’s been here! Yes, this is hers!” she cried and fell to her knees to hug it to her.
Lifting the shotgun, Drew went down on one knee beside her as he scanned the area. “Check what’s in it. See if her counts and notes are there.”
“It doesn’t feel like anything is inside,” she told him, still holding it to her before she slowly opened it. “See, nothing.”
“Then someone emptied it, and it wasn’t some forest creature. Bring it. Let’s keep looking.”
“Should I call for her?”
“If you want, but…”
“But what? Drew, she could be out here hurt. However this looks, we can’t give up on that possibility, can’t give up on her. Mother! Mariah Lockwood! Mother!” she cried, but her voice broke on a sob.
“Mariah!” Drew took up the call. “Mar-i-ah!”
They strained to listen. As the wind picked up and shifted directions, they heard only rustling leaves and their own footsteps. The third cove they came to was also partly stripped of its sang and marked with the red berries. But this time, they could both tell what the patterns showed.
“Claws or teeth, maybe,” Drew said, “but I’m betting on arrows, pointing the way.”
She could barely breathe. “The way to what?” she whispered.
They went different directions around a massive, hollow red cedar, the kind the Indians and early settlers used to take shelter in during storms or snow, the kind of tree that was sacred to Sam’s people.
Nothing but more trees lay ahead, thicker in the deeper woods. Had they missed the meaning of the arrows? But now, with the change in wind direction, Jessie smelled something. Not skunk. Dear God, not something dead?
They circled back. Then, within the hollow shelter of the cedar, mostly hidden under slashed and dying sang piled inside the trunk, there she was—or what had been Mariah Lockwood.
Chapter 11
11
T he awful scent of death reached for them as they gaped at the half-obscured body, mostly shrouded by the dying plants. Mariah was curled up with one arm thrown across her head as if to protect her face. The thin band of her wedding ring glinted on her stark white, waxy finger.
Jessie heard a woman scream, “Mother! Mother—noooo!” Another scream rang in her ears as she pushed past Drew to run to the tree. The woman screaming—it was her.
Drew’s iron arm hit hard around her middle, knocking the breath from her. When she fought him, he picked her up, draped over one arm while he dropped his shotgun with the other. Her rear and the backs of her legs pressed into his hips as he bent over to stop her thrashing.
“Jess, no, she’s gone! You can’t touch her, go to her. We have to stay away!”
“I have to see—”
“No closer. Crime scene!”
His words pierced her panic. Crime scene—crime. She sucked in a huge sob. Drew, steady as a rock, held her to him, wrapped in his arms. Finally, the trees stopped spinning. She almost regretted that her brain cleared. Shock and horror had been easier than this smothering devastation.
Had her mother huddled there and died? Of an injury? Hiding from an animal attack? A human animal? Had she been murdered by a poacher?
“If someone killed her, I’ll kill them!” she cried so bitterly she didn
’t know her own voice. She tried to wrench free of Drew again.
“Stop fighting me!” He sat her down tight against him, pulling his shotgun into his reach. At first she sobbed so hard she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk. Then, holding to him, she quieted. Drew still wasn’t looking at her, but, with his hand on the gun, scanned the area. “We don’t know for sure it’s murder,” he said, his voice raspy as if he, too, would cry. “She might have hurt herself somehow, then left those arrows to show a rescuer where she was and cut sang to hide under and keep warm at night. Stay here a minute,” he ordered and pulled away to stand and go closer to the tree.
“I’m not leaving her,” Jessie choked out, swiping at her slick cheeks with the sleeves of her jacket. “I’m not leaving her here alone any longer.”
Still looking around, then down at Mariah’s body, Drew held his breath and peered closer, then hurried back. “We need help, but cell phones and even my two-way won’t work from here. We’re going to have to hike back out, then get help to return for her body.”
“I said, no! We can’t leave her!” she said, scrambling to her feet. “I’m staying with her if you have to go for help.”
“Jess, this area and the other three sang sites have to be preserved the way they are, and I’m responsible for that. For more than one reason, I can’t leave you here.”
“I won’t touch her. I don’t think she got there on her own. Someone did this, and we’ve got to find out who.”
“Which means we’ll have to find out why.”
“Fear of a low sang count.”
“It may be more. But I repeat, I can’t leave you here. I’m going to have to be the one who secures the site. Can you handle a handgun, a repeat fire Beretta?”
She hated guns; she’d never fired any kind of gun, but she swiped at her tears again and told him, “I can handle anything I have to, to find who did this. I got us here, I can get out, then back again with help—if you’ll take care of her.”
Without a word, they hugged hard. She pressed her face against his shoulder.