Deep Down (I)

by Karen Harper

  “Tyler,” Drew said and shook his hand. He took the folder and without looking at it, put it under his left arm, tight against his ribs, though he was anxious to see the picture. Buford ambled over. Strapped on his back was a tripod and a distance measuring wheel, like police officers used to calibrate tire skid marks at the scene of accidents. Other surveying tools were laid out near his truck with a pack he was evidently filling.

  “Ryan Buford, surveyor for the Department of Transportation,” the man introduced himself, extending his free hand.

  Drew shook his hand, trying to size up both the man and his surveying equipment. “A lot of things to carry with you,” Drew observed, taking a few steps closer. Laid out on the mossy track of what had once been a road lay a can of red spray paint, a level, a couple of plumb bobs, a bright orange safety vest that resembled a life preserver, a compass and a gas-powered, steel-bladed chain saw with a red handle.

  “That’s a brush ax, for clearing bushes and small trees, government issue,” Buford said when he saw Drew staring at it. Gesturing at the other things, he added, “All tricks of the trade.”

  “Which is surveying roads for what reason?”

  “Although this timber was never heavily cut, some of these roads from the old logging days may need to be widened or, eventually, paved.”

  “For modern logging equipment? Decades ago, selective, minor logging was done around here. If this area’s going to be logged again, the locals will be up in arms.”

  “Like most of us, I just follow orders,” Buford said with a shrug. “I’d guess the roads might be paved for retirement homes, bring a lot of business besides the ginseng into Deep Down. I know that would please Vern Tarver for his general store and museum and make Audrey Doyle pretty happy about new customers at the Soup to Pie and her B and B. I’m staying at her place.”

  “Is that right?” Drew said, knowing full well that man-eating Audrey would consider this guy a tasty piece of raw meat. No wonder she hadn’t put herself in his path the past couple of days. “I heard you were into the sheriff’s office, but not to see me,” Drew told him.

  “I’ve been hoping to meet you, but I know you’ve been busy,” Buford countered. They were like wrestlers, Drew thought, circling each other without managing a hold yet. He could see why Emmy had fallen for Ryan Buford. Unlike guys around here, he was smooth and self-confident without being cocky. He wasn’t quite six feet, but was compactly built and just plain looked like Prince Charming.

  “Emmy said you’ve got quite an investigation on your hands,” Buford went on when Drew just studied him. “Real sorry to hear about the reason for that. I hear Mrs. Lockwood was a lovely lady.”

  “She was. Emmy is, too, though maybe a bit young and naive. But then, that’s what you get with a backwoods girl who has a protective family of a father and four older brothers. Gun-happy, every last one of them.”

  Buford cleared his throat. He glanced at Tyler, but he was fooling around with his light meter. Buford looked toward Drew’s truck; whether he could see Seth in there, Drew wasn’t sure. “Emmy’s a great girl,” Buford finally said. “Well, I’d better get going. Just because I’m out here on my own doesn’t mean I don’t punch a clock.”

  The manila folder was burning right through Drew’s jacket to be opened, but he couldn’t let Buford go yet. “So when did you get here?” he asked as the man started away.

  He turned back. “Just two days ago, on the sixth, right when everyone was out searching for Mrs. Lockwood—that’s when I met Emmy.”

  So Emmy could vouch for his arrival, Drew thought. He’d assigned her to man the office and coordinate the search teams out in the forest, which is where he should be right now.

  “Ever been through here before?” he asked Buford, knowing full well he had.

  “Yeah, couple of years ago. Been down in Florida since then, laying out roads in the Everglades. It’s so different from here, but both beautiful places. See you around town, then,” he said and bent over his supplies.

  At least the guy had not lied about having been here before, but he probably knew he’d get caught on that. With Tyler hovering, this was no place to ask Buford if he knew Cassie Keenan. Besides, she had always given Drew the impression that Pearl’s father was someone local. She’d probably kill him if he asked her outright about Buford.

  “If we don’t get back by the time the retirement homes go up for sale,” Drew called to Buford, “send someone after us. You’re sticking around here, I take it?”

  “For now, until I hear different,” Buford told him as he quickly bent back over his equipment.

  Drew went over to the truck where Seth sat as if carved from wood. Turning his back on Tyler and Buford, Drew opened the folder. Tyler had blown the photo up to an eight-by-ten, but it was grainy. Still, he immediately saw what had set everyone off: a broad-shouldered, big-headed form back in the dim, mottled forest. It reminded him of the silhouette of King Kong more than anything else. He passed the photo thruough the window to Seth.

  “Sure not a badger,” Seth muttered. “Not a bear, either.”

  “A play of light—a freak alignment of tree limbs?”

  “No. It’s something. Maybe we can find the spot. Let’s go.”

  Jessie was actually relieved Cassie hadn’t come with her to choose a casket, because she intended to question Clayton Merriman about his coroner’s report. Her friend had enough to worry about with a sick daughter. Probably something Pearl had eaten, Cassie’d said, but she was taking her into the new walk-in clinic between Deep Down and Highboro today.

  Merriman’s Funeral Home, the wooden, hand-painted sign in front of the old mansion on the east side of Highboro read. Why did they call them “homes,” Jessie wondered as she got out of her car and started up the walk. And Merriman seemed the wrong name for what most Appalachians still called an undertaker; this funeral director was also the coroner and seemed to be such a serious, solemn man. But in this case, it all suited Jessie just fine. At least she didn’t have to go pounding on the door of the county morgue for answers.

  With fluttering expressions of sympathy, Etta Merriman let her in and led her into a carpeted office where Clayton Merriman rose from behind his oak desk.

  “A very brave young woman,” he complimented Jessie, or perhaps he was addressing his wife. Jessie had noticed the other night that he seemed to talk in broken sentences. “Led all of us to where her mother was found.”

  He came around to sit in a maroon leather chair facing Jessie’s, while Mrs. Merriman perched on the edge of the matching settee in the conference area of the office. Jessie didn’t mean to pounce on the man, but she had to know.

  “I’d like to hear the official cause of death. I realize you’ll need to discuss all that with Sheriff Webb, but I want to know.”

  “Yes. Understandable. Blunt force trauma to the head. The death certificate—a copy of it, your property, of course.”

  “She was indeed murdered?” she asked with a shiver she tried to hide.

  “At first, I thought she might have fallen backward onto a rock, but body lividity—the settling of blood—indicates she lay for a while where she fell facedown. Didn’t crawl into that hollow, old tree and cover herself up with the plants.”

  “So—just to be completely clear, you haven’t ruled an accidental death? It is a homicide?”

  “Regret to say, but true.”

  Etta Merriman leaned over to place her hand on Jessie’s. She let her, though her first instinct was to brush her off. “Blunt force trauma to the head,” Jessie repeated his earlier words. “Would she have died right away or blacked out? I’m hoping that fiend didn’t cut her face while she was alive.”

  “No, no, or the lacerations would have bled instead of just showed a hairline of dried blood.”

  “That’s what I told Drew,” she blurted, before she realized she’d said too much.

  But he only nodded. “The initial, crushing blow means she didn’t suffer, wasn’t conscious,
” he said as Etta patted Jessie’s hand again. “Worded in my notes this way, if I remember—‘Deceased received nonsurvivable injuries and died very shortly after the injury, if not immediately.’” Jessie withdrew her hand from Etta’s and gripped her other hand in her lap. She must have made a face, because he went on, “So, no suffering, after the impact of the weapon.”

  “Which might have been what?”

  “Not sure. Something with some length or a handle to provide velocity when it was swung.”

  “May I see your notes or even your photos or sketches?”

  “Only the death certificate until Sheriff Webb gives permission,” he said. “In his jurisdiction, you see.” He rose stiffly from his chair, took a piece of paper from his desk and extended it to her. She skimmed it, then reread it more slowly.

  CAUSE OF DEATH:…depression fracture of the occipital region of the skull with epidural hemorrhaging and ruptured artery from a blow of blunt force…Estimated time of death uncertain because the body was not found for several days—unable to employ readings of rigor mortis or temperature. Legal time of death, 8:17 a.m., September 7, 2007.

  “You put the time of death as last night,” she protested, looking up.

  “The legal time—when the deceased is pronounced by the medical examiner,” he said, somewhat defensively. “First time I saw her body in the woods.”

  She looked down at the paper again. Her gaze snagged on the words, a blow of blunt force. Someone had forcibly taken her mother from her. Elinor had died of a heart attack last year and now this. A blow of blunt force…

  A woman’s voice pierced Jessie’s silent agonizing as a hand extended a glass of water to her. “The best we can do for those we have lost is to honor them by seeing they are properly buried,” Etta said.

  “If they died naturally,” Jessie replied as she took the glass. “If not, there’s much more to do.”

  “It’s a good thing you took evidence photos of the sang berry art,” Drew told Tyler when they reached the sang cove site. He stated the obvious: the berries were moved or missing.

  “I dropped the photos off with your secretary just before I met you,” Tyler told Drew. “I figured you didn’t want to drag them around in the woods—except that one,” he said, gesturing toward Drew’s backpack where he’d put the photo of what he was coming to think of as The Thing.

  “Seth,” Drew said, “I’ll have to show you the other photos when we get back to town. Let’s take a look at the tree where we found her.”

  As they approached it, Seth stopped dead in his tracks. Looking up at it, he almost fell backward.

  “What?” Drew demanded. “You know this place?”

  “A grandfather tree,” he whispered, his eyes narrowed, his head down now as if he could not even gaze on it again. “Old. Sacred.”

  “She was huddled up inside it, covered with sang,” Drew told him.

  “Atalikuli,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “Ginseng—atalikuli, it climbs the hills. To be buried with it is—good. It helps to take you—upward, into the sky above the hills.”

  Behind Seth’s back, Tyler looked entranced; he leaned closer to hear, as Drew asked the old man, “So, do you know this place?”

  Seth finally looked at him. “Yes. By tradition of my people. It was also the place where some hid under leaves—not ginseng, but dried leaves—to escape the soldiers who had come to take their homes, force them away.”

  “On the Trail of Tears?” Tyler spoke up, startling Drew.

  Seth nodded. “And now we have another trail of tears. Now, because I know this place, because of what I said about atalikuli taking the dead onward, upward, you think I killed her and put her there, but I did not.”

  Drew put his hand on Seth’s shaking shoulder, but he couldn’t help picturing that unknown beast from the woods again. A buried memory stabbed at him. When he was really young, his father had told him a ghost story around a campfire. He’d said that, “Indians like Cherokee Seth could make monsters out of nothing, big, furry ones that like to eat kids like you.”

  Back then, brave and cocky, Drew had shaken his head and laughed it off, but he wasn’t laughing now.

  “I intend to hold a sitting up for her—a wake,” Jessie told the Merrimans as they led her into a large back room with caskets arrayed on the carpeted floor and on deep shelves.

  “Why, sure,” Etta said. “My mother used to call that a settin’ up with the dead. Used to be better attended than weddings, if I rightly remember. Haven’t been to one of those for years, but then, we do encourage people to visit the deceased here where we can keep the casket proper.”

  “She had one for my father years ago, so I couldn’t do anything less,” Jessie went on as if Etta hadn’t spoken. “I’ll have a closed casket because of those claw marks on her face, though,” Jessie added.

  “You’ll be pleased how she’ll look,” Clayton said. “But under the circumstances—well, always the family’s choice. No other kin then?”

  “None, but most of Deep Down will come by.”

  Jessie surveyed the choices of caskets and immediately went to a plain-cut but highly polished curly maple one with the traditional flat top, wide at the shoulders and narrow at the feet with handles on the sides for the pallbearers.

  She put both hands on its smooth surface. “I intend to bury her with ginseng plants instead of flowers in her hands,” she said.

  “I just read the article about her work in the paper today. That will be right fine and proper,” Etta encouraged her. “We’ll have you fill out her information for a formal obituary before you leave today, and we’ll phone it into the paper.”

  Jessie felt the formality of the rituals of death now, wrapping around her like a tight, heavy cloak. Just talking about the wake, seeing the coffin—it hurt but it helped.

  “I’d like to see her now, please.”

  “Suggest you’d wait till she’s ready to be laid to rest,” Clayton said with a slow gesture toward the coffin. “She’ll look more like herself then.”

  “Yes, my dear,” Etta said. “I promise you, I’ll have her fixed up really lovely. How about you come early tomorrow and escort her back home in a little procession with the hearse. You can take all the time you want alone with her then, all laid out nice and proper.”

  Nice and proper? Nothing was nice and proper about any of this, Jessie wanted to shout, but perhaps they were right. Besides, she should be home when Drew came back from the forest with Seth and Tyler. Emmy Enloe had phoned after Peter Sung had left to say that Drew had tried to call her. If she’d talked to him, she’d have insisted her take her, too.

  “All right,” she told the Merrimans. “I’ll be back tomorrow midmorning and plan to accompany her back home. I’ve arranged for the funeral to be at the Baptist church in Deep Down the day after that.”

  Would her mother’s killer be at the wake or funeral, she wondered as she left the silent room and went back into the office to help write her mother’s obituary. If so—or if not—she and Drew were going to find him.

  “Look! Look, that’s the general place, I’m sure of it. I recall Cassie, Pearl and I walked here, along the creek!” Tyler said as the three of them bent their heads close over the photo, then looked up at the tree line again. “See, the trunks align, and that one boulder on the ground.”

  “Looks like it,” Drew agreed and started toward the trees.

  Seth came on silent feet behind him. Tyler, off to the side, made a lot of noise and new tracks, but what did that matter now? With the rain and falling leaves shifting around, finding tracks would be a long shot.

  “About here, I think,” Drew said. “Tyler, you’ve got the eye for this. Go on back out where you must have shot the photo—here, take it with you—and yell at us when we seem to be at the right place where this thing—this anomaly—must have been.”

  Tyler looked as if he’d argue, but he nodded and tramped back out with the photo.

 
; Seth, who had been silent since they’d left the hollow tree, said, “Good that you sent him out. He doesn’t want to take living things from the forest, but he wants pictures of it all—same thing.”

  “I didn’t just send him out to get rid of him.”

  “But I see the place already.”

  “You do? I’m not sure from here, so—”

  He thrust out his arm to keep Drew back. “Right here,” Seth whispered, pointing.

  “How can you be sure? I thought we could triangulate the place from Tyler’s position and—”

  “Because,” Seth said, as he bent close to the rough bark of a huge oak, “the bark has snagged pieces of fur here, high up, but I see no claw marks.”

  Drew bent to view the bark at the same angle, his chin almost on Seth’s shoulder. “Yeah, I see it. So it was a big bear rubbing up against it to mark territory?”

  Seth shook his head. “Like I told you, badger,” he muttered, plucking at pieces of gray and reddish fur, then sniffing at them. “Yes, a musky smell. But how can that be when they don’t climb but dig underground when they are endangered or chased?”

  “As you said, that tall, furry-headed thing in the photo is sure as hell no badger and not a bear, either. Maybe there’s no connection to Mariah’s death, because the animal she was killed by was definitely human.”

  Chapter 15

  15

  A knock on the front door jerked Jessie awake. The room lay in the grip of deep shadows. Where was she? Oh, that’s right. She was on the sagging sofa in her mother’s—her own—living room. Besides being emotionally bereft, she’d exhausted herself cleaning the house for the wake and then arranging the chairs and unpacking baskets of food two church deacons and their wives had dropped off. She’d merely sat down to rest but had fallen into a heavy sleep. She snapped on a light; her watch read 7:15 p.m.