by Karen Harper
“I’m not sure. I think he’s in shock. He did tell me he hasn’t been here all day. He went back to Bear Creek to look for more evidence about your mother’s murder—despite the fact that Vern Tarver had told him if he didn’t keep out of it, something bad might happen to him.”
“Are you going to question Vern again?”
“Since I only got him to clam up before, I thought my deputy might do that, when she reports into work for him. Maybe it should take priority over starting your sang count tomorrow. I wish I had a wanted poster to put up in his store, but I’d be laughed out of town if it was the one Tyler took of The Thing. I’m trusting you to finesse something out of Vern that will give me a reason to question him again. Peter said he’d be at Vern’s tomorrow, so you could keep an eye on him, too.”
“Yes, good. I’d love to do something to really help. I’ll bring Seth breakfast and see if he’ll let me count sang at his poplar stand first thing tomorrow, then I’ll go see Vern.”
“Even to count Seth’s sang, can you take Cassie along? If not, I’ll go with you.”
Remembering her panic in the forest tonight, which surely was just because she was so upset about Beth’s death and the fire, she nodded. “I promise, I won’t count sang alone. But we’ve got to find out why Seth’s wearing that claw necklace and animal fur.”
“I can tell it’s not badger fur. I think it was a way to honor your mother’s spirit. Gotta go. See you either late tonight or tomorrow morning.”
He walked over to Cassie, evidently to ask her to stay with Jessie for the night, because her friend glanced at her and nodded. Jessie started for Cassie’s truck, thinking how the soot and ash on Drew’s face made him look like a coal miner emerging from the depths of a cave. It was only when she glanced at her own face in Cassie’s rearview mirror that she realized she looked gray-faced, too. She had not realized that she’d cried, but she had white tear tracks running down her cheeks like pale stripes of paint—or ghostly claw marks.
The next morning, Jessie drove to Seth’s with Cassie and Pearl following in their truck. He had accepted the blankets and food last night; today she had a cooler of food and drinks to get him through the day. Drew, exhausted from a long, fruitless stakeout at Junior Semple’s, had gone into Highboro to confer with the coroner. When Jessie had phoned Vern this morning, he’d been only too happy to have her come in this morning to “learn the ropes” of grading and buying sang.
It was still raining, but, with Seth’s permission, she managed to count his sang back in the poplar stand. Today the woods seemed welcoming, not frightening, alive with leaves dancing from the plop of rain on them. Seth even went along with her, Cassie and Pearl, the three females under umbrellas, Seth ignoring the rain. At least he’d washed the paint from his face. He still wasn’t saying much, but, without asking directly, Jessie was trying to get something out of him about her mother’s mention of him in her sang count notes.
“Is this where you cut the sang for my mother’s funeral vases?” she asked him, after she’d done a thorough count of the plants and recorded her findings.
He nodded.
“I appreciate your letting me count it, because I know you never approved of her doing that for the government.”
“In a way, maybe the count will protect the sang. If it’s low.”
“I saw in her notes that she had written ‘poplar stand with Seth.’ Were you going to count it with her?”
He nodded. Praying she wasn’t pushing her luck with him, she asked, “Were you going to any other sites with her? I don’t have her complete notes, so I’m looking for any help I can get.”
“No. Just here. Only here.”
“I appreciate your returning to the area where she died to look for evidence and honor her yesterday—that’s what Drew said.”
“He also said you are going to work for Vern Tarver at the Fur and Sang.”
“Yes. Most sellers will be bringing in last year’s sang as well as this year’s, but I thought it might give me an idea of what’s out there. In this rain, I’d rather not be out in the woods all day.”
“Better there than at the Trader. If the woods are dangerous, I say that place is, too. I thank you for your kindness. Even here in what is called civilization, be careful. More rain with lightning coming,” he added so quietly she could hardly hear him as he turned and started away.
Immediately, the wind whipped up. She and Cassie fought their umbrellas as they followed Seth back to the ruins of his house. He’d told Drew he was going to knock it down to its foundations, then build another with his own hands. What else had he told Drew?
Jessie saw Pearl wave to the old man as Cassie pulled out in her truck, heading for home, while Jessie headed for Vern’s Fur and Sang Trader with Seth Bearclaws’s warning ringing in her ears.
“Bethany Brazzo was killed by a blow to the side of her head,” Clayton Merriman told Drew, stripping off his latex gloves as he emerged from the back room of the mortuary that served as his morgue. “And not one from falling on that ledge.”
Drew’s head jerked up. As tired as he was from his fruitless all-night stakeout at Junior Semple’s, his mind and body snapped to attention. A second homicide. He could feel his heartbeat pick up.
“A stellate skull fracture—star shaped,” Merriman went on, drawing it in the air. “I’d expect a simply linear fracture from a fall. She was probably beyond help when she went over the cliff. But the blood under her head indicates her heart pumped for a little while after she hit the rock.”
As if he recited such horrors on a daily basis, Merriman shoved the door behind him open with one shoulder and threw his gloves into a waste can. The smell from the room bit deep into Drew’s lungs; on an autopsy table in the middle of the room, he glimpsed Beth’s form, partly draped by a sheet. His stomach roiled; he fought to keep his focus.
“And the weapon?” he asked. “Was it shaped like whatever smashed Mariah’s skull?”
“Not definitive yet,” the coroner said as the door swung shut behind him again. “A different pattern could be attributed to a different weapon, or the same one hitting the skull at a different angle. Unlike Mariah Lockwood, Bethany Brazzo had defensive wounds on her hands and arms. I was just going to do fingernail scrapings when you knocked.”
“The defensive wounds indicate she fought her attacker? They weren’t just wounds she’d get from a fall or a tumble to that ledge?”
“Forearms and wrist bruises on the ulnar side of her arms—the little finger side—where she probably lifted her arms to protect herself. Struck with some sort of long, thin pole or shaft, I’d guess. One bone broken in two places. Also bruised buttocks and a broken coccyx from where she may have fallen down in her flight or struggle.”
“And, again, those injuries were not from the fall to the ledge?”
“You find who’s doing this, and I’ll testify they weren’t.”
“Time of death?”
“Working on it.”
“Tyler says he talked to her on the phone about 9:30 a.m., but I don’t just want to go on that, so I’ll be anxious to hear what you come up with. Tyler’s contacted their office in New York, and they’re handling the notification of next of kin. So, could you tell from her position—lividity and all that—if she was pushed over or maybe posed? She looked almost alive, as if she was still running. Damn,” he said, pressing his hands to his head as if he could feel a blow there. “A serial killer in Deep Down?”
“No offense, Sheriff, but you look bad. You need some rest. All this is getting to you.”
“And not to you? Two dead women with their heads bashed in?”
Merriman shook his head and shrugged. “Served in ’Nam. After the carnage there—not only our guys but enemy corpses, women, kids, too—guess I learned to cope. Sheriff, you want to lie down?” Clayton put a hand to his elbow, then withdrew it.
“No, thanks. I’ll be fine.” He shook the man’s hand and headed out. Admirable. Amazing. Despite Drew�
�s years as a marine, maybe he just couldn’t cope with all this, not with Mariah being found like that, and now a healthy, strong woman like Beth Brazzo, beaten, then thrown over the side of a cliff like so much trash.
If anything happened to Jess…She could have been killed when he took her with him to question Junior Semple. She’d hiked out of the area where her mother had been killed to bring help. She’d plunged into the forest again to help Seth. He’d asked her to help him with Vern, where she’d be facing the lion in his own den, right about now. He’d suggested she keep an eye on Peter, too. He wished he could lock her up until all this was over, but he needed her, needed her in all kinds of ways.
Staring at the prominent scratches on the side of his vehicle, Drew hunched his shoulders as the rain beat down on him. Lightning cracked; thunder rolled and reverberated. The storm in the mountains echoed the one in his head and heart.
He got in and closed the car door. Gripping the steering wheel, he rested his head on his hands. He was so exhausted he could puke, but he had a lot to do. If he didn’t get a little shut-eye he’d be no good to anyone, except to whoever was murdering women in Deep Down.
Chapter 22
22
J essie entered the dim, cavernous Fur and Sang Trader and put her umbrella in an old spittoon. The sweet, earthy smell of sang wrapped itself around her, making her miss her mother even more. Rain beating on the roof sounded like snare drums with the more distant accompaniment of bass drums from the thunder. Despite pools of light from hanging lamps, the gray day made it dark in here.
Vern looked up from dealing with a customer she didn’t recognize. “Glad you’re here, Jessie. Be with you in a bit,” he said and went back to loud dickering on prices.
She nodded, then began to look around. The Tarvers hadn’t traded big-time in furs since the 1960s, but Vern had never changed the name of the store, or much else. Though it seemed nearly deserted right now, this was a neighborhood gathering place, the complement to his V & T General Store next door. There, local women congregated; here, it was pretty much a masculine world, but, after all, the vast majority of sang sellers were men. She could hear someone in the back room, which had two pool tables and some video games.
Over the long, wooden sales counter hung a sign she re membered Elinor fretting over. It had attracted her because it was a quote from a Jack London story: “I searched two seasons and found a single root of the wild mountain ginseng, which is esteemed so rare and precious.” “There’s more to that quote,” Elinor, in her best linguistic professor voice, had told Jessie and her mother. “It goes on to say, to paraphrase, ‘I could have lived a year from the sale of that one root, but I got arrested trying to hawk it.’” How amazing, Jessie thought, that there had always been those two yin-yang aspects of what Peter called jen-shen, the great reward and the danger of it, just like with life.
And even more amazing was how she heard Elinor’s voice even now, but not the way she’d sensed her mother’s voice when she first saw her in her coffin. It was different from the way she had somehow shared her mother’s thoughts, her fears, that day she felt threatened in Hong Kong when her mother must have been endangered, maybe even dying.
On the wall between two mounted deer heads, Jessie noted another sign, a typical in-your-face comment from a proud Appalachian who resented being pegged a hillbilly by outsiders: Don’t Worry. We Only Shoot Federal Agents and Relatives.
The bearskin rug on the floor was a classic: claws and fangs on display and some backwoods taxidermist’s version of a tongue hanging out. The fur itself looked antique and not well-preserved. It would be better off in the museum upstairs, but it did seem to balance the hanging stag and doe heads on the walls. The few times she’d been in here when she was small, she’d always felt a thousand eyes were watching. It was the same feeling she’d had as a kid at Seth’s place, only there, everything looked as dead as it was. Here, the living dead had proudly held heads and moist-looking eyes, as if the rest of the animal would step through the wooden walls like in Jean Cocteau’s old silent French film Beauty and the Beast.
Vern and his customer kept arguing about the price and quality of the sang, which, her mother had said once, was standard procedure around here, part of the game. “You’re just lucky I’m willin’ to sell you this grade A stuff, Tarver,” the seller was saying. “It’s the real fine kind. I’d like to grind it up in my sausage mill and drop in some conversation juice, for a pick-me-up tonic with the ladies.”
Jessie knew “conversation juice” was moonshine. Vern said, “Marv, all you old sang hunters tell ’bout as many tall tales as a fisherman. Now, the price stands. Least you ain’t reamed out the roots and jammed BBs in there like one of your Cutshin Creek neighbors did last week.”
“Now, ain’t that a good one,” Marv said, slapping the counter. “Okay, sold for seven hundred and thirty dollars then. Hope them Chinese get a good jolt from it, since I can’t now.”
Jessie wasn’t certain if Peter had arrived yet, but his car wasn’t in front. Still, she’d heard he sometimes parked in back, as if he knew his black Cadillac stood out like an ebony-polished fingernail amidst the sore thumbs of the trucks. He could be upstairs in the apartment Vern let him use, next to the two-room museum. She’d always thought that letting the biggest sang dealer in the state stay above this store was like letting the fox into the henhouse.
Vern rang up the sale from his old metal cash register, though she knew his scales were digital and he kept a state-of-the-art safe in the back room. She’d never known him to have a cell phone, but then, they didn’t work consistently around here. She’d heard he had a PC but kept it at home. Vern might seem to be clinging to the past, but he did well enough in the present as ginseng middleman. She wondered if the prices for Kentucky sang were still one thousand dollars a pound on the Asian market. It seemed she’d been in Hong Kong ages ago when she’d heard that price, but it had been less than two weeks. An eternity seemed to have passed since then.
She looked around the Trader a bit more. It made her think of a time capsule. The front room seemed untouched with its shelves of candy bars and a soft drink machine. Vern’s office shared the back of the building with a storage room and the game room, which boasted twin pool tables and the Nintendo and video games advertised in the front window. She wished she could search his storage and office areas for the rest of her mother’s sang notes. Whoever had those also had a lot of questions to answer.
Hearing the click-click of pool balls, she meandered back to glance inside the game room. To her surprise, Ryan Buford bent over one of the tables, playing solo billiards.
“Hey, how you doing?” he asked, evidently recognizing her at once, even in the muted lighting from the fake Tiffany lamp over his table. He straightened with a pool cue in his hand. “I couldn’t work in this rain, so I have a little downtime. I’m really sorry about your mother.”
“I appreciate that. I saw you at the funeral with Emmy.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think I should stay for the dinner, though, being an outsider.”
“You would have been welcome,” she said, walking closer. He was the only one in the room. He’d cleared the table of about half its colored balls. If she played her own game just right, she thought, maybe she could find out if he knew Cassie, especially from the last time he’d been here. She could hardly just demand to know if he’d fathered Pearl and then deserted both of them. She recalled that Seth didn’t like this man at all. He’d said something about his killing trees, but deciding what vegetation stayed and what went must be part of a surveyor’s job. Maybe she should test the water with Seth first, then come around to Cassie.
“Did you hear about the fire at Seth Bearclaws’s place last night?” she asked.
“Yeah. Vern told me. He said it was ‘a bear’ to put out, but I thought that was a pretty sick joke.”
“Vern doesn’t think much of Seth.”
“Yeah,” he said, lowering his voice, “so I gathered. I he
ar the fire was arson, too. Makes you wonder who’d want to burn him out, but I’ve heard some murmurings that he might have had something to do with your mother’s loss.”
“Did Vern say that, too?”
“No. Maybe it was just something Emmy overheard.”
“She’s a very nice girl.” Jessie leaned her hips against the other table and spun the cue ball across it, where it bounced off the edge and came back. Like Cassie, she suddenly felt protective of Emmy, but she didn’t want to scold this man so that he clammed up.
“Yeah, her bright outlook on life keeps me going. But I’ve been told by her employer and self-appointed guardian, Sheriff Webb, to watch myself with her. He mentioned her trigger-happy father and brothers, but they seem nice enough to me.”
If he’d charmed that bunch, Jessie thought, he was even smoother than she thought. “You didn’t run into any of the Enloes when you were here last time?” she asked, still trying to get the conversation around to Cassie. He shook his head and hit another shot; the ball he’d targeted bounced off the bumper twice and clunked into the pocket. “Well,” Jessie went on, “I guess Emmy herself would have been pretty young then. When was it you were through here last?”
“Five, six years ago,” he said. “Camped out and didn’t mingle much.”
“Didn’t you make any friends? You seem to have made them this time.”
“I try to get along wherever I’m sent. I move around quite a lot for work. It’s not only the military recruits who hear, ‘Uncle Sam wants you!’ Same goes for us government employees. You know, have government-issued surveying equipment, will travel.”
He was as skilled as Peter Sung at shifting topics. “I’m sure it’s much nicer at Audrey’s B and B,” she added, “than wherever you camped out last time.”
“Yeah. Good home cooking at the Soup to Pie, too. So, Emmy mentioned you’re going to pick up where your mother left off with the ginseng count.”