by Karen Harper
Then she heard her skull crack. No, a gunshot. The Thing that was a man still swung his spade, but missed her as he crashed headlong across her, a bright crimson flower blooming in the middle of his head. Lying close to her, he made a gurgling sound, then didn’t move.
Startled, Jessie stared up at the patch of sky where he had towered over her. Someone scrambling closer. Dizzy, still breathless, she tried to turn her head.
Cassie! Cassie stood over her with an old gun in her hands. Then, ignoring the dead man, her friend fell to her knees and hugged her. The pain was staggering, but that didn’t matter now.
The sound of a single gunshot crazed Drew, but at least he knew where someone else was now. He cut off the path into the trees, running hard, trying to protect his eyes from twigs and limbs.
None of the murders had been by a gun. It could be some local hunter or poacher. It had sounded like an old hunting rifle. Cassie hated guns, and he didn’t think Jess had one. Most women around here could shoot, but guns were pretty much a man’s world.
He burst into a small clearing. His entire life flashed before his eyes as if he were dying. Jess on the ground; Cassie hovering. And, from the looks of the man in a monster suit—Ryan Buford, deader than dead.
Cassie cried out until she saw who he was. “Jessie, Drew’s here,” she said, as he knelt over Jess next to Cassie, trying to assess if she was hurt. Cassie looked dazed and Jessie like she was in shock, white as a ghost, shivering, obviously in pain.
“Drew’s always here,” Jess whispered, not looking at him, but beyond at the sky. “Here in my heart, even if his father throws him out again.”
“She’s out of her head,” Cassie whispered. “I killed him, Drew. He was going to smash her head, and I—”
“It’s all going to be all right. I know it’s going to hurt her, but I’m going to carry her to the Cherokee and drive her to Highboro instead of waiting to get a squad way out here. He’ll keep. Bring both guns. Come on.”
“I think she fainted.”
He felt for her pulse. Rhythmic but weak. It wasn’t until he blinked and tears flew that he realized he was crying.
While the emergency room doctor and a nurse set her arm and put her shoulder in an elastic wrap connected to a sling, Drew never left her side. At least she thought so, but she was so doped up, so out-of-it that she had even thought she’d seen him crying.
When she woke in a hospital bed, he was still there, pacing the small room. Cassie sat on a chair at the foot of her bed. When they saw she was awake, they both jumped up to hover over her.
“Did all that happen?” she asked. Her voice was a raspy whisper. She tried to clear her throat.
“Damaged larynx,” Cassie explained, “but they said it will heal. We’ve all got to heal.”
“How did you know where I was?” she asked them, despite her raw throat. It helped to whisper. Maybe she’d just talk like this the rest of her days—it sounded sexy, but her shoulder-to-wrist cast and other wrappings made her look like a mummy from a horror show. A horror show—was the nightmare of murders over now?
Cassie was talking. Jessie tried to focus on the words. “I wasn’t trying to find you, but him.”
“She saved your life, Jess,” Drew said, bending over the bed and gently stroking her left cheek with the back of his fingers. At least, Jessie thought, Buford didn’t have time to cut her the way he had her mother—at least not that cheek. But what about the other? She was suddenly afraid to ask. “When I saw Vern’s store was closed, I came looking for both of you,” Drew explained. “But I would have been too late.”
“Never too late,” she whispered. “We are getting a late start but not too late.”
He nodded as Cassie said, “I think that’s my cue to take a little walk to the waiting room. Tyler’s there with Pearl, but he’s got to fly out to Beth’s funeral. I’ll go tell them you’re doing fine—and about to be finer. Is—is it okay if I go, Drew?”
“Sure. I’m not worried about you skipping bail.”
Cassie bent to kiss Jessie’s forehead and, with a little wave, went out.
“Don’t talk if it hurts,” Drew insisted.
“Nothing hurts anymore. But—Cassie isn’t under arrest, is she?”
“No, but I imagine there will be a grand jury convened to consider an indictment for her shooting her former lover.”
“But she did it to save me. Otherwise, she never would have…” She stopped talking, not only because her throat hurt, but because she remembered those poison herbs Cassie grew and stored. She’d admitted she’d gone looking for Ryan, and she just happened to have a gun with her, although she hated guns. “Are you sure she’ll be all right?” she choked out, then took a sip from the water glass Drew held to her lips.
“With both of us testifying for her and the fact she feared for her life in those woods—which is where we’ll use Tyler’s photo and testimony—I’d bet on it.”
“Drew, I thought the murderer was Vern. That’s why I locked him in his storeroom. I hope he’ll forgive me.”
“A customer finally heard him shouting and got his manager from the store next door to let him out. With that costume he had in his closet—which he said he needed to take to Highboro to get dry-cleaned before Tyler took his photos—he says he understands. But I’d try working for him for free for a while, if I were you. He admitted he lied about how he parted from your mother, too. It’s been eating at him. Besides, the illustrious sheriff of the county was convinced that Peter Sung was to blame. I came that close,” he said, holding his thumb and finger an inch apart, “to having him arrested in Lexington, and I don’t think he would have been quite as forgiving as Vern.”
“If you’d known he’d put one of those tracker dog collars in my purse, you would have nabbed him for sure.”
“Did he? I’m tempted to report his attempted bribes. But that’s small potatoes next to the big lumber industry lobbying scandal that’s about to hit the fan. Still, it will be worth it to get rid of the ‘cut and get out’ scheme Buford had set up, with him getting a huge cut of their profits.”
“A huge cut,” she echoed, again trying to put her right hand up to be sure her face wasn’t cut, but she was tethered to IVs.
“Your face is beautiful—and uncut,” he added, as if he could read her mind. “I see Mariah in you. Listen, Cassie’s going to finish the sang count you had planned. Depending on your other professional plans, you can get your ginseng leaf lab going in Deep Down, and she can do the counts in the future—or maybe both of you together—if we can convince you to stay. I know you’d be giving up a lot, but—”
“But, deep down, it’s where I want to be. I’ll see if I can get a grant, commute once in a while to the university.”
“Then, how ’bout I start really sweethearting you, as they used to say in the old days?” He leaned down to kiss her check, then, when she turned her head slightly, her mouth. The kiss lingered, both yearning and promising so much more.
“It’s about time,” she whispered, though she wanted to shout. “Too much of two separate lives have passed since we both tried to get things started and were rudely interrupted.”
“We’ll make up for all we’ve lost, I swear it, my love. My partner.”
Though she was exhausted, sore and so doped up she could hardly move, she could have flown.
On an early summer day, the thirteenth anniversary of the day they’d been parted in Deep Down and the six-month anniversary of their marriage, Jessie and Drew made a sort of pilgrimage. They stopped at the spot where they’d been found making love so long ago. In the middle of the day, in the sun on the grass, they made love.
“To seal the deal,” he’d told her breathlessly when they finally sat up and reached for their clothes.
“I’ll say,” she said with a sated smile. “We’ll show them who should be together! You know, I think we should meet here on a weekly basis.”
“Too close to the nosy Miss Pearl Keenan and her herb-hunting
mother,” he said, with a grin. “Besides, although I wouldn’t mind a photo of us together here, I wouldn’t trust Tyler not to put it in his next Wildlife in Appalachia book.”
As Drew had predicted, the grand jury had not indicted Cassie for her former lover’s death. She and Tyler were closer than ever and were talking about a Christmas wedding. Tyler still went back and forth to New York, twice taking “his girls” with him. When he was in town, he lived above the sheriff’s office in Drew’s old rooms.
Holding hands the entire duration of their long hike, Drew and Jessie walked through the forest to the grandfather tree and laid a spray of roses there from the bush in what had once been Mariah’s garden. Seth kept the hollow tree filled with dry ginseng leaves in the winter, but a neat row of new sang plants sprouted all around it now, also courtesy of the old Cherokee.
“Life sprouts anew,” Drew said.
“It does indeed,” she agreed, and tugged him away toward the creek. “There’s one more spot here I want to visit before we head back.” They were going to a community cook-out tonight, a sort of housewarming for Seth’s new cabin. Deep Down citizens who had murmured against him last year had even provided some of the wood—timber that would probably have been cut and trucked out if Ryan Buford had had his way—and they were bringing gifts for the inside of the new place today. Seth’s building was done so quickly that he had helped Jessie remodel her sun porch into a cozy, useful lab where sang leaves were proving to provide as strong ginsenosides as the more rare and precious roots had.
“Your parents’ little island, where you made your stand against Buford?” Drew asked as she stepped across the stone to the big rock and he followed.
“I felt their love and protection that day here, even though The Thing still stalked me. I’m not afraid anymore when I sense my mother’s presence, and think I hear her voice.”
On the rock, he nodded, and they held hands. “I thought about giving you your engagement ring here,” he admitted, “but I figured it might hold bad memories for you.”
“Which I banish this very minute,” she told him, smiling through her tears, “by telling you here that, as you said, life sprouts anew. Drew, I’m pregnant.”
He looked startled, then he whooped and picked her up and swung her, moss-edged rock or not. “I’m so happy—so happy!” he told her with tears in his eyes, too. Somehow, in this special place, she felt her baby’s grandmother Mariah was happy, too.
Author’s Note
Author’s Note
A s a lover of ginseng tea, I’ve been saving articles on ginseng for years, thinking I might make it “the hook for a book” someday. Ohio, where I live, has some good ginseng areas, but my love of Appalachia made me decide to set this book in eastern Kentucky. Also, as a history buff, I was fascinated by the background of ginseng. It was of interest to such diverse people as George Washington and Daniel Boone, and, in China, to the emperors who guarded their precious Imperial ginseng under threat of death. All this added to my desire to make ginseng a main character in this book. When I read about the outcast race of Siberian ginseng hunters, I couldn’t resist using their unusual costume in the novel.
Two books I relied on heavily (among many others) in my research are the following, both of which make good reading: Ginseng Dreams: The Secret World of America’s Most Valuable Plant by Kristin Johannsen, The University Press of Kentucky. Although I had other research on how ginseng is being used in the battle against cancer, this far-ranging book has an excellent section on this. Also Ginseng, The Divine Root: The Curious History of the Plant That Captivated the World by David A. Taylor, is very intriguing. Additional information on ginseng is available on the Web site of the Appalachian Ginseng Foundation: www.a-spi.org/AGF/faq.htm.
As for Beth Brazzo’s power drinks, much of my research was done by visiting supermarket shelves as well as by noting numerous TV ads and newspaper articles, which promote such products as Diet Pepsi Max and Danone’s new energy drink Volvic Revive, which contains ginseng and guarana. Ginseng’s botanic name, Panax, is the root word for our term panacea, so even in the plant’s name lies a hint about many cultures’ beliefs in its curative powers.
The price of ginseng fluctuates, as do the protective measures each state and the U.S. government set forth to protect the crop. But in December of 2007, as I began this book, “brokers were selling the highly prized Kentucky root for as much as $1000 a pound on Asian markets” and “Diggers who harvest the tiny roots by hand [were] demanding up to $800/pound.” (From the USA TODAY article, “States Seek to get Grip on Wild Ginseng Market,” by Donna Leinwand, December 2, 2007.)
As for the practice of the logging industry (and logging lobbyists in Washington) making it easier to build roads and cut trees, I’ve seen numerous articles on this contested practice, including, “Forest Official Makes No Apologies for Cut-first Timber Policies,” by Matthew Daly, Associated Press, Naples Daily News, Feb. 24, 2008.
Thanks for advice on Appalachian speech to Patty Taylor, who lives in Appalachia; to Jeanie Snell for the supply of “sang” tea; to Heather Kurtz for advice on ad vertising firm campaigns; and, of course, to Don for jaunts through Appalachia as well as for proofreading and putting up with an obsessed author. As ever, to my editor Miranda Indrigo and the great Mira support team, and to my dynamic duo of agents, Meg Ruley and Annelise Robey.
August 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4268-3385-4
DEEP DOWN
Copyright © 2009 by Karen Harper.
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