Kitabı oku: «Deep Down», sayfa 2

2

“You want me to call in more guys with their hounds tomorrow?” Sheriff Chuck Akers asked Drew over the two-way radio. His former boss and mentor, sheriff of the Lowe County seat in Highboro, was out in the woods with one of the search parties for Mariah Lockwood.

Drew was running the rescue effort—he hoped to hell it wasn’t a recovery operation—out of the old house that was now his police station: an apartment where he lived upstairs; downstairs, a reception desk and phone center behind a counter, both run by Emmy Enloe; his office; a supply room and two holding cells. He had no deputy, so Emmy was his entire staff. Today he’d moved her onto the front porch to keep track of volunteer searchers. Usually as quiet as the grave, his office and the whole town were in chaos today.

Drew had just come in from using a search warrant to go through Mariah’s unlocked front door, which he’d secured and put police tape across when he left. Two days ago, he hadn’t gone farther than the kitchen when he went in, looking for Jess’s contact information when the numbers her friend Cassie had given him turned out to be dead ends. Mariah’s place looked neat enough. He’d need Jess to tell him if anything was really disturbed or missing, other than two pairs of old shoes he’d taken to scent the hounds with.

“Drew, you read me?” came Akers’s scratchy voice.

“I read, Sheriff. You’re breaking up, but go ahead.”

“I got me two more groups I can send out tomorrow.”

“I’ll let you know first thing in the morning. We need to call it a night now before it gets pitch-dark. Besides, I don’t trust some of the volunteers to just look for signs of her instead of shooting at anything that moves, like the Shelton kid did. Said he saw a huge buck. I’ve got the woods full of search parties, and I don’t need someone killed,” he said and signed off.

Someone killed. The words echoed in his head. He’d been praying that something terrible hadn’t happened to Mariah. If it had, he didn’t know how he could tell Jess. But then, he wasn’t sure how he could face her, anyway, after all this time. Water way over the dam, sure, but it still ate at him. She was twenty-eight now and he was thirty-four, so that meant they hadn’t spoken for nearly twelve years before that brief international phone call. What happened between them was so long ago—almost in another life. So why did it still haunt him?

He startled when someone spoke close behind him. He prided himself on being aware of people sneaking up, but then Cassie Keenan had always moved as silently as a wraith.

“She’s just nowhere I knew to look,” Cassie called out as she poked her red head in the front door.

“Thanks for searching, anyway,” Drew told her.

Once Jess’s best friend, Cassie was the local beauty, if you could look past the vacant stares, when she sometimes seemed to drift off to somewhere else. For once she didn’t have her darling little four-year-old, Pearl, with her. A wildcrafter like Mariah, Cassie had no husband, never had.

Though an illegitimate child was fairly common around here, she’d never told anyone who Pearl’s father was, and she was such a loner no one yet had managed a good guess. Just the other day, Drew had told Vern Tarver to shut his yap when he’d joked about Pearl being the second child ever born by immaculate conception.

If Cassie wanted to keep that secret, it was fine with Drew, except she was barely making it financially on her own. More than once he’d bought her groceries, using the excuse he appreciated her cooking a meal for him. That was a big lie since she always put strange plants and herbs in about everything she made, and Drew had always favored meat and potatoes—or since his years in Italy, pasta.

“I been to lots of spots with Mariah to gather moss and herbs,” Cassie went on, “but can’t find hide nor hair of her in any of them, nor the sang spots I know. Guess she had to keep her counting spots real quiet, so they didn’t get poached or dug up. I can ‘preciate that—her keeping something to herself. But if she was counting sang at her secret sites, Jessie’s the only one might know all of them.”

“That’s what I figured, too. She’ll be home—here—in a couple of hours. She called when her plane landed in Cincinnati before she caught a commuter to Lexington.”

“Poor thing, driving in the dark to all this. Too bad Dr. Gering died last year, or she would’ve come with her sure. I’m praying she’s not lost her blood mother, well as her foster one. You just let me know when she’s here now, ‘cause maybe I can help her some.” With a flutter of one delicate hand, she was gone.

Cassie’s comments made Drew realize how much of Jess’s life he had missed. He’d never met the woman who had been a second mother to her. After the big blowup here over Jess and him, Mariah had sent her to live with a UK professor who specialized in Appalachian dialect. Jess had come home every August, so he’d heard, but, except for a couple of month-long leaves, he’d been away for years, first overseas with the marines and then as a deputy in Highboro, around the other side of Big Blue.

He thought he’d made a good life for himself, but so had Jess. Though some in town resented her “fancy book-learning,” as far as he was concerned, she was Deep Down’s big success story. He thought Jessica Lockwood made a mockery of the stale, old joke that the only good thing that ever came out of Deep Down was an empty bus.

“Sheriff, how ‘bout I fetch you some more coffee or apple pie? Or you in dire need of a good back rub?”

Audrey Doyle, who ran the only restaurant in town, the Soup to Pie, draped herself in his doorway. He had to admit she’d been helping with things today, offering free coffee to search parties. Unfortunately, ever since he’d been back in town, she’d been offering him a lot more than that and she didn’t like to take no for an answer. With her long, platinum hair and too tight jeans holding in a voluptuous figure, Audrey was cruising for a third husband. He was not interested in more than food and local information from her.

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“You sure are. You’re doing a great job.”

“I’m not doing a great job, because we haven’t found her,” he said, as he brushed past her onto the porch where Emmy and two other girls were sitting at a card table, manning the lists and locations of searchers. He saw several groups coming back into town, some walking, some in their pickups with yapping hounds in the back. He wondered if anyone had taken sang from Mariah’s precious sites, so carefully counted.

Audrey sidled up behind him, close enough that he could feel her breath on the nape of his neck. “I know some folks resent having a sheriff here, but I think it’s long overdue,” she whispered.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said and bent over Emmy’s shoulder to skim the lists. Audrey took the hint and sashayed back toward the Soup to Pie three doors down.

Despite Audrey’s soft-soap compliments, Sheriff Drew Webb knew he had a lot to prove to Deep Downers and those in the surrounding rural areas of his jurisdiction. He had things to prove to himself, too. And now to Jess Lockwood.

Despite the fact he’d been hell on wheels in his younger days, Drew had been sent from Highboro to his old stomping grounds as their first sheriff for three reasons: first, he’d earned a good reputation both in the marines and in Highboro; second, Sheriff Akers was getting too old to leave Highboro and police this area every time something went wrong; and third, because the town, despite its sleepy demeanor and rural charm, was smack in the center of this area’s lucrative ginseng trade, and the state was really cracking down on sang as an endangered herb.

Strange that a plant, a root, had got him his job. But it meant he made enemies, too, every time he enforced the Lacey Act antipoaching laws against those who illegally took or bought sang in these hills. Worse, Deep Downers thought that gathering sang, even in the cultivated forest patches planted by others, was their right. Drew knew he had to watch his back—and he was starting to fear Mariah Lockwood should have watched hers, too.

Jessie Lockwood ached all over from holding herself tense, waiting to hear news about her mother on the cell phone she kept on the car seat beside her—not that cells worked well more than half the time in the eastern part of the “Great Commonwealth of Kentucky,” as she’d so often heard the state called. She felt stiff from the endless flight back to the U.S., mentally fogged from the jet lag and now from this three-and-a-half-hour, twisting drive from Lexington to Deep Down. On a short straightaway, she snatched another swig from her now-cold coffee container.

Darkness had descended like a steel trap about halfway home—if Deep Down was really home anymore—but she knew the roads well. Over and over, she agonized about what could have happened to her mother: a sprained or broken ankle in a groundhog hole; tripping on a tree root; a slip on a mossy stone in a creek, so that she fell and knocked herself out. Maybe she’d run into illegal diggers who had been more than she could handle and had tied or beat her up. But then, why didn’t the searchers find her?

Familiar landmarks swept by as Jessie fought to keep her mind on her driving, her bloodshot eyes on the corkscrew road between Big Blue and Sunrise Mountains. Despite her visit during the Christmas holidays last year, she should have come home in August as usual. She should have visited more often, not let the breakthrough in her lab work and her nerves about facing Drew Webb keep her away. As much as she was grateful for her life outside the hills, she didn’t need a shrink to tell her she still had a deep-seated anger issue at her mother for giving her away. Nevertheless, she should have phoned her from Hong Kong, whatever it cost, to say she was all right and to check how her mother was.

What if she never saw her again? What if she could never tell her that she was grateful for the sacrifice she had made to let her live with Elinor and get an education and—

Deep Down, 3 miles. The sign leapt into her headlights from the darkness.

Three miles and a lifetime back. She was twenty-eight, but it suddenly seemed only yesterday she’d left with Elinor …

“You can call your mother and speak to her anytime you want, you know, Jessica.” She heard Elinor’s voice now as clearly as she had in that big sedan twelve years ago, heading the other way on this road. “My work brings me back into this area often, and I’ll bring you for visits, of course.”

“I still don’t want to leave. What’d you mean when you said on the phone that I was your lies and do little? I don’t lie and I been a hard worker, both me and Mommy, ever since Daddy died.”

A little smile peeked at the corners of Elinor’s mouth. “Of course you’re truthful and a hard worker. Mariah is, too. I’ve been impressed by both of you ever since you first helped me with the vocabulary and the definitions. You see, I didn’t say ‘your lies’ and ‘do little.’ Eliza Doolittle is a character in a play—in a Broadway musical, too. A man named Professor Henry Higgins took her into his home to study the way she spoke and to help her to speak more properly, and I’m hoping that’s one of the gifts I can give you. A bright girl like you doesn’t need to spend her whole life looking for herbs and moss in the woods like Mariah and your friend Cassandra.”

“I was fixin’ to be a wildcrafter, too. It takes lots of know-how in the woods.”

“Of course it does. But there’s an entire world outside places like Highboro and Deep Down. Jessica, as I told your mother, I don’t have a child, and I will give you that wide world—my world—as best I can. Besides, that Webb boy who accosted you is a no-account. He’d ruin you and never look back …”

But Jess was looking back now.

Deep Down, 2 miles

Drew had not accosted her. She wasn’t sure back then what that even meant, but she knew what they’d been caught doing had been powerful and mutual, despite the fact they weren’t even sweethearting and he had another girl. She guessed that was mostly why her mother decided she should go live with Elinor. “I don’t want you breeding Webb young-uns, living in some trailer in a holler!” she’d screeched at her that night. Later, Jessie heard Drew had left, too, joining the marines and living overseas.

But now she was going back to where she and Drew might have to work together to find her mother, going back to where she needed him in a whole new way from how she used to …

Drew Webb had been the most handsome, exciting—if hellfire raised—boy she’d ever known. Sure, he was six years older than her sixteen when everything blew up, but that was real exciting. He’d seemed so experienced compared to her. Why, back then, he’d been to far places like Frankfort and even Ohio, visiting kin. Of course, from the time she fell for him at age twelve till that only night he’d touched her, he hadn’t known she was alive, at least not the way she’d wanted him to. “Skinny and bug-bit,” Cassie said he’d called her once.

That night, Drew had beat up his own father because he was roughing up Drew’s mother. Jessie had seen it all. She’d been taking Gaynell Webb salve for her bruises, from supposedly falling down some steps. When Jessie saw the fight, then Drew take off, she followed him down to Skitter Run, past Fancy Gap Hollow where Cassie still lived today.

He hadn’t gone to see Cassie or her folks, though. He’d gone to wash his wounds and be alone. But Jessie had seen the beating he’d taken and given, seen how Lem Webb treated his wife and kids, though about everybody knew it. So when Drew stalked off, limping and bleeding, she’d followed, to help or comfort him. Fran MacCrimmon was his girl, but Jessie couldn’t help herself. She’d loved him from afar, with his black Irish looks of rakish, raven hair, his don’t-give-a-damn slouch, even his frown below those steel-blue eyes. Writing about him in the diary Elinor had given her the first time she’d visited them, putting herself in his path just to say hi, even following him and Fran one time into the woods to see what they done there …

Deep Down, 1 mile

What they did there, she corrected her thoughts. For years Elinor had teased that she could take the girl out of the mountains, but not take the mountains out of the girl. But Elinor had given her a whole new world. Though it had been a painful transition, Jessie had come to love Lexington and the University of Kentucky campus where Dr. Gering spent so much of her time teaching and researching. They had lived nearby; Jessie could even walk to campus. Since Elinor taught graduate courses in sociology and linguistics, Jessie had come to know many of her academic colleagues and students—people whose interests were a far cry from those of her little hometown. Elinor’s research had taken them to the British Isles, especially to Scotland and Northern Ireland, where the Appalachian dialect had originated.

Jessie’s expanding mind had soaked it all in; soon she’d seen huge gaps between where she’d been and where she wanted to go. How hard it had been to be a curiosity to Elinor’s associates at first. But Elinor had not only studied her but taught and loved her and, slowly, life in Lexington—or visiting New York or London—had become part of her, the new Jessica, a different woman from Jessie of Deep Down.

And when she’d made her own life, attending college at UK, majoring in biology and then choosing to go to grad school and pursue research of her own in the lab, she had finally found a way to meld her old life with her new. Who would have thought that the ginseng that had supported her mother and Deep Down for years might be able to slow the growth of certain cancer cells?

Still, her adolescent years in two different worlds had been difficult. Was she really Jessie or Jessica, or could she manage to be both? When she had come home to visit, she’d tried not to sound uppity as Vern Tarver had called her once. During her first visits, she’d gone back to talking the talk, but a little voice in her head had often corrected Deep Downers, even her mother. She’d been pulled one way and then the other when she moved between her two worlds.

Just northwest of town, her headlights illuminated the entries of three old logging lanes, now mostly derelict and moss-covered. Such roads ran like veins in this area, which had not been mined and had barely been logged. Could her mother have taken one of those roads back into the forested hills to her counting sites? Why hadn’t someone seen which way she went? Why hadn’t she given Cassie some hint about where she was heading?

Deep Down, Welcome, the town limits sign read.

Despite Jessie’s utter exhaustion, she sat up straighter. The tires of her car made a hollow sound over the Deep Creek Bridge. She’d expected to see lots of people in the short, single street, klieg lights set up, police cars, but that was only her memories of city search scenes on the eleven o’clock news. Still, a light shone from Audrey Doyle’s B and B, where she took in boarders she fed down at her restaurant. Where the few commercial buildings clustered together, lights were out except for the old MacCrimmon house, which her mother had said now housed the sheriff’s office. It was lit up, throwing a big block of yellow light into the dark street where she pulled in.

Emotions overwhelmed her. Tears blinded her eyes as she saw Drew, tall, wide-shouldered and ramrod-straight—no slouch now—come out to greet her. She still had the car door locked when he tried to open it. Every muscle in her body, every buried memory in her brain seemed to scream as she turned off the engine and fumbled to unlock the door.

“No news?” she asked as he opened the door, then reached in to help her out. His hand was warm through the elbow of her shirt, his grip strong.

He shook his head. He wasn’t in uniform, but he wore a utility belt with a flashlight and prominent pistol on one hip. Shadows etched deep into his frown. His body was filled out now, mature, solid. But he was still the Drew she’d carried and buried in her mind and heart.

“The news is you’re here safe,” he said, “and we’ll find her together.”

She had to lock her knees to stand; she was shaking all over. His arm, like an iron band, went around her shoulders as he led her inside.

3

Jessie felt as if she floated; her feet were hardly under her, and her right leg trembled from alternating between the accelerator and brake for hours. No using cruise control in these hills—no control in her life at all right now.

Drew led her past a waist-high divider, through a small reception area with a single desk, then into a separate room with the open door labeled Sheriff. Inside, he sat her in a carved wooden chair near the door, but did not go around the desk to sit in his leather chair. He lowered his muscular frame into the wooden one next to hers.

“Coffee or water, Jess?”

“No, thanks. I’m too full of coffee.”

“The bathroom’s at the back of the hall. Help yourself.”

“Later. No news at all?”

“Nothing.” His face serious, even sad, he bit the corner of his lower lip, then the words tumbled from him as if they’d been dammed up. “We’ve had six different search parties out for two days. I scented three packs of hunt hounds on shoes I took from her place. Hunt hounds aren’t as good as a K-9 crew—they get distracted by game trails. But the state police can’t get one here until day after tomorrow because there’s a couple of Boy Scouts lost in Boone National Forest. Two of the hounds evidently briefly picked up her scent on the old logging trail under Snow Knob but nothing panned out.

“Besides, it rained heavy the first night, enough to wash off her scent. Tomorrow, we’ll start where her trail vanished, but it’s like she vanished. She didn’t take her truck, but she was—is—” he corrected “—such a strong walker we have a big area to cover. I’m hoping you can help me find some of her off-path or secret haunts.”

Haunts. The word snagged in Jessie’s exhausted brain. Haunts, as if Mariah had come back from the dead to walk the woods as they said some spirits had over the years, folks from long-ago pioneer and Indians days who’d gone out hunting game or sang and had never returned … never been found.

“At first light, we’ll start again,” he went on, his deep, resonant voice both reassuring and disturbing. His mere physical presence, handsome yet rugged, unsettled her. His black hair was clipped fairly close, but not a military buzz cut as she’d expected. Under bronze skin, a light beard stubble peppered his square jaw. A small scar she’d never seen slanted into his taut lower lip; his nose still had that slightly crooked look from one of his boyhood fights. Tiny, white crow’s-feet perched at the corner of his eyes fringed with black-as-night lashes, so thick for a man’s. The cleft in his chin and the angular slant of his cheekbones were more pronounced than she recalled, despite the weight and muscle he’d put on over the years.

“We’ll find her,” he was saying, “probably with a broken ankle or some such in one of her sang counting spots, living off late berries and gourmet mushrooms, eating pawpaws for dessert and drinking mountain spring water most folks would pay a bundle for. She’s a survivor, Jess. She could probably outlast a corps of marines on a survival bivouac in those woods.”

Grateful for his trying to comfort her, she gripped the arms of her chair and managed to murmur, “I really appreciate all you’ve done so far.”

“Cassie says you’ve gone sang counting with Mariah the last couple of years. That so?”

“Yes, off and on, but she used landmarks to find some of her sang counting spots. She’s only supposed to count them once a year. She took lots of notes for her annual report, so maybe I can turn up something in the house. I can probably find a few of the places from memory, but I’m not sure about one near Snow Knob. So you’ve called off the mass search?”

“You don’t mind going out just with me, do you?”

Their gazes met and held. She wondered if he was hearing echoes of Vern Tarver and her mother yelling at him that night. She’d tried to explain to them that Drew hadn’t hurt her, that she’d let him hold her and take her, but no one was listening and everyone was blaming him.

“If you think that’s best, that’s fine with me,” she said, trying to keep her eyes from wavering the way her voice did. When this was all over, when they had found her mother, maybe they could talk of that other time. Just to clear the air. What happened had been as much her fault as his. In the meantime, yes, it would be difficult being with Drew. They’d never had a real relationship in the first place, though she’d built one in her mind and heart during the four years leading up to that night. She wondered, after all was said and done back then, if he thought she was cheap or crazy.

“This was Fran MacCrimmon’s home,” she said, glancing around at what had once been his girlfriend’s house.

“Right.” Eyes narrowed, he was studying her intently, even as she had him. But he was a police officer, trained to analyze people. She mustn’t read in more than that. He might be afraid she’d get hysterical. She’d done that the last night they’d been together. Why did that seem as if it was really just last night?

He took a phone call, evidently from Sheriff Akers in Highboro. She strained to listen, at least until it turned out to be just a check on progress. Then her gaze darted around the room.

Drew’s office was spartan, neater than any place she’d ever seen in Deep Down, as if he could control this eccentric town by being tidy here. A big, old oak desk held stacked metal baskets of papers and supplies; he had a mobile phone, desktop computer and peripherals. Four tall filing cabinets, two on each side of a window, lined the wall behind him. A flag of the commonwealth of Kentucky, a marine flag and an American flag stood against the wall facing his desk. On one side wall, large maps of the local area were marked with colored lines and pins stuck in, but didn’t seem related to this search.

What really captured her attention on the side wall with the other window—both windows were covered by neat, dark-blue vertical blinds—were two chrome-framed photos. One was of Drew with two other marines—oh, his younger brothers, Josh and Gabe—in sharp uniforms under a banner that read Semper Fi. The other picture was of him with Highboro’s longtime sheriff, Akers, pinning a badge on Drew’s chest. In the marine photo he wore a shiny dress sword at his side; in the police one, a sidearm. She tried not to gape, but to see Drew Webb standing so stunningly, stiffly at attention in crisp uniforms—a man who’s family had never heeded rules and regs—shook her to her very core.

Jessie sensed a full blush coming, just the way it had when he’d so much as glanced her way years ago. How foolish, childish and inappropriate, she scolded herself. Despite her exhaustion, she had to get control. She felt she was still rushing forward, in a plane, in a car. She needed a bed and soon, but she dreaded going home without her mother there.

“I will use your facilities,” she told him when he hung up. “I’ve been sleepless since Cincinnati and feel like a zombie. I hope I can sleep tonight without her there.”

She started to stand, but, dizzy, sat back hard. Drew rose and took her hands, pulling her up beside him, almost propping her up. She was five-eight, but she had forgotten he was so tall, maybe six-one or-two. In all those years she’d had her secret crush on him, she’d seldom been this close.

“You’ve got to be exhausted as well as strung out,” he said, keeping his hands under her elbows. “But I can’t let you back in Mariah’s house until we can take a careful survey of her property tomorrow. I used a search warrant to go through briefly today, then crime-taped the place.”

“Crime tape? It’s a crime scene? Is that agent from the big Chinese buyer still coming in here to buy sang at Tarver’s? What about the guys from the pharms and the ginseng-laced power drinks companies? I can’t see anyone around here hurting her, but those outsiders might do something to keep her sang count up so that—”

“Let’s go over all that tomorrow. The crime tape’s just a formality. Now, listen,” he added, his voice darkening as he gave her the slightest shake, as if to force her fears back down. “I’m going to phone Cassie, because I’m sure you can stay there tonight. Then, after we check out the house for any sort of clues—”

“For clues? You do think something awful has happened to her, don’t you?”

“Let’s not assume the worst for a woman who knew the woods so well. I’m sorry I can’t let you go home tonight, but we can keep your car here, and I’ll take you out to Cassie’s, then pick you up just after dawn. I’ll transfer your things to my vehicle now. You want to give me your keys, then I’ll help you to the bathroom before I call her?”

“I’ll be all right. But she has to be all right, too!”

Damn, she was going to cry. Her mother was missing, and she couldn’t go home. But neither could she have a meltdown. She had to focus on finding her mother, and that meant going along with Drew, in more ways than one.

“I’ll be all right,” she repeated, blinking back tears as she pulled away from him and fished her keys out of her purse. When she handed them to him, their fingertips touched; a jolt of lightning might as well have leapt between them. She thought he felt it, too, but his words came calm and steady.

“Stay strong, Jess. We’ll work through this together.”

Not trusting her voice, she nodded and went out of his office and down the hall, with both hands on the walls to stop the place from spinning. Neither of them was saying it, but they knew a lot was at stake in Mariah’s sang count and, therefore, in her disappearance. It was all tied in with mountain pride and worse—big money both here and abroad.

Jessie knew she had to deal with a new Drew, but then, she was a new person, too. One with a missing mother who might be as endangered as wild wood sang.

* * *

Drew had to fight the urge to pull Jess against him and hold her. It was an insane thought, considering the last night they’d been together and now this nightmare. Despite her obvious exhaustion and frustration, he was astounded at how beautiful she’d become, delicate and edgy, yet sturdy and strong. Tall, slender with tousled, curly blond hair and blue-gray eyes that bored right into you. Yeah, just as he’d remembered her and yet not the same at all. Filled out, at ease in what had once been a string bean of a body, self-assured despite her dilemma …

“Here, let me open the Jeep door for you,” he said as she stepped outside to join him on the porch.

“It looks more like a truck. Is this Deep Down’s version of a cop car?”

“It’s a Jeep Cherokee with a wired-off backseat in case I have a prisoner to transport. I’ve only got two small holding cells here.”

“A Cherokee? I’ll bet Seth Bearclaws likes that.”

“I tried to give him a lift the other day, but he won’t ride in it. Says it’s just another thing ripping off his people’s heritage.”

He went back to the office, turned out the lights and locked the door before he got in the driver’s side of the front seat. He was proud of this silver, four-wheel SUV he’d been issued when he’d taken the job. It had made his measly salary sound a lot better. It was a sturdy vehicle for the mountain roads. It didn’t have a light bar, just a single red light he put on the roof if he had a pursuit or an emergency. Traffic jams were nonexistent here. He’d been tempted to have Sheriff stenciled on both front doors, but realized it might make some folks in his jurisdiction nervous or even trigger-happy. Still, with some characters in the outlying areas, he felt as if he had a bull’s-eye on his doors and on his back. Could Mariah have run afoul of any of them?