Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author Karen Harper

“Will keep you awake until bedtime and beyond.”

—Tess Gerritsen on Empty Cradle

“A compelling story … intricate and fascinating details of Amish life.”

—Tami Hoag on Dark Road Home

“The story is rich … and the tension steadily escalates to a pulse-pounding climax.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Hiding Place

“Harper keeps tension high as the insane villain cleverly evades efforts to capture him. And Harper really shines in the final act, providing readers with a satisfying and exciting denouement.”

—Publishers Weekly on Inferno

If you love Karen Harper look out for

DARK ROAD HOME

available from www.mirabooks.co.uk

“The Cherokees speak of the ginseng plant as a sentient being … able to make itself invisible to those unworthy to gather its roots.”

—William Bartram, naturalist, Philadelphia, 1791

“Ginseng is the child of lightning. It blends yin and yang, darkness and light.”

—Chinese legend

“I’m not afraid of my ginseng garden being robbed anymore … my guns will hold their position with their eyes wide open day and night.”

—LJ Wilson, Special Crops, 1908 journal

“For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.”

—I Timothy 6:10

Deep

Down

Karen

Harper

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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1

Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia September 4, 2007

Head down, her eyes skimming the ground, Mariah Lockwood walked the woods. She was looking for ginseng, not to dig and sell its roots as so many Appalachians did, but to count the plants that sprang from the precious roots. At this altitude, the herb was especially easy to spot right now with its yellowing leaves and clusters of red berries. The buried treasure of the ginseng root was worth millions to its buyers, especially in the massive Chinese market. Wild wood American ginseng, locally called sang, was getting so rare it was threatened, and that’s where she came in.

Seven years ago, her daughter, Jessica, had gotten her the nice-paying job of ginseng counter in these parts. The human-body-shaped ginseng root was on the U.S. government’s endangered species list. If Mariah’s yearly count went down too far, exports would cease and lots of Appalachians, as well as the Chinese and other deep-pocket buyers, would be spitting mad.

Since the sun was sinking fast, this site would be Mariah’s last stop of the day. Yet, feeling the pinch of hunger, she stopped to pluck some pawpaws. Most places, the little, banana-shaped fruits ripened later, but where the setting sun streamed past the peaks, they were ready early. Their sweet flavor was an acquired taste, but she and Jessie loved them baked and served with cream.

As she savored the soft pulp, Mariah wondered what her girl was eating in Hong Kong at that big conference on cultivating ginseng. Probably chop suey, rice and lots of tea. More than once, Jessie had wanted her mother to travel with her, but traveling to Lexington for her doctorate graduation was as far as Mariah wanted to stray from this area she knew and loved.

“This is the forest primeval,” Jessie had quoted from some poem the last time the two of them had walked the woods. Ever since Mariah had agreed to let Dr. Elinor Gering take Jessie into her home near the Kentucky university campus in Lexington, she’d taken fast to book-learning, though the little town of Deep Down and its people still ran fierce in her blood. Although Jessie used to spend every August here, she’d been too busy this year, and Mariah couldn’t help but wonder if Drew Webb’s return had something to do with that.

Before she checked her last sang spot—one of her secret ones, far back in the smallest hardwood cove huddled up to the stony skirts of Snow Knob—she got her a notion to walk the rocks of Bear Creek, just like in the old days. She and Nate had courted here beside its rushing waters, jumping from rock to rock and sitting out on the biggest one to share corn bread and kisses. When they were both nineteen, smack-dab in the middle of that rock—their island, they’d called it—he’d asked her to marry up with him, and Jessie had been born the very next year. The precious, nearby sang patch had provided roots that paid for her gold wedding band, their marriage license and some blankets and dishes to set up housekeeping.

With her pack slung over her shoulder, she jumped to the first rock, then leapt from stone to stone, just as she and Nate had, holding hands. The year Jessie turned eight, she’d lost him in a freak accident when he was repairing a barn roof for extra cash. Though she was still young and could have used someone to support them, she’d never wanted to wed again. A one-woman man, that was her. And sometimes here, like right now, she felt her curly haired and sky-blue-eyed Nate was still with her, laughing, leaping. No way this place made her sad.

Finally, reluctantly, much farther down the creek, she stepped back on firm ground again. In the spring or after a rain, the creek rose high and covered some of these stones as if they weren’t here at all—like folks you’d loved and lost but you knew were still there, just below the surface of your rushing thoughts.

From the slant of sun, Mariah reckoned it was after seven. Evening shadows stretched long and dark, ‘specially here at the foot of Snow Knob. Hurrying now, she set off again. She was fixin’ to get this last site counted before she went home. The familiar forest trail snaked through the fern-carpeted floor ever deeper into the basswood and walnut trees, the kinds sang liked for company. A ragged canopy overhead that threw mottled shade and sun—that was sang country.

Already she could hear Bear Falls, which fed the creek, crashing down its limestone stairs. She’d once joshed Seth Bearclaws, the only full-blooded Cherokee round here, by asking if the falls were named after him. But Seth didn’t have a sense of humor, ‘specially about someone counting or digging sang in the old sacred places of his people.

As if the thought of diggers had summoned them, Mariah’s practiced eye picked up signs they’d been through here, or at least someone had used the sharp edge of a shovel or hoe as a kind of cane as he walked this path. A few small limbs were snapped off too, as if to mark a way back out. She prayed they hadn’t found her special spot, untouched all these twenty-eight years, maybe even longer. Folks not only poached sang off-season, but outright stole and even killed to get or protect the root. Right now was legal sang season, but diggers had to get a license and fill out all kinds of government forms when they sold it, and the local game was to get around all that. Her friend Cassie had said she thought picking sang was a rite of passage ‘round here, and Drew Webb had opined it had something to do with testosterone, or whatever that male hormone was that made men feisty and daring.

Vern Tarver, who owned the sang store and historical museum in town, had argued that if George Washington knew the value of ginseng and Daniel Boone made money selling it, why should folks today have to change their ways? Appalachians over the centuries had considered hunting anything, anytime, their God-given right and couldn’t abide the government telling them what to do. Not when sang money had brought many of their kin through the Depression or tided them over in other tough times.

Mariah figured it didn’t take the likes of Vern Tarver to know sang roots were worth as much as one thousand dollars a pound in Asian markets. It was next to useless to try to tell Eastern Kentuckians to let the sang alone for a few years till it matured or to be sure to replant the precious berries when they dug up a site, no matter if the new sheriff said times and laws were different now.

The Chinese buyers who came into Vern Tarver’s store, smooth as they were with their clean hands and hard cash, Mariah liked less than poachers or careless diggers. The big money market encouraged ripping out roots, legal season or not, and she knew Vern was only too happy to play middleman to get his cut. No use trying to talk sense to him, ‘specially not since she’d told him to stop trying to sweetheart her. He’d near on had a fit when she’d told him no to his fancy marriage proposal, and if he couldn’t accept that, just not to come ‘round no more.

Yes, she saw the footsteps with the hoe marks heading toward her deep woods sang patch. If that fancy GPS thingamajig or the tiny cell phone the government had given her worked worth a darn in these hills and hollers, she’d use them right now to call Sheriff Drew Webb, tell him to watch in town for illegal sales of prime, old roots. She’d have him stake out another spot she knew. She could give him the location by the landmarks she always went by, never mind satellite coordinates that were no good, no how here. Why use things in outer space to find where you were, when you knew these woods like your own back forty?

Mariah hunkered down to examine the torn ground where someone had dug out the patch of sang—four-prongers, at least, if she rightly recalled her notes from last count. In all her forty-eight years, this was the weirdest-looking dig she’d seen. Odd hoe marks, strangely curved, pierced the ground in a pattern. A big hoe, a sharp one, but not carelessly used. No, the slashes in the earth were exact, deep and powerfully placed.

She couldn’t picture anyone from Deep Down doing this so precisely, then stuffing their prizes in the usual pillowcase or backpack and just hightailing it back to town. Strangest of all, the lopped-off yellowing plants and their red berries were laid out in designs around the edge, like some foreign work of art.

Then, even through the muted roar of the falls and the rustling leaves, she heard a sound she couldn’t place.

What in creation? A footstep? Someone snapping a branch? She’d been a wildcrafter almost all her life, picking wild herbs, mushrooms and moss to sell to outsiders as far away as Highboro or even Lexington. She knew the normal forest sounds and scents, but some new, heavy smell—fetid and yeasty, or was it moth balls?—came to her on the breeze.

Slowly, in the middle of the ravaged, rearranged sang patch, she stood. Turning her head, she tried to pierce the narrow shafts of sun stabbing almost horizontal between the tree trunks. For once, this vast, deep woods seemed to press in on her. Mariah had never claimed to have the sixth sense of some mountain women, including her own mother, but she sensed danger now. Someone else was out here close, something waiting for the shadows to deepen, maybe for her to leave. It could be a bear, but she didn’t think so. They liked to make themselves real scarce, and they didn’t smell like that. It wasn’t skunk, she thought, as her nostrils flared.

Hair prickled on the nape of her neck. Maybe she’d surprised a digger who’d rubbed some sort of homemade liniment or bug juice on his skin, and he was watching, waiting. Maybe he knew she’d recognize him and didn’t want to get caught without a license, afraid she’d tell Drew Webb.

For the first time in her life, alone in the woods, Mariah Lockwood tasted bitter, raw fear. She’d surprised poachers and diggers before, and they could be as dangerous as those who grew the stuff and guarded it with shotguns and no shut-eye. But she’d always just made a quick retreat or told them she’d keep quiet. When a mountain person made a vow, that was that. So why did this feel different?

Hefting her pack with her precious records and lists of landmarks, Mariah edged back toward the path she’d taken coming in. She wouldn’t walk the rocks of the creek this time, but hightail it back to the old logging road.

Then, about thirty feet away, she saw something blocking her path.

She let out a half grunt, half scream. The sun-streaks behind the large, dark thing blinded her. Was it a bear? This was not some sort of prank or joke. Pure menace reeked from it, along with that smell.

She threw her trembling arms over her head to make herself look larger and shouted in a loud voice, “Bear, go! Go!” Not only did it not run, but it took a step forward and lifted something in its paw or hand.

Not a bear, no, it held itself more erect. And bears didn’t use tools. Bulky, maybe human, but grotesque with that fur—that obscured face and strange-shaped head. Despite all the legends of forest creatures, none told of an Appalachian yeti or big ape. It had something shiny and sharp in its paw or hand. Hellfire, had that thing been digging sang?

Though it would take hours in the dark to get back down to town another way, she turned and fled. Her pulse pounded in her ears; her innards nearly let loose. The things in her pack bounced; the shoulder strap slipped down her arm so the pack almost tripped her. She hadn’t run dead out in years … dead out.

Her breath rasped in her throat. Was this a nightmare, and she’d wake up? Was that thing a haint like folks said appeared from the dead? A shape-changing monster from one of Seth’s Cherokee myths?

She took a tumble over a tree root and lost her pack. She scrambled up again, on hands and knees at first, then stumbling, staggering. It was coming after her in wide strides at a jogging pace, breaking tree limbs, hitting something against tree trunks. With stark fear in her soul, she was sweating, shaking. She did not look back at the thing, but looked into her heart. Jessie, she thought, so far away, so smart. Proud of her, she was, though sometimes she regretted giving her away, sending her away … Away … She had to get away …

Despite the heat and humidity hitting her like a hammer, Dr. Jessica Lockwood was excited to get out of the plush, air-conditioned lobby of her Hong Kong hotel. Most people at the conference spoke decent English, but for this foray outside she’d hired one of the translators, Sunny Chan, to accompany her to nearby Ko Shing Street, also called Ginseng Street.

It was only a little after seven in the morning—that would make it just after 7 p.m. of the previous day at home, she thought—and she was astounded by the impact of the oppressive weather and the push of people, both in business suits and traditional clothing. Cursing her naturally curly, flyaway tresses, sprung loose by the instant steam bath of humidity, she shoved her chin-length hair back behind her ears and headed out.

The crowds seemed as oppressive as the heat. However much she had travelled for research or relaxation, she never quite seemed to shake the habit of judging everything against quiet, little Deep Down, the tiny Appalachian town with a population of 127 where she was reared—raised up, as her mother would put it. Sometimes in her head, the slow, flat drawl of her mother’s voice battled with the undulating speech of Elinor, the Lexington professor who had been her guardian from the time she’d turned sixteen.

“I can’t believe how busy it is already,” Jessie told the petite, pretty translator as people rushed past. “I was hoping to talk to a few ginseng sellers before the masses hit.”

“Masses hit?” Sunny echoed in her clipped, British accent as she arched her winged eyebrows. “Oh, you mean before it gets crowded. Believe me, the shop owners would be very honored to speak with you.”

Although Jessie’s presentation on how ginsenosides from the ginseng herb significantly slowed the growth of breast cancer cells in test tubes had been well-received, she realized Sunny meant that the reputation of wild Appalachian ginseng was strong in Asia. As they managed to avoid darting workers with cloths coiled around their heads for elaborate sweatbands, the first shop they came to proved the power of U.S. sang.

She couldn’t read the handwritten calligraphy on the sign, but the U.S. flag was elaborately drawn and colored in on a poster next to a picture of a hairy, two-legged, two-armed ginseng root and an arrow beckoning buyers to step inside. Yes, wild forest Appalachian sang had a strong reputation here and was increasingly trendy at home. If it proved useful in the battle against endocrine-driven cancers, its demand and value would escalate even more.

But suddenly, strangely, this place was getting to her.

Jessie had loved the lofty view from her quiet room in the almost futuristic glass-and-steel skyscraper hotel, with the freighters and junks in the harbor and the mountain-studded monster of mainland China looming beyond. But she felt enclosed, trapped here. This cluttered, crowded shop was a far cry from Vern Tarver’s Fur and Sang Trader at home. Amidst all these unique, jumbled herbs, a strange smell slammed her square in the stomach, fetid, rich, yeasty. The familiar ginseng, yes, but something else, something forbidding, even dangerous.

Jessie glanced around for the source of the smell. Displayed on wooden trays in the long, narrow shop, which seemed like something out of a medieval time capsule, were some things she could recognize and some she could not.

“Bird nests and shark fins—very expensive—for health-giving soups,” Sunny was explaining in a singsong voice as she translated the cards sticking out of each box. “Dandelion for gallbladder cleansing, deer tail for back pain, dried lizard to improve weak kidneys, dried sea horse for asthma and, oh, for sexual problems, too.”

Sexual problems, Jessie thought. The only problem she had was the lack of a man in her life. In fact, her past with guys was as gnarled and twisted as the sang roots she spotted heaped up farther back in the store, where a Chinese woman with a face webbed with wrinkles was pawing through a pile with a calculator in one hand.

Sunny rattled off some Chinese to the old woman, though the only word Jessie could pick out was jen-shen. The Chinese word for the herb meant “root of life.” The woman’s wizened face lifted; she eyed Jessie as if she were going to price her to sell. Though Jessie had longed to see the inside of a ginseng shop in the land where much of the $52 million-a-year market was based, she had to keep herself from fleeing. The woman was not frightening, so what was wrong with her? Was she coming down with some exotic sickness, or were the smells and heat just getting to her? All this seemed so far away from her mother and Kentucky. And from the strange yearnings she’d had for Drew Webb, whom she knew was back in Deep Down.

“She’s saying,” Sunny told her, “last year she had a root she displayed on velvet cloth go for six figures in American money. Came from Kentucky. She wants to know, you have any to sell?”

“She must know it’s all regulated,” Jessie protested. “Did she get that root from the black market?”

“She says she know nothing of black market.”

Jessie’s head was beginning to pound. She had to get out of here. Her heartbeat sped up, as if she’d run miles.

“Now with Americans putting jen-shen in power drinks and health foods,” Sunny was translating again, “costs going up …”

Jessie squinted back into the dim reaches of the shop where women of all ages bent over rows of cardboard boxes on long wooden tables, sorting ginseng. When the shop owner saw where she was looking, she spoke to Sunny, who said, “She say her sorters, even if they are old, have soft, young hands from touching the jen-shen all day. She say the herb preserve yin, the life force, and good for aphrodisiac and keep people young.”

If her head had not been pounding and her stomach roiling, Jessie would have laughed. If ginseng was a fountain of youth, why did this old woman look like some ancient sorceress who had stepped from the pages of a book on primordial myths? She had to get back into the calm of the hotel. She felt a stab of longing for her mother, for the cool, leafy coves in the skirts of the mountains.

“I feel a bit faint,” Jessie told Sunny and managed a polite nod to the old woman. “Please thank her for speaking with me. I’m going to head back to the hotel.”

She walked as steadily as she could, though she felt the urge to run. Had the other-side-of-the-world time zone difference given her delayed jet lag? At least her headache wasn’t caused by staring too long into a microscope at floating ginsenosides attacking tiny cancer cells and tumors in the test tubes. Hours of research sometimes made her eyes cross and her brain blank out. She felt like that now and, worse, as if something in the midst of these towering skyscrapers in old-new Hong Kong were chasing her.

The shrill ring-ring, ring-ring dragged Jessie from deep, dream-haunted sleep. It took her a moment to recall she was in her Hong Kong hotel room. Exhausted, she’d collapsed in bed after her visit to Ko Shing St., almost as if that strange smell in the herb shop had drugged her. Her bedside table clock read 7:17 p.m. She’d missed the afternoon lectures and the tour of the city she’d signed up for. Maybe it was some conference attenders on the phone, wondering if she could meet them for dinner or why she’d missed the tour bus.

She grabbed the receiver. “Dr. Jessica Lockwood.”

“Jess? Sheriff Webb in Deep Down—Drew.”

Her heartbeat kicked up even more. No one has ever called her Jess but Drew. Despite the coolness of the room, she shoved the duvet and covers off. She began to sweat. She’d know that voice anywhere, deep, husky. It was a voice she’d known since her earliest memories, one that haunted her. Something must be wrong at home, very wrong.

“Drew, what is it?”

“You were hard to trace. Cassie gave me your Lexington apartment and your lab number, but then I found this Hong Kong hotel number with a note in your mother’s kitchen. Jess, I know you’re thousands of miles away, but can you come home right away? I’m sorry to inform you that your mother’s missing.”

She gasped. “Missing? What happened? Missing how?”

“As best I can tell she went out counting sang and just didn’t come back. Vern Tarver dropped by her house after dinner yesterday evening but couldn’t find her, though her truck was there. He checked all around, called people, but she wasn’t at Cassie’s—nowhere—so he called me. I rechecked her neighbors and friends but no leads. I’ve had a search party out since daybreak—they’re still out, some even with hounds. But she covers a wide area, and I don’t know her sang counting spots. Do you?”

She raked her fingers through her hair. “Some. I—I’m not supposed to head home until tomorrow. Maybe she twisted her ankle or something like that. Please keep looking. She knows those woods like the back of her hand.”

“Yeah, but some of those spots are secret and deep in. I’m really sorry to have to call you like this. Be assured we’ll keep looking, all of us. You—you did know I’m sheriff here now?”

“She told me. Be a good one, Drew. Please, please find her safe and sound. I’ll make arrangements to fly back as soon as I can, and I’ll call you. Here’s my cell number if you need it.” She recited it to him, and he gave her his.

“But you know it’s better to use the landlines around here,” he reminded her. “Even now, the mountains make a difference. Jess, take care and see you soon.”

The line went dead. For one moment, she stared at the sleek receiver in her hand, seeing Drew that last night, furious, hurt—naked. She’d just been told the last thing in the world she could bear to hear. And from the last and only man she had ever really loved.

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?

“One of my little causes around here,” he told her, “is reminding people to lock their doors. The times, they are a changin’’ round here.” She seemed very far away, not just across the console; she looked as if she was glued to the outside door. “Seat belt,” he reminded her, then had to help her click it in the unfamiliar lock.

“Lots of locks. So big-time crime’s coming in here?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. In the four months I’ve been on the job, it’s hardly been cops and robbers,” he admitted, as he turned on the headlights, pulled out and headed toward Cassie’s. “I broke up a fight between the Talbots and the Enloes so that feud wouldn’t restart.”

“As I recall, that feud went back to the Civil War. If the truth were known, probably to the old clan wars of Scotland. So that was a good day’s work. What else?”

He was touched that, despite her own problems, she seemed genuinely interested. About half the local population insisted there was no need for law enforcement here. He almost confessed to her how hard it had been to see the sneers and overhear the snide comments about Drew Webb, of all folks, from all families, coming back to uphold what the government said was right.

“I arrested a guy from Frankfort for letting his six-year-old son chase deer on a noisy ATV. The dad was hopping mad, said he’d sue—he was a lawyer, no less, who should have had some brains. The kid could have been killed with the ridges and rills around here. I deal with a lot of pranks from kids who are just plain bored,” he told her. “I think we can both sympathize with that.”

A moment’s silence stretched between them.

“Yes.”

“I do a lot of knock-and-talks, playing counselor as well as enforcer. The things I thought would cause me the most problems, drinking and policing illegal patches of marijuana, haven’t taken much time. Hardly anyone makes their own moonshine anymore, and when I find pot patches, I destroy them. But I don’t make an arrest or apply to have the land legally confiscated if I’m not sure who planted it.”

“Unless you catch them in the act, you’re never sure.”

“Right. Besides, like sang spots, a lot of it is planted far outside of town.”

“I’m sure sang is even harder to police,” she told him, slanting her body slightly in his direction as he turned off onto the side road toward Cassie’s. “I mean,” she went on as they began to bounce down the long, rutted lane, “sang’s more of a heritage here, a God-given medicine and moneymaker.”

“That’s exactly it. Local diggers and foreign buyers alike don’t give a damn what the endangered species laws say.”

“And your knock-and-talks?” she asked. Again, it really got to him that, as whipped and upset as she was, she was focusing on what he’d said. He hadn’t realized he’d been so lonely, coming home to Deep Down.

“I’ve arrested two guys and driven them into jail in Highboro for domestic violence. I owe my mother that much. Above all else, I took this job because I can’t stand guys who rough up their women and kids, and there’s still a lot of it in these patriarchal parts. I—I almost lose control—again—when I see that. Sometimes I think life was easier in sunny Naples, Italy, when I was MP—military police. I was in charge of the brig for drunken sailors and marines. They didn’t expect favors from a onetime bad boy from a hellfire family.”

He realized he sounded angry. He hadn’t really let loose with anyone since he’d been here, not even with Chuck Akers. He’d been walking a fine line between building bridges and enforcing the law.

Cassie’s house came in sight, pouring light into the darkness of Fancy Gap Hollow where she’d been raised. Her form appeared at the window, then disappeared before her front door opened. In a long, ghostly white nightgown, with a shawl around her thin shoulders, she came out on the porch as they pulled up. Jess opened the door before he could get out.

“Jessie!” he heard Cassie cry as she embraced her friend. “Despite the troubles, welcome home!”

4

Cassie Keenan had known Jessica Lockwood her whole life. Both only children, a rarity in the area, they had clung together like sisters, however different their personalities. Cassandra and Jessica—Cassie and Jessie—their lives had seemed to rhyme like their names, until Mariah sent Jessie away. If folks thought Mariah did that just because of Drew Webb, Cassie knew they were wrong, ‘cause Mariah had always wanted a different life for her child.

Still, however distant their lives had become, Cassie treasured how they could pickup where they’d left off, just like they hadn’t been apart a long time. Though Jessie hadn’t visited Deep Down this August as usual, she’d been here last Christmas with all sorts of gifts for her and Pearl. But things might be different now with Mariah missing. Desperate to help her friend get through this, whatever befell, Cassie hugged Jessie hard, then led her inside while Drew followed with her suitcase and matching smaller bag.

“I hope we won’t wake Pearl,” he said as Cassie sat Jessie down at the plank table, shoving potted herbs aside to make a spot for her. She’d meant to straighten up the little house a bit when she heard Jessie would spend the night, but there was nowhere to put her precious plants unless she carried them outside with the others. Herbs, both live and dried, covered the floor, walls and ceiling. It was like a grotto in here, Elinor Gering had said, when she’d come to record Cassie talking about life here in Deep Down.

“Now don’t you all fret about making noise,” she told Drew. “Once that little angel’s out, she sleeps like the dead.”

Cassie saw Jessie wince at that. She scolded herself for not thinking ahead of her mouth. “This here’s ginseng tea with a touch of chamomile,” she told her friend as she set a cup before her. “Gives you energy and yet makes you sleep. Drew, you want some coffee? Won’t take a minute.”

“No, thanks. I’m coffeed out for the day and need to hit the sack myself for a couple of hours.”

Looking beyond exhausted, Jessie wrapped her hands around the hot cup, then lifted it to her lips.

“I’ll be going,” Drew said. “Jess, I’ll be here at eight sharp, though I know you need the sleep.”

“What I need is my mother back,” she said, turning to face him. Then she added, “Sorry about the heavy bag. I didn’t repack at home, just got my car and headed out.”

Cassie watched the two of them talk, both tipping their heads in the same direction and leaning slightly toward each other as if they were straining against a fence. She recognized the wild wind between them, the kind you couldn’t hold back. She’d figured both of them still had feelings for each other, and now she knew it. Tarnation, she understood that sort of pull, that turning toward the sun as if it were the source of life itself.

“‘Night and thanks, Cassie,” Drew said as he started for the door.

“Come a few minutes early for pancakes,” she told him. “I’m gonna put a good, hot meal in Jessie first thing tomorrow, so you come, too. Thanks for that bag of groceries you brought me back from Highboro the other day,” she added, hurrying after him to the door. “Me and Pearl’s beholden to you, ‘specially for standing up for my right to keep silent. I heard what you told Vern Tarver.”

“You’re only beholden for a pancake breakfast,” he said. He stood at the door as if he hated to leave, then looked past her to Jessie again. “We’ll find her, Jess,” he said and went out into the night.

“Whew-ee,” Cassie said as she went to sit across the narrow table from her friend. “I know you two will find Mariah. But for now, least you found each other.”

“Except for the fact I need his professional help—” Jessie’s voice came real sharp “—our past has nothing to do with the present situation.”

“Listen, my Deep Down sister, don’t you go lecturing ‘bout things of the heart, even if you are way smarter’n me,” Cassie scolded, shaking her finger at Jessie like she did at Pearl. “My girl’s daddy may be out of my life and hers, but she was a love child.” Afraid she’d say more, she pinched her lips tight.

“Of course she is. I never said otherwise.”

“So I know it when I see it, even if I don’t have it no more.” Cassie made herself sit back and calm down. No way did she want someone clever as Jessie catching on to who Pearl’s daddy was or what she had planned.

“I don’t know which way’s up, that’s all,” her friend said, taking another big swig of the tea. “What you’re seeing and hearing is sheer exhaustion. I just feel so weak—helpless.”

“I got some mushroom soup and corn bread, if you’re hungry for that kind of food ‘fore you go to bed.”

“My system’s so screwed up from time zone changes and I have stomach cramps from being afraid and grieved—”

“And on edge back with Drew again. Like most men, he may be dense as a wall on that, but you’re not. Anybody like you who can look in a microscope and find a way to stop killer cells can—”

“Can find a killer?” Jessie blurted and, to Cassie’s dismay, burst into tears. She banged the cup down and covered her face with both hands. Her shoulders shook and the curly blond hair Cassie had always thought was way better than her own straight red hair bounced against her hands. “It’s just,” Jessie got out between big, choking sobs, “I think something awful—might have happened—to her. She knows the woods, she’s always safe in the woods …”

Cassie jumped up and went around the table to hug her from behind. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to set you off, and I shouldn’t bring up Drew like that. I promise, I won’t say no more about it till you’re ready to admit it.”

“You’re so damned annoying and stubborn, Cassandra Keenan.”

“That’s me,” she said and went back to her place across the table as Jessie reached in her purse, looking kind of surprised to find it still over her shoulder, and took out a tissue. “‘Member how Elinor told us that Cassandra in some old Greek stories was a woman who always told the truth, even predicted the future, but no one believed her?” Cassie asked.

“Elinor said a lot of things,” Jessie muttered and blew her nose. “She once made me read a book she loved called You Can’t Go Home Again, and here I am. And I hated the book.”

“Jessie, anything I can do to help, I will.”

Jessie reached across the table, past the plants, to put one hand on hers. “I’d better get to sleep. Morning and Drew will be here early.”

“I’m gonna sleep with Pearl, and you take my bed. Want to wash up?”

“In the morning. Right now, I just need a couple of things out of my carry-on bag and a bed.”

Cassie rolled Jessie’s big suitcase into her bedroom, the one that had been her grandparents’ and parents’ room before it was hers. In truth, she was glad to give it up, ‘cause after watching the smothered desire between Jessie and Drew, she might be too het up and not sleep well in there tonight. Too often she didn’t, remembering her own sweeping passion in that bed and then how the midwife had helped her birth the result of that there.

She’d buried that love and lust now, put it away and closed up all her wounds, though they still festered under the surface. Sure as rain, she was laying plans to make him pay for his betrayal of her and Pearl. She knew people whispered that she never spoke his name nor hinted who he was because she was too shattered over the desertion, still so much in love that she was giving him a pass, protecting him.

Well, they were all dead wrong. As soon as she got her herbal potions mixed, no matter how important a man he was, he was the one who was gonna wish he was dead.

Something woke Jessie instantly. A shifting sound. Movement. Shadows huddled in the room. As out-of-it as she was, she became instantly alert with her pulse pounding in her ears.

Was that noise inside or out? Yes, another sound, but from where? Someone sneaking in through the door she’d left ajar? Had Cassie locked the outside doors? What if someone who wanted to stop her mother from handing in her ginseng count had heard Jessie was back and thought she knew more than she did? What if …

She didn’t move, didn’t breathe, concentrating, straining to listen. Yes, something outside. Maybe a branch scraping or tapping against the glass. She wished Cassie had a clock in the room.

With a groan, she got out of bed and shuffled to the window, shifting the left edge of the homemade drapes slightly aside. Black as it was outside, a half moon etched the bizarre backyard in faintest silver.

The usual clutter stretched across the back of the house between two herb gardens. Jessie saw the solid, black silhouettes of the old iron kettles where her friend boiled the natural dyes she used to make wild plant mordants, which weavers used to set colors in cloth. Above that, lines of barbed wire dangled from tall post to post, not to keep people out but to dry moss Cassie sold to florists and craft stores for about five dollars a sack. Humps of moss were draped there now, looking like the tops of furry heads peering over the wire at the house.

Then one of them on the top wire moved. It rose, turned away, then disappeared.

No. No, she could not have seen that. It was just the breeze moving the moss, the slant of moonlight or even her tired eyes playing tricks on her.

She squeezed her eyelids tight, then opened them to look again. The moss-heavy barbed wire shifted in the breeze, gilded by moonlight, that was all. Surely, she had not heard something scratching on the window or seen a big, hairy head move. She was getting back in bed at least until dawn or until Cassie, ever an early riser, woke her up. Even now, her stomach did a little roll and plunge to think that Drew was coming for her, even if it was to find out what dreadful thing must have happened to her mother.

Back in bed, she tossed and turned. She didn’t think she slept again, but she must have because she saw strange shapes of huge, hairy ginseng roots come to life and chase her, through the trees, through the Hong Kong market …

“Aunt Jessie?” came the tiny voice and then the little face peered up over the side of the bed in the graying room. “I heard you was coming. But why isn’t Mommy here in this bed ‘stead of you?”

“Pearl, sweetie, how are you? But your mommy’s in with you. She let me sleep here for the night.” As her head cleared, she helped the child climb up beside her. “You mean she’s not in bed?” she asked.

Pearl shook her head, making her reddish-blond hair swing. “Maybe she’s in the bad part of the garden. Even in the dark, she’s there.”

Jessie frowned at the child’s babble, but covered her up with the blanket, then got out of bed to be sure that Cassie was around somewhere. Surely, those nearest and dearest to her weren’t just disappearing.

She glanced out her window first at the drying moss and iron kettles. Yes, that’s what she’d seen last night, nothing else.

“Stay here,” she whispered to Pearl. “I’ll be right back.”

She checked the bathroom—empty—then peered out a side window. In the first dusting of dawn, Cassie was in her eastern garden, gone to riot in late-summer growth. She was cutting herbs with a long, curved knife, hacking away as if she were angry at them. Jessie knocked on the window and waved. Startled, Cassie looked up and held up a finger to indicate “just a minute,” then bent back to her work.

Her friend had always been a hard worker, but then she’d had to be, especially lately to eke out a living for herself and Pearl. Cassie would not take donated money. But why work out there in the dark and chill of morning? Maybe she’d gotten behind, since, like so many Deep Downers, she’d spent time looking for Mariah.

Jessie padded back to the bedroom, checking her watch as she went by the dresser. Seven. She had to get moving to take a bath—no shower here, just a big, old claw-footed tub you could almost swim laps in—and get ready for a grueling day before Drew arrived.

“She’s outside, just like you said,” she told Pearl, who looked like a little elf in the middle of the big double bed. The child had a pert, freckled face; her pale complexion and reddish hair were a clear heritage from her mother. No hints of who might have sired her in the child herself. If Mariah didn’t have a clue who might have made Cassie pregnant—or so she’d said—no one but Pearl’s parents must know.

Mariah and Cassie had also been close for years. Sometimes, Jessie thought with a pang, it was as if, after Cassie’s mother died and her father left the area, Cassie took Jessie’s place. Besides digging some sang, both Mariah and Cassie made their livings from wildcrafting for seasonal moss, ferns, morel mushrooms and herbs to sell to craft and floral shops, health stores and dyers in Kentucky towns. But Cassie had said, just before they went to bed, that she had not been to most of Mariah’s sang sites with her and she couldn’t find a trace of her in their usual wildcrafting areas. Jessie could only pray she’d find some of her mother’s notes in the house or that she’d recall the sang counting sites once she was out in the woods with Drew.

She snapped open her big suitcase and pulled out two of the silk scarves she’d bought in Hong Kong as gifts for friends and coworkers—and for her mother, as strange as it would be to see her in silk. The jade-hued one she tied around Pearl’s cotton nightgown like a sash while the child was all big eyes, so excited at the gift. The scarlet one she kept out for Cassie, since that was her favorite color.

“Now you just stay snug as a bug in a rug in that bed until I take a bath, and, after I get dressed, you can help me set the table for breakfast,” she told Pearl.

She bent back down to her tightly packed suitcase and dug past her two business suits and the array of blouses she’d taken until she found the single pair of clean jeans and a long-sleeved sweatshirt that, unfortunately, was emblazoned with a Phi Beta Kappa key. Not that most Deep Downers would know or care what that was, but what had seemed so right for the conference was all wrong here. She decided she’d just wear it inside out and find something of her mother’s to wear later—if Drew let her touch anything in her house.

“You from the Highboro Herald or another paper?” Drew asked the blond guy with the expensive camera equipment. The stranger was leaning against Jessie’s car, in front of the police office, to steady himself while he took a picture down the street toward the bridge. He looked almost Nordic—like a Viking—with light blue eyes and white-blond hair.

Drew had been wondering if Mariah’s disappearance would attract any media. Unless he could find out she’d been abducted and taken out of the area, he didn’t want them involved, but it was hard to keep the search low-key with so many people helping.

“Newspaper? Not me,” the man said almost defensively as he lowered the camera and turned to face Drew. “Officer, I plead not guilty to being part or parcel of the American media today.” Unlike most civilians, he did not hesitate to step forward and shake hands. “Tyler Finch,” he said. “I was just in the area, that’s all. I’m doing a photo book on Appalachia.”

“Sheriff Drew Webb. You just drive in this morning?”

“I stayed in Highboro last night at a B and B—my cousin’s place, actually—so I do know the basic area. My bread-and-butter job is as a site analyst for the advertising firm Bailey and Keller, in New York City.”

Drew observed he had a video camera as well, hanging behind his back on a shoulder sling. A notebook and pen stuck out of his denim jacket. Drew didn’t put it past a reporter to try to sneak in around here, but for some reason, he believed this man.

“We’ve got a missing person case ongoing here, Mr. Finch. That’s why I thought you might be media.”

“Sure, no problem. Besides my own stuff, my paying assignment is to shoot some possible scenes for future magazine and TV ads, but I’ll be sure to stay out of your way. Actually, I’m going to photograph what my boss calls the mecca of ginseng. Bailey and Keller’s going to do some ads for G-Men and G-Women new caffeine and ginseng drinks. Their company rep, Beth Brazzo, has already scouted some places, but I’m not very good at directions, even with notes.”

Drew thought of Mariah’s notes on her sang sites. He hoped they weren’t missing. But he could hardly force this guy to stay out of the woods around here.

“I’ve met Ms. Brazzo,” he told Finch. “Tall, brunette.”

“That’s her. Look, I know you’re busy, but could you suggest someone who’d like to be my assistant—point out spots for shots?—I’d pay them.”

“I do have someone in mind. How about I meet you right here around eight-thirty and bring her along? Cassandra Keenan’s her name, and she’s what they call a wildcrafter, knows the hills well from gathering herbs and such.”

“That would be great. Let me know if I can do anything for you.”

After he drove away, Drew did think of something Tyler Finch might be able to do for him, besides providing Cassie and Pearl with some income to get them through the winter. If Drew and Jess found any evidence of foul play in Mariah’s disappearance, he might need a photographer faster than it would take Sheriff Akers or the highway patrol to get one in here. He had an old camera in the Cherokee, but he was lousy with it.

As he turned down Cassie’s bumpy lane, he shook his head as if to rid himself of the growing fear that something really bad had happened to Mariah. More than once, he’d wanted a case to prove himself around here, but not this one.

5

Through the front window, Jessie watched Cassie arguing with Drew outside. She wore her new scarf, tied around her like a thin shawl, and it fluttered in the breeze, snapping itself into an S shape.

The scarlet letter, Jessie thought. An edge-of-the-forest unwed mother who wouldn’t identify the father and an elfin child named Pearl, no less. Elinor would surely see some sort of portent or symbol in all that. In Hawthorne’s novel, the heroine was keeping the man who had fathered her child a secret because he was respected in the community. He turned out to be a Puritan minister, who had his reputation at stake.

Jessie studied Drew, then Cassie. Why had Cassie asked him to step outside when he’d told her he’d met a man who would pay her for advice about sites to shoot photos? Drew seemed very protective of Cassie and Pearl, but Jessie admired him for that. Maybe he knew who Pearl’s father was; it could be some friend of his. When, exactly, had his younger brothers left town to join the marines? Surely, Drew himself hadn’t been anywhere around Deep Down when Cassie fell in love with someone who left her pregnant.

She scolded herself silently as she moved away from the window. It was just that she was so on edge that everything looked dark to her, everyone looked guilty.

As Jessie returned to listening to Pearl read aloud from a book of fairy tales—interspersed with her own babblings about buried treasure and magical spells—Cassie stormed in, untying her scarf. “We’re going into town, Pearl, to meet a man about a job.”

“In Drew’s big car?” the child asked.

“No, in the truck. Run and get ready now. Wear your jacket.”

They had all shared a peaceful breakfast until Drew had mentioned that he’d suggested Cassie’s name to Tyler Finch. Cassie had about choked on the next bite of pawpaw pancakes, so rich with huckleberries and walnuts it was almost like eating Christmas fruitcake.

“Not a job you like the sound of?” Jessie asked Cassie now as she grabbed her purse. Drew had already loaded Jessie’s bags back into his Cherokee.

“Grateful for the money, but don’t like Drew fixin’ me up with a stranger.”

“Oh. But it’s only a business deal.”

“Never you mind. We got to get going so you can go through Mariah’s house. Thought maybe I could help today if you’re not sure ‘bout something there, but now I’ll be busy. I been in there more than you have since January. Pearl, shake a leg now!”

Jessie went out and climbed into the front seat. Drew started the engine but waited until Cassie and Pearl got in their old Ford truck and roared by.

“I ought to get her for speeding,” he muttered and followed them down the rutted lane toward the highway. “And ingratitude.”

Jessie was tempted to ask him when his leaves from the marines had been. She knew he’d been back to this area briefly off and on. But if he had secretly made love to Cassie, he would certainly have stepped forward to claim Pearl and her. Wouldn’t he?

Cassie couldn’t help it that she was fixing to have a conniption. Drew had more or less told a strange man she’d work with him—maybe go off in the woods with him. Did Drew guess she’d done that before, so reckoned she would again? Yes, she needed the money, but that’s how the other had got started. But this man would be business—only business. Everyone, including Sheriff Webb and Mr. Tyler Finch, would see that clear enough.

Was that the man, standing there outside the sheriff’s office? Tall and straight as an oak, hair like sunlight and with blue eyes?

“You just keep quiet now, Pearl, you understand? Your ma’s got to talk money with that man.”

She got out and pulled Pearl after her. Icicle-blue, that’s what his eyes were. Laws, she hadn’t thought a man had looked that good for—for nigh on about five years. She even felt those dangerous little butterflies fluttering in her belly.

“Cassandra Keenan, this is Tyler Finch, a professional photographer,” Drew introduced them. Jessie had stayed in Drew’s SUV. Pearl kept hold of a back pocket of Cassie’s jeans. She wasn’t shy back at the holler but about everywhere else.

“The sheriff says you know the area well,” Tyler said with a little nod as they shook hands and she sized him up. “I’d really appreciate some local expertise picking unique but typical sites.” Wouldn’t you just know, the masculine pine scent of him reminded her of high, pretty places up on Big Blue, and his smile was dazzling as sunshine on the stream.

“I could do that,” she said, realizing this man was good with words and she was sounding like she couldn’t string more than two of them together. She cleared her throat. “If you need pictures or movies of meadows, trees, hollers—hollows—mountains, you name it.”

“Then you can name your price, Ms. Keenan. That is, if you wouldn’t mind doing a little modeling, too—just a distant shot or two with the wilds behind you, maybe with you walking away down a path.”

Cassie stared up into his eyes, ready to say no to that, money or not. Her gaze darted a moment as Drew said his goodbyes and started away. Vern Tarver was leaning in the window of Drew’s SUV, talking to Jessie. No way she wanted to work in that smelly fur and sang trading shop for him again this winter. Why, he’d made her dust all that old, dead stuff in his so-called museum upstairs and do that Chinaman’s laundry, too, when she’d always heard they were the ones with laundries.

“I’d need to cart Pearl along with me,” she told the eager-eyed Tyler Finch, “least most of the time.”

“I’d pay extra for a picture or two of her, maybe the two of you together, not a close-up but a shot with the scenery in the distance.”

“Then let’s talk turkey.”

“I’m so very, very sorry about Mariah—her going missing,” Vern Tarver told Jessie, as Drew came back and got in the driver’s seat again. Vern patted her arm on the ledge of her rolled-down window.

“Thanks, Vern. I know you two were keeping company off and on.”

He nodded solemnly, looking sad but nervous, too. “We were getting serious. Of course, we didn’t see everything eye-to-eye, but opposites attract. Listen, Jessie, I know you and Drew have a lot to do today, but just let me know if I can help in any way. I—I’m glad I realized she had gone missing so I could get folks looking for her.”

Vern Tarver was the closest thing Deep Down had to a mayor. He owned the V & T General Store, Tarver’s Fur and Sang Trader, and the so-called two-room historical museum above it. Vern seemed to make most decisions for the town, just as his father had before him. He ran the elementary school committee—children older than that went to the consolidated school between here and Highboro—and oversaw the tiny town park and the cemetery next to the Baptist Church, where he was an elder. Though most visitors roomed at Audrey Doyle’s, Vern took in an occasional guest in his big brick house on the edge of town. Peter Sung, the agent for the Chinese Kulong family that bought most of the ginseng exported from this area, had stayed in an apartment above Vern’s store for years.

In short, Vernon Tarver was Deep Down’s answer to Donald Trump. Jessie supposed that Vern even resembled “The Donald,” with his big build, pompadour of sandy hair and business suits, except they were old ones with wide lapels. Vern was probably the only man within a hundred miles of here whose uniform wasn’t jeans.

As he stepped away and she rolled up her window, Jessie told Drew, “If we need to make a list of someone who could have—have spirited my mother away, Vern could be a lot of help. Sooner or later, locals and outsiders pass through his stores.”

“Good observation. And good observations are what we’re both going to need in your mother’s house this morning.”

“So, like I said yesterday, is Peter Sung in town? If my mother’s sang counts were low and the government stopped exports for a while, he and that Kulong family in New York he represents would stand to lose a fortune.”

“So he’d have to stop her somehow? Anything’s a possibility, but he hasn’t been around for over a week. Let’s not think the worst. We’ll case her place, look for clues to where to search the forests. If we find no help that way, I’m just praying you can recall some of her sites that were deep in.”

“I’m ready to do anything I can to find her.” Then she blurted out something she had admitted to no one—not Elinor, not Cassie, and, sadly, not her own mother. “I’m feeling guilty that I’m still upset she sent me away to live.”

He bit his lower lip, then nodded. “My fault.”

“No, it wasn’t—really. Mother and Elinor had been talking about my going to live with her when it came time for college—the impossible dream for a Deep Down girl. It just—it just happened earlier, that’s all.”

“It’s hell both loving and hating parents. I know that,” he said, almost in a raspy whisper. He reached over to touch her hand, then quickly put his hand back on the steering wheel as they turned into the hollow where Jessie had been raised.

The next statement hung between them, but neither of them voiced it: It was also hell both loving and hating what had happened to them in Deep Down twelve years ago. If he insisted, she’d find some way to talk about that later, but she wasn’t prepared to face all that today.

Neither was she prepared to see Seth Bearclaws sitting on her mother’s front porch, right under the yellow-and-black police tape.

As Seth stood to greet them, Jessie saw he’d brought one of his big carvings, unless it had been put there since New Year’s. A Cherokee, Seth was one of only a thousand tribal purebloods left, her mother had told her once. For years, besides hunting and trapping, Seth had made his living carving two-to three-foot tree trunks into local animals with chain saw, chisel and knives. At first, she couldn’t tell what was carved from this one, though. Not the usual bear or deer head.

“Sad to hear your mother’s missing,” Seth spoke first to her, then turned to Drew. “Any news of Mariah?”

“No, but with Jessie home we’ll have a better shot at finding her. That wasn’t here yesterday, Seth,” Drew added, gesturing at the carved tree trunk. “Did Mariah order that?”

“A surprise for her. I bring it now so when she comes home, she will have it.”

Tears in her eyes, Jessie bent toward it, but a shiver snaked up her spine when she saw what it portrayed. In the fragrant, reddish cedar wood were roughly hewn two hands above a ginseng plant, as if the hands were protecting it. “That’s really lovely, Seth,” she told him.

“Mariah and me used to argue over ginseng, her counting it, allowing it to be taken from the woods for money. It should be for cures right here, not in other countries, not for power drinks for runners,” he said with a sneer, eyes narrowing as he crossed his arms over his chest.

Seth Bearclaws was about seventy, though with his wrinkled, wizened face, he seemed either much older or ageless. For some strange reason, looking at him, Jessie thought of the old woman in the ginseng shop in Hong Kong, but she shook off that foolish thought. Seth had tattoos all over his arms and even one on his chin, most of them of bear paws and claws, similar to the leather thong necklace dangling long, curved claws he always wore around his neck. Mariah had said the tattoos were not done with a needle but by pricking gunpowder under his skin, a Cherokee tradition from way back. Seth had lived here from way back, too, first with his wife until she died and then alone with his memories and tribal causes. In a way, Seth Bearclaws was the original eco-warrior around here.

Since he’d protested sang being sold for other things but the herbal cures his people valued, Jessie almost told him about her breakthrough in the lab. It looked as if the ginsenosides from ginseng roots might delay or halt the growth of cancer cells, even tumors, and that could benefit all mankind. But she kept quiet, hoping he might say something more about her mother.

“But,” Drew said, “this gift means you’re not angry with Mariah over her ginseng counts? That you’ve forgiven her now?”

Seth shrugged. “When she returns, she will know what this means. That she must be strong to tell everyone the plant count is too low. For years, I was telling her the old Cherokee saying that a person who deserves life must pass by three sang plants before taking the fourth one. Now she understands that, so I bring her this.”

“A person who deserves life?” Drew repeated. “Meaning what?”

“He means all plant life is sacred, don’t you?” Jessie put in. “My mother believed that, too, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be good uses for sang or herbs.”

“But some bad uses, too,” Seth said, walking past them as if the conversation had suddenly ended. He lived not far away, down the creek. Had he walked all the way here with this heavy wooden piece? He surely hadn’t carved it on site. And why had he been camped out on the porch, when he knew Mariah was missing?

“How could he have brought that heavy trunk here?” she asked Drew.

“I’ve seen him rolling them, but that would be too far for this. I’m sure not buying the superstitions about Seth around here, that he can call up mythical creatures to do his bidding. I’ll worry about him later. We’ve got to search the house, then get out to some of the sang spots others might have missed.”

Jessie took a last, long look at the rough carving of the two hands and the sang plant. She should have thanked Seth for her mother. Later, when there was time, she would go to see him and take care of that.

“First of all,” Drew said, “does anything look out of place—not just moved, but really disturbed?”

From where they were standing in the front door, Jessie surveyed the place that was once her home. A white, wood-sided house with a shingled roof, it had hardly changed over the years, while she had changed so much. This front entry opened onto a living area, with a big hooked rug and a flagstone fireplace. Six worn, dark wood chairs surrounded a long wooden table that served as the dining area; a store-bought sofa and two hand-crafted rockers faced each other before the long front window looking out over the porch. A short hall led to a kitchen at the back left and two bedrooms on the right with a small bathroom between. Her mother had put modern plumbing in after Daddy died. A long, glassed-in sunporch stretched along the back of the house, a place for storage but a lot of living, too. That was still Jessie’s favorite room.

It was so strange to be here without her mother’s presence. The place seemed too silent—haunted. “I don’t think anything’s out of place,” she said, going in to look around the main room and kitchen. She peered into the back rooms. “It’s as if she just stepped outside for something. But her denim jacket is gone from its peg by the back door and her favorite old, scuffed hiking boots aren’t here.” She heard a scratching sound and saw that Drew was taking notes.

“Do you know where she kept her sang records?” he asked.

“Some in her desk, some in a tin box in the closet—her idea of a filing cabinet.” She sat down at her mother’s pine desk in the front room, one her father had crafted with his own hands, jack-of-all trades that he was. Sliding different drawers open and gently rifling through things, she said, “Believe me, it took some convincing, from both me and Professor Gering—Elinor, to get Mother the sang counting job in this area. I made her take all the modern devices like a GPS and cell phone they offered, but she refused to e-mail her findings in on spreadsheets and snail-mailed them instead. Still, they knew she was the best person to find sang around here.”

“As I said, we’re going to have to find her sang spots,” Drew said, hovering over her. “Anything about her counts there at all?”

“No, though I can go through everything more thoroughly later. Let’s go check her lockbox.”

“Will you need a key?” he asked, following her into the larger of the two small bedrooms. Mariah had made her bed; the familiar wedding ring heirloom quilt looked untouched, slumping into the shape of two human forms in the double bed her mother had once shared with her father and refused to replace.

“Believe it or not, she seldom locks it,” Jessie said.

She opened the closet door and the earthy, fresh aroma of the forest hit her with stunning impact. Jessie closed her eyes for a moment, breathing in the scent she most associated with her mother, wishing this were a magic entry into the forest, to the spot where Mariah must have met with some accident. You’re being foolish, she scolded herself. Too many childhood readings of Alice in Wonderland or The Chronicles of Narnia from Elinor.

Her mother’s closet looked small but roomy, compared to her own walk-in closet at home that was stuffed with clothes, but that made it easy to see what was on the floor. Hiking boots, walking shoes, only one pair of nice-looking flats, one extra purse. In the back right corner of the closet Jessie spotted the black metal tin box, despite the fact it was covered by a still new-looking Lands’ End backpack she’d bought her mother last year. Stubborn as ever, Mariah must still prefer her own, old, shoulder-sling pack.

Jessie knelt and slid the box out into the room. Drew squatted down to help her. It was about two-feet square and a foot deep and as old as the hills. Sitting cross-legged, Jessie lifted the lid—yes, unlocked.

“You mentioned about urging people to use locks,” she told Drew, “but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” To her surprise, the papers in the box looked in great disarray, as if someone had pawed through the contents.

“Is it always that messy?” Drew asked, his shoulder bumping hers as he sat down cross-legged next to her.

“I haven’t looked in it for years, but it’s not like her. This looks like it’s been stirred.”

“Or ransacked. Let me carry it into the kitchen so you can go over it better. Don’t touch the lid again, in case we need to dust it for prints.”

Jessie watched, wide-eyed, as Drew took a pair of latex gloves out of a packet from inside his jacket and pulled them on. That bright yellow police tape he’d had across the front door—now this.

Her insides churned as a memory hit her hard. “Drew, when I was in Hong Kong visiting a ginseng shop, I had a panic attack.”

Frowning, he snapped the gloves onto his big hands. “Tell me about it.”

“I—I got suddenly claustrophobic, even though I’d been really looking forward to visiting such a shop. I couldn’t breathe, the smells got to me and I almost threw up. I’ve never had anything like that happen before,” she said as he hefted the box and bounced it once to get a better grasp.

“And?” he prompted. “Tell me the rest.”

“I thought—felt—someone was chasing me, when that was ridiculous. I ran back to the hotel and collapsed for hours—then your call woke me. The time zones are hard to figure, but I’m thinking that would have been around sunset here, the night she went missing.”

She walked ahead of him into the kitchen where he put the box on the table. He straightened, turned and put his gloved hands on her shoulders. Grateful, needful, she lifted her hands to grip his wrists, encased in the thin latex.

“So you’re thinking it was some kind of ESP from Mariah?” he asked. “Like she was in some kind of trouble right then? You’ve never had the mountain woman sixth sense, have you?”

“Never. I don’t really believe in it, even though my mother said her mother had that gift. I didn’t mean to sound crazy—I know we need hard facts.”

“I’m glad you told me,” he said, letting her go and pulling out a ladder-backed chair at the table for her. “If there’s anything else like that, let me know. But right now, let’s see if we can find something to really go on. I’d like us to check some of her deepest forest spots in a couple of hours, but I think it’s worth it to go through this stuff first. If you come across anything that seems even vaguely useful, tell me and I’ll write it down. Go ahead, Jess, okay?” he added when he saw her hesitate.

Why did she feel so afraid? She felt almost closed in again, as if a big, black box were shutting around her. Or a coffin with the thud, thud of soil hitting its lid. With a shudder, she dug into the jumble of papers and photos.

6

“I never would have found this back road,” Tyler Finch told Cassie as they bounced along a rutted track in her old Ford truck.

“No offense, Mr. Finch, but even if you would have found it, that compact rental car wouldn’t get you back in where we’re going.”

“I’d like it if you’d call me Tyler.”

Pearl, squeezed in between them, piped up, “Finch is better ‘cause it’s a real pretty bird. It crunches seeds in its pow-ful beak.”

“Pearl’s getting to be quite a reader,” Cassie said. “All right, I’ll call you Tyler and you call me Cassie, but Pearl has to mind her manners and call you Mr. Finch.”

“And I promise I won’t crunch any seeds,” he said.

Pearl found that funny. Her girl was warming up to this stranger fast, a good reminder for her mother to keep her distance. Poor Pearl, with no daddy—not one she knew, anyway. Shy as she was, she took to most men once she knew them. Pearl’s loss was even greater than her own, and another reason a certain man deserved to die.

“What’s this mountain ahead of us called?” Tyler asked.

“Big Blue, but the place we’re going for your first shots is right by Shrieking Peak.”

“Sounds haunted. Does a story go with that?”

“Not that I know of. When the wind blows, which is most of the time, it sounds like a woman screaming.”

“Your friend’s mother you were telling me about—”

“Mariah Lockwood.”

“Yes. Could she have wandered up into this area?”

“That’s one of the good things about working for you, Mr.—Tyler. We’re going to keep a good eye out for signs of her, as well as for pretty places for your photos. Mariah Lockwood wandered far and wide, that’s why it’s been so hellfire hard to find her. Oh, sorry for the cussing. Pearl, you just forget you heard that now.”

She parked the truck where the thick stands of oak and basswood began, and they hiked up toward the place she knew would not only suit Tyler Finch but awe him. Their pace was slow, because he didn’t seem used to the rough terrain and Pearl’s legs were still so short. Besides, might as well treasure their time together—the extra money, that is, ‘cause he said he’d pay her each and every day.

“So,” she said, trying not to stare at him, “tell me more about your work.”

“There’s hard work and then there is joy work. Not that I don’t like my job, but I often have to go into the city—New York. It’s a bit too crowded and noisy for me, and I’m always fenced in by someone else’s ideas. For example, my assignment here is to get some photos of sites where TV ads for a power drink could be shot later—with live people.”

“Better’n dead ones. Ginseng power drinks?”

“Right. I’d like some really winsome ads, but we’ll probably have pro athletes hiking or rafting around here.”

Cassie wasn’t sure what winsome meant, but it must have something to do with winning. She nodded to encourage him.

“Our client puts caffeine and ginseng in their liquid sports aids,” he explained. “G-Man and G-Woman Drinks. Bailey and Keller, my advertising firm, helps a client build a brand name and tell their story.”

“Tell their story,” she repeated. “That’s important, I reckon, even for things, let alone for people.”

“Someday, Cassie,” he said, stopping and turning to face her, “will you tell me your story?”

She shrugged but smiled. “Not much to tell. Will you tell me yours then?”

“Yeah,” Pearl said with an impish grin. “Like you have to go first!”

He smiled at both of them, then got serious again. “On paper, my story is not important. I plead guilty to being an artistic workaholic unhappily wedded to the corporate world. Divorced, no kids, not much family left but some cousins—one who lives in Highboro, so I know the general area and love it. I make a good salary, but that doesn’t fulfill me. The joy work I mentioned is my own project, a book about Appalachia, mostly pictures, some text.”

“So these photos you want are for both your hard work and joy work?”

Their gazes snagged and held. The wind ruffled his short, sun-struck hair. He looked so wholesome—winsome—kind of like he belonged here and yet was some sort of alien invader. Don’t do this, Cassie told herself. Don’t go feeling all shaky about this man just ‘cause he looks like that and talks to you real heartfeltlike.

“Exactly,” he said when she’d forgotten what she’d asked and Pearl tugged at her hand. “Are we almost there? I think I hear the shrieking woman and something else—a roar.”

“It’s not a monster, so don’t worry!” Pearl put in.

Cassie thought of Mariah again, lost or hurt in these parts somewhere. Had Mariah called for help but there was no one to hear? Or had someone hurt her—or worse? Tyler was staring at her again, and Pearl was yanking her along.

“That roar’s Indian Falls,” Cassie said, as the world seemed to rotate back into place again. She had to keep shoving strands of her long red hair out of her eyes. “By the way, there’s a Cherokee man lives ‘round here you might like to meet if you want good stories for your book. He says his people believe waterfalls and large trees can capture your soul, and that the woods are a sacred but scary place.”

Even when they climbed to the crest of the open hillside and Cassie pointed toward Big Blue’s massive gray-and-purple shoulders shrugging off the crashing waters of the falls, Tyler Finch kept looking at her for a long moment.

“This takes my breath away,” he said as he finally turned to see the sights stretched out before them.

“I feel like we didn’t find a darned thing,” Jessie told Drew as they headed for Mariah’s door. She’d added one of her mother’s jackets and a pair of hiking boots to her jeans and sweatshirt. They had found no clue about where to start looking for a needle in this massive haystack of trees and hollows and hills.

Jessie’s feet and spirits were dragging now. Earlier, she’d been on a roller-coaster ride of emotions as she’d searched through her mother’s things in her metal box. The deed to this land, records of income tax returns. A large, dried ginseng plant—a five-pronger—pressed between pieces of wax paper had somehow gotten stuck in the big envelope with her parent’s marriage license. There had been old school photos of herself, skinny and gawky. “Man, you have changed!” Drew had said, looking over her shoulder. They had also found faded pictures of her parents in their courting days, a few of her father she’d never seen.

Also, copies of past ginseng counts, which had been pulled from another large envelope, then half-stuffed back in. But to their dismay, nothing hinted at particular sang counting sites, past or present. In haste, had her mother pulled what she needed from this envelope, then thrust the rest back in?

Jessie could tell Drew was upset, too, though he promised they’d spend days looking for signs of Mariah if they had to. His words echoed in Jessie’s head and heart. Signs, as if her mother had left a message behind, but wasn’t around herself anymore …

“What’s this behind the door?” Drew asked as he opened it for her to go outside ahead of him. He reached down to pick up a calendar that was wedged on its side, standing upright against the wall.

“Oh, a calendar I gave her for Christmas,” she told him as he handed it to her. “I thought she’d like all the photos of the flowers for each month. It must have been tacked on the wall behind the door and got bumped off.”

“Check it to see if she listed places she was going to count sang.”

She flipped back a page to Mariah’s major counting month of August and skimmed the entries. Vern Tarver’s name was listed about twice a week with the name of restaurants in Highboro. Mariah’s scrawling handwriting recorded a church covered-dish supper to raise money for Widow Winchester. “Look,” she said, pointing at a Wednesday in August. “This doesn’t say Sang but Sung—Peter Sung’s name!”

“Your hunch about talking to him sounds right on. I’ll have to check if he was in town then. Anything under the first few September dates?”

She flipped to the current month. Since her mother had disappeared on the fourth, not much was filled in but for Vern’s name—this time crossed off heavily, jaggedly, on the third. On the fourth, scribbled in light pencil, was Semples OK.

“Does that say samples?” Drew asked, reading it upside-down. “Maybe Peter Sung wanted some samples of wild ginseng to know the quality he could expect to buy this year.”

“No, see—the S is capitalized. Semples.”

“Junior and Charity Semple? They’re the only Semples in the area, and he grows raised sang up in the woods above his place. But would she count sang that’s not wild but cultivated?”

“I’m pretty sure she always kept an eye on his crop—technical name, virtually wild sang. The crop’s health is a valid indicator since, once he plants the seeds, Mother Nature takes over. He used to have a couple acres of sang, scattered throughout the woods above his house.”

“It’s worth a try, a place to start. And that notation is on the day she disappeared.”

“You’re sure she got that far—that is, left the house that day and wasn’t somehow taken from here?” she asked.

“A couple of people spotted her walking along the highway that morning—come to think of it, in the direction of the Semples’. I’ll go check on this at their place.”

“You?” she challenged, stepping ahead and turning to face him as he tried to pass her to head out the door. She raised her chin to look him in the eye. “I thought we were working together on this.”

“Jess, you remember Junior Semple. Believe me, he’s gotten more cantankerous and off-the-wall over the years.”

“Is he the one who tied copperhead snakes around his sang patch?”

“No, but he’s paranoid about poachers. He’s been in trouble before for his belief that the best defense is a good offense. I’ll take you with me whenever I need help finding a sang site, but not out to the Semples’.”

They faced each other squarely in the doorway, half in, half out. She didn’t budge. “I realize the man used to be trigger-happy,” she conceded, “but he might tell you more if I were there. It would be like a daughter just looking for her mother with your help, not some official investigation. You’d probably spook him, now that you’re sheriff here.”

“I don’t want you getting hurt. You should be here, in case word comes about Mariah’s whereabouts.”

“You mean I’m allowed to stay here now?”

“Yes, but don’t make this—”

“Difficult? It is, Drew! I’m going with you. Please, or else you can just lock me up in your jail cell!”

He opened his mouth to say something else, then just shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. “All right. You just might be of help. But if Junior pulls anything, you do exactly what I say.”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

He cocked his big head and squinted down at her. “You been around marines, ma’am? Then you know the chain of command is not something to mock or ignore. Let me have that calendar,” he said, taking it from her and glaring down at it instead of her. “It may just be our first piece of evidence, not only because of Semples being listed here. Her crossing out of Vern Tarver’s name, after this long string of dates, looks really angry. And if she was upset, maybe he was, too.”

No one answered Drew’s “Hello!” or knock at the Semples’ one-story clapboard house back in Crooked Creek Hollow. Jessie hadn’t been here for years, but the place boasted a typical scattering of buildings—not as ramshackle as she recalled—with deep forests hunkered above. Actually, the house looked newly painted, so maybe raised sang had paid for that. Her eyes took in the chicken coop with no chickens, the old rundown, roofless barn, sturdy smokehouse, and a work shed, all strung up a narrowing valley. Tombstones like broken teeth guarded a small family graveyard, the kind not allowed anymore. She couldn’t read the dates on the mossy limestone markers, but the pioneers buried here had probably known Daniel Boone and Seth Bearclaws’s ancestors, when all of this territory was their hunting ground.

“You got any memories about where Junior’s sang patches are?” Drew asked her in a low voice. He kept shifting his narrowed stare, especially up into the deep shadows under the trees where a ragged dirt path zigzagged upward.

“No, but the patches will be on the northern exposure side of a gully, steep hillside or cove. Ginseng loves its privacy and leaf litter intact. Maybe in a woodlot with a beech or maple canopy overhead and maidenhair ferns and goldenseal to tip us off. I’ll spot it if we walk up in there a ways. See, you do need me.”

He turned and gave her a look that made her knees go weak. She hadn’t meant to goad him. Was he just ticked off, or was that fierce look something else? He put a finger to his lips to signal silence as they went on.

After about a five-minute walk, they heard something before they saw anyone. A thud, crunch, thud, crunch. Someone digging. Maybe digging sang. Though Jessie had been leading, Drew seized her wrist and pulled her back behind him.

“Me first, now,” he whispered as he unsnapped the holster on his belt and pulled out his gun.

Drew noticed a couple of .22 caliber casings on the ground, the choice of rifle shells around here. Junior was one of the few men in the area who didn’t keep coonhounds, so he was grateful they didn’t have to fend those off.

Up ahead, on the breeze, he heard the digging sounds again. Ever since they’d opened that old, black box of Mariah’s, stashed in her closet, he’d had a foreboding feeling that they hadn’t found her because someone had buried her. Talk about Jess maybe having a sixth sense on this! The only capital case he’d worked over in Highboro was when a man killed, cut up and buried his wife in cardboard boxes in about ten different places. That whole investigation still haunted him.

Drew realized whoever was making the noise would hear them soon. Too many dried leaves on the forest floor and this path now, even though the trees hadn’t shed this year’s bounty yet. He’d love to get the drop on whoever it was, but it was probably Junior. He didn’t want any trouble with Jess in tow, so he decided to sing out.

“Junior? You here’bouts? Drew Webb with Jessie Lockwood. Need a word with you!”

All was silent. Then Junior appeared to their side, not where the sounds had been. But Drew had seen many a mountain man move through the woods softer than a panther.

“Hey, now,” Junior said. He had a rifle in his arms, at ease, not cocked. “Don’t you know better’n sneaking up on someone like that?”

“That’s why I yelled for you, like we did down below.”

“Jessie,” Junior said with a nod of his worn, backward baseball cap as he shuffled out from behind the tree. “Any word on Mariah?”

“That’s why we’re here, Junior,” Drew said before she could answer. At least she seemed to be letting him take the lead. “Mariah had a notation on her daily calendar that she was coming up here the day she disappeared. So, did she get here—Tuesday, that is?”

Junior narrowed his eyes under his thatch of thick, gray eyebrows as if he had to consider his answer. Though he was probably about forty-five, his shaggy, salt-and-pepper hair made him look at least a decade older. He was tall and wiry but with big shoulders. He had a pronounced lazy eye, which always made it seem he was looking two places at once, both at you and past you, as if someone else might be sneaking up behind. Years ago, Drew and his brothers used to laugh about that cross-eyed look, but now it just made him nervous.

“Yeah, Mariah stopped by that day,” Junior finally said after he made both of them swear not to talk about his sang patches to others. “She always does a count of a patch of my raised-up sang. To compare almost wild to the real wild, she says.”

“So,” Drew said, holstering his gun slowly, but leaving its cover unsnapped, “where and when on Tuesday, the fourth?”

“Right after dinnertime, ‘bout one o’clock. Set a piece with Charity and me, had some Arizona iced tea Charity bought ‘cause it has sang in it that could be our’n. Then Charity went to see her mother in Highboro, so Mariah counted the spot where I was ready to dig.”

“Would you mind showing us that spot?”

“But I’m telling you, not to breathe no word of any of this layout. Got me a friend other side of Big Blue guarded his forest sang spot like the dickens, but the one weekend he went away all summer, poachers hit and cleared him out of a $200,000 plus harvest. Don’t trust no one,” he said and turned away to hack and spit behind him. “Still, I know you got to look for Mariah.”

Jess said, “We’re really grateful for your help, Mr. Semple. Did she say anything about where she was going next when she left?”

Looking uncomfortable again, Junior shrugged, then said, “Up by Sunrise, I think, but that’s a lot of land. Come on then, and walk behind me, right in my footsteps from here on up. Don’t want no one trampling a sang plant down.”

Drew knew enough about sang to see that there were no plants in this immediate area, so he wasn’t sure why Junior was so touchy. Likely it was just his nature. Drew had had a fair-warning talk with him the first week he’d gotten here because Junior had gone far beyond leaving scarecrows around to frighten off possible poachers. He’d put out word of haints—spottings of spirits or ghosts—and even hung ghostlike sheets in the trees to scare off teenagers who had done some poaching. What Drew really feared, though, was how quick with the trigger-finger Junior could be. Sheriff Akers had said he’d been in jail for a month a couple of years ago for rigging shotguns to go off if anyone crossed a trip wire near his sang patches. He’d been a terrible prisoner, went berserk in his jail cell and was always yelling to get out.

“So how has your crop been this year?” Jess asked him.

“So-so,” he said, though Drew could tell the patch they were approaching had three-and four-prongers, which were mature, valuable plants. But Junior had brought them to a very small, ragged patch, and he wondered if this really was the one Mariah had visited. What if Junior still had a shotgun or two rigged around here, and she’d gotten off the path and one discharged? Would he just bury her to avoid trouble—and a long stay in a prison cell?

“We heard you digging away,” Drew said. “Mind showing us exactly where?”

Junior turned and frowned. Drew had the urge to pull Jess behind him again, but he could get to his .45 as fast as Junior could raise that rifle. “Tell you what,” Junior said, drawling his words more than ever. “I’ll give you the same demo I give Mariah.”

In the same place? Drew wondered, but he decided not to press his luck. Junior led them around a large basswood tree and pointed to a sang patch atop a sharp, wooded hill with northern exposure. The creek ran through a rocky bed about twenty feet below. Sang plants, looking autumn-yellow with their small clusters of red berries, nodded in the breeze along the whole crest of the hill.

“I was digging somewheres right about here while she counted,” he told them and pulled a homemade sang hoe out of the leafy ground. It sported a sharp, needle-nosed blade he must have cut and hammered out from a shovel. Actually, Drew thought, it made one hell of a makeshift weapon.

“Damn poachers,” Junior went on. “They done cut a lot out of this site last month, then slid down the hill over yonder and hiked out by the creek bed.” He lifted the hoe, then stabbed it into the ground.

Drew could see he had already started to cut around a sang plant. Diggers always gave the root plenty of room to avoid cutting off the little root hairs. You never knew how big the so-called limbs of the taproot itself would be.

“Is this exactly where my mother did her count, just to get an idea of the rest of your patches scattered around here?” Jess asked, God bless her. He was right to bring her along. She knew when to keep her mouth shut and when to step in with a woman’s softer approach to a key question.

“Right,” Junior muttered, not looking up.

But Drew didn’t believe him. Why would he show Mariah a spot that had been poached—unless he was just complaining to her so he could continue to justify his illegal attempts to attack poachers? Junior might have planted this sang and kept an eye on it, but the forest floor, even this close to his property, was open land. Unless Junior caught them, or unless they tried to sell stolen sang and didn’t have a government license, poachers could get away with a fortune here. In the wilds like this, even if Junior slung the seeds and covered them up, the risk was all his.

“Ever think of starting a real big cultivation of sang, like they grow in farms in Wisconsin or Korea?” Jess was asking.

“Naw,” Junior told her with a shake of his shaggy head. “Everybody knows sang’s the most valuable nontimber plant you can grow in the woods. Even if the cultivated kind is easier to protect, wild sang’s worth more, Miss Jessie, you know that. Still, gotta admit, high fences would cut down on varmints like deer—human varmints, too. That’s the thing, and you both know it. When you’re raising a crop worth five hundred dollars a pound that’ll grow only in deep forest, you gotta do what you can to protect it. You understand that, don’t you now, boy—Sheriff?”

Drew decided not to take the bait of another snide comment about his past. He knew Junior and others had no use for him, but he needed Junior now. But damn this old geezer for not volunteering the information about Mariah heading for Sunrise Mountain three days ago. Knowing that could have kept search parties from wasting time around Big Blue. But was Junior even telling the truth now, or was this just a way to give them a quick show-and-tell and then get them out of here?

“This one’s prob’ly four, five years old,” Junior said. His voice had taken on a quickness; his hands on the hoe were actually shaking, and he’d put his rifle down on the ground, which made Drew feel a lot better. Maybe he was just overreacting to the scent of danger and duplicity here.

The ball of soil Junior was cutting out was about a foot around, six inches out from the stem on all sides. Cautiously, he tipped the root-ball out, then knelt and started to break the soil away with his fingers, careful not to harm the side roots or even their tiny hairs.

“I’ll count the growth scars to see how old it really is,” he told them. “Now lookie at this, good size! Dried, this root’ll go for twenty dollars or more at Vern Tarver’s, then end up with Peter Sung or that tall woman who buys for that power drinks company. Just think of that!”

He held it up toward them with the red Appalachian soil still clinging to it. The root looked as if it was carved from old ivory, Drew thought, as Junior shook it cleaner. It had the shape of a twisted, crouching, many-legged beast. Seeing the sudden transformation in this man, from edgy and hesitant to eager and awed, Drew grasped the power of this valuable, strange plant people had lied and died for.

“That’s it now,” Junior told them, putting the root carefully on the ground. “That’s what I did for Mariah—that’s all I know. Go on back down now, by the same path you come up on.”

Drew not only smelled the rich, earthy scent of the sang but a rat. Junior Semple was hiding something, but no way he could force him to tell what or run him in for questioning, though he’d like to get a crack at him without Jess around.

“Thanks for your time and the tip about Sunrise,” Drew told Junior, and took hold of Jess’s upper arm and firmly propelled her away.

“All right now,” Junior called after them, all-too-obviously relieved they were going. “Just you watch your step on the path, ‘cause it got some steep points.”

“He’s nervous about something,” Jess said out of the side of her mouth. “He doesn’t want us off this path.” They started down until they were out of sight.

“Stay here one sec and let me just glance down the other side of this rise,” he told her and put her on the far side of a big maple tree. “We’ll never find footprints in this leaf litter, but I just want to see if I can spot a bigger patch nearby where he might really have taken Mariah for a count.”

He moved quickly away and looked down at the crooked stream rattling along below. Someone could have taken a tumble along this jagged path through broken foliage, ferns and saplings. This was where Junior had said poachers slid down a hill. Yet he felt something was wrong here.

He walked back toward where he’d left Jess and saw her also looking over the edge of the rise. Maybe she’d found a clue, because she stooped and reached out for something protruding from the ground. At first he thought it might be a scrap of cloth. No, it was shaped more like a property line stake, though Semple’s property was nowhere near this high up.

She heard him coming and turned his way, still reaching out toward the stake. “Drew,” she said, “this looks like a half-buried marker stake, kind of shaped like a firecracker or something like th—”

Then he knew what it was, but the knowledge might have come too late.

“No—don’t!” he shouted and threw himself at her, just as the thing went off.

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