Karen Harper - Deep Down

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?”