Karen Harper - Deep Down

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.