Karen Harper - Deep Down

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.