Free Deep Down (I) by Karen Harper Page B

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