“Jess—” he said fervently, then bit his lower lip.
Feeling suspended, she hung on that single, whispered word. Of all her names and titles, that one from him thrilled her. When he said no more, she asked, “Why have you always called me Jess? No one else does.”
He frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a way to show you’re special. Years ago, it was probably a desperate attempt to just pass you off as one of the guys, so I didn’t have to notice you.”
“How could you notice skinny, little, bug-bit me with a hottie like Fran MacCrimmon wrapped around you most of the time?”
“Hey, that makes it sound like you were stalking me.”
“In a way, I guess I was.”
“Jess, what was between us that last night just happened, but what we did—even then, I felt it was a happening.”
“That sounds like a greeting card,” she said, her voice breathy, “one I would have saved pressed in a book of memories or a diary forever. I used to write things about you in a diary that Elinor gave me. Oh, sorry, too much information. You’re going to think I was nuts. Drew, I’ve been wanting to say that what happened that night—when we were found and…and separated—was my fault as much as it was yours.”
“No, it was mine. If you’re to blame, it was only because that was the first night I took a good look at you—your warmth and concern for me as well as your beauty, the woman you had almost turned into. I was so broken, so down, and you reached out to comfort me…”
He stopped talking and cocked his head as if listening to something in the distance. Except for the wind, knocking a tree limb against the porch roof, silence stretched between them. Had they said too much? Jessie wondered. Once again, had they gone too far, too fast?
“And now,” she said, when he didn’t go on, “you are a comfort to me.”
“There’s a lot I could say, but—”
“But now’s not the time.”
“Your deciding to stay will give us some time.”
“I don’t mind waiting. First, we have to find who hurt my mother.”
“Absolutely. If you’re willing, I’ll bring the two sacks of sang leaves in from the Cherokee now, and we can go through them together before you use them. We’ve got to be sure there’s no kind of clue mixed in.”
“Yes, let’s. We’ll be so busy tomorrow and the next day.”
He rose and gave her his hand to help her up. But he pulled her right into his arms in a hard hug.
She clung to him, pressing her face against his shoulder, her hands clamped to the small of his back. He felt so solid, so strong. He brushed his lips against her tousled hair, dipped his head, and they were kissing. Moving together, tipping heads to miss noses and meld mouths. Breathing together.
She slid her hands heavily up his back to caress the nape of his neck. The short, crisp hairs there tickled her palms. His hands on her waist, he pinned her hard against him, from thighs and knees to breast and chest. She felt his unbroken kiss clear down into the pit of her belly. The world was going to spin out of control again, she thought, trying to snatch at sanity. Why had this man—the first man she’d ever wanted, the man who had haunted her for years even when she was with others—why had he remained the only one who could make her feel her inner power and yet lose herself?
Their breathing quieted; she was sure he forced himself to let her go. “I actually just grabbed you, hoping that you’d scratch my back,” he said with a taut smile. “That poison ivy’s still bugging me. I’ll go out and get the sang. My mother used to say, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.’”
“As if you used to listen to her,” she said, just to fill the awkward moment between them as he walked to the front door, shifted the curtain aside and looked out. She peered out over his shoulder. Pale moonlight sifted silver over the windy scene.
“But I did hear her, even though I seemed to never be listening to her,” he said as he opened the front door and went out, digging his keys out of his jeans pocket.
Leaving the door open behind her, Jessie followed
across the porch and down the steps to his vehicle. Then both of them stopped and stared.
She gasped; Drew swore.
“I can’t believe it,” he cried, smacking his hands on his thighs. “Some bastard keyed my car out here!”
“Keyed?” she said, staring at the long scratch marks that marred the entire driver’s side of the vehicle.
“It’s usually done with a fist of car keys,” he said, not looking at her, but showing her what he meant with his own keys.
Gooseflesh, not from the chill, peppered her arms and made the hair on the back of her neck prickle. She was certain someone—something—was watching from the darkness.
“But this,” he whispered, his voice now more awed than angry, “looks like some giant beast has clawed it.”
16
D rew shook with rage. The scratches on the Cherokee were so similar to those on Mariah’s face that he almost didn’t need to try to make a match. Jessie stepped closer to him, but he put out an arm to keep her away.
“Stay back. There might be fresh footprints.”
“You won’t be going out there—after whoever did this?” she asked, still keeping close as he went around to the passenger side to unlock the doors and get a flashlight.
“It would be useless and stupid. Go inside, bring out our jackets and both of the claw necklaces. And another flashlight, if you have one.”
When she went in, he trained the flashlight on the long scratches. They were deep, not ones that could easily be buffed out and repainted. He went all around the vehicle, but the marks were only on the side he’d parked toward the house, the driver’s side. A double-edged message? A defiant threat to him or to Jess, since it was done here?
Damn, he’d been so proud of this Jeep Cherokee and had tried to keep it clean and shined. If it weren’t for the familiar pattern of the marks, he’d think it wasn’t even necessarily related to Mariah’s death. Several locals had
admired the vehicle; Seth had been the only one who had disliked the use of the Cherokee name, refusing to ride in it, at least before today. Surely Seth hadn’t decided he needed to strike out at the vehicle. But he did live a short walk away through the woods. No, he wouldn’t do so many things to make himself look guilty.
Jess came back with his jacket, another flashlight and both leather-thong claw necklaces. He examined the claws, but he knew both kinds were spaced too close together to match these scratches. But, as he held up one of each kind of claw against the marred metal surface, it seemed to him the sharp, slanted tip of the badger claw looked about right for the width of the lines. Badger claws, badger fur—it didn’t make sense. Why a badger?
Of course, he reasoned, to badger someone meant to harass someone, but that kind of wordplay was too far-fetched, too complex a joke. He couldn’t picture anyone around here but Peter Sung thinking that one up. Had his hounds been hunting badgers, since killing bears was illegal in this state? And what did a man care about what was illegal if he’d murdered someone?
The vandal had dared to take his time, making one long track and then the next one, unbroken the entire length of the vehicle. He’d thought he’d heard a noise earlier, a kind of shuffling. If he would not have been so intent on Jess, he might have glanced out and all of this—Mariah’s murder, too—would be solved.
“You’re thinking,” she said, standing back from him and shining her flashlight on the ground as he started to look for tracks, “that those claw marks resemble my mother’s cuts. Do you have those photos here too?”
“In a brown envelope between the front seat and the
console on the passenger side,” he said. Her clear thinking in a crisis surprised him again. “All the photos are there, including ones Tyler took of the sang berries arranged in patterns and the animal head. I showed them to Seth after we returned from the forest, and he didn’t bat an eye—again, he denied having anything to do with any of it. Watch where you step, but bring them around, please—Deputy.”
At another time they both might have laughed at his calling her that, but she just squeezed his shoulder and walked to get them. One hell of a woman, but then, this was getting to be one hell of a mess. Someone crafty and clever was playing with them, but this wasn’t a game.
Yes, footprints were here, but vague. Someone had shuffled along, blurring the size of their feet. Intentionally? He followed the tracks until they went onto the grass toward the forest. He backtracked where Jess was still standing by the vehicle, her hair washed by wan window light. She’d taken the photos out and was keeping off the tracks, bending toward the vehicle to compare the pictures of her dead, disfigured mother. She was brave, too, or else she was still so furious over Mariah’s cruel death that nothing was going to scare her off.
“Anything distinctive about the footprints?” she asked.
“It’s like the person lumbered along, dragging his feet the entire way.”
“Are you sure it’s a him?”
“Figure of speech. An educated guess from working with marines and sailors for years, a lot of drunk ones.”
“Are you sure it’s a person?”
“Jess!” he muttered and took the stack of pictures from her. “I’ll admit, because of Tyler’s one weird photo, I’ve nicknamed the figure in it The Thing, but, of course, this
vandalism and Mariah’s murder were committed by a person. This isn’t some Stephen King novel, for heaven’s sake. You haven’t had some other strange vision, have you?”
“No, Sheriff. Sir, no, sir!”
He thought she’d like to smack him with the flashlight, but again, she directed her beam for him while he compared the pattern of marks on Mariah’s cheeks to those on the Cherokee. The perspective and spacing were different, of course. Still, he’d bet a year’s salary they were made by the same kind of claws. Badger claws. Could Seth have extra ones, or was someone else involved?
He remembered once betting fifty bucks with another MP in Italy about whether the Kentucky Wildcats or the Wisconsin Badgers would win a tournament basketball game back home. The guy had told him that the badger was such a brave and tough animal that it had been known to drive off a full-grown bear, if it invaded its territory. He’d said Wisconsin was called the Badger State, not because those animals were more common there than other places, but because the early miners were too busy to build homes. During the brutal winters, they were forced to live like badgers in holes they dug with their shovels into hillsides or abandoned mine shafts.
His mind seized on that. They burrowed in with shovels as if they were human claws…Had Mariah been hit in the back of the head by a sang spade like Junior Semple’s? Drew knew it wasn’t Junior who did this, because he was in jail in Highboro. But the numerous local sang diggers or poachers must have hundreds of homemade spades like Junior’s.
Vern had some he’d made for sale in his store and had said he had a collection of old, homemade ones in his pride-and-joy museum. The poor guy was always trying to
get people to visit it, and they hardly ever did. Like Drew, most locals had never set foot up there, and tourists continued to be minimal—unless Ryan Buford’s roads opened things up or word of some feral beast loose in these woods brought in the media and others.
“Let’s go inside,” he told Jess. “As bold as it was for someone to do this on the side facing your house, when we could have glanced out, I can’t do anything else till daybreak. I’m not leaving you alone here tonight. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“You can sleep in my old bed in the back room.”
“I want to be where I can look out here, though the damage is done. He’s so brazen, he might come back. I’ll be fine on the sofa. Let’s go in.”
On the porch, she waited for him to lock the Cherokee and join her. He lit his way with his flashlight trained on the ground, the steps, then the porch floorboards.
“Drew, look!” she cried and seized his arm, turning her flashlight back on and pointing at some dirt she must have tracked in when he sent her back inside.
“No one’s gone in but you, even though the door stood open,” he tried to comfort her. Her boldness had disappeared; she’d gone white as a ghost. He watched her play her light along the porch on both sides of the doorstep, then back inside. Faint smudges of tracks were there, women’s tracks. Hers, of course, he thought. She was trembling again; her beam actually bounced.
“Jess, trust me on this. No one’s gone in, and I’m staying with you.”
“Yes. Yes, thanks. I’m just getting spooked by all this, that’s all.”
He put his arm around her shaking shoulders as they went in, and he shot the bolt behind them.
Jessie couldn’t sleep, and this time, it wasn’t her poison ivy bothering her. Trying to relax, to find a comfortable position, she kept telling herself that temporary insomnia was natural. She was mourning and frightened and furious. She should feel totally safe since Drew Webb, boy of her childhood dreams, man of her heart—and an armed sheriff to boot—was sleeping just on the other side of that door. She’d heard him get up from time to time and walk around, on guard, on patrol.
But tomorrow she would see her mother’s body, publicly begin to face friends and neighbors in what the coroner’s wife had called “settin’ up with the dead.” The dead—that was what was really getting to her, the Chinese customs Peter Sung had told her about the dead.
As Drew had said, those were, no doubt, her own footprints in dirt and dust near the front door. But were her feet that narrow and could she have tracked that much soil in herself? Mr. Sung had said that the Chinese believed that the “spirit of the deceased” returned home about a week after his or her death. The mourning family often sprinkled flour or talcum powder at the front door, so they would know the spirit had come home.
She thrashed her bedcovers again, then sat up and put her head in her hands. A far cry, Mr. Sung had said, from Baptist beliefs, and that was true. Only the Lord could bring someone back from the dead: Himself, of course, and a young girl and His friend Lazarus who had been called out of his tomb after so many days that “he stank.” The scent of death had come from her mother, too. For some reason, despite the smells of the ginseng market that day in Hong Kong, she’d thought she had scented something
besides the herbs, something fetid and yeasty, almost as sharp as mothballs.
More than once last night, while she and Drew had sifted through the ginseng leaves that had covered her mother, she thought she’d recognized that very smell. “Do you smell something besides sang here?” she’d finally asked him.
“These leaves were near a dead body for several days. But I didn’t bring the ones that were nearest to her.”
“So I wouldn’t see any blood?”
“I took some of those leaves for evidence the night we found her.”
“To have them tested to see if it was only her blood?”
“Yeah. Those leaves are in plastic evidence bags en route to Frankfort for testing. But it will take time, even if they put it on the fast track.”
“I know those tests are not done in a couple of hours like on TV forensic shows. Drew, have you ever investigated a murder before?”
He had nodded. “Besides a murder in Highboro I worked on, two in the service, both sailors. One was a guy who was dating an Italian girl whose previous boyfriend took offense and a hammer to him. Another, a knifing, the result of a barroom brawl. You know, as tough as that police work was since we were in a foreign country, turning over every rock in my hometown is one hell of a lot harder.”
She’d sympathized, but he wasn’t getting her off track. Finally, in the limp sang leaves she’d found some reddish-gray fur that smelled stronger of the scent that was haunting her.
“Smell this,” she’d told Drew, putting it in her palm and lifting it toward him.
He’d sniffed, frowned, but nodded. “I must not have the
nose you do for it, but Seth says that’s badger fur. And the online encyclopedia I used to read about badgers said they have a strong musky odor.”
“You and I both know she wasn’t killed by the ‘attack of a giant badger,’ like some horrible Japanese monster movie! Maybe a badger climbed up that other tree where Seth found fur, and it was just a coincidence that Tyler got that weird picture. Then, maybe, by coincidence a badger scratched Mother’s face after she was put in the hollow tree.”
“Evenly, on both cheeks?” he challenged. “There’s no such thing as coincidence in good police work, Deputy.” She’d thought he was reaching for the badger fur, but instead he had taken her hand in his. A tingle had shot clear up her arm. “I—maybe we—will find him, sweetheart,” he’d whispered. “Promise.”
Jessie flopped back in the bed again. Drew had not just been teasing when he’d called her “deputy” last night; he had meant it as a compliment. But when he’d called her “sweetheart,” whether it had just been a casual term or he’d really meant it, she had been thrilled. Right in the middle of being obsessed with her mother’s murder, she was thrilled.
“Dr. Jessica Lockwood,” she muttered, “get hold of yourself.”
She was going to look like the living dead if she didn’t get some sleep. The wake would go all tomorrow night, although others would sit with her mother’s coffin to give her a rest. Still, she would probably be functioning on adrenaline and anger. In the back of the refrigerator she’d seen some of that G-Women power drink, probably given to her mother by Beth Brazzo, because she couldn’t picture her mother buying it. The stuff was loaded with
caffeine and ginseng. Maybe she’d have one of those for breakfast—if morning ever came.
The next morning, Drew and the Merrimans left Jessie alone with her mother’s body in a private back room of the funeral home. When the door closed behind them, she walked over to the open coffin, steeling herself. Gazing at her mother’s still upper torso and placid face, gripping the edge of the coffin, she whispered, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” She sniffed back a sob. “Sorry that you died—how you died. I always meant to say I was grateful you gave me the world, not just Deep Down. I—I understand why you did it. I’m sorry I was so angry. And I’m so sorry it ended this way, but I’ll find out—I’ll try—Drew, too—to make it right.”