Deep Down (I) Read Free Page B

to call it a night now before it gets pitch-dark. Besides, I don’t trust some of the volunteers to just look for signs of her instead of shooting at anything that moves, like the Shelton kid did. Said he saw a huge buck. I’ve got the woods full of search parties, and I don’t need someone killed,” he said and signed off.
    Someone killed. The words echoed in his head. He’d been praying that something terrible hadn’t happened to Mariah. If it had, he didn’t know how he could tell Jess. But then, he wasn’t sure how he could face her, anyway, after all this time. Water way over the dam, sure, but it still ate at him. She was twenty-eight now and he was thirty-four, so that meant they hadn’t spoken for nearly twelve years before that brief international phone call. What happened between them was so long ago—almost in another life. So why did it still haunt him?
    He startled when someone spoke close behind him. He prided himself on being aware of people sneaking up, but then Cassie Keenan had always moved as silently as a wraith.
    “She’s just nowhere I knew to look,” Cassie called out as she poked her red head in the front door.
    “Thanks for searching, anyway,” Drew told her.
    Once Jess’s best friend, Cassie was the local beauty, if you could look past the vacant stares, when she sometimes seemed to drift off to somewhere else. For once she didn’t have her darling little four-year-old, Pearl, with her. A wildcrafter like Mariah, Cassie had no husband, never had.
    Though an illegitimate child was fairly common around here, she’d never told anyone who Pearl’s father was, and she was such a loner no one yet had managed a good guess. Just the other day, Drew had told Vern Tarver to shut his yap when he’d joked about Pearl being the second child ever born by immaculate conception.
    If Cassie wanted to keep that secret, it was fine with Drew, except she was barely making it financially on her own. More than once he’d bought her groceries, using the excuse he appreciated her cooking a meal for him. That was a big lie since she always put strange plants and herbs in about everything she made, and Drew had always favored meat and potatoes—or since his years in Italy, pasta.
    “I been to lots of spots with Mariah to gather moss and herbs,” Cassie went on, “but can’t find hide nor hair of her in any of them, nor the sang spots I know. Guess she had to keep her counting spots real quiet, so they didn’t get poached or dug up. I can ’preciate that—her keeping something to herself. But if she was counting sang at her secret sites, Jessie’s the only one might know all of them.”
    “That’s what I figured, too. She’ll be home—here—in a couple of hours. She called when her plane landed in Cincinnati before she caught a commuter to Lexington.”
    “Poor thing, driving in the dark to all this. Too bad Dr. Gering died last year, or she would’ve come with her sure. I’m praying she’s not lost her blood mother, well as her foster one. You just let me know when she’s here now, ’cause maybe I can help her some.” With a flutter of one delicate hand, she was gone.
    Cassie’s comments made Drew realize how much of Jess’s life he had missed. He’d never met the woman who had been a second mother to her. After the big blowup here over Jess and him, Mariah had sent her to live with a UK professor who specialized in Appalachian dialect. Jess had come home every August, so he’d heard, but, except for a couple of month-long leaves, he’d been away for years, first overseas with the marines and then as a deputy in Highboro, around the other side of Big Blue.
    He thought he’d made a good life for himself, but so had Jess. Though some in town resented her “fancy book-learning,” as far as he was concerned, she was Deep Down’s big success story. He thought Jessica Lockwood made a mockery of the stale, old joke that the only good thing that ever came out of Deep Down was an empty