LITMIR.BIZ

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recovery operation—out of the old house that was now his police station: an apartment where he lived upstairs; downstairs, a reception desk and phone center behind a counter, both run by Emmy Enloe; his office; a supply room and two holding cells. He had no deputy, so Emmy was his entire staff. Today he’d moved her onto the front porch to keep track of volunteer searchers. Usually as quiet as the grave, his office and the whole town were in chaos today.

      Drew had just come in from using a search warrant to go through Mariah’s unlocked front door, which he’d secured and put police tape across when he left. Two days ago, he hadn’t gone farther than the kitchen when he went in, looking for Jess’s contact information when the numbers her friend Cassie had given him turned out to be dead ends. Mariah’s place looked neat enough. He’d need Jess to tell him if anything was really disturbed or missing, other than two pairs of old shoes he’d taken to scent the hounds with.

      “Drew, you read me?” came Akers’s scratchy voice.

      “I read, Sheriff. You’re breaking up, but go ahead.”

      “I got me two more groups I can send out tomorrow.”

      “I’ll let you know first thing in the morning. We need 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 bus.

      “Sheriff, how ‘bout I fetch you some more coffee or apple pie? Or you in dire need of a good back rub?”

      Audrey Doyle, who ran the only restaurant in town, the Soup to Pie, draped herself in his doorway. He had to admit she’d been helping with things today, offering free coffee to search parties. Unfortunately, ever since he’d been back in town, she’d been offering him a lot more than that and she didn’t like to take no for an answer. With her long, platinum hair and too tight jeans holding in a voluptuous figure, Audrey was cruising for a third husband. He was not interested in more than food and local information from her.

      “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

      “You sure are. You’re doing a great job.”

      “I’m not doing a great job, because we haven’t found her,” he said, as he brushed past her onto the porch where Emmy and two other girls were sitting at a card table, manning the lists and locations of searchers. He saw several groups coming back into town, some walking, some in their pickups with yapping hounds in the back. He wondered if anyone had taken sang from Mariah’s precious sites, so carefully counted.

      Audrey sidled up behind him, close enough that he could feel her breath on the nape of his neck. “I know some folks resent having a sheriff here, but I think it’s long overdue,” she whispered.

      “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said and bent over Emmy’s shoulder to skim the lists. Audrey took the hint and sashayed back toward the Soup to Pie three doors down.

      Despite Audrey’s soft-soap compliments, Sheriff Drew Webb knew he had a lot to prove to Deep Downers and those in the surrounding rural areas of his jurisdiction. He had things to prove to himself, too. And now to Jess Lockwood.

      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

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