LITMIR.BIZ

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as she was, she became instantly alert with her pulse pounding in her ears.

      Was that noise inside or out? Yes, another sound, but from where? Someone sneaking in through the door she’d left ajar? Had Cassie locked the outside doors? What if someone who wanted to stop her mother from handing in her ginseng count had heard Jessie was back and thought she knew more than she did? What if …

      She didn’t move, didn’t breathe, concentrating, straining to listen. Yes, something outside. Maybe a branch scraping or tapping against the glass. She wished Cassie had a clock in the room.

      With a groan, she got out of bed and shuffled to the window, shifting the left edge of the homemade drapes slightly aside. Black as it was outside, a half moon etched the bizarre backyard in faintest silver.

      The usual clutter stretched across the back of the house between two herb gardens. Jessie saw the solid, black silhouettes of the old iron kettles where her friend boiled the natural dyes she used to make wild plant mordants, which weavers used to set colors in cloth. Above that, lines of barbed wire dangled from tall post to post, not to keep people out but to dry moss Cassie sold to florists and craft stores for about five dollars a sack. Humps of moss were draped there now, looking like the tops of furry heads peering over the wire at the house.

      Then one of them on the top wire moved. It rose, turned away, then disappeared.

      No. No, she could not have seen that. It was just the breeze moving the moss, the slant of moonlight or even her tired eyes playing tricks on her.

      She squeezed her eyelids tight, then opened them to look again. The moss-heavy barbed wire shifted in the breeze, gilded by moonlight, that was all. Surely, she had not heard something scratching on the window or seen a big, hairy head move. She was getting back in bed at least until dawn or until Cassie, ever an early riser, woke her up. Even now, her stomach did a little roll and plunge to think that Drew was coming for her, even if it was to find out what dreadful thing must have happened to her mother.

      Back in bed, she tossed and turned. She didn’t think she slept again, but she must have because she saw strange shapes of huge, hairy ginseng roots come to life and chase her, through the trees, through the Hong Kong market …

      “Aunt Jessie?” came the tiny voice and then the little face peered up over the side of the bed in the graying room. “I heard you was coming. But why isn’t Mommy here in this bed ‘stead of you?”

      “Pearl, sweetie, how are you? But your mommy’s in with you. She let me sleep here for the night.” As her head cleared, she helped the child climb up beside her. “You mean she’s not in bed?” she asked.

      Pearl shook her head, making her reddish-blond hair swing. “Maybe she’s in the bad part of the garden. Even in the dark, she’s there.”

      Jessie frowned at the child’s babble, but covered her up with the blanket, then got out of bed to be sure that Cassie was around somewhere. Surely, those nearest and dearest to her weren’t just disappearing.

      She glanced out her window first at the drying moss and iron kettles. Yes, that’s what she’d seen last night, nothing else.

      “Stay here,” she whispered to Pearl. “I’ll be right back.”

      She checked the bathroom—empty—then peered out a side window. In the first dusting of dawn, Cassie was in her eastern garden, gone to riot in late-summer growth. She was cutting herbs with a long, curved knife, hacking away as if she were angry at them. Jessie knocked on the window and waved. Startled, Cassie looked up and held up a finger to indicate “just a minute,” then bent back to her work.

      Her friend had always been a hard worker, but then she’d had to be, especially lately to eke out a living for herself and Pearl. Cassie would not take donated money. But why work out there in the dark and chill of morning? Maybe she’d gotten behind, since, like so many Deep Downers, she’d spent time looking for Mariah.

      Jessie padded back to the bedroom, checking her watch as she went by the dresser. Seven. She had to get moving to take a bath—no shower here, just a big, old claw-footed tub you could almost swim laps in—and get ready for a grueling day before Drew arrived.

      “She’s outside, just like you said,” she told Pearl, who looked like a little elf in the middle of the big double bed. The child had a pert, freckled face; her pale complexion and reddish hair were a clear heritage from her mother. No hints of who might have sired her in the child herself. If Mariah didn’t have a clue who might have made Cassie pregnant—or so she’d said—no one but Pearl’s parents must know.

      Mariah and Cassie had also been close for years. Sometimes, Jessie thought with a pang, it was as if, after Cassie’s mother died and her father left the area, Cassie took Jessie’s place. Besides digging some sang, both Mariah and Cassie made their livings from wildcrafting for seasonal moss, ferns, morel mushrooms and herbs to sell to craft and floral shops, health stores and dyers in Kentucky towns. But Cassie had said, just before they went to bed, that she had not been to most of Mariah’s sang sites with her and she couldn’t find a trace of her in their usual wildcrafting areas. Jessie could only pray she’d find some of her mother’s notes in the house or that she’d recall the sang counting sites once she was out in the woods with Drew.

      She snapped open her big suitcase and pulled out two of the silk scarves she’d bought in Hong Kong as gifts for friends and coworkers—and for her mother, as strange as it would be to see her in silk. The jade-hued one she tied around Pearl’s cotton nightgown like a sash while the child was all big eyes, so excited at the gift. The scarlet one she kept out for Cassie, since that was her favorite color.

      “Now you just stay snug as a bug in a rug in that bed until I take a bath, and, after I get dressed, you can help me set the table for breakfast,” she told Pearl.

      She bent back down to her tightly packed suitcase and dug past her two business suits and the array of blouses she’d taken until she found the single pair of clean jeans and a long-sleeved sweatshirt that, unfortunately, was emblazoned with a Phi Beta Kappa key. Not that most Deep Downers would know or care what that was, but what had seemed so right for the conference was all wrong here. She decided she’d just wear it inside out and find something of her mother’s to wear later—if Drew let her touch anything in her house.

      “You from the Highboro Herald or another paper?” Drew asked the blond guy with the expensive camera equipment. The stranger was leaning against Jessie’s car, in front of the police office, to steady himself while he took a picture down the street toward the bridge. He looked almost Nordic—like a Viking—with light blue eyes and white-blond hair.

      Drew had been wondering if Mariah’s disappearance would attract any media. Unless he could find out she’d been abducted and taken out of the area, he didn’t want them involved, but it was hard to keep the search low-key with so many people helping.

      “Newspaper? Not me,” the man said almost defensively as he lowered the camera and turned to face Drew. “Officer, I plead not guilty to being part or parcel of the American media today.” Unlike most civilians, he did not hesitate to step forward and shake hands. “Tyler Finch,” he said. “I was just in the area, that’s all. I’m doing a photo book on Appalachia.”

      “Sheriff Drew Webb. You just drive in this morning?”

      “I stayed in Highboro last night at a B and B—my cousin’s place, actually—so I do know the basic area. My bread-and-butter job is as a site analyst for the advertising firm Bailey and Keller, in New York City.”

      Drew observed he had a video camera as well, hanging behind his back on a shoulder sling. A notebook and pen stuck out of his denim jacket. Drew didn’t put it past a reporter to try to sneak in around here, but for some reason, he believed this man.

      “We’ve got a missing person case ongoing here, Mr. Finch. That’s why I thought you might be media.”

      “Sure, no problem. Besides my own stuff, my paying assignment is to shoot some possible scenes for future magazine and TV ads, but I’ll be sure to stay out of

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