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Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author Karen Harper

“Will keep you awake until bedtime and beyond.”

—Tess Gerritsen on Empty Cradle

“A compelling story … intricate and fascinating details of Amish life.”

—Tami Hoag on Dark Road Home

“The story is rich … and the tension steadily escalates to a pulse-pounding climax.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Hiding Place

“Harper keeps tension high as the insane villain cleverly evades efforts to capture him. And Harper really shines in the final act, providing readers with a satisfying and exciting denouement.”

—Publishers Weekly on Inferno

If you love Karen Harper look out for

DARK ROAD HOME

available from www.mirabooks.co.uk

“The Cherokees speak of the ginseng plant as a sentient being … able to make itself invisible to those unworthy to gather its roots.”

—William Bartram, naturalist, Philadelphia, 1791

“Ginseng is the child of lightning. It blends yin and yang, darkness and light.”

—Chinese legend

“I’m not afraid of my ginseng garden being robbed anymore … my guns will hold their position with their eyes wide open day and night.”

—LJ Wilson, Special Crops, 1908 journal

“For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.”

—I Timothy 6:10

Deep

Down

Karen

Harper

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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1

Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia September 4, 2007

Head down, her eyes skimming the ground, Mariah Lockwood walked the woods. She was looking for ginseng, not to dig and sell its roots as so many Appalachians did, but to count the plants that sprang from the precious roots. At this altitude, the herb was especially easy to spot right now with its yellowing leaves and clusters of red berries. The buried treasure of the ginseng root was worth millions to its buyers, especially in the massive Chinese market. Wild wood American ginseng, locally called sang, was getting so rare it was threatened, and that’s where she came in.

Seven years ago, her daughter, Jessica, had gotten her the nice-paying job of ginseng counter in these parts. The human-body-shaped ginseng root was on the U.S. government’s endangered species list. If Mariah’s yearly count went down too far, exports would cease and lots of Appalachians, as well as the Chinese and other deep-pocket buyers, would be spitting mad.

Since the sun was sinking fast, this site would be Mariah’s last stop of the day. Yet, feeling the pinch of hunger, she stopped to pluck some pawpaws. Most places, the little, banana-shaped fruits ripened later, but where the setting sun streamed past the peaks, they were ready early. Their sweet flavor was an acquired taste, but she and Jessie loved them baked and served with cream.

As she savored the soft pulp, Mariah wondered what her girl was eating in Hong Kong at that big conference on cultivating ginseng. Probably chop suey, rice and lots of tea. More than once, Jessie had wanted her mother to travel with her, but traveling to Lexington for her doctorate graduation was as far as Mariah wanted to stray from this area she knew and loved.

“This is the forest primeval,” Jessie had quoted from some poem the last time the two of them had walked the woods. Ever since Mariah had agreed to let Dr. Elinor Gering take Jessie into her home near the Kentucky university campus in Lexington, she’d taken fast to book-learning, though the little town of Deep Down and its people still ran fierce in her blood. Although Jessie used to spend every August here, she’d been too busy this year, and Mariah couldn’t help but wonder if Drew Webb’s return had something to do with that.

Before she checked her last sang spot—one of her secret ones, far back in the smallest hardwood cove huddled up to the stony skirts of Snow Knob—she got her a notion to walk the rocks of Bear Creek, just like in the old days. She and Nate had courted here beside its rushing waters, jumping from rock to rock and sitting out on the biggest one to share corn bread and kisses. When they were both nineteen, smack-dab in the middle of that rock—their island, they’d called it—he’d asked her to marry up with him, and Jessie had been born the very next year. The precious, nearby sang patch had provided roots that paid for her gold wedding band, their marriage license and some blankets and dishes to set up housekeeping.

With her pack slung over her shoulder, she jumped to the first rock, then leapt from stone to stone, just as she and Nate had, holding hands. The year Jessie turned eight, she’d lost him in a freak accident when he was repairing a barn roof for extra cash. Though she was still young and could have used someone to support them, she’d never wanted to wed again. A one-woman man, that was her. And sometimes here, like right now, she felt her curly haired and sky-blue-eyed Nate was still with her, laughing, leaping. No way this place made her sad.

Finally, reluctantly, much farther down the creek, she stepped back on firm ground again. In the spring or after a rain, the creek rose high and covered some of these stones as if they weren’t here at all—like folks you’d loved and lost but you knew were still there, just below the surface of your rushing thoughts.

From the slant of sun, Mariah reckoned it was after seven. Evening shadows stretched long and dark, ‘specially here at the foot of Snow Knob. Hurrying now, she set off again. She was fixin’ to get this last site counted before she went home. The familiar forest trail snaked through the fern-carpeted floor ever deeper into the basswood and walnut trees, the kinds sang liked for company. A ragged canopy overhead that threw mottled shade and sun—that was sang country.

Already she could hear Bear Falls, which fed the creek, crashing down its limestone stairs. She’d once joshed Seth Bearclaws, the only full-blooded Cherokee round here, by asking if the falls were named after him. But Seth didn’t have a sense of humor, ‘specially about someone counting or digging sang in the old sacred places of his people.

As if the thought of diggers had summoned them, Mariah’s practiced eye picked up signs they’d been through here, or at least someone had used the sharp edge of a shovel or hoe as a kind of cane as he walked this path. A few small limbs were snapped off too, as if to mark a way back out. She prayed they hadn’t found her special spot, untouched all these twenty-eight years, maybe even longer. Folks not only poached sang off-season, but outright stole and even killed to get or protect the root. Right now was legal sang season, but diggers had to get a license and fill out all kinds of government forms when they sold it, and the local game was to get around all that. Her friend Cassie had said she thought picking sang was a rite of passage ‘round here, and Drew Webb had opined it had something to do with testosterone, or whatever that male hormone was that made men feisty and daring.

Vern Tarver, who owned the sang store and historical museum in town, had argued that if George Washington knew the value of ginseng and Daniel Boone made money selling it, why should folks today have to change their ways? Appalachians over the centuries had considered hunting anything, anytime, their God-given right and couldn’t abide the government telling them what to do. Not when sang money had brought many of their kin through the Depression or tided them over in other tough times.

Mariah figured it didn’t take the likes of Vern Tarver to know sang roots were worth as much as one thousand dollars a pound in Asian markets. It was next to useless to try to tell Eastern Kentuckians to let the sang alone for a few years till it matured or to be sure to replant the precious berries when they dug up a site, no matter if the new sheriff said times and laws were different now.

The Chinese buyers who came into Vern Tarver’s store, smooth as they were with their clean hands and hard cash, Mariah liked less than poachers or careless diggers. The big money market encouraged ripping out roots, legal season or not, and she knew Vern was only too happy to play middleman to get his cut. No use trying to talk sense to him, ‘specially not since she’d told him to stop trying to sweetheart her. He’d near on had a fit when she’d told him no to his fancy marriage proposal, and if he couldn’t accept that, just not to come ‘round no more.

Yes, she saw the footsteps with the hoe marks heading toward her deep woods sang patch. If that fancy GPS thingamajig or the tiny cell phone the government had given her worked worth a darn in these hills and hollers, she’d use them right now to call Sheriff Drew Webb, tell him to watch in town for illegal sales of prime, old roots. She’d have him stake out another spot she knew. She could give him the location by the landmarks she always went by, never mind satellite coordinates that were no good, no how here. Why use things in outer space to find where you were, when you knew these woods like your own back forty?

Mariah hunkered down to examine the torn ground where someone had dug out the patch of sang—four-prongers, at least, if she rightly recalled her notes from last count. In all her forty-eight years, this was the weirdest-looking dig she’d seen. Odd hoe marks, strangely curved, pierced the ground in a pattern. A big hoe, a sharp one, but not carelessly used. No, the slashes in the earth were exact, deep and powerfully placed.

She couldn’t picture anyone from Deep Down doing this so precisely, then stuffing their prizes in the usual pillowcase or backpack and just hightailing it back to town. Strangest of all, the lopped-off yellowing plants and their red berries were laid out in designs around the edge, like some foreign work of art.

Then, even through the muted roar of the falls and the rustling leaves, she heard a sound she couldn’t place.

What in creation? A footstep? Someone snapping a branch? She’d been a wildcrafter almost all her life, picking wild herbs, mushrooms and moss to sell to outsiders as far away as Highboro or even Lexington. She knew the normal forest sounds and scents, but some new, heavy smell—fetid and yeasty, or was it moth balls?—came to her on the breeze.

Slowly, in the middle of the ravaged, rearranged sang patch, she stood. Turning her head, she tried to pierce the narrow shafts of sun stabbing almost horizontal between the tree trunks. For once, this vast, deep woods seemed to press in on her. Mariah had never claimed to have the sixth sense of some mountain women, including her own mother, but she sensed danger now. Someone else was out here close, something waiting for the shadows to deepen, maybe for her to leave. It could be a bear, but she didn’t think so. They liked to make themselves real scarce, and they didn’t smell like that. It wasn’t skunk, she thought, as her nostrils flared.

Hair prickled on the nape of her neck. Maybe she’d surprised a digger who’d rubbed some sort of homemade liniment or bug juice on his skin, and he was watching, waiting. Maybe he knew she’d recognize him and didn’t want to get caught without a license, afraid she’d tell Drew Webb.

For the first time in her life, alone in the woods, Mariah Lockwood tasted bitter, raw fear. She’d surprised poachers and diggers before, and they could be as dangerous as those who grew the stuff and guarded it with shotguns and no shut-eye. But she’d always just made a quick retreat or told them she’d keep quiet. When a mountain person made a vow, that was that. So why did this feel different?

Hefting her pack with her precious records and lists of landmarks, Mariah edged back toward the path she’d taken coming in. She wouldn’t walk the rocks of the creek this time, but hightail it back to the old logging road.

Then, about thirty feet away, she saw something blocking her path.

She let out a half grunt, half scream. The sun-streaks behind the large, dark thing blinded her. Was it a bear? This was not some sort of prank or joke. Pure menace reeked from it, along with that smell.

She threw her trembling arms over her head to make herself look larger and shouted in a loud voice, “Bear, go! Go!” Not only did it not run, but it took a step forward and lifted something in its paw or hand.

Not a bear, no, it held itself more erect. And bears didn’t use tools. Bulky, maybe human, but grotesque with that fur—that obscured face and strange-shaped head. Despite all the legends of forest creatures, none told of an Appalachian yeti or big ape. It had something shiny and sharp in its paw or hand. Hellfire, had that thing been digging sang?

Though it would take hours in the dark to get back down to town another way, she turned and fled. Her pulse pounded in her ears; her innards nearly let loose. The things in her pack bounced; the shoulder strap slipped down her arm so the pack almost tripped her. She hadn’t run dead out in years … dead out.

Her breath rasped in her throat. Was this a nightmare, and she’d wake up? Was that thing a haint like folks said appeared from the dead? A shape-changing monster from one of Seth’s Cherokee myths?

She took a tumble over a tree root and lost her pack. She scrambled up again, on hands and knees at first, then stumbling, staggering. It was coming after her in wide strides at a jogging pace, breaking tree limbs, hitting something against tree trunks. With stark fear in her soul, she was sweating, shaking. She did not look back at the thing, but looked into her heart. Jessie, she thought, so far away, so smart. Proud of her, she was, though sometimes she regretted giving her away, sending her away … Away … She had to get away …

Despite the heat and humidity hitting her like a hammer, Dr. Jessica Lockwood was excited to get out of the plush, air-conditioned lobby of her Hong Kong hotel. Most people at the conference spoke decent English, but for this foray outside she’d hired one of the translators, Sunny Chan, to accompany her to nearby Ko Shing Street, also called Ginseng Street.

It was only a little after seven in the morning—that would make it just after 7 p.m. of the previous day at home, she thought—and she was astounded by the impact of the oppressive weather and the push of people, both in business suits and traditional clothing. Cursing her naturally curly, flyaway tresses, sprung loose by the instant steam bath of humidity, she shoved her chin-length hair back behind her ears and headed out.

The crowds seemed as oppressive as the heat. However much she had travelled for research or relaxation, she never quite seemed to shake the habit of judging everything against quiet, little Deep Down, the tiny Appalachian town with a population of 127 where she was reared—raised up, as her mother would put it. Sometimes in her head, the slow, flat drawl of her mother’s voice battled with the undulating speech of Elinor, the Lexington professor who had been her guardian from the time she’d turned sixteen.

“I can’t believe how busy it is already,” Jessie told the petite, pretty translator as people rushed past. “I was hoping to talk to a few ginseng sellers before the masses hit.”

“Masses hit?” Sunny echoed in her clipped, British accent as she arched her winged eyebrows. “Oh, you mean before it gets crowded. Believe me, the shop owners would be very honored to speak with you.”

Although Jessie’s presentation on how ginsenosides from the ginseng herb significantly slowed the growth of breast cancer cells in test tubes had been well-received, she realized Sunny meant that the reputation of wild Appalachian ginseng was strong in Asia. As they managed to avoid darting workers with cloths coiled around their heads for elaborate sweatbands, the first shop they came to proved the power of U.S. sang.

She couldn’t read the handwritten calligraphy on the sign, but the U.S. flag was elaborately drawn and colored in on a poster next to a picture of a hairy, two-legged, two-armed ginseng root and an arrow beckoning buyers to step inside. Yes, wild forest Appalachian sang had a strong reputation here and was increasingly trendy at home. If it proved useful in the battle against endocrine-driven cancers, its demand and value would escalate even more.

But suddenly, strangely, this place was getting to her.

Jessie had loved the lofty view from her quiet room in the almost futuristic glass-and-steel skyscraper hotel, with the freighters and junks in the harbor and the mountain-studded monster of mainland China looming beyond. But she felt enclosed, trapped here. This cluttered, crowded shop was a far cry from Vern Tarver’s Fur and Sang Trader at home. Amidst all these unique, jumbled herbs, a strange smell slammed her square in the stomach, fetid, rich, yeasty. The familiar ginseng, yes, but something else, something forbidding, even dangerous.

Jessie glanced around for the source of the smell. Displayed on wooden trays in the long, narrow shop, which seemed like something out of a medieval time capsule, were some things she could recognize and some she could not.

“Bird nests and shark fins—very expensive—for health-giving soups,” Sunny was explaining in a singsong voice as she translated the cards sticking out of each box. “Dandelion for gallbladder cleansing, deer tail for back pain, dried lizard to improve weak kidneys, dried sea horse for asthma and, oh, for sexual problems, too.”

Sexual problems, Jessie thought. The only problem she had was the lack of a man in her life. In fact, her past with guys was as gnarled and twisted as the sang roots she spotted heaped up farther back in the store, where a Chinese woman with a face webbed with wrinkles was pawing through a pile with a calculator in one hand.

Sunny rattled off some Chinese to the old woman, though the only word Jessie could pick out was jen-shen. The Chinese word for the herb meant “root of life.” The woman’s wizened face lifted; she eyed Jessie as if she were going to price her to sell. Though Jessie had longed to see the inside of a ginseng shop in the land where much of the $52 million-a-year market was based, she had to keep herself from fleeing. The woman was not frightening, so what was wrong with her? Was she coming down with some exotic sickness, or were the smells and heat just getting to her? All this seemed so far away from her mother and Kentucky. And from the strange yearnings she’d had for Drew Webb, whom she knew was back in Deep Down.

“She’s saying,” Sunny told her, “last year she had a root she displayed on velvet cloth go for six figures in American money. Came from Kentucky. She wants to know, you have any to sell?”

“She must know it’s all regulated,” Jessie protested. “Did she get that root from the black market?”

“She says she know nothing of black market.”

Jessie’s head was beginning to pound. She had to get out of here. Her heartbeat sped up, as if she’d run miles.

“Now with Americans putting jen-shen in power drinks and health foods,” Sunny was translating again, “costs going up …”

Jessie squinted back into the dim reaches of the shop where women of all ages bent over rows of cardboard boxes on long wooden tables, sorting ginseng. When the shop owner saw where she was looking, she spoke to Sunny, who said, “She say her sorters, even if they are old, have soft, young hands from touching the jen-shen all day. She say the herb preserve yin, the life force, and good for aphrodisiac and keep people young.”

If her head had not been pounding and her stomach roiling, Jessie would have laughed. If ginseng was a fountain of youth, why did this old woman look like some ancient sorceress who had stepped from the pages of a book on primordial myths? She had to get back into the calm of the hotel. She felt a stab of longing for her mother, for the cool, leafy coves in the skirts of the mountains.

“I feel a bit faint,” Jessie told Sunny and managed a polite nod to the old woman. “Please thank her for speaking with me. I’m going to head back to the hotel.”

She walked as steadily as she could, though she felt the urge to run. Had the other-side-of-the-world time zone difference given her delayed jet lag? At least her headache wasn’t caused by staring too long into a microscope at floating ginsenosides attacking tiny cancer cells and tumors in the test tubes. Hours of research sometimes made her eyes cross and her brain blank out. She felt like that now and, worse, as if something in the midst of these towering skyscrapers in old-new Hong Kong were chasing her.

The shrill ring-ring, ring-ring dragged Jessie from deep, dream-haunted sleep. It took her a moment to recall she was in her Hong Kong hotel room. Exhausted, she’d collapsed in bed after her visit to Ko Shing St., almost as if that strange smell in the herb shop had drugged her. Her bedside table clock read 7:17 p.m. She’d missed the afternoon lectures and the tour of the city she’d signed up for. Maybe it was some conference attenders on the phone, wondering if she could meet them for dinner or why she’d missed the tour bus.

She grabbed the receiver. “Dr. Jessica Lockwood.”

“Jess? Sheriff Webb in Deep Down—Drew.”

Her heartbeat kicked up even more. No one has ever called her Jess but Drew. Despite the coolness of the room, she shoved the duvet and covers off. She began to sweat. She’d know that voice anywhere, deep, husky. It was a voice she’d known since her earliest memories, one that haunted her. Something must be wrong at home, very wrong.

“Drew, what is it?”

“You were hard to trace. Cassie gave me your Lexington apartment and your lab number, but then I found this Hong Kong hotel number with a note in your mother’s kitchen. Jess, I know you’re thousands of miles away, but can you come home right away? I’m sorry to inform you that your mother’s missing.”

She gasped. “Missing? What happened? Missing how?”

“As best I can tell she went out counting sang and just didn’t come back. Vern Tarver dropped by her house after dinner yesterday evening but couldn’t find her, though her truck was there. He checked all around, called people, but she wasn’t at Cassie’s—nowhere—so he called me. I rechecked her neighbors and friends but no leads. I’ve had a search party out since daybreak—they’re still out, some even with hounds. But she covers a wide area, and I don’t know her sang counting spots. Do you?”

She raked her fingers through her hair. “Some. I—I’m not supposed to head home until tomorrow. Maybe she twisted her ankle or something like that. Please keep looking. She knows those woods like the back of her hand.”

“Yeah, but some of those spots are secret and deep in. I’m really sorry to have to call you like this. Be assured we’ll keep looking, all of us. You—you did know I’m sheriff here now?”

“She told me. Be a good one, Drew. Please, please find her safe and sound. I’ll make arrangements to fly back as soon as I can, and I’ll call you. Here’s my cell number if you need it.” She recited it to him, and he gave her his.

“But you know it’s better to use the landlines around here,” he reminded her. “Even now, the mountains make a difference. Jess, take care and see you soon.”

The line went dead. For one moment, she stared at the sleek receiver in her hand, seeing Drew that last night, furious, hurt—naked. She’d just been told the last thing in the world she could bear to hear. And from the last and only man she had ever really loved.

2

“You want me to call in more guys with their hounds tomorrow?” Sheriff Chuck Akers asked Drew over the two-way radio. His former boss and mentor, sheriff of the Lowe County seat in Highboro, was out in the woods with one of the search parties for Mariah Lockwood.

Drew was running the rescue effort—he hoped to hell it wasn’t a 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 Deep Down. On a short straightaway, she snatched another swig from her now-cold coffee container.

Darkness had descended like a steel trap about halfway home—if Deep Down was really home anymore—but she knew the roads well. Over and over, she agonized about what could have happened to her mother: a sprained or broken ankle in a groundhog hole; tripping on a tree root; a slip on a mossy stone in a creek, so that she fell and knocked herself out. Maybe she’d run into illegal diggers who had been more than she could handle and had tied or beat her up. But then, why didn’t the searchers find her?

Familiar landmarks swept by as Jessie fought to keep her mind on her driving, her bloodshot eyes on the corkscrew road between Big Blue and Sunrise Mountains. Despite her visit during the Christmas holidays last year, she should have come home in August as usual. She should have visited more often, not let the breakthrough in her lab work and her nerves about facing Drew Webb keep her away. As much as she was grateful for her life outside the hills, she didn’t need a shrink to tell her she still had a deep-seated anger issue at her mother for giving her away. Nevertheless, she should have phoned her from Hong Kong, whatever it cost, to say she was all right and to check how her mother was.

What if she never saw her again? What if she could never tell her that she was grateful for the sacrifice she had made to let her live with Elinor and get an education and—

Deep Down, 3 miles. The sign leapt into her headlights from the darkness.

Three miles and a lifetime back. She was twenty-eight, but it suddenly seemed only yesterday she’d left with Elinor …

“You can call your mother and speak to her anytime you want, you know, Jessica.” She heard Elinor’s voice now as clearly as she had in that big sedan twelve years ago, heading the other way on this road. “My work brings me back into this area often, and I’ll bring you for visits, of course.”

“I still don’t want to leave. What’d you mean when you said on the phone that I was your lies and do little? I don’t lie and I been a hard worker, both me and Mommy, ever since Daddy died.”

A little smile peeked at the corners of Elinor’s mouth. “Of course you’re truthful and a hard worker. Mariah is, too. I’ve been impressed by both of you ever since you first helped me with the vocabulary and the definitions. You see, I didn’t say ‘your lies’ and ‘do little.’ Eliza Doolittle is a character in a play—in a Broadway musical, too. A man named Professor Henry Higgins took her into his home to study the way she spoke and to help her to speak more properly, and I’m hoping that’s one of the gifts I can give you. A bright girl like you doesn’t need to spend her whole life looking for herbs and moss in the woods like Mariah and your friend Cassandra.”

“I was fixin’ to be a wildcrafter, too. It takes lots of know-how in the woods.”

“Of course it does. But there’s an entire world outside places like Highboro and Deep Down. Jessica, as I told your mother, I don’t have a child, and I will give you that wide world—my world—as best I can. Besides, that Webb boy who accosted you is a no-account. He’d ruin you and never look back …”

But Jess was looking back now.

Deep Down, 2 miles

Drew had not accosted her. She wasn’t sure back then what that even meant, but she knew what they’d been caught doing had been powerful and mutual, despite the fact they weren’t even sweethearting and he had another girl. She guessed that was mostly why her mother decided she should go live with Elinor. “I don’t want you breeding Webb young-uns, living in some trailer in a holler!” she’d screeched at her that night. Later, Jessie heard Drew had left, too, joining the marines and living overseas.

But now she was going back to where she and Drew might have to work together to find her mother, going back to where she needed him in a whole new way from how she used to …

Drew Webb had been the most handsome, exciting—if hellfire raised—boy she’d ever known. Sure, he was six years older than her sixteen when everything blew up, but that was real exciting. He’d seemed so experienced compared to her. Why, back then, he’d been to far places like Frankfort and even Ohio, visiting kin. Of course, from the time she fell for him at age twelve till that only night he’d touched her, he hadn’t known she was alive, at least not the way she’d wanted him to. “Skinny and bug-bit,” Cassie said he’d called her once.

That night, Drew had beat up his own father because he was roughing up Drew’s mother. Jessie had seen it all. She’d been taking Gaynell Webb salve for her bruises, from supposedly falling down some steps. When Jessie saw the fight, then Drew take off, she followed him down to Skitter Run, past Fancy Gap Hollow where Cassie still lived today.

He hadn’t gone to see Cassie or her folks, though. He’d gone to wash his wounds and be alone. But Jessie had seen the beating he’d taken and given, seen how Lem Webb treated his wife and kids, though about everybody knew it. So when Drew stalked off, limping and bleeding, she’d followed, to help or comfort him. Fran MacCrimmon was his girl, but Jessie couldn’t help herself. She’d loved him from afar, with his black Irish looks of rakish, raven hair, his don’t-give-a-damn slouch, even his frown below those steel-blue eyes. Writing about him in the diary Elinor had given her the first time she’d visited them, putting herself in his path just to say hi, even following him and Fran one time into the woods to see what they done there …

Deep Down, 1 mile

What they did there, she corrected her thoughts. For years Elinor had teased that she could take the girl out of the mountains, but not take the mountains out of the girl. But Elinor had given her a whole new world. Though it had been a painful transition, Jessie had come to love Lexington and the University of Kentucky campus where Dr. Gering spent so much of her time teaching and researching. They had lived nearby; Jessie could even walk to campus. Since Elinor taught graduate courses in sociology and linguistics, Jessie had come to know many of her academic colleagues and students—people whose interests were a far cry from those of her little hometown. Elinor’s research had taken them to the British Isles, especially to Scotland and Northern Ireland, where the Appalachian dialect had originated.

Jessie’s expanding mind had soaked it all in; soon she’d seen huge gaps between where she’d been and where she wanted to go. How hard it had been to be a curiosity to Elinor’s associates at first. But Elinor had not only studied her but taught and loved her and, slowly, life in Lexington—or visiting New York or London—had become part of her, the new Jessica, a different woman from Jessie of Deep Down.

And when she’d made her own life, attending college at UK, majoring in biology and then choosing to go to grad school and pursue research of her own in the lab, she had finally found a way to meld her old life with her new. Who would have thought that the ginseng that had supported her mother and Deep Down for years might be able to slow the growth of certain cancer cells?

Still, her adolescent years in two different worlds had been difficult. Was she really Jessie or Jessica, or could she manage to be both? When she had come home to visit, she’d tried not to sound uppity as Vern Tarver had called her once. During her first visits, she’d gone back to talking the talk, but a little voice in her head had often corrected Deep Downers, even her mother. She’d been pulled one way and then the other when she moved between her two worlds.

Just northwest of town, her headlights illuminated the entries of three old logging lanes, now mostly derelict and moss-covered. Such roads ran like veins in this area, which had not been mined and had barely been logged. Could her mother have taken one of those roads back into the forested hills to her counting sites? Why hadn’t someone seen which way she went? Why hadn’t she given Cassie some hint about where she was heading?

Deep Down, Welcome, the town limits sign read.

Despite Jessie’s utter exhaustion, she sat up straighter. The tires of her car made a hollow sound over the Deep Creek Bridge. She’d expected to see lots of people in the short, single street, klieg lights set up, police cars, but that was only her memories of city search scenes on the eleven o’clock news. Still, a light shone from Audrey Doyle’s B and B, where she took in boarders she fed down at her restaurant. Where the few commercial buildings clustered together, lights were out except for the old MacCrimmon house, which her mother had said now housed the sheriff’s office. It was lit up, throwing a big block of yellow light into the dark street where she pulled in.

Emotions overwhelmed her. Tears blinded her eyes as she saw Drew, tall, wide-shouldered and ramrod-straight—no slouch now—come out to greet her. She still had the car door locked when he tried to open it. Every muscle in her body, every buried memory in her brain seemed to scream as she turned off the engine and fumbled to unlock the door.

“No news?” she asked as he opened the door, then reached in to help her out. His hand was warm through the elbow of her shirt, his grip strong.

He shook his head. He wasn’t in uniform, but he wore a utility belt with a flashlight and prominent pistol on one hip. Shadows etched deep into his frown. His body was filled out now, mature, solid. But he was still the Drew she’d carried and buried in her mind and heart.

“The news is you’re here safe,” he said, “and we’ll find her together.”

She had to lock her knees to stand; she was shaking all over. His arm, like an iron band, went around her shoulders as he led her inside.

3

Jessie felt as if she floated; her feet were hardly under her, and her right leg trembled from alternating between the accelerator and brake for hours. No using cruise control in these hills—no control in her life at all right now.

Drew led her past a waist-high divider, through a small reception area with a single desk, then into a separate room with the open door labeled Sheriff. Inside, he sat her in a carved wooden chair near the door, but did not go around the desk to sit in his leather chair. He lowered his muscular frame into the wooden one next to hers.

“Coffee or water, Jess?”

“No, thanks. I’m too full of coffee.”

“The bathroom’s at the back of the hall. Help yourself.”

“Later. No news at all?”

“Nothing.” His face serious, even sad, he bit the corner of his lower lip, then the words tumbled from him as if they’d been dammed up. “We’ve had six different search parties out for two days. I scented three packs of hunt hounds on shoes I took from her place. Hunt hounds aren’t as good as a K-9 crew—they get distracted by game trails. But the state police can’t get one here until day after tomorrow because there’s a couple of Boy Scouts lost in Boone National Forest. Two of the hounds evidently briefly picked up her scent on the old logging trail under Snow Knob but nothing panned out.

“Besides, it rained heavy the first night, enough to wash off her scent. Tomorrow, we’ll start where her trail vanished, but it’s like she vanished. She didn’t take her truck, but she was—is—” he corrected “—such a strong walker we have a big area to cover. I’m hoping you can help me find some of her off-path or secret haunts.”

Haunts. The word snagged in Jessie’s exhausted brain. Haunts, as if Mariah had come back from the dead to walk the woods as they said some spirits had over the years, folks from long-ago pioneer and Indians days who’d gone out hunting game or sang and had never returned … never been found.

“At first light, we’ll start again,” he went on, his deep, resonant voice both reassuring and disturbing. His mere physical presence, handsome yet rugged, unsettled her. His black hair was clipped fairly close, but not a military buzz cut as she’d expected. Under bronze skin, a light beard stubble peppered his square jaw. A small scar she’d never seen slanted into his taut lower lip; his nose still had that slightly crooked look from one of his boyhood fights. Tiny, white crow’s-feet perched at the corner of his eyes fringed with black-as-night lashes, so thick for a man’s. The cleft in his chin and the angular slant of his cheekbones were more pronounced than she recalled, despite the weight and muscle he’d put on over the years.

“We’ll find her,” he was saying, “probably with a broken ankle or some such in one of her sang counting spots, living off late berries and gourmet mushrooms, eating pawpaws for dessert and drinking mountain spring water most folks would pay a bundle for. She’s a survivor, Jess. She could probably outlast a corps of marines on a survival bivouac in those woods.”

Grateful for his trying to comfort her, she gripped the arms of her chair and managed to murmur, “I really appreciate all you’ve done so far.”

“Cassie says you’ve gone sang counting with Mariah the last couple of years. That so?”

“Yes, off and on, but she used landmarks to find some of her sang counting spots. She’s only supposed to count them once a year. She took lots of notes for her annual report, so maybe I can turn up something in the house. I can probably find a few of the places from memory, but I’m not sure about one near Snow Knob. So you’ve called off the mass search?”

“You don’t mind going out just with me, do you?”

Their gazes met and held. She wondered if he was hearing echoes of Vern Tarver and her mother yelling at him that night. She’d tried to explain to them that Drew hadn’t hurt her, that she’d let him hold her and take her, but no one was listening and everyone was blaming him.

“If you think that’s best, that’s fine with me,” she said, trying to keep her eyes from wavering the way her voice did. When this was all over, when they had found her mother, maybe they could talk of that other time. Just to clear the air. What happened had been as much her fault as his. In the meantime, yes, it would be difficult being with Drew. They’d never had a real relationship in the first place, though she’d built one in her mind and heart during the four years leading up to that night. She wondered, after all was said and done back then, if he thought she was cheap or crazy.

“This was Fran MacCrimmon’s home,” she said, glancing around at what had once been his girlfriend’s house.

“Right.” Eyes narrowed, he was studying her intently, even as she had him. But he was a police officer, trained to analyze people. She mustn’t read in more than that. He might be afraid she’d get hysterical. She’d done that the last night they’d been together. Why did that seem as if it was really just last night?

He took a phone call, evidently from Sheriff Akers in Highboro. She strained to listen, at least until it turned out to be just a check on progress. Then her gaze darted around the room.

Drew’s office was spartan, neater than any place she’d ever seen in Deep Down, as if he could control this eccentric town by being tidy here. A big, old oak desk held stacked metal baskets of papers and supplies; he had a mobile phone, desktop computer and peripherals. Four tall filing cabinets, two on each side of a window, lined the wall behind him. A flag of the commonwealth of Kentucky, a marine flag and an American flag stood against the wall facing his desk. On one side wall, large maps of the local area were marked with colored lines and pins stuck in, but didn’t seem related to this search.

What really captured her attention on the side wall with the other window—both windows were covered by neat, dark-blue vertical blinds—were two chrome-framed photos. One was of Drew with two other marines—oh, his younger brothers, Josh and Gabe—in sharp uniforms under a banner that read Semper Fi. The other picture was of him with Highboro’s longtime sheriff, Akers, pinning a badge on Drew’s chest. In the marine photo he wore a shiny dress sword at his side; in the police one, a sidearm. She tried not to gape, but to see Drew Webb standing so stunningly, stiffly at attention in crisp uniforms—a man who’s family had never heeded rules and regs—shook her to her very core.

Jessie sensed a full blush coming, just the way it had when he’d so much as glanced her way years ago. How foolish, childish and inappropriate, she scolded herself. Despite her exhaustion, she had to get control. She felt she was still rushing forward, in a plane, in a car. She needed a bed and soon, but she dreaded going home without her mother there.

“I will use your facilities,” she told him when he hung up. “I’ve been sleepless since Cincinnati and feel like a zombie. I hope I can sleep tonight without her there.”

She started to stand, but, dizzy, sat back hard. Drew rose and took her hands, pulling her up beside him, almost propping her up. She was five-eight, but she had forgotten he was so tall, maybe six-one or-two. In all those years she’d had her secret crush on him, she’d seldom been this close.

“You’ve got to be exhausted as well as strung out,” he said, keeping his hands under her elbows. “But I can’t let you back in Mariah’s house until we can take a careful survey of her property tomorrow. I used a search warrant to go through briefly today, then crime-taped the place.”

“Crime tape? It’s a crime scene? Is that agent from the big Chinese buyer still coming in here to buy sang at Tarver’s? What about the guys from the pharms and the ginseng-laced power drinks companies? I can’t see anyone around here hurting her, but those outsiders might do something to keep her sang count up so that—”

“Let’s go over all that tomorrow. The crime tape’s just a formality. Now, listen,” he added, his voice darkening as he gave her the slightest shake, as if to force her fears back down. “I’m going to phone Cassie, because I’m sure you can stay there tonight. Then, after we check out the house for any sort of clues—”

“For clues? You do think something awful has happened to her, don’t you?”

“Let’s not assume the worst for a woman who knew the woods so well. I’m sorry I can’t let you go home tonight, but we can keep your car here, and I’ll take you out to Cassie’s, then pick you up just after dawn. I’ll transfer your things to my vehicle now. You want to give me your keys, then I’ll help you to the bathroom before I call her?”

“I’ll be all right. But she has to be all right, too!”

Damn, she was going to cry. Her mother was missing, and she couldn’t go home. But neither could she have a meltdown. She had to focus on finding her mother, and that meant going along with Drew, in more ways than one.

“I’ll be all right,” she repeated, blinking back tears as she pulled away from him and fished her keys out of her purse. When she handed them to him, their fingertips touched; a jolt of lightning might as well have leapt between them. She thought he felt it, too, but his words came calm and steady.

“Stay strong, Jess. We’ll work through this together.”

Not trusting her voice, she nodded and went out of his office and down the hall, with both hands on the walls to stop the place from spinning. Neither of them was saying it, but they knew a lot was at stake in Mariah’s sang count and, therefore, in her disappearance. It was all tied in with mountain pride and worse—big money both here and abroad.

Jessie knew she had to deal with a new Drew, but then, she was a new person, too. One with a missing mother who might be as endangered as wild wood sang.

* * *

Drew had to fight the urge to pull Jess against him and hold her. It was an insane thought, considering the last night they’d been together and now this nightmare. Despite her obvious exhaustion and frustration, he was astounded at how beautiful she’d become, delicate and edgy, yet sturdy and strong. Tall, slender with tousled, curly blond hair and blue-gray eyes that bored right into you. Yeah, just as he’d remembered her and yet not the same at all. Filled out, at ease in what had once been a string bean of a body, self-assured despite her dilemma …

“Here, let me open the Jeep door for you,” he said as she stepped outside to join him on the porch.

“It looks more like a truck. Is this Deep Down’s version of a cop car?”

“It’s a Jeep Cherokee with a wired-off backseat in case I have a prisoner to transport. I’ve only got two small holding cells here.”

“A Cherokee? I’ll bet Seth Bearclaws likes that.”

“I tried to give him a lift the other day, but he won’t ride in it. Says it’s just another thing ripping off his people’s heritage.”

He went back to the office, turned out the lights and locked the door before he got in the driver’s side of the front seat. He was proud of this silver, four-wheel SUV he’d been issued when he’d taken the job. It had made his measly salary sound a lot better. It was a sturdy vehicle for the mountain roads. It didn’t have a light bar, just a single red light he put on the roof if he had a pursuit or an emergency. Traffic jams were nonexistent here. He’d been tempted to have Sheriff stenciled on both front doors, but realized it might make some folks in his jurisdiction nervous or even trigger-happy. Still, with some characters in the outlying areas, he felt as if he had a bull’s-eye on his doors and on his back. Could Mariah have run afoul of any of them?