Deep Down. Karen Harper

      In the same place? Drew wondered, but he decided not to press his luck. Junior led them around a large basswood tree and pointed to a sang patch atop a sharp, wooded hill with northern exposure. The creek ran through a rocky bed about twenty feet below. Sang plants, looking autumn-yellow with their small clusters of red berries, nodded in the breeze along the whole crest of the hill.

      “I was digging somewheres right about here while she counted,” he told them and pulled a homemade sang hoe out of the leafy ground. It sported a sharp, needle-nosed blade he must have cut and hammered out from a shovel. Actually, Drew thought, it made one hell of a makeshift weapon.

      “Damn poachers,” Junior went on. “They done cut a lot out of this site last month, then slid down the hill over yonder and hiked out by the creek bed.” He lifted the hoe, then stabbed it into the ground.

      Drew could see he had already started to cut around a sang plant. Diggers always gave the root plenty of room to avoid cutting off the little root hairs. You never knew how big the so-called limbs of the taproot itself would be.

      “Is this exactly where my mother did her count, just to get an idea of the rest of your patches scattered around here?” Jess asked, God bless her. He was right to bring her along. She knew when to keep her mouth shut and when to step in with a woman’s softer approach to a key question.

      “Right,” Junior muttered, not looking up.

      But Drew didn’t believe him. Why would he show Mariah a spot that had been poached—unless he was just complaining to her so he could continue to justify his illegal attempts to attack poachers? Junior might have planted this sang and kept an eye on it, but the forest floor, even this close to his property, was open land. Unless Junior caught them, or unless they tried to sell stolen sang and didn’t have a government license, poachers could get away with a fortune here. In the wilds like this, even if Junior slung the seeds and covered them up, the risk was all his.

      “Ever think of starting a real big cultivation of sang, like they grow in farms in Wisconsin or Korea?” Jess was asking.

      “Naw,” Junior told her with a shake of his shaggy head. “Everybody knows sang’s the most valuable nontimber plant you can grow in the woods. Even if the cultivated kind is easier to protect, wild sang’s worth more, Miss Jessie, you know that. Still, gotta admit, high fences would cut down on varmints like deer—human varmints, too. That’s the thing, and you both know it. When you’re raising a crop worth five hundred dollars a pound that’ll grow only in deep forest, you gotta do what you can to protect it. You understand that, don’t you now, boy—Sheriff?”

      Drew decided not to take the bait of another snide comment about his past. He knew Junior and others had no use for him, but he needed Junior now. But damn this old geezer for not volunteering the information about Mariah heading for Sunrise Mountain three days ago. Knowing that could have kept search parties from wasting time around Big Blue. But was Junior even telling the truth now, or was this just a way to give them a quick show-and-tell and then get them out of here?

      “This one’s prob’ly four, five years old,” Junior said. His voice had taken on a quickness; his hands on the hoe were actually shaking, and he’d put his rifle down on the ground, which made Drew feel a lot better. Maybe he was just overreacting to the scent of danger and duplicity here.

      The ball of soil Junior was cutting out was about a foot around, six inches out from the stem on all sides. Cautiously, he tipped the root-ball out, then knelt and started to break the soil away with his fingers, careful not to harm the side roots or even their tiny hairs.

      “I’ll count the growth scars to see how old it really is,” he told them. “Now lookie at this, good size! Dried, this root’ll go for twenty dollars or more at Vern Tarver’s, then end up with Peter Sung or that tall woman who buys for that power drinks company. Just think of that!”

      He held it up toward them with the red Appalachian soil still clinging to it. The root looked as if it was carved from old ivory, Drew thought, as Junior shook it cleaner. It had the shape of a twisted, crouching, many-legged beast. Seeing the sudden transformation in this man, from edgy and hesitant to eager and awed, Drew grasped the power of this valuable, strange plant people had lied and died for.

      “That’s it now,” Junior told them, putting the root carefully on the ground. “That’s what I did for Mariah—that’s all I know. Go on back down now, by the same path you come up on.”

      Drew not only smelled the rich, earthy scent of the sang but a rat. Junior Semple was hiding something, but no way he could force him to tell what or run him in for questioning, though he’d like to get a crack at him without Jess around.

      “Thanks for your time and the tip about Sunrise,” Drew told Junior, and took hold of Jess’s upper arm and firmly propelled her away.

      “All right now,” Junior called after them, all-too-obviously relieved they were going. “Just you watch your step on the path, ‘cause it got some steep points.”

      “He’s nervous about something,” Jess said out of the side of her mouth. “He doesn’t want us off this path.” They started down until they were out of sight.

      “Stay here one sec and let me just glance down the other side of this rise,” he told her and put her on the far side of a big maple tree. “We’ll never find footprints in this leaf litter, but I just want to see if I can spot a bigger patch nearby where he might really have taken Mariah for a count.”

      He moved quickly away and looked down at the crooked stream rattling along below. Someone could have taken a tumble along this jagged path through broken foliage, ferns and saplings. This was where Junior had said poachers slid down a hill. Yet he felt something was wrong here.

      He walked back toward where he’d left Jess and saw her also looking over the edge of the rise. Maybe she’d found a clue, because she stooped and reached out for something protruding from the ground. At first he thought it might be a scrap of cloth. No, it was shaped more like a property line stake, though Semple’s property was nowhere near this high up.

      She heard him coming and turned his way, still reaching out toward the stake. “Drew,” she said, “this looks like a half-buried marker stake, kind of shaped like a firecracker or something like th—”

      Then he knew what it was, but the knowledge might have come too late.

      “No—don’t!” he shouted and threw himself at her, just as the thing went off.