Read Online Deep Down (I) by Karen Harper - Free Book Online

years, I was telling her the old Cherokee saying that a person who deserves life must pass by three sang plants before taking the fourth one. Now she understands that, so I bring her this.”
    “A person who deserves life?” Drew repeated. “Meaning what?”
    “He means all plant life is sacred, don’t you?” Jessie put in. “My mother believed that, too, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be good uses for sang or herbs.”
    “But some bad uses, too,” Seth said, walking past them as if the conversation had suddenly ended. He lived not far away, down the creek. Had he walked all the way here with this heavy wooden piece? He surely hadn’t carved it on site. And why had he been camped out on the porch, when he knew Mariah was missing?
    “How could he have brought that heavy trunk here?” she asked Drew.
    “I’ve seen him rolling them, but that would be too far for this. I’m sure not buying the superstitions about Seth around here, that he can call up mythical creatures to do his bidding. I’ll worry about him later. We’ve got to search the house, then get out to some of the sang spots others might have missed.”
    Jessie took a last, long look at the rough carving of the two hands and the sang plant. She should have thanked Seth for her mother. Later, when there was time, she would go to see him and take care of that.
     
    “First of all,” Drew said, “does anything look out of place—not just moved, but really disturbed?”
    From where they were standing in the front door, Jessie surveyed the place that was once her home. A white, wood-sided house with a shingled roof, it had hardly changed over the years, while she had changed so much. This front entry opened onto a living area, with a big hooked rug and a flagstone fireplace. Six worn, dark wood chairs surrounded a long wooden table that served as the dining area; a store-bought sofa and two hand-crafted rockers faced each other before the long front window looking out over the porch. A short hall led to a kitchen at the back left and two bedrooms on the right with a small bathroom between. Her mother had put modern plumbing in after Daddy died. A long, glassed-in sunporch stretched along the back of the house, a place for storage but a lot of living, too. That was still Jessie’s favorite room.
    It was so strange to be here without her mother’s presence. The place seemed too silent—haunted. “I don’t think anything’s out of place,” she said, going in to look around the main room and kitchen. She peered into the back rooms. “It’s as if she just stepped outside for something. But her denim jacket is gone from its peg by the back door and her favorite old, scuffed hiking boots aren’t here.” She heard a scratching sound and saw that Drew was taking notes.
    “Do you know where she kept her sang records?” he asked.
    “Some in her desk, some in a tin box in the closet—her idea of a filing cabinet.” She sat down at her mother’s pine desk in the front room, one her father had crafted with his own hands, jack-of-all trades that he was. Sliding different drawers open and gently rifling through things, she said, “Believe me, it took some convincing, from both me and Professor Gering—Elinor, to get Mother the sang counting job in this area. I made her take all the modern devices like a GPS and cell phone they offered, but she refused to e-mail her findings in on spreadsheets and snail-mailed them instead. Still, they knew she was the best person to find sang around here.”
    “As I said, we’re going to have to find her sang spots,” Drew said, hovering over her. “Anything about her counts there at all?”
    “No, though I can go through everything more thoroughly later. Let’s go check her lockbox.”
    “Will you need a key?” he asked, following her into the larger of the two small bedrooms. Mariah had made her bed; the familiar wedding ring heirloom quilt looked untouched, slumping into the shape of two human forms