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
