Deep Down (I) by Karen Harper

Author:Karen Harper [Karen Harper]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romantic Suspense
Publisher: Mira
Published: 2012-03-01T16:36:21+00:00

“It’s a good thing you took evidence photos of the sang berry art,” Drew told Tyler when they reached the sang cove site. He stated the obvious: the berries were moved or missing.

“I dropped the photos off with your secretary just before I met you,” Tyler told Drew. “I figured you didn’t want to drag them around in the woods—except that one,” he said, gesturing toward Drew’s backpack where he’d put the photo of what he was coming to think of as The Thing.

“Seth,” Drew said, “I’ll have to show you the other photos when we get back to town. Let’s take a look at the tree where we found her.”

As they approached it, Seth stopped dead in his tracks. Looking up at it, he almost fell backward.

“What?” Drew demanded. “You know this place?”

“A grandfather tree,” he whispered, his eyes narrowed, his head down now as if he could not even gaze on it again. “Old. Sacred.”

“She was huddled up inside it, covered with sang,” Drew told him.

“Atalikuli,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Ginseng—atalikuli, it climbs the hills. To be buried with it is—good. It helps to take you—upward, into the sky above the hills.”

Behind Seth’s back, Tyler looked entranced; he leaned closer to hear, as Drew asked the old man, “So, do you know this place?”

Seth finally looked at him. “Yes. By tradition of my people. It was also the place where some hid under leaves—not ginseng, but dried leaves—to escape the soldiers who had come to take their homes, force them away.”

“On the Trail of Tears?” Tyler spoke up, startling Drew.

Seth nodded. “And now we have another trail of tears. Now, because I know this place, because of what I said about atalikuli taking the dead onward, upward, you think I killed her and put her there, but I did not.”

Drew put his hand on Seth’s shaking shoulder, but he couldn’t help picturing that unknown beast from the woods again. A buried memory stabbed at him. When he was really young, his father had told him a ghost story around a campfire. He’d said that, “Indians like Cherokee Seth could make monsters out of nothing, big, furry ones that like to eat kids like you.”

Back then, brave and cocky, Drew had shaken his head and laughed it off, but he wasn’t laughing now.

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