“You want to ride with me, or would you rather follow me up?”
“I’ll follow you,” I said. “That way you don’t have to drive me back to town.”
We walked out together, past the bench, past the whittlers. This time O’Conner had the box of bones under his arm.
“Evening, Sheriff,” said Whittler Number One. Either O’Conner ranked higher in their esteem than I did or they were sufficiently curious to speak first.
“Evening, fellas,” he said.
“Are them there that girl’s bones?”
O’Conner didn’t say anything at first. I could see a couple of different emotions working in his face, then it smoothed out, and he said, “Yes, sir. They are. We’re going to give her a decent burial finally.”
“That’s good,” said the old man. “That was a shame what them Kitchingses done to her. She deserves a decent burial.”
“You all have a good evening,” said O’Conner. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Night, Sheriff,” the two men chorused together.
O’Conner placed the box in the backseat of a black-and-white Jeep Cherokee that had a seven-pointed star on the side.
I got into my truck, and together we backtracked along River Road a couple of miles back toward I-40, then turned up a gravel road through dense forest, along a small stream that fed into the river on the other side of the blacktop. My first trip up this gravel road, I’d been blindfolded and bound with duct tape—shanghaied by a giant mountain man named Waylon—and brought up this road to see Jim O’Conner. I hadn’t known what lay along either side of the gravel at the time. My second trip up, I’d been able to see, and I had seen the gravel end at a wall of vegetation—or seem to end. In fact, it plunged beneath a cascade of kudzu vines. We had snaked through a tunnel of kudzu and then emerged into a small hanging valley, where O’Conner was conducting a secret experiment in agriculture. Not marijuana, as I had suspected at one point, but ginseng: he’d found a way to replicate wild black ginseng, the sort prized by poachers, the sort that commanded top dollar in Chinese markets. This trip, I noticed that the road had recently been regraveled. It looked slightly wider, and a film of dust on the weeds alongside hinted at heavy traffic. When we got to the kudzu tunnel, I saw that the vines hiding the tunnel’s mouth had been cut back, transfering what had once been a secret entrance to O’Conner’s little valley into a shaded arbor. The vines had been thinned, which took some frequent attention, I knew, given kudzu’s prodigious ability to grow by several feet a day. Sunlight filtered through. It still wasn’t cool under here, but it was a brief respite from the baking sun of the late-summer afternoon. When we emerged out the other side, into a large clearing with a frame farmhouse at one end, I was surprised at the transformation. Half a dozen vehicles, pickup trucks, and late-model cars were tucked into a small parking lot of gravel. The kudzu vines that had wrapped the back of the house—forming another tunnel connecting with the giant ginseng patch—had also been trimmed back, and the house had been freshly painted. I saw a small satellite dish and junction boxes, where underground telephone wires and television cable emerged from the ground.
As I got out, I said to O’Conner, “I see you’ve made some changes around here.”
He smiled. “A few,” he said. “My cover was blown, so I figured we needed to go ahead and get into the market with this fall’s crop, which’ll be our first. We took some samples to buyers, and we’ve got contracts for all we can produce. Should be several thousand pounds of top-grade ginseng root. We’re not getting quite what the poachers get for the stuff from the national park,” he said, “but close. If we can keep things from drying out in the heat of the summer, we should have several thousand pounds, at almost two hundred dollars a pound.”
I did the math. “So you’re looking at six figures?”
“Should be,” he said. “Seven if we get real lucky. But you know what? It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s been an interesting experiment. Maybe it’ll help lessen the demand for the poached ’sang, which would be good. And I’ve got half a dozen people working for me, doing honest jobs, which is also a good thing here in Cooke County. But I don’t really need the money, so if this doesn’t work, I’m not hurting.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I know how big that sheriff’s paycheck is,” I said.
“Well, yeah, I’m not gonna get rich off that,” he said. “But I’ve got almost no overhead, apart from the ginseng operation here. My car’s provided. I’ve long since owned this farm outright. I live like a monk when I’m not at work. Hell, I don’t even spend everything the county pays me.”
“You sound like a man whose life is in balance,” I said. “Of course, even when you looked like an outlaw, you seemed pretty balanced and content.”