by Nevada Barr
Anna never pushed. She, too, had principles, though they hadn’t been sanctioned by the bishop. She wouldn’t be a part of Paul being defrocked for behavior unbecoming a representative of the church, and she wouldn’t play a part in a scandal that would lose him his upcoming re-election for sheriff. Once she’d thought she’d never willingly form any part of a triangle, but it was too late for that. By keeping her clothes on and sleeping alone, she hoped to retain the dignity and self-respect they would both need if they were to be able to meet without shame after the divorce.
Though she was relieved they would not have to share a romantic social event while steadfastly being neither romantic nor social, Paul’s obvious relief stung. Heart and ego are not big proponents of logic.
“Let me know what’s happened.” Paul touched her arm.
“Sure,” Anna said, wondering if she would. She’d want to call—that was unfortunately a given—but she’d lost her taste for soap opera sneakings, however justified by the sneakers, somewhere between her sophomore and senior years at Mercy. Cloaking it in the trappings of job interaction didn’t count for much in the world of karma.
“You can use the phone in the office,” Paul said.
Anna made the necessary calls. John Brown Brown, the Natchez Trace Parkway’s chief ranger, doomed to a life of redundancy because his mother’s maiden name and her husband’s surname were the same, would inform the superintendent, currently out of pocket at a regional meeting in Atlanta. Dispatch was given her ETA at Mt. Locust. The park aide who’d paged, a seasonal interpreter named Sherry or Shelly, was soothed, then instructed to stay away from the inn and keep visitors out. There was nothing more to be done till Anna was on scene.
Needing to keep her mind from speculating on the report the park aide had babbled over the phone lest she arrive with preconceived ideas, Anna concentrated on history and nature as she drove south.
Both were a balm. History because its sins had already been committed, nature because she was supremely indifferent to the petty hysterias of the human race.
Mt. Locust was thirty miles south of Port Gibson on the Natchez Trace Parkway. Once it had been a producing plantation with the attendant kitchen and slave quarters. In the early 1800s it became one of the first of over fifty “stands”—rudimentary inns—serving travelers between Natchez and Nashville. Of these stands, Mt. Locust was the only one remaining and, built about 1780, arguably one of the oldest structures in Mississippi. The outbuildings and detached kitchen had been reduced to rubble and memory. All that remained to tell of the many slaves who labored in them was a recently discovered cemetery out beyond the kitchen garden, bones without names or markers.
In the past year, Ranger Dinkins, with the help of the park archaeologist and historian, had undertaken to find out who was buried there. So far they had eleven names. With the tendency of Mississippians, both black and white, to settle close to home, it was hoped that through deeds of purchase, oral history and DNA testing the descendants could be found. The graves would then be marked and commemorated, a piece of a people’s violently fractured history put in place.
Anna drove with the window rolled down, breathing in the essence of autumn: an exhalation of a forest readying itself for sleep, a smell so redolent with nostalgia a pleasant ache warmed her bones and she was nagged with the sense of a loss she could not remember.
Most of the leaves had been stripped from the trees by a recent hard rain. The sweet gum and sassafras were bare, winter branches etching a sky still summer blue. Pin oaks and black oaks clung to their foliage though it was sere and brown and clattered rather than rustled when the wind blew. Along the shoulders of the narrow two-lane road, grass as green as springtime was neatly mowed to tree line. Here and there, in hollows where the mechanical slash of the bush-hog couldn’t reach, the soft blue of chicory shimmered. The delicate yellow daisy that an enemy of botany and poetry had named tickweed touched the higher ground with earthen sunlight.
Anna savored the thirty minutes of the drive, the beauty flashing by at a speed the original travelers of the Trace would never have dared even imagine lest they be accused of witchcraft. Soon enough the darker side of being a park ranger would assert itself. She wanted to absorb all the antidote she could before she drank in whatever poison awaited. A poison that she knew from experience and observation was addicting. Actors weren’t the only ones who thrived on drama.
Before ten on a Saturday morning in November, Mt. Locust’s parking lot was blessedly empty. The park aide was outside the small visitors center, a brick building with the one-room bookstore to the left, bathrooms to the right and a breezeway between. The aide was a tiny woman, scarcely bigger than a child. Anna’s thoughts flashed on her maternal grandmother as she pulled the Rambler into the shade of an oak tree, one of several left on a center island when the asphalt was laid. What Anna’s grandmother had lacked in stature she’d made up for in venom. Anna wished she’d taken more time to know this seasonal interpreter so she’d know which way the little woman might break under pressure.
As she walked toward the visitors center, the aide stopped pacing, her eyes fixed on Anna. They were blank and slightly hostile.
“Hi,” Anna said, needing to make a connection.
Shelly Rabine—Anna had come close enough to read the name tag—stood squarely in front of the breezeway and crossed her arms on her chest. “I’m sorry. Mt. Locust is closed. You can’t go up to the house,” she said.
Her voice was high and strained, a mouse squeaking authority, a kindergartner putting her foot down. Stress showed in the hunch of her shoulders and the way her hands cupped her elbows as if the crossing of arms was not only to keep the world out but also to hold herself together. Regardless of the trauma she’d sustained, Shelly was determined to hold the fort till the cavalry came. Anna admired that.
“It’s me, District Ranger Anna Pigeon,” Anna said. She waved a hand at the red dress and red-and-black high heels. “I’m disguised as a normal person. It was a wedding.”
Shelly Rabine blinked rapidly. Large exothalmic eyes, so light brown as to be nearly yellow, were framed in chin-length parenthesis of stick-straight dark hair. Her face was wide and slightly squashed, the brow and chin narrow bands. Clear pale skin and perfect brows rescued her from plainness.
The fluttering lids stopped. Information was processed. “What took you so long? I called hours ago. I’m not going back.”
“Good job calling me right away like you did,” Anna said. “That was quick thinking.” The shoulders lowered fractionally. “I’m going to go on up now and take a look.” Anna put the humdrum of normalcy in her voice._“Why don’t you keep on with your work down here. Keep any visitors from heading up to the house. That would really be a big help to me.”
Miss Rabine was wound tight. The sight she’d been greeted with coupled with what, to her, seemed an unconscionably long wait, put her in fight mode. Had Anna asked Shelly to come with her up to the old stand, she had little doubt there would have been an altercation centering around “that’s not in my job description” or “that’s what you get the big bucks for.”
Left comfortably where she was with only boring peripheral responsibilities a sudden, and—to Anna who’d seen it countless times before—unsurprising transformation took place. The fight didn’t disappear, too much adrenaline in the system for that, but instead did an abrupt about-face. “Don’t you want me to show you how I found—it. All that. I mean, it could be important. What I touched and what all.” The implication that Anna didn’t live up to police procedure as seen on TV was clear.
“Would you like to come up with me?” Anna asked mildly. “Maybe tell me on the way?”
“Visitors might come,” Shelly said stubbornly, but she was winding down, anger leaking out of her shoulders and neck. Anna waited patiently, no glances up the hill to the inn, no tightening of the mouth.
“Somebody might come,” Shelly said. “They shouldn’t ... I mean nobody should ... like kids,�
� she finished lamely. The last vestiges of warfare dribbled away. The yellow-brown eyes were clear, if bruised by what they had seen. From harridan in the inimitable style of Anna’s grandma Sanderman, Shelly had settled back into a tractable, well-intentioned employee of the National Park Service.
“It’ll be all right,” Anna said. “You can come back down if we see anybody.”
Shelly adjusted her summer straw Stetson more squarely on her head and, with tiny fingers, plucked the pleats on her breast pockets straight. The man about to grant them an audience was way beyond caring about a woman’s personal appearance, but Anna didn’t say anything. Everyone has her own way of girding for battle.
They walked in silence through the short breezeway. To either side were glassed-in bulletin boards with the usual park paraphernalia: maps, camping instructions, rules, warnings. This season on the Natchez Trace, visitors were told to be on the lookout for rabid raccoons and to wear bright colors while hiking. On either side of this federally controlled ribbon of land it was deer hunting season. Who could blame a good old boy for taking aim across park boundaries if he thought he spotted a deer?
Anna’s pumps clicked officiously on the concrete, and she felt suddenly, overwhelmingly absurd teetering along in pointy-toed, high-heeled girl’s shoes. As they stepped out of the shade and into the crystal sunlight, the noise shifted to a less offensive crunch on the gravel path.
The path curved gracefully along the bottom of a small hill. Ancient live oaks shaded the split rail fence separating the house from a field planted with cotton, a remnant of the twelve hundred acres of the original plantation. Lovingly refurbished by the park service to its 1820s self, the inn stood alone on a low knoll overlooking the field and the Trace, watery window glass watching Fords and Buicks where once had been soldiers of the American Revolution, Indians and traders from the Ohio Valley. Brick steps, built by the NPS for visitor convenience, led up the grassy slope.
The stand was built, as were all well-appointed dwellings in the old south, with an eye to shade and breezes. Stilts supported it several feet above ground level to aid in air circulation, and a deep porch, complete with a rocking chair, ran the length of the house. Three doors opened onto the porch. Two were closed, probably bolted from the inside if the last interpreter off duty the previous night had adhered to protocol. The one farthest to the left stood ajar as if someone had left in a hurry.
“Why don’t you tell me exactly what you did,” Anna said as they reached the bottom of the brick steps. Probably it wouldn’t matter much, but she knew Shelly needed to tell her story and would probably feel more comfortable talking now that they were getting close.
“I got here just before eight,” Shelly said. “And I opened the visitors center like I was supposed to. The visitors center door and both the bathroom doors were locked.” Shelly was speaking slowly. Her voice wasn’t as high-pitched as it had been when Anna arrived, but she would probably sound like a child all of her life. There was thought behind the park aide’s words. She was working to remember details. A good witness, if she’d seen anything worth witnessing.
“I opened the cash register. Everything was just like it was supposed to be—you know, nothing missing or anything like that.”
They were on the brick stairway now, and Anna’s heels were clicking annoyingly again.
“At nine I walked up here, up to the house, to open it up. I opened Grandma Polly’s room first. There on the end.”
Anna knew which room was Grandma Polly’s. One of the reasons Mt. Locust was so well preserved was that it had belonged to one family for many generations. Paulina Chamberlain came to Mt. Locust as a bride in 1801. When she died in 1849 she left it to her descendants. In the 1940s, another Chamberlain gave Mt. Locust to the National Park Service and stayed on to serve as the first ranger there. The last of the line, Eric Chamberlain, still served, working as a GS-4 park aide. There was one open plot in the family cemetery at the end of a tree-shaded lane on the park boundary. When Eric died the cemetery would be complete and Mt. Locust would lose by it.
“You opened Grandma Polly’s room,” Anna nudged when Shelly failed to go on.
“It was locked like it’s supposed to be so I wasn’t thinking about anything, then I saw this thing on the bed. I thought it was like a big fish, a landed walrus maybe. That’s stupid, isn’t it?”
“Not stupid,” Anna said. The human brain was an organ designed to make sense of things. When faced with the senseless, it scrambled madly through known images, desperate to make a match.
“What then?” Anna asked. They’d reached the top of the brick steps and stood on a landing. The wooden stairs to the porch were in front of them. Anna wanted Shelly to finish her recital before they went up. It would be easier to clear her mind if her attention wasn’t divided.
“I paged you.”
“Did you go into Grandma Polly’s room?”
“No. Yes. Sort of. I went in maybe a few steps. Till I saw what it was.”
“Did you touch anything?”
“Nothing.” Shelly was emphatic about that.
“Did you check for a pulse?”
“No. God no. I mean this guy’s really dead. Dead dead. I wasn’t going to touch him. No way. Gross.”
“Okay,” Anna said. “Were the other doors locked?”
“I don’t know. I went down to the VC to call you. I guess I should have checked.”
“No. You did just exactly the right thing.” Anna started up the wooden stairs, Shelly trailing after.
“Want me to check them now?” the aide asked. No longer alone, she was warming to the adventure aspect the crime offered and was eager to be a part of it.
“No,” Anna said. “Right now it’s best if we touch and disturb as little as possible.”
“Oh, right. Fingerprints.”
The door hardware at Mt. Locust was so old and pitted with rust Anna doubted they would be able to lift any fingerprints, but she said nothing. Shelly had found a reason she could understand for leaving well enough alone. If it kept Anna from being interfered with, she was happy with it.
Anna’s patrol car, with everything she’d need in the trunk, was parked in front of her house at Rocky Springs, fifteen miles north of Port Gibson. Before heading south, she’d stopped in the Port Gibson Ranger Station and scraped up a tape recorder, camera, gloves, measuring tape and notebook. The camera, long in storage, was dusty; its functioning suspect. Having set the grime-streaked rucksack she’d liberated from behind the seat of the fire truck to tote this hastily assembled investigation kit on a bench beneath a window, she pulled out two pairs of latex gloves, put one on and handed the other to Shelly.
“Let’s take a look,” she said. Mt. Locust was painted white, the paneled doors and shutters over the windows done in a bright cheery blue. Heels clacking on porch planks, Anna walked to the half-open door, Grandma Polly’s room. Using her fingertips she gently pushed the door until it was completely open. A shaft of early sunlight chased the door’s shadow, running across the worn wooden floor to illuminate the old bed, its mattress stuffed with Spanish moss, ropes netted beneath for support.
The sudden light in the gloom threw the object on the patchwork coverlet into glowing relief. Big fish. Landed walrus. The images were apt. “Gross,” Anna murmured, unconsciously echoing Shelly Rabine’s summation.
Lying on Grandma Polly’s bed, drenched in autumn sunlight, was a fat white man. Very white. Fish-belly white. But for a pair of underpants, probably cotton, possibly Fruit of the Loom, he was naked. From her vantage point at the doorsill Anna could see the wide puffed bottoms of two splayed feet, heavy calves and meaty thighs, a great rise of belly as white as lard and folded in on itself near the navel. One arm and hand, so brown from the sun they looked as if they’d been borrowed from a different cadaver, stuck over the side of the bed, elbow locked, palm up. The face was obscured by the mounded belly and one sagging pec.
“You going to wait till somebody else gets here?”
Part of her brain registered both the disappointment and the understanding in Shelly’s voice. The young woman thought Anna was afraid to face the dead by herself. In Anna’s estimation, dead bodies were about the most trustworthy humans on the planet. It wasn’t squeamishness or fear that kept her in the doorway; before she contaminated the crime scene with her presence she wanted to take note of everything she could. Contamination, to her, not limited to the inevitable effluvia of her hair, skin and shoes, but to her mind as well. Once she stepped in the door she became part of the room. She would see it differently.
“Hand me the radio, Shelly. There in the bag.” The part of the Natchez Trace Anna served as district ranger ran through four counties: Adams, Jefferson, Claiborne and Hinds. All were held in concurrent jurisdiction with local law enforcement. Investigations were worked by federal, state and county agencies. It was a system that worked well; cooperation was the rule rather than the exception. The other death Anna worked had been at Rocky Springs in Claiborne County, so Paul Davidson had shared that tragedy. Mt. Locust was in Adams County, where Anna had yet to meet the sheriff. That was about to change.
