Hunting Season

by Nevada Barr

  She called dispatch in Tupelo and requested they contact him and the coroner to ask them to come to Mt. Locust.

  Handing the radio back to Shelly, who still held the rucksack in front of her like a little kid with a trick-or-treat basket, Anna said, “Camera please.” Shelly traded radio for camera, looking serious and professional and happy to have something to do.

  Camera to her eye, Anna began framing death; the first step in the compartmentalizing process, boxing off the dead from the living. The last box would be of wood and buried in the ground.

  The stand was built in the French style of the early nineteenth century with enclosed rooms or cabinets. Bedrooms didn’t open into the central taproom where the travelers ate, but onto the porch. In Polly’s room a second door exited out the far side into a storage room with access to the back porch.

  Anna clicked four pictures: as wide an angle of the room as she could get in tight quarters, showing the rear door, the bed and the window on the left-hand wall next to a shallow fireplace. The other three were close-ups of those areas. Probably a waste of film but it might be important later when wondering if things were open or closed, locked or unlocked, without having to rely on memory.

  Lowering the camera, she looked carefully at the floor. It was of worn planks, with a single tied rag rug to soften it. Visitors were not allowed in this room. The public had to stand behind a waist-high, clear plastic barrier, slid into brackets on the doorframe where Anna stood. The floor was clean, swept, but not recently; a thin film of dust coated the planks. Dust had collected on the dressing table by the door and the rocker in the corner. A couple months’ worth at a guess.

  The sidelight provided by a low November sun was ideal for her purposes. Anna got down on hands and knees and put her cheek on the doorsill.

  “What’re you doing?” Shelly asked.

  “Looking,” Anna returned repressively. Between her nose and the rag rug, the dust was unmarked. Beyond the small rectangle of faded cotton, in the area from the storage room door to the bedside, the dust had been disturbed.

  “Get on the radio, Shelly. Have dispatch get in touch with the sheriff. Tell him we got tracks in dust. Special paper, kind of a cross between Saran Wrap and tinfoil, will lift them. Several different brand names. Port Gibson District doesn’t have any. Tell him to bring some if he’s got it.” Anna wasn’t optimistic. She’d never worked in a park that kept that kind of stuff on hand. There was no reason a small town sheriff’s department would. The technology of criminal investigation had far outstripped most law-enforcement budgets. Taxpayers weren’t willing to cough up the funds to equip a town with maybe one homicide every four or five years, and most of those straightforward I-shot-the-son-of-a-bitch-and-here’s-why situations, with the high-priced bells and whistles, much less the funding to train an ever-changing cadre of sheriffs’ deputies to use them.

  Of course, if things got dicey, the public would be up in arms because the combined genius of NASA and the CIA hadn’t been brought to bear on whatever backyard slaying the media dictated they take an interest in.

  Anna was rather glad that in most places in America crime hadn’t reached levels where cutting-edge Buck Rogers goodies were factored into everyday standard operating procedures. In most of the country cops still took pictures, drew sketches and crawled around on their hands and knees with tweezers and envelopes.

  Standing up, Anna said, “I’m going in,” then nearly laughed out loud. She’d uttered the words with the intensity of Dirty Harry about to clear out a felon-infested warehouse on the New York City docks. Maybe she’d gotten a tad cynical and practiced at looking cool, but the sight of a dead body in suspicious circumstances still triggered an adrenaline rush. It was good to be alive. She reached into the bag Shelly held and took out a tape recorder.

  “Uh-oh,” Shelly said.

  “No danger,” Anna reassured her. “I’m just going to step inside.”

  “No. You got your dress all smeary.” The genuine sympathy in the young woman’s tone reminded Anna how pretty the dress was, and how expensive.

  “It’ll wash,” she replied, hoping it was true. Stepping through the doorway, she shut Shelly, the spoiled dress and everything else from her mind and took in the sense of the room. Simplicity, the utilitarian nature of pioneer construction and furnishings, lent it a beauty that was rarely evident in late twentieth and early twenty-first century homes: four-poster bed beneath a sash window, a desk, a rocker, a bureau. Beneath the bed was a trunk. Two hooks on the wall above the bed served the needs of a closet for a way of life that required few changes of clothing. Candles in sconces and an oil lamp would provide the room with light. Had the body been an aged family member, laid out in burial garb by loving hands, Grandma Polly’s bedroom would have retained its symmetry and peace. It was so steeped in history, death itself did not seem out of place. Nudity, modernity did.

  Anna crossed the room and, standing on the bit of carpet so she wouldn’t destroy the tracks in the dust nearer the bed, she looked over the body. “Moby Dick,” she muttered irreverently as she stared down at the great white whale beached in her park. She clicked on the tape recorder, tested it, then began.

  “White male, fifty to sixty years of age, maybe five-foot-ten inches tall, well over two hundred pounds. Hair gray and brown, thinning on top, cut short. Eyes blue.” Eyes. Anna was not a big fan of the eyes of the dead. Never was it clearer that they were the windows of the soul than when, looking into them, one saw only emptiness, a place devoid of hope or humanity. Once she’d seen eyes like that on a living person, a boy of eleven in a psych ward she’d visited. He’d been mutilating the family pets. His parents finally brought him in when he’d tried the same thing on his little sister.

  These dead eyes were rolled back slightly, as if their owner had been looking out the sash window above his head, trying to catch a last glimpse of the stars before he died. Flesh fell heavily in the bags beneath the eyes and in his jowls, pulling down his cheeks and lips till the tips of straight, white, clearly artificial crowns could be seen.

  Her gaze moving methodically down the body, Anna continued her visual exploration. “No jewelry around his neck, no marks of strangulation. No visible wounds on head, shoulders or arms.” Standing on tiptoe so she would see over the man’s bulk, she checked his other side. “No defensive marks evident on hands or forearms.” Her focus shifted down to the torso. Here things began to get interesting. She’d started at the top of the head because thoroughness in police work was worth a great deal more than inspiration. “Torso marked with bruise pattern,” she said into the machine. “Bruising evident beneath the arms. Bruising and chafing in a band approximately four inches wide just below the sternum. Abdomen unmarked. Subject wearing white men’s briefs. No blood or semen stains visible. On the inner thighs bruising and chafing, contusions having oozed blood.”

  “Major, major yuck,” said a voice in Anna’s ear. “Like, this is a sex crime! God. I think it’d be a crime for a guy like this to have sex at all.”

  “Spoken like a young, thin person,” Anna said. Drawn by adventure and the macabre, Shelly had drifted in to stand behind Anna’s left shoulder. Anna checked to see that she stood on the rug. During the busy season half a hundred visitors a day poked their heads in. Park aides had the run of the place. And soon the room would be populated with the sheriff’s people, the coroner and whoever else got sent on the call. A few dark hairs or pale flecks of skin from Shelly Rabine weren’t going to obfuscate any clues.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Anna reminded her and left it at that.

  “I know not to touch,” Shelly said, slightly aggrieved. Everybody knew it and everybody, even seasoned professionals, had to be reminded. Other than on the body itself, maybe the patchwork coverlet and the tracked bit of floor, it didn’t really matter. The unbroken veil of dust on planks and furniture made it clear there would be no recent fingerprints to be lifted.

  “Maybe it was that auto-erotica thing or whatev
er you call it,” Shelly suggested. “You know, where guys hang themselves while they jerk off.”

  “No ligature marks,” Anna said. “And his underpants are still on.”

  “Oh. Where are his clothes? You’d think they’d be lying around somewhere.”

  “I doubt he was here alone. Whoever killed him or found him before we did probably took them.”

  “Why?”

  Anna had no answer for that. It was too early for answers. She said nothing but traded Shelly the tape recorder for the camera and began taking photographs of the body and, as best as ambient light and mediocre equipment would allow, of the tracks in the dust on the floor.

  When she finished and looked up, Shelly had moved away from the bed. No longer on the island of rug, she stood in front of Grandma Polly’s writing desk. Anna felt a stab of annoyance that the younger woman had not obeyed her to the letter. Shelly’s hands were clasped dutifully behind her back, carefully not touching anything, so Anna stifled her waspishness.

  “What have you got?” she asked.

  “Too weird. Come look.”

  On the writing table an old book lay open. On the right-hand page was a picture of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. The left side was covered in verse, and half of it had been circled in red felt-tip pen.

  Sins against a holy god

  Sins against His righteous laws

  Sins against His love and blood

  Sins against His name and cause

  Great, Anna thought sourly.

  “What do you figure?” Shelly asked. Either stress or proximity to religion was bringing out the park aide’s drawl. Local girl, Anna remembered, from Vicksburg. First summer home from college after graduating from Ole Miss.

  “Beats me,” Anna said. “Could be a lot of things. Maybe means nothing. An impulse. Murderers are not the sort of folks known for controlling impulses.”

  “It’d of been night,” Shelly said.

  “Good point.” Anna thought about that for a moment. Mt. Locust, true to its 1802 history, had no electricity. Whatever had transpired in Grandma Polly’s room had been done by flashlight. The candles in the sconces had never been lit; the wicks were still white virgin cotton. The globe on the oil lamp was sheathed in a fine, unmarred layer of dust. It was unlikely, though not impossible, that whoever had been there had happened to see the verse. Maybe the picture. Only a religious person would know it was Christ in the Garden. Anna had needed to read the caption.

  “Maybe the ...” Shelly looked over her shoulder at the bed with its unsavory burden as if concerned its occupant would overhear them gossiping. “... the deceased,” she continued self-consciously, “circled it himself. Like a suicide note.”

  “Nothing’s impossible. Whoever did it had to have left a track in the dust. I missed it. Now it’s been obliterated.” Both women were standing on the bare wood.

  “Oh, gosh, I know,” Shelly said excitedly. “Baptists.”

  “Baptists?” Anna echoed stupidly.

  “Yeah. It was done by Baptists. They’re real serious about sins of the flesh. Not like Catholics or anything.”

  “They are?”

  “Boy. You’re sure not from around here. When you profile the killer are you going to make him Baptist?” Shelly asked hopefully.

  “If I’m not mistaken, sixty percent of the state of Mississippi is Baptist,” Anna said. She didn’t want to go into the fact that garden-variety, one-corpse killers weren’t profiled. “The sheriff should be getting here soon. Why don’t you go down to the VC and wait for him.”

  Perhaps feeling contrite about stepping off the rug, or having just had her fill of the vicarious thrill of unnatural death, Shelly Rabine handed Anna the rucksack she’d been holding and left without argument.

  Anna took two close-ups of the picture of Christ and its accompanying verse.

  “Damn,” she whispered. Christians made her nervous, and here she had a corpse that appeared to have been bound and bruised by the Bible belt.

  2

  Taking camera and tape recorder with her, Anna walked around the stand to the back. An old grape arbor, leaves brown with the season, stood to one side. Behind the house remnants of a well—a circle of brick—were all that remained. Eric Chamberlain’s kitchen garden had been put to bed for the winter. Beyond it lay a field, then the woods. Poison ivy stitched the tree line in scarlet. Beneath the pine and oak, grown through with roots, lay the bodies of slaves. Autumn had taken its toll on the leaves and the sign the NPS had erected showed through the branches. On it were the names of the dead identified so far. Two were familiar : Dinkins and Restin. Whether they were related to Anna’s field ranger Barth Dinkins or Paul’s deputy Lonnie Restin remained to be seen; the surnames were not uncommon in the local black community. Because of the habit of slaves taking—or being saddled with—the last name of their owners, tracing family history was difficult.

  Barth was a curator by training and a historian by nature. Sleuthing out the origins and descendents of the Dinkins buried in the scrub was his pet project.

  Anna pulled her attention from yesterday’s dead to today’s. Turning, she studied the back of the inn. Here, too, was a covered porch, once used as an open-air bunkhouse for travelers. To the left a small bedroom had housed generations of children. To the right was the storeroom that opened both onto the porch and into Grandma Polly’s room. The storeroom door was open, the wood in the frame splintered where it had been kicked in, modern lock holding, ancient timbers shattering around it.

  Anna took a couple photographs, bracketing for light. The planks of the porch, shuffled over daily by tourists, had collected enough in the way of dust to show obvious tracks. A wide, clean line snaked from the top of the steps in through the storeroom. Shelly’s beached walrus had been dragged in the back way. Dragged in dressed; Anna’d noted no dust or splinters embedded in the corpse’s ample acreage of epidermis. She turned back to the porch rail and studied the grass, the gravel path. No drag marks. Possibly some on the steps but it was hard to tell. The walrus had been killed or rendered unconscious, carried to the porch then dumped, dragged to the bedroom and stripped down to his undies.

  The less-than-appetizing picture forming in Anna’s mind was blessedly fragmented by the sound of voices moving up the gentle hill from the visitors center. Not wanting to walk mindlessly over ground she hadn’t checked, she retraced her steps around Mt. Locust’s south side.

  Led by the petite Shelly Rabine, three men crunched up the gravel path beneath the live oaks. The sheriff, resplendent in a uniform that looked as if it had been ironed by a West Point cadet, walked beside the park aide. From the old sweat stains on the man’s hat and the scuffed boots a heavy load of polish had failed to make shine, Anna guessed the sheriff of Adams County wasn’t usually so formally turned out. Elections were coming. Lawmen all over Mississippi would be sprucing up.

  Staying in the shadows a moment, she watched. The sheriff’s name was Clintus Jones. Dispatch had given her that. Age was hard to tell. He was a black man with very black close-cropped hair, thin arched brows over wide-set dark eyes. His lips were full and precision cut. A mustache and goatee of incongruous white framed them. Jones wasn’t tall, maybe a handspan over Rabine, but his bones were made for a big man: wide flat cheeks, broad shoulders and hips rounded into a barrel shape. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands. The smith, a mighty man is he with large and sinewy hands.” Anna whispered a line from a poem she’d presented to Mrs. White’s third-grade class at Johnstonville Elementary School, and marveled that the words were still housed in her brain.

  “Hey, Anna. The sheriff’s got here,” Shelly called.

  Anna was annoyed, then impressed. Customarily, if she stood still in the shadows out of the natural line of sight she was invisible. She was mentally complimenting the young park aide on her sharp eyes when she remembered she was no longer in green and gray. Wearing a fire-engine red calf-length dress and high-heeled, red patent-leather
pumps, she was as obvious as a cardinal in the winter woods.

  “Hey,” Anna replied, stepping into the clear and perfect sunshine. “Anna Pigeon, District Ranger.” She stuck out her hand, and the sheriff took it carefully. Not the fishtail droop of a weak or reticent handshake, more the controlled delicacy of a bird dog trained to retrieve game without crushing it.

  “Jones,” the sheriff said and opened his fist to let her hand take flight. “This is my under-sheriff, André Gates.” Gates was only African-American by the dictates of a culture that had once been proud of the premise that one teaspoon of black blood made a person black—and this was a bad thing—a form of insanity groups of northern white supremists were trying to keep alive. Gates was a product of what Anna hoped was intermarriage but was probably generations of rape. Regardless of how the man’s gene pool had been filled, he’d turned out very pretty. Not as pretty as Harry Belafonte, but close. By the back tilt of his head and the set of his shoulders, she guessed he was also proud unto arrogance.

  “André,” Anna nodded politely.

  The sheriff introduced the third man. “Gil Franklin.”

  White, portly and sweating through an expensive suit designed for harsher Novembers, the coroner cut Sheriff Jones off.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Franklin said.

  Anna half expected him to add the implied, “I haven’t got all day,” but he restrained himself. “This way, gentlemen,” she said and took them up the porch steps to Grandma Polly’s room.

  Gil Franklin chuffed up the stairs with surprising speed. Either he had somewhere else to be or the thought of a dead body was a treat of the highest order. His leather-soled loafers clattered across the wood, drowning out the embarrassing click of Anna’s heels.

  “Gil, hold up a minute,” Sheriff Jones hollered as the coroner steamed through the door, thrusting his considerable self into the small crime scene. Gil Franklin didn’t hear or chose to ignore the request. Anna suspected the latter.