Hunting Season

by Nevada Barr

  Ten minutes earlier she’d have been experiencing pure relief. Bringing tragic news to surviving relatives had never been one of her favorite parts of the job. Since the advent of the tardy son and the shotgun, her curiosity had been piqued. She wanted a go at the feisty old lady.

  “Looks like we come back tomorrow,” she said disappointedly.

  “Wait,” the sheriff replied. “Raymond’s thinking, is my bet. Figuring the ramifications. How’s answering versus not answering going to look in the local newspaper.”

  “Maybe he’s hoping we’ll bust the door down and find him protecting the privacy of his sainted mum.”

  Clintus laughed. “He’d love that.” Local politics, for all that it seemed small-time to outsiders, carried much of the same low-down, mud-slinging, high-stakes ramifications as a bid for the presidency.

  Anna promised herself never to run for office even if an adoring constituency begged her.

  The sound of footsteps approaching announced the end of undertaker Barnette’s cogitations. The heavy oak swung inward a foot or so, and Raymond extruded onto the porch pulling the door shut behind him. A mask of empathy was fitted over his features, but Anna sensed satisfied complacency beneath.

  “How’s your mama doing?” Clintus asked, southern manners at the fore.

  Barnette shook his head in slow theatrical sadness. “It’s a bad shock. I’ve called Doc Fingerhut. He’s phoned in a prescription. Poor Mama is used to hard times. She’ll weather.” He tried a brave and understanding smile, but it was ruined by the oversized incisors.

  “We need to ask her a few questions,” Clintus pressed on. “See if she can shed any light on where your brother was last night, who he was with.”

  Barnette hesitated. Then, perhaps remembering he might hold the job of sheriff in the not-so-distant future, relented. “Don’t be too long about it.” Turning, he dug a set of keys out of his trouser pocket. He’d locked the front door behind him when he’d come out. Not since she’d lived in New York City had Anna seen such a paranoid display of personal security.

  The inside of the house was so dark it took a moment for Anna’s eyes to adjust. Blinds were drawn on the windows, then reinforced with heavy drapes, as if light was the enemy. Heavy furniture of antique design crouched in the gloom. Wallpaper was dark, a brown and pink background for pictures framed in dark wood, subjects indecipherable in the dim light.

  Every available surface was cluttered with magazines, newspapers and cast-off clothing. Beer cans, half-eaten bags of chips and paper plates bearing crumbs finished the classic bachelor décor.

  “Doyce lived downstairs,” his brother explained as they threaded their way through the darkling mess. “Mama lives up.”

  Though the day was perfect, the temperature hovering in the low seventies with a slight breeze, the house was closed up tight. By the dusty fall of the heavy drapes, Anna doubted the windows had been opened in years. In place of the rich living air of the outdoors they were left with the chill flat touch of air-conditioning. It gave the Barnette ancestral home the same feel as Barnette’s Funeral Home.

  Remembering the dirty plates littering Doyce’s lair, Anna looked on the bright side. Perhaps the air-conditioning kept the smells to a minimum.

  Though the house was only two stories, the ceilings were close to fourteen feet high and to reach the upper floor they climbed two foreshortened flights. A window with a magnolia in stained glass shed green and yellow light on the landing where the stairs turned back on themselves. Below the window hung a flyspecked oil painting of the Last Supper.

  Anna’s knowledge of biblical history was sketchy at best but she seemed to remember the Last Supper was eaten somewhere in the vicinity of the Garden of Gesthemane.

  “Sins against a holy God”; one of the lines circled in red at the murder scene. Anna shook off the thought. Probably half the homes in Adams County had religious images scattered across their walls. Besides, regardless of how tough old Mama Barnette was, she just wasn’t big enough to lug around a piece of dead meat the size and heft of her older boy.

  After the pizza crust and old gym socks ambience of the downstairs, Mama’s realms were a heaven of order. The same overabundance of furniture prevailed, but above stairs it was at least clean and free of debris.

  The upstairs consisted of three bedrooms and a bath clustered around a spacious landing at the top of the stairs. Two of the doors stood open and, by the light which filtered through the lace sheers, Anna noted the world Mama Barnette had preserved on the second floor. She glimpsed the bedroom to the right as they came up the last steps. The feel was prewar; not II or I, but Civil. A four-poster bed dominated the room. In lieu of a closet was a fine old armoire with mirrored doors.

  “Mama’s in here,” Raymond said sharply, as if to pull Anna’s prying eyes from the bedroom. He stood aside to the left of the landing and ushered them into another spacious high-ceilinged room. The second bedroom apparently served as Mrs. Barnette’s sitting room. Careful arrangements of formal Victorian chairs flanked a small marble-topped table with carved legs bandied out from a pedestal. A high-backed cherry settee sat against the wall, and tufts of what may very well have been the horsehair of the original stuffing poked through the threadbare fabric. Crocheted doilies were pinned to the back and the arms in an attempt to hide the ravages of age.

  Mrs. Barnette sat in a rocking chair by a fireplace. November had yet to get cold enough for fires and the opening was discreetly covered by a decorative paper fan.

  Anna and the sheriff entered and stood awkwardly amid the fragile furniture, waiting to be received. Raymond scuttled over to his mother’s chair. “This is the sheriff,” he said in a loud voice. “The doctor’s called in a prescription for you.”

  The old woman turned her round blue eyes up at her son. From where Anna stood, they appeared to be free of tears or any other discernable signs of grief.

  “I know who he is,” the old woman snapped. “I don’t need no doctor’s poisons. And I ain’t deaf.”

  Raymond smiled. Anna thought it smacked more of an undertaker sizing up a customer for a coffin than the understanding of a devoted son.

  Evidently it struck his mother the same way. “Stop grinning like an idiot,” she ordered her younger son. “Your big teeth are hanging out.”

  Raymond did as he was told. His face clung doggedly to a mask of benevolence, but his eyes mirrored the pure nastiness of his mother’s.

  Blood will tell, Anna thought and glanced around her, an instinct to check for more vipers in the nest.

  “We’re real sorry about Doyce,” Clintus began.

  “Get on with it,” Mrs. Barnette interrupted the condolences.

  “Okay,” he said. They’d not been invited to sit. As they stood like servants called on the carpet, Clintus started the interview. “We just need to ask you a couple of questions so we can figure out what happened.”

  “Ask them. Don’t shuffle around all day scuffing up my good rug.”

  Anna heard Clintus sigh, before abandoning the delicacy he had thought the situation called for. “Do you know where Doyce was last night?”

  “I don’t. He got this bug to play poker all of a sudden.” She said the word ‘poker’ the way a Carmelite nun might say ‘sodomy’. “Friday nights he was off playing poker with his low-life friends. I don’t know who they were and I don’t want to know.

  “He’d be out most of the night. He thought I wouldn’t know but I heard him come in. I ain’t deaf,” she said again and glared at Raymond.

  “He never mentioned who he played with?” Clintus tried. “Not even first names or anything?”

  “I told you he didn’t. I wouldn’t have listened if he did. They were drinking and smoking and gambling. When that boy come in I could smell it on him all the way up here. That stink of sin coming right up the stairs.

  “He was losing money, too. He lied about that but he was all right. Just throwing away all me and his daddy, God rest his soul, worked so
hard for. The devil’d got hold Doyce and now he’s dead.”

  Mrs. Barnette sounded as is she figured it served him right but venting the anger had melted something in her wizened old heart and at the word ‘dead’ tears flooded her eyes and ran down in a zigzag pattern through the time-carved creases in her face.

  “Mrs. Barnette, do you mind if we take a look around downstairs, see if we can find out who he was with?” Clintus asked.

  Mrs. Barnette gave no indication she heard.

  They’d gotten what they were going to out of the old woman. Clintus gave his condolences. Mrs. Barnette did not accept them, though Anna’s she acknowledged with a sniff and a nod. When they left she was in her rocker staring straight ahead, tears running down her cheeks, her stony old face as unchanged by the tempest as the stones the rain falls on.

  Raymond reluctantly supplied the permission they needed. Anna hoped he’d remain with his grieving mother but no such luck. The undertaker’s lanky angulated form followed them downstairs like Edward Gorey’s uninvited guest, his dark work suit melting in and out of the shadows on the landings.

  Resolutely, she put him from her mind.

  “You take Doyce’s room,” Clintus said, ignoring murmured instructions from their attendant mortician that the investigation could be better served in a myriad of other ways. “I’ll see if the living room has anything to offer.”

  The part of the house Doyce lived in consisted of a spacious living room, a formal dining room, a kitchen and what had once been a library, a perfectly square room with built-in bookcases from the floor to two feet below the ceiling. The bookcases, painted dark green, took up two walls. A fireplace claimed the third and a bay window the fourth.

  From the living room, Anna could hear the annoying rattle of Raymond Barnette’s advice. Quietly, she closed the library door in the probably vain hope it would keep the man out.

  The first order of business was light. Having threaded her way through the clutter to the bay window, she threw open the heavy drapes and was rewarded by a shower of dust. A spider, her web disarranged probably for the first time in generations, ran for cover. She was small and not overly alarming so Anna let her live.

  The sheers were opened next. Though Anna did not handle them with undue violence one of them tore, the fabric so old it had become almost as fragile as the spider’s web. The window shade was last. Finally, to Anna’s relief, there was light.

  It had been in her mind to throw wide the casement and let in the rejuvenating air of autumn, but one look at the paint-encrusted sill convinced her it wasn’t worth the time and effort. She turned back to the room.

  When the library had been forced into use as a bedroom no changes had been made, no closet added, a bed had just been jammed up against one of the built-ins. The books were long gone, and the cases were used to house an eclectic collection of the deceased’s belongings.

  The bed, a single that looked as if it had survived Doyce’s childhood in the 1950s, was unmade. Blankets were tangled in a ball and the bottom sheet had come loose, exposing the mattress ticking. Adolescents were prone to crawling into nests of that sort rather than taking the trouble to make things neat. In an adult it spoke of a disregard or disrespect for one’s self.

  An unwelcome memory bloomed behind Anna’s eyes. After Zach had died there’d come months she’d retired to just such a bed night after night. Usually fully dressed. Often too drunk to care. She shook off the image. It didn’t surprise her Doyce lived as he did. From what little she’d seen, she didn’t need a degree in psychiatry to know this was a seriously dysfunctional family.

  The clothes scattered over the floor and the room’s one chair told her little but that Doyce favored sweatpants, T-shirts and camo-patterned army fatigues. She supposed the former to be for at-home lounging and the latter for more formal occasions.

  Half a dozen snapshots, unframed but propped up against old sneakers and a half-empty box of rifle shells, showed Doyce in his finery. He and two other men, also in full camouflage dress, posed around the empty-eyed carcass of a deer.

  The rifles were equipped with night scopes. The men had traces of blacking on their faces, aping commandos on night maneuvers. Anna shook her head. The stealth and technology men put behind stalking a timid herbivore with the cognitive capacity of an eighteen-month-old child mystified her.

  She turned the photos over but luck was not with her; no names had been scrawled on the backs. Still, she slipped one in her pocket for future use. Chances were good at least one if not all of his hunting buddies would also be a poker-playing buddy.

  The room offered up little else. Doyce’s personal life was evidently centered on eating and sleeping. There were no books, only magazines, two on hunting. A third, imperfectly hidden behind a shoebox half full of loose change, matchbooks and spent shotgun cartridges, was a Penthouse from August 1998. The little things that tell of life and interests, checkbooks, letters, lists, pictures, gifts from friends and family, were missing.

  The door pushed open and Raymond “Digger” Barnette shoved his long face into the room. “Are you about finished up?” he asked. “I need to get back up and see how Mama’s doing.”

  “Finished,” Anna said. She fished the snapshot of the hunters from her pocket. “Mind if I take this?”

  Raymond looked at it for a long time as if seeking to see if there was anything objectionable in it. “Go ahead,” he said grudgingly.

  “I’ll get it back to you,” Anna promised.

  “Keep it.”

  Anna buttoned the photo back in her pocket.

  Clintus met her in the foyer. “Anything?” he asked as Raymond hovered around, trying to urge them out the door.

  “Not much,” Anna admitted. “You?”

  “A phone message left last night at six-forty-nine. ‘Hey Doyce, Herm, you up for it? Come on down,”’ the sheriff recited, dropping into a heavy southern drawl that made Anna smile. “A place to start,” he said. “There’s just not that many Hermans in this part of the country.”

  Raymond saw them to the front door, then closed it behind them.

  Anna trotted down the front steps and suppressed an urge to spread her arms like wings, turn her face to the sky and spin in the childhood dance celebrating life, air and the sun. The misery embedded in the house wasn’t static. It lived and grew. Anna could feel it like a fungus on her skin. The touch of the sun burned it away.

  Clintus didn’t dance but he tilted his face to the light then rubbed it with both palms as if he washed in light. “I’d never been inside before,” he said. “Man. If this had been a suicide I doubt I’d even of questioned it.”

  “There’s not enough Prozac in the world to induce me to live like that,” Anna said. She’d seen dumps before. Clintus would have, too. Places eaten away by poverty or neglect. Rooms and buildings ravaged by the violence of those who lived there, reflecting it back on the residents. Homes of people too mentally ill to care for themselves or their property. It wasn’t the disarray downstairs or the absence of light and fresh air that had struck at Anna. The Barnette house was closed up, shut off in some way. Keeping in old pain and old pride. Shutting out a flow of life that, in normal circumstances, would bring new emotions, new interests, to replace those time had used up.

  The place was a mausoleum. Anna was reminded of Great Expectations, of the old woman in her decaying wedding dress presiding over a feast long go eaten by mice and worms. The analogy wasn’t quite right, but as Anna did not choose to think any more about it, it would have to stand until she came up with something better.

  “Ish,” she said as they fled for the second time to the sheriff’s patrol car. Clintus was in, and as Anna reached for the door handle, she was stopped by a faint insistent beeping.

  Because of the bleak mental landscape the house had engendered, a sudden picture of bombs, the kind favored by filmmakers, with the last seconds ticking away before the explosion, filled her mind.

  Standing stock-still, she listened
. The beeping came from Raymond Barnette’s Cadillac, a shining heap of Detroit iron painted, as befitted his calling, as funeral-black as any hearse.

  “Hang on a second,” she said to Clintus through the open window.

  The undertaker’s car was parked in the sun. Anna crossed the weedy gravel turnaround. In his haste to get to the house, Raymond had left the keys in the ignition and the driver’s door ajar. In an act of automatic kindness, Anna started to close it for him to save his battery. On the passenger seat was a sheaf of neatly stapled papers. Last Will and Testament was blazoned across the top in oversized Gothic type.

  Curiosity shouldered aside the good Samaritan. Anna leaned in and snatched it up. “Plain view,” she whispered to herself, quoting the rule that allowed law-enforcement officers to use things that might be claimed as protected by a citizen’s right to privacy in evidence. Anything left in sight for any eyes that happened by did not fall under the privacy laws.

  Kneeling on the driver’s seat, she scanned the document. Florence Littleton Barnette’s estate consisted of the house and property and little else: no stocks, bonds, mutual funds or other real estate. The whole of it had been left to her elder son, Doyce Felder Barnette. In the event that Doyce should die before his mother, the estate would then go to the younger son, Raymond Allan Barnette.

  This, then, was why Raymond had been so long getting to his mother’s house with the tragic news. He’d stopped off at his home or the lawyer’s office to get a copy of the will.

  Who better than a mortician to appreciate the notion that life is short, and one has to make hay while the sun shines?