Hunting Season

by Nevada Barr

  Taco was banished. Clintus took him back to the VC to sulk with Shelly. Anna and Barth spent the next two hours sitting on the damp earth, the fog soaking into their clothes and their spirits, clawing through lumps of hard clay and pine needles. Their combined efforts produced a pile of what appeared to be rotted wood and three bones. The bones were tiny and old. No flesh remained on them, and they were so brittle with age they looked more like sticks than pieces of human skeleton. From the size and general shape, Anna guessed they were either from a foot or a hand.

  When they finished, they set their finds aside and began shoveling dirt back into the hole.

  “Somebody dug up a grave,” Barth said. Despite the cold, his shirt was dark with sweat. Beads of moisture from the fog glistened in his close-cropped hair. His pale greenish eyes shone with exertion or passion. “They dug it up and stole the body, coffin and all. It being so old, it must of fallen apart. These pieces we got were left behind.”

  “Looks that way.” After crouching so long absorbed in the minutia of dirt clods and needle clumps, Anna was enjoying the sheer physicality of lifting and moving shovelfuls of dirt.

  “They just must’ve dumped the remains in a garbage bag all higgledy-piggledy and hauled them off,” Barth went on. Sadness and outrage embittered the words. “Why would anybody want to do that?”

  That’s what Anna was wondering. The odds of anything valuable being buried with the body of a slave were negligible. On the million-to-one chance that had been the case and a historical treasurer hunter had discovered it, there would have been no need to take the body and what was left of the coffin as well. A vague possibility presented itself.

  “Maybe the descendents of whoever was buried here wanted to reinter the remains in a churchyard or family gravesite and figured the park service wouldn’t let them,” Anna suggested. Like most other government agencies, the park service had been taught the importance of ancestor remains by the more outspoken Native American groups. If a person could even kind of sort of prove the remains were theirs, the parks would not only have turned them over but paid for removal out of the public coffers—but most people didn’t know that.

  Barth mulled over that thought for a while. He was a thorough man. Multitasking was a concept he would never embrace. The better to concentrate, he stopped working and leaned on his shovel. Anna kept on, enjoying the heat exertion generated, enjoying the mindless repetition and the pull on her muscles. Soil and duff fell in soft rhythmic thuds as the hole slowly filled.

  Finally Barth shook his head and resumed shoveling. “Doesn’t feel right,” he said succinctly.

  It didn’t. Folks sufficiently concerned about ancestors, final resting places and being right in the eyes of their god tended to do things in the open. If it were politically motivated, as Anna suspected a number of such claims were, then it would have been done in loud voices on the steps of the capitol after the local television stations had been alerted.

  “Some kind of creepy cult thing where they needed the bones of a black man?” Barth suggested. Anna looked up at him and thought she saw a flash of superstitious fear twist his face. Christianity, in its fundamental state, brought not only the Heavenly Host into the homes of its adherents but a counterbalancing army of The Fallen. The devil was part of a package deal. Barth didn’t seem to be of that school of thought, but given a childhood in the 1950s in Mississippi, he very well could have been raised in a home that was.

  Thinking of her field ranger’s personal history, it occurred to Anna that he had grown up in the era of segregation. As a child he would have been denied white schools, drinking fountains, bathrooms. Certain stores, bars and restaurants would have had “Whites Only” signs in the window. Growing up in the West, these things were ancient history to Anna, the Civil Rights movement a vaguely remembered event that took place in black and white on a thirteen-inch TV screen. For Barth it was the warp and weave of his childhood. He would have been in high school when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, when Life magazine’s cover featured the picture of a little girl walking with such courage and dignity through a phalanx of National Guardsmen to be the first black child in an all-white school. When Mississippi was burning.

  Anna had known these things in a bloodless history-quiz sort of way but had never given it much thought. Trying not to get caught doing it, she watched him as he scraped up the last heap of dirt, then began packing the excavation down with the flat of the shovel. From now on a part of her would look at him differently. The way one looked at World War II veterans, concentration camp survivors, astronauts and Peace Corp volunteers; those who lived through experiences that most people merely watched on television or read about in books.

  Anna preferred to leave the psychoanalyzing to her sister, but the thoughts did help her understand Barth’s odd mixture of pride and anger, fear and shame. And his determination to make things right.

  He finished smoothing the now-empty grave, looked up and caught her watching him.

  Erasing the probably offensive compassion from her face, Anna said, “I doubt the remains were taken for any dark reasons. At least not of the racial or metaphysical variety. My guess is the bones were taken so we wouldn’t find them. Because the bones would tell us something somebody doesn’t want us to know.”

  “Like there was another body in the grave, one not so steeped in history?”

  Anna hadn’t thought of that.

  11

  Seven o’clock: Anna had been up for two hours and had her uniform on for half that. Sleep had been so filled with dreams of dead bodies and empty graves it contained little in the way of rest, and she was anxious to get back to work. Interviewing people about possible sex crimes and sorting moldy bones might not be the most captivating of pastimes but at least it was something to do.

  Seven o‘clock in Mississippi, eight o’clock in New York. It was late enough to legally call her sister, Molly. Her Park Avenue practice didn’t open till ten but she was an early riser. Frederick Stanton, Anna’s erstwhile lover, now Molly’s husband, answered on the second ring.

  In the thirteen months he’d been married to Molly, Frederick had been well trained in the Pigeon sisters’ unique phone etiquette. After the briefest of in-law chitchat, he handed the phone over to Molly.

  Connected to the world by the sound of her sister’s voice, Anna unloaded the feelings she’d kept pent up in a skull that was coming to feel too small to house them. She didn’t talk of the professional dramas that beset her: murder, vandalism, Thigpen’s new leaf. That was business as usual, things she could discuss with Clintus, Barth or, in a pinch, even Randy Thigpen. Girl talk was what she needed. She told the story Molly’d heard a dozen times before: of Paul and the Mrs., frustrations, gossip, conflicted feelings. When she’d finished, there was silence, true silence, and Anna was grateful for it. Over the thirty years they’d been paying AT&T blood money for the privilege of staying close, most of the gaps in their conversations had been punctuated by the hush of cigarette smoke entering and exiting her sister’s precious lungs. No more. Thigpen wasn’t the only human being capable of change.

  Because geography dictated that Anna and Molly’s relationship be conducted primarily over the phone lines, Anna had learned to read her sister’s silences the way others read body language. This one held a hint of exasperation and, even more alarming, a strong undercurrent of sympathy. “Married is married,” Molly said finally. “Statistically your chances of happiness are not good.”

  “Lies, damn lies, and statistics,” Anna voiced a half-remembered quote from somewhere.

  Molly laughed. A wonderful sound. The years of scotch whiskey and unfiltered Camels had given her voice a gravel quality that warmed the listener’s soul like the embers of a dying fire. Molly was a top-notch psychiatrist, but Anna had always suspected it was her voice that prompted her patients to fork over the big bucks for a fifty-minute hour.

  “He’s getting a divorce,” Anna said, hating herself for sounding h
opeful, hating having to defend Paul Davidson.

  “When?”

  Anna said nothing.

  Another silence ensued. Anna could feel sympathy and love leaking through the black distance and it made her squirm. Taco, sensing discomfort, came over to where she sat on the hall floor tethered to the wall by the phone cord and stuck his tongue in her free ear to comfort her.

  “I understand that he’s got a lot to lose,” Molly said finally. “Respect as a man of God and votes as a man of the people. But the key word here is ‘man.’ As a man—at least one that you’d want—he’s got to stand up for what he needs and take whatever hit is coming. If that need is you, that’s what he’ll do. If the need for community acceptance is greater, then he’ll keep sneaking around in a guilty relationship.

  “It’s your call. Either you’ll accept that or you’ll move on.”

  Molly was right. Anna knew it; had known it before she’d called. She was behaving like a crazy person, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome each time. The only flaw in her sister’s logic was the “moving on.” Moving on to what? Anna had spent nearly a decade grieving for Zach, living in the widow’s fantasy that death claimed a perfect love when, in reality, it merely intervened at a perfect moment in a humanly imperfect world.

  It was a lonely fantasy but tremendously comforting. It excused Anna from taking part in the rigors of the mating dance and the emotional dangers inherent in opening up to another person. When she’d awakened from this dream, she’d found herself well into middle age. The landscape was no longer peopled by single men anxious, willing and able to enter into relationships. The men she met were as scarred as she, as weighted down with baggage. Paul was the first she had felt a true yearning to be with. Anna sensed she would not move on but go back to the aloneness she’d cultivated so assiduously.

  “Do you think Paul’s your last chance?” Molly said, reading her mind with annoying accuracy.

  “No,” Anna lied.

  “He’s not. This isn’t the end of your rope. This isn’t the time to tie a knot and hang on.”

  Again Molly was right, but Anna had no intention of admitting it. She changed the subject to mental illness—men—tal illness other than her own current delusion and denial.

  Molly wasn’t much help. Not because she hadn’t thought and studied, but because the finite information did not exist. Unlike serial killers, there was no standard white-male-between-thirty-and-forty-five profile for those who deviated from the norm. In the sexual arena most things that could happen did, and fairly regularly. Old, fat redneck Mississippi boys were as likely to harbor a secret desire to wear silky ladies’ underthings or to play with whips and chains as their more urbane Yankee brothers..

  Since talk had turned to murder, Frederick was invited into the conversation. In his years with the FBI’s Chicago office he’d run across his share of sex crimes. Like Anna, he thought good ol’ Doyce’s situation didn’t quite fit the bill for cold-blooded murder.

  The more likely scenario was sex games gone bad, the body moved to confuse the issue and save the other participant embarrassment and possible prosecution.

  Anna hung up none the wiser but feeling better for having talked with like-minded people.

  Overnight the Indian Summer bliss of the past two months had blown away on the tail end of a cold front pressing down from Canada, dumping snow on the Midwest and dropping temperatures as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. Anna drove to Port Gibson under a slate-gray sky that appeared to weigh as much as slate itself. Rain lashed out from the storm’s underbelly, cutting sodden leaves from the trees. Red, ochre, green, shapes in soft rounds of oak and knife-edges of willow pasted themselves across the car’s windshield.

  It was a day to curl up by the fire with a good book. Since Anna had nothing but a decrepit oil stove from the early sixties and Thomas Gifford, her favorite author, had died, she was glad she had an office and job to go to.

  But for the maintenance men, holed up in the mechanic’s workshop, Anna was alone.

  Not quite sure what to do with herself, she sat in the chair Thigpen had ruined and grew still, dumping the ragtag shreds of her personal life so her mind could organize itself along more productive lines.

  The phone rang. In the outer office that her field rangers shared she could hear the answering machine click on, followed by the insistent hum of the fax. Glad to be given direction, she went to the machine and watched the paper curl out.

  This fax was the cheapest money could buy, ninety-six dollars in the electronics department at Wal-Mart. Sick of being the only ranger station on the Trace without one, Anna’ d bought it and installed it herself.

  The fax was from the medical examiner’s office in Ridgeland, a northern suburb of Jackson. Anna took the pages as the machine cut them off and read them standing.

  The revelations were few. Doyce’s tox screen was clean. He wasn’t on any drugs—or at least not the more common ones they tested for. His BAC was .04, a blood alcohol content commensurate with a couple of beers in a couple of hours, not drunk enough to be banned from driving.

  Trace evidence had been gathered and sent on to the lab in Jackson. The obvious was noted in the report. Fibers, a cotton-poly blend, tan in color, had been found in the contusions in the groin area. Dirt was embedded in the corpse’s heels, the back of the calves and the seat of the underpants. Three splinters, acquired after death, were lodged in the flesh, one in the right heel, two in the right buttock. They’d been driven in at an angle that confirmed the body had been dragged headfirst in a supine position over a surface of rough wood.

  No injury marks were found on the body, no blunt trauma or cuts. Cause of death was listed as suffocation but there were no signs of strangulation or of anything being held over the nose and mouth.

  There were no bodily fluids: no blood, no semen in the mouth or the rectum. The rectum showed no contusions or tearing. He’d not been sexually assaulted nor had he been willingly engaged in any sexual act just prior to or after death.

  Bruising on the inner thighs, buttocks and chest were clean and surrounded by chafing. Two darker bruised areas indicated metal buckles, the kind with clasps and a sharp tongue, had been used to secure the straps. The medical examiner’s opinion was that the deceased had not been beaten but had been hung in a harness of some kind. Due to the man’s obesity, his organs had been compressed while hanging until he was suffocated by his own fat. There were no defensive injuries on the hands or arms and no sign that Doyce had fought his attacker. Chafing indicated that, once in the harness and hung, he had struggled long and pitifully until strength, air and, finally, life had abandoned him. Time of death between 11 P.M. and 2 A.M.

  Anna spread the report out on her desk. For reasons unknown poor ol’ Doyce had allowed someone to buckle him into a harness, probably of leather or canvas webbing. He had allowed this person to string him up.

  Anna let that grisly picture dangle in her mind for a while, wondering what sort of game could have been being played. If sexual, it had not reached its natural climax unless the other party got his satisfaction merely from watching, which certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

  After Doyce drowned in his own blubber, he’d been taken down, the harness removed, and carted to Mt. Locust to be dumped on Grandma Polly’s bed. From the fibers found in the scrapes on Doyce’s inner thighs, it was a good bet the harness had been worn over his clothes. When he’d been dangling to death he’d rubbed the fabric into his flesh. Pants and underpants had been on at the time of death. The sexual aspect of the crime was staged. Anna was unsurprised.

  Mt. Locust was a very public place, one guaranteed to garner local media attention. Yet, at night, it was as dark, deserted and private as one could want for acting out nefarious activities. Ideal for setting a stage, the curtain to rise promptly at 9 A.M. just as the sign in the visitors center window said. An elaborate ruse to throw investigators off track? To merely louse up the investig
ation, the easiest thing to do would be to hide the body, tie it to a sack of bricks and dump it in one of the bayous. By the time it was found—if it was found—alligators, snapping turtles, fish and bacteria would have effectively devoured any clues. Anybody who watched television would know that much.

  Whoever had moved the body had not been attempting to dispose of it but to advertise it.

  Why, Anna couldn’t guess. The Bible text had been circled. Was it a warning? Retribution?

  The body had been put at the old inn for a reason. Dead wasn’t enough. A message was being sent or a finger being pointed or something else Anna wasn’t thinking of.

  Trussed and buckled in a harness. If Doyce had not been willing, he might have been unconscious. Anna mulled that over for a bit and discarded it. Humans were pretty tough animals. To render one unconscious usually left signs. Even if chloroform was used there’d be some faint burning in the nasal passages, traces of the substance in the blood.

  The other option was that Doyce had put himself in the harness for reasons of his own. He’d strung himself up, then couldn’t get down and suffocated while trying. Sort of a new twist on the auto-erotica deaths that occasionally occurred when somebody tried to heighten the masturbatory experience by partially hanging himself during the event, lost consciousness and was found not only dead but looking extremely undignified.

  If Doyce had hoisted himself on his own idiosyncratic petard, who had found him, stripped him and moved him? “Why” was the key. Anna didn’t need to know what message the dead messenger was carrying, only to whom it was sent. If she could figure that out, she could work backward to the sender.

  Anna stopped speculating and returned to the report, still warm from the fax machine and curling on the desktop like autumn leaves. Wishing she’d had the fiscal where-withal to buy a better fax, one that used real paper, she found her place in the blurred text.

  No defensive injuries: cuts, contusions or bruising on the hands or forearms that would indicate an attempt had been made to ward off blows. No bruising on upper arms or wrists indicating the victim had been held or bound.