by Nevada Barr
“I know it’s against regulations technically. But I’m going to be shed of this place in a couple months so there’d be no big overlap.”
He was right and he was wrong.
“I’m fifty-six,” he went on when she said nothing. “If I miss this election I’ll be sixty before the chance rolls around again. I know I’m not in the best of shape. I’ll probably be an old man at sixty.”
Listening to him, Anna realized she was hearing his real voice for the first time. The overlays he used to hide behind, intimidate and blend in had fallen away. The adopted Southern accent was gone, leaving a trace of his childhood in Jersey. Bluster, bravado and heartiness were stripped away. At long last Randy Thigpen pared down to the bare bones of his truths: he was fat, he wasn’t getting any younger and he wanted to be the sheriff of Adams County in his retirement.
Honesty, Anna could respect, even—or perhaps especially—from the likes of Randall Thigpen. “You got any leave time built up?” With leave time tacked on he could retire early.
“No.”
“Sick leave?”
“Tons.”
“We’ll work something out. Till then keep this stuff out of my sight and use the copier at the Piggly Wiggly if you have to.”
Thigpen smiled. This too was genuine and, because of that, damn rare. It was charming. For a moment Anna allowed herself to almost like the man.
As if in payment for the favor, Randy asked, “What happened last night? I mean, I got the gist of it through the grapevine this morning but no details.”
This was the first interest he had shown in her near-death experience. A normal coworker would have been hovering around the coffeepot when she walked in, waiting for the news. Rangers loved stories, especially their own. Randy had either subverted this natural urge for tribal gossip to his own need to gripe about being left out of the Crowley interview and run copies of his campaign poster, or he genuinely didn’t care enough about her continued existence even to the extent of mild curiosity. Indifference was colder even than hatred.
“Glad you asked,” she said honestly and told him how the destruction of her vehicle had come about. He laughed a little more than she would have liked but almost made up for it by appearing impressed by her clever snaking out in the dark on the passenger side, a fortuitous bit of paranoia that had saved her skin.
Randy’d seesawed from anger when she first arrived because he’d missed the Crowley interview to nearly honest humility when caught making campaign posters. Now that her story was told, he’d returned to the role he’d chosen for himself earlier in the week; the new leaf was again in evidence.
Anna watched for a moment, waiting to see if any more emotional about-faces were in the offing, but Thigpen had stabilized in the helpful ranger mode.
The act of having a simple conversation with Randy was tiring. Muscles used only by middle managers and tightrope walkers were constantly taxed. The need to be alone, or at least away from Randy, became paramount. With a sigh she tried to disguise as a yawn, Anna stood, retrieved her duty belt and headed resolutely for the door into the garage where the pumper truck was housed.
“Need a lift to Mt. Locust?”
“I thought I’d take the pumper truck,” Anna said. “It’s time it was given a run. This is as good an excuse as any.”
“I took it out for a run the other day.” Randy rose reaching for his duty belt. “Everything’s just peachy. I’ll take you on down to Mt. Locust. I’d kinda like to see the wreck by the light of day.”
Had Anna been a betting woman she would have put a month’s salary on the fact that Randy hadn’t taken the pumper truck out “the other day”—or any day since she’d come to the Trace. That sort of routine activity wasn’t logged so there was no way to prove it. To call him on the lie would only cause him to lie again. Why, Anna couldn’t guess. Maybe he found her company too irresistible to pass up.
“I’m not going to Mt. Locust.” Anna changed plans instantly. “Thought I’d go on down to Natchez, have another talk with Raymond Barnette.”
Randy lost interest. “I don’t have time to go all the way to Natchez,” he said and returned to the R & R catalogue, his sudden helpfulness evaporating.
Anna’d hoped he’d say that but wondered what had killed his stated desire. Driving the pumper truck into the gloomy day, she contemplated why interviewing Raymond Barnette was of so little interest to Thigpen. He’d been avid about the interviews of the poker players and the physical examination of the meadow. He’d been pointedly indifferent to the incident where her car was crushed and, now, totally unconcerned about participating in further congress with the undertaker. Was he merely being capricious or did he know something she didn’t? And if so, what?
Most of the way to Natchez she pondered those questions
She also spent mental time on the odious fact that someone had tried to kill her. The night, the rain, then Paul’s revelation and the intimate and most welcome celebration that followed had conspired to make the assault on her patrol vehicle seem almost a dream. Till she found herself driving with one eye on the rearview mirror, starting to sweat every time a pickup truck appeared there, she hadn’t been fully aware of the impact the attack had on her.
Just past the bridge where the incident occurred, she pulled two of the pumper truck’s wheels off the road and parked.
Maintenance had done a thorough job of cleaning up the site. Anna found two pieces of red plastic, probably from the Crown Vic’s taillights, and a piece of chrome from a shattered headlight. That she kept. It was a long shot but it might help to get a positive ID on the truck if they ever found it. Before day’s end she would track down the guys who’d cleared the road and go through any other debris they’d swept up.
Rain and wind had cleaned away what maintenance had missed. The only evidence remaining that anything had occurred was the scarring on the stone blocks of the bridge rail. For a minute or more Anna stood in the cold, the air so heavy with moisture that droplets formed on her hair and eyelashes, with one hand on the slick surface of the rock, allowing the stone to remember for her. Memories rushed back: crying metal, ice water filling her boots, the sense of watching her own earthly death from a place removed. No revelations came. Either she was deeply hated by an individual, or she’d gotten close enough to something in the murder investigation that it made it worth that individual’s while to take the risk of removing her.
Had anyone hated her sufficiently to go into the berserker rage in an old Ford truck, Anna believed she would have sensed it, read it in his or her face at a previous encounter, therefore she must be on to something.
“Damn,” she whispered and took her hand away from the stone. Had the would-be murderer known how totally in the dark she was, he could have saved himself the time and the taxpayers a car.
When she reached Barnette’s Funeral Home, Ray’s black Cadillac was parked out front. There were no other customers. Funeral homes weren’t big shopping draws, even this close to Christmas.
Anna let herself into the ornate foyer. The place was still and cold as befit the nature of the business. Raymond was not in the chapel or showroom. Following the circuitous route he’d led her and Clintus on the first time they’d visited, she made her way back to his office. That, too, was empty. Opportunity presenting itself, Anna looked through the papers on his desk. Bills for casket fittings, a funeral scheduled for Saturday, catalogues of awnings, black arm-bands and florists were collected into neat piles. Nothing indicated he was other than what he said he was: a mildly grieving younger brother. Because he stood to inherit a valuable piece of property and because he was a genuinely creepy individual, Anna rather liked him as a suspect in the murder of his brother. Clintus did, too, though, given they were rivals for the coveted position of Adams County Sheriff, he’d never been so crass as to say it out loud. He had, however, discreetly checked to see if Raymond had an alibi for the night Doyce was killed. He had: a meeting with seven men and two women at a vestry dinne
r. According to Clintus Jones, the dinner meeting had gone from seven-thirty to past midnight, effectively letting Raymond off the hook.
One of the windowless walls of the undertaker’s office held a collection of old photographs. During her first visit, Anna’d been so taken with the commercial macabre of tiny coffins and ads for embalming fluids that she’d not noticed it. There were seven pictures displayed with pride, if being separated from the necessary minutia of the undertaker’s trade was any indication. The oldest had the sepia tones of daguerreotypes or tintypes.
Anna loved old photographs, and having come to see Barnette more or less to escape the company of Mr. Thigpen, she was in no rush to find him. The collection chronicled the history of Barnette’s Funeral Home over at least a hundred and fifty years. The earliest photo was of greatest interest. Most pictures she’d seen that pre-dated the Civil War were formal portraits of unsmiling people dressed in their best and posed in front of painted backdrops. This was unrehearsed, as if the photographer experimented with a more modern concept of capturing real life on celluloid. Two men stood in a carpenter’s workshop. One was black, the other white. They were shoulder to shoulder, both in overalls, the black man’s torn out at the knees. Behind them was an exquisite armoire. Three tables and a bentwood rocking chair, not yet completed, were scattered around them. Neither man was smiling, intimidated probably by the momentous event of having their picture taken, but by the way they stood—close, casual, comfortable—Anna guessed they were friends, that they’d worked together long and well.
She took the photograph from the wall and looked at the back. “Papa Doyce and Unk Restin 1861 Natchez” was written in a crabbed and fading hand.
She replaced the picture with care and studied the others. The closer they came to the present, the less interesting they became. The last, in glossy color, of a slightly younger Raymond Barnette, leaning on a younger version of his black Cadillac and grinning at the camera, she gave barely a glance.
On a waist-high filing cabinet that ran beneath the photographs was a stack of color posters: Barnette for Sheriff. Including Randy Thigpen, there were at least three hats in the ring. Anna knew Barnette had high hopes. Some of them were undoubtedly pinned on the fact that he was white and Clintus Jones was black.
Except for a handful of hard-core, old-style racists, Anna doubted it would do him much good. Of the fifty or sixty percent of Adams County who were not African-American, Barnette’s association with a brother, not only murdered, but branded a sexual deviant by the story leaked to the papers, would rob him of their vote. Once that story had come out, Ray Barnette’s campaign was dead in the water, though he’d chosen to stay in the race.
Thigpen might be another matter. Anna was the first to admit he had a plethora of faults, but racism was not one of them. The African-American community would know that. In order to survive and prosper, most had developed good intuitions along those lines. Another factor might win Randy a few votes: older blacks sometimes preferred “the Boss” to be a white man. There was a sense of security in the familiar that helped shield them from a younger generation of African-Americans whom they feared and could not understand. Randy’s career as a park ranger would also lend him an unearned reputation for having a history in law enforcement. That could turn the election in his favor.
It crossed Anna’s mind to give Clintus a helping hand by lousing up Randy’s plan. Since she’d more or less given her word that she’d help, she abandoned the idea as soon as it came to mind.
Snooping having availed her nothing, she resumed her search for the funeral parlor’s proprietor. Clichés of the dead dogged her as she wandered down the hall past a bloodlessly non-denominational chapel: silent as the grave, cold as a tomb, dead still. The next door opened into the showroom. Ornate caskets lined with tufted crepe and polished to a satin finish, their hinged Dutch-door lids half open as if inviting one inside, lay in state on dark wooden tables. The air smelled faintly of varnish.
Anna had never bothered to write a will. With the exception of a couple of good Navajo rugs, she had nothing of value to leave anyone. Looking into these empty houses of the dead, she promised herself she’d write one if for no other reason than to demand her remains be cremated and let free to blow on the prevailing winds.
Farther back in the mazelike bowels of Barnette’s establishment she came to a door that, unlike the others, had no pretense of somber elegance but was of metal, scratched and dented by good hard use.
Pushing it open, she stepped into the only part of the building that felt alive: a carpentry shop. The air was warmed and dried by an old woodstove. Classical music full of strings gentled her nerves. The smell of newly cut wood and coffee reminded her of life and industry.
Raymond Barnette stood at a lathe in the middle of the far wall. His back was to her. He whistled tunelessly, relaxed in the mistaken assumption that he was alone. Anna had been well trained in shop etiquette. One never startled a man working with machinery. Careful to make no sound, she studied Barnette while he completed his task: rounding off the edges of an oddly shaped piece of hardwood.
He wore faded Levi’s, an old sweatshirt and boating moccasins stomped into slipperlike shapelessness. It was the first time Anna had seen him that he wasn’t dressed in his meet-the-public clothes. He looked smaller, nicer, more approachable.
Having finished his task, he switched the lathe off. Anna cleared her throat to announce herself in the least alarming manner.
“Ranger Pigeon,” he said, recognizing her, then spoiled the kinder gentler thoughts she’d been having of him by smiling with all his big white teeth.
The better to eat you with, my dear. The words of the Big Bad Wolf came unbidden to Anna’s mind and she knew why she’d come to see him. She wanted to know whether he owned an old Ford truck with a cowcatcher welded to the front bumper. Perhaps he hadn’t killed his brother, but there was something about the man with his toothy ways and his closeness with the dead that led her to believe he might be willing to kill as long as he didn’t have to actually lay hands on a live body in the process.
To his credit, he didn’t seem either surprised or disappointed to see her alive, but she put little credence in that. During their brief acquaintance, she’d seen him don then doff half a dozen emotions in minutes without blinking an eye at his own duplicity. If he had a police scanner, he could have heard her call clear of the scene of the wreck the previous night and had time to prepare his face for when they should meet again.
“What brings you here?” he asked as he slipped the piece of wood he’d been working on out of sight behind a canvas-draped sawhorse. Till he did that, Anna’d been singularly uninterested in his woodworking project. Now she wanted to see it. “Good news, I hope,” he added.
The words jarred. When one’s only sibling was ignobly and irretrievably dead, what good news could one possibly expect? “We’ve no new leads as to who might have killed Doyce, if that’s what you mean.”
“Too bad.” He didn’t sound particularly aggrieved. Niceties concluded, he looked at her expectantly.
Anna told the first easy lie that came to mind. “I know in your capacity as a concerned family member and possibly the next sheriff of Adams County you’ve been doing a little investigating of your own. I was down to meet with Clintus and thought I’d drop by, see if you’ve come up with anything we might have overlooked.”
The mixture of girlish—if aging—respect and a plea for assistance worked its customary magic. As the words were soaked up, Ray’s lugubrious features rearranged themselves into avuncular condescension.
“Coffee?” he offered. “It’s cold enough to freeze a grave digger’s hind pockets today.” He grinned at his topical humor, and Anna dutifully grinned back. She was afraid they’d retire to his claustrophobic little office for the proposed coffee klatch, but he had a pot on a hotplate by the lathe.
“Hope you take it black,” he said.
“Black is good.” Anna couldn’t stomach the st
uff without a healthy dollop of heavy whipping cream, but she wasn’t here to drink; this symbolic breaking of bread might help her find out what he knew. Coffee attended to, Ray slung one buttock onto a table and Anna perched on a sawhorse.
“Like you said, I’ve done a bit of nosing around on my own,” Barnette said importantly. Anna could almost see his chest swelling under the imagined sheriff’s badge. He rambled on for a while. Listening expression in place, wide eyes, furrowed brow, chin tilted down, Anna let him. He’d done little and learned less, but after ten minutes or so he’d softened himself up with love of his own voice sufficiently that she could ask the questions she’d come to ask.
“Do you know of anybody who owns an old Ford pickup truck? Burgundy or dark red probably, with a heavy iron grill custom-welded to the front?”
Barnette laughed. His laughter sounded hollow but it always did; the sound of a man aping his fellows but never getting the joke. No change came into his face that Anna could detect, no infinitesimal twitch of surprise, guilt or recognition, not even the faint glimmer of smugness that occasionally gave away smart criminals who took pride in their work.
“Old trucks with heavy grills are not exactly rare as hens’ teeth in these parts,” he replied. “Oh, you see those SUVs everywhere, but they’re just for show. Mostly moms hauling kids and guys with desk jobs pretending they’re big game hunters come the weekend. Anybody around here really wants to haul something’s got himself an old truck.”
“Anybody special sell used trucks around Natchez?” Anna asked.
“Sells? Sure. Everybody. They sell them, trade them for work, a used deep freeze, a load of lumber. But pink slips and taxes? With a truck that old I’d say not. After a while they get passed on like old clothes.” Barnette bared his ominous teeth once again, happy to have given Anna information that showed she didn’t know a whole hell of a lot. Other than that, it was totally useless.
“You’re probably right. Keep your ears open and give me a call if you hear anything,” Anna said. No harm in keeping up the fiction that they were working together. She eased her rump off the sawhorse. She’d learned what she’d come for. Unless her instincts deceived her, which wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, Barnette had nothing to do with the assault truck. “Thanks for the coffee.”
