by Nevada Barr
“Can’t do that,” she said.
“I know.”
On the walk back Barth speculated about what was buried at the lonely grave site: an aborted fetus from an indiscretion, a child stillborn to a family too poor to go to a doctor, an illegitimate child born alive only to be dispatched to an unmarked grave, the polished oak casket a sop to conscience. Children were usually reported missing eventually. Infants were another story. If the mom said it was born dead, who’d argue?
“I’m thinking it’s not a kid, Barth.”
Barth wasn’t reassured. “When’ll we talk to Mr. Barnette?” he pressed. The forlorn little grave was weighing on his mind.
Anna looked at her watch. It was a few minutes after noon. The time surprised her. So dark had the day grown, it felt closer to sunset. “Have you had lunch?” she asked. He hadn’t. “I need to stop in at the ranger station for a minute and make a call. We can get something to eat, then track down our undertaker.”
“Are you going to ask him straight out what he buried back there?”
Anna noted the pronoun “we” had been replaced with “you.” Being the boss had its moments, but not many of them. Part of her yearned to apply for one of the coveted backcountry positions in Rocky Mountains, Big Bend or Glacier. Jobs where the ranger lived alone in a primitive cabin much of the time, monitoring the health and well-being of the wild places. A backcountry job would entail a demotion and a cut in pay. Money and status in government work was directly related to how many other people one managed. Managing mule deer and chipmunks didn’t count.
Then there was Paul.
Since the advent of the southern sheriff, being alone had begun to feel lonely. Anna was troubled by that. Alone had been comforting for a long time. She’d come to rely on it. In a very real way love, or whatever it was she felt for Paul Davidson, was eroding that one safe place.
“Well, are you going to ask?”
They’d arrived at the Mt. Locust office. Anna stood in the doorway. She’d been so lost in thought she’d traveled the last fifty yards like a sleepwalker. It took her a second to remember what they’d been talking about.
“That would be my first instinct,” she said. “ ‘Hey, we saw you burying that kid’s coffin. What was in it?’ But with Raymond I don’t know. He’s a cold fish and he’s arrogant. It might be better to come at the thing obliquely. Give it some thought while I make my call.”
Barth closed the door and leaned against it, determined to make this a short stop.
Anna called the medical examiner’s office in Ridgeland. The ME had gone to lunch. His secretary, brown-bagging it at her desk, obligingly took the message and read it back to Anna: “Ranger Pigeon says to run a nitrate test on Doyce Barnette’s hands.”
“That’s it,” Anna said, then to Barth, “You drive.”
“Why’re you having them run the hands for traces of powder?” Barth asked. “He was not only unarmed, the poor guy was undressed.”
“He wasn’t killed at Mt. Locust, just dumped there. We don’t know about earlier. Maybe he was armed and dressed, the stripping done after the murder to remove clues or suggest exactly what it suggested: sexual high jinks leading to a well-deserved end.”
“He may have been dressed but if he was armed why is he dead? The coroner said he suffocated. Self-defense? The victim tries to shoot somebody and they suffocate him to save themselves?”
The edgy tone and harsh words were so out of character for Barth that Anna was taken aback. As he buckled himself in, she watched him covertly. Strain showed around his eyes and in the tense crimp of the well-shaped lips.
Now she knew two things about Ranger Dinkins. He was passionate about the history and dignity of African-Americans and he was passionate about children.
Maybe that was why Anna admired people with passion. A person’s passion told a lot about who they were. Those without passions seemed to have a hollow place inside. One never knew what grew in that darkness.
17
Anna was glad to be free of the ranger station. The office, seldom used, was cold and smelled of dust and stale cigarette smoke. “Any bright ideas?” she asked as they drove out. “I visited Raymond yesterday. Me showing up again without a plausible excuse is going to put him on his guard. If he isn’t already.”
Barth said nothing. Both thought for a while. Cold sapped Anna’s energy. Heat now would be worse; it would make a nap inevitable.
“I saw some pictures in Barnette’s office at the funeral home,” she said at last. “Old photos. Barnette’s was a cabinet-making shop before it evolved into a mortuary. Didn’t you say something once about cabinetmakers banging together cheap coffins for the slaves of the outlying plantations? We could ask him if he has any records that could help with the history of your slave cemetery.”
“Our slave cemetery.”
“Right.”
“A while back I tried to talk to old Mrs. Barnette. Being as her property abuts there at Mt. Locust, I thought there might be at least old family stories or some such. She wasn’t what you’d call forthcoming.”
Anna laughed at the big man’s delicacy. “She met Sheriff Jones and me at the front door with a double-barreled shotgun because she thought Clintus was you. Unless he took off right after he buried whatever, our boy Raymond is still at home with Mama. If we want to talk to him that’s where we’ve got to go.”
Barth looked torn. From previous experience, Anna knew he did not choose to meet hatred with hatred when faced with white racists. Perhaps his anger went so deep he was afraid to let it out for fear of what he would do. He didn’t talk about it either. Like many abuse victims, he carried the shame of the abuser, taking their malfeasance as an indication of personal worthlessness.
“I’ll be with you,” Anna said, keeping any trace of offensive sympathy or understanding from her voice. “I’ll be Melanie to your Scarlett.”
Barth laughed at that and his face was transformed. Fleetingly Anna was saddened at the many walls of culture and society that would always stand between them, shutting them away from any true friendship.
“Now there’s a picture,” he said. “The Old South will be spinning in her grave.”
“I hear if you put a knife under de bed it cuts da pain,” Anna said, mimicking the actress who brought Prissy to life in the film version of Gone With the Wind. The instant the words were out of her mouth, she froze inside waiting for the iron doors to slam shut behind Barth’s remarkable eyes at her aping Hollywood version of black speech. A second fear, that angered her even as she dismissed it, bolted through her innards. In the current cultural climate she could be brought up on civil charges for racial slurs in the workplace. Yet another of the many walls barring them from connection.
Barth laughed again. She’d underestimated the man.
“We’ve got nothing to lose,” he said.
“Except the skin the buckshot blows off.”
The Barnette home looked particularly grim in the blowing rain. Without the golden fall sunshine to ameliorate the depredations of age and neglect, it took on the aspect of the classic haunted house: dark, forbidding, shutters loose, paint peeling.
Raymond’s black Cadillac, no longer shiny but splattered with rain and mud, was parked in the gravel drive. His was the only vehicle there. That had been the case on her earlier visit as well. Mama Barnette was old enough; chances were good she no longer drove. But where was Doyce’s automobile? Given the plethora of hunting accoutrements in his room it was plausible he owned a pickup truck. An old burgundy with a cowcatcher welded to the front bumper was not beyond the realm of possibility.
Could Raymond have been behind the wheel the night Anna’s Crown Vic was totaled? Why? She’d not yet seen the tiny coffin. Had he killed his brother and believed, erroneously, that she was getting close? But why put the body, stripped to its underpants, in an historic inn? Doyce’s unseemly appearance at Mt. Locust had effectively ended Raymond’s chances of getting elected sheriff of Adams County.
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Anna unzipped her Gore-Tex parka so she’d have easier access to the gun at her hip.
Barth twisted the handle of the antique mechanical doorbell and its tinny bicycle-bell ring jinkled behind the heavy door.
Enough time passed that Anna grew certain there would be no answer. Little doubt existed that both mother and son were on the property.
“Could be Raymond’s still out poking around the woods.” Barth offered. “The old lady mighn’t always hear a doorbell anymore up there in her rooms to the back.”
Anna looked out from under the rain-blackened eaves protecting the porch. Needle-sharp teeth of ice were forming where the water dripped from the roof. In imperfect sheets, it had begun coating the windshields of the cars.
“Raymond’s a pansy,” Anna said apropos of nothing but a gut feeling. “He’s not going to stay out in this any longer than he has to. Ring again.”
Barth gave the butterfly-shaped brass a vicious twist and produced another short spate of jangling within. A minute or more elapsed. Time was said to be relative and nowhere was that more true than when waiting on a doorstep.
At length footsteps were heard crossing the hardwood floor and the door was pulled open. Days of rain had swelled the wood, and it screeched as it pulled loose from the frame. Anna started at the noise but managed not to screech herself.
Her nerves, she realized, were stretched a little thin what with the weather and the attempts on her life.
Raymond materialized in the black gash created by the open door. He was dapper as ever in gray gabardine trousers and a long-sleeved blue-and-white pinstriped shirt. Damp hair and wet loafers, mud streaked across the left toe, missed when the shoes were wiped clean, were the only indications he’d recently been wielding a shovel in the dank and lonely wood. Well, that and his smile.
Most of his teeth showed, the incisors as square and white as Chiclets. Either Anna’s imagination was as inflamed as her nerves or his eyeteeth actually were longer and pointier than the average member of the living community.
Despite its sinister appearance, the smile seemed real, downright festive and celebratory. Anna wondered what it was he’d buried that had so freed his spirit. He was a man with a weight off his shoulders.
“Come in, come in,” he urged them expansively. “Not even good weather for ducks. The roads will be one big sheet of ice by tonight. A lot of car accidents, no doubt about that.”
Barth drew himself up in haughty disapproval, but Anna didn’t begrudge the undertaker counting his chickens before they died. She’d done it herself a time or two when search-and-rescue work was slow and she needed the overtime. Nothing personal, but people who enjoy their jobs like opportunities to work.
“Mama’s got tea upstairs. I brought over Claudia—she does for Mama. Mostly keeps her company. Let’s see if she’ll brew up a couple more cups.”
Anna wanted a cup of hot tea and, after the welcome she’d received the first time she’d come calling, was pleased to be let in so graciously.
Barth Dinkins was not so easily won over. He followed Anna up the stairway. When it doubled back on the landing, illuminated on better days by the stained-glass window above the painting of the last supper, he walked like a man who suspects ambush. Should they be so fortunate as to receive the promised tea, she doubted Barth would drink his.
“Mama, we got company,” Raymond called as he reached the top of the stairs. Had the tones not been so habitually funereal, Anna might have said he called gaily. The Barnettes were a strange family. “Claudia, put the kettle on,” he followed up.
Anna followed him into his mother’s over-stuffed and over-heated sitting room. A fire burned in the grate and a radiator murmured and hissed in the comer. Mrs. Barnette, looking tiny, ancient and not nearly as glad to see them as her son, sat in the rocker by the hearth, a hand-knit shawl over her shoulders, her feet in fluffy pink slippers so worn the fake fur was matted and mangy. The room was ninety degrees or better. To Anna if felt grand, like the first blissful submersion into a hot tub. Without waiting for an invitation to take off her coat and stay awhile, she shrugged out of the saturated Gore-Tex to better enjoy the heat.
“Claudia, take Ranger Pigeon’s coat,” Raymond said. A plump middle-aged black woman wearing a hot pink running suit and tennis shoes had entered from the second room of however many rooms Mrs. Barnette’s “suite” comprised.
Claudia patted the old woman’s shoulder reassuringly as she passed and smiled at Anna. “It’s gonna be a cold one tonight. This go in the dryer? I’ll see if I can’t at least warm it up some.”
Anna didn’t know what a dryer would do to Gore-Tex but, since it had failed to keep her dry, she didn’t much care.
Claudia offered the same service to Barth but he refused, preferring discomfort to accepting what he clearly viewed as tainted hospitality. Claudia shrugged round pink shoulders, gave Anna a wry grin that women of all races use to communicate a shared amusement regarding the stronger sex and left the room.
Raymond went to his mother and leaning over her chair said loudly. “Mama, this is Ranger Pigeon and Barth Dinkins.”
Anna couldn’t help but notice the undertaker failed to give Barth his title. Undoubtedly Barth noticed as well. Anna chose not to look at him to find out. Slight or oversight? Barth had had half a lifetime to become paranoid over that decision.
“They’ve come to pay you a call,” Raymond finished.
“I know who they are,” Mama snapped. “Stop your hollering and hovering.”
Looking like he wanted to strangle the old woman and smiling idiotically in an attempt to disguise it, Raymond did as he was told.
“Sit. Sit,” he said, again the generous host. Having scanned the crowded room and not seen the shotgun, Anna accepted the invitation, choosing a tatty glider that was, despite appearances, incredibly comfortable. Barth remained at his post inside the door, sweltering in his coat.
Company arranged, Raymond folded down till his immaculate butt settled on a low footstool, the once ornate embroidery worn and colorless from decades of use. “Now, what brings you two out on a day like this?”
The winter grave, purposefully lost in the woods, was a complicated issue so Anna started with the question foremost in her mind. Forgetting the southern tradition of starting with the niceties, she said, “Did your brother Doyce have a vehicle?”
Whatever questions Barnette had been preparing for, this was not among them. For an instant he was nonplussed. “Vehicle?” he said as if the word were foreign to him.
“Car, truck, motorcycle, John Deere,” Anna said to jog his brain.
“What does she want?” his mother demanded shrilly.
“She wants to know what kind of car Doyce had,” Raymond said loudly.
“I’m not deaf,” the woman snarled.
Raymond gritted his big teeth.
“A truck. Doycie had a truck,” Mama Barnette said. “What else would he have? Damn fool.”
Anna wasn’t certain whether the last referred to her, Raymond or the deceased. Probably all three. The woman’s malice was apparently universal in nature.
“What kind of truck?” Anna asked Raymond.
“Why ... a Chevy I think, older model. It wasn’t worth anything.” If he harbored any maniacal memories regarding his brother’s pickup, he was disguising them brilliantly. Anna pressed on, adhering to the theory of leaving no stone unturned. One never knew what might crawl out from under the most innocent-looking rock.
“Where is it?”
Her tone, harsh because she was tired and because the Barnettes and their creepy house made her uneasy, was wearing away Raymond’s good cheer.
“Why?” he demanded. “It’s at my place. I used it to haul wood. That’s not illegal far as I know.”
Realizing she’d alienated him to no purpose, Anna schooled herself to be nice. “No. No. Nothing like that. Sorry if I sounded officious. Occupational hazard.” She smiled at him and he smiled back. An image of hostile dogs b
aring their fangs at one another filtered through Anna’s mind. “We just need to know where it was the morning after your brother was killed.”
“Here,” Barnette said promptly.
“I didn’t notice it when we came to tell Mrs. Barnette of the ... incident.” Anna was being delicate in the face of the deceased’s mother, more out of habit than necessity, she suspected. Mama Barnette, crouched in her chair, eyes sharp, turning her head this way and that, trying to make her failing ears catch every word, seemed more a preying falcon than a grieving mom.
“Doyce kept it parked out back. Mostly we come and go through the kitchen. Nobody much uses the front door except strangers. I came and got it that night, and seeing as Doyce wasn’t going to be needing it...”
Raymond must have realized he was sounding callous. He stopped talking altogether and for a half minute—a long silence in a small room choked with heat and people—the only sound was the pop of the fire and the hiss of the radiator.
Claudia plowed into the awkwardness with a tray of cups and a pot of tea, bringing normalcy with her in a welcome cloud.
When the clattering and sugaring had been accomplished, Anna asked, “Is the truck at your place?”
“Yeah. There in the drive.”
Anna and Barth would check it out but she doubted it was the truck they were seeking.
“Why the interest in Doyce’s truck?”
Anna’s brain shifted gears effortlessly. Even if the truck had not been used in an attempted murder, it was of interest.
“If Doyce didn’t drive himself the night he was killed, then somebody must have come by here and picked him up. Mrs. Barnette, did you hear or see anyone come to the house that night?” Anna pitched her voice louder but kept the tone conversational. It was the voice she used with people who were hard of hearing but who grew angry if anyone else noticed it.
“I keep to myself,” the woman said. “What Doyce did was his business.”
