by Nevada Barr
“You mean the kid’s coffin and the slave cemetery? I don’t see how.”
“Raymond Barnette inherits land that butts up against the Trace. There’s a cemetery on the Trace. Raymond Barnette is an undertaker. A grave is robbed. He builds a little coffin and buries it. There ought to be a through line there somewhere.”
“What is it?” Barth said with the open excitement of a child awaiting a fabulous secret.
Anna had to disappoint him. “Beats me. I was hoping you’d be able to see a pattern. Undertakers, grave robbers, coffin builders, grave diggers. Not a lot of people doing that sort of work these days.”
“You going to add murderer to that list? Within a hundred yards of the slave cemetery the suffocated brother of your undertaker-coffin builder gets plopped down in the bed of the lady who owned the slaves buried out back,” Barth said.
Anna’s list of potentially related incidents hadn’t yet encompassed homicide, but Barth was right. Like everybody else in Mississippi: old dead, recent dead and could-be dead were probably blood relations or at least knew one another.
“Raymond stood to inherit that property if his big brother was out of the way,” Barth said.
“There’s that,” Anna said. “Is the property worth anything?”
“Three hundred acres, some of it good farmland. Might be worth three, four hundred grand. There’s oil in these parts. He might could think the land’s worth drilling.”
Oil wells. That upped the ante. Most of the oil wells in the Natchez area were tapped out. The wells that still produced weren’t making any Texas-style millionaires.
“Oil or not, that land’s big with Mama Barnette. Maybe Doyce was going to sell it or some such and she got his little brother to do away with him. Raymond looks to be about scared to death of his ma.”
“She could just change her will,” Anna said. “Leave the place to Raymond. That’d be easier than murder, surely.”
“Maybe she just wanted him out of the house. Fifty and still at home. Maybe it was getting on her nerves.”
Anna laughed. “If Raymond did it, even at his mother’s instigation, why strip the body and put it in a public place? Raymond knew right off any whiff of sexual deviation would kill his shot at being a sheriff. He seemed genuinely mad when it was leaked to the papers.”
Barth had no answer to that.
They’d exhausted speculation and rode the rest of the way back to Mt. Locust in companionable silence.
Sleet turned back to rain, then to drizzle and finally resolved itself in a fine mist that hovered like gray gauze between the observer and the observed. The denuded trees with their blackened trunks and branches could have been the inspiration for T. S. Eliot’s last dingdong of doom.
Nothing but paperwork awaited at the ranger station. Enough remained of the day that Anna decided to hand carry her bark samples to the lab in Jackson and see what, if any, information could be gleaned from them.
At the forensic lab she completed the necessary forms and pushed them and her Baggie of bark scrapings across the counter. The business day was coming to a close. She’d hoped to stop by the medical examiner’s office in Ridgeland, but by the time she’d get there they’d be closed. She borrowed an office phone and called. The ME had left for the day. His assistant checked the files. The tests for gunpowder residue had been run on Doyce Barnette’s hands. There were indications he had fired a gun shortly before death.
On a whim, she headed up Interstate Fifty-five to drop in on Steve Stilwell. After the surreal life she’d been living, murderous trucks by night and raging old ladies by day, his particular brand of insouciance struck her as the perfect grounding to a saner world.
The Ridgeland Ranger Station, a few cramped rooms in a long, low building that formed one side of a gravel yard, was as crowded and dingy as that in Port Gibson. Two desks filled the tiny front room. Four more were squashed into the room behind. Walls, desktops and the few bookcases were cluttered with papers and other debris. It was Anna’s contention that future archaeologists would be able to unearth the history of the National Park Service in microcosm via digging through a single ranger’s office.
A handsome young ranger named King informed Anna that Steve had gone off duty. She’d missed him by a half an hour. “Try his quarters,” King suggested.
The Ridgeland ranger’s quarters were behind the ranger station in a wooded lot. Rangers planning on homesteading—staying in one park and, very possibly, one job—for a majority of their careers, bought real houses and lived like real people. Those like Anna and Steve, just passing through in order to take advantage of promotions, rented government housing.
Steve lived in a low, cheaply built, ranch-style house, new in the 1960s. Too many tenants and too little care had rendered it sad and shabby. In the mist and the dying light, it looked downright depressing.
Anna parked in the short drive behind Stilwell’s patrol car. Her approach to the house was heralded by a frenzy of deep-throated barks and the ominous sound of a large maddened beast hurling itself against the door of the screened-in porch.
Rutger, an eighty-five pound German shepherd, was a failed experiment. Stilwell had purchased the puppy with great plans to train it in search and rescue with a minor in drug sniffing.
Either from neglect or inclination, Rutger had grown into a great hulking lump of pure orneriness, willing to bite all comers. Eventually Steve would have to get rid of him. Till then the dog lived the life of a convicted felon. On fine days he was tied to a run in the backyard. In inclement weather he was incarcerated on the back porch. From the crashing of dog flesh against wood, Anna doubted it would hold him much longer without structural reinforcement.
Despite the racket, Steve didn’t come to the door. Anna knocked loudly, setting off another round of furious canine assaults from the porch at the side of the house. At Anna’s second knock, Steve finally opened the door.
“Hey,” he said cheerfully. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
The warmth of the house drifted around him, carrying the scent of newly washed hair and good cologne. “Come in.” Steve stood aside and gestured grandly. “Sorry I didn’t hear you at first. I was gilding the lily.”
Anna started. Men had so many euphemisms for masturbation mere woman could not keep up with them. Then she laughed. Steve was dolled up, hair clean and soft, beard trimmed. A fine broadcloth oxford shirt in rich burgundy was worn with pleated gray wool trousers.
“You even ironed your shirt,” Anna said admiringly.
“Women can’t resist a man who irons,” Steve said. “It provides a hint of domesticity but doesn’t commit you to a lifetime of it. The language of chores is like the language of flowers. Very subtle.”
“I was hoping for dinner,” Anna said. “But I’ve got a feeling this onslaught of personal beauty is not for me.”
“It could have been,” Steve said airily. “But you chose the inferior man and now it’s too late. Your window of opportunity is closed. And all this masculine appeal is for you in a way. The sacrifices I make on your behalf...” He waved Anna toward a couch. The furniture was worn, mostly hand-me-downs from the previous tenant. Stilwell could afford better but nomads traveled light.
“We’ve got time for a drink but that’s about it. Duty calls,” he checked his wristwatch, “in seventeen minutes.” He sighed dramatically. “As it happens, I may yet be hoist on my own petard. A petard lifted, I might add, for you.” Again she suspected him of double entendre. With Stilwell one could never be sure.
He wanted Anna to cross-examine him. That’s what the alluring hints were designed for. The game required at least two players. Anna chose to play disinterested. For a moment Steve waited, his eyebrows lifted invitingly. Anna wished she’d fallen in love with Steve. Chances are the ride would have been short but a whole hell of a lot of fun.
He laughed and she knew she’d gained a point in whatever game it was he was playing. During the remainder of their short visit she told him of the pa
ltry pieces of information they’d turned up on the murder investigation.
“Corpse had a gun,” Steve mused, clinking imaginary ice cubes. He took his whiskey neat: no water, no ice, but tended to shake the glass as if he sloshed the liquid over the cubes. A move he’d undoubtedly picked up from the movies thirty years before. The affectation had become habit at some point. Now, like a number of his other mannerisms, it merely added to his eclectic charm, the whimsical gentleman aspect of his complex persona. “So. He has a gun. He uses it. Yet he ends up ignobly dead. What do you figure? Either he shoots and misses or shoots and connects, in which case you should have a report of a gunshot wound showing up at a local hospital or a second corpse washing up in a bayou.”
“Or he’s shooting before the murder is committed.”
“As in hunting?”
“As in hunting,” Anna said.
“As in having to do with your pursuing poachers.”
“Exactly.”
“It fits better with the assault by the Ford truck. If it was done by the poachers—or at least one of them—killing to cover the crime of illegally taking the king’s deer didn’t make much sense. Covering up a murder’s a different story.
“If Doyce had a gun, doesn’t that suggest he would have tried to defend himself? According to what you said there was no indication of defensive wounds in the autopsy, that he’d been alive and probably compliant when he got strapped into whatever bruised him up.”
“Two possibilities,” Anna said. “Either the gun powder residue on his hands has nothing to do with the murder at all but only indicates he was shooting shortly before his death. Or he wasn’t playing poker but out poaching with the boys and got himself killed, either by the boys or afterward by somebody else that he willingly played leather games with. Could be he was coerced into the leather games at gunpoint and nobody laid a hand on him till after he was dead.”
Stilwell shook his head. “If I had a gun and an unholy urge I sure wouldn’t waste them on a fat, middle-aged guy.” Neither would Anna.
“Where does Brother Raymond fit into this scenario?” Steve asked.
“He doesn’t,” Anna admitted. “He’s got an alibi both for the time of the murder and the evening the poachers chased me. And, far as I know, he’s not a hunter.”
“I guess working with the dead the thrill of the kill could get blunted. No more mystery: meat is meat.”
“I don’t know about the mystery but I doubt he’d agree with you on the meat issue. I believe Mr. Barnette takes his responsibilities to the deceased very seriously.”
“As in building a fine wooden coffin for whoever he buried in the backyard?”
“Something like that.”
Their allotted time was up. With an annoying air of secrecy about the event he’d been primping for, Steve walked Anna to her patrol car, then climbed into his glorious old truck.
The ice storm the forecasters had predicted with ill-concealed glee had backed off and Anna drove the fifty miles back to Rocky Springs without incident.
Again, shortly after midnight, her sleep was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Again the caller hung up. Again Anna slept behind locked doors.
19
For three hours the following morning Anna was held hostage by the phone in her office. Waiting, biding one’s time in the lee of a rock or undercover of a tree, until the unwary prey wandered by, had always been easy for Anna. The Zen of the huntress had survived eons of civilization and flowered in her soul. That morning, waiting in an office for unnamed bureaucrats and technicians to get around to phoning her was pure torture. She’d cast the toxic bread of this investigation upon the system’s waters and could do little till it returned: lab reports to tell her if Martin Crowley’s venison was from the same animal she’d found in the meadow by the deer stand, if the bark shaving from the tree she’d so assiduously scraped matched the bark found beneath Doyce Barnette’s fingernails, what Clintus Jones had tracked down on the lead regarding the owner of the Ford truck that had battered her patrol car into tinfoil.
When Paul Davidson called, she was thrilled. It would kill time and, girlishly, she wanted to hear his voice. For a while they exchanged the inconsequentialities of their lives, basking in the joy of sharing. To her delight and, on the undeniably cynical level of Anna’s middle-aged mind, mild embarrassment, she heard herself saying “I miss you” and reveling in Paul saying it back after only thirty-six hours of separation.
“My wife came over last night,” Paul said guardedly when a lull came into the conversation. “We had a good talk.”
The doors that had been pushed open a crack around Anna’s well-defended heart started to close. Hearing him say “my wife” with what sounded like real warmth hurt, physically, a sharp pinch beneath her sternum. Hating herself for it, Anna wondered if the “good talk” had been had between the sheets.
“Oh?” she said and was pleased that fear did not chill her voice.
“She drove down to get some of her things that were stored in our garage.”
Our garage. His and his wife’s. Again the pinch. Anna didn’t trust herself to speak lest she reveal her emotions. Time and self-preservation had taught her not to show weakness. She let the silence speak for her.
“You’ve definitely got an enemy in the park service,” Paul said. “That worries me a little.”
So. The “good talk” had been composed at least in part of evil rumors in which Ranger Anna Pigeon was prominently figured. Curiosity and an odd component of self-loathing—mostly for her own vulnerability—urged Anna to ask what had been said. She resisted it.
“What was the bottom line?” she asked. Cold infected the reasonable tone she’d hoped for.
“Oh. Could you hold a sec?”
Before Anna could scream, “No, goddamn it. Talk to me,” she heard vague mutterings as he spoke with someone else in the room. Had he called her from the office or home? Was he sitting in the kitchen of their house, talking on their phone with the Mrs. pottering domestically about? “Damn,” Anna whispered.
Paul came back. “Anna, I’ve got to go. Can I see you tonight? We need to talk.”
“We are talking,” she said.
“I mean in person, face to face.”
Anna wanted to say she was busy, leaving town, anything to avoid it. Take the hit, she told herself. “Sure. What time?”
“Seven okay?”
“Seven it is.”
He hung up hurriedly, anxious to get on with whatever or whoever was interrupting the call.
Anna sat at her desk, in her miserable chair, and stared at the fragments of the puzzle she’d been so intent on solving ten minutes before. Now it seemed meaningless, the joy in her work sucked away by other concerns. “Getting a life is highly overrated,” she muttered.
When Barth showed up with a plan and the task to go with it, she jumped at the chance to get out of the office and actually do something.
Barth didn’t need her assistance nor did he seem to particularly want it, but Anna volunteered as a helper and followed him out to his car. The ice storm that had failed to materialize the previous night had not passed over but merely backed off. The day was in the mid- to high thirties with the low dark skies and intermittent rain squalls of the day before. Barth drove the forty odd miles to Natchez. Anna was content to sit in the passenger seat, warmed by the heater, mildly irritated by the Christian music on the radio, and cogitate.
There were many things her mind could have amused itself with, but she had unwittingly passed a psychological point of no return in her relationship with Paul Davidson. She was old enough to keep the obvious signs under wraps. Except with her sister Molly, who, as a psychiatrist with doctor/patient privilege could surely never be called to testify against her, Anna never, ever gave in to the temptation to chatter on and on about The Boyfriend. She hadn’t gotten a face-lift, lost weight or started wearing new eye-catching outfits to work. Once, she’d regressed to the point of writing Anna Davidson o
n a sheet of scratch paper to see what it looked like. No one had caught her and she had destroyed the evidence. It had been merely a whimsical reflex predating high school. First married at high tide of the feminist movement, Anna had kept her own last name. At the time it had seemed terribly important. For better or worse, richer or poorer, it was the name she would die with. It had defined her for too many years ever to be abandoned. And, in a strange way, to change it would be an insult to Zach. She’d refused to take his last name, how could she take another man’s?
Of the foolishnesses that besieged her sex in matters of the heart, the one she had been unable to avoid was thinking too much about the object of desire. As the gray and black patterns swept by the car windows and rain streaked the side window in horizontal squiggles, Anna found herself reliving their phone conversation and growing more depressed by the minute. She focused on the last painful aspect.
“I’ve heard from a reputable source that somebody—probably somebody on the Trace—is spreading rumors about me,” she said to Barth, sounding more defiant and belligerent than she felt.
Barth snorted softly as he was jerked out of his own reverie. “Well, it’s not me, if that’s what you been thinking.”
“No, not you.” Anna dismissed the idea without apology. Sufficiently self-absorbed, she didn’t note the fact that she’d offended him. “Maybe Randy,” she said. “But I don’t even think it’s him. There’s been a feel of conspiracy about this, like from higher up.” As she talked, Anna stared out the window. Trees, flooding meadows, creeks, flashed beyond the glass with a hypnotic sameness.
“You mean like some sort of conspiracy in the brass up to Tupelo to stir up a scandal or something about you down around here for some secret reason?” Barth asked.
“Yeah.”
“Boss, you’re getting creepy on me here. Maybe you should go get that psycho stuff they keep harping on.”
“Critical Incident Stress Debriefing?”
“That’s it. Sounds like you’re in need of some serious debriefing. Maybe because of the car and all. Whatever, I wouldn’t go talking conspiracy to anybody but me.”
