Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 08 - Deep South

by Deep South (lit)

  "

  "It makes sense," Anna said. "You said that buckle I found was from a Union soldier, one of the squad that vanished. That, put together with Ruby's story, explains it. Port Gibson wasn't 'too pretty to burn." Grant had a mistress there. I got to thinking about the vanished squad, the plantation owner who shot his slaves."

  "This says 'run off."

  " Barth tapped the manuscript with his glasses. "What would you tell a little girl when six grown-ups she knew were shot?" Anna asked. "I'd tell her they run off," Barth admitted.

  "Caught the freedom train."

  "So that same night he dressed his wife as a Yankee soldier and killed her, then killed himself. The wife was Great-grandma Opal's Alyssum. Her husband killed her for infidelity, then got his slaves to kill Grant's men and bury them where they fell along the Trace at Rocky Springs," Anna finished.

  "Then he killed the slaves to keep them quiet. Or because they knew he'd been shamed."

  "You can check, can't you? Find out the name of that Port Gibson alderman's slain wife."

  "Should be easy enough," Barth said. "Jimmy Williams must have added it up the same way we did. He and his buddies were mining those dead soldiers."

  "For artifacts? Hardly worth killing for."

  "For handwritten letters from Ulysses S. Grant to a Southern wife not his own. Worth a fortune," Anna said. "If they exist."

  "If they exist. If they ever existed. If an enraged cuckold didn't find and burn them. Let's get that search warrant for Williams's place. Push it. See if we can get it for this afternoon. We'll look for shovels, Civil War clothes, and papers. Any copies of notes, research, etcetera.

  Artifacts from the vanished squadron. Let's do it before Williams gets home." Barth looked as if he would protest the hour, the effort, the haste, but in the end, he didn't. "I'll call Sheriff Davidson, see if he can expedite this thing," Anna said.

  It was after six by the time they got the warrant. Anna was so tired she was sick and the aches had penetrated to the bone, yet she dared not veil her mind with painkillers.

  Once the group was armed with the warrant, things moved quickly.

  Mrs. Williams had left town suddenly to be with her husband. The baby-sitter cooperated with a relish that didn't speak well of loyalty to the family.

  Jimmy had left without the chance to cover his tracks. The artifacts from Union soldiers in Grant's detachment were found meticulously cataloged and stored along with a photocopy of Ruby Tangeman's manuscript and copious notes speculating on the letters from General Grant to Alyssum.

  The coup de grice was in an unlocked desk drawer in the captain's study: Leo Fullerton's suicide note.

  Anna found Barth at Jimmy Williams' desk holding a single sheet of paper and looking stricken. "Pastor Fullerton killed the girl," he said in a voice so devoid of emotion it rang hollow. "Let me see." Anna crossed the uncarpeted floor. Williams' home had been a dream to search.

  Furnishings were sparse and classy. Very few tchotchkes cluttered the shelves. A military orderliness was maintained despite the existence of small children.

  Barth handed Anna the note, Leo's last communique on this side of the River Jordan. Though the light was good and the type of the usual size, letters blurred and Anna waited while a wave of dizziness passed and her vision cleared.

  Pastor Fullerton began with a plea for forgiveness: forgiveness from his flock for abandoning them, from his god for the sin of despair, and from his friends for betraying their part in the death of Danielle Posey.

  He told of bow he'd struck her down in fear when she suddenly thrust herself out of the bushes above where he dug. He pleaded that whoever read this should know that in the dark and the fear he'd thought her a bear or a bobcat, not a girl. He wrote of how, when he and Ian had been sent back to camp for the rope and sheeting, he knew he could not live with what he had done and could not live with a deceit that would cause racial strife. "Danni Posey didn't die of the blow to the bead," Anna said. "She died of a broken neck. Fullerton didn't kill her, Williams did.

  While Ian and Leo went back for the sheet, Williams checked her carotid.

  We found his prints. She was alive and he snapped her neck."

  "That just makes them both murderers," Barth said sadly.

  "The fact Leo's blow didn't kill her doesn't mean it couldn't've." Anna could see the moral logic in that. "Bag it," she said and handed Barth the suicide note.

  "The Deforest boy was telling the truth," Barth remarked.

  "Eventually," Anna conceded. "He and the other boys terrified and chased Danni, but she stumbled on death from another quarter."

  "That makes them murderers in a way," Barth said. "We are all murderers in a way. It doesn't do to track the threads of death too far from their end."

  "Why do you suppose they dropped the body where they did?"

  "My best guess?" Anna thought a moment. "I'd bet Williams instigated the half-assed KKK red herring. Ian and Leo couldn't stomach it and backed out partway through. Williams couldn't engineer it alone, so Danni was left where they dropped her."

  "Sad for everybody," Barth said. "Even the doers." i an McIntire was arrested as an accessory. Anna left as soon as he called for a lawyer, which was about the same instant he opened his door. Williams would be arrested when found and that wouldn't be long. The baby-sitter kindly gave them a number Mrs. Williams had left where she could be reached in case of an emergency with the children. Two calls established that Williams was in Birmingham at the Methodist Hospital. He had undergone surgery for the removal of his left testicle. Barth winced at the news, but Anna was unmoved.

  It was nearly midnight when all was said and done. Anna was no longer able to hide either her pain or her fatigue and waited in the car while Barth finished up at the Madison County Sheriff's Office, where they had taken McIntire. On the Crown Vic's radio, she heard Randy Thigpen make a traffic stop. When he got wind of the fact that they'd had all the fun without him, he was going to be about as easy to get along with as a badger with a sore paw.

  When the time came, Anna would exhibit fairness and genuine concern for his issues. Faking that shouldn't be a problem and it would give her the distance she needed to keep from challenging him to a duel.

  She'd fallen into a loose and miserable doze by the time Barth returned to the car, sleep full of dreams of spiders, rocks and things that gave the body disease.

  Thoughtfully, he refrained from asking her if she was okay.

  Adjusting the radio to a station playing the gentlest strains of Ravel, he curled into his own thoughts and left her to hers.

  Moving through the darkness of the Natchez Trace, headlights cutting swatches of color to the sides of the road, fear nagged at Anna from the utter night of woods that pressed too close, felt too full of life.

  She was glad when the ride was over.

  "You gonna call Sheriff Davidson?" Barth asked. Davidson had assisted by phone, but an ugly domestic situation erupting in violence had kept him in Port Gibson. "He's gonna want to know the details." Anna pried herself painfully out of the Crown Vic. She still suffered from a vague feeling that Paul Davidson was a shit. Though she couldn't remember why, she had no desire to talk to the man " u do it," she said. "If anybody wants me, tell them I died and we2to0a hot bath." Clutching her painkillers to her bosom like an old drunk with his bottle of rotgut, she shuffled toward the sanctuary of home and Taco and Piedmont.

  Barth backed out of her drive and left. Soft clouds, gray in the moonlight, had materialized, wet and close to the treetops. There wasn't a breath of air, and in this strange time between late night and dawn, even the forest was still.

  Anna slowed as she approached the now familiar red door that was to open on home. It didn't feel like home. She heard the hum of Barth's tires change in tone as he turned right on the Trace, headed south.

  When the sound was gone, she was still standing on her front step.

  She was scared. Craven, soul-sucking fear made her want to whimpe
r and hide. She'd been beaten; blinded and beaten into the ground. An unseen man had tried to take her life with the brutal pounding of his fists.

  She was scared to stay out on her front walk, exposed, knowing another blow would undo her. And she was scared to go in her own house, scared of the shadows under the eaves and the dark places behind the door. She wanted to cry but was afraid a sound, even the smallest breath of a sigh, would call down some evil.

  Anna had been afraid before-many times. Fear was good, heightening the senses, adding fleetness to the feet. But never like this. Not the knowledge that she could be shattered into so many pieces that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put her back together again.

  The longer she stood in the waspish moonlight the more frightened she became, unable to go in, unwilling to stay out. Fleetingly, she had a picture of Frank finding her in the morning, cowering on the stoop, her mind gone. The image should have been absurd, but it wasn't. It felt prophetic and loosed another bowel-jangling wave of terror.

  From within, Taco starting barking. The sudden staccato stab of sound hit her like a cattle prod, and she flinched. The animals.

  Even in the face of a paralyzing terror she'd not felt since childhood nightmares, she would take care of her animals. "It's me, Taco," she said and pushed open the unlocked door. Her vocal cords had seized up along with the sphincters of her body and the words emerged as a high-pitched whisper. Despite the Minnie Mouse voice and Raging Bull face, Taco recognized her. She was greeted with a whine, a whapping of his tall against his bedding and the sti" an uncleaned kennel.

  Taco was a cripple. Frank went off duty at three-thirty. The poor animal hadn't been out since breakfast. Guilt was added to the stew of emotions in Anna's soul. Taco didn't help any by taking the blame on himself, looking at her with shame in his dark eyes, his bedding stretched out where he'd pulled his bandage-swathed body as far from the scene of the crime as health and strength permitted. Shoulders and head were pushed up against the metal where the furnace had stopped his progress. Atop the heater, belly spread on the summer-cool tin, Piedmont had risen above the offal, but Anna noted with a second wave of guilt, the cat had not abandoned his friend. "Poor old guy," she said to the dog, shamed by how joyfully he greeted her worthless self, grinning and trying to wriggle close enough to slather her with canine caresses. "It's not your fault; it's mine. Let's not talk about it." She knelt with great care, trying to keep her head balanced on its precarious perch at the apex of her spine.

  "Let's get you outside. Your poor bladder must be the size of a weather balloon. What a guy. Superdog." Anna crooned compliments to Taco for holding his water in hopes he'd forget he'd slipped in other areas as she worked her hands gently under his seventy-five pounds. Or was it now seventy?

  What did a dog's leg weigh?

  Whatever it was it was too much. The blows to her shoulders and the side of her neck, the hairline fracture of her humerus combined to drain the strength from her arms. She could not lift Taco, and she started to cry.

  Kneeling on the hardwood, she rested her forehead against the lab's side and wept because she was a terrible ranger, a damn Yankee, a woman, a cripple and a lousy pet owner, useless to man and beast, Had there been worms nearby she couldn't even have cateri them; she was not worthv.

  Knock!'-:ig at the door scared her so badly that her wretched sobs were jerked up in a violent hiccup and she froze as a rabbit freezes in the shadow of a hawk. The knocking came again. She flinched at each rap as if the knuckles banged on her skull and not the hardwood of the door.

  Anna? It's Paul." The announcement of the sheriff's name did not comfort. Perhaps he would go away if she played dead. Hugging the dog, Piedmont butting worriedly against her ribs, Anna tried to make herself invisible.

  Behind her, she heard the door pushed open. Taco began to bark, high alarm barks that cut into her bruised brain with the delicate touch of a double-bladed axe.

  "Oh Lord! Are you all right? Anna..

  Footsteps sounded on hardwood followed by the muffled tread of shoes on the Navajo rug. Then warm arms were around both Anna and the dog. Taco stopped barking. Piedmont fled the crush, leaping back to the top of the heater. "Did you fall? What's happening?

  Talk to me, Anna. Do you know your name? Where you are?" Paul Davidson's hands were running over her head, her neck, down her arms, as he deftly sought injuries in the way of those accustomed to field medicine. His skin was warm, his hair fragrant, his breath sweet, his touch gentle.

  For the first time in more years than she could remember, Anna wanted help, wanted a man to lift her burdens just for an hour or so, wanted to be held, told everything was going to be all right, tucked into bed. A piecemeal fragment of an old play her husband, Zach, had starred in at dinner theater in New Jersey the year they'd been married flashed to mind. Harvey. The psychiatrist sharing his greatest fantasy: to lie and rest, a beautiful woman holding his hand saying "there, there..." That's what Anna wanted. She wanted it from Paul Davidson. Yet she could not unbend, not even to speak. There was an iron band around her heart-or her brain-made of two parts suspicion and one part self-preservation. Anna didn't trust him, and she couldn't remember why.

  Tears came again, weak and womanly.

  Lest he see them and judge her as she judged herself, she buried her face in Taco's side. He licked her elbow, the only part of her he could reach. Prickles of affectionate angst scraped her scalp: Piedmont reaching down from his perch to claw concernedly at her hair. Anna knew she did not deserve such loyalty and the tears came thicker, hotter, drenching the foul-smelling fur she hid her face in.

  Paul's warm hands left off their search for wounds. Whether he deemed her structurally sound or beyond saving, he walked away.

  Feeling both safer and abandoned, Anna pulled her face out of Taco's side and disentangled the cat's claws from her hair. In a minute, when she heard the front door close behind the retreating sheriff, she would stand up. Sit up. Something.

  Instead of the slamming of a door, footsteps returned. Anna stifled 3@ an impulse to dive back into the dog and another to hide her face in her hands. She couldn't bring herself to open her eyes.

  All that is required is that I look sane for a minute or so, she told herself. Say something like "I'm fine" or "It looks worse that it is." She opened her eyes a slit. Looked to Taco for courage, to Piedmont for attitude, but still she didn't speak. "Come on," Paul said. "Upsa-daisy.

  I'm running you a bath. While you're soaking, me and the critters will get squared away. Take our evening constitutional." Anna allowed herself to be led, coaxed, managed. It was sufficiently uncharacteristic that she wondered at herself even as she watched, a disinterested third party. Maybe it was the painkillers. Maybe it was the pain. Whatever had robbed her of her will, it was consistent. She said nothing till she was standing by the tub, the sheriff unbuttoning her shirt. Then she managed: "I can undress myself." Had he argued, she wouldn't have protested.

  Her clothes dropped where she stood. Unlacing boots was a exercise in pain and enfeebled frustration, but it never crossed her mind to call him back. When she finally attained it, the hot bath was heaven.

  Paul tapped on the door twice. Once he offered to bring her wine.

  She refused and knew she'd quit drinking. Again. Maybe for good this time. Mississippi was bound to have AA meetings. Tomorrow-the day after-she'd think about that. The second knock was to bring her dry, clean pajamas and tell her dinner was ready.

  Piedmont slipped in with the pi's and took his accustomed place on the edge of the tub, snaky orange tail swishing in the water. Idly, she wondered if he did that intentionally to take her mind off her troubles.

  Dried, pajamaed and ensconced in the Morris chair, Anna sat while Paul brought her dinner of tomato soup and half a tuna fish sandwich. It was the meal her mother had served whenever she was sick, and Anna felt herself tearing up again as he set the tray across her knees. "You don't have to do this," she said to ward off the untowa
rd emotion. "Yes, I do." He pulled up a footstool and folded himself down at her feet. A newly washed Taco dragged himself over to be near Davidson.

  Traitor, Anna thought unkindly as she spooned soup into her mouth.

  I filed for divorce today," the sheriff said. Anna forced the soup down through a suddenly constricted esophagus. That was it; that was why she'd not trusted him. The memory returned and with it a burning flush of shame. Mrs. Davidson had called to pay her respects shortly before Anna was attacked. The ensuing madness--or her own need to forget it-had driven the scene from her mind. "We were married for eight years," Davidson said.

  "We've been separated for three. I filed for divorce today," he repeated. "Why did you wait three years?" Anna asked.

  I never needed a divorce till now." Tears came and Anna was helpless to stop them. Truth be told, she didn't try. They washed away the rusted iron she'd felt clamped around her chest. "Do you want to go to bed?" he asked kindly.