Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  Even under duress, the manners were holding. Anna was impressed. “Okay. You were drunk. A blackout. It happens. Who was Danielle’s date?”

  Heather stood up abruptly. “How would I know that? Look, I gotta go back to class. We’ve got a test.”

  Anna let her go. She would get nothing more out of her today. Staying in the bleachers, she watched until the door closed behind Heather. Of course she knew who Danni’s date for the prom had been. She knew Anna could find out easily enough from a number of sources. Yet Heather hadn’t wanted to be the one to tell her. It had been Anna’s experience that people almost invariably wanted to be the one to tell. So much so it was common for them to make things up just so they could feel important, be part of the action. When they didn’t want to, it could mean any number of things, usually that they had something to hide or something to fear. Heather showed symptoms of having both.

  Anna sat a while longer. As a girl, she’d been strong and fast but never much of an athlete. Girls weren’t athletes when she was growing up. The little ones were tomboys, the older ones misfits. Still, of all the places in a high school, the gym was the most comfortable for her. Perhaps it was because of Willy, Mrs. Williams, Anna’s high school PE teacher. A woman Anna could have talked to about growing up when she couldn’t talk to her own mother. She didn’t talk to Willy—she bit those early bullets in silence—but she could have, and that made her memories good ones. Maybe it was simply because the genders were segregated in the gymnasium. There was a freedom in that, particularly at an age and in an age when sexuality confused, excited, shamed and glorified and all within a single heartbeat. As that thought coalesced, she realized that was why she’d brought Heather here, instinctively feeling she might have the same reaction.

  As she was making her way back through the twists and turns of the halls toward the vice principal’s office, the bell rang. Anna suffered momentary panic as the doors flew open and students poured out. Quelling the urge to flee, she calmed her mind and watched the colorful clacking mass, the hope of the future. Despite the noise and posturing that was part of the pack mentality, they looked to be good kids. On the whole a lot taller and prettier than when Anna’d been in high school. Acne treatments and early orthodonture accounted for part of it, but there was a worldliness to them that kids lacked once upon a time. Anna didn’t think it was a bad thing. Just scary to parents who carried with them an anachronistic Model-T and milkman dream their own folks had worked so hard to leave behind.

  The fashions didn’t surprise her, except maybe by the lack of punk and piercing, but she did notice that in terms of how girls and women appeared, Adele Mack and Heather were not exceptions; they were the rule. Most of the girls wore heavy, beautifully applied makeup, the kind Anna would expect on a working model or an actress. No wonder Mississippi had won the Miss America Pageant more times than any other state in the union. They looked lovely in a glossy-magazine sort of way, but Anna had an almost overwhelming urge to catch them and scrub their faces.

  Adele was on the phone but raised her eyebrows and grimaced to let Anna know her company was preferable to whomever she was currently speaking with.

  “Ah. There. That’s done for another month,” Ms. Mack said after she put the phone down. “Did you have a nice talk with Heather?”

  The vice principal had chosen to pretend that this visit was not promulgated by the murder of a child. In Ms. Mack’s profession, little could be more heinous than the death of a student. Anna liked her for it.

  “She’s hiding something,” Anna said, trusting Ms. Mack to understand. “I don’t think it’s about her, though. I get the feeling she’s protecting or afraid of somebody.”

  The vice principal drummed the pads of her fingertips on the blotter, making a sound like a stampede of tiny pawed creatures. A habit developed, Anna guessed, to protect the porcelain nails. Customarily Anna waited out silences, finding it got more information in the long run. This time she didn’t. It was probably a question of loyalties; Ms. Mack wanted to cooperate but the students were her primary concern.

  “Do you know who Heather might be protecting?” Anna asked in a kindly but official tone.

  “It’s hard to say. Heather and Danielle were friends after a fashion. I think it was one of those friendships of convenience girls this age often form. Both of them had fallings-out with their own little cliques at about the same time. Sixteen-year-old girls are like ions—they seldom float around unattached for long. Even a best friend you don’t really like is better than no best friend at all. I don’t think they’d been palling around for long. Miss Wilson will know. She had both of them for homeroom and, if I’m not mistaken, geometry. Heather might could be protecting Danni, but I don’t think so. Maybe Matt Dryer? He’s the boyfriend. Or was before prom. They pair up about six weeks before the dance to guarantee they’ve got a date. The day after the crepe paper comes down, it’s splitsville.”

  Splitsville. Adele Mack was older than Anna’d first thought. The paint job had fooled her.

  “Matt’s a terrific boy. There’s never a dull moment when he’s around. He does the usual things: shows up late, gets himself banged up, breaks girls’ hearts and makes teachers earn their pay. But he’s a real good boy. I can’t imagine he’d get himself into any kind of serious trouble. He’s smart. A smart, good boy.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  Adele Mack got the look of somebody who has inadvertently gotten their buddy in trouble.

  “He was Heather’s date. Since Heather was ...” Anna was going to tell Mack of the girl’s drunken state, then for some reason decided to cut Heather some slack. Maybe it was the fear she’d seen just under the girl’s skin. “He might be able to remember things Heather can’t. Fill in a few gaps,” she concluded.

  Vice Principal Mack procrastinated. She didn’t want to give Matt up. She’d been much quicker to throw Heather to the wolves, assuming Anna was the wolves. If her reticence was because Matt was a good boy, did it follow that Heather was not a good girl? Suddenly Anna felt out of her league. She had no kids. Her sister Molly had no kids. Besides a brief and now long-distance relationship with fellow Park Ranger Patsy Silva’s children, Anna knew no teenagers. What constituted “good” these days? In 1967, “good” had been synonymous with “virgin” for girls and “works hard” for boys. She doubted that was the case any longer.

  “Matt’s in band practice,” Ms. Mack was saying. During Anna’s momentary inattention, she’d called up Matt Dryer’s class schedule on her computer screen. By the way she looked at it instead of Anna, it was clear she didn’t want him disturbed.

  This time Anna did wait, trusting Adele Mack suffered from a need to be fair to her charges. She did. “I’ll see if he can be called out of practice,” she said with a sigh and left to find whoever was in charge of calling out.

  Anna decided against the gym. Good smart boys were too comfortable in general. She interviewed Matt in the front seat of her patrol car. Matt Dryer was thin, five-foot-eight or -nine, with light brown hair that looked as if it had been cut with lawn shears: coarse, very straight hair that no amount of gel or spray can tame. His mouth was wide and full-lipped, but instead of looking sensual or cruel, it lent an aspect of youthful innocence. Around his neck was a leather cord full of oddments—beads, rings, buttons—that probably meant something. He wore baggy paint-stained khakis, a white T-shirt and Birkenstocks. From the way he carried himself, Anna was willing to bet this mode of attire was on the cutting edge of cool.

  “This has got to be about Danni, right?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “The Smokey Bear suit. Danni was killed on the Natchez Trace. It was in today’s paper. Bad news.”

  Matt did seem like a “good” boy in the sense of a real boy, the kind Pinocchio wanted to be. He was open. He showed no flippant disrespect of the death of a fellow student nor did he seem to need to feign a personal grief he obviously did not feel.

  “Did you know Danni?”
>
  “Everybody knows everybody here, or didn’t you notice? Yeah, I knew Danni. She was pretty obvious around school.”

  “How so obvious?”

  Matt closed down slightly.

  Anna took a stab at the cause. “Don’t want to speak ill of the dead?”

  He squinched his face up a bit and shook his hair into his eyes. Probably a hiding mechanism left over from his not-so-distant childhood. It undoubtedly drove the girls wild, the more so because it was done without self-consciousness.

  “Tell me,” Anna said. “It won’t hurt Danni. Since I’ve only a professional interest in her, it won’t hurt me, and it might help us catch her killer.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Give it a shot.”

  “It’s nothing that bad, really. It’s not like Danielle was doing drugs or anything illegal.”

  “A slut?” Anna was intentionally jarring in hopes of shaking him out of his reticence.

  “Not even that. She did this ‘big woman on campus’ thing mostly. In with the ‘in crowd.’ Nothing really. It just put me off. But hey, what do I know? Everybody else loved it. She was different this year, I thought. Since around Christmas. I was actually beginning to think she was turning into a real person. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel right about trashing her. Like that Princess Di thing. Somebody looks like maybe they’re getting it together and, wham! Makes it worse somehow.”

  “What happened at Christmas?”

  “What? Oh. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t even Christmas. Just sort of last winter, you know.”

  “How did she change last winter?”

  “It wasn’t like a Jekyll and Hyde thing. It didn’t happen all at once because she drank some kind of potion. It was just little things. Probably nobody else even noticed. Heck, maybe I didn’t notice. I’ve got a very creative memory, you know.” He grinned, and Anna couldn’t help smiling back.

  “Try,” she said.

  “Boy, you don’t give up easy do you? Okay.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the seat. His fingers, balled into fists, pounded lightly on his thighs. “She was nicer. She’d smile at geeks like me in the hall once in a while—somebody who wasn’t a jock. She stopped laughing all the time. Sometimes she actually looked like she was listening. She stopped trying to dress like she was some kind of socialite and wore regular clothes.”

  He sat a bit longer searching his self-imposed darkness for other salient observations. Anna expected him to start repeating himself, casting about for more, because that was the usual response when people ran out of firsthand observations, but he didn’t. Anna hadn’t been as self-possessed as Matt until she was about thirty-eight.

  “Who was Danielle’s date for the prom?” she asked.

  Matt’s eyes popped open. “Just the most popular guy in school. Brandon DeForest. Quarterback of the mighty Arrows. Face like James Van Der Beek, body like Kurt Russell, brain like Beavis. A major all-around most-valuable dork. Brandon’s an anachronism. Or would be any place but here. Here he’s a demi-god.”

  A chink in this good boy’s armor? Jealousy of a geek for a demi-god? Anna didn’t think so. Matt had referred to himself as a geek, but he’d done so with a perverse pride that suggested he not only did not believe it, but was confident no one else did either.

  “Tell me about prom night,” Anna said.

  “You mean me and Heather? Not much to tell. We went out to dinner. Went to the dance. Heather kept going out to the parking lot with Danielle. She got sloppy drunk. I had better things to do than hang around till she got to the puking stage. Around ten or eleven I offered to take her home. She declined. I left her with her new friends, danced a few more dances and went home. End of story.” He was quiet for a minute, not looking at Anna, not busying his eyes elsewhere. Then, meeting Anna’s gaze with apparent frankness, he said, “Officer Pigeon, Heather’s a good sort. I’ve known her most of my life. We were never a hot item, but we’ve been friends. She’s just ... just susceptible, if you know what I mean. Being Danni’s friend was a big deal to her. She’s not like a nerd or anything, but she’s never been in what she calls ‘the inner circle.’ It’s horse sh—It’s silly, but her folks are Mormon and this is not Utah. Not like anybody came right out and said anything. Don’t get me wrong. Heather’s well liked. But she always felt it made her different. I don’t think it was her being Mormon, but she did. So when Danni needed a new friend and picked up on Heather, she wanted to be like Danni. Drinking and what all.”

  “You didn’t go with her to Rocky Springs.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You didn’t abandon her passed out drunk in a crypt.”

  “Holy shit, no! I mean, no, ma’am, I did not.”

  Anna believed him. “Are you and Heather broken up?”

  Matt seemed taken aback by that. For the first time he squirmed a little, shifting his narrow buttocks on the vinyl. “Heather and I were never together. Not like that. Like I said, we were just friends. Now that Danni’s dead...”

  He stopped there, just where Anna was beginning to get interested. “Now that Danni’s dead what?”

  “Nothing. Heather’ll just have a lot to deal with for a while. Are we done? I should be getting back to band practice.”

  Anna’d never seen a bunch of kids so anxious to get back to class. Before she let Matt go, she described the boys she’d seen in the graveyard. Either Matt didn’t recognize them from her description or he wasn’t talking. Either way, the fruitful part of the interview was at an end.

  Another pass through Adele Mack’s office brought forth the information that Brandon DeForest was on a bus headed for an “away game.” Anna found herself more relieved than disappointed. This venture into the 90210 of Dixie had worn her out.

  The refrigerator was stocked, Piedmont was fed, Taco had a new chew toy and Anna was in the District Office outside Port Gibson lunching on Doritos and RC Cola from Gary’s Shell Station. Barth and Randy were telling her of their morning’s adventures. As tragic as the murder was, Anna couldn’t help but see a teensy-weensy silver lining. Randy and Barth were feeling important. That wonderful sense of importance would keep them invested, for a while, in their jobs. If she was very, very lucky and played whatever cards she had just right, some of that sense of their own importance would come to be associated with her. Never a bad thing. When men were sexist, they were scared. Tempting as it might be to slap them upside the head with a two-by-four, reassurance usually worked better. Marginally better, but better.

  “The campers didn’t have much to say,” Randy told her. “I figured they wouldn’t. The murder was way up the creek. I doubt whoever did it even came in that way. People down here aren’t into hiking. Snakes.”

  “There are snakes in the Western parks,” Anna said mildly.

  “This isn’t a Western park. What I’m telling you is people around here don’t hike much.”

  Anna accepted the reproof without comment. It served her right in a way. “Go on,” she said.

  “So. Mostly it was a waste of my time.” He was sitting backward on a straight-backed chair that looked to have been stolen from a schoolteacher’s desk in 1950. Folding his arms across his chest, he leaned his elbows on the chair’s back. Anna had needled him. To prove himself right about the pointlessness of her choice to question campers, he wasn’t going to share what he had found.

  Anna ate more chips. “Mostly?” she pressed on doggedly.

  Randy struggled but years of rangering overcame peevishness. “I got a pretty decent description of the cars that were haring around from the Boy Scout leader.”

  “Excellent,” Anna said and meant it. “I got them the night of the disturbance. We’ll see if they tally.”

  “If you’d told me you’d already gone and done it, I wouldn’t have wasted my time.”

  Anna considered a lengthy explanation regarding the difference between on-scene questions and in-depth interviews, thought better of it and said: “Go on.”

&nb
sp; “As to who was or wasn’t in the campground, I got nothing. Nobody knows who’s next to them, what cars ought to be where, who’s coming, who’s going.” Randy sulked.

  “Follow up on the cars,” Anna said. “Start with Clinton High School. It was their prom night. See if the kids need permits, anything that’ll help you find the cars described and attach a kid to them. I’ll give you any names I get. You can check to see if the parents have a car fitting any of your descriptions.”

  Randy nodded, either bored or lamenting the fact that doing his work had resulted in having more work to do.

  “What’d you do with your time, Barth?”

  Anna munched another Dorito. From the way Barth was eyeing them, she suspected Ranger Dinkin wanted some, but her need to win the guy over didn’t extend that far.

  “Lot of what you’d expect,” Dinkin said, tearing his eyes away from the chips. “The Poseys are pretty broke up. I’d got there before Mr. Posey’d told his wife. The boy, Mike, knew—there’s the two kids, or was, the girl and an older boy about nineteen, twenty. He’s a piece of work.”

  “How so?”

  “Just is.”

  By the firm set of Barth’s mouth, he wasn’t going to elaborate on that subject anytime soon.

  “What else?”

  “They weren’t in a mood to talk much,” Barth said casually. So casually Anna began to wonder if he was hiding the fact that he hadn’t been out to the Poseys at all. She looked over at Randy to see how he was reacting. Both men were in her office, Barth in a second secretary’s chair, his weight threatening to destroy its bowed spine, Randy straddling his. Randy rested his big head on hands locked across the chair’s back. His mustache hid his upper lip and his eyes were half closed. He wasn’t looking at Barth and he wasn’t looking at her. It was as if he watched a movie inside his own skull, and it wasn’t Pollyanna.

  “Randy. What are you thinking?” Anna asked abruptly.

  The man’s eyes refocused. “Let me go talk to them,” he said. His voice was flat, the voice of a man rigidly in control of a violent emotion. Or the voice of a sociopath.