Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  For a moment Anna watched him, trying to figure out what was going on behind those meaty features. Several more Doritos were eaten but they didn’t do anything for her mind-reading skills. “I’ll go,” she said finally. “It’s time I met some of the locals.”

  Anna gave the Poseys till the next morning. Two rangers, a sheriff and a dead child in one day would be enough to make anyone antisocial. A child. Anna winced involuntarily. Throughout her career she’d been told the death of a child would be harder to take than that of an adult. Till now she’d not believed it. Not a child, she told herself. A teenager. It didn’t help.

  As befitted the tenor of her day’s activities, clouds settled low and dark, pressing into the trees, and a steady rain had been falling since before sunrise. Colors were muted, the sunshine of the Carolina jasmine and the glow of the red buds dulled as if the rain were tinged with gray paint. Seldom, if ever, did it rain like this in the high desert. Here water streamed and pooled, the grasses by the roadside wavering like rice paddies. Wood and mud and pavement were dark with water. Anna felt damp to her core. Though it wasn’t warm, she had to run the car’s air conditioner to keep fog from blanking her windshield.

  Following the precise and neatly written directions Barth had provided, Anna found the Posey homestead without incident. From the Trace, she could see a house with worn white siding, dwarfed by old trees. A decrepit barn, with derelict automobiles nosed up to the weathered wood like piglets to a sow, stood to one side. Trusting Barth’s descriptive powers, she guessed it was the Posey place, but she had another seven miles to drive before she could get to it. Part of the charm of the Natchez Trace—or the aggravation, depending on whether one was sightseeing or commuting—was that entrances and exits were severely limited.

  A short gravel drive circled in from the surface road. A harrow rusted by the barn. A blue 1978 Chevrolet truck was parked in front of what was probably the kitchen door. Anna pulled around beside the Chevy and waited, the car idling, to let the inhabitants get used to the idea they had company. After a minute, the door opened behind the screen. Taking that as an invitation, Anna ducked out of the Crown Vic.

  The figure behind the screen didn’t offer anything in the way of welcome as Anna came up a concrete walk, buckled into disparate stones, weeds pushing boldly through ever-widening cracks.

  When she was seven or eight yards from the door—and as far from her car—she heard the unmistakable sound of dogs growling, low and vicious. Watchdogs bark when an intruder arrives, a racket to alert the house. Attack dogs don’t.

  Anna stopped dead in her tracks. Slowly, she turned her head to find the source of the noise. Equally slowly, she put her hand on the butt of her pistol. A dozen feet away, the distance of a single lunge, were two white shepherds, big dogs, eighty to a hundred pounds each. The rain had flattened their fur, but along the hackles it was glued into spikes.

  “Call off your dogs,” Anna said quietly, never taking her eyes from them. The smaller of the two, but not by much, began inching toward her, stiff mincing steps. The second broke away, circling between her and the cars.

  “Call off your dogs or I’ll kill them,” she said in the same even tone. This interview was off to a great start.

  The shadow behind the screen neither moved nor spoke. Anna thumbed the snap free on the leather strap that secured her pistol in her holster.

  “Bubba! Rocket! That’s enough,” came a sharp female voice from within the house. The hell hounds were transformed. Tails wagged. Tongues fell out in dopey grins.

  Anna was unimpressed. Without taking her eyes from the animals or her hand from her nine-millimeter, she said: “May I come in?”

  “Go on! Git!” came the same voice and Anna waited to see if the command was meant for her or the dogs.

  Bubba and Rocket stopped wagging and grinning and slunk off toward the barn. They’d obviously been trained the old-fashioned way, with boot and stick.

  The screen opened. “C’mon in. You’re getting soaked. Don’t mind them dogs. We don’t get all that much company.”

  The speaker was the shadow behind the screen, visible now that she held the door open. A little woman, not as tall as Anna, maybe five-foot-two and skinny. The flat wide kind of skinny: broad pelvis spreading fleshless hips, wide rib cage with no muscles or breasts to give it depth. From head-on, she looked average; in profile, there was nothing to her. Adding to this peculiar now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t physique was the ageless quality of an aging face. The blond hair was faded, not so much gray as colorless, the skin unlined but lacking the elasticity of youth. The woman could have been thirty-eight; she could have been fifty. She had a ghostlike quality of not being in real time. Anna found it hard to believe this wraith would set the dogs on her intentionally. Then again she found it hard to believe the woman would care one way or another if the beasts tore her to pieces on the front step. Either way she seemed unoffended by Anna’s threat to shoot them. That was a plus. Anna was taking what she could get this morning. “You are Mrs. Posey?”

  “Mr. Posey says I am.”

  She stood aside to let Anna into a kitchen that apparently served as dining room and entertainment center of the house. Shelves held the usual paraphernalia of a kitchen. The floor was covered in speckled linoleum gouged by a bygone disaster of some sort. The walls had once been papered, then peeled, but no new paper had been hung. A Formica-topped table with four matching chairs of chrome and vinyl in cracked and fraying yellow took up the center of the room. The air smelled of coffee, cigarettes and an odor that took Anna back to the sixties: hair spray. Aqua Net, if she didn’t miss her guess. From a rolling stand between two doors leading to the rest of the house, a television with a twenty-seven-inch screen flashed the rude colors and noise of a talk show. Beyond, it was dark, the blinds and curtains closed, making shadowed caves where too much furniture hunkered in the gloom.

  “Can I get you a Coke?” the woman asked.

  Anna started to decline, but the suspicious look on Mrs. Posey’s face changed her mind. She said yes, and it lifted. Evidently Mrs. Posey didn’t trust people who wouldn’t drink a Coke at nine-thirty in the morning. Anna watched as her hostess did the honors. The old refrigerator was packed with Cokes, not Wal-Mart cola but the familiar red and white cans. There must have been close to three cases, leaving little room for anything else.

  A mental institution, the sheriff had said. Suddenly Anna was glad the beverage offered came in a hermetically sealed container.

  Mrs. Posey set a Coke on the table for Anna and opened one for herself. “You sit down,” she ordered. Anna did as she was told.

  “Is Mr. Posey home?” Anna asked, mostly to make conversation.

  “He’s always somewhere or other. You’re the lady ranger,” Mrs. Posey said. “I heard about you.”

  “What did you hear?” Anna asked, genuinely curious.

  “You found that girl that was killed.” Mrs. Posey was looking past Anna at the television screen where an ample redhead was screaming and throwing her shoes at a little black girl who was doing a bad job of looking fierce while two television “bouncers” held her back.

  “She stole the other girl’s fiancé,” Mrs. Posey said. “He was a white boy, too. It’s him they oughta be talking about killing, messing around with a colored.” Mrs. Posey seemed unaware that her pronouncement wasn’t a universally accepted truth.

  Anna said nothing. It wasn’t her kitchen, and it wasn’t what she was here for.

  “I’d like to ask you some questions about your daughter, Mrs. Posey. Would it be better if I came back another time? When your husband’s home?” Anna fought to be gentle over the contrived clamor of the TV.

  “Fred doesn’t know anything about Danni,” Mrs. Posey said, still absorbed in the television. “Danni tells me everything.” She stopped then, took a long pull on her soda and said, still without looking at Anna: “I know that girl you found was my Danni. I know she’s dead.” Her face didn’t change expression and her
voice lost none of its flat character, but tears began to run down her face and drip off her chin. If she was aware of them, she made no move to wipe them away.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Anna said. She wanted to say more but every phrase that came to mind was so pathetically inadequate she couldn’t bring herself to utter it.

  Mrs. Posey watched her show, and Anna cast about for a good way to escape without being devoured by Bubba and Rocket.

  The show cut to a commercial, and Mrs. Posey finally looked at her guest. “I’ll talk about Danni being alive if that’s all you want but I won’t talk about her being dead. Not now. Not ever.”

  “Tell me about her friends,” Anna said.

  “Danni was the most popular girl at school. There wasn’t nobody that wasn’t her friend or leastways nobody who didn’t want to be. But I’d tell her, Danni you pick; you don’t be running with people not good as you. They’ll drag you down. Danni always listened to me. She’d bring some girl home and I’d say that girl’s just fixin’ to be trash and that’d be the end of it. Danni always listened to me.”

  “Any special friends?” Anna asked.

  “She had a hundred friends. Good friends.”

  Danni might have listened to her mother, but it didn’t sound as if she talked to her much. Anna sat in silence and waited while Mrs. Posey cast about for a single name and failed to find one.

  “Yesterday they sent that big nigger over here to talk to me about my girl. I’m not talking to no nigger man about my Danni.”

  Anna jerked in her chair as the words smacked into her. Barth Dinkin. This crazy rotten remnant of a woman was talking about one of her rangers. As anger flashed and she clamped her teeth against it, Anna had a sudden thought: was this why Randy had gotten so hostile? Because he knew the Poseys had treated Barth badly and he knew Barth was too ashamed to say anything? For the first time since meeting the man, Anna felt a wave of respect for Ranger Randy Thigpen.

  “You can talk to me about Danni,” Anna said evenly. “I’m white.”

  Mrs. Posey was oblivious to sarcasm. “They should’ve sent you first and not go insulting people like that.”

  Anna said nothing.

  “Danni was going to be a model. Big, like Cheryl Tiegs. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I knew. It was Danni and me’s secret.” The talk show came back on. Anna couldn’t stomach any more of Mrs. Posey’s personal brand of insanity. Largely unnoticed by the other woman, Anna thanked her for the Coke and let herself out the kitchen door.

  The rain had not let up, and the overcast had not lifted, but after the Poseys’ kitchen, Anna felt she stepped into glorious sunshine. Bubba and Rocket were nowhere to be seen. It was a straight shot to her patrol car and escape.

  “Can I help you?” A man materialized from the gullet of the barn and was hollering at her. Two ghostly canine forms walked about in the gloom behind him. The voice was friendly enough, but Anna felt herself tensing; his voice sounded the death knell for her new-won freedom.

  “Are you Mr. Posey?” Rain soaked through her shirt and grew cold against her skin. Somewhere in her new closet was her Gore-Tex rain gear. Today being a car-and-kitchen kind of day, she hadn’t thought she’d need it.

  “I’m Fred Posey. Don’t stand out there in the rain.” Anna hesitated and he added: “Don’t mind the dogs. These old boys wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

  Anna didn’t believe him but trusted he wasn’t fool enough to let them eat a federal law enforcement officer without a pretty good reason. Walking slowly, despite the rain, she crossed the gravel and joined him in the shelter of the barn.

  Mr. Posey was considerably more substantial than his wife, but to Anna he looked to be in poor health. His skin was sallow, his hair thin and lusterless. For a man probably not yet fifty, his shoulders were rounded down and his neck bowed. Too long carrying too much weight. Anna had seen it before. People expected farmers to be robust and hearty types, but it was a hard life. It killed and crippled people young. Those who were remembered were those who grew old at it. They were tough as leather and nails.

  “Been talking to Cindy?” he asked. There was a guarded sadness in his face that Anna thought she understood.

  “Mrs. Posey?”

  “My wife.” A challenge if Anna ever heard one. Fred would brook no disparagement, even in the form of sympathy, where his wife was concerned. Anna liked that in him and relaxed somewhat.

  “We talked a little and had a Coke,” Anna said.

  “You come to talk about Danni?”

  Anna nodded. “I didn’t upset her, Mr. Posey.”

  “It’s hard on a woman,” he said. “You go ahead and ask me your questions.” He sucked in cheeks grown loose over the years and craned his neck as if in pain, squeezing off the tears. Anna busied herself getting a notebook and pen out of her shirt pocket, giving him time to recover. Fred Posey struck her as the kind of man who might never forgive a woman for seeing him cry.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noted the whereabouts of Bubba and Rocket. The two of them had crawled under the hulk of some sort of many-bladed, wicked-looking piece of farm machinery. For the moment, they seemed content to let her live.

  “I’m sorry to make you deal with this stuff,” Anna said. “But the sooner we can get leads, the better off we’ll be.”

  “I understand,” Mr. Posey said. “Ask away.” He wasn’t doing anything. Not leaning on a rake or holding a tool. His hands weren’t in his pockets. He didn’t fidget or shuffle his feet. Pale, bent, he just stood in the watery light, arms hanging at his sides. For some inexplicable reason, Anna was put in mind of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird “Do you know who Danni’s date was for the dance?” Heather’s boyfriend Matt had given her a name, but she wanted to hear it again from another source.

  “I think she was going to go with Brandon DeForest, Colonel DeForest’s boy. Her mom says they’ve been kind of sweet on each other for a while. They been squabbling, so maybe she went with some other boy.”

  “The boy didn’t come to the house to pick her up?”

  “Yes, I believe he did.”

  “Were you out at the time?”

  “I was looking at TV.” A silence followed that Anna didn’t want to break. When he spoke again, his voice rattled at the outset as he forced it through sorrow or shame or maybe regret. “Her mom said Danni looked real pretty. I guess she’d gotten a special dress for the party.”

  “Can you tell me about her friends?” Anna asked.

  Mr. Posey looked out into the rain, his eyes as colorless as the day. “She was always running around with some little gal or other. Her mom would know.”

  Fred Posey knew little about his only daughter, not even what year she was in school. Her birthday was the twelfth or the fourteenth of June. Her mom said she was a good enough student. He guessed she was happy enough.

  Anna thanked him and left him to his barn and his dogs and his rusting equipment. On the drive back to Airport Road, where she could get back on the Trace, Anna found herself feeling sorry for the murdered girl. Her father had abdicated and her mother had gone crazy. Danni Posey must have been very lonely.

  Ten miles south on the Trace, past the turnoff for the town of Raymond, just as she was beginning to dry out, Anna clocked an oncoming car at seventy-nine miles per hour. Too much over the speed limit to let go. Being damp and in a racist’s kitchen had made her crabby. There’d be no kindly warning today. They make an officer get out of a warm patrol car and stand in the rain; they by God get a ticket. Anna flipped on the blue lights and was startled when blue lights flashed in return.

  No traffic but for two law enforcement officers, both exceeding the posted speed limit. Anna slowed to a stop and let the sheriff’s car pull up beside her. Davidson rolled down his window and smiled. Suddenly Anna felt the Poseys’ farm had been an alien planet and now she was back on Earth.

  “Hey,” she said, lacking anything better with which to express he
r pleasure at seeing his officially rational countenance.

  “Hey, your ownself,” he replied. “I’m glad I ran into you. Save one of us a trip. I got the autopsy report back on Danielle Posey. If you want, we can pull off somewhere and go over it. I’ll get you copies of whatever you need, but it won’t be till tomorrow probably.”

  “I’d like a look at them now if you’re not in a big hurry.”

  “No hurry. At least not at the present.”

  “I’ll pull off,” Anna said.

  “Better not. Too much rain. One of us is bound to get stuck and nothing looks sillier than America’s finest digging around trying to pry their cars out of the muck. I’ll turn around and follow you on down to Dean’s Stand. It’s not more than a mile or two.”

  Vaguely, Anna remembered passing a tasteful brown NPS arrowhead sign with words to that effect. She led the way then turned left on a narrow tree-shrouded road. A quarter mile or less and it ended in a loop with a garbage can and a picnic table. Davidson parked next to her and leaned over to unlock the passenger door so she could slide in with only minimal exposure to the elements.

  “Dean’s Stand,” Anna said. “I’ve got to do my home-work. There’s nothing here.”

  “There’s history,” the sheriff returned.

  “There’s history everywhere,” Anna said, her humor not yet fully recovered. “That’s the nature of the beast.”

  “Yes, but in the South we take note.”

  She had no answer to that. “So. What’ve we got?” she asked.

  Davidson pulled a pair of half glasses from the pocket of his uniform shirt and slipped them on, adjusting them partway down his nose. That done, he leaned toward her to pluck a manila file folder from a battered brown leather briefcase. When he moved, Anna was aware of the warmth of his body and a faint pleasant odor of cologne. What kind, she couldn’t hazard a guess. She’d not bought a man cologne or aftershave for ten years. Maybe not all grown-ups wore Old Spice anymore.