Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  ★ 9 ★

  Piedmont, who’d never had a good word to say about dogs in his entire nine lives, was unaccountably distraught. Maybe it was the smell of blood and vet that hung about Anna. Maybe the old pumpkin-colored cat just missed abusing his buddy. Whatever the cause, he sat on the side of the tub and complained as Anna tried to soak out the aches Will Peterson had pounded into her with his scaly tail. Rocky Springs’s water was brown and gave off a faintly unpleasant odor.

  “Smells like cottonmouths have been peeing in it,” she told Piedmont. He twitched his long banded tail, oblivious to the fact that he swished it through bath water.

  “Turning swamp cat on me?” Anna asked. “Tail like our friend Mr. Peterson?” According to the Fisheries and Wildlife men, the alligator had been purposely put in her carport. A joke. A prank. The false accident report would be written off as a joke, a prank. It happened often to people who called attention to themselves or challenged the status quo: the first Asian ball player, the first black bomber pilot, the first female district ranger in southern Mississippi. Anna doubted it was anything so sinister as a plot to kill her-or her dog. Just put a scare into her. Or make a fool of her. Prove she wasn’t man enough for the job.

  Her own rangers could have masterminded it, but she didn’t think so. Randy she pegged as too lazy to catch an alligator or set up a conspiracy so elaborate he could be safely at home when the false report was called in. Barth didn’t seem the man for petty spite, or for midnight shenanigans.

  Shenanigans. Despite its potential harm to her and its actual harm to Taco, this struck her as kid stuff. The snickering over the cell phone, the use of clothesline to snare the alligator. Kids, for all their posturing, were mostly apolitical. They might ape what their daddies said about women in law enforcement, but they were too wrapped up in their own world to care one way or another what adults did for a living.

  If kids did put Will Peterson in her carport as a prank, they would have stayed close—in the woods or parked out front—to watch the fun. Anna’d been pretty busy for a few minutes there but she was fairly sure there wasn’t a car nearby. The woods, she couldn’t be sure of, but with the rain, it would have been off-putting to the average prankster and in the darkness she probably would have seen at least one flashlight during their retreat.

  The third alternative was the most likely. Kids had put an alligator in her carport not as a prank but to frighten or disable her for their own reasons. Heather, Matt, the dead girl’s boyfriend, Brandon DeForest, the two tuxedoed boys she’d seen fleeing the graveyard the night Danni died: these were the only kids she had any connection with in Mississippi.

  “Stupid,” she told the cat as she added more hot water to the bath, turning the knob with her toes. “Don’t kids read anymore? An attack on the detective only serves to make her that much more determined.”

  At the first respectable hour after dawn, she decided she would call the sheriff and see if he had better luck than she at tracking down the boys who’d partied in the cemetery on prom night.

  Paul Davidson. Anna let her mind float around his edges. A gentleness cloaked him that was unusual in a man and positively rare in a lawman. Years of sniffing out, chasing down and locking up wretched, unpleasant and dangerous people tended to smash one’s rose-colored glasses all to hell. Cynicism was close under the surface of most law enforcement people. Some wore it on their sleeves. Even more boasted of it, as if it were their gain and not their loss. Those not in law enforcement became the enemy: perps, scumbags, bleeding hearts, whiners, junkies, whores. In the green and protected version of policing Anna’d dedicated herself to, the care of the national parks, much of that poison was avoided. But she’d swallowed some. She could feel it in her intolerance of intolerance.

  Davidson, a white sheriff in a predominantly black county, one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the richest country in the world, seemed untouched. It wasn’t naïveté. In his position, to be naive would be deadly, not to mention nigh to impossible. His eyes had age in them that his face and body didn’t lay claim to. Paul Davidson had seen the dark side of life, Anna guessed, and survived it, soul intact.

  “Metaphysics,” she said to the cat. “I must be farther gone than I think.”

  Her thoughts drifted, changing dimensions as her conscious mind turned its burdens over to the land of the Tooth Fairy and flying without wings.

  The phone woke her. The water was cold. Piedmont was gone. Her skin was fish-belly white and shriveled.

  Taco. The vet said he’d call. Naked and shivering, she slopped from the tub and squished down the hall. “Rocky Springs,” she said into the receiver and knew video phones, where caller could see caller, were never going to be big sellers.

  “Anna Pigeon?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is David Christianson. Taco made it. He’s stable. I think you’ve still got yourself a dog.”

  “Good news,” Anna said. Piedmont appeared from somewhere and was butting her shins with his head. Anna sat cross-legged on the floor and tugged his tail to let him know he was loved. “When can I come get him?”

  “Not for a couple of days. I had to amputate his right rear leg. He’ll get around just fine. You’ll be amazed. But right now he’s one sick puppy. I want to keep him here for a while. You can visit,” he said kindly.

  “I’ll do that.” Anna started to hang up then jerked the phone back. “Thank you,” she said.

  “My pleasure. Dogs are God’s way of teaching us unconditional love.”

  Apparently God weasled his way into everything in Mississippi. Anna hung up the phone. “Taco’s going to be okay,” she told the cat.

  The crisis past, Piedmont feigned indifference.

  Anna crawled into bed with her cat and managed two glorious hours of sleep brought to a heated close by a dream of the Southern sheriff so deliciously erotic she woke feeling warm and wanton and quite refreshed.

  The investigation into the murder of Danielle Posey continued to weigh heavily, but the day-to-day housekeeping chores of her new position had to be attended to. Anna spent part of the morning at the Rocky Springs office on the phone with John Brown and the superintendent, and the rest wrestling with the archaic computer that had, to all intents and purposes, been gathering dust in the Port Gibson office since the NPS had acquired it. Near as she could tell, scheduling had been done by hand by the old district ranger and, if Steve Stilwell had done it differently during his tenure as acting district ranger, he’d used his own computer in Ridgeland.

  When George Wentworth poked his head in her office at ten-thirty A.M., Anna was glad of the excuse to take a break. The rain had stopped but the damp continued, all-pervasive in a warm mist that kept sweat close to the body. Anna was impressed at how natty the maintenance head looked. Most NPS employees dragged their uniform shirts out of the dryer and hoped for the best. George—or more likely his wife—had ironed his. Creases from the pockets were crisp and sharp and the button-down shoulder tabs, vestigial epaulets, were starched to military precision.

  Barth didn’t come on till noon and Randy was scheduled for the four-to-midnight shift so they had the office to themselves. Having doctored their coffee with non-dairy creamer and, for George, with artificial sweetener, they plopped companionably down, one at each of the desks the field rangers had moved to face each other.

  “How goes the murder investigation?” Wentworth asked. Anna’d tipped her chair back and rested her heels on Barth’s desk, careful not to squash a half-eaten bag of Cheetos he had stashed there. The maintenance head was just being personable, Anna could tell, and she enjoyed telling someone who had no vested interest in their findings. Talking it through helped clarify things.

  “I’ve had dealings with the Poseys,” he said when she reached that part of the story. “When they leased that acreage, my boys had to bush-hog it. He’s not a bad egg taken all around like a doughnut. These old farmers have a hard life, some of them. You can’t really
blame them for getting hard themselves. Mrs. Posey ... Well let’s just say I was ready to run her over with a bush-hog and swear on a stack of Bibles it was an accident till I found out she was mentally ill. I met the girl—Danni—once or twice. She turned out to be a pretty nice girl. Or seemed like one. But her brother’s not somebody I’d want to meet in a dark alley.”

  Wentworth had a touch of a drawl, but the idioms he used reminded Anna of the cowboys she grew up with. “You’re not from around here, are you?” She intentionally mimicked what seemed to be the sixty-four-dollar question in Claiborne County.

  George laughed, showing his perfect teeth and, against the velvety brown of his lips, a startlingly pink tongue.

  “I’m from San Diego,” he said.

  “Why did you—” Anna couldn’t think of a comfortable way to finish the question. With the exception of commercialism and communism, talk of the “isms” had become socially unacceptable. Walls went up, defenses did likewise, people became cagey and hyperalert.

  “Why did a black man move to Mississippi?” George rescued her easily. “Leda, my wife, is from Natchez, and once these girls get Mississippi mud between their toes there’s no making them happy till you bring them home.”

  Curiosity overriding good manners Anna asked, “How has it been?”

  “Maybe like a Jew returning to Israel. There’s a downside, but there’s a black culture here: black churches, businesses, social clubs. Not so much a sense of the silent majority blocking you with a smile.”

  The ease was gone, Anna had poked too close to the bone. She changed the subject to one she knew gave George pleasure, his sought-after football hero of a son. “Has your son”—Anna scraped around her brain for the boy’s name—“Lock, decided to go join one of the professional football teams?”

  The homely question didn’t have the desired effect. George lost that edginess, but a new discomfort settled over his face. Worry, if Anna guessed right.

  “Twenty’s a tough age. It’s hard to know what you want,” Wentworth said guardedly.

  Anna’s coffee cup was empty and she was striking out in the socializing department, but it seemed awkward to. just jump up and go back to her office. She squirmed till she’d pretty much pulverized Barth’s Cheetos before the two of them were rescued by the ringing of the phone.

  “Time to get back to work,” George said with a hint of relief in his voice and Anna picked up the receiver.

  The call was from Sheriff Davidson.

  He dropped by the office around one o’clock. After the XXX-rated dream Anna’d had about him, she found herself embarrassed, as though he could read her mind. It made her gruffer than usual. To his credit, he was unperturbed and it was only a matter of minutes before the awkwardness passed. Still, she found herself looking at him with more interest than she had before he’d revealed himself in his incubus persona.

  “Time to divvy up chores again,” he said. He’d put his Stetson on the built-in counter that served as Anna’s desk: Now he moved it in a circle, one half inch at a time, by pinching the rim. Nice hands, Anna found herself thinking. She rubbed her temples with the heels of her hands to force her brain to behave.

  “The DeForest boy needs to be talked to. Chances are he’ll have a good idea who the two boys you saw in the graveyard are. And one of us needs to track down those campers you mentioned, the Civil War re-enactors. They’ll be locals. If they saw something, they might be able to make sense of it in the context of the personalities involved. Mississippi is a small town; everybody knows everybody else and about half the state is related.”

  “You choose,” Anna said. “It’s your turf.”

  Davidson thought for a minute. The hat made a quarter circuit. “Why don’t you tackle DeForest. From what I hear, he’s a brazen sort. Full of himself. Big man on campus at the high school. He may get his back up at me. If we’re lucky, he’ll want to brag if he gets a female audience. I’ll talk to your campers.”

  Anna told him what she remembered: Jimmy Williams, a lawyer in Jackson; Ian McIntire; and a Baptist minister, Leo something.

  “No sense starting with a lawyer,” the sheriff said as he put on his hat. “I’ll look up McIntire then try my luck with the minister. We speak the same language.”

  Davidson left a copy of the report he’d gotten back on the physical evidence. When he’d gone, Anna read it, glad to postpone for a few minutes another pilgrimage to the halls of Clinton High.

  Danielle’s dress was stained with mud and plant materials in accordance with where the body had been found. Fibers had been found on the dress that could have been from the seats of three different vehicles. Not surprising given the date motif. If necessary, the fibers could be matched to those of a suspect’s vehicle. Except, at present, there were no suspects. The sheet she’d been draped in had trace evidence of grease, fibers, rust, mud, gasoline, paraffin, wool colored with vegetable dye in a process that hadn’t been used in seventy years, and specks of rotted crumbling leather. The eyeholes had been cut recently and with a knife or scissors. The report was consistent with a piece of cloth that had probably been kept in the trunk of an automobile. In other words, a rag.

  The dead girl’s underpants had semen stains and stains from plant material.

  Anna filed the report with the copy of the autopsy. The sheet had been a car rag. That suggested Danni had been killed near a vehicle, or had been transported by a vehicle after death, or her pursuer had carried the sheet with him for the express purpose for which it was used. Him. Anna thought about that for a moment. Not as opposed to “her,” though Anna did think of this murderer as male. A whack on the head could have been delivered by a woman—or another girl—but few women had the physical strength to carry one hundred eight pounds dead weight very far, especially not in the dark and over rough country. Anna was thinking of “him” as opposed to “them.” This was, or had been made to look like, a hate crime, with the amateur KKK overtones added after death. Lynchings were crimes committed by mobs. Danielle could have been put to death by a group. That was more chilling somehow: the mindless rage of the pack, humanity lost.

  By the time Anna headed north, the mists had burned away and the sky was the deep blue she associated with autumn in the upper Midwest, cloudless and impossibly deep. After the wash of the rains, the green was so intense it looked unreal and everything sparkled with water droplets. As she drove the Trace, each curve revealing a scene rich with life and as picturesque as illustrations from a children’s book, Anna was struck again by the beauty of the state. Over her years as a Yankee and a Westerner, she’d heard Mississippi described many ways. Beautiful had never been one of them. Maybe, like her, others had gleaned their impressions of the Deep South secondhand.

  Adele Mack, the vice principal at Clinton High, was not overly pleased to see her, but she hid it well. Anna appreciated that. Business was business; good manners made it go more smoothly. Adele looked different from before, but Anna couldn’t put her finger on it till Ms. Mack was talking into her telephone. The mask of cosmetics was exquisitely in place but the vice principal was experimenting with painting the lipstick just outside her lipline. From a distance it may have made her lips appear more full and luscious. Up close it gave her a disconcerting out-of-focus aspect.

  When Anna told her she’d come to speak with Brandon DeForest, Adele cheered up a bit. “He’ll be in chemistry,” Ms. Mack said efficiently. “I’ll get him myself. You’ll want to talk to him in the office. Brandon is easily distracted.” As she walked out, careful to close the door behind her, Anna got the sense that if any of Adele’s little charges had to be given up, young Brandon would be at the top of her list of sacrifices.

  Ms. Mack left Anna and the boy alone in her office. Brandon eschewed the second visitor’s chair and sat in Ms. Mack’s place behind the desk, then smiled at Anna as if he’d scored a point.

  She smiled. Once one knew the games of intimidation, they served only to highlight the other’s insecurities. DeForest w
as fighting for high ground before a single shot had been fired. Anna wanted to know why.

  Theoretically he was a handsome lad: well-built, with the muscular upper body and thick neck of a young athlete made to do neck bridges and sprints. His hair was honey-blond, worn long on top and shaved close to the head on the sides. Anna knew that was the fashion of the moment, but when she was of high school age it was the earmark of a new and cheap haircut. Brandon’s features were regular, his ears small and close to the head.

  The qualifier “theoretically” came to mind because, though he’d photograph well and most people would see him as beautiful, in actuality there was something unappealing about him. A pimple in the corner of his mouth, an aggressiveness in his excessive eye contact, dishonesty in the pose he struck of exaggerated comfort. In the seconds it took her to make her appraisal, he tilted back in the vice principal’s chair and put large sneakered feet on her desk, daring Anna to comment.

  As she was dragged again into the realms of youth, an old taunt came to mind: Anybody who’ll take a dare will suck eggs.

  “Take your feet off the desk,” Anna said pleasantly, risking the egg.

  DeForest looked at her. His eyes were blue, the color of new denim. He was trying to read her, but he was a babe in the woods. She could read his thoughts the way an actor reads a TelePrompTer, word for word: “And if I don’t? Want to make me? You’ve got no say here.”

  She waited. In the end he said nothing, just procrastinated long enough to prove insolence but not so long as to be insubordinate, then put his feet on the floor.

  “Do you know why I’m here?” Anna asked.

  “Ms. Mack said you had some questions.”

  Anna waited, an open, friendly look on her face. She’d already questioned two of his classmates. There were few secrets in high school. With the possible exception of the teachers, everyone in the building had a pretty good idea why a National Park Ranger was on campus asking to see the team quarterback.