Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  The Thunderbird would be towed to the impound lot, and the evidence would be placed in a locker at the ranger station. Anna left Thigpen and Dinkin to deal with it and turned to go. “Steve,” she said. “If you’ve got a minute, stop by the house.”

  “Right behind you.”

  She didn’t miss the knowing look Randy shot his cohort, but there was nothing she could do about it. Long ago she had accepted the fact that the park service not only attracted more college graduates than any other agency but was equally irresistible to gossips. There wasn’t a coffee klatch in the country that could hold a candle to a gathering of the men in green and gray.

  She meant to talk with Stilwell about Randy and Barth, his take on their refusal to provide backup, but she found herself unable to bring the subject up. So she drank a little of his Scotch, thanked him for driving down at breakneck speed, and resisted the urge to flirt.

  Stilwell had a way of looking at her that made her feel valuable. Probably a trick that served him well. She didn’t have to ask to know that he wasn’t married. He dropped that bit of information into the conversation early on, referring to himself as “between divorces.”

  Anna smiled at the memory of him even as she was glad he’d left. The person she really needed to talk with about her management dilemma was Molly. Since her sister’s engagement to Frederick Stanton, Molly could no longer be counted upon to be at home evenings and, childlike, Anna crossed her fingers as ringing sounded on the line.

  “Hello?” Molly said breathlessly, answering on the third ring. Gone were the days when she answered with the perfunctory “Dr. Pigeon speaking,” after the sixth or seventh hail.

  “Hah!” Anna said. “You’re expecting Frederick to call.”

  Molly laughed. “I’m always expecting Frederick to call, and bless his little federally employed heart, he always does. But you’re just as good.”

  Anna accepted this as high praise indeed. Molly and Frederick’s courtship had been whirlwind, but in the ten months of their engagement Anna had seen both of them settle deeply and comfortably into love.

  “I have a question for you in your role as psychiatrist and administrator,” Anna said and told her sister of the situation with Randy Thigpen and Barth Dinkin.

  “Those slimy, cowardly sons of bitches,” was Molly’s diagnosis. Her prescription followed: “They ought to be strung up by their thumbs or made to walk the plank or whatever they do to national park rangers who have become a danger to society.”

  Vindication, in the form of anger on her behalf, warmed Anna and melted the tears that fear and pride had kept frozen for the past three hours. “Here’s the weird part,” she said, her voice ragged and pathetic. “I feel so embarrassed and ashamed. Like a kid who doesn’t get picked or who has cooties.”

  “Like a rape victim,” Molly said coldly, and Anna was brought up short. As good fortune would have it, Anna had never been raped, but over the years she had dealt with nearly a dozen women who had. Hearing her sister’s words, she remembered the deep sense of guilt and shame the women carried. How hard it had been to turn that shame into anger, to make them see that it didn’t matter where they were, what they said, how they dressed, who they trusted, a terrible crime had been committed against them. The crime was what mattered. The perpetrator was the one who was guilty.

  “Holy smoke,” Anna breathed. “You think?”

  “Yes, I think, for Christ’s sake. I wouldn’t trivialize rape by suggesting this was the same thing. You did not suffer the invasion of your person that is so devastating. You did not suffer actual violence. And you managed to retain your power—you won. But most of the elements of rape are there: power, man over woman, violence—do you think they cared what happened to you? The desire to hurt, to degrade. Fear of you. Resentment of your power. It’s not quite classic, but it is most assuredly comparable. You called for backup. They hid out. All else is irrelevant: whether those jackasses really would have killed you. Lord! You cannot let this pass.”

  “I won’t,” Anna said. “The park service does have a watered-down bureaucratic version of flogging. I can’t remember the disciplinary procedures, but this being the government, it’s in a manual somewhere.” Chances were good she had it on one of her bookshelves, a relic of some long-forgotten management class she’d stumbled into before she’d even considered getting out of fieldwork.

  “I hope the consequences for those individuals are dire,” Molly said.

  The formalized venom made Anna laugh. “They won’t be. The NPS tends to make bold disciplinary statements along the lines of: ‘If you ever do this again, we’ll tell you never to do it again.’ But you get enough of those in an employee’s file and eventually they can be fired. Usually it takes years.”

  Feeling much better, Anna let the talk run on more pleasant subjects. The wedding date was set, September twenty-third. The hall was booked: an exquisite little B&B two hours north of New York City. The party would be small and formal: tuxes all around. Anna felt echoes of her wedding to Zach, twinges of envy and nostalgia, but mostly she felt joy and hope: joy for Molly, hope that she, too, might be inspired to cross over matrimony’s state line in the next twenty or thirty years.

  Sure enough, the standard operating procedures were rife with disciplinary guidelines. Anna had her choice of a formal discussion with a written report that would go into the personnel files, a verbal warning that would be from her lips to their ears, or something in between: a verbal warning with a written chaser, a report that went into her personal management files so, should the situation be repeated, she would have documentation that the employees had been warned and counseled. This was to include a description of what had transpired and what the corrected behavior would consist of, and a warning as to what consequences could be expected if the undesirable behavior should be repeated.

  Much as she was tempted to pull out the big guns and wreak as much havoc in her rangers’ lives as was humanly possible, Anna opted for choice number three.

  This was her first management challenge. If there was any hope of making a working team out of the rangers in her district, she wanted to salvage it. Should the gods be in a mood to be fair, Randy and Barth would feel gratitude that she was choosing not to give them a permanent black mark. Should the gods be feeling generous, Thigpen and Dinkin would respect her for facing their gross dereliction of duty head-on and dealing with it in an open manner.

  “Not bloody likely,” she told Piedmont as she switched off the light.

  Schedules in many parks were worked on a rotating basis. A ranger worked an early shift on his “Friday” and a late shift on his “Monday.” The upside was the weekend was thus maximized. The downside was one tended to work a different shift every day. At this juncture it worked to Anna’s advantage. Barth was on early, Randy at four P.M. She wanted to talk with Barth first and get his reactions before his partner in crime had a chance to work on him. At a guess, she didn’t figure Dinkin for a stand-alone guy. Without Thigpen involved, she suspected he’d be more receptive.

  She had no intention of seeing or speaking to either of them till afternoon. The rain and clouds were gone. Sun shone with a new fierceness, as if burning away the last vestiges of the kindly weather of spring and getting down to the serious business of a Mississippi summer. Feeling like a kid playing hooky, Anna left gun, cuffs, pepper spray and long trousers behind. Clad in uniform shorts, with hiking boots so old they resembled cordovan-colored lumps on her feet, she went around the loop of the campground. Walking purposefully lest she be sucked into conversation, she quickly reached the hillock at the west end and went down to the beginning of the Old Trace.

  Partly she was just goofing off—the rain would have obliterated any sign Thigpen and the others hadn’t pulverized with their elephantine tread—but still it was worth another look. Sad snapshots of Danielle Posey in death haunted Anna. Symptomatic of posttraumatic stress, so she knew it would pass. Most of it would pass. After each incident she carried away on
e or two pictures that became hardwired into her brain. At odd times they would flash behind her eyes, bringing with them emotion so strong it was as if they had happened again, in that moment. The image of the Posey murder that triggered the deepest compassion was that of Danielle’s feet. Little feet, soft and rounded, the prettiness of childhood not yet callused, clothed in their grown-up shoes. Strappy, sequined, high-heeled sandals—shoes Anna’s generation in crass moments would have called “fuck-me pumps.”

  On the feet of a sixteen-year-old girl they had spoken such innocence, a playing at the seamy side, posing as a woman of the world. The harmless charade of the very young, when aping evil is just a thrilling game and sophistication is achieved with paste jewelry and phony accents.

  Those feet, those shoes, had plucked at Anna’s heart-strings. Then they’d lodged in her mind. Like Heather’s, the sandals had three-inch heels, cut square. The ground was soft. If Danni had fled her attacker, she would have made holes in the ground deep enough the rain might not have washed them away.

  On the day Anna’d found the body, she’d not been able to pick up Danni’s trail. Today, like a search dog ordered to track, she intended to circle wider, try and pick up the trail farther out.

  Retracing her steps to the hollow where Danielle had been dumped wasn’t as easy as she thought it would be. Unlike the desert, Mississippi healed itself with astonishing rapidity. Moving slowly, examining leaves and mold and twigs to acclimatize herself to the kind of surfaces she must learn, Anna noticed small branches, broken off by the traffic of policemen and rangers, had already sprouted new shoots. Crushed leaves had bounced back, regained their original strength, and near as she could tell, a redoubled robustness.

  After an hour she took a break from her crash course in Southern tracking and sat on a log. Sweat soaked her shirt and the waistband of her shorts. According to the locals, it wasn’t hot yet: eighty-five degrees and seventy-two percent humidity. Anna poured half a quart of tepid water down her throat to even up the moisture content between body and air.

  The log was soft. The ground was soft. The air was soft. She was sinking into the geography. Moving was becoming more and more of an effort.

  “No wonder they used dogs in all those old prison movies,” she said to a box turtle trying to pass himself off as part of the forest floor. “Nobody can track in this stuff. It’d be easier to track a duck across a pond.” A praying mantis joined them, sitting wisely on a fungus ruffled and tinted into a sculpture of poisonous beauty. Had she not found a tick crawling on the back of her knee, Anna might have stayed to be sociable.

  She circled as well as she could the hollow where Danni’d been found. It was crumpled and cluttered, with no view of the sky, no landmarks, uphill and downhill as meaningless as that in a crunched-up ball of tinfoil, and she found it hard to keep her bearings. Each and every part of the whole steaming forest dripped, slapped, drooled, tickled or poked her. And, apparently overnight, a phenomenon of worms had descended. From every branch and twig little green worms hung down on long sticky fibers like spiders’ webs. They numbered in the zillions, dangling like hung paratroopers, till Anna waded through them and carried them away in her hair and on her clothes.

  And it was hot. Wet hot. Clothing itched and bound. Spiderwebs stuck. Mosquitoes filtered up from stagnant water. Anna discovered patience in Mississippi was an entirely different discipline from what it was in the Southwest. Here, with the sliming and sweating and tickling, it was nigh on impossible.

  After the better part of three hours, dehydrated and disgruntled, she gave up the hunt as a lost cause and walked back in the direction of the Old Trace. There at least she could move without having to break trail through suspended invertebrates.

  In acreage—if not in living matter—the area in which she’d attempted to find tracks was mercifully small. Ten minutes’ walk brought her to the top of the bank marking the perimeter of the ancient road. There she stopped to let the heat of her body and mind boil off before scrambling back down into the path of park visitors. Her circuitous ramblings had brought her back just fifteen feet to the west of where she—and half a dozen other people—had tracked up the bank on the body retrieval. A great tree, roots exposed, doomed to topple in the next good wind-storm, stood between her and the new-made trail to Danni’s penultimate resting place. Anna stepped from sight behind this venerable pin oak and unzipped her shorts to do a quick tick check. The vile creatures seemed to have lost their taste for her. The parts of her anatomy she could see were free of blood-sucking intruders. Zipping up her fly, she noted the ground between the toes of her boots.

  “Happiness is in your own backyard,” she muttered, quoting Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Neatly between her lug soles was a puncture in the earth’s soft brown skin. Beneath the sheltering oak, the ground was less overgrown and much of the rain had been deflected. Though the edges of the hole were not squared, melted as they had been by moisture, it was not a mark that came naturally. Anna sat on her heels and studied it. If there’d been a corresponding toe print, the shallower mark had washed away, but next to it, close to the trunk of the tree, was another hole. This one, even more protected by the elements, had one clear edge. Danielle Posey had stood here, leaning against this tree, much as Anna had done.

  For the next hour, Anna inspected each leaf and blade of grass in a fifteen-foot radius of her tree. One other mark that might have been made by the heel of the dead girl’s sandal turned up two yards from the trail they’d carved during the body recovery. There was no way to tell if Danni had been traveling east or west, but she had been here and she’d been alive.

  Having found all she was going to, Anna slid down the bank onto the bed of the Trace and sat in the soft earth to think. The claustrophobic embrace of the woods clogged her brain. Here there was a semblance of air and space. Idly playing dirt through her hands, she let pictures form. Danni was on the rim of the Trace, up where the going was hard, when down below was a gentle trail. Either she was lost, she was hiding, or she had come from some other direction, as Anna had, and happened upon the old road. The places a high-heeled girl in total darkness could logically have come from were limited. The Natchez Trace itself—even without a light, she could have found her way here from the campground. The trail was well marked and there might have been a moon on prom night. Anna couldn’t remember, but it was easy enough to find out. Danni could have parted company with her pursuers at the campground and fled in this direction; maybe she escaped from one of the cars full of revelers the campers had complained of. Or the party could have moved up here and then turned ugly.

  Another possibility was that they had come down the Old Trace from where it ended near the church. Anna tended to discount this: too far for drunks in bad shoes, and had Danni traveled the Old Trace in either direction, Anna was pretty sure, she would have seen the girl’s tracks. The paved road up to Rocky Springs Church ran roughly parallel to the Old Trace, with about half a mile separating them. It was conceivable that Danni had escaped a vehicle there, tried to run and hide in the woods, and been hunted down and killed. From the number of scrapes and scratches she’d sustained, that seemed the likelier scenario. But if she’d come cross-country from the paved road, why had her body, in its grotesque impromptu costume, been found back in that same direction? Caught her here. Killed her. Decided to carry her back to the car and hang her somewhere to make whatever twisted point the killer had in mind? Then tired, bored, or scared, dumped the body and cleared out?

  That would have meant the killer had carried with him whatever he’d used to whack her, the dirty sheet, a knife or scissors to hack eyeholes in it and twenty-two feet six inches of yellow nylon rope. A bit cumbersome when crashing around in the inky night belly of the forest, chasing a girl.

  If the plan had been to carry the body back to the car for the final robing and roping, then why cart the stuff along on the chase?

  None of the stories hung together. Still, the morning hadn’t been wasted. If Danni
had been here, at the Old Trace, alive, then dead a ways back in the woods toward the main road, it made sense she’d been killed between here and there. Or killed here, right where Anna sat play- . ing in the dirt. That thought was good for an unpleasant shiver and a quick look over her shoulder.

  Time to go home and shower, Anna told herself, not liking to think she believed in ghosts.

  Dusting the dirt from her hands, she noted a dull gleam in the embankment. Her mindless digging had uncovered a treasure. Thinking of the re-enactors’ tales of General Grant, a faint dream of Union gold skittered through her skull. The South was a battlefield. War artifacts were found as commonly as arrowheads out West: buttons, musket balls, rusted wagon parts and weapons. Anna blew the loose dirt off her discovery. Not gold, brass: a tarnished belt buckle with an insignia engraved on the back of it, a circle, like a seal stamped on important documents. Maybe Civil War vintage, maybe Boy Scouts.

  Park etiquette required the finder of indigenous treasures to leave them to be found and enjoyed by each visitor with sharp enough eyes and interest who happened along. Trouble was the next guy along was bound to steal it. The tragedy of the commons.

  Rationalizations in place, Anna decided to keep it.

  The campground was awake, cars and dogs and people fiddling about, tents being erected and fires burning—not because it was cold or anyone was cooking but because campfires hooked so deeply into the human psyche that all the environmental preaching the park service could muster did little to stomp them out.

  The Civil War camp had reappeared Brigadoon-like in the same place it had been previously. Captain Williams, shirtsleeves rolled up over nicely muscled forearms, was rigging a cast-iron tripod over a neatly constructed fire ring. As before, he was decked out in work clothes in a fashion more than a hundred years old. Ian, his stalwart frame draped over a tiny camp stool, was watching intently, the apprentice at the feet of the master.