Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  Anna’d grown up in a logging town in Northern California, and Bogachitta Mills had the rustic look she’d come to expect of the industry. Computers might have invaded the offices, but the yards were still places of saws, piled logs, evil-smelling ponds and men who worked hard for their wages.

  Barth was driving, Anna riding shotgun. Most places she’d worked, at least the places with cars, the men had loved patrolling with her; she had no competitive need to drive. Left to her own devices, she preferred to look out the window, watch the world go by and think her own thoughts. Her ideal was never to patrol in an automobile at all. Cars cut rangers off from the natural world, blunted their senses and, Anna was convinced, over time, by some alchemy of metal and glass, turned them from rangers into cops.

  The crunching . of tires on gravel announced their arrival. Barth parked in front of a derelict flat-roofed building with faded blue letters proclaiming Bogachitta Mills. Inside was a single desk, a computer and a woman in her late fifties or early sixties with cotton candy blond curls high on her head. A pack of Virginia Slims lay next to an ashtray full of dead compatriots. The most recent sacrifice burned in a groove put in the glass for that purpose.

  “Sean’s out in the field today,” she informed them, then coughed through a throat full of phlegm. If she wondered what they wanted with the Doolittles, she hid her curiosity remarkably well. So well, Anna wondered if the long arm of the law reaching out to Bogachitta Mills employees was a common occurrence. Recovered from her coughing fit, the woman said: “Jackie’s out on the chipper. You can go ahead out, but ya’ll gotta wear hard hats.”

  Anna and Barth each took a yellow plastic hard hat from the row she indicated with a red porcelain nail and left their Stetsons in their places.

  Finding the chipper did not challenge the detecting skills. The machine, full-sized trees being stuffed into its maw by two men and a Caterpillar armed with a giant pincer claw, made a horrific racket Envying the men their ear protection, Anna stood with her fingers in her ears watching once living plants reduced to mulch. Years before, she remembered, a man in the Northeast had murdered his wife, frozen her body and fed it through a wood chipper. Seeing one in action brought the old story home in a graphic way.

  “Yuck,” she said, her editorializing lost in the din.

  Several shattering minutes passed before the heavy equipment operator saw them and signaled to someone out of sight behind the chipper, and the operation was shut down. The ensuing near-quietness was a palpable balm that flowed into the yard in a sweet wash, loosening the muscles Anna had tightened in an attempt to keep the noise from rattling the core of her being.

  Under hard hats and protective eyewear and earwear, the men were almost anonymous. Almost. Anna had recognized Jackson Doolittle as one of the two men high on the lip of the chipper guiding logs into its gullet. He saw them the instant the chipper shut down and started to jump off the back side out of sight.

  “Jackie!” Barth called before Anna could speak. “Miss Loretta wants to know what you’ve gone and done with her car.”

  Doolittle stopped, catching on to the chipper for balance.

  “Come on down,” Barth said reasonably. “We’ll get your mama’s car back to her. But you need to talk to this lady here. Come on, now.”

  Jackson Doolittle hadn’t struck Anna as being burdened by an excess of brain cells, but it seemed even he finally realized there wasn’t much point in running off again unless he planned to run from his job, his home and probably the only life he’d ever known. He jumped heavily to the ground. “Takin’ a smoke break, Billy,” he said to the operator of the mechanized claw.

  Doolittle led the way to a picnic table in the shade of a tree that had grown draggled and downcast from watching the fate of its fellows. The mill worker sat on the table, his feet on the bench. Anna braced one foot up on the bench and waited. She was curious to see what he’d say without the guidance of a question. Barth didn’t jump into the silence, and she was impressed.

  Fortified by a deep drag from a Marlboro he’d fished from the pack and lit, Doolittle said: “How much trouble am I in?”

  “Quite a bit,” Anna replied.

  “Is Mama going to get her car back?”

  “That depends.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry me and Sean run off like that.” He looked up through his smoke, and Anna saw the startling green of his eyes, green as a cat’s. All cats are gray in the dark—she’d not noticed them before. “Mike was starting to show his butt. When he gets like that there’s no tellin’ what he’ll do. We got scared is all. I mean, I knew you could find me if you wanted to,” he added, as if this made running away null and-void.

  “When Mike gets like what?” Anna asked.

  Jackson looked at the tip of his cigarette. Finding no answer there, he searched the new leaves overhead, already weighed down with the ephemeral tragedies of life. “Oh, I don’t know. Like that. You know.”

  “No. I don’t know. Was he going to hurt me?”

  A long silence followed. Jackson searched the places that had failed to provide answers before. They failed him again. In the harsh light of April, with the dirt of the day’s work on his face, Jackson looked like what he was, little more than a boy. “I don’t know,” he repeated his mantra. “Maybe. Mike gets kind of crazy when he’s been... when he’s... you know...”

  “Coked up?” Anna suggested.

  “Liquored up?” Barth said at the same time.

  “Yes, ma’am. Like that.”

  “And he was coked up and liquored up last night?” she pressed.

  “Yes, ma’am. I guess he was.”

  “And you, do you guess you were?”

  Another silence, another search through the leaves and smoke, another disappointment. “Not coke. Not me and Sean.”

  “Drunk, though.”

  “Look, ma’am. I’ve got me a DUI—”

  “One?”

  “Maybe more than one. I can’t get no more. They’ll be fixin’ to take my license then, and how’d me and Sean get to work?”

  “Tough break,” Anna said unsympathetically. “You sure that’s not why you ran? Because of the DUI and not because you were scared?”

  “No, ma’am. We was scared, too.”

  The man who had been working with Jackie feeding trees into the chipper was sauntering toward them. Barth turned to stop him, but Anna said: “It’s okay. We’re nearly done here.”

  “They bothering you, Jackie boy?” he asked. He slung one hip on the table and pinched the Marlboros from Jackie’s shirt pocket, helping himself to one. He was a black man, probably in his fifties, strong and beautifully fit, his hair cropped close and grizzled at the temples. With the sweat and dirt and sawdust, both men were a uniform tannish-gray.

  “Nah. They just come to see about Mama’s car like I was telling you,” Jackie replied. The older man punched Doolittle gently in the arm and tucked the smokes back into the younger man’s pocket. It struck Anna that he’d been taking care of Jackie for a long time.

  “Jackie and his brother gotta have a car,” he told Anna. “Their mama can’t work; she’s laid up. Their dad, he’s been gone awhile.”

  “I hear that,” Anna said, warmed by his straightforwardness, but making no promises. To Jackie she said: “Mike Posey was making noises that he knew who murdered his sister. What can you tell me about that?”

  Jackie looked pained. He shot his buddy a glance that Anna couldn’t fathom. Fear but what of or for whom was unclear. “Mike just talks. Likes to seem like he knows more’n he does,” Jackie said.

  Anna was unconvinced and fixed him with an open, interested stare. Without words for cover, Jackie began to wiggle as if he wanted to hide his nakedness. The hum of the chipper, shut down but not shut off, wove around them like the drone of a summer day.

  “Mike doesn’t know nothin’,” Doolittle blurted. Again the look at his friend.

  The older man flicked his cigarette butt away and said to Anna: “Posey
said he was gonna find the nigger that killed his sister.” He filched another cigarette from Jackie’s pocket. “What, Jackie? You don’t think he talks that way when I’m around? He don’t to my face because I could snap him like a dry stick. He’s that kind that talks around the edges, making sure you hear him and pretending he’s not talking to you at all. You and Sean steer clear of Posey, you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Jackie said.

  “Posey’s not right in the head. Bad blood. His mama’s been sick in her mind her whole life. He takes after her. Maybe it’s not his fault. I don’t know. But you get a rabid skunk in your yard, you don’t go trying to make a pet out of it.”

  Jackie Doolittle took the lecture with good grace.

  “I’ve got to get back to work,” the man said. “You people finish up here.”

  “Beau’s foreman,” Jackie explained. “I got to get back.”

  “In a minute. Why does Mike Posey think his sister was murdered by an African-American?”

  “Because he thinks everything ugly is black and everything black is ugly. Like Beau said, he’s not right in the head.”

  “Think,” Anna ordered. “He’s drinking and talking. Did he say anything at all about it? The sheet his sister was draped in, KKK, anything?”

  “No. None of that. I think maybe he said something about his sister seeing somebody.”

  “Somebody black?”

  “Maybe. It’s just a thing I’m thinking. I don’t remember him saying so right out.”

  Driving back through the town of Port Gibson, Anna found herself looking for Sheriff Davidson’s car with the interest of a schoolgirl dragging Main Street in hopes of accidentally meeting him.

  Cursing herself for a fool, she grabbed the first subject that came to mind. “The city too beautiful to burn?” she said aloud.

  “That’s what the chamber of commerce says,” Barth replied. Black Southerners didn’t seem to have the interest in the Civil War their white brethren did. Perhaps the fantasies of who they were could not be so easily glamorized.

  “Then again maybe Grant didn’t burn it because the town militia turned up its toes and cried uncle,” Barth said. “There’s histories and there’s histories. Mrs. Posey’s not the only crazy white person in the South. Round about then they had an alderman here got himself hung for killing his wife. He dressed her up as a Yankee soldier and ran a Yankee sword through her half a dozen times.

  “Same night he took a deer rifle to six slaves. Shot ‘em and left ’em for dead on the garbage dump at the back end of this plantation he had. No law against that. He was hung for killing his wife.”

  “Were they?” Anna asked.

  “Were they what?”

  “The slaves he left for dead, they all died?”

  “All but one, a kid no more than fifteen. He’d been shot twice in the head and twice through the belly. An old white lady who used to scavenge from the garbage dump found him and dragged him a mile and a quarter to her shack. Since his health was never good again and he didn’t talk anymore, the alderman’s heirs let her keep him.”

  “White of them,” Anna said and glimpsed a half-smile chipped out of a racial memory bitter as quinine.

  “That kind of stuff never makes it into the brochures,” Barth said.

  Anna laughed. The South was growing on her. The extremes were more honest than the even veneer of trendy sanity that afflicted Northern and Western cities. To be human was to be melodramatic, to feel things acutely, love and hate and lust, to search for the Holy Grail, outrun the other kids in the fifty-yard dash and care mightily about it.

  “So. What do you think about the Posey girl being killed by a black man—assuming our killer’s male,” Anna asked.

  “It sounds real handy,” Barth said curtly.

  “But not impossible.”

  “You know how many murders we had around here last year?” Barth asked. “Eighty-nine. Eighty-eight of them were black on black. One was white on black.”

  “No black on white?”

  “Not one.”

  Anna pondered that for a bit. Surely it had a deep sociological meaning, but whatever it was escaped her. “You don’t think Danni was involved with a black boy?”

  “I didn’t say that. It happens but not as often as you’d think. There’s strong opposition from both sides. Mixed-race couples scare everybody. Everybody. What I’m saying is if Danni Posey was involved with a black boy it wouldn’t’ve been him killed her. More likely that brother of hers would’ve killed her himself, seeing as how she’d tarnished the family name.” Barth laughed but not without bitterness. Anna didn’t hold it against him. She felt honored he was talking to her at all. Maybe experience taught Mississippians that outsiders not only did not understand the complex chemistry that made up their culture but drew their own conclusions to use for their own ends, usually at Mississippi’s expense.

  Mike Posey might murder his sister if he’d found her with a black boy. Anna reached back to her odious interlude with the man. There’d been little or no evidence that he grieved for Danielle. And he’d said something. Anna closed her eyes the better to reenter the past. Maybe Danni had it coming. Her brother had said that of her brutal murder. If he was so cold as to think a sixteen-year-old girl deserved to have the life stomped out of her, he might be cold enough to deliver the blow. Especially with the added incentive of forty thousand dollars in insurance money if he ruined her face.

  Then there was Cindy Posey, a card-carrying lunatic who had “set free” her black babies to live with the other animals of the forest. Even if the black babies were delusions, it spoke worlds about her attitude. What if she found her girl, her beautiful Danielle, the supermodel and great white-trash hope, had been betraying the family in such a way? Anna put the picture together in her mind. Mrs. Posey suspects Danni of seeing a black boy. She follows them on prom night. Danni leaves Brandon DeForest as he said she did. She meets up with her illicit lover. They come to Rocky. Have sex. Mrs. Posey whacks her daughter with an edged instrument. Panicked, the boyfriend flees. The sheet, the rope, moving the body: efforts of a crazy woman to point the finger elsewhere.

  Fine and dandy, except Anna doubted Cindy Posey could have carried Danni as far as the body was carried. And why would she have blunt instrument, rope and sheet with her deep in the woods? Where was she taking the body? If Cindy Posey was guilty of the murder of her daughter, she had to have had help. Back to Mike Posey. They could have done it together. Mother and son were racists. Mother was mentally ill and son was very possibly following in her erratic footsteps. Mike’s talk of getting the “nigger” who killed his sister could be a smoke screen to cover their tracks and cast the blame on a group of humans he’d chosen to hate.

  That still didn’t explain the time, the place and the bizarre accoutrements of the death. Nor did it explain the chase. By the condition of Danni’s shoes and hose and the superficial scratches on her arms and face, it was clear she had been pursued for quite some distance. Would she have run from her own mother and brother? From what Anna’d been able to glean, Danni was the apple of her mother’s eye. There had been trust and love of a sort between them.

  If Danni did have a black boyfriend, why might he kill her? Lovers’ quarrel? That seemed a little extreme, but it happened. Maybe he caught her back in the arms of Brandon DeForest and in a rage struck her down. If Danni had threatened to go public, perhaps his family would have been angered. Though the autopsy proved she was not, she could have told him she was pregnant and the boy was not ready to make a commitment that would be a hard one to keep in America’s racial climate.

  Boy. Anna thought about that for a moment. There was nothing to indicate that, if Danni had an African-American lover, he had to be a boy. Perhaps she’d gotten involved with a married man, a man with a wife, a family, stature in the community, a life he valued greatly and that would be blasted all to hell if a little white girl, of statutory-rape age, started telling people of their liaison.

&n
bsp; Danni makes threats. He follows her on prom night. Gets her alone. She runs. He catches and kills her, then dresses the body in a pseudo KKK costume to throw the blame back on the white population.

  Chases her deep into the woods. Strikes her down. Leaves the body, hikes back to his car, gets sheet and rope, hikes back through the dark, drapes and nooses the corpse, carries it a hundred and fifty yards and abandons it.

  Nothing hung together.

  “I need to have another chat with Heather,” Anna said. “Want to come along?”

  Barth drove through the gates to the ranger station and parked next to Randy Thigpen’s patrol car. For half a minute, he let the engine idle. Anna guessed he was making hard choices. After the disciplinary actions, battle lines were drawn. Thigpen remained unrepentant. Either he would be kept in line by Anna’s threat or he wouldn’t. Either way she expected she’d have to weather the back-biting and gossip and undermining that was the bane of the park service, a plague she felt had only grown worse as salaries and living conditions had improved. The spirit of the NPS, created by the natural and cultural treasures and the love of them by those dedicated to protect them, had sickened somewhere along the line. Not died, just sickened, and morale suffered. To Anna’s way of thinking, Thigpen was one of those not only ailing but spreading the disease.

  Barth was having to decide whether to risk climbing out of the barrel with a white Yankee girl or let the other crab pull him back into the safe and familiar morass of discontent and self-pity.

  “I’ve got a lot of paperwork to catch up on,” Barth said uncertainly, and Anna felt a pang of disappointment that startled her in its intensity. A few seconds ticked by. She reached for the door handle, sorry that she had to go it alone.

  “It’ll keep,” Dinkin said with a sigh. “Sure. When?”

  Anna was thrilled out of proportion for this tiny victory. She looked at her watch. If they left soon, they’d get to Clinton between school and supper. “Now’s good.”