Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  That was where the story ended and the blackout began. No matter from which direction Anna came at it, Heather couldn’t remember anything else.

  At five-thirty, Anna let the girls go. She’d seen Heather late on prom night, and believed that she had lost the end of the evening to alcohol.

  “Do we go see the DeForest boy?” Barth asked when they were back in the Crown Vic, threading their way out of the neighborhood.

  “Let’s talk to Sheriff Davidson first,” Anna said. “See what he wants to do with it.” Bullying children had given her a headache. It felt good to lean back against vinyl cooled by air-conditioning and let Barth keep the car on the road.

  “Sounds like DeForest to me,” Barth said. “Drunk. Mad. Showing off for his buddies. Things got out of hand.”

  “Sounds like,” Anna said absently. “I wonder who she was going to meet, where she was meeting him. Maybe she had a rendezvous set up at Rocky before she even left the dance with DeForest.”

  “Sounds more to me like she was running to boyfriend number two because she was scared of boyfriend number one,” Barth said obstinately.

  Boyfriend number two was black. Barth sincerely didn’t want a black man to be the killer. Anna could understand that.

  “She said she’d used DeForest to get out of the house. That suggests to me she might’ve had a plan to meet number two from the get-go.”

  “Steal number one’s car and drag girlfriend Heather along?” Barth said. “Doesn’t sound like much of a plan to me.”

  Danni could have stolen the car to meet her lover because she was drunk or angry, or wanted DeForest to meet the Other Man. Who knew? Maybe she wanted them to fight over her. And bringing Heather along—same story, wanting an audience to her popularity. Or maybe Heather was uninvited and just jumped into the getaway car. Still Anna conceded the point to him. Arguing suppositions was a waste of energy.

  Barth steered smoothly off I-20 and up onto the Natchez Trace Parkway. To the north the road ended at a battered barricade, indicating a gap in the ambitious plan to run the Trace from Natchez to Nashville. This was a ten-mile stretch of road between where the Trace ended at Clinton and where it began again in the city of Ridgeland, a northern suburb of Jackson. At present the section was under construction. Secretly, Anna hoped to be gone from the Trace before it opened, bringing with it urban crime gathered as it passed through the capital city.

  Barth turned south. Though the concept of wilderness was an illusion on the Trace, a narrow strip of well-manicured gardens crowded on both sides by homes and farming concerns, Anna felt relieved to be free of the towns, to rest her eyes not on the smeared faces of baby beauty queens, but upon the ten thousand shades of green that bedecked the woodlands. Green was a soothing color. Green was the color of the walls in sanitariums, the color of the NPS uniform. Far less authoritarian and menacing than the blacks and blues favored by the police.

  Several hundred yards down the Trace from I-20 was a pullout. Near as Anna knew, it had no historical significance but was a rest area with a picnic table. Three cars were parked there and a pickup with the ubiquitous rebel flag on its bumper. A lone man sat behind the wheel of a late-model Oldsmobile. No one else was in evidence.

  “What’s with all the cars?” Anna asked, just to speak of a subject other than murder.

  “Clinton pullout’s kind of a problem area,” Barth said with disgust. Peeling off the two-lane road, he cruised behind the cars.

  “Hinds County plates. They’re from around here. So why use a pullout?” The question was rhetorical and Anna waited obediently for the answer. It was not forthcoming.

  Barth’s demeanor was undergoing rapid changes. As Anna watched, she saw the disgust being tempered by confusion, which melted into alarm, then resolved itself into the pain of an innocent—a child discovering there is no Santa Claus.

  “Joggers,” he said abruptly. “Just folks leaving their cars here while they run.”

  Before Anna could speak, Barth pulled out of the turnout and put his foot on the accelerator. A quick glance at the speedometer: he’d nearly floored the Crown Vic. The needle was easing up on seventy-five.

  Another time, Anna might have amused herself by trying to ferret out the reason for her companion’s peculiarities. At the moment, she was content to let it be. Tonight, the vet had promised, she could retrieve Taco. A three-legged dog, a disgruntled cat and a bottle of good wine were all she wanted to think about.

  Taco was ecstatic. So was David Christianson. Both were grinning widely when Anna arrived. Mrs. Christianson’s prayers—and Anna’s, had she admitted to being the praying kind—had been answered. The black lab, his right haunch swathed in bandages, was a great deal more healthy and exuberant than anyone had dared to hope.

  When Taco saw her, he struggled to stand, fell on the legless hip and whined at the sudden pain. Anna’s eyes stung as he dragged and scooted across the linoleum, willing to endure the unendurable for the privilege of washing her feet with doggie devotions.

  Anna met him more than halfway and sat on the floor letting him lick her face and snort dog breath up her nose without recrimination. To the vet she said: “Every law enforcement officer should have a dog. That way you’re guaranteed at least one somebody will be glad to see you.” Christianson laughed long enough to let Anna rid herself of the lump in her throat. A good doctor for animals and people.

  “He’ll learn to get around,” the vet promised. “In a month he’ll be his old self. Till then you’ll want to work on your upper body strength. He’s a big boy.” With that the vet easily lifted the mass of wriggling dog flesh and, at Anna’s instruction, deposited Taco on the nest of blankets she’d prepared for him on the front seat of the Rambler.

  Christianson had stayed late at his clinic so Anna could be reunited with her dog. Southern hospitality. Having thanked him with deplorable Yankee reserve, she drove into the long and gentle twilight of Mississippi’s spring. Though the sun had been down more than half an hour, the temperature was still in the high sixties and the air soft and fragrant. Humidity held life close to the earth, retaining heat and scent, cloaking it close around the body. Anna loved the scouring air of the high desert, the arid winds that stripped the day from skin and soil, but ears full of frog music and senses alive to the richness of this new place, she began to suspect she would come to love this too. A vague sensation of being somehow traitorous to the Southwest plagued her for a moment. She banished it by telling Taco of the adventures he’d missed since his run-in with the alligator. Anna wasn’t talking to him as though he could understand or give her good counsel—he wasn’t a cat, after all—but because she wanted to talk and Taco wanted to listen.

  In peaceful conversation, everybody happy with their role, Anna drove the three miles on Clinton Raymond Road to 1-20 and then onto the Trace. As she coasted up the on-ramp to the parkway, she reached the part in her narrative where Barth had gotten squirrelly and sped away from the Clinton pullout. As she told the tale to the dog, it occurred to her that it was more than Barth’s sudden decision to head home that bothered her. Four empty cars, one man. Joggers, Barth said, and it made sense at the time. Except there hadn’t been any joggers. The Trace, at least on the Clinton end, had no trails, no dirt lanes. The road was bordered by overgrown, weedy, boggy terrain and very little of that. Joggers would have to run along the one, the only road. Anna and Barth had driven it together for forty miles, and she’d not seen a single runner.

  “Mind if we stop a sec, Taco?” He thumped his tail. Anna took that as a yes.

  No cars were at the pullout. She parked crosswise, so she could watch oncoming traffic and reviewed what Barth had said: a problem area, the two cars she’d paid attention to had Hinds County plates. Barth had posed the question of why locals would come to a rest area off the beaten path when they could go home. He’d cruised slowly through the tiny parking lot, past the Olds with its single occupant, a couple of nondescript sedans and the pickup truck. In that brief span of
time, he’d seen or thought something that spurred the sudden retreat.

  “It’s a drag trusting no one,” Anna said peevishly.

  Taco raised one eyebrow. Not trusting was alien to his nature.

  “I’m going to look around.” Not wanting to call attention to the fact he was a cripple and couldn’t go, she added, “Guard the car.”

  Light lingered above the treetops and in the open spaces. Beneath the trees, night was already gathering for its assault on the sky. The mowed grassy knoll was unremarkable but for an abundance of litter Anna’d not found in pullouts farther south. The wooden picnic table was scarred with carved graffiti. In the waning light, she couldn’t read it, but she suspected it was the usual mix of love and mathematics: Alice + Joe = defacement of government property. Better the picnic table than the trees; the table was already dead.

  Beyond was the band of greenery that edged the Trace. Already the shadows had congealed, but the suffocating darkness of the woods at night had yet to solidify. In the growing gloom, Anna could see half a dozen paths—social trails, the parks called them, not officially maintained trails but trampled lanes visitors made, usually taking shortcuts. Nothing was at the Clinton pullout to take shortcuts between. People wandering into the trees to pee? Six trails: a lot of natural-world peeing for a place less than a mile from a truck stop with modern facilities.

  Picking the path that showed the most traffic, Anna pushed into the gloom. Behind her, she heard Taco begin to bark.

  Vegetation had grown up thick and wild as is the way with natural areas that have been deforested and allowed to come back. Natural selection had yet to cull the weaker species. Every weed, vine and shrub struggled desperately for light and space.

  This was not a good place. Anna could sense it. It lacked the feel of earth and clean, living things. There was about it a tired carnival air, as if hard boot heels had ground lime snowcones into every scrap of ground. Weeds, spindly, clawing, head-high, plucked at her hair and clothes. A cotton ball brushed her shoulder and she stopped. Not cotton, Kleenex. Staring to catch what light remained, Anna realized the plethora of pale puffs she’d taken for feral cotton blossoms were toilet tissue.

  Most of them were toilet tissue. A closer look and she realized condoms festooned the bushes. Used condoms. Ahead of her, on one of the few trees that had fought past the stringy starving phase, was a square of paper. She followed the path to it, contorting her person to avoid contact with the scatological flotsam.

  Without a flashlight, the page looked to be a print of modern art ripped from a magazine, surreal shapes and forms meaning nothing.

  Anna pulled it from the tree and, holding her breath, backed through the sewer, ran to her car, climbed in and slammed the door.

  “Too gross even for a dog,” she told Taco. “Don’t lick me—I’m defiled.” A past master at eating revolting forms of offal, Taco licked her anyway.

  Anna switched on the overhead light and looked at the picture she’d torn from the tree. The strange forms became comprehensible. It wasn’t surrealistic art but graphic pornography so up close and personal that the body parts lacked humanity. At the bottom, written in black magic marker, were the words “Follow Me,” and an arrow.

  ★ 13 ★

  Night was in full-throated song by the time Anna and Taco returned to Rocky Springs. Invisible creatures, frog and cricket and nightingale, celebrated in dark festival. A half moon hung above the treetops, so bright its perfect light dappled the road surface with the shadows of leaves. Laden with perfumes intoxicating enough to sweeten the hand of Lady Macbeth, a breeze stirred the shadows and the asphalt appeared insubstantial.

  Anna turned the Rambler into the campground entrance. “Almost home,” she told Taco. The dog had worked his crippled hindquarters around till he could rest his chin on her thigh. His breathing sounded shallow and his nose was warm. Anna worried she’d brought him home too soon. The vet had argued for several more days in the hospital. The drawback was Christianson was a large-animal vet who spent his days making barn and sty calls and couldn’t care for an inpatient. He’d argued for removal of Taco to another vet. Anna’d argued for home care and won. Now she wondered if she’d placed the restorative power of love too far above that of medical science.

  “Here we are,” she said and, “We’ve got company.”

  Parked in the driveway, neatly to one side so her patrol car was not blocked, was a battered and aging Toyota pickup. Arms folded across his chest, a man in khaki pants and pink polo shirt leaned against the rear fender.

  Had she not the faithful and ailing Taco to consider, Anna would have thrown the Rambler into reverse and fled to a Motel 6 for the night. Each religion had its own version of hell: fire, ice, an eternity without the love of God, pointy-tailed vermin with pitchforks and unsavory appetites. Anna’s was a place where she had to talk to and be talked at by people day after day. A place where there was no solitude, no silence, no sacred meadows, nowhere one didn’t feel the scrape of others’ eyes upon one’s skin. A place where words fell in a constant assault upon the senses.

  According to these lights, Anna had had a particularly hellish day. Words had battered down like hail. Threats, lies, excuses, hopes, dreams, packed into words and shoved from her and to her. Whoever had come up with the chant “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” had been an idiot. Words could hurt worse than any stone, and the bruises lasted longer.

  Harboring every intention of being rude, she cranked the wheel and turned into her driveway. Headlights, purposely left on high to be more offensive, raked across the intruder. He raised his hand to shield his eyes, and Anna realized it was Sheriff Davidson.

  Her intention to be rude joined other paving stones to hell. It wasn’t merely that her mood lightened, her heart leapt in accordance with the rules of paperback romances. To Taco she said: “Hey, look, we’ve got a helper.” Her voice was so downright chipper it annoyed her. “Fucking Pollyanna,” she muttered to maintain equilibrium.

  Abreast of the defrocked lawman, Anna stopped and spoke through the window. “Are you up to carrying seventy pounds of man’s best friend?”

  “I can do that,” Davidson agreed. “I take it you got your dog back.”

  “Most of him,” Anna said. She had inherited wide shoulders and a strong back. Working outdoors kept her fit. In a pinch she could bench her body weight but genetics decreed she was to be female, five-foot-four and a hundred twenty pounds. History had tagged more than forty years onto that package. Though Anna knew she could lift and carry Taco, she liked the dog well enough to admit she couldn’t do it smoothly and painlessly.

  That was what she told herself even as a weasly little voice, muffled by layer upon layer of pride, reminded her it was a very old and very feminine form of flattery to ask a man to lift heavy objects.

  Davidson had gone around the car and opened the passenger door. “Hey old buddy, old pal, old doggie, old thing,” he was murmuring kindly to the damaged pooch. He leaned in, and Anna leaned over to help scoop Taco into his arms. The faint aroma of shampoo came off the sheriff’s hair and, when she brushed his arm during the canine transfer, his skin was warm and dry. Desire passed through her in a wave that left her feeling vulnerable and exposed. Even the marginal glow of the cabin light seemed enough to illuminate her nakedness. Pulling back suddenly lest rampant pheromones give her away, she cracked her head on the door frame.

  “Damn!”

  “Are you all right?” This was said with such warmth and concern that Anna felt compelled to snap his head off.

  “I’m fine. Watch it with the dog.”

  Southern hospitality was evidently not something acquired by the simple expedient of moving south.

  Taco was an exemplary patient till Anna unlocked the front door and Paul carried him inside. Being home didn’t soothe his doggie nerves. Once indoors, he began to whine, then growl low in his throat. Feebly, he tried to struggle free as if, bandaged and crippled, he needed
to give chase.

  “Easy fella, easy boy,” Davidson crooned in a way Anna had heard half a hundred cowboys croon to agitated horses.

  “Hold him a minute,” Anna said, and hurried down the dark hallway toward the back bedroom. The light switches in the Rocky Springs housing had been installed by a mischievous electrician. None were located where reasonable homeowners had been taught to expect them. The light to the hall was at the far end. Having traversed the hallway without incident, Anna didn’t bother to locate it but stepped into an even darker bedroom and felt her way around the end of the bed to the far side to switch on the reading lamp.

  With the sudden light, she felt relief and was surprised. She’d been strung tighter than she’d thought. Taco’s growling didn’t help. Either it carried a note of menace not accounted for by phantom pain in his severed leg or her imagination was working overtime. She sensed a wrongness about the house, or thought she did. But the lamp showed her bedroom just as she had left it, not terribly neat but comfortingly familiar even in its bleak just-moved-in persona.

  Having gathered up the disreputable cushion that was the only keepsake Taco brought with him from his old life, Anna carried it back to the front room and arranged it by a stove she wouldn’t need for six months.

  Careful and conscientious as a practical nurse, Paul settled Taco on his bed. The growling continued, an alert and hostile sound that made Anna want to follow suit though she didn’t know what demons the dog was seeing.

  “Vets give them ketamine,” the sheriff said. “Maybe they hallucinate just like people.”

  “Flashbacks?” Anna asked. Ketamine was a powerful hallucinogen that anesthetized animals without depressing the respiratory system.

  “Who knows?” Davidson said philosophically.

  Taco pulled his lips back and showed teeth ugly with intent. Scrabbling with his forepaws, whining against the pain, he tried to pull himself off the cushion and across the hardwood floor toward the hall. The fur on the back of his neck was standing on end. So was Anna’s.