Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  “We thought maybe steroids,” George said finally. “You know, the mood swings and all. We asked Lock about it and he said no.” He looked up at Anna. “You’d have believed him. He didn’t say it like he even cared we’d thought it. Just this quiet ‘no’ like it didn’t matter.”

  Clinical depression. Anna’d been there. Too deep to care, too sick to pray. An ugly thought wormed through the layers of her mind.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “A week. Maybe less. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  It did to Anna. Danni Posey had gone to Alcorn with Heather and Shandra Lea to a football game, and after the game they’d gone to a college football party. Heather and Shandra Lea thought Danni had met a boy there. Danni’s brother, Mike, thought she had a black sweetheart. Lockley Wentworth, a handsome, charming, black football hero, goes into an emotional tailspin immediately after Danni Posey is found beaten to death.

  If George Wentworth’s son was not Danni Posey’s lover, that was way too many coincidences for such a sparsely populated state.

  “Did he get any bad news? Football teams or grades or a health problem?” Anna asked.

  “That’s just it,” George said, and the frustration loaded his voice till it broke in anger. “Nothing like that. Nothing. He would have told us. His mother and I’ve been over it and over it. There’s nothing he couldn’t tell us. Even if he’d got a girl in trouble, something like that, he’d of told us.”

  Unless the girl was underage, white and dead.

  Anna wanted to talk with the Wentworth boy in the worst way—without his parents’ permission. George struck her as the kind of man who would lay down his life for his son. Admirable in a father. A pain in the butt in a murder investigation.

  “How old is Lock?” Anna asked, suppressing the knowledge she was being opportunistic and hard-hearted.

  “Just twenty. Hardly more than a boy. Too young to throw his life away.”

  Not a juvenile. Fair game. To assuage her conscience, Anna said: “My sister’s a psychiatrist, and from what she’s told me over the years, I’d guess Lock’s suffering from severe depression. He’s treatable. Don’t let him cut off his options yet. When he comes out of it, he can pick up where he left off.” Unless he was in the state penitentiary on a murder charge.

  George accepted her crumb of hope for the crumb it was and returned doggedly to his paperwork.

  Barth was likewise employed, head down over a pile of speeding citations, the top one so dimpled and smeared from rainwater as to be almost illegible. Either he’d decided to snub Anna or was distracted by his work. He didn’t look up or acknowledge her greeting. Anna was happy to shut herself in her office and think.

  Accepting the theory that Lock Wentworth was Danni’s secret lover did not mean accepting him as the murderer. His sudden and acute depression indicated intense emotion. It was possible he’d killed the girl in a fit of rage or jealousy and was eaten up by guilt. It was equally possible he was doing Romeo to her Juliet. In which case his life was at grave risk. Depression could be deadly. He could be suffering guilt because he wasn’t with her, couldn’t protect her. Shame because the relationship had been clandestine. The Poseys weren’t going to be the only parents outraged. Anna doubted George Wentworth would be pleased to see his son risk his hopes and ambitions by bringing upon himself the kind of trouble a sixteen-year-old white girl carried with her. Lockley Wentworth might be scared out of his wits: his girlfriend was murdered, her brother frothing at the mouth to pin it on the black boyfriend, the body draped in a sheet reminiscent of the KKK, a symbol designed to frighten and intimidate. And who could he tell? His girlfriend was dead, and he couldn’t even cry about it. At least not where he’d have to explain it to anybody. If he had killed her, it was a reasonable assumption that it wasn’t premeditated. If he hadn’t, he was bottling a poisonous mix of emotions and stoppering it with terrible anger at whoever had destroyed Danni and at himself for not being there to save her.

  Anna flipped through her Rolodex till she found the number for the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Office. The kiss she’d enjoyed so much the night before turned sour on her lips. Business with pleasure, like wine with whiskey, was bound to leave one with a hangover. This hangover took the form of second guesses. Was she calling him because she needed to share the new theory—it was not yet evidence or even information, merely an equation she thought she’d seen in the welter of a wounded father’s words—or was she using it as an excuse to call? If so, was it transparent? This second adolescence rattling between her ears, she knew when Davidson answered she’d be all icy business. Then he’d wonder what he did wrong. Would he shy away? Just never—

  “Oh, shut up,” Anna growled and punched the numbers. To her relief, the sheriff was out. She would have a chance to go through the mental gyrations of a schoolgirl with a crush all over again at around three-thirty when he was due back.

  “Have him call me,” she snapped, then, to make amends to the innocent deputy who’d answered the phone, she said the first thing that popped into her head. “Sorry. I just dropped the dictionary on my foot.” Whether or not it made any more sense to him than it did to her, he sounded placated.

  For half a minute she stood where she was, staring down at the smooth wood of the built-in desk and absently pushing the antique belt buckle around the way a tot might push a Matchbox car. Colliding worlds of lust and law enforcement, personal and professional, pubescent and menopausal had left her mind a blank, wiped clean.

  “Ah,” Anna said as time, place and task flooded back into her reality. “Barth!”

  The ranger did not appear and, rather than shout again as her grandmother assured her only fishwives were allowed to do with impunity, Anna stepped out of her office into the long dingy room that housed the coffeepot and the desks of her field rangers.

  Barth sat as he had before. Back to her office, head sunk between thick shoulders, he gazed down at the same pile of traffic citations. Assuming he’d not heard her call, Anna started to repeat his name, then she noticed he sat in front of exactly the same pile of citations. The ticket defaced with rainwater was on top of the pile, partly hidden by the edge of Barth’s meaty hand, right where it had been when Anna’d first come in. Between his thumb and forefinger, as before, was a government issue pen. Either the man was dead, asleep or caught in a time warp.

  “Barth!”

  He didn’t start like a man caught napping. He began to stir slowly, as if her voice reached him through a fog faintly.

  With the ponderous movement of the very old or those in pain, he turned his head to look at her. Evidently, there had been a time warp. Anna resisted the urge to check the wall calendar to see if years instead of minutes had elapsed from when she’d first stepped into her office to call Paul till she’d stepped out again to talk with Barth.

  Bartholomew Dinkin was close to forty but retained a certain youthfulness. The years had touched him only lightly till today. This noon it looked as if Father Time had clog-danced on his face. His cheeks were dragged down, and red rimmed his lower lids. An ashen hue dulled the skin around his mouth. Alarming as these symptoms might be, the most disturbing lay on the desk in front of him: an untouched bag of Cheetos.

  “What’s with this office today?” Anna said, tired of other people’s problems. “George is in a funk. You’ve gone catatonic. Is it the water around here? What?”

  His baleful gaze rested heavily on her face. In the bleak depths of Barth’s translucent eyes, Anna saw no accusation, no attempt to punish or inflict blame—the customary manipulations of the publicly bereft—but sadness so dead it looked like hatred turned inward. Anna had seen it once before, at Carlsbad Caverns, in the eyes of a woman who’d accidentally killed her sister in a climbing accident.

  “I guess there is something in the water,” she said more kindly. Uninvited, she crossed the small space to lean a hip against the end of his desk. “Do you need to take the rest of the day off or anything? You’re looking a
little under the weather.”

  “I don’t want time off,” he said too quickly, and Anna knew he was fighting some bitter memory. Saying nothing, she leaned, swung her foot. Then a partial answer came to her.

  “You were friends with Leo Fullerton,” she said. “I was sorry to hear.”

  Barth looked away but not before Anna saw what she could have sworn was shame in his face. Shame or guilt. Sadness was there, the sorrow of losing a friend, but the emotion wasn’t pure. An energy underlay it that belied mere sorrow.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “He was my pastor,” Barth replied. Anger flashed, making his eyes suddenly dangerous. Something wasn’t jibing, but Anna chose not to pursue it.

  “What are you messing with?” Barth asked, heading off a line of inquiry she’d already abandoned.

  Without realizing it, Anna’d carried the Civil War relic she’d been playing with out of the office and continued to fiddle with it while they talked.

  “I found it on the Old Trace,” she said, and handed him the buckle.

  Placed on his wide palm it looked no bigger than a doll accessory. Barth took a magnifying glass out of his desk and studied the brass rectangle carefully. “It’s in good condition,” he said. “Hardly even scratched. Union. Issued near the end of the war.” Flipping it over delicately with the tip of a finger, he scrutinized the back. “Here’s an interesting thing. Look here.” He handed the buckle and the glass to Anna. She looked where he pointed. The inscription “G.G.35th” had been scratched on neatly with a sharp instrument. “My guess could be General Grant’s army thirty-fifth division. Either the supply sergeant scratched it on or the soldier himself did it.”

  Anna was impressed. “Are you a collector?”

  Barth shook his head. “When I worked in Tupelo, I did a little curatorial stuff. Went to some training and the like.”

  “Is it worth anything?” Anna asked.

  “It won’t be if you keep on messing around with it. You’ll scratch it all up. Besides, it’s not yours.”.

  “I know that,” Anna said, slightly miffed.

  Barth took it back and studied it again. “Historically, it would have been of some interest, but since you moved it that’s pretty well shot.”

  Anna took the hit quietly. Barth was right. A relic, out of context, lost much of the information it might have been able to impart to archeologists and historians.

  “These aren’t that uncommon. I’m not up on my artifacts, but this might get you five, six hundred dollars or thereabouts.”

  Less than a third of what Jimmy Williams, in his persona of Captain Williams of the Avengers, had offered for it. She told Barth.

  “Lemme look.” Barth bent over the object. “This on the front is a state seal, the state where the soldier was from. That may make this a more important find. Who’s this Jimmy Williams?”

  “He’s the guy with the mustache who makes that Civil War camp where Pastor Fullerton used to go.” Now that the man was dead, it seemed callous to call him just Fullerton or Leo, so Anna accorded him his title.

  The pastor’s name brought the burden of guilt back to Barth’s countenance and Anna was sorry she’d reminded him of whatever it was she’d reminded him of. Maybe he’d missed one too many Sundays in the front pew.

  Barth put the magnifying glass back in his desk drawer and set the buckle to one side where Anna couldn’t further defile it with her oily little fingers.

  “I’ll catalog this and pony it up to Tupelo,” he said. “Pony” was a term Anna’d only just learned. Road patrol rangers would carry packages to the next district and hand them off to a ranger there, a four-hundred-fifty-mile relay race.

  “Re-enactors are usually serious about their hobby. It’s funny this Williams would offer to buy a historical artifact off a district ranger.”

  “Maybe he thought I was crooked,” Anna said.

  “Or stupid.”

  “That too.”

  George Wentworth emerged from his office, nodded to them in lieu of good-bye, and left. His appearance reminded Anna she was in a bit of a hurry.

  “I want you to come with me to talk to George’s son,” she told Barth. “I think he’ll be more comfortable with a man, and someone he knows.”

  This time Anna drove. She needed the distraction and the control that driving afforded. As she told Barth what she had put together and why she wanted to talk to Lockley Wentworth, he grew more silent.

  Disapproval radiated off of him in waves, thick and noxious. Anna stood it as long as she could.

  “Barth, we’re not going down to lynch the kid. I just want to talk to him,” she finally said in exasperation.

  “Got to talk to him,” Barth agreed. “No good way outta that.” The oozing morass of disapproval thickened.

  Anna wasn’t going to give in to it again. She switched the radio to 103 FM, the local station for the newest in boot-scooting and shit-kicking tunes. Lowering her window, she let in the sweet spring air. She took pleasure in the flower-dressed hills and marveled at the towering green graveyards where kudzu had suffocated parts of the forest, covering every inch with a thick, dank carpet of green leaves, a green so dark and voracious as to seem nearly evil.

  Several miles north of Hermanville, where George Wentworth lived with his family, Barth broke his self-imposed silence.

  “If what you say is true, they’re going to pin that girl’s murder on him.”

  “That girl,” not Danielle Posey. Humanity had to be expunged before the political battles could be fought.

  Anna turned off the radio, rolled up the window. “Who’s ‘they’? ” she asked mildly. “Sheriff Davidson? Me? Chief Ranger Brown?”

  “They is they,” Barth said stubbornly and Anna remembered an exchange from the play Lenny Bruce that her husband had acted in.

  “They is very paranoid, Lenny,” Bruce’s mother had said.

  “They is very powerful, Mama,” the comic had replied.

  “You don’t live in the same world we do,” Barth broke into her thoughts. “Maybe it’s not better, not worse. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is, it’s not the same. Sure, you hear stories about some middle-class black couple pulled over for nothing and some white cop throwing his weight around, calling ‘em nigger or boy or whatever. Maybe you’re a nice enough person. You think that’s bad news. But it’s not your news and you can tuck it away. ‘Oh that was a long time ago’ or ‘there’s bad apples in every barrel:

  “Our news is it wasn’t a long time ago. And no, it doesn’t happen often, just often enough you know it’s still out there.

  “Something like this comes up and they want Lock to be guilty. They need Lock to be guilty. The ninety-nine percent of good white folks’ll maybe go ‘Tsk, tsk.’ Come Sunday, there’ll be sermons about it. But nobody’ll interrupt their day. And they, that stinking Posey one percent, that white boy who couldn’t keep a job if he stapled it to his shirttail and wants somebody to blame, they’ll push till it’s a done deal. The truth’ll get lost.”

  “A black jury won’t buy it,” Anna said.

  “By the time it’s been to trial, George is broke and Lock’s lost what chance he’s got to play ball.”

  Anna had no answer for that. Win or lose, a court trial was devastating to everyone but the lawyers, who in an underpopulated, poor state like Mississippi had to eke out a meager living charging only a hundred dollars an hour instead of the three-seventy-five their big city counterparts commanded. Feeling stung from the lecture, she said: “Life isn’t over because you can’t play football.”

  Barth looked at her as if she were from another planet. Football and hunting, not autumn and winter, marked the seasons in the South. Basketball and baseball were just something to pass the other six months till they came around again.

  Anna switched back to her own brand of logic. If Danni had been “in love” with Lock, why had she gone to the prom with Brandon? Was it as cold as it seemed? Heather said Danni had taunted the
DeForest boy, said she just used him to get to the dance. It could be true. At sixteen, one didn’t realize that playing with the feelings of others could have very real and sometimes deadly consequences. Was Danni just toying with the boys? Was Lock Wentworth her “black experience”? Experimentation? A way to get even with her parents, her boyfriend or her brother Mike?

  “I think children should go to same-sex convent schools,” she said.

  Barth said nothing.

  Hermanville was east of the Trace and twelve miles south of Rocky Springs. Though Anna’s mailing address was Hermanville—the town of Rocky Springs having been defunct for more than a century—she’d never been there. The town, if such a humble scatter of buildings around a crossroads and a single-room post office could be called a town, embodied the Northerner’s view of the “real” Mississippi. The gracious homes of Natchez were not in evidence, nor was the classic architecture Anna’d seen in Port Gibson and the city of Clinton. Trailer houses and shacks sat at odd angles to the two-lane road as if they had fallen haphazardly from a passing cargo plane. A juke joint, Mississippi’s homegrown version of the local pub—an antiquated building that looked as if it had started out as a beauty salon, passed a chunk of its long life as a store-front church, and finally settled into its dotage as a liquor-purveying establishment—had four cars parked in front of it. Catty-corner from the juke joint was a convenience store, windows blanked with a decade’s accumulation of ads and flyers. On the broken concrete steps three young men, appropriately down-and-out, obligingly passed a bottle in a brown paper bag among them to complete the cliché.

  If Hermanville could be said to have outskirts, the Wentworth home was on them. George’s house was of brick with a tidy yard ringed by majestic pecan trees that predated the house by a hundred years. A kitchen garden, the com already knee-high, had been planted adjacent to the two-car garage. Wentworth was evidently not one of those men who gives his all only in the workplace. The house, the yard, the garden, the gravel drive were all maintained with scrupulous care.