Deep South

by Nevada Barr

★ 16 ★

  Just before the tumoff to Port Gibson, on impulse, Anna finally asked Paul to dinner. To her excitement and dismay, he accepted. Because she’d been tormented by motives of an ulterior stamp, she was awkward in his presence even as he’d tried to ease the evening by helping with the cooking and telling self-effacing anecdotes. It worked to a certain extent, but both spent a goodly amount of time talking to Taco and Piedmont, a sure sign of conversational strain.

  In an attempt to recapture the comfort she’d felt with him during his first, unannounced visit the night of Leo Fullerton’s suicide, Anna drank, three, maybe four glasses of Pinot Grigio, guzzling an expensive wine in an attempt to be out of her own skin, if only briefly.

  Paul had been warm and Paul had been sweet and Paul had been funny. When he left her at just before seven-thirty, Paul had been believable in his excuse. Mrs. Ruby Tangeman, the old lady whom Leo Fullerton was trying to get published, had called. Her great-niece “did” for the pastor. Using the housekeeper’s key, Mrs. Tangeman had visited Leo’s home to discover her precious manuscript had gone missing. The good sheriff had promised to drop by to hold her hand and help her look.

  Paul kissed Anna on the front step. Had he not turned and walked purposefully away, she suspected she would have tumbled into bed with him.

  Grateful for being saved that premature act of idiocy, she promised herself—as she had done since her first cold beer after emerging from the bowels of Lechuguilla Cave two years before—she’d quit drinking or at least cut down. Even as the words formed in her mind, she knew they’d be meaningless come five o’clock the following day—the witching hour when one longs to drop a veil over the harsh glare of the day’s events.

  Customarily, Anna wasn’t the least uncomfortable around men. She worked for them, alongside them and, most recently, as their manager. She’d always gotten on well with the brawnier gender. Nor had she led the life of a monastic. Some she slept with, some she dated and some she flirted with.

  The hideous self-consciousness this time around was engendered by the fact that not only did she want to run barefoot, metaphorically speaking, through the sheriff’s thick blond hair, but she liked him on a deeper level. One that made her want him to like her.

  Too much time around teenagers, she thought acidly. Apparently, adolescent angst was a contagious disease.

  Now all she wanted was to sober up. She’d been drinking long enough that three—or was it four—glasses of wine didn’t disable her. That perhaps Paul hadn’t even known she was knocking the stuff back too fast comforted her somewhat.

  She longed to leave the leafy, suffocating confines of Rocky, but she hadn’t descended the slippery slope far enough that she’d drive drunk. Not yet. Not unless she got a call-out. Would she have the courage to tell dispatch she’d had too much to drink and to call someone else?

  Shaking the thought from her, she left the house, not even the dog for company, and began walking toward the campground just to be moving. Daylight saving—or wasting, she could never remember the point of moving the clock an hour twice a year—was upon the South, and though the sun had set, the sky still glowed with a rich and lingering twilight. To the southwest, a storm was brewing. Deep purple clouds piled into the stratosphere, and Anna could hear distant thunder. Until it arrived, even when night fell, there would be no true darkness. A fat moon already hung above the trees.

  Stealth mosquitoes, robbed of their whine, bored itchy snouts into her back and shoulders but she ignored them, too distracted to return to the house and spray herself with insect repellent.

  As she reached the intersection where the spur of road to the employee housing met with the main road into the campground and picnic areas, the headlights of a northbound car strobed through the trees, giving her a momentary sense of vertigo.

  The car turned into Rocky and drove slowly past the visitor center. When its high beams raked across her, it stopped, backed up half a dozen yards and parked in one of the handful of slots in front of the unprepossessing brick structure. The door of the Chrysler Sebring opened, and a woman dressed in a suit, as if she just had come from a vestry meeting or working late at the office, stepped out.

  Anna had no wish to engage with anyone, but the woman had seen her and appeared to be waiting so she walked in that direction, prepared to answer whatever visitor-in-need questions the woman had brought with her. As Anna approached, the woman came toward her, hand outstretched, big smile, like a politician canvassing for votes.

  “You must be the new ranger here. Anna Pigeon, isn’t it?” she said, as Anna allowed her hand to be grasped and pumped. The woman’s fingers were a good thirty degrees colder than the ambient air temperature. Either she had no blood in her veins or she’d been driving with the air conditioner on max.

  “I am,” Anna admitted. The visitor was about Anna’s age and attractive in an anorexic, iron-coiffed kind of way. Her voice was high and melodic, made pleasant by a genteel drawl. Ladies’ Garden Club material without a doubt.

  “I was just coming back from Jackson and stopped in to use the facilities,” she said with an easy laugh. “I don’t like driving the Trace after dark. Everybody hears the stories. But the trucks on Highway 61 have gotten so bad it’s more than your life’s worth to go that way.”

  “What stories?” Anna asked feeling the dullness of the wine and her preoccupation.

  “You know. They look for a white woman driving alone. And if you ever get run off the road ... I think I’d drive straight into a tree before I let that happen.”

  The story smacked of an apocryphal tale handed down from one anonymous paranoid source to the next. “It happen to somebody you know?” Something was irritating Anna. Maybe the insinuating “they.”

  “No. But it happens.” Clearly the woman didn’t like her fears challenged. “You be careful,” she said, and Anna guessed it was more to ratify her own neurosis than any real feeling for a sister. “Anyway, I’m glad I ran into y’all. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Sensing a trap, though what kind, she couldn’t fathom, Anna waited.

  “You work with my husband, Sheriff Paul Davidson.”

  Snap: the steel jaws closed. Anna felt the pain in her gut as if the words had razor sharp edges. Like the Spartan boy with his stolen fox, Anna let the pain eat up her insides, never showing any of it on her face.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Davidson. Paul’s told me so much about you. I’m glad to make your acquaintance.” In that instant, Anna’s desire to be sober vanished. If anything, she wished to be a whole lot drunker before long.

  What Mrs. Davidson had expected, Anna didn’t know and didn’t care. The woman lied. She’d come from the south, not north from Jackson, and she left without using the john. Not that it mattered. The message she carried had been delivered and received. Anna had no quarrel with her and wasn’t in a mood to pass judgment on the techniques employed to protect what she deemed hers.

  As the Sebring’s taillights disappeared, winking like bloody stars dragged through the darkening woods, Anna felt the pain beneath her sternum wink out. The desire to numb herself with more booze was gone too. What she felt was a gaping emptiness, a bankruptcy of body, mind and spirit.

  Such was the depth of the hole, Anna couldn’t even tell what emotions would come to fill it. Disappointment? Cynicism? Bitterness? Sadness? Understanding? As long as it wasn’t bitterness, she would cope. Buried so deep she only guessed at it and resolutely remained in denial about the possibility of its existence, a part of her suspected the hollow place was lined with loneliness. She’d come from a long line of lonely women. Women who’d come to take pride in it, overlay it with competence, independence and hard work. And despise any woman so weak she gave in to it.

  Too tired to drag up the traditional defenses, Anna took her solace where she always did, in the natural world. The smell of the earth, the touch of the sky held for her a special alchemy able to turn loneliness into aloneness and, so, make it, if not sacred, at least
bearable.

  Careful not to think, careful just to be, feeling the roll of her feet as they met the asphalt, the silk of the storm-charged air sliding in and out of her lungs, she walked through the gathering darkness onto the loop road that corralled the campsites.

  Fires glowed comfortingly from behind the broken wall of vehicles marking the perimeter. Children, wild with the night, sped by her on small-wheeled bicycles, screeching like birds of prey as they passed. Overhead, bats echoed their movement, albeit with less racket.

  Anna was aware, but not a part. She watched the human species as a tree or a cloud might: with little interest and no judgment. And no kinship.

  Drifting thus with the darkness, she reached the top of the loop, where the trail led into the woods. Over her shoulder, the moon poured light enough to see by if she stayed to the improved pathways. Weary of the noise and light and smoke people poured into the atmosphere, she left the asphalt and followed graveled steps, carved into the clay and stabilized with six-by-six beams, down toward the creek.

  Breathing, five counts in, seven counts out, she felt her feet touching the gravel, noted the grating sound as her weight shifted the fractured stone. Clogging strands of spiderwebs or the fine silk the small green worms hung from the trees tickled her face and bare shoulders. Anna noted their touch but did not wipe them away.

  Frog and cricket song swelled from the woods on every side, her quiet passing not distracting the minute musicians. The childhood smell of grape Nehi floated around her like purple gauze. She was in the kudzu.

  The path she followed turned sharply to the left, running along the south side of Little Sand Creek. The moon began a flirtation with the clouds and its light, moving and uncertain, threw handfuls of silver coins on the rippling water.

  For a long moment, Anna stood on the bank of Little Sand, watching the play of shallow water and moonlight so different from what she was accustomed to. Here the chorus of night creatures sang so loudly that the water seemed to run in silence, no murmur of liquid over stones. No stones. The creek bed was of soft, smooth, golden silt. By the willow-wisp light of the moon, it shone cold as pewter.

  Clouds boiled up from the southwest. Rain clouds, towering cumulus filled with lightning and winds. Yet here, beneath and amidst the verdant cloak of life, Anna could not smell the coming rain, could not feel the gusts that would herald it.

  The hollowness left in the wake of Mrs. Davidson’s visit was edged with a new fear: had she run so far in search of a promotion that she left behind the tie with nature that had been her mainstay? Would moonlight, wind and wild things no longer bring her comfort?

  From behind her, over the sound of the frogs, she heard a woman shouting at her children, then the jarring blare of an automobile’s horn.

  REPENT. That was what the sign said when she’d first driven into this part of the country. REPENT. The second sign read: FINAL WARNING.

  Dredging little-used information from the archives stowed in her brain during sophomore religion class at Mercy High School, Anna remembered “repent” meant to turn away from, turn back.

  And she’d thought God worked in mysterious ways. Evidently in Mississippi, he just scribbled out his warnings on plywood and nailed them to roadside trees. Anna wished she’d paid more heed.

  The irate mother shrieked again, and Anna walked farther into the darkness to escape the brawl of humanity.

  The moon was gone to a shroud woven by the coming rain. Anna carried no flashlight, yet she pushed on, taking pleasure in the concentration it took to move along the wooded path in near-total darkness. Her progress was creeping, one toe nuzzled ahead at a time probing, blind as a mole’s snout, for roots or undergrowth lying in wait to trip her.

  Hands loose at her sides, she continued to breathe five counts in, seven counts out, aware of each unevenness underfoot, every nuance of the frog concert. She was unafraid. She’d walked the path in daylight and knew there were no overhanging branches to bang her head into. Other visitors, out for an evening’s stroll, would have sense enough to carry a flashlight so head-on collisions were pretty much ruled out. Coyotes were the largest predator in this part of the world, and as she was neither a cat nor a lamb, there was no danger from them. The only real risk was wading into the middle of a myopic and cowardly cottonmouth, but that thought never got past the booze and pseudo Zen that Anna was using to anesthetize herself. As she inched along, absorbed in her blind traverse, the emptiness within, if not healed, was filled with the richness of the night’s sensory offerings.

  Anna came finally to the three-cornered clearing where the path forked, one branch to the Old Trace, the other to peter out in the woods a quarter of a mile after crossing Little Sand Creek. Without the trees between her and the sky, enough light trickled around the edges of the storm that she could see. Being so long in the dark had made her night vision acute.

  The Old Trace, wide and clear, would allow her freedom of movement. Tired of the sightless pastime she’d so recently taken refuge in, she took the left-hand path and felt the joy of stretching her legs, covering ground.

  In less than a minute, the Old Trace opened before her. She slowed to absorb the picture it presented. Wind she knew must be escorting the clouds had arrived. Through the frog’s chirring, she could not hear it, and down in the earth and foliage, though she longed to, she could not feel it. But the wide gully of the ancient highway cut a clear view to the tops of the trees on either bank and the clean ribbon of sky between.

  Boughs tossed, leaves, black and ragged, swept a cloud-strewn sky only slightly lighter than they. Silver-edged by the hiding moon, clouds raced by at a speed usually only obtained by filmmakers fast-forwarding. Viewed in this narrow scope, the clouds seemed to be passing at the rate of geese flying south for the winter: winging, shapes changing, shadows racing over the brief canvas of cleared ground allotted.

  Surreal.

  Anna liked it. The real had been pretty piss-poor of late, and she was glad to step away from it.

  Letting wind she could neither hear nor feel blow her on, she entered a canyon beaten so deep in the soil that finally even the ravening vegetation had had to retreat to the top of the world’s skin, leaving a trail easy on the feet of travelers.

  Perhaps if she hadn’t had three glasses of wine, or been intent on hiding from her feelings, Anna would have sensed the restless spirit of the murdered girl or the malevolent spirit of her killer, but she felt neither and moved down the sunken Trace as one caught up in a wild dream.

  An eighth of a mile in, she began to feel raindrops and welcomed them. By the time she reached the great oak that marked where they had carried Danni Posey’s body from the woods, the rain had settled into a steady downpour. The frogs had hushed, their symphony replaced by low growls of thunder. The shifting light of the moon was lost in sharp flashes of lightning still too distant to be seen in anything but sudden glows, like the fire from bombs exploding far away.

  In one such unexpected revelation of light, Anna noted the earth had been disturbed beneath the tree and along the bank of the Trace, digging too deep to be accounted for by the mere rootings of armadillos in search of grubs. The disturbance stretched along the side of the Trace for thirty or forty feet. But for one, gaping like an open grave at the far end, there were no holes, just turned earth, as if the digger had prepared the soil for planting or, having dug up what was sought, filled the excavations in again.

  Given the soft and melting nature of loess, the soil of the area, one good rain would dissolve the evidence of the dig.

  The call of her profession, or the curiosity that kills cats, did for Anna what nature and wine could not. She was pulled out of her self-pity and her attempts at hiding from self-pity. Wiping the rain out of her eyes and wishing she had a flashlight, she walked along the freshly turned earth till she reached the hole at the end. Crouching, she waited for the next flash of lightning to tell her what was going on.

  The rain on her shoulders wasn’t cold; it didn’t r
efresh, but fell in warm drops the size of nickels to trickle into her armpits and run down the small of her back into her shorts.

  Lightning flashed and the hole before her was ignited. Harsh-cut edges made not by snouts or claws, but with the blade of a shovel. A shovel, edged but not necessarily sharp, long-handled enough to swing with tremendous force. Not knowing how she knew, Anna was sure Danni had been struck down by a shovel. Struck down here. In her dulled brain sparked the nonsensical idea that this grave had been opened to receive, to hide the girl’s corpse.

  Again a flash of lightning and Anna saw the bones. Washed clean by the downpour, they appeared in stark relief, like a Halloween skeleton under black lights, then were gone again in the darkness.

  The lightning was followed by a crack of thunder so loud that it struck Anna down, a blow that landed her face in the mud.

  Her ear was ringing from the impact and her mind struggling to right itself, form a cohesive thought, when the second blow landed.

  Not thunder.

  Reflexively throwing her hands up to protect her head, she felt rough canvas and fought, in panic, to pull it from her head and face. Hard hands batted her arms away. She dropped her fists to the mud, pushed, tried to rise, to roll. She was cuffed down again. Bare knuckles pounded: neck, back, shoulders. Weight dropped on her spine and her face slammed into the ground. She could feel water seeping through the canvas, puddling around her mouth and nose, threatening to drown her. Knees smashed down on the backs of her upper arms.

  A big man, heavy.

  Anna would not fight free of this one. A blow crashed into the side of her skull above her right ear. Her brain skidded away from the force, dragging consciousness in its wake.

  Anna could not draw breath, could not move, could not see. Another blow landed on the back of her head. Her jaw smacked against the wet canvas. Muddy water, or her own blood, flooded her mouth and throat. She began to choke.

  With a jerk, her head was pulled upward; then, as suddenly, it dropped again and she felt rough and uniform pressure around her throat. A noose. A noose like they’d found around Danni’s neck had been put around hers. She too would be found in the woods, rotting down to feed the fungi and the creepers.