by Nevada Barr
Wretched as she felt, she was not sorry to have left the hospital. Sun on her face, the smell of hot asphalt and honeysuckle melted the stale food and antiseptic odors from her skin; she felt more like a living thing. Still and all, she allowed Barth to open the door for her and eased into the familiar contours of the Crown Vic’s seat with relief.
Barth took his place behind the wheel, cranked the ignition and turned the air-conditioning up. Anna preferred the healing heat of spring, but considering what she’d put the man through, she stoically withstood the cold, soulless air.
Barth didn’t put the car in gear. There was an ultimatum brewing; Anna could feel it. To pass the time, she cranked the rearview mirror around to survey the damage to her face. Gross, the childish word sprang to mind. Her unshampooed hair was flat and spiky by turns. Bed-head moussed in place with remnants of mud. Her left eye was in the enraged reds and purples of early bruising. The sides of her neck were black with it, and raw contusions striped her left cheek.
She thought she’d expected it, thought she knew how bad it would be, but it shook her.
“Wherever we go, whatever we do, you stay in the car or the deal’s off.” Barth came out with his terms.
“Of course,” Anna said.
“With you there don’t seem to be any ‘of course’ about anything. I’d make you promise, but your promises don’t seem to mean diddly-squat when you want your own way. So I’m just telling you. This is how it is, and I got no problem with just stuffing you in the back and locking the doors.”
“I’ll stay in the car,” Anna said. She would too. Not only was her strength of ten men seriously depleted, but one look at her face and she’d realized it would be highly unprofessional to appear in public, in uniform. The taxpayers do not like to see their servers and protectors looking like dog food.
Barth was placated. The car began to move.
The city of Pearl bumped up against the east side of Jackson just across the Pearl River. So named, Barth told her as they crossed the bridge, because of the freshwater oysters once found there. Whether the oysters were extinct and whether they had ever produced a single pearl, Barth didn’t know.
Pearl didn’t live up to its name. Possibly some fine old Southern architecture existed, but not on the street where the Honda sales lot was located. The town was indistinguishable from a thousand towns Anna’d been through: strip malls, fast food, stoplights and billboards.
Two blocks before they reached Bob Deckert’s Hondas, Barth said, “Steve’s here.”
Anna hadn’t been aware that she had closed her eyes until she had to open them to see what he was talking about. Stilwell, very sensibly, had parked in front of Payless Shoes, where he could watch traffic and wait for them. A lesser man would have plopped himself down in Deckert’s showroom giving everybody too much time to wonder what he was doing there.
“Dozing?” Barth asked.
The note of concern in his voice annoyed Anna. She didn’t answer him. In truth, she barely heard him. He was talking at her deaf ear. Anna sincerely hoped she’d been dozing. If she’d lost consciousness for another reason, she was in serious trouble. It felt like a nap, she reassured herself.
Barth pulled the Crown Vie into the Payless lot beside Stilwell. The other district ranger obligingly left his own vehicle to sit in the backseat behind the heavy wire grid protecting Barth and Anna.
“Howdy, howdy,” he said amiably.
Anna could turn neither head nor body to look at him. Before she could muster a response, Barth betrayed her. With the swipe of one meaty paw, he cranked the mirror around so Stilwell could see her reflection.
“She oughtn’t be here,” Barth said stubbornly. “I told her that. You see now what I was getting at?”
“Whoa,” Stilwell said. Then, as if needing stronger language, added: “Yikes.”
“She’s not fit to do anything.” Sensing an ally, Barth grew more confident.
“I’m not going to do anything,” Anna said placatingly. “You guys are.”
“Then why didn’t you just tell us what needed doing and stay put in the hospital like you was s’posed to?” Barth asked reasonably.
She had no answer to that. She trusted Barth and Steve. There wasn’t much she could do but direct and ask questions at best, get in the way and distract at worst. She’d just had to get out of the hospital. Since she could remember, they’d given her the willies. After Molly’s long stint in Columbia-Presbyterian, the willies had escalated to the pre-phobic warm-ups.
“There was nothing good on TV,” she said.
Amazingly, both Steve and Barth knew what she meant, and though their voices were obnoxiously gentle when they addressed her, there was no more argument. Anna was relieved. She needed her strength to tell them what she thought had happened and what she wanted them to do.
“Doesn’t make sense,” Barth said when she finished. “That buckle wasn’t worth much. Shoot, the paraphernalia from the whole Union army detachment wouldn’t be worth this kind of stuff. You think Williams searched your house for the buckle?”
“He knew Taco wouldn’t be there. I told him that morning he was at the vet. The search was like a lawyer search: no indication anybody’d really done anything.”
“And he committed murder and attempted murder for what to him’s gotta be a little bitty thing? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“Do you think he was the one put the boys up to alligatoring your garage?” Stilwell asked. “Another attempt on your life.”
Anna didn’t. She was thinking about the overtime slip of Randy’s with Fisheries and Wildlife listed as the assisting agency. She was willing to bet a couple of calls to William and Pete would prove it was a pesky gator and had been left in the care of Ranger Thigpen.
“There’s more to it than artifacts,” she insisted. “Just what, I don’t know. But right now we have exactly nothing: no confession, no witness, no evidence, not even probable cause to get a search warrant. If you two don’t scare something up for me, odds are good this will be pinned on one of those boys: Brandon because we can prove he was there or Lockley because he can’t prove he wasn’t.”
True to her promise and because her muscles, apparently not realizing she wasn’t dead, had gone into rigor mortis, Anna remained in the patrol car when they reached the Honda sales lot. In an attempt to be kind, Barth left the radio and the air-conditioning on. As soon as he disappeared through the gleaming showroom doors, she struggled up far enough to turn the AC to low and switch radio stations. Gospel, old-time gospel, she’d developed a taste for. Contemporary Christian jangled her nerves.
The radio cooperated, and the next station the needle found played Perry Como’s “Catch a Falling Star.” Anna could live with that.
Steve and Barth were back in less than half an hour. They said nothing till the car was back on Highway 80 in the flow of traffic. Then Barth told the story.
“Ian McIntire’s uneasy about something. Couldn’t tell what, but he’s not a fella that can not show. He was upset. He looked to be healthy enough. Not like he’d look if he’d had—if you’d—if he’d suffered the kind of injury you said happened to the man assaulted you. And his hands and knuckles were clean: no bruises, no broken skin.”
Stilwell had his elbows on the seat back, sitting forward, his face near the cage. Anna could see his floppy bangs and one of his eyes in the mirror. “Anna, he was real, real concerned about you,” he said. “Genuinely concerned, seemed to me. The kind of concerned people are when they’re scared because of another’s injury. Are you and he special pals?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then he wasn’t so much scared of what happened to you as scared of what might happen to him because of what happened to you, if you get my drift. Are you sure you had only one attacker?”
“Only one,” Anna said. “As I live and breathe. Let’s visit our lawyer.”
Jimmy Williams wasn’t at his office. Home sick, his secretary told Barth. Anna’d stayed in the ca
r, Steve with her. She’d only thought she was in pain earlier. Now that the painkillers were wearing off, she found it hard to keep up appearances and not degenerate into whining and whimpering. Stilwell read the piece of paper a disapproving nurse had thrust upon her when she insisted on checking herself out of the hospital: persistent headaches, nausea, vomiting, loss of consciousness, unusual drowsiness. But for the headache, Anna was clear of alarming symptoms.
“I’ll live,” she told Steve. “But right now that’s not a whole hell of a lot of comfort.”
Because it was Mississippi, the last holdout in America against total paranoia, Williams’s secretary gave Barth his home address and phone number.
They opted for arriving unannounced, and after they’d wandered around Ridgeland lost for twenty minutes, Barth got them to Dinsmor Estates, a posh community on the northern edge of Jackson.
Oversized homes on undersized lots, all looking more or less alike, formed a backdrop to the BMWs and assorted sport utility vehicles that would never see any off-road use, probably never even be shifted into four-wheel-drive. Stilwell summed up neatly: “Très chic track shacks.”
The Williams residence was set on a manicured lot just a hair bigger than a house that looked, from the outside, to have given more than half its square footage to an impressive two-story foyer. Barth and Steve went to the door. Anna watched through a haze of pain as one of the double doors opened a crack and they were let inside.
By the time they returned, she had slipped into a lethargy that left her barely enough energy to worry what, precisely, constituted “unusual drowsiness.”
Slamming doors and the jolt of Barth’s considerable self plopping down on the bench seat roused her.
“Something’s screwy,” Barth said succinctly.
Stilwell leaned on the seat back, his mouth close to Anna’s left ear. When he spoke, she realized she could hear a bit in that ear and was reassured. “Mrs. W. said hubby was on a business trip. Left day before yesterday. Out of town when you were assaulted.”
“Allegedly out of town,” Anna corrected him.
“We asked why his secretary said he was out sick and she fumbled around a bit, then said it was personal family business. Then said she didn’t know where. Not a practiced liar.”
“I take it, then, the Mrs. is not also a lawyer,” Anna said.
“We got nothing.” There was a mix of annoyance and finality in Barth’s voice that indicated he was not committed to Anna’s theory. “Without more to go on, we can’t play hardball. No search. Can’t make her tell us where Mr. Williams is.”
“You can bet she’ll be on the phone to him in a heartbeat,” Anna said. “By the time we get a handle on him, any evidence will be gone.”
The three of them sat without speaking. Anna could hear Stilwell wriggling around. Hands on the wheel in the ten and two position, Barth stared straight ahead. They’d come because Anna had asked them, but the spark of faith her surmisings had ignited in them was pretty much dead. They were tired of chasing wild geese and wanted to go home.
She was tempted to do the same. Pain, fatigue and the tail end of the painkillers had left her muzzy-headed. She was beginning to wonder if the answers that had burned so bright in her concussed cranium were just figments of a bruised imagination.
Maybe if the lives of children hadn’t been in the balance, she’d have given up.
“She seem like a nice lady?” Anna asked.
“Real nice,” Barth said. “Got two little kids just as cute as the dickens.”
“Did she know why you were asking after her husband?”
“I don’t think so. She seemed more confused and scared than protective.”
“Time to play the sympathy card,” Anna said. “Let’s go show her my face.”
“It’ll scare the kids,” Barth said.
He wasn’t kidding.
“The little buggers’ll just have to get over it,” she replied, and turned her attention to the painful business of getting out of the vehicle. Going up the walk, she leaned on Steve’s arm. She pretended it was just for effect, and he pretended to believe her. Barth remained in the car. Three rangers, even if one was small and looking the worse for wear, would be too intimidating for Anna’s purposes. Stilwell rang the bell, and they waited. The sun was high and hot. In the shade of the porch, mosquitoes pooled, pleased at having lunch delivered. Anna suffered a couple bites on her neck and face. With the wearing off of whatever Dr. Munroe had given her to ease the hurt, her upper torso had seized up. She could barely raise her elbows. The blows to her neck had traumatized the muscles controlling shoulders and arms.
“Maybe she slipped out the back,” Steve suggested. He sounded hopeful.
“No. She’s here.” Anna hadn’t the energy to explain why she was so sure. The house just felt occupied, a faint tension generated by those hiding within. “Ring again.”
The second bell brought Mrs. Williams to the door. She wore that harassed angry look nice women get just before they go ballistic. Anna was familiar with the phenomenon. Anger, real red-hot anger, was not okay for females. Most learned to repress it so successfully that they didn’t even know it was there till it erupted full-blown. It was one of the many things that made dealing with women more challenging than dealing with men. Women’s anger went from zero to sixty in sixty seconds—no warning signs, no time to get out of the way.
The sight of Anna disarmed her before she went off on them. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed. Her hand flew to her cheek in a cliché of feminine concern that was as genuine as the shock in her eyes.
“Do I look that bad?” Anna asked and smiled lopsidedly to keep Mrs. Williams’s sympathy.
“No. No. You look... I’m so sorry. Come in. Sit down. Can I get you anything? Goodness.”
From the kind flusterment of Mrs. James Williams, it was clear she had no inkling that Anna was the woman who’d tried to rip her husband’s balls off. “We can’t stay, but thank you,” Anna said and didn’t have to feign the weak and weary tone. “I was just hoping you could help me.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Williams said promptly, then a look of fear scuttled across her even features. “If I can,” she added cautiously. Anna guessed she worried about the lies her husband had asked her to tell.
“A friend of mine,” Anna said, “an elderly lady, has written a book. She’s got no money and hopes this’ll pay for her funeral when the time comes. Your husband said he’d take a look at it—you know, tell her what to do. Well, she’s gotten to fussing and wants it back. Do you know if Mr. Williams has it here or at his office?”
Such was Mrs. Williams’s relief at not being asked again where her husband was or why, she fell all over herself to be of assistance. While Anna and Steve stood inside the front door, she bustled through the foyer twice and eventually returned with a brown lidless box that had once held canned goods but now contained a sheaf of handwritten pages tied in a neat bundle by two bits of kitchen string.
“Is this it? Mrs. Ruby Tangeman?” She proffered the manuscript. Anna forced her arms up far enough to receive the box, holding it carefully by the edges.
“That’s it,” Anna said. “Thanks a million. Ruby will be so glad to get it back.”
Anna insisted on carrying her prize herself. Steve hovered half a step behind her, one hand on her elbow as if she were a tottery old woman. It was annoying, but since falling over was a real possibility, she accepted Stilwell’s kindness as the lesser of two evils. He opened the door for her. In order to regain her seat, she had to relinquish her prize. “Careful,” she cautioned Barth as he reached across the seat to take it. “Edges only. Fingertip and thumb.”
“What’s in it? Goldfish?” he grumbled, but did as she requested.
“Are you going to tell us what we risked life and limb facing down a housewife and two toddlers for or are you going to torture us indefinitely?” Steve asked after they’d driven in silence for several miles.
“If I’m not mistaken, this m
anuscript belongs to a lady in Leo Fullerton’s congregation. It’s the book she wrote that he was trying to help her get published,” Anna said. “I think it’s why Danni was killed. Why I got beat up.”
No great revelatory congratulations followed this assertion. Anna’d dropped down another notch on the credibility scale. Not only was she new, female and a Yankee; now she was an invalid as well. Head injury no less. Only slightly more believable than a raving lunatic. A couple more miles rolled by, then Steve said from the backseat: “Let me get this straight. You think Williams figured this was going to be a bestseller so he steals it? Going to be the next Southern lawyer to make it big in the world of publishing? My limited experience would suggest even copyrights are a waste of time. Not only does nobody want to steal your work, you can’t give the stuff away.”
“Besides, why not just kill Ruby?” Barth put in. “The Posey girl’s got nothing to do with the book.”
“Not the book itself,” Anna said. “What’s in it. You said that buckle I found was from Grant’s vanished unit. I found it where Danni was killed, where they’d been digging all this time.”
“It’s still not worth enough money to murder somebody over,” Barth said.
“What about all the stuff from that unit: swords, guns, buttons? What if he knew what happened to the soldiers?” Anna asked. “The entire unit?”
Barth thought for a while. “Still not that much. Not for a man like Williams. I’m betting he makes good money.”
“There’s something more to it besides buckles and swords,” Anna said. “There’s got to be. And it’s in here.” She tapped the papers tied up with string.
Nobody argued with her. Not because they thought she was right but because they felt sorry for her. Shoot, she felt sorry for herself.
“Maybe some hard evidence,” Anna said when her mind focused again. That perked the boys up.
“How so?” Barth asked cautiously.
“Fingerprints. The box and the first and last page of Mrs. Tangeman’s manuscript. We’ll check the prints against those lifted from Danni’s throat and my ankle. We get a match, we at least got Williams for assault.”
