Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  Knocking at the door scared her so badly that her wretched sobs were jerked up in a violent hiccup and she froze as a rabbit freezes in the shadow of a hawk. The knocking came again. She flinched at each rap as if the knuckles banged on her skull and not the hardwood of the door.

  “Anna? It’s Paul.”

  The announcement of the sheriff’s name did not comfort. Perhaps he would go away if she played dead. Hugging the dog, Piedmont butting worriedly against her ribs, Anna tried to make herself invisible. Behind her, she heard the door pushed open. Taco began to bark, high alarm barks that cut into her bruised brain with the delicate touch of a double-bladed axe.

  “Oh Lord! Are you all right? Anna...”

  Footsteps sounded on hardwood followed by the muffled tread of shoes on the Navajo rug. Then warm arms were around both Anna and the dog. Taco stopped barking. Piedmont fled the crush, leaping back to the top of the heater.

  “Did you fall? What’s happening? Talk to me, Anna. Do you know your name? Where you are?” Paul Davidson’s hands were running over her head, her neck, down her arms, as he deftly sought injuries in the way of those accustomed to field medicine. His skin was warm, his hair fragrant, his breath sweet, his touch gentle. For the first time in more years than she could remember, Anna wanted help, wanted a man to lift her burdens just for an hour or so, wanted to be held, told everything was going to be all right, tucked into bed. A piecemeal fragment of an old play her husband, Zach, had starred in at dinner theater in New Jersey the year they’d been married flashed to mind. Harvey. The psychiatrist sharing his greatest fantasy: to lie and rest, a beautiful woman holding his hand saying “there, there ...”

  That’s what Anna wanted. She wanted it from Paul Davidson. Yet she could not unbend, not even to speak. There was an iron band around her heart—or her brain—made of two parts suspicion and one part self-preservation. Anna didn’t trust him, and she couldn’t remember why. Tears came again, weak and womanly.

  Lest he see them and judge her as she judged herself, she buried her face in Taco’s side. He licked her elbow, the only part of her he could reach. Prickles of affectionate angst scraped her scalp: Piedmont reaching down from his perch to claw concernedly at her hair. Anna knew she did not deserve such loyalty and the tears came thicker, hotter, drenching the foul-smelling fur she hid her face in.

  Paul’s warm hands left off their search for wounds. Whether he deemed her structurally sound or beyond saving, he walked away. Feeling both safer and abandoned, Anna pulled her face out of Taco’s side and disentangled the cat’s claws from her hair. In a minute, when she heard the front door close behind the retreating sheriff, she would stand up. Sit up. Something.

  Instead of the slamming of a door, footsteps returned. Anna stifled an impulse to dive back into the dog and another to hide her face in her hands. She couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes.

  All that is required is that I look sane for a minute or so, she told herself. Say something like “I’m fine” or “It looks worse that it is.” She opened her eyes a slit. Looked to Taco for courage, to Piedmont for attitude, but still she didn’t speak.

  “Come on,” Paul said. “Upsa-daisy. I’m running you a bath. While you’re soaking, me and the critters will get squared away. Take our evening constitutional.”

  Anna allowed herself to be led, coaxed, managed. It was sufficiently uncharacteristic that she wondered at herself even as she watched, a disinterested third party. Maybe it was the painkillers. Maybe it was the pain. Whatever had robbed her of her will, it was consistent. She said nothing till she was standing by the tub, the sheriff unbuttoning her shirt. Then she managed: “I can undress myself.” Had he argued, she wouldn’t have protested.

  Her clothes dropped where she stood. Unlacing boots was a exercise in pain and enfeebled frustration, but it never crossed her mind to call him back. When she finally attained it, the hot bath was heaven.

  Paul tapped on the door twice. Once he offered to bring her wine. She refused and knew she’d quit drinking. Again. Maybe for good this time. Mississippi was bound to have AA meetings. Tomorrow—the day after—she’d think about that. The second knock was to bring her dry, clean pajamas and tell her dinner was ready. Piedmont slipped in with the pj’s and took his accustomed place on the edge of the tub, snaky orange tail swishing in the water. Idly, she wondered if he did that intentionally to take her mind off her troubles.

  Dried, pajamaed and ensconced in the Morris chair, Anna sat while Paul brought her dinner of tomato soup and half a tuna fish sandwich. It was the meal her mother had served whenever she was sick, and Anna felt herself tearing up again as he set the tray across her knees.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said to ward off the untoward emotion.

  “Yes, I do.” He pulled up a footstool and folded himself down at her feet. A newly washed Taco dragged himself over to be near Davidson.

  Traitor, Anna thought unkindly as she spooned soup into her mouth.

  “I filed for divorce today,” the sheriff said.

  Anna forced the soup down through a suddenly constricted esophagus. That was it; that was why she’d not trusted him. The memory returned and with it a burning flush of shame. Mrs. Davidson had called to pay her respects shortly before Anna was attacked. The ensuing madness—or her own need to forget it—had driven the scene from her mind.

  “We were married for eight years,” Davidson said. “We’ve been separated for three. I filed for divorce today,” he repeated.

  “Why did you wait three years?” Anna asked.

  “I never needed a divorce till now.”

  Tears came and Anna was helpless to stop them. Truth be told, she didn’t try. They washed away the rusted iron she’d felt clamped around her chest.

  “Do you want to go to bed?” he asked kindly.

  Anna laughed and didn’t mind that it hurt. “Yes. Now I want you to take me to bed.”

  And now a sneak preview of Nevada Barr’s newest

  Anna Pigeon mystery,

  FLASHBACK

  Available from Berkley Books

  Until she ran out of oxygen, Anna was willing to believe she was taking part in a PBS special. The water was so clear sunlight shone through as if the sea were but mountain air. Cloud shadows, stealthy and faintly magical at four fathoms, moved lazily across patches of sand that showed startlingly white against the dark, ragged coral. Fishes colored so brightly it seemed it must be a trick of the eye or the tail end of an altered state flitted, nibbled, explored and slept. Without moving, Anna could see a school of silver fish, tiny anchovies, synchronized, moving like polished chain mail in a glittering curtain. Four Blue Tangs, so blue her eyes ached with the joy of them, nosed along the edge of a screamingly purple sea fan bigger than a coffee table. A jewfish, six feet long and easily three hundred pounds, his blotchy hide mimicking the sun-dappled rock, pouting lower lip thick as Anna’s wrist, lay without moving beneath an overhang of a coral-covered rock less than half his size, his wee fish brain assuring him he was hidden. Countless other fish, big and small, bright and dull, ever more delightful to Anna because she’d not named them and so robbed them of a modicum of their mystery, moved around her on their fishy business.

  Air, and with it time, was running out. If she wished to live, she needed to breathe. Her lungs ached with that peculiar sensation of being full to bursting. Familiar desperation licked at the edges of her mind. One more kick, greetings to a spiny lobster (a creature whose body design was only possible in a weightless world), and, with a strong sense of being hounded from paradise, she swam for the surface, drove a foot or more into the air and breathed.

  The sky was as blue as the eye-watering fishes and every bit as merciless as the sea. The ocean was calm. Even with her chin barely above the surface she could see for miles. There was remarkably little to soothe the eye between the unrelenting glare of sea and sky. To the north was Garden Key, a scrap of sand no more than thirteen acres in total and, at its highest point, a few m
eters above sea level. Covering the key, two of its sides spilling out into the water, was the most bizarre duty station at which she had served.

  Fort Jefferson, a massive brick fortress, had been built on this last lick of America, the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles off Key West in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time construction started in 1846, it was the cutting edge of national defense. Made of brick and mortar with five bastions jutting out from the corners of a pentagon, it had been built as the first line of defense for the southern states, guarding an immense natural—and invisible—har—bor ; it was the only place for sixty miles where ships could sit out the hurricanes that menaced the Gulf and the southeastern seaboard or come under the protection of the fort’s guns in time of war. Though real, the harbor was invisible because its breakwaters, a great broken ring of coral, were submerged.

  Jefferson never fired a single shot in defense of its country. Time and substrata conspired against it. Before the third tier of the fort could be completed, the engineers noticed the weight of the massive structure was causing it to sink and stopped construction. Even unfinished it might have seen honorable—if not glamorous—duty, but the rifled cannon was invented, and the seven-to-fifteen-foot-thick brick-and-mortar walls were designed only to withstand old-style cannons. Under siege by these new weapons of war, the fort would not stand. Though destined for glorious battle, Jefferson sat out the Civil War as a union prison.

  Till Anna had been assigned temporary duty at the Dry Tortugas, she’d not even heard of it. Now it was home.

  For a moment she merely treaded water, head thrown back to let the sun seek out any epithelial cell it hadn’t already destroyed over the last ten years. Just breathing—when the practice had recently been denied—was heaven. Somewhere she’d read that a meager seventeen percent of air pulled in by the lungs was actually used. Idly, she wondered if she could train her body to salvage the other eighty-three percent so she could remain underwater ten minutes at a stretch rather than two. Scuba gave one the time but, with the required gear, not the freedom. Anna preferred free diving. Three times she breathed deep, on the third she held it, upended and kicked again for bliss of the bottom.

  Flashing in the sun, she was as colorful as any fish. Her mask and fins were iridescent lime green, her dive skin startling blue. Though the water was a welcoming eighty-eight degrees in late June, that was still eight point six degrees below where she functioned best. For prolonged stays in this captivating netherworld she wore a skin, a lightweight body-hugging suit with a close-fitting hood and matching socks. Not only did it conserve body heat, but it also protected her from the sometimes vicious bite of the coral. Like all divers who weren’t vandals, Anna assiduously avoided touching—and so harming—living coral, but when they occasionally did collide, human skin was usually as damaged as the coral.

  Again she stayed with and played with the fish until her lungs felt close to bursting. Though it would be hotly debated by a good percentage of Dry Tortugas National Park’s visitors, as far as she was concerned the “paradise” part of this subtropical paradise was hidden beneath the waves.

  Anna had never understood how people could go to the beach and lie in the sand to relax. The shore was a far harsher environment than the mountains. Air was hot and heavy and clung to the skin. Wind scoured. Sand itched. Salt sucked moisture from flesh. The sun, in the sky and again off the surface of the sea, seared and blinded. For a couple of hours each day it was heaven. After that it began to wear one down as the ocean wears away rock and bone.

  Two dive sites, twenty dives—the deepest over forty feet—and Anna finally tired herself out. Legs reduced to jelly from pushing through an alien universe, she couldn’t kick hard enough to rise above the surface and pull herself over the gunwale. Glad there were no witnesses, she wriggled and flopped over the transom beside the outboard motor to spill on deck, splattering like a bushel of sardines. Her “Sunday” was over. She’d managed to spend yet one more weekend in Davy Jones’s locker. There wasn’t really any place else to go.

  The Reef Ranger, one of the park’s patrol boats, a twenty-five-foot inboard/outboard Boston Whaler, the bridge consisting of a high bench and a Plexiglas windscreen, fired up at a touch. Anna upped anchor, then turned the bow toward the bastinadoed fortress that was to be her home for another eight to twelve weeks. Seen from the level of the surrounding ocean, Fort Jefferson presented a bleak and surreal picture: an overwhelming geometric tonnage floating, apparently unsupported, on the surface of the sea.

  Enjoying the feel of a boat beneath her after so many years in landlocked parks, Anna headed for the fort. The mariners’ rhyme used to help those new to the water remember which markers to follow when entering heavy traffic areas rattled meaninglessly through her mind: red on right returning. Shrunken by salt and sun, her skin felt two sizes too small for her bones, and even with dark glasses and the sun at her back, it was hard to keep her eyes open against the glare.

  The opportunity to serve as interim supervisory ranger for the hundred square miles of park, scarcely one of which was above water, came in May. Word trickled down from the southeastern region that the Dry Tortugas’ supervisory ranger had to take a leave of absence for personal reasons and a replacement was needed until he returned or, failing that, a permanent replacement was found.

  Dry Tortugas National Park was managed jointly with southern Florida’s Everglades National Park. The brass all worked out of Homestead, near Everglades. Marooned as it was, seventy miles into the Gulf, day-to-day operations of the Dry Tortugas were run by a supervisory ranger, who managed one law enforcement ranger, two interpreters and an office administrator. Additional law enforcement had been budgeted and two rangers hired. They were new to the service and, at present, being trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia.

  “Supervisory Ranger” was a title that bridged a gray area in the NPS hierarchy. For reasons to which Anna was not privy, the head office chose not to upgrade the position to Chief Ranger but left it as a subsidiary position to the Chief Ranger at Everglades. Still, it was a step above Anna’s current District Ranger level on the Natchez Trace. To serve as “Acting Supervisory Ranger” was a good career move.

  That wasn’t entirely why she’d chosen to abandon home and hound for three months to accept the position. Anna was in no hurry to rush out of the field and into a desk job. There’d be time enough for that when her knees gave out or her tolerance for the elements—both natural and criminal—wore thin.

  She had taken the Dry Tortugas assignment for personal reasons. When she was in a good frame of mind, she told herself she’d needed to retreat to a less populated and mechanized post to find the solitude and unmarred horizons wherein to renew herself, to seek answers. When cranky or down, she felt it was the craven running away of a yellow-bellied deserter.

  Paul Davidson, his divorce finalized, had asked her to marry him.

  Two days later, a car, a boat and a plane ride behind her—not to mention two thousand miles of real estate, a goodly chunk of it submerged—she was settling into her quarters at Fort Jefferson.

  “Coincidence?” her sister Molly had asked sarcastically. “You be the judge.”

  The fort had only one phone, which worked sporadically, and mail was delivered once a week. Two weeks had passed in sandy exile, and she was no more ready to think about marriage than she had been the day she left. But, given the paucity of entertainments—even a devotee could only commune with fish for so long—she was rapidly getting to the point where there was nothing else to think about.

  Under these pressing circumstances, she’d done the only sensible thing: she stuck her nose in somebody else’s business. Daniel Barrons, a maintenance man-of-all-trades and the closest thing Anna’d made to a friend at the fort, had a weakness for gossip that she shamelessly exploited.

  He was a block of a man, with what her father would have referred to as a “peasant build,” one designed for carrying sick calves into the barn. Perhaps in his
late forties, Daniel covered his blunt face with a brown-black beard. On his left arm, seldom seen as the man wasn’t given to tank tops, was a tattoo so classic Anna smiled whenever she glimpsed its bottom edge: a naked girl reclining on elbows and fanny under a cartoon palm tree.

  Given this rough and manly exterior, tradition would have had him strong and silent. Every time he snuggled down in his favorite position to dish the dirt, elbows on workbench, hindquarters stuck out and usually bristling with tools shoved in his pockets, furry chin in scarred hands, Anna was charmed and tickled.

  With only a small nudge, Daniel had assumed the position and filled her in on why she’d been given the opportunity to explore this oddly harsh, boring, beautiful, magical bit of the earth. Her predecessor, Lanny Wilcox, hadn’t taken an extended leave willingly. It had been forced upon him when he’d begun to come unglued.

  “His girlfriend, a little Cuban number as cute as a basket full of kittens, ran out on him,” Daniel had told her, his voice low and gentle as usual. He consistently spoke as if a baby slept in the next room and he was loath to wake it.

  “Lanny was a terrific guy, but he was getting up there, fifty-one this last birthday. At his peak he couldn’t a been much to look at. Hey, I like Lanny just fine, but, well, even he knew he was about as good-looking as the south end of a northbound spiny lobster. Five, six months ago he hooked up with Theresa. She’s not yet thirty, smart, funny and a nice addition to a bathing suit. Next thing you know, she’s living out here. When she cut out, Lanny just sort of lost it.”

  From what Anna had gathered, the old Supervisory Ranger’s “losing it” consisted of increasingly bizarre behavior that revolved around the seeing and hearing of things that no one else saw or heard. “Ghosts,” murmured a couple of the more melodramatic inhabitants of the fort. “Hallucinations,” said the practical ones, and Lanny was bundled up and shipped off to play with his imaginary friends out of sight of the tax-paying public.