Dark of the Moon

by Parrish, PJ

  For Daniel,

  who made it happen.

  And for Charlotte,

  who gave it meaning.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Phil Ward and Fred Grimm, who helped color our sketch of Mississippi.

  To Robert Terry, who kept us honest and entertained.

  To Heather Montee, for her handholding and research.

  Grateful acknowledgment to Hannah Kahn, for the use of the poem “To be Black, to be Lost.”

  And most of all, to Maria Carvainis, who refused to settle for anything but the best.

  Kensington Books are published by

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP

  850 Third Avenue

  New York, NY 10022

  Copyright ©1999 by P.J. Parrish

  “Silhouette” from Collected Poems of Langston Hughes Copyright ©1948 by Langston Hughes.

  Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf

  All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  ISBN-I-57566-394-5

  First printing April, 1999

  Southern gentle lady.

  Do not swoon.

  They’ve just hung a black man

  In the dark of the moon.

  They’ve hung a black man

  To a roadside tree

  In the dark of the moon

  For the world to see

  How Dixie protects

  Its white womanhood.

  Southern gentle lady. Be good! Be good!

  —Langston Hughes, Silhouette

  Chapter 1

  December, 1983

  The naked trees snaked upward, black capillaries against a bleached, predawn sky. The ground beneath his feet was a mire of dead leaves and copper-colored mud. A cold December wind wafted through the trees, loosening raindrops from the needles of the tall pines.

  Louis stumbled as his boot sank into a puddle, the suede immediately blanketed by a thin membrane of algae. Cursing softly, he stepped free and trudged on, grabbing the thin arms of small trees as he scaled the slippery slope.

  He could no longer see the orange vest of the hunter ahead and he called for him to slow down. Pausing at the crest of the hill, Louis rested against a fallen tree, pulling up the fleece collar of his cocoa-brown jacket. He waited for the last man of his trio to puff his way up the muddy incline.

  Despite the freezing temperature. Junior Resnick’s porkish face was flushed and beaded with sweat. His brown jacket, spotted with mud, looked like a sleeping bag tied around his thick belly.

  “Man,” Junior said, breathless, “I thought he said it was jus’ a-ways out here.” He wiped his nose with his forearm. “This is fuckin’ crazy, Louis, plum fuckin’ crazy.”

  Louis allowed himself a small smile. He enjoyed seeing Junior suffer. Wiping the mud from his trousers with a gloved hand, he turned away and started down the hill. “We’ve come this far, we keep going,” he said.

  At the bottom of the ravine, he stopped on the banks of a rippling creek. The sun chose that moment to break through the heavy gray clouds, shooting eerie streaks of light into the morning mist. Louis heard Junior’s footsteps coming up behind him and he motioned for him to stop. A mockingbird’s haunting call sent creatures scampering from the brush as the wind whistled softly through the trees. The swirling mist floated over the damp ground, creeping over Louis’s shoes. He felt a stir of excitement. It was a fitting day to find a body.

  Junior’s grunt broke the mood. “How much further?”

  “Jus’ a-ways, guys, up near the swamp,” the hunter yelled back.

  Louis stepped onto a jagged string of rocks, making his way across the creek, his heart quickening slightly in anticipation. He heard a splash behind him and looked over his shoulder to see Junior shaking water off his boots.

  Louis moved on, up a steep hill. Junior began to puff loudly behind him.

  “What’s the matter there, old-timer? Need a cane?” Louis called over his shoulder.

  Junior, a year younger than Louis, showed his annoyance with a slit-eye sneer. Mumbling to himself, he broke off a tree limb, and plucked off the dead branches as he moved on, shaping the branch into a walking stick. “This is crap, Kincaid,” he said. “I can’t believe you got me out here at six in the morning for this.”

  A ripple of vexation crossed Louis’s face. “This is a dead body. Aren’t you the least bit curious? You’re a cop, for chrissakes.”

  “Yeah, a cold and hungry cop.”

  “Well, this is the first interesting thing I’ve come across since I’ve been here.”

  “Yeah, like you’re some veteran or something. What are you, twenty-five? Twenty-six? And besides, you ain’t been here but a couple weeks. I bet this here body woulda still been here this afternoon.” Junior slipped again. “Fuck,” he said, more to the mud than anyone else.

  “You didn’t have to come. Junior.”

  “Easy for you to say. Sheriff would ream me good if he knew I let you wander out here alone.”

  Louis suppressed a sigh and walked on. He wondered what motivated men like Junior to become cops. The man didn’t seem interested in police work and he complained about the hours, the paperwork, the pay, and just about everything from the weather to the tires on the squad cars. The only thing he did seem to take pride in was the badge itself. Not what it meant, but the small perks it afforded him around town.

  But the remark about the sheriff did remind Louis that Junior had one important function. He was Louis’s watchdog, a human buffer, so the nice white folks of Greensboro County, Mississippi, wouldn’t get riled when a black cop came ringing their doorbells. And, Louis had to admit. Junior did that part of his job well. In the three weeks Louis had been in Black Pool, Junior had stuck to him like kudzu on a telephone pole.

  “You know, you’re full of shit, Kincaid,” Junior called. “We gets lots of interestin’ stuff. ’Member Emmett Jenkins’s missing cows? That was a good one and we done solved it.”

  It had started to rain again. “Yeah, we solved it. The damn cows were lost,” Louis muttered. He held back a branch so it wouldn’t smack Junior in the face, although he was tempted to let it fly.

  “Does it rain like this in Dee-troit, Louis?”

  “This time of year it snows. White Christmas and all that.”

  Junior guffawed. “That’s real funny, Louis, coming from you…white Christmases. Say, they got colored Santas in Dee-troit?”

  The question seemed so genuinely innocent, Louis almost answered. But the hunter cut him off.

  “Here it is fellas, right here.”

  Louis and Junior came to a stop, staring at the orange cap the hunter had left as a marker, dangling from the leafless limb of a poplar tree.

  In the eerie silence that followed, the three men gathered their courage. Louis had never seen a corpse before, not one like this. He had seen dead people. A few in silk-lined coffins, their faces powdered and prepped. And a few traffic fatalities. That was all. This was different. Very different.

  The body, or what remained of it, lay cradled in the knotted roots of a twisted old oak tree, almost concealed by the thick grass, pine needles and branches. Louis approached it slowly, knelt in the mud and removed his gloves. Gently, he brushed away the dirt. His fingers touched something and he withdrew. An ocher-colored skull protruded from the mud, its eye sockets empty, black caverns.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Junior murmured, standing over Louis’s shoulder.

  Louis squinted up into the rain, wishing there was more light. The rest of the body was covered with a thin layer of dirt, indicating to Louis a hasty burial. Brushing a forearm across his face, he scratched at
the cold mud, his fingers soon growing numb from the effort.

  They touched something rough. Louis eased it from under the skeleton. It was the end of an old rope, blackened with decay. A heavier, knotted part was intertwined with the bones in the shallow grave; the other end snaked off into the woods. Louis gave a tug and with a sucking sound, the ground released the rope. When it broke free of the dirt, Louis stood up, clearly defining the noose against the silvery light. The three men stared. They all knew what it was—a lynching.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Louis,” Junior whispered, “Jesus fucking Christ Almighty.” He took a step back, distancing himself from the noose.

  “I’m done here, man,” the hunter said uneasily. “Y’all don’t need me here, do you?”

  Louis shook his head, gripping the rope in his cold hand. His gut tightened. He had only a few memories of his childhood and this place he had left so long ago. This kind of violence, the horror stories of Southern-style justice had seemed just that, stories you saw on TV or in movies. Until now. Suddenly, they were very real and the sensation that moved over him was very frightening.

  “What do you wanna do, Louis?”

  Louis ignored Junior, following the rope, pulling as he went, letting it lead him to its end. He expected to find it frayed and worn, rotted away. But it was cut clean.

  He looked up at the oak, wondering if the tree had served as gallows for the man who lay at its feet, and if so, who cut the rope down. He stood silent for a minute, stiff in the fine spray of drizzle, trying to gain a feel for what had happened. He shivered, feeling a presence in the air. But he could see nothing.

  “Louis, I’m cold,” Junior whined.

  Louis turned and glared at Junior—the pudgy face, spotted with freckles, the unruly wisps of rust-colored hair sticking out from under the sides of the cattleman’s hat, puerile blue eyes and a chinless mouth. Junior Resnick was so very stupid, and at that moment, so very, very white. Louis bit back his anger and held out his hand. “Give me your radio.”

  The strange firmness in Louis’s voice compelled Junior to hand it over without question. Louis called the station, waiting patiently for some life on the other end of the radio while Junior drew circles in the mud with his stick.

  “Sheriff Dodie here. Who the hell is callin’ me so early?”

  “I am, sir, Louis. I asked them to call you at home.”

  “Where’s Junior? He with you?”

  “Yes sir. We’re out on old Road 234, a mile or so off the highway.”

  “And?” Sheriff Dodie asked impatiently.

  “We have something out here. A body.”

  “Anybody we know?”

  “Just a skeleton, sir, if that. Just bones.”

  “Bones? You sure they human?”

  Louis’s jaw tightened. “They’re human, sir.” Louis looked down at the pattern of ovals Junior was drawing in the mud and back at the bones. “It looks like a lynching victim,” he added.

  There was a silence on the other end of the radio. Louis wiped the dampness from his brow.

  “Still raining out there?” the sheriff asked finally.

  Louis frowned at the odd question. “Yes, sir. How long do you think it’ll be before we can get someone out here?”

  “Kincaid, need I remind you it’s six a.m. Besides, we ain’t got no coroner right now. Got to git Davis from over Sampson Coimty way.”

  “We’ll wait,” Louis said. Junior rolled his eyes.

  There was another pause. “Then you’ll be waiting in that rain until after dinner.”

  “Dinner?” Louis repeated. “Six o’clock?”

  “Dinner, Kincaid,” the sheriff said impatiently. “Not supper.”

  Louis sighed, remembering dinner and supper were two very different things here. Dinner was lunch.

  “I’ll see if I can roust him,” Dodie said. “Y’all wait on the side of 234 and be watchin’ out for us.”

  Louis clicked the radio off and handed it back to Junior, turning to look down at the skeleton. The sky was lighter now and the birds had come alive with the vanishing mist. A cold breeze rippled his trousers. The skull stared up at him. What had the eyes seen last? Pharisaic white hoods or the trusted face of someone familiar?

  A sudden gust of wind scattered dead leaves around Louis’s feet and over the face of the skull. He looked at Junior, who had ambled over.

  “Junior,” he said quietly, “do you have any idea what we are really looking at?”

  Junior poked at the skull with his stick. “No offense, Louis, but it looks like a dead nigger to me. Nothin’ but a poor dead nigger.”

  Chapter 2

  The Blazer bounced over the rough terrain, cutting through the brush like a tank. Sheriff Dodie drove, with Junior seated next to him and Louis in the back with Ed Davis, the Sampson County coroner. Greensboro County hadn’t had its own coroner since last June, when that man had died of a heart attack and no one had seemed anxious to replace him. Not much was expected of the coroner except to show up and officially pronounce someone dead, all for the grand salary of $25 dollars per body. Junior had said nobody hereabouts wanted the job.

  Louis stared blankly at Ed Davis’s craggy profile, then turned his gaze out to the trees, lost in his thoughts. He checked his watch. It seemed to be taking an eternity to get back to the scene. Half the day was gone.

  “Kincaid, you ever seen anything like this before?” Sheriff Dodie asked, his eyes searching the rearview mirror for Louis’s face.

  “No, sir.”

  Junior turned in his seat and squinted at Louis. “Got a good one for you. What did the ni…I mean, Mexican, do with his first fifty-cent piece?”

  “Don’t start on that shit. Junior,” Dodie said.

  “He married her. Like that one, Louis?”

  Louis turned away, his jaw set, his eyes focused on the passing woodlands. He could feel Junior staring at him.

  “Don’t suppose you saw many hangings up north, now, did you?” Junior asked.

  Louis met the sheriff’s eyes in the mirror as he spoke. “Not as many as you do here.”

  Junior turned back around, sinking into the seat. “Always a smart-ass, aren’t you, Kincaid?”

  No one answered Junior and the interior of the Blazer fell quiet until Junior’s voice broke the silence. “Sheriff, here! Look, there’s the marker we done left. Stop!”

  The sheriff hit the brakes and the Blazer slid to a muddy stop. The men climbed out and with Louis leading the way, started up the slope. The four were silent as they made their way down the ravine. In the distance, Louis saw the hunter’s hat on the poplar tree. Though eager to get back to the site, he slowed his steps in deference to old Ed Davis.

  He waited under the tree for the others to catch up. The sheriff stopped, staring down at the bones, his face impassive. Davis came up beside Dodie. He blanched, swallowed hard, then slowly knelt beside the shallow grave. Junior took out a 35-mm camera, preparing to take photographs. Louis pulled a half-roll of yellow police tape from his jacket.

  The sheriff, chewing on an unlit cigar, watched as Louis tied the tape to a tree and began to unravel it. “Kincaid, what the hell you doing?” he said finally.

  Ed Davis and Junior looked over.

  “Roping off the crime scene,” Louis said.

  “Just what the hell are we protecting?”

  Junior snickered and Davis hunched over the bones. Louis looked at Sheriff Dodie, mystified. Shaking his head, Dodie walked over to where Davis was and looked down at the elderly man.

  “Ed, how old you guess them bones to be?” he asked.

  The coroner looked up. “Could be five, ten or even thirty.”

  Dodie turned back to Louis. “Now, do you really think it’s necessary to do that after so many years?”

  “But someone could—”

  “Nobody’s gonna come out to this swamp and ruin no ‘crime scene.’ Put the goddamn tape away,” Dodie said firmly.

  Louis retraced his steps slowly, r
olling up the tape, watching the sheriff out of the corner of his eye. A single thought kept running through his mind, the same thought that had flashed into his head the first day he set foot in Sam Dodie’s office: What am I doing here?

  He had come back to Black Pool for one reason and one reason only: to care for his dying mother. The job with the sheriff’s department, well, that had been a lucky break more than anything. Louis let his gaze wander over the forest. He had never been an investigator. Or a detective. He had a college degree and two years’ street work as a cop. All he had been looking for was a deputy’s job, something to put food on the table. But he had been offered the job as an investigator. Louis never knew why. Maybe the sheriff was impressed with the degree. Louis had readily accepted. How much crime could a little Southern town have?

  Louis’s eyes drifted down to the skull, now being slipped into a paper bag by Ed Davis. It occurred to him how ironic it was that he had to come to such a godforsaken place to work on his first homicide. Louis shivered slightly in the cold wind. Homicide…This was no ordinary homicide. This was a lynching.

  His gaze went back to Dodie and he found himself seeing only one thing—the color of his skin. In his mind, every white man over forty had suddenly become a suspect. The guy at the Texaco station. Had he been there? The old man sitting outside the barber shop. Had he watched it? The man in the pickup who pulled up beside him at the stoplight. Had he been the one who had tightened the noose around the victim’s neck? God, he was getting paranoid.

  Louis put the tape in the truck and leaned against a tree. He studied the three men. Ed Davis was certainly old enough to have been around at the time of the lynching, but he had lived in neighboring Sampson County. Junior would have been in diapers at the time. Louis’s eyes went to the sheriff.

  Sam Dodie was a big man, six foot or so, with a broad chest and a convex waistline. He parted his black hair on the side and there was just enough gray at the temples to add distinction to the pitted but comely face. In the short time Louis had been here, he had never seen Dodie in a uniform. He wore his badge on the pocket of a plaid flannel shirt and his gun on a belt that supported faded jeans. He always wore the same soiled red cap, embroidered with the county sheriff’s emblem.