Hunting Season Page 10

  Anna sneered at the thought. She’d cleaned up after that brand of American macho gang “fun” too many times: rape, vandalism, harassment, assault. Men and women in the United States carried a terrific burden of anger against the other gender for reasons Anna could never fathom. Women took theirs out in psychological torture sometimes aimed at men, more often at themselves. Men were more hands-on: and the hands were too often on the smaller, weaker sex.

  “Not all men,” Anna forced herself to say out loud. “Not even most,” the rational voice of her sister in her head forced her to add. Some days it was harder than others to remember that evil was still front page news. Goodness and order were so much the norm they needn’t be reported.

  A dozen feet or so from the stand itself Anna found a small excavation, a hole maybe a foot across, a couple inches deep and still damp. There being no other reason for its existence, she figured it was where the men had poured out their canteens to mix the mud they’d smeared on their faces.

  The timing bothered her. The mud, the three cigarettes at the ambush sight. They’d had time to plan and wait before she came. They must have seen her patrol car the moment she’d stopped. Clearly, they’d had all the time in the world to stroll back to their vehicles and simply slip away undetected. Instead they’d painted their faces and lain in wait.

  Spontaneous combustion of assholes was frightening but usually soon over. Premeditated viciousness was apt to recur until its goal, whatever it was, was achieved.

  She shook off the musings, shrugged out of the night before, and came back to the sweet-smelling sunlight at the foot of the stairs. Her last chance at evidence lay there. She needed an open mind.

  The steps, made of unpainted two-by-fours weathered to gray, were clean. She climbed up, enjoying the childlike feel of climbing into a treehouse in spite of her darkened mood. The stand, a wooden platform with a simple rail around it, was as clean as the steps. No clues. Few leaves. Spotless.

  “Damn,” Anna muttered as she stared at the weathered boards. The thing had been swept, not with a branch or anything else that one might imagine would be handy to a group out hunting deer and lady rangers, but swept with a broom. What had once been muddy boot prints was now a veil of dried dust neatly streaked with the fine stiff straw of a household broom. The maid had been in.

  She climbed the last step onto the platform. There was no evidence, not even so much as a clue left behind to disturb. She might as well enjoy the view. Leaning her elbows on the railing, she looked out over the small meadow toward the Trace.

  The hunting stand was well-placed, several yards back from the meadow’s edge in the branches of an old pecan tree. Mixed hardwood, pine and the fast growing weed trees, mimosa, willow and popcorn, had crowded back around the pecan once its protectors were gone. Now it provided a leafy hidden bower.

  With a clear shot to the meadow.

  Anna had never grasped the lure of hunting. When she went to the trouble to travel to quiet, beautiful, isolated places, usually the last thing on her mind was killing anything.

  She walked the length of the stand. The wood was weathered and splintery and the stand was in uneven repair. The steps were rickety and one side of the platform rotted through, but a piece of the railing had been recently repaired. Time had come to tear the stand down. Surely nobody would be using it now.

  Surely.

  For a moment she remained, thinking. Decision made, she backed down the rudimentary stairs. The stand would stay. The hunters had put so much time and effort into building it. They’d successfully terrorized and chased away the lady ranger. Maybe they’d be back. It was worth a try. Each ache of bruised muscle and sting of torn flesh earned the night before reminded her how thoroughly she wanted to catch the bastards.

  At ten-thirty Anna met Sheriff Jones at the Mt. Locust Ranger Station. When she’d first come to the Trace, the office was housed in two grungy rooms in the maintenance building. Since then some of the seasonals positions were cut, housing reappropriated, and the ranger station moved to a house much like the one she lived in. The “new” office was located between the maintenance yard to the north and Mt. Locust to the south. From the luxury of a screened-in porch, the visitors center and the old stand were visible.

  “You look beat,” Clintus said kindly. “Bad night?”

  Anna ran her fingers through her cropped hair then realized, far from smoothing it, she’d probably stood it all on end. As much white as brown had begun to show in recent years. She’d discovered that white hairs, like old women, did just as they pleased.

  “Hard night,” she agreed and told him of her nocturnal adventures with the local sportsmen.

  Clintus listened with flattering attention and reacted with satisfying ire. He could identify with Anna’s horror of “good old boys having a little fun.” Validation and support were all Anna got, all she expected. He could no more guess the identity or track down her night-hunters than she could.

  “I’ll check old reports,” he promised. “See if we’ve got anything on poachers over the past few years. Don’t get your hopes up. Around here it’s a kind of slap-the-wrist and wink crime. Left over from the days everybody hunted to lay in meat for the winter. Or maybe just not liking to be messed with by the government.”

  “I won’t hold my breath,” she said and they moved on to other matters. Anna hadn’t given poor old Doyce a thought since she’d first spotted the hunters’ light from the stand. It was a relief to return to a crime that engaged only her mind and left the rest of her in peace.

  “I believe we’ve got our Herm,” the sheriff said. Herm was the man who’d left a message on Doyce Barnette’s answering machine. Their visit to Mama and Doyce’s homestead felt like it had happened when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and Anna had to concentrate to bring the threads of yesterday together.

  “André nosed around and I made a few calls. It seems Doyce used to pal around with Herman Thornton. He runs an Army surplus place on the highway outside Natchez. He and Doyce own a bass boat together. Fishing buddies. Down in these parts that’s a bond more lasting and meaningful than marriage.”

  “Have you talked with this guy?” Anna asked.

  “Nope. Figured you’d want to be along.”

  Anna had liked Clintus Jones right off. If he kept up this level of considerate professionalism, he could give Paul Davidson a run for his money. Pure widow’s reflex made her look at his left hand. A dull gold band proclaimed him a married man.

  At least he wears one. The bitterness of the thought jerked Anna upright in her chair. Anger, sorrow, hate, envy, joy—those were emotions she could live with. Bitterness-was a trap. Mixed with self-pity it became a quagmire. “Ugh,” she said aloud and shook herself like Taco after a bath.

  “Beg pardon?” Jones murmured politely.

  “Nothing.” Anna swung her feet down from the third chair. Because of the beauty of the day, they’d eschewed the confines of the office, reeking with Thigpen’s stale cigarette smoke, and adjourned to the screened-in porch. It was furnished with three plastic chairs, the stackable kind, left over from some bureaucratic endeavor or another.

  Clintus rose as Anna did. Never let it be said Mrs. Jones didn’t raise her son right. “Shall we beard Herm in his den?”

  “He’ll be at the surplus store,” Clintus said stolidly. “I drive.” The sheriff had control issues, a hazard of law enforcement.

  “No problem.” Anna had spent so many years on foot and horseback that, to her, driving was a chore.

  Crashing through the woods from the direction of Mt. Locust stand arrested their attention. Anna felt a flash of fear, the sound momentarily putting her back into the night of the baying hunters.

  Bearlike and almost growling, Barth Dinkins emerged from the trees onto the small swale of mowed weeds that served as a lawn.

  “Hey, Barth,” she called through the screen.

  He hadn’t seen them and his head swung up at her hail. He grunted, completing the image of the mara
uding bear.

  “We got a problem,” he said as he charged toward the porch.

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” Anna muttered. Barth didn’t hear her. He was beyond listening. Anna’d never seen Barth angry before, and it transformed him. The softness was gone; the bland, amiable face hardened and his strange eyes, too light for his brown-skinned face, glittered like something from a grade-B science-fiction movie.

  Banging open the screen door, he stepped onto the small porch. His energy sucked the air from the little enclosure. Anna found herself and the sheriff backed against the far wall.

  “You’re going to give yourself a stroke, Barth,” she said mildly.

  “Yeah ... well...” He cast about as if for something to smash but settled for hurling himself into one of the recently vacated chairs. Once seated, the anger gushed out of him and he shrank back to his normal size.

  “My sign,” he said. “They just tore it all up. Broke it to bits. It’s never over. It’s just never fucking over.”

  Not once in the months she’d known him had Anna heard Barth use foul language. From him it generated the disgust and vileness that over-use had robbed it of in the mouths of an increasingly foul-mouthed society.

  Anna took the other chair, sat and waited. The sheriff remained where he was, watchful but not interfering.

  Barth gathered his wits. He stared down at his broad hands, the nails neatly trimmed, the beds a rich purple. “No call for me to be using that kind of language in front of a la—in front of you, Boss.”

  Both Barth and Randy had called Anna “boss” when she first arrived. They’d used it in sneering derision. After she and Barth had worked together on Danielle Posey’s murder, Barth’s way of saying it changed. Now, from him at least, it was a term of respect and acceptance.

  “What sign?” she asked.

  “Up at the slave graveyard. I was up there to do some measuring, see if I could suss out where more of the people might have been buried. I got there and the sign listing the names of the dead had been tore down. Not just tore down but tore up.”

  Anna waited but Barth had sunk into a place from which he didn’t seem inclined to communicate. His reaction was extreme for a sign knocked over, a kind of vandalism not unusual in the parks. Barth Dinkins wasn’t a man prone to emotional vapors. There was more to the story.

  “Show us,” Anna said. She shot a look at Clintus, an apology for cutting into his time with park matters. An almost imperceptible nod from the impeccably groomed head excused her.

  Barth dragged his face up, and Anna was surprised to see what looked like shame in his eyes. “I guess,” he said uncertainly.

  Anna and the sheriff followed him back through the band of trees separating the makeshift ranger station from the visitors center and around the stand to Eric’s vegetable garden. Shelly was on the back porch with a group of tourists, her childish voice telling a tale of bandits and bloodletting.

  Wordlessly the three of them crossed the plowed land to the trees where the old slave cemetery had lain unmarked and ungrieved for so long. At first glance the damage didn’t seem bad enough to warrant Barth’s reaction. The sign was well made: two treated four-by-fours driven deep in the clay, one-by-sixes nailed across, the names of deceased they’d been able to identify burned into the slats. Three more boards, still empty, awaited new discoveries. The boards with the wood-burned names had been hammered off and lay scattered around the sign.

  Barth stopped, turned back and stared across the field toward Mt. Locust as if divorcing himself from the party.

  “It doesn’t look so bad,” Anna said as she stepped around him. Then she stopped. “I take that back.” The four boards lying at her feet had not merely been knocked loose, they’d been attacked, defiled. A maniac with hammer and hatchet had hacked and clawed at the names until they were barely legible. Hatred, deep and vicious, emanated up from the crazed cuts and dents. Not satisfied with mere destruction, whoever had ruined the sign had taken the time to defecate on one of the boards before leaving. Vaguely, Anna remembered her sister telling her that was the calling card of a psychotic, and she felt a shimmer of dis-ease though she was well-armed, well-attended and standing in the sunshine.

  The shame she’d seen on Barth’s face made sense now. This had been done to annihilate and degrade. It’s just never fucking over, the mindless hatred of one people for another.

  “I am so sorry,” she said sincerely. An ice-cold glance from Barth and a stony lack of reaction from Clintus let her know her sympathy had come across as pity, but she couldn’t take it back.

  “Get maintenance to clean up the mess,” she told Barth. “Call Tupelo and get new signs made. Then see if you can find out who did this.” The last was just a sop and the three of them knew it. Unless vandals were caught in the act or stupid enough to scrawl their names, it was virtually impossible to trace them. Most often it was kids. This didn’t look like kid stuff.

  Clintus drove. Anna rolled her window down but even the crystal air seemed tainted with humanity’s spiritual excrement. She didn’t speak. Though she knew she was not personally responsible for the collective sins of the world, she couldn’t shake a creeping shame for enslaving Africans, decimating the American Indian tribes, annihilating the passenger pigeon, building strip malls on California’s beaches and leaving behind unsightly junk on the face of the moon.

  Clintus’s single-minded attention to the rules of the road smacked of shame as well. Whoever had desecrated Mt. Locust’s slave cemetery had had the power to embarrass across color, religious and gender barriers, an all-purpose slime.

  Herman Thorton’s Army surplus store, imaginatively named “Herm’s Army Surplus Store,” was on the outskirts of Natchez along Highway Sixty-five in the midst of a scattering of other unprofitable-looking business establishments. Herm occupied half of a low flat-roofed building. The other half had housed a dry cleaners, since out of business, the windows soaped to discourage vandals. Herm himself might have had a hand in the demise of Kris’s Kleaners. His portion of the building was daubed and dabbed and smeared with green, gray and brown paint aping the design of jungle camouflage. “Herm’s” was hand lettered in white across the unappealing mixture.

  “I checked up on Thorton,” Clintus said as he parked in front of the store. “No serious trouble with the law that I could find. He’s been getting the court’s attention for about seven years for nonpayment of alimony and child support, but it’s never gotten so far as to come across my desk. He’s been in and out of half a dozen businesses.”

  “Career in interior design didn’t pan out, I take it,” Anna said.

  Clintus laughed. Both were glad to move away from the thoughts left behind by Barth’s discovery.

  “Opened his surplus store about three years ago—Oh, well, isn’t that just peachy,” Clintus said, his attention diverted to the left of the defunct cleaners.

  At the corner of the building was a shiny black Cadillac.

  “Raymond Barnette?”

  “Looks like,” the sheriff replied.

  Suspicions pattered through Anna’s mind on sharp little dik-dik hooves: Barnette colluding with Herm Thorton in the death of his brother, come to warn him, come for vengeance, come for information?

  Clintus sighed deeply, staring over the steering wheel at the globby storefront. “It would look real good in the newspapers if he solved a murder case while running for sheriff, wouldn’t it?” he said sourly.

  That was a cynical twist Anna had not come up with. Given how skeptical she was concerning the innate goodness of the human race, she was surprised at herself.

  The sheriff’s cynicism was borne out. Pushing open the glass door of the shop, they could hear the undertaker’s somber bell tones ringing forth from beyond the boots, guns and fishing rods.

  “So Doyce was found dead there at that old historic Mt. Locust on the Trace. Found yesterday morning around nine. Looks like he was suffocated somehow. Maybe smothered or choked is my guess. I’m looking
into it sort of in a semi-official capacity, being Doyce was related.”

  Anna stepped closer, the better to eavesdrop. In doing so, she trapped Clintus in the doorway at her shoulder.

  “Well.” She felt his breath stir her hair. “Now Herm knows everything we do. That’s just dandy.”

  The sheriff’s whisper carried the icy draft of the sudden anger she’d noticed he was prone to. She stepped quickly aside.

  He shouldered his way through the enclosing racks of used military uniforms. Anna, trailing him, had a sudden picture of grim-faced commandos pushing through foreign jungles, AK-47s held at ready, hearts beating heroically, ready to kill for their way of life. Maybe she’d underestimated Herm. If he’d engineered this high and overhanging mass of green and gray materials to feed into the fantasies of men bored with their lives, bored with the paltry outcome of their dreams, men like the s.o.b.s who had so gleefully hunted her, then Herm Thorton’s decorating skills were superb.

  More likely, he was just a Doyce kind of guy: happier when curled in a mess of his precious stuff. Despite the implements of death and destruction with which Herm surrounded himself, he was a pleasant unprepossessing-looking fellow. Whether because of the history Clintus had given or because she actually could read it in the man’s face, Anna saw one of life’s gentle losers. Hair thinning, body gone to fat, nails chewed to the quick on what had once been fine, almost delicate hands, he cowered behind his glittering array of knives. Earlier on, in his twenties and thirties, Herm might have raged against his fate, bashed from one get-rich-quick scheme to the next. Acceptance had come somewhere along the line. He’d crawled into this well-lined nest and hidden. Anna saw no fight in the man.