Hunting Season Read online

  “But one never knows, does one?” Steve added, the playfulness back.

  This time Anna could laugh and it felt good.

  Steve finished his drink. “Time to saddle up.”

  Having dislodged the limp and grumbling form of Piedmont from her lap to drape him over her shoulder, Anna walked Stilwell to his truck. The evening was dead still and cool. Temperatures would be in the forties by morning. Moon not yet risen, the forest surrounding her house was perfect black, ending in a star-studded lace where leafless branches etched the margins of the sky. Invisible in the night, a creature skritched through the thick blanket of leaves beneath the trees.

  Steve opened the door of his antique truck, the candy-apple red blood-black without the light of the sun. He didn’t get in.

  “Since you’ve been sufficiently unwise as to choose someone other than yours truly who, I might add, has no wife to speak of, upon whom to bestow your affections, I’ll see what I can do. I worked down here for seven months. Got to know a lot of the locals.”

  He didn’t sound like he was joking. At least not completely. “What’re you planning?” Anna asked warily. “Bribe a divorce lawyer? Hire Bubba to smash her knee caps?”

  “Anna, you sting me to the heart. I’ll be infinitely subtle. Toodle-oo.”

  Anna watched him drive off, wondering what new imbroglio she’d just tumbled herself into.

  Monday and Tuesday were Anna’s lieu days, and she was determined to take them. Despite the public’s view, murder was one of the lesser evils. An officer could afford to take days off during a murder investigation. With the exception of serial killers who, fortunately, were rare as hens’ teeth, unlike raging wildfires or rising flood waters, most murderers weren’t an immediate danger to citizens. The garden-variety murderer killed whomever he or she thought needed to be dead and the matter was settled. Those willing to kill to solve their problems were sometimes of such a mindset that, should a second problem arise, they might turn to the same solution, but more often than not, it was a one-time thing.

  Anna went into Clinton: she did her shopping, got her hair cut, and went to the movies—an activity viewed by most as social. She’d grown so accustomed to doing it alone over the years she’d come to prefer it that way. Despite his recent invitation to call anytime, she didn’t call Paul Davidson and he didn’t call her. In saner moments they agreed that, until the divorce issue was settled, less contact would be best. Constraint rankled and Anna cursed Steve Stilwell for putting the image of Brando’s snake-catching into her mind.

  By Tuesday she’d run out of things to do and sat in the sun on the cold cement of her kitchen step drinking coffee and wondering what people with real lives did when they weren’t on the job. Insistent ringing rescued her before she’d had time to convert restlessness into self-pity.

  “Rocky Springs,” she answered. Anna’s being on the phone was, for some critter-born reason, a signal for Taco and Piedmont to vie for her attention. Both arrived on schedule to butt, paw and vocalize their demands.

  “What the heck is going on?” came an equally demanding voice snaking through the ether of the telephone lines.

  Caught off guard, Anna shoved Taco away without the customary pat of apology. “May I ask who’s calling?” she asked politely.

  Fighting fire with fire was a technique almost guaranteed to fail in verbal confrontations. A lot of years of trial and error had trained Anna to grow calmer in direct inverse proportion to her adversary’s excitement.

  “This is Raymond Barnette, Doyce’s brother,” the voice came back a degree or two less hostile.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “You read the papers this morning?”

  Anna hadn’t. Nobody wanted to deliver a daily to Rocky Springs. Not only was it too isolated to make it cost-effective, but commercial vehicles weren’t allowed on the parkway: no semi-trucks or trailers, no Papa John’s Pizza delivery, no newspaper boys.

  “It’s in all of them,” Raymond went on, the hostility back full bore. “The Natchez paper, The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson. It’s all over the front pages. Do you know what this could do to me in the election? I’ve got a mind to sue.”

  A lawsuit; one of the few things in life that could strike terror into Anna’s heart while not actually threatening her person with sharp objects. “What’s on the front pages?”

  “Listen to this,” he said and began to read. “‘The investigation of Doyce Barnette, found dead last Saturday morning in the old stand at Mt. Locust on the Natchez Trace Parkway nine miles north of the city of Natchez, has turned up new evidence. A source closely involved with the murder investigation, who asked not to be named, informed The Clarion-Ledger reporter Fowlard Yost that the body of the deceased was found in a condition indicating he was killed in the commission of a ritual sexual act. Though unable to release details of the finding due to the ongoing investigation, the Ledger’s source went on to say Doyce Barnette appeared to have been involved in acts of bondage or possibly sadomasochism. A religious message, the contents of which were held back, again to protect the investigation, was left near the body. Our source declined to say what the official consensus was regarding the text and said only that it was Christian. Clintus Jones, the county sheriff heading up the investigation, declined comment, saying only that the investigation was continuing. District Ranger Anna Pigeon of the Natchez Trace could not be reached for comment.’ ”

  Anna was at a loss for words. Knowing Barnette not only expected but deserved a response, she scrambled around and came up with one. “This information wasn’t released by the National Park Service or the sheriff’s department. A number of people saw Doyce’s body. One of them could have called in the information, or it might even be someone they told.”

  “Who saw the body?” Raymond asked.

  “I’ll look into it,” Anna promised.

  “Who saw? I got a right to their names.”

  Barnette, faced with his brother’s death, a shotgun-toting mother and, when found interrogating Herm Thorton, two annoyed officers of the law, had remained civil, moderately urbane and, in an indefinable way, cold. Faced with a situation that directly threatened his plans, Anna was seeing a new side of him. He was still cold, but rather than the chill of empty tombs Anna’d sensed before, he’d taken on an edge, a determination. Not for the first time she wondered if he’d killed his brother. Cain and Abel. It fit in with the quasi-religious theme suggested by the circling of the verses on Grandma Polly’s writing desk.

  Maybe he’d left Doyce in a public place to spread suspicion around and took his clothes to destroy trace evidence, never realizing it would look like a sex crime.

  “I’ll look into it and get back to you,” Anna said.

  “You’re liable to find yourself in the middle of a lawsuit if you don’t get this mess straightened out and quick,” Barnette said.

  “I’ll call you when I know anything.” The lawsuit threat was empty. The information leaked to the papers was information she and Clintus had decided to keep confidential, but all of it was true.

  Anna decided to conduct her inquiries in civilian clothes partly because they were more comfortable and partly so she could pretend to herself she was giving up a chunk of her “Sunday” under duress. To corroborate her unofficial standing, she took Taco with her when she drove south.

  The task carried with it absolutely no urgency and, on Anna’s part at least, very little irritation. She and Clintus had kept the secret of how Doyce’s body was found not so much to aid in the investigation but to protect the feelings of Doyce’s family. Now that Anna had met Raymond and Mama Barnette she didn’t much care whether their feelings were hurt or not.

  Seeking the source of the leak was merely something to do. If it should turn out to be a malicious or self-serving act on the part of an employee in her district or local law enforcement, it would give her a heads-up on who to avoid. Proving who did it would be difficult and a waste of energy.

  Even if the a
ction was proven, the illegality of it would remain in question. Heads wouldn’t roll. Hell wouldn’t be paid. The juice wouldn’t be worth the squeeze.

  The coroner, Gil Franklin, was a possibility. He’d seen the body, then taken it upon himself to call Ray Barnette. Shelly Rabine, the little interpreter at Mt. Locust, had discovered the body. That lent her a cachet the newspapers would love. There was Clintus Jones of course. He was the only one Anna could think of off the top of her head that would get anything other than attention out of the disclosure. As Barnette said, linking his family to a sex crime wasn’t going to bring in the Christian voters come election day. But since it was Clintus who suggested keeping the details under wraps in the first place, Anna crossed him off her list. André Gates, Clintus’s pretty, haughty under-sheriff, might have done it. Anna doubted he’d remain in his position long if Barnette was elected. If Raymond didn’t oust him, he’d probably quit. André didn’t strike her as the type to have patience with an arrogant and inept white boss-man. Randy Thigpen and Barth Dinkins knew the details. There was nothing in the telling for them but momentary attention and a sense of self-importance. Unfortunately that was enough to tempt some people over the line. But her field rangers were the only two who would suffer consequences if caught. The United States might fiercely protect the right of free speech, but her government agencies had all manner of rules against its exercise by their employees.

  Anna doubted Barth would do it. He was honorable and preoccupied, his energies taken up by the desecration of the slave cemetery. She hoped Randy hadn’t done it. He’d already proved an embarrassment. On the bright side, if he had, maybe she could get his fat ass fired. Anna smiled at the thought.

  Thigpen and his weighty derrier would not be on duty till four. Anna decided to start with Shelly Rabine. Not only did she intimidate the little interpreter, she rather liked her—two factors that would ease the questioning process. Besides that, at Mt. Locust, Taco could get in a good run if he were so inclined. The poor dog had been sorely neglected since the murder of Doyce Barnette had begun usurping most of Anna’s time.

  Only one car was parked in the lot in front of the visitors center, a ’91 burgundy Honda Accord that belonged to Rabine. Anna pulled her Rambler American in beside it and sat for a moment enjoying the phenomenal stillness. If she skewed her reality just a few degrees, it was easy to believe the world had come to a full stop; that, like the first entrant into the thorn-shrouded castle of Sleeping Beauty, she was the only living thing not frozen in thrall.

  Not the only living thing. Taco was bounding and slavering to be set free. Hauled back to the mundane, Anna leaned across to open the passenger door. The three-legged Lab leapt out with a speed and agility many four-legged dogs would have envied.

  Shelly had evidently seen the Rambler through the visitors center window. She came out and waited for them on the concrete apron in front of the little building. Taco, who had never laid eyes on Shelly before, rushed over to greet her like a long-lost sister. The dog must have weighed nearly as much as the child-sized park aide, but Shelly was unthreatened and allowed him to express his saliva-laden devotion much longer than Anna would have.

  Watching Taco’s ecstatic tongue lap at Shelly’s thin cheeks, Anna felt a mild stab of guilt. Where dogs were concerned, she was never going to get the Owner of the Year Award.

  “Hey, Anna,” Shelly called in her wispy voice. “Anything new? It’s been dead around here since Saturday.”

  If the pun had been intended, the young woman gave no sign of it but chattered on happily. “Not one single visitor yet this morning. The big excitement here was old Mack fussing about poltergeists moving his stuff.”

  Mack, Anna remembered, was the oldest and most senior of the maintenance men in her district, maybe on the Trace. He was secretive about his age but he had to be near eighty. He’d been forcibly retired from driving the tractors used to mow the edges of the parkway when his sight began to make him a danger to automobile traffic. That had been a decade or more before Anna’s arrival. Since then, he’d putzed, pottered and gardened the Mt. Locust site with the possessive fussiness of the little-old-lady cliché.

  “Find any more bodies or anything neat?” Shelly asked with innocent ghoulishness.

  “No more bodies,” Anna said. “Want to close up shop for a few minutes and walk with me? Taco needs some space.”

  Shelly was only too glad to abandon the tedium of her post. She locked up the VC, and because it was the way traffic naturally flowed, they wandered up the path toward the stand. Taco bounded ahead, apparently bent on showing that the district ranger’s dog was gloriously and illegally off leash.

  For the first time in weeks, the succession of clear blue and gold autumn days was broken. The sky was overcast, hinting at the possibility of much-needed rain. A fog so thin it was second cousin to mist fell like a scrim over the meadow, giving trees and fences the vague outlines of things dreamed and poorly recalled on waking.

  “You just busman’s holidaying or what?” Shelly asked. The mist and the stillness didn’t seem to oppress her one bit, just as seeing a dead body hadn’t had any dampening. effect on her spirits that Anna had noticed.

  “Well, kind of,” Anna replied. “I was wondering, you being here every day all day, if you’d maybe noticed something—any little thing—that we might have overlooked.” The best way to get people to talk was to get people to talk. Words, like water, flowed better en masse.

  Flattered and delighted with the question, Shelly wrinkled her smooth brow in concentration. Watching her, Anna flashed back to when she was in her twenties, when she and Zach had lived in New York City, he struggling to find work as a director and she dabbling in the world of acting. Cast in a role older than herself, she’d sat in front of a poorly lit mirror, the silver backing peeling off at the edges, in a dressing room of a ramshackle, roach-infested theater near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. With like concentration she’d screwed her face into wrinkles and painstakingly painted lines where the flesh folded. Now the lines were always there, a roadmap to her past.

  Shelly’s best effort failed, and to her credit, she didn’t invent anything to cover the fact. Not the action of someone starved for attention. Anna pursued her inquiry anyway.

  “The way you found the body—you know, in his underpants and all—was weird. Did anybody you told about it have a theory we might not have thought of?”

  “I thought we were supposed to keep all that a secret,” Shelly said. The affront in her voice was too genuine to be feigned, colored not with anger at being accused but disappointment that she’d been righteously withholding a terrific story that was hers by right while others were dining out on it.

  Shelly wasn’t the one who’d leaked the information to the newspapers. Anna decided to let the matter rest. “We were,” she said. “But somebody screwed up. The details were in the morning’s paper.”

  “I didn’t tell them,” Rabine said indignantly.

  “I know,” Anna said.

  “I didn’t.”

  “I believe you.”

  Shelly opened her mouth to protest her innocence again but chose to accept Anna at her word and said nothing. They reached the fork in the path below the inn. The wider trail led toward the bricked steps to the porch. Following Taco, they took the road less traveled and walked around the back to Eric Chamberlain’s kitchen garden.

  “Do you have any idea who might have told?” Anna asked.

  “Shoot, no,” Shelly said. “I don’t even know those guys—the sheriff and that fat, tiny-footed guy.”

  “The coroner, Gil Franklin?”

  “I guess. The only one besides you was Randy. And I only know him to say ‘hi’ to. It’s not like law enforcement spends any time hanging around talking to lowly park aides.”

  The bitterness in her voice was not new to Anna. In most parks she’d worked there’d been friction, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, between the various disciplines. Of late it had been exacerbat
ed. Once they were all known as park rangers. For reasons that escaped Anna, the NPS had decided to remove interpreters, naturalists and historians who brought the park to life for the visitors, from that proud and time-honored group, forcing them to be referred to as park aides. If they wished, at some point, by jumping through administrative hoops, they could regain the title of park ranger.

  The bureaucratic logic of pay scales, promotional series and career development paths had been explained when the change took place, but the sense of disenfranchisement remained. Little boys and girls didn’t dream of growing up to be aides. They dreamed of growing up to be rangers.

  “Anyway,” Shelly said, regaining the cheer that seemed her natural state. “Mississippi’s like hometown central for stories. A good story’ll spread like kudzu. Friday it’s this deep dark secret and by Sunday morning half the preachers in the state are preaching a sermon about it. Down here we don’t have to tell stories, we just sort of breathe them in and everybody everywhere knows.”

  Anna laughed. She couldn’t argue with that. Southern secrets were kept from outsiders, but everybody else knew things by osmosis.

  Taco was digging madly at the end of a row of corn plants, the leaves brown and papery. Anna shouted at him. He looked up, his tongue lolling out between muddy jaws. He then obediently left off what he was doing to come rub dirt and dog spit on her Levi’s.

  The interview was pretty much at an end. Chilly and gray, the day didn’t tempt Anna to dawdle. Pushing away Taco’s demonstrations of abiding love, she started to turn back.

  “Barth’s sure been working his tail off in the old slave cemetery,” Shelly said quickly. “Wanna go and see?” Anna looked at the young woman. Her slightly protuberant eyes were further exaggerated by the wide hopeful stare. Rabine -looked all of twelve years old and just as transparent. She didn’t want to go back to standing behind the counter in a cramped visitors center waiting for visitors that never showed.