Hunting Season Page 23

  On the way to the door she passed the lathe and remembered the undertaker’s surreptitious stowing of the wood he’d been working. She stopped and turned. “This is a nice shop,” she said. “You work in wood?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to. Business is too good.” Anna waited for the “people are just dying to trade with me” joke, but mercifully it never came.

  “What’re you working on now? That was—what?—oak you were finishing?”

  “Just keeping my hand in. My great-great-granddaddy Doyce started out as a cabinetmaker. Had pieces in some of the finest homes in Natchez.”

  “Would that be Papa Doyce, the guy in the picture in your office?” Anna asked. “I went in there looking for you and got to admiring your pictures.”

  Ray’s cheeks quivered and the ease in body and face he’d had when lecturing on the economics of old trucks leaked away.

  Anna didn’t make too much of it. Maybe he worried she’d found incriminating evidence. More likely he was just alarmed at having anyone unattended in his private office. She would have felt the same way.

  “Papa Doyce,” Ray said, his proper business face back on. “He started the business in eighteen fifty-six. My brother was named for him.” While speaking, the undertaker was making the moves of an impatient host trying to get a guest to leave. Anna stood her ground.

  “I’d love to see what you were working on. I used to do a little woodworking myself.”

  “It’s just something to keep my hand in.” Ray touched her elbow to expedite her departure.

  “Still, I’d love to see it.” Anna leaned against the lathe, settling in for the long haul.

  Barnette had two choices. He could make a scene by continuing to refuse a simple request or he could acquiesce. He was enough of a politician to give in with what would have passed for graciousness had Anna not been close enough to see the strain in his smile and the fury behind his controlled movements. He took the plank from its impromptu hiding place.

  Angry as Barnette might have been, there was no slamming about of things. He handled the wood with the care of the true craftsman, lifting it then laying it on the lathe’s table.

  It was not as Anna had first thought, a single plank of fine oak, but several pieces of lumber glued almost seamlessly together and sanded to a fine sheen that showcased the subtle tight grain of the wood. The piece was three feet or less in length, but the shape was unmistakable. Disparate images of children, rotted wood and mouldering bones clashed in Anna’s skull. Maybe one mystery was solved. Maybe another was born. Unsure, she cleared her mind.

  “A child’s coffin?” she said.

  The undertaker blinked once as if she’d spoken a language foreign to him, then his eyes cleared and he said yes, smiling in a way he probably truly believed was reassuring.

  “You do beautiful work.” Anna had a deep love for natural wood in its many incarnations: living trees, sturdy cabins, fine furniture, logs for the fire in winter.

  Either the sincerity of her words or the flattery dispelled the undertaker’s anger. His long fingers stroked the edges, newly made from the lathe, with pride and pure sensual pleasure.

  “Do you make many coffins?” Anna asked, remembering the glossy ornate boxes in the showroom.

  Warmed by the genuine interest in her voice, Raymond’s facial muscles thawed, his smile became less ghoulish. “Not anymore. Nobody wants to pay for handwork anymore, and I don’t have the time like I used to, but every now and then I’ll get a special order.”

  “Somebody ordered this?”

  Again the hitch in his features, so fleeting Anna wasn’t sure she really saw anything. “People get a little crazy when a child dies,” he said. “That’s when they call me. They seem comforted to know their loved one will find a home made with care by somebody they know.”

  For all his oily ways and toothy deceptions, Raymond Barnette was serious about his work. Anna didn’t doubt that he cared deeply about the housing of humanity’s mortal remains.

  “Do you want to see the coffin I picked out for Doyce?” he asked brightly. “It’s top of the line.”

  An image of an upholstered box with a satellite dish to collect Monday night football and a cup holder for poor ol’ Doyce’s Budweiser filtered through Anna’s brain, disturbing her composure. “Some other time,” she said. “I’d better be getting on with my day.”

  What that day was to comprise, other than avoiding Thigpen and awaiting delivery of her “new” patrol car, Anna wasn’t sure. Because she was in Natchez, she headed in the direction of the sheriff’s office. As she drove she reviewed her interaction with Raymond Barnette, playing it back in her mind as if it were a videotape she could start and stop at will. This habit of review had stood her in good stead over the years. Try as one might, it was impossible to keep emotions from clouding one’s perception when in the company of others. Fear, intimidation—those were easy to spot and so to see past. It was subtle feelings that obscured details: self-consciousness, embarrassment, the desire to appear more powerful and professional. It was easy to get so wrapped up in one’s own performance that the nuances of one’s fellow actors slipped by unnoticed.

  Mental viewing, after physical distance was attained, lent clarity. Critiquing her scene with the undertaker, what struck her most forcefully was his reluctance and discomfiture regarding his woodworking project. Once she pressured him into letting her see his work it was obvious he took pride in his skill, in the skill of his ancestors. Why then hide it and fuss over showing her? What was there in the crafting of a child’s coffin to be wary or ashamed of?

  One solution had already occured to Anna, and she dearly hoped it was the right one. But she wasn’t willing to bet the life of a child on it.

  What child had died recently?

  This was not her jurisdiction and, arguably, none of her business. Even with an imagination as fertile as her own, Anna would be hard-pressed to articulate how it related to the incidents on the Trace. Still, she would find out. In the local parlance there was “probably no cheese down that hole.” Nevertheless, she would follow it till she reached the end. If it proved a waste of her time it would serve to even up her karmic balance. Her motives were far from pure; she would dearly love to pin something on the unctuous mortician. And, unlike the murky unpredictable malice that had lain over the Trace for the past couple of weeks, finding death stats was easy; there was a clear path to follow. Both considerations factored in, but mostly Anna felt uncomfortable turning her back, humming the American mantra “not my problem,” on any situation that included Raymond Barnette, a child and a coffin if there was anything the teensiest bit shady about it. Raymond’s evasion and anger provided more than the requisite teensy bit.

  Investigation that required only a mind and a telephone was the sort of thing Barth Dinkins did well. Anna would start him working on it. Long habit had her reaching for the truck’s radio. An unbidden memory of her patrol car smashing into the bridge railing stopped her hand. The more she thought about it, the less keen she was to share her concerns over the radio. She turned the pumper truck around and headed back up the Trace toward Port Gibson.

  Barth was behind his desk at the district office, half-glasses sliding down his low-bridged nose, the clear gray-green eyes alight in his dark face.

  “I was wondering if you could help me with some leg-work,” Anna said upon entering. “It requires no actual legs, mostly wheedling legally available information out of bureaucrats.” Barth sat behind a stack of photocopies; old land deeds, birth, death and marriage certificates from the look of them. Anna ripped her gun belt from the Velcro underneath and dropped it on Randy’s desk.

  No New York City socialite took off her spike heels with a greater sense of relief than Anna divesting herself of her duty belt. Permanent discolorations marred the skin over the pelvic bones from constant bruising. She’d once complained to her district ranger in Mesa Verde and been told to fatten up. Despite the south’s penchant for deep-fried food an
d plenty of it, she had failed to gain the necessary poundage.

  “What you got?” Barth said amiably and pushed his papers aside to let her know she had his full attention.

  Anna related the tale of the tiny coffin. Barth’s strange eyes seemed to iridesce, become opalescent. The pupils were shrinking to pinpoints. The man was an enigma to her. They worked together most days; respect and a form of friendship had grown between them, but nothing approaching intimacy. Anna’d never been invited to his home, and he’d managed to wriggle out of the invitations she’d extended to him and his wife. The two rangers never spoke of personal concerns. They knew no one in common who wasn’t park service. Barth was black, Anna white. She was his boss. He was a married man and she a single woman. Too many hurdles to overcome.

  “No problem. My work can wait.” A child, a coffin captured his attention. Like most big men, Barth had little understanding of anyone preying on the helpless.

  Anna thanked him, divided up the phone chores, then sequestered herself in her office. For three hours, including a break for lunch, she talked on the phone. She called city clerks, county clerks, county coroners for Adams, Jefferson and Claiborne and all the hospitals. By the size of the coffin Barnette had been crafting so lovingly, the recipient had to be under three or four years of age. Anna framed her questions accordingly.

  Because of the pressing nature of embalming and interment, she set her time frame to include the previous ten days. Bodies were seldom kept that long, but she wanted to make sure she didn’t miss any possibilities.

  By midafternoon she knew there had been no children recently dead from foul play, accident, domestic abuse or disease. None of the hospital doctors had signed death certificates. None of the three coroners had been called to declare a small citizen dead. No child, no infant had died in any of the counties contacted since September.

  Barth had fared no better in finding small dead people. Wanting to lean back and prop her feet on her desk, the appropriate position for deep and meaningful thought, Anna cursed Randy soundly for ruining her chair. If she leaned back past center she would achieve, not comfort, but a comic moment; her backside hitting the floor providing the laugh.

  Remaining upright, she considered the lack of information so laboriously accumulated. Sixty-three days without the death of a single child should have been cause for celebration, but Anna wasn’t happy. If no child had died why had his or her parents commissioned an expensive oak coffin? Had any parent really ordered the coffin? And, the question that bothered her most, was a live child slated to fill that coffin either by somebody in conspiracy with Barnette or with Barnette simply an innocent working in good faith?

  It was possible, Anna supposed, that the parents or guardians of a terminally ill child might commission a coffin against the inevitable moment of death. Possible, but she doubted it. On the two blessedly rare occasions she’d had to deal with parents of dying children, denial was what kept them functioning. Somehow, some way, a miracle was going to happen, God or modern medicine was going to step in. Their child would not be allowed to die.

  The mindset of a mother who would order a coffin for her living infant was unfathomable.

  If no one had ordered it and no child had died, why in hell was Barnette making it? More to the point, why did he tell her it had been ordered for a deceased child? Unless there were sinister overtones she was missing, he’d lied to her.

  She listed out the scene: she’d seen Barnette working at the lathe. He discovered he was being watched and made haste to hide what he was working on. When she’d asked to see it he refused. She insisted. He acquiesced but was angry. She asked what it was for. Barnette became uncomfortable. Then he told her it had been ordered. After that he was comfortable, talkative.

  The lie had let him off the hook.

  If not for a child, why was he making a tiny coffin? There were plenty of legitimate reasons: a prototype, a model, for practice, even just for fun. Everybody was wired differently.

  Had any of those been the case he would have had no reason to lie. Had he chosen one of those lies, Anna would never have caught him. In the fear of the moment, he’d said the first thing that came into his head. Unfortunately for him it was also the one thing she could trace, prove to disprove.

  Anna decided to shelve the unanswerable questions and mark the one answer she’d found in her mental column: Raymond Barnette had lied to her.

  15

  Near four o’clock, the light going fast as if the rain that had begun in the afternoon washed it from the sky, Anna’s replacement car, along with Ranger Steve Stilwell, showed up at the district office. Both were a welcome sight. Given that her world now consisted almost entirely of a road, she’d not felt quite dressed driving the pumper truck. Steve asked for a lift back to Ridgeland and she was glad of an excuse to visit with him, play hooky from office politics for a couple hours.

  Stilwell, his soft stick-straight hair in its usual disarray and needing a cut, seemed pleased with himself and life more than usual. He listened kindly to her tale of the wreck and was properly incensed at the perpetrator.

  Strains of classical music soft on the radio, rain and darkness making the warm privacy of the moving car intimate, Anna and Steve whiled away the drive to Ridgeland in pleasant fantasies of the violent revenge they would wreak upon Anna’s growing number of attackers should they meet them in an alley one dark night.

  Because the attack was committed with a battered pickup and conducted with bubbalike vehemence, Stilwell leaned toward the perp being one—or two, Anna couldn’t swear there hadn’t been a passenger—of the hunters who had chased her the night she and Randy stalked the illegal deer stand, and having nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Doyce Barnette.

  Coming from Steve, the theory sounded good, and Anna rather liked the idea that only one group in Dixie wanted her dead, but she couldn’t buy it. The hunters had merely been opportunistic. They’d achieved what they wanted: her humiliation and escaping scot-free with their poached meat. They had nothing to gain and everything to lose by a second attack on her. Even if they believed she was able to identify and prosecute them for the poaching, in Mississippi the penalty for poaching deer was not sufficient to motivate murder.

  All through the maze of speculation and retribution that they wandered, Stilwell maintained an undercurrent of gleeful superiority. Anna sensed, because he so clearly meant her to, that he knew something she didn’t. Because he was so smug about it, she suspected it had nothing to do with murder and mayhem but was personal.

  Rather than reassuring her, that increased her sense of disquiet. She wasted a lot of energy wondering what he was up to. By the hints he dropped she could tell he wanted her to try and wheedle it out of him. Her curiosity was such she would have dedicated herself to cajolery if she’d believed it would work, but Stilwell was having way too good a time to tell his secret. She chose not to give him the satisfaction of watching her fail.

  As they neared North Jackson with its plethora of trendy eateries on County Line Road, Anna’s stomach reminded her it was nearing suppertime. Once the idea was conceived it took over. A nice dinner in good company would be an excellent way to cleanse her soul of the niggling loneliness and insecurity that had been dogging her the past week. “Want to get a bite to eat?” she asked.

  “Can’t,” Steve said. “I’ve got a hot date.”

  He didn’t even have the decency to sound disappointed.

  “On a weeknight?” she asked with some asperity, then had to smile because she heard her mother in her own words.

  “When sweeping a woman off her dainty little feet, the key is consistency and, above all, persistence. Women can’t resist perseverance. Taps into two of their driving forces: guilt and vanity.”

  Steve was so pleased with himself and so right Anna wanted to punch him. Seat belts and the spurious dignity of middle age kept her from it.

  “Who is the lucky lady?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” St
eve said delightedly.

  She would but would never lower herself to ask.

  He suffered through the silence for less than a minute. “A mutual friend,” he said finally, trying to tease her back into the game.

  Anna said nothing. The only mutual friends they had were large, armed men. “You’re gay and at long last throwing wide the closet door?”

  Congratulating herself on social heroics, Anna turned down his offer of a consolation prize consisting of a drink of single malt scotch served in a coffee mug.

  Partway down Interstate Two-twenty, the freeway that, until the fifteen-mile stretch of scenic parkway between Clinton and Ridgeland was completed, connected the northern portion of the Trace to the southern end, she remembered the dead deer parts she’d been ferrying when the killer truck appeared in her rearview mirror. They were the sole reason she’d been on the road the previous night. The excitement of the crash with its aftermath of report writing had pushed it from her mind.

  General Services Administration had a center in Jackson. The wrecked Crown Vic would have been picked up from where she and Barth had dumped it at the Mt. Locust Ranger Station and towed there. Turning off at Medgar Evers Boulevard she wound her way into the city, reaching the GSA yard at quarter of six. Luck was with her; one employee, already working late and mildly disgruntled that he would have to stay later, pointed to where her vehicle had been unloaded. Deciding his duties did not require him to both stay late and get wet, he remained in his office as Anna squished across the yard toward the far corner of the lot. Cyclone fencing eight feet high and topped with razor wire secured an assortment of government equipment, some new, some discarded.

  At the sight of her car, mangled and crushed into a wad of metal, she realized she could never have survived and was overtaken by an unwelcome frisson of pure terror. The jolt of fear was so strong she stopped and stood in the rain, willing it to pass. Occasionally law-enforcement officers lost their nerve, had to retire or go into another line of work. Experiencing the paralysis of overwhelming fear for her mortal self, Anna fully understood the phenomenon.