Hunting Season Read online

  Anna saw her reflection in the window smile. With Barth, finally, she felt among friends. Professionally speaking, this duty station had been the loneliest she’d ever known. She was the boss, the only woman and, until Barth had chosen to let her in, hated outsider to the very men she had to work with every day.

  With an effort, she pulled her gaze from the passing scenery and shook herself free of the fog that had formed in her skull. “Nope. Not that kind of conspiracy,” she said. “I’ve not quite been driven round the bend yet.”

  Barth’s face, hardened into mask of concern, softened a little at the intentionally sane and cheery note she struck.

  “This is something I’ve heard filtering down from an unexpected source in Jackson,” she said. “No big deal.”

  “Sheriff Davidson’s wife?” Barth asked bluntly, and Anna was reminded that, in a National Park, no one had any secrets.

  “Yeah,” she admitted. Denying it was useless and silence was worse.

  “What did you expect?”

  Though buried in respect and what Anna hoped was friendship, she heard the condemnation in Barth’s voice. Christian music bleated its saccharine rock, and Anna damned herself for opening such a personal can of worms. Though Paul and his wife had been apart for three years, though half the people sitting in the pews come Sunday morning were divorced, though their own fucking Bible said let he who is without sin cast the first stone...

  “Whoo!” Anna said, blowing out the anger that had flamed up and crowned in the forest of her thoughts. “Pay no attention to me, Barth. The phone keeps wrecking my sleep. It’s given me a jaundiced view of life this morning.”

  They didn’t go to Barnette’s Funeral Home. After the debacle of the previous day, there was little chance Raymond would be forthcoming on any subject except, perhaps, the planning of their own funerals. Barth had been giving thought to what Claudia told them. For that Anna was grateful. Her mind had been co-opted by the Sturm und Drang of her love life, and she’d been less than helpful.

  First they went to the historical society, then to the library, then to the land assayers office and the county clerk. At Barth’s suggestion they researched not the names he’d uncovered at the Mt. Locust cemetery, but the history of the Barnette family as told by the paper trail left behind. Since the Barnettes were white and owned land, records had been kept of their official interactions.

  The earliest was a land grant of 2,300 acres to Joseph Doyce Barnette in 1743. What service he had performed to receive such a boon was not mentioned. The tract of land included the 300 acres now owned by Mama Barnette and an additional 1,900 acres stretching north and west.

  Sifting through old newspaper reports of slave sales, weddings, social events, local elections, bills of lading, birth, death and marriage certificates, they patched together a history of sorts.

  Joseph Doyce, born 1717, died 1799, had been prosperous. He bought and sold both slaves and cotton. He had given and been invited to balls and soirees of sufficient interest to be remarked upon in the society pages. During his long life, Joseph had seven children and two wives. Three of the children and both wives died young of a malady described only as “fever.”

  His land was left in toto to his eldest surviving son, Matthew Doyce Barnette. Whether hard times or profligacy afflicted Matthew, the dry pieces of paper they pored over didn’t say. The records listed only the facts. Of the original 2,300 acres, 1,500 had been sold over a period of seven years. Matthew had also sold twenty-one slaves. How many had been owned originally and how many had been retained to manage the remaining 800 acres was not recorded. Matthew Doyce Barnette died in a carriage accident at the age of forty-eight. The depleted plantation was left to his only child, a son, Harold Doyce Barnette, aged six, to be held in trust for him by his mother, Martha Gain-street Barnette, till he reached twenty-one years of age or married.

  Anna and Barth could find little during the years Martha held the land for her son. No record existed of her remarrying, her name was not included in the society pages. Evidently with the change in fortunes, the Barnette family had fallen from grace. Four formal complaints from creditors had been lodged against her. Martha had held on to the land, but in 1815 she had put five more slaves on the auction block.

  The record of Harold coming into the property in the fall of 1827 preceded that of Martha’s death by three months. Her duty done, she had evidently given up.

  Harold Doyce Barnette was, historically speaking, an invisible man after that. Search as they might there was no record of his marrying, buying, selling, running for office, getting arrested or even dying. That he must have done at least some of these things was attested to by a record of his will and the transfer of the land to his son in 1851. The son was Doyce Altman Barnette.

  “Papa Doyce, what do you bet?” Anna said when they’d reached this point in the dusty saga. Her head was full of dead people, her body cramped from sitting in an assortment of cold rooms throughout the day. Other than that she felt fine. For the first time she understood the lure that dragged historians back into the years. There was the thrill and occasional satisfaction of any good investigation, but the triumphs and atrocities were of only intellectual interest. The historian got no blood or vomit on her hands and, most attractive, was under no obligation to change the future, to keep injustice or injury from happening to the living. There were no living. The dead had become merely the stuff of ratified fiction.

  Outside the day darkened, grew colder, rain fell. None of it touched Anna and Barth. They were locked in the storms of previous centuries, those that could not, in reality, touch them.

  Papa Doyce brought the Barnette family back onto the public radar. It was he who had started the cabinet-making business. Raymond’s boast of his great-great-grandfather making fine furniture for the quality folk was not empty. Bills of sale to named gentry were recorded, and orders for expensive rare woods had been placed regularly by Barnette’s Cabinetry. He’d even been written up in the newspaper when a wealthy Natchez matriarch commissioned him to build a bedroom suite as a gift to her soon-to-be married daughter and son-in-law.

  In the article Anna found what Barth had known must be in the records somewhere. “I got it,” she said, feeling a rush of intense satisfaction. “Listen: ‘The suite, including bed, chest of drawers and armoire, made by local artisan Doyce Altman Barnette and his freedman Lanford Restin, will be open for viewing with the other wedding gifts for the public’s enjoyment from ten A.M. till noon at the home of Mrs. Ronald Vincent Coleman, prior to the nuptials on June seventh, eighteen sixty-four.”

  “Unk Restin was a freedman,” Barth said and laughed, taking pleasure in the good fortune of a man dead long before he was born. “Restin was one of the names in the Mt. Locust cemetery I could in nowise trace. If Unk Restin is that Restin or an ancestor, it makes sense. I was looking for slaves.”

  “Which plot is Restin’s?” Anna asked.

  “We don’t know. Nothing was marked. I uncovered only the names of the dead from family histories. The exact location of the graves is lost.”

  The two of them fortified themselves with stale Oreos and unbelievably bad coffee from a vending machine and continued the search. Because Lanford “Unk” Restin was a freedman he had been given at least nominal status of personhood and entered recorded history, no longer living and dying with the anonymity of slaves and other livestock.

  Late in the afternoon Barth startled Anna by an explosion of sound. “Holy smoke. This is it.” The big man positively crowed.

  Glad to stop wading through microfiche of barely legible newspapers, Anna quit working. “Well, out with it,” she demanded when Barth held on to his information too long, reveling in his discovery all by his lonesome.

  “Papa Doyce Barnette deeded three hundred and two acres to his freedman Lanford Restin April twenty-second of the year eighteen hundred and sixty-three.”

  “Where?” Anna asked. The crumpled feelings hours in the chair had left her with were g
one. This information could very well have an impact on the living and, for all the pleasure she was taking in sleuthing the dead, the living were more in her jurisdiction.

  “Where” was tricky. They traveled through the bowels of the Adams County Courthouse, guided by a succession of three helpful women who worked in this troglodyte habitat among ceiling-high racks of rolled, folded, filed, misfiled and ever-changing documentation. Zoning laws, county lines, city limits, property lines, dredging of canals, bayous, river beds; the human demarcations overlaying the natural topography and each other dating back 200 years were drawn in blue ink on yellowing paper.

  Anna and Barth compared descriptions, property lines and maps of rivers and bayous no longer accurate because their subject matter, like all living things, constantly changed. Finally, with help and luck, they were able to conclude with fair certainty that the 300 acres deeded by Papa Doyce to his freedman, partner and probably friend, was taken from the acreage on the southern and eastern-most borders of the 800 acres that remained of the original 2,300 in Joseph Barnette’s land grant. Over a century ago Papa Doyce had given away the land Raymond and his mother were so proprietary about and given it to a black man: Lanford “Unk” Restin.

  At some point in time the Barnettes had lost Papa Doyce’s 500-acre parcel and reacquired Lanford Restin’s 300 acres. “What do you bet if they bought it back, it was for peanuts?” Barth said. The words were soured by the potential truth in them, but his tone was cheerful. From the brightness of his gray-green eyes and the almost lascivious way he cracked his knuckles before opening or unrolling a cobwebby old sheet of paper, Anna could tell this was his idea of a really good time.

  Day-to-day road patrol—speeding tickets, DUIs, visitor assists—tended to eat up Trace rangers’ time and it was work that wasted Barth’s talents. Had he been willing to move, he’d have found a home at a higher pay scale in one of the historical parks with curator duties. Barth was a Mississippi boy, born and raised. His family was here. Nothing short of revolution or the much touted power of wild horses would ever drag him from his home in Jefferson County.

  Anna made a mental note to see if something local could be worked out. Half a dozen tiny historical graveyards existed on the ninety-mile stretch of parkway in her district. Most were being eaten away by time, neglect and vandals. She’d see if he could start with them, she decided.

  They stayed until all but one of the helpful ladies had gone home for the day and the lady remaining was beginning to show signs of bad temper.

  Several years after Lanford “Unk” Restin was deeded the property backing Mt. Locust, civil war racked the South. Written records of daily life suffered from the storm. Both Unk and Papa Doyce were killed. Not, as one might expect, with one in blue and one in gray. They’d both died fighting a house fire that apparently had nothing to do with the war. The paper said only that local business-man and landowner, Doyce Altman Barnette, along with his freedman, had burned to death when the roof unexpectedly collapsed while they tried to rescue two servants trapped on the second floor. Papa Doyce was survived by a wife and two sons. Of Lanford Restin, it merely said he’d chosen to be buried “back with his people.”

  Records surfaced of the sale of the acreage Barnette had retained after he deeded the 300 acres to Restin. It had been auctioned off in 1871 to cover bad debts. More recent records from the 1900s existed telling of births, deaths, taxes and building permits for the Barnette family on both the 300 acres Mama still dwelt on and the cabinet shop turned funeral parlor. Nowhere could they find any indication that Lanford Restin had sold, willed or given up his land. Apparently it had been quietly reacquired by the Barnette descendents without legal documentation.

  Darkness had fallen by the time they were ushered out the door. Darkness, made palpable in sleeting rain, coated trees and roads, but Anna and Barth were sufficiently pleased with their day’s work that it failed to dampen their spirits.

  Ten miles south of Port Gibson, dispatch in Tupelo called for five-eight-zero, Anna’s number. The dispatcher’s voice, usually a template for aural calm, had a ragged edge to it. “What now?” Anna muttered irritably. She didn’t appreciate the present interfering with what had been such a successful day in the past.

  “Five-eight-zero,” she said into the mike.

  “Where have you been? We’ve been trying to reach you all day.” The totally human demand from such a professional source alarmed Barth as it did Anna. He turned up the volume on the radio as if it weren’t already loud enough. A frisson of guilt passed unmarked between Anna and her field ranger. At some point in the afternoon the incessant chatter from the radios on their belts had become distracting as well as annoying to those in whose offices they toiled. They had turned them off and forgotten to turn them on again.

  “What’s up?” Anna asked, wasting no time or pride on public explanations.

  “Sheriff Jones of Adams County’s been trying to reach you.”

  “I’ll call him,” Anna said. “Anything else I missed?”

  “Not much. Pretty quiet. We should get some motor vehicle accidents up here. The roads are already starting to ice over.”

  There was a good chance they’d get a motor vehicle accident or two in the Port Gibson-Natchez district as well. Anna hoped inclement weather would keep the traffic light. Though hunters, she’d noticed, seemed even more determined than the post office to ignore rain, sleet and dark of night.

  “What time did Sheriff Jones call?” Anna asked.

  “He started calling about an hour ago. Hang on. First call came in at three-fifty-eight P.M. Just over an hour.”

  “Thanks,” Anna said, signed off with her call number, changed the radio to the frequency used by the Adams County Sheriff’s Department and radioed Clintus.

  “Clintus, Anna. I had my radio off.”

  “Where are you?”

  Anna told him.

  “I tracked down that matter I left a message for you about,” he said.

  “The truck?”

  A moment’s silence then. “Call me on a landline as soon as you get to the office.”

  “Will do,” Anna said.

  “What’s all that about?” Barth asked. “He sounded about half-mad at you over something. You been stepping on the local talent’s toes?”

  “I don’t think so,” Anna said. “I don’t know what the deal is.”

  Lights were on and Randy’s patrol car was parked in front of the ranger station when they pulled in. A weekend night, Randy was on his requested four-to-midnight shift.

  Barth rolled to a stop and Anna got out. He drove away, heading for the rear gate and the shortest route home. On her handheld radio Anna heard him calling out of service.

  She turned and walked through the sleet toward the little porchlike area that fronted the ranger station. A thin sheen of ice had formed over the concrete, and she fought for balance as her boots hit it. The door opened and Randy appeared in the flesh, never a pretty sight.

  “Hey,” he said cheerfully. “Clintus just called. He traced that truck you had problems with to Badger Lundstrom. Wants us to meet him there. I’m to fill you in on the way. André and three other deputies’ll be there. I guess Clintus isn’t taking any chances.”

  Randy skirted his vehicle and headed for Anna’s patrol car. She watched him for a moment, feeling the irritation that interaction with Ranger Thigpen invariably inspired prickling under her collar. Regardless of how many leaves the man turned over she doubted he would ever change perceptibly.

  Giving in to the inevitable, she shrugged. “Guess I’m driving,” she announced to an invisible and sympathetic audience.

  Having dug the keys from her pocket, she slid in behind the wheel and started the ignition. Letting the engine warm, she pulled up the mike to let Tupelo know where they were headed.

  Randy’s hand whipped out. He switched the radio off as Anna was depressing the mike key. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to cut you off like that. It’s just I forgot to
tell you. Clintus said to maintain radio silence. He got that from you I guess, thinking the truck driver must’ve been monitoring our frequency to get your location so exact.”

  Anger at having somebody—anybody—but especially Randy Thigpen screwing with her machinery hit Anna in a blast of sudden internal heat. Intellectually she accepted his reasoning. Clintus, when he called ten minutes earlier, had made it clear that he did not wish to discuss the Badger Lundstrom situation over the airwaves. That which ran deeper and more primitive than intellect stayed hot as new lava, and Anna chose not to respond verbally lest she expose her basic animal nature. She put the mike back on its hook, buckled her seat belt and drove sedately out the gate. Repetitious, habitual actions brought down her emotional temperature. The extent of her irritation was a clue to how tired and on edge the day—indeed the week—had left her. Not a good mind-set to carry into a potentially dangerous situation. Consciously she brought herself into the present, relaxed her body, breathed, opened her mind and let the dusty clutter of the day drift out of the comers. When she’d gained the level of calm and maturity she sought she said, “What’s the plan?”

  Without asking, she’d turned south when she left the ranger station, heading toward Lundstrom’s residence on the outskirts of Natchez.

  “Through the Adams County DMV Clintus tracked down a guy—a soybean farmer by the name of Quantas Elfman—who’d bought that truck,” Randy said.

  “Right. He was going to check it out,” Anna said.

  “Took him a while, but he did it. This Elfman sold it to a man runs a feed store in Utica about seven years ago. The feed-store owner traded it for two loads of metal pipe last winter.”

  “Badger Lundstrom provided the pipe,” Anna finished for him.

  “Yep. According to our feed guy Lundstrom had bought it along with a lot of other scrap an oil man was unloading when his business went belly up. Not that it matters where he got it,” Randy said. “Clintus said André’s already got Lundstrom’s place staked out. Lundstrom’s home. Clintus was leaving with the other deputies right after he called here.”