Hunting Season Page 5

  As was his wont, Jones kept his voice even and cool, but Anna heard an echo of bitterness and remembered the sudden deep anger she’d seen at Mt. Locust. She wondered why, in all the chit-chat about notifying the deceased’s family, he’d not bothered to tell her he was running against poor ol’ Doyce’s baby brother for the job of Adams County Sheriff. Vague, unfocussed suspicion flared, brought on more by a naturally cynical nature than by any untoward events. She doused it with logic. This was Mississippi. From Tennessee to Louisiana everybody pretty much knew everybody else’s business. Clintus Jones might not have mentioned it simply because he assumed everybody already knew.

  “That’s it.” Clintus pointed with his chin. An odd habit that had a military feel.

  Like most funeral parlors Anna had seen, Barnette’s was designed to look like an upscale home. A Mississippi native, Raymond had been unable to resist the antebellum lure. White columns covered in plaster suggesting dead Greek architects and Italian marble quarries fenced in the two-story portico.

  Either out of consideration or superstition, Clintus didn’t park his patrol car at the front doors in the shade of the pillars, but pulled around back by a Dumpster, the contents of which Anna hoped never to become aquainted with. The two of them walked back around to the front of the building and let themselves in.

  Oversized doors, with knobs higher than standard, always made Anna feel a little like the Lily Tomlin character Edith Ann: too little for this world. Maybe that was the point.

  Within the doors was a predictable foyer, lush in pseudo luxury with too many tasteful wall hangings. As befitted the place’s function, it was as chill and silent as a tomb and smelled faintly of flowers. Not a pleasant smell, and Anna wondered fleetingly why flowers in hospital rooms and funeral homes carried a different scent than bridal bouquets and children’s nosegays.

  Hard-soled shoes on plastic parquet sounded from the back of the building. Silence, ghost blooms and recent events conspired, and Anna would not have been surprised to see Vincent Price appear from the shadows.

  It was the only slightly more reassuring countenance of Raymond Barnette Anna had come to know from the posters. The grinning visage was composed in that delicate balance morticians master, somewhere between a welcoming greeting for those shopping for all eternity and a compassionate sympathy for those left behind.

  As soon as Barnette saw who’d called him forth, the professional mask crumbled. Even his gait changed, became looser, less formal.

  “Why, hey, Sheriff Jones, what brings you here? Not business, I hope? New recruit?” he said of Anna before Clintus could respond to his first question.

  Anna introduced herself and they shook hands. To her surprise his was warm, dry and firm. Contact with the dead had not robbed him of body heat.

  “Actually, it is business,” the sheriff said. He took off his hat and ran a hand over his hair, the fingers not mussing but gently patting it as if to assure him it hadn’t been rearranged.

  Because of the sheriff’s careful observance of the amenities at Mt. Locust, Anna had wondered at his not removing his hat when they first came inside. She now suspected it was a subtle sign of disrespect.

  At the word ‘business’ the undertaker’s face altered slightly, not a return to professional empathy but veiled with a thin cast of wariness; that of a citizen wracking his brain for remembered indiscretions he’d believed had gone unwitnessed.

  “It’s your brother, Doyce,” Clintus said. “I’m afraid we’ve got bad news. He’s been killed.”

  A flicker of what might have been relief—or merely a changing of gears behind what Anna was coming to realize was an actor’s countenance, capable of putting on one emotion after another without the inconvenience of feeling—briefly crossed Raymond Barnette’s face. It was gone in a heartbeat and Barnette’s features emerged in proper doleful arrangement.

  “Yes,” he said. “Gil called me from his cell phone. He’s showing the old Shugrew place out past Mama’s. A nice piece of property.”

  An odd detail to mention. Maybe it was callousness, maybe shock. Anna looked at Clintus. He’d taken on a slow burn.

  “Gil called you?” he asked evenly.

  Barnette picked up on the undercurrent. “Just a courtesy, sheriff. Gil and I go way back. He told me Doyce had passed. I was just now closing up shop to break the news to Mama. What was it? Gil said maybe heart attack. Doyce’s never taken care of hisself—himself.”

  The correction triggered what might have been the first honest emotion Anna had seen on Raymond Barnette’s face: hatred. For himself, for his past, for what he thought he should be. A lapse in control that showed his lingual roots.

  “It’s a little more than that,” Clintus told him. “Is there a place we can talk?”

  “Surely. Surely.” Barnette led them back to an office as formal and unused looking as the front foyer. Through that, behind a discreet door, was his working office, unadorned, cramped and cluttered with papers, coffee machine, copier, computer and other modern business paraphernalia.

  All that differentiated it from any other business office were the salesmen’s samples thumbtacked to the walls and littering the top of the four metal filing cabinets: tiny coffins, bits of wax shaped into a nose and what looked to be part of an ear, a color poster showing the before and after pictures of a corpse with a disfiguring facial wound carefully reconstructed with mortician’s magic for an open-casket viewing.

  Crowded in two narrow chairs, coffee offered and declined, Raymond settled behind his desk and Clintus told him how his brother had been found.

  Details were omitted: the semi-nudity, the strap marks on the body. When the sheriff had finished, the three of them sat in silence for a minute or more. Anna passed the time watching Barnette’s face. She could read nothing from his expression or lack thereof.

  When he mentally came back into the room he said, “Mt. Locust? On the Trace there? What in God’s name was that—was Doyce doing at Mt. Locust?”

  “Well...” Clintus looked at Anna. She was no help. “It looks like it might be some kind of sex crime, Ray.”

  Barnette hardened, face and body, as if the muscles beneath the skin had suddenly turned to steel. He shot such a look of malevolent suspicion at the sheriff that Anna was startled.

  “I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t that,” he said coldly. “You go sayin’ it was that and you got yourself a lawsuit on your hands.”

  The undertaker’s careful diction had slipped again, but his meaning was clear enough. Neither Anna nor the sheriff responded. People in grief—if this was grief—said many things. Law enforcement officers learned not to engage.

  “I got to break the news to Mama,” Barnette said and stood to end the interview.

  3

  For reasons the sheriff chose not to divulge to Anna, they were going, uninvited, to be in attendance when Raymond told “Mama” that her firstborn was dead. During the twenty-minute drive through green and rolling hills north of Natchez, Anna covertly watched Clintus Jones. Anything that might have been there to read was locked beneath a mask of professional stoicism.

  It crossed her mind that he went to the Barnette homestead merely to annoy a man he’d apparently never liked and who had recently become a rival. She might have believed it of another man, but Sheriff Jones just didn’t seem the type. He had the anger, but it seemed reserved for moderately righteous causes.

  “This’ll be the Barnette’s,” the sheriff said, and he pointed to what once had been a classic avenue of oaks leading off the road to the right. There was neither sign nor mailbox, and Anna wondered if he had cause to know Doyce and his mama’s home from previous visits or if it was merely the knowledge of all good small-town sheriffs of their constituency.

  “Why go to Barnette’s?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know,” Clintus confessed. “I got a funny feeling.”

  Anna had great respect for funny feelings. Undertaker Raymond Barnette’s reaction to the news of h
is brother’s death had left her out of balance as well.

  Jones turned smoothly onto the gravel drive beneath the over-arching trees. The leaves of the live oaks never turned gold or scarlet or rained to the earth in autumn’s annual celebration of death, but they did grow dry, the canopy thin-looking with coming winter. Many of the trees had been cut down, leaving gaps in a living sculpture that had been planted to endure centuries.

  “Some kind of disease get the trees?” Anna asked.

  “You might say that,” the sheriff returned. “Hard times. Doyce and Ray’s daddy died during the Depression. Their mama got on for a year or so with the help of the neighbors, but the neighbors were having hard times of their own. One day she sold half of ’em for lumber. Never planted-new ones, never would let anybody dig out the stumps. Me, I wouldn’t want to be reminded of the bad times every time I went to the mailbox. Takes all kinds, I guess.”

  Anna said nothing. She was thinking of a far-away day in high school in Red Bluff, California. She and Sister Judette had witnessed some form of aberrant behavior. To seem worldly, Anna had expressed the old cliché. The sister had shot her a sour look and retorted, “It doesn’t take that many kinds.”

  The fractured avenue was short-lived, as though the original owner had the pretensions but lacked the acreage to carry them out with much aplomb. At the end of the corridor stood the homestead. It had never been a mansion—too small for that title—but once it had been a fine house. Two stories tall, it boasted a gracious front porch curving around a comer entrance. Rather than the long rocking-chair type, it was square, forming an outdoor room furnished with wicker sofas and chairs.

  Clintus executed a Y-turn on the dirt in front of the house and backed the patrol car under the shade of a magnolia tree, the nose of the vehicle pointing back toward the road as if for a fast getaway. Ray Barnette’s black Cadillac was nowhere to be seen.

  “Looks like the hard times never left,” Anna said.

  “Never did, I guess. From what I’ve picked up over the years, Mrs. Barnette fell victim to about every get-rich-quick scheme that floated down the river and passed on the tendency to Doyce. Raymond’s the only member of the family that ever did a lick of real work.”

  They’d reached the porch. An old fan was festooned with spider webs. The cushions on the furniture had faded to mottled gray-brown; stuffing extruded through rents in the rotting fabric. Leaves patterned the painted plank flooring. The roof was supported by squat pillars with peeling white paint, revealing the gray of weathered wood beneath.

  This outdoor living space had not been used for a while. Anna and the sheriff stopped, neither wanting to be the first to try to breach the forbidding oak door that closed off the main house.

  “Where the hell’s Ray Barnette?” Anna asked. “He took out of the funeral home like a bat out of hell.” They’d neither followed nor passed Barnette on the way, merely assumed he’d gone to “Mama’s” as he said he would.

  “Maybe he stopped for a cup of coffee,” the sheriff said sourly. “We’ll wait.”

  Anna eyed the wicker chairs but decided against sitting. The cushions looked as if they might have become a habitat for any number of crawly things.

  Before a decision could be made on where to perch, the sound of shuffling steps and the turning of the door latch arrested their attention. Clintus shot Anna such a panic-stricken look she thought for a second he was going to bolt for his patrol car. She would have been right on his heels. By arriving before Raymond, they’d landed themselves in the midst of a potential social gaffe that even county and federal law-enforcement uniforms would not excuse.

  “We’ll chitchat till Ray shows,” the sheriff stage-whispered and stood shoulder to shoulder with Anna, both looking as guilty as villains from a melodrama.

  The door swung open. Clintus snatched off his Stetson. From out of the gloom of the high-ceilinged room an old woman materialized. Another midget: she was as tiny as Anna’s maternal grandmother, no more than four foot ten. Her white hair was chopped off just below her ear lobes and held back on either side by pink plastic barrettes shaped like little butterflies. The childishness continued. The old lady wore a short, brightly patterned rayon dress Anna remembered seeing on the rack in the juniors department at Dillards.

  What killed the quirky charm of the birdlike blue eyes and youthful attire was the double-barreled shotgun she pointed purposefully at their middles.

  “Whoa,” Anna breathed and, “easy now, lady,” as she raised her hands in the universal I-mean-you-no-harm gesture.

  “You git,” the old woman shouted. “I’m tired of you sniffin’ around prying into things, trying to steal my land. I see you here one more time you’ll get a hide full of buckshot.”

  The threat was directed, not at Anna, but at Sheriff Jones. Again, Anna wondered at Clintus’s familiarity with the place.

  Without taking her eyes from Jones, the old woman said to Anna, “You get your boy outta here, now. I don’t know what you’re playin’ at with these people but keep ’em away from me and mine.”

  Anna hazarded a look at Clintus. He appeared as genuinely baffled as she was.

  “We’ll be going now, ma’am,” Anna said firmly. “You don’t need that shotgun. Come on, Clintus.” The two of them backed slowly toward the porch steps, the old woman following, nudging them along with short, sharp jabs of the shotgun barrel.

  The crunch of tires on gravel arrested what Anna was sure was a ludicrous tableau.

  “Mama, it’s all right,” Raymond called. He came up the steps behind Anna and the sheriff. “Mama’s” aim never wavered and neither of them put their hands down.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” Ray said soothingly. “No need for fireworks.” He took the shotgun from his mother’s wrinkled grasp. He tried to do it gently but the bony fingers held on till he gave the weapon a vicious twist. Anna flinched but Mama’s trigger finger let go before the gun went off.

  Disaster averted, Raymond put his arm around the tiny harridan in what looked to Anna like a parody of filial affection. “Mama, this is the sheriff,” he said loudly. “Sheriff Clintus Jones.”

  “Mama’s eyesight isn’t as good as it used to be,” Raymond said with a smile that was meant to be ingratiating but, given the oversized front teeth, came off as mildly menacing.

  “Let’s go on inside, Mama.” He herded his aging mother into the shadows behind the oak door and pulled it firmly shut behind them, leaving the sheriff and Anna marooned on the porch.

  “Jeez Louise,” Anna muttered as she shut herself in the sanctity of Clintus’s patrol car. “Jeez Louise” was fairly unsatisfying but, since she’d moved to a region where “What church do you belong to?” was as common a question as “where do you live?” she’d consciously tried to cut down on taking the Lord’s name in vain.

  “You said it.” Clintus whistled and shook his head. “What do you figure that was all about?”

  Anna looked at him sharply. Mama Barnette had appeared to recognize and hate the sheriff. She’d accused him of, among other things, trying to steal her land. In memory the sequence of events was so Hatfields-and-McCoys via 1950s TV that Anna laughed.

  “What?” Clintus demanded.

  Antebellum dry rot, the decimated oak lane and the shotgun had conspired to dislocate Anna culturally and, for the moment, she felt a stranger in a strange land, unsure whether Mississippians had TV in the fifties and sixties, if the images that shaped the rest of the country would evoke an emotional connection in this part of the country.

  “Nerves,” Anna made a long story accessible.

  “Jiminy Christmas,” Clintus hooted, continuing the theme of ersatz profanity. “I felt like an extra in a bad episode of the Beverly Hillbillies.”

  Again Anna laughed, American pop culture restored and binding. For a few moments they sat without speaking. Absently she scratched at a fire ant bite on her wrist. She’d gotten it more than a week before, but the toxin of these minute monsters was persistent.


  “What’s Mama Barnette got against you?” she asked finally.

  “Beats me,” Clintus said with all apparent honesty. He shrugged appealingly and turned his hands up. His palms were wide and soft. Anna found strong men with pillowed hands particularly gentle-looking for some reason.

  “She thought you were someone else,” she said.

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Who?”

  Again the sheriff said, “Beats me.”

  More silence. “We’ve got to go back in,” Clintus said finally.

  “I know.” Anna felt like an idiot cowering in the car, facing the prospect of slinking back to the front door a second time. From the way the sheriff sat in a lump fiddling with a lacing on the leather steering wheel cover, she guessed he felt no better.

  “I don’t want to give her too much time with her number two son before we question her,” he said. Anna nodded. Raymond the-last-word-in-honesty Barnette did not inspire confidence.

  Clintus was the first to reach for the door handle. Anna had trailed him back into the shade of the neglected porch. As he stood before the door, presumably gathering his dignity for the coming interview, she enjoyed the timeless peace of a southern autumn.

  Spring was a raucous season with the song of countless frogs and nesting birds creating complicated symphonies of new birth. By fall many of the birds had gone and the frogs, those who’d not given their leapy little lives that the birds might grow strong, had matured into middle-aged complacency and no longer sang.

  This tucked-away place with its ancient oaks and magnolias hummed quietly. A moment of Indian summer, caught in amber by the perfect light and promising to last forever.

  Not so the peace of the human animal. Clintus rapped on the door too sharply, overcompensating for the memory of their ignoble rout, and Anna was jerked back to petty mortality.

  The wait before the knock was answered grew so long Anna began to ask that creepy question that comes to all law officers every now and then: What will I do if they just won’t play the game? One can hardly batter down a grieving mother’s door just to get an interview, and Anna couldn’t picture herself or Clintus yelling, “We know you’re in there. Come out and nobody will get hurt.” Law and order, the day-to-day bread and butter stuff, was predicated on a cooperative citizenry. There are no policemen in an anarchy, only soldiers. Clintus knocked a second time. Another minute passed.