Deep South Page 6

  There she leaned against the still-warm brick and watched. Her reasons were twofold: to get an aural or ocular fix on her miscreants and to absorb the surreal scene that had unfolded as she rounded the corner. Behind the church, in a clearing beyond a decrepit fence with a wire gate, was an ancient graveyard. Stones lay broken on the ground. Those still standing had sunk into the earth, swallowed by the graves they marked. Moss, black in the weak light of the moon, erased names, dates, lives. On the far edge of the clearing, pushing into the night of trees, were monuments of marble, towers of once-white stone, ten and twelve feet high. Beyond them a walled area, overgrown with vines, was just visible: a family plot, exclusive even in death. In the strange warm embrace of the night, trees close on every side and Spanish moss hanging in dense veils silvered by the faint breath of moonlight, for a heartbeat Anna was afraid. Not of the dead, or of the undead for that matter, but of having wandered into Rod Serling country, a twilight zone in the nineteenth century from which there was no way out. Unpleasant tingling started at the nape of her neck and crept up the back of her head hair by hair. It was time to get some sleep. She was so tired she was scaring herself.

  A sharp “fucking hell!” from the shadows beyond the clearing brought her back into the twentieth century. “Fuck” might be a good Anglo-Saxon word dating from the Middle Ages, but to Anna it rang with indifferent modern malice. She tucked more deeply into the shelter of the church and waited.

  A moment passed, filled with the promising sound of stumbling feet, then Anna’s patience was rewarded. Two high-school-age boys emerged from the darkness on the far side of the graveyard.

  Single file, unsteady on their feet, they threaded through the tombstones. It was too dark to make out their faces, but they were tallish—five-foot-ten to six feet. One had the wide shoulders and thick neck of an athlete. The other was the body type Anna remembered from her high school days: all neck and wrist and Adam’s apple. Both wore tuxedos. The skinny boy had lost his jacket and his white shirt glowed in the moonlight. Neither wore a tie.

  Quiet as the tomb, Anna waited till they’d come through the gate and walked within a yard or two of her lair.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” she said pleasantly.

  The geeky lad in the lead screamed, “Jesus Christ,” and fell to his knees. The boy behind tripped over him in his stampede.

  Anna laughed. A little low comedy almost made up for her interrupted sleep. She stepped out of the shadows where they could see her. Proving she was not an apparition but flesh and blood did not calm them as she’d expected it to.

  The larger boy hauled his fallen comrade to his feet with an unsympathetic jerk on the latter’s cummerbund. In the feeble light, she could see nothing but great dark holes where the eyes were and a black gash of mouth as they gaped at her.

  “What brings you boys out so late?” she asked.

  “Go, go, go,” the bigger boy cried, and shoved the other before him. In an instant, they were sprinting down the path toward the road behind the church.

  Anna had no intention of giving chase. They could outrun her without half trying. As she listened to their noisy retreat, she felt some genuine alarm for the first time that night. Over the years she’d interrupted a lot of kids in the midst of some sort of feral fun. Little kids ran. Teenagers seldom did. Unless they had really done something wrong.

  “Damn,” Anna muttered. Two choices: go back to the house and find a working flashlight or wait till morning to see what damage had been done.

  She’d pretty much talked herself into the efficacy of waiting till sunrise when she heard the crying.

  ★ 4 ★

  Thoughts of bed were banished. The crying subsided to a low moan followed by pitiful retching. Anna took the ghostly path through the cemetery, retracing the footsteps of the boys. The sound of the dry heaves remained constant, making her progress toward the source sure, but it tickled her gag reflex and she had to keep swallowing lest the vomiting prove contagious.

  The rounded headstones of the moonlit clearing behind her, she reached the near-perfect darkness of the woods. A tapered stone marker disappeared into the trees above. At her feet was an unusual burial stone, a wide flat slab, large enough to sleep on comfortably and raised up on four sturdy blocks so it formed an elevated dais. Ahead was a walled enclosure, ramparts of brick roughly capped with concrete and about chest-high. This mortality exclosure was deep in the trees, shrouded in darkness and veiled with Spanish moss. Thin choking sounds emanated from within.

  Picking her way over roots and an occasional shard of shattered stone, Anna eased toward the pale line of concrete topping the bricks. The puking came to a stop. By ones and twos and tens of thousands, frogs recovered their voices and began again to sing. Music swelled until the night grew close with it, and Anna felt a twinge of claustrophobia.

  The bricks were high enough she couldn’t see over. Hoping there was nothing unutterably vile on the far side, she hauled herself up and swung one leg over to straddle the wall. Secure on her perch, she surveyed the tangled interior.

  The enclosure was about fifteen feet square. Without light, Anna could make out nothing but an uneven mass of midnight. From the rich, slightly spicy smell, she guessed it was rank with weeds. A fine place to hide a body, dead or alive.

  Near the west-facing wall were two narrow pale marks in the undergrowth. Legs. Bare legs. Gingerly Anna lowered herself into the square. Plants crushed beneath her feet, and she smelled the scent of honey and licorice. Feathery tops reached to her armpits. High-stepping like a woman walking in deep mud, she moved through the vine-clogged morass of plants.

  The South was thick with life, crowded with it. There was a feel of sentience to the soil, the night, the forest, and now this corral of graveyard grass, as if, by a will neither good nor evil but merely indifferent to human life, these things could swallow a woman up.

  Closer did not mean clearer. The darkness was too absolute. Bending down Anna touched the white smudge. Warm skin. This was good. Her touch brought forth a moan. Another sign of life. The leg was smooth and shaved and coated with nylon. The stench of alcohol and the sour smell of vomit overlay the sweet sweat of youth and cheap hair spray. A young girl, Anna guessed, and began to talk.

  “My name’s Anna. I’m a ranger here. Are you hurt?”

  Moaning was the only reply. Then even that stopped. Anna knelt in the weeds, feeling them close overhead tickling her neck and arms. Tickling. Ticks. Ticks and the South were inseparable. The thought was fleeting, and she kept her attention on the girl under her hands. There was no need to check for breathing. The girl had subsided into a deep and stentorian rhythm.

  “I’m going to touch you,” Anna said, “to see if you’re hurt, okay?” With the fleeing boys and the smell of booze, sexual assault was a real possibility. Quick and sure from practice, Anna palpated neck, skull and, finally, the face, legs, abdomen, back and arms. Though her patient was unresponsive, Anna kept talking, a soothing stream of information to let her know whose hands were all over her body and why.

  The girl didn’t seem to have sustained any serious wounds. Anna detected no deformities of bone or wetness of blood. Injury to the head was always a possibility, a blow that produced swelling inside the skull rather than out, but drunk was Anna’s professional assessment. Dead, sick drunk.

  The little inebriate was wearing a silly strappy little number that was barely long enough to cover her rear end if she didn’t sit down. Panty hose were intact, and she had on one shoe. Anna’s mood lifted. Rapists of drunken children were not known for replacing undergarments.

  Relief brought with it the luxury of irritation. “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Anna muttered. “What am I supposed to do with you?”

  A hand punched her feebly in the stomach making her jump. In a voice raspy with vomiting and crying her patient croaked: “Danny. Running. Running.” And something that sounded like: “Are you going to ... you’re nice ...” The rest was a mumbled slur.

&nb
sp; “That’s right,” Anna said. “I’m nice. And we’re going to.” Going to what? She couldn’t leave the girl in the weeds and ticks and, had she been assaulted, alone with her fears or possibly her attacker.

  Consumed with checking the child for injury, Anna hadn’t given much thought to danger. Careless. Had the boys in tuxedos injured this girl, there was no reason they couldn’t circle back and do further damage. For a moment Anna tried for fear, a spurt of adrenaline to give her a boost, but couldn’t manage it. Anger was there, at the boys for leaving, at the girl for being young and stupid.

  Anna felt for her patient’s face and tapped the cheek lightly. “Come on. Wake up. Rise and shine.”

  Dead weight. Dead moaning weight.

  Anna rocked back on her heels and looked around.

  The girl was crumpled against one wall. Above her was a lighter patch a couple of feet off the ground. A family plot would have to have an entrance. Leaning over the patient—never recommended for a number of perfectly good reasons pertaining to the well-being of both parties—Anna felt for the lighter section. Her guess was right, it was concrete capping the brick but built low to allow people in and out. Why it wasn’t open to the ground, she didn’t care to speculate, but the comings and goings of snakes and alligators would certainly be curtailed by this configuration.

  “Come on, honey, up you go. You’ve got to help me now. That’s my girl.” With tugging, badgering, pleading and, once, in desperation, pinching, Anna got the girl’s fanny up on the low part of the wall and her feet to the outside of the square.

  Fortunately the girl didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds, a hundred and one if you included her clothes. From the half wall, Anna knelt with her back to the little drunk, drew the slender arms around her neck and stood up. By bending forward, she could get the girl’s toes clear of the ground.

  Doubled over, carrying a body, Anna crept through the tombstones like a grave robber. Only the feverish heat of the bare arms and the warm breath on the back of her neck reassured her the child was drunk and not dead.

  A hundred pounds was just twenty pounds shy of Anna’s own body weight. Even the short distance from the plot to the old church cost her dearly. She was breathing heavily, and the muscles of her shoulders and thighs burned.

  Trudging one baby step at a time, noting only the changes in footing, the coming of light to the path, the path becoming the asphalt in front of the church, the sudden downward slope, Anna entertained half a dozen plans: leaving the girl in the church while she fetched around the car, presuming there was an easy way around. Driving back to Rocky Springs Campground and rallying the Confederate Army. Each plan she came up with that allowed her to dump her burden also required she leave it behind for a time. And one did not leave drunks, especially drunken children, alone. Wood chips came underfoot. Anna walked near enough to the rail fence that she could touch it with her elbow and so keep on the path. Several splinters shot home, but the pain was so minimal compared with that of her neck muscles that she scarcely noticed.

  By the time she reached the parking lot, she was wringing wet with sweat. It poured in her eyes, stuck her shirt to her back and trickled between her breasts. In the West, sweat evaporated, thus performing its mission of cooling. In Mississippi, one merely contributed one’s bodily fluids to the flow toward the nearest bayou.

  After a bout of maneuvering, Anna got her charge dumped into the back seat of the patrol car and, at long last, got a look at the girl by the light of the overhead dome. She was young, sixteen or seventeen, and small-boned, with the charming unmarked face of a child. Anna felt old and stuffy as she realized she was a bit shocked by the scarcity of fabric in the girl’s party dress. It was a tiny spandex number with rhinestone-studded spaghetti straps and enough cut-outs on the sides to rattle the cage of any red-blooded male. Her hose had run, her dress and arms were muddied and she was missing one shoe. Other than that, she appeared undamaged. Around her neck was a gold cross. Anna snorted. A meager talisman to ward off the kind of evils a dress like this was likely to invite.

  No hope of ID. If she’d had a purse it was lost in the weeds, and there was no place in her brief costume to secrete so much as a driver’s license. Anna would have to wait until she regained consciousness to find out who she was.

  Back at her house, Anna half dragged, half walked the inebriated child into the living room. Determined not to give up her own bed, she laid her out on the hard narrow cushion of her grandmother’s couch, removed two ticks from the back of her patient’s right knee, swabbed iodine on a scrape on her elbow and, having arranged her on her side so she wouldn’t choke on her own vomit, threw a comforter over her.

  Following a personal tick check, Anna went back to bed. Piedmont had come out of seclusion and lay on the rumpled sheets. As she wriggled in on the far side so as not to disturb him, Taco padded from the room. The retriever’s instincts were in alignment with the law enforcement credo “to protect and serve.” Anna didn’t doubt that he would camp out next to the drunken prom queen and keep the bad guys at bay.

  Excuse me, ma’am? Excuse me.” Thin piping penetrated Anna’s slumbers. Claws on her arm jerked her more rudely from her dreams as a still-skittish Piedmont launched himself off the bed and back to the imagined safety of the closet, his hiding place of choice when strangers intruded.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Do you have a phone I could use?”

  Anna sat up. Foreseeing just such an awakening, she’d done the unthinkable—and the uncomfortable. She’d slept in her emergency backup pajamas.

  Peeking timidly through the bedroom door was her little drunk. Mascara ringed the big brown eyes and the brown hair, done up to the nines and affixed with industrial-strength hair spray the night before, resembled a ruined cake. Around her shoulders she clutched the comforter against the cool of the morning—or the shame of the night. One small white hand was fiddling with the sable ear of her newly adopted protector, Taco.

  “What time is it?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know.” The girl’s voice faltered; then her face crumpled and fat tears rolled blackly through the makeup and down her cheeks. “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what happened.” Tears clogged the slender throat, making intelligible conversation impossible. She slumped to the floor, buried her mucky face in Taco’s coat and bawled.

  “Take it easy. Take it easy,” Anna said and unwrapped herself from the sheets. “Doggone it, don’t cry. You’re okay.” It annoyed her that she didn’t have any tried-and-true soothing maternal phrases, and the annoyance made her voice sharper than she intended.

  The girl cried harder.

  Anna sat on the edge of the bed and tried to scrub some sense into her tired mind by scratching her scalp good and hard. “Okay,” she tried again. “My name’s Anna. I’m the ranger here, as of yesterday. I found you passed out drunk in the graveyard and brought you here to my house. That’s where you are and what happened. Now how about you tell me who you are and we call somebody to take you home?”

  The sobs changed tone. Anna could tell they were on the wane and sat quietly lest she trigger another storm.

  Finally the girl lifted her head. Black tears glistened on Taco’s coat but he stood his ground.

  “Start with your name,” Anna suggested.

  “Heather,” came in a whisper.

  “Heather what?”

  A long silence followed then the girl said, “Barnes. Heather Barnes. My father’s going to kill me!” She dove wetly back into the dog’s fur.

  Anna stood and tugged on the comer of the comforter. “Tell you what, Heather. Let’s call your dad first. The sooner he finds out the less likely he’ll be to kill you outright.”

  Heather clung to the dog.

  “I’ll talk to him if you like,” Anna offered. “Give him some time to cool off. Tell me your number, and I’ll call while you take a shower. You’ll feel better. I’ll feel better. Nothing wrong with that.”

  Heather let Anna get her
up then and show her into the bathroom. As a gesture of goodwill, Anna tossed in a pair of old sweats and a T-shirt so the girl wouldn’t have to shimmy back into her handkerchief-sized dress.

  At the joyous news her daughter was safe, Mrs. Barnes burst into tears. Then, proving Heather might not be oriented to time and place but her sense of family was intact, the woman added: “Her father’s going to kill her.”

  The Barneses were from Clinton, a small town that butted up against the western edge of the state capitol of Jackson, a city of about 400,000. “We’ll be there in half an hour,” Mrs. Barnes told her. She stopped for a moment while someone hollered at her—presumably the killer dad—then amended her statement. “We’ll be there in about an hour. I know the speed limit on the Trace is way low,” she said virtuously.

  Anna made coffee, then, remembering her first hangover, a pot of weak tea for Heather. Ten minutes later the girl emerged from the shower looking revived. And much younger. To Anna’s jaundiced eye, Heather appeared to be all of twelve years old.

  “Do you have any makeup?” the girl asked pitifully.

  “Nope.”

  “A blow dryer?”

  “Nope.”

  “You won’t tell Daddy I was drunk, will you?”

  “Yup.”

  “God, please don’t.”

  Anna ignored the wailed request and sipped her coffee. “Sit down. I made you tea. After last night you’ll be dehydrated. You need to drink something.”

  “Do you have a Coke?”

  “Nope.”

  Heaving an exaggerated sigh, the girl slumped into a chair. She was on the way to full recovery.

  “Tell me what brought you to my graveyard,” Anna said.

  Heather’s gaze wandered around the room. Taco came over to sit beside her, lay his chin on her thigh and look dreamily into her face.