Hunting Season Page 7

  4

  Clintus, Anna and the pretty young under-sheriff, André, gathered in Anna’s office on the outskirts of Port Gibson in deference to the Trace’s chief ranger, John Brown Brown. Brown had made the drive from Tupelo to monitor the festivities and had been left to cool his heels in the district office for three hours. His usually equitable disposition had suffered in transit.

  The doors at either end of the long, dingy office space were propped open and, in lieu of the grinding of the decrepit air conditioner that had sawed at Anna’s nerves throughout the summer, the soothing sound of a breeze in the pin oaks and an occasional birdcall drifted in.

  Chairs had been brought out of the tiny office Anna claimed as district ranger. The chief had taken one, Clintus Jones the other. Anna and André stood, leaning against the walls for comfort.

  Anna’s field rangers, Randy Thigpen and Barth Dinkins, their desks shoved together to form one large working surface, took their own chairs by right. Barth, just back from a morning at the dentist’s, watched the proceedings with a half-frozen face that gave him a deceptively stupid look. Barth was African-American with short, black hair sprigged with white and smooth, dark skin. He’d been teetering on serious obesity when Anna had first come to Mississippi. Since then he’d shed close to thirty pounds. He remained beefy and still soft but no longer fat. His eyes, a beautiful and startling feature, always had a mildly unsettling effect on Anna. They were clear gray-green, the sclera white almost to pale blue. They gave her the same sense she had when being studied by a blue-eyed Samoyed, that there were forces she could not completely understand at work behind them.

  Randy Thigpen wasn’t scheduled to come on duty until 8 P.M., but as the murder had taken place during his shift the previous night, Anna’d asked him in early. Thigpen, a middle-aged man from New Jersey posing as a southern-fried good old redneck, had chosen to be a thorn in Anna’s side since she’d been hired as district ranger, a job he believed was owed to him.

  Early on he’d sued her on the grounds of racism. Thigpen was a white man, with reddish brown hair of which he was inordinately vain and a healthy bush of mustache, which was used to collect donut crumbs and hide his upper lip: both attested to Scots-Irish ancestry. He’d accused Anna of giving scheduling preference to Barth because he was black. It had been proved that during the time of Thigpen’s complaints, Anna had been following the schedule left in place by the previous district ranger and the lawsuit was dropped. Since then Thigpen had waged a war of petty insubordination. Today was no exception. Anna noted with the grim satisfaction one feels when an expected nastiness comes to pass that showing behind the open neck of Thigpen’s uniform shirt was a bright purple undershirt. Thigpen had been on the Trace for close to thirty years. He knew he was out of uniform, knew the chief ranger would notice, knew he’d mention it to Anna, a sign her district was lax in discipline.

  Even before the advent of the purple underclothes, Anna suspected she’d lost some of John Brown Brown’s good will. He had been instrumental in getting her the job on the Trace. Since he’d brought her on board there’d been two murders in one year. Two murders on the 450-odd-mile-long Trace was rare. Two in the sleepy Natchez-to-Jackson district was unheard of. Not since the bad old days when it was a wilderness footpath beset by robber bands had there been this much violence. From the sidelong glances the chief cast in her direction, Anna had the feeling he somehow held her responsible.

  Randy caught Anna staring at the offending purple. He hadn’t quite the audacity—or the courage—to smile, but she did not miss the slight tightening of his one visible lip and the glint in his pale blue eyes.

  She took comfort in the fact that, unlike his compatriot, he’d not lost weight. At six feet tall he weighed in at close to three hundred pounds, most of it carried in a great gut. Surely he’d have a massive heart attack one day soon.

  To give the devil his due, Randy was on his best behavior this afternoon. For once he’d abandoned his sneering, lounging demeanor. He sat upright in the wooden office chair, his heavy elbows planted on his desk amid the clutter of unrecorded speeding tickets and unfinished reports.

  He followed the conversation with apparent interest, and when the chores were being divvied up, he actually volunteered. Clintus took on the task of tracking down the “Herm” who’d left a message on Doyce’s answering machine. Failing to get that assignment, Randy asked to be the one to find and question the friends—if there were any—of the victim.

  “Since the wife and I moved to Natchez in June we’ve tied in with the community,” he said sanctimoniously. “I think the folks there trust me. The men’ll talk to me.” Even in this new and surprising persona of the good and helpful ranger, he couldn’t resist shading the emphasis and sliding a look to Anna to suggest the locals wouldn’t be so forthcoming with her.

  “Works for me,” she said, wondering what Thigpen was up to. Maybe it was just the thrill of being in on a major murder case. The previous spring circumstances and Thigpen’s own goldbricking had allowed her to keep him on the fringes of the investigation of the murdered girl. Evidently he was determined not to be left out of the excitement this time around.

  For hard leads they were pretty much down to Herm and the elusive poker party. ,

  The autopsy might turn up something, as might the lab reports on the victim’s underpants and the bedspread where the corpse had been deposited. Anna didn’t envy the technician, given the coverlet. The patchwork quilt that had unwittingly become Doyce Barnette’s penultimate resting place hadn’t actually belonged to Grandma Polly herself, but the thing was probably sixty years old. Too frail to wash, it had been gathering whatever effluvia drifted by from half a century of visitors and park rangers. Searching for trace evidence was bound to become a microscopic archaeological dig.

  Brown’s sourness, Thigpen’s cooperation; society as she knew it was out of balance. That or her attitude was still jaundiced from the interview with Mama Barnette. Whatever the cause, Anna was getting increasingly twitchy. Chief Ranger Brown fixated on the FBI. National Parks were federal lands. When capital crimes occurred, the Federal Bureau of Investigation could be given jurisdiction, either assisting or taking over from local talent.

  Often, for reasons of their own, the Bureau was not interested and the park was left to solve its own problems. During her career with the Park Service, Anna had worked with the FBI three times. Naturally she’d heard the gossip about their high-handed, authority-stealing ways, but her experiences had been positive. Her discomfort stemmed not from the fact that Brown talked of calling in the Feds—this murder had the trappings of what could be a sex crime and, next to drugs and guns, the bureau seemed drawn to the bizarre—it was the way Brown was talking about it.

  She couldn’t tell whether he was motivated by lack of faith in her and her admittedly unpromising-looking crew or whether, because of the crime’s potentially lurid aspects and the circled religious text, he was merely anxious to separate himself and the park service from it as much as possible.

  “I’ll call the agent in Jackson,” she said to end the discussion.

  “I’ll call the agent in Jackson,” Brown said, shutting her down in front of her rangers. He had the courtesy to look apologetic, but the satisfaction on Thigpen’s face cancelled any comfort Anna might have taken from it.

  In other circumstances in other parks, she would have wondered what she’d done to compromise herself in the chief ranger’s eyes. On the Natchez Trace she wondered what Randy Thigpen said she’d done that brought about the change.

  Days were growing short, clocks had long since been dialed back to daylight wasting time, and it was dark by the time the meeting broke up. Chief Ranger Brown headed back to Tupelo, preferring a late arrival home to a night in a motel by the freeway in Jackson.

  Anna headed for her house in the Rocky Springs campground area.

  The headlights of her patrol car cut along the tree trunks, firing a litter of leaves beneath. This fall had been
bone-dry following a summer of drought, and the leaves were mostly dun-colored, but a few still sparked with crimson and flame orange. Two deer, caught in the high beams, stared at her with startled eyes. One was a doe, the other a young buck with polished antlers, either a two- or four-pointer. Anna could never remember whether one counted all the prongs or just those on one side.

  She slowed to a crawl. Deer were silly creatures. It was impossible to tell which way they would break. Though it saddened her to see the carcasses, she never much blamed the drivers in car-deer collisions. As often as not the skittish deer seemed to throw themselves under one’s wheels.

  This time of year, danger threatened them from all sides. Cars on the Trace, and beyond the narrow ribbon of federally protected parkland, it was hunting season in the South.

  Lacking the huge tracts of public lands of the west on which to hunt, Mississippians—or at least those who could afford it—joined hunting clubs. These clubs owned hundreds of thousands of acres in the state. The fancy ones boasted clubhouses, cabins and indoor plumbing. The simpler ones promised only male bonding and a chance to kill something.

  The deer, for all their innocence and stupidity, seemed to have some sort of race memory. During hunting season, they crowded the safe zone of the Trace in staggering numbers. One night Anna had counted one hundred and twenty-three on the forty-mile stretch of road between Natchez and Port Gibson.

  Disappointed hunters driving home from various hunting camps were often tempted beyond their ethics by this largesse. Poaching was an ongoing problem.

  Turning into the familiar darkness of Rocky Springs, she allowed herself to think of home. Taco would be waiting with great leaps and slurps of canine welcome. Piedmont, an aging yellow tiger cat she’d rescued from a Texas flashflood when he was so little his eyes were still blue, would withstand the indignities of doggie exuberance to butt her legs with his striped skull and meow the day’s disappointments.

  Home is where the heart is. For a lot of years these furry creatures had been the main and stalwart keepers of Anna’s heart. Regardless of this, the low brick house, built in the 1960s, too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, had yet to feel like home. Though she had no plans to apply for work in other parks and tradition demanded one spend a least a year in a duty station that had come with a promotion, Anna couldn’t shake the feeling she was just passing through.

  Self-pity was cut short as she turned into her driveway. A familiar white Toyota pickup truck was parked behind her old Rambler American. The porch light was on. The lights she’d installed in the arachnid-choked carport blazed.

  Father/Sheriff Paul Davidson had come to call.

  Anna suffered a physical jolt, a sensation not unlike stepping off a step that isn’t there in the dark. Paul: a complicated man enmeshed in complicated circumstances, who had appeared in the spring and upset the comfortable loneliness she had built up around herself since Zach died.

  She drove into the “spider-port” and switched off the ignition. For a moment she sat behind the wheel trying to sort out her feelings. The attempt was unsuccessful. She climbed out of the patrol car, unsure whether she was exhilarated or deeply annoyed at this unexpected invasion. The thought of Paul with his slow smile and strong hands, waiting to hear her and hold her, carried her up the walk in an adolescent thrill. The sight of him, uninvited, in her front room, her personal cat on his lap, her private dog curled slavishly at his feet, transformed this volatile sensation into irritation.

  “Hey,” she said neutrally and, not meeting his eyes, busied herself with taking off her duty belt, a piece of wearing apparel heavier and more restrictive than any long-line girdle ever invented.

  “Hey your own self.” He stood in one fluid movement. Paul was fifty-one but he moved with a boy’s natural grace and energy. Piedmont, boosted from lap to shoulder, curled shamelessly around Paul’s neck. The cat studied Anna with knowing amber eyes and twitched the tip of his long ringed tail. The message was clear: she’d left his food bowl empty long after 5 P.M. She could be replaced.

  Taco, having no dignity to stand on, rushed over belatedly to lick his welcome. Anna was unmoved.

  “What brings you here?” she said to the sheriff and was appalled at how cold her words sounded. But he’d stolen the affections of her cat so she didn’t retract them.

  Had Davidson been snappish and peevish in return, Anna’s day would have been perfect. She would have nailed herself back into the familiar isolation and been oddly comforted by it. He didn’t. His smile of greeting turned to a look of concern.

  “Bad day?” he asked kindly. “Here. Have a cat.” He placed a purring Piedmont in her arms. Kindness, warmth and fur resolved Anna’s conflicting emotions.

  “Moderately sucky day,” she admitted and leaned her forehead against his chest so he could hold both her and her cat.

  With the exception of alcohol, a wonder drug Anna’d forsworn yet again when it had contributed to her getting beaten half to death, Paul provided everything she could have wished for: light, food, a kind ear and good conversation.

  An illicit tryst between a married priest and the local widow lady would bloom far more salacious in the telling than in the transpiring. And, though they chose not to waste time worrying about it out loud, both Anna and Paul knew there would be the telling. Their relationship had been born under two microscopes: the gossipy insular world of the National Park Service and the gossipy insular world of Southern Mississippi.

  The wonderful thing Anna’d come to know about both the service and the state was that they’d treat you like family. There was always someone to lend a hand or stand you a free lunch. The downside was they treated you like family: nosing in, giving unwanted advice, passing judgment, discussing your affairs ad nauseum.

  After Anna had eaten they sat for a while at the dining table in the uncomfortable, ladder-backed rattan chairs Anna had inherited from her grandmother. Taco had the decency to lie at Anna’s feet rather than at Paul’s, and Piedmont came to sprawl companionably beside the salt and pepper shakers on the scarred cherry-wood tabletop.

  The jarring ring of the telephone made both of them flinch. Paul looked suddenly young and guilty as if he was afraid the bell tolled for him, that his wife was calling him at his mistress’s house. Anna swallowed the creeping nausea that image dragged up her throat and pushed away from the table.

  On the fourth ring she picked up the phone. “Rocky Springs,” she answered. Silence. “Hello?” Then a click.

  “What was that?” Paul had risen from the table.

  “A hanger-up,” Anna said wearily. “It happens a lot, especially on the weekends. My number must be close to that of a local pizza parlor.”

  Paul looked relieved and for the briefest of moments Anna hated him for it. They sat again in the rickety ladder-backed chairs. For Anna, at least, the mood had soured.

  For a minute or more neither of them spoke. To talk about “the relationship” with Paul’s angry wife hovering at the edges of their minds was too exhausting.

  Anna broke the silence first, choosing to discuss what they’d talked about on their first date: murder. Because Paul was in law enforcement and because she trusted him, but mostly because she needed to confide in someone, she related the suggestive details of Doyce Barnette’s corpse.

  “I don’t know the Barnette family,” Paul said after a moment’s consideration. “But of course I know of them.”

  “Of course,” Anna said and was treated to Paul’s slow smile.

  “From what I gathered, Doyce wasn’t your sex-crime type. At least not the S & M bondage sort. Doyce was a southern boy. Hunting, fishing, football, that seems more along his line.”

  “What’s the sex-crime type?” Maybe she was just tired, but Anna found herself bristling at the southerner’s easy assumption that the rest of the country was more deeply steeped in sin than the Magnolia State.

  Paul heard the acid in her words but chose to ignore it. Anna was grateful. Though she fe
lt prickly she had no wish to be left alone.

  “Our sex crimes tend to be family affairs,” he went on evenly. “Rape, incest, that sort of thing. Every society has its aberrations, its sociopaths, deviants, what have you, but like it or not, culture does factor in. Down here we’ve got a close-knit church-based society. It breeds crimes of repression, but it’s not fertile ground for deviancies that require group organization. There’s no urban infrastructure in place to meet and greet with others of like interest.”

  He looked at Anna and laughed. Caught out, she wiped the sour look from her face and reached for his hand. Piedmont lazily put out a paw and snagged her sleeve, claiming her affection for himself.

  “Sorry for the lecture,” Paul said. “It’s just this is something I’ve given a lot of thought to in my roles as sheriff and priest.”

  “The Internet’s made an urban interface for the world,” Anna said. “The perverts’ Yellow Pages.”

  Paul said nothing. She’d just said it to say something. She didn’t give it any credence. Doyce hadn’t had a computer in his room. Even if he had it was hard to imagine any city trickster setting up a middle-aged fat man in rural Mississippi for trysting and death.

  “Some other kind of bondage then,” Anna said. Years before, in Idaho, she’d seen bruises sort of like those on Doyce’s body when she’d worked a fire as an emergency medical technician. A smokejumper had been brought into the first-aid tent. He’d gotten caught up in a tree and hung there for several hours before he’d been found and cut down. The concept of Doyce being shoved from an airplane and dropping into Mt. Locust in his Fruit Of The Looms was too ludicrous to put into words so she kept her musings to herself.

  Paul left soon after ten. The strain of being together without being together cost them both. As she watched his car drive off, the taillights the last to be swallowed by the darkness, she wasn’t surprised that statistically the relationship that ended a marriage seldom survived. The emotions attendant on the dissolution were as caustic as battery acid, eating through what was once integral and whole.