Hunting Season

by Nevada Barr

  Paul turned slightly to see her face. “I had a long talk with Amanda last night.” Amanda was his wife. For reasons Anna chose not to examine but which probably stemmed from vestigial adolescence, she never called or even thought of her by her first name. When forced to refer to her, Anna used “Mrs. Davidson.” As an exercise in dignity and discipline, she always said it with neutral respect.

  Hearing Paul say “Amanda” was jarring. Without appearing to do so, Anna took note of where she’d kicked off her moccasins and dropped her jacket in case she was leaving anytime soon. Perhaps Paul had said the name with a tinge of bitterness. Anna found herself hoping so. Paul never spoke unkindly about his estranged wife. At first Anna’ d found that admirable. Lately it was beginning to get on her nerves.

  These thoughts and others bandied about inside her skull. More than enough time elapsed for paranoia to be planted, sprout and flower; Paul had lapsed into a brown study. Much as she wanted to, Anna wasn’t going to kick down the door. Or even lure him out from behind it with careful questions or listening sounds.

  “She was different somehow,” Paul said finally. “Softer in some ways. More malicious in others. It made me think.”

  Anna waited with feigned patience for these thoughts to turn into words.

  “Amanda said a lot of negative things about you.” Paul looked at her and smiled dryly. “No surprise there. We’ve been careful, but women have a way of divining these things.”

  “Why don’t we call it off,” she said, wanting to bring down the sword and slash open the Gideon’s knot they’d made of their lives.

  “No! That’s not where this is going.” Paul slid across the sofa and took Anna’s hands in his. She was so strung out from the car crash and the conversation, it was all she could do not to snatch them away and run.

  “I hated hearing her. I hated you being attacked, if only verbally. I hated myself for being a coward. That’s why I invited you over. Half the people in my congregation are divorced. Half the men in the sheriff’s department. And I’ve been cowering behind some mistaken propriety out of fear of who was going to throw the first stone. I told myself I was obeying God’s law, that I was protecting you. I’m too old for that bullshit. I care about you too much. I’m trying to get a divorce I should have gotten three years ago. I’m courting the lady ranger. That’s my life at present. That’s what’s important to me.”

  Having braced herself for the brush-off, Anna was unsure how to feel. Faced with the prospect of bringing their relationship out into the open, she was suddenly shy of her own privacy, her own reputation.

  “What did she say about me?” Anna asked. She knew the question sounded self-centered and she knew she wouldn’t want to hear the answer. She was playing for time.

  “That’s the second part of the equation,” Paul said. He dropped her hands and stared into the fire. “And there is an equation. That’s how Amanda’s mind works: tit for tat, quid pro quo. I’ve never known her to do something without a reason, usually one that moved her in a direction she wanted to go. Her snipes weren’t her usual stuff: bad hair, ugly clothes, loose morals.”

  The bad hair and ugly clothes stung. Anna resisted the urge to smooth the hair over her ears and tug Zach’s decrepit sweater into more flattering lines. She consoled herself with the thought that it wasn’t what one wore but how one wore it that counted.

  “These were professional jibes,” Paul went on. “Amanda wouldn’t tell me who—she was secretive to the point of smugness about her source—but she’s been talking to somebody in the Park Service who evidently has it in for you. Then she hinted that, for the right settlement, she might let the divorce go through uncontested. She’s got something up her sleeve.”

  “Randy Thigpen?” Anna said. He was the only employee of the Natchez Trace who’d gone out of his way to be a major pain in the ass, but it was hard to see where a man of his style or lack thereof would connect with the fastidious Mrs. Davidson.

  “Thigpen was my first choice, too,” Paul said. “But I don’t think it’s him. Amanda didn’t say it wasn’t, but she implied it was somebody higher up, maybe one of the big dogs from Tupelo. She made it sound as if you were on the verge of getting fired.” Paul looked at Anna questioningly. Firelight warmed the side of his face and touched his hair with flame orange.

  “I don’t think so,” Anna replied carefully. In the nine months she’d worked the Trace she’d been part of two murder investigations, been sued for reverse discrimination and, now, totaled an expensive patrol car. Other than that, things had gone swimmingly. Her midyear review had been excellent in all categories. As far as she knew no one had it in for her up north. Chief Ranger John Brown Brown had been a bit testy of late but he continued to back her decisions. Still, an attack aimed at her professionally frightened her.

  Out of anger she spoke unfairly: “So you decided to drag our relationship out of the closet—what? To defend me?”

  Paul winced as if she’d slapped him. Anna was sorry, but for reasons she was unsure of couldn’t bring herself to back down. She stared at him, hostility clear in her face.

  “No,” he said simply. “I did it for me. I honor you, but I did it for me. I don’t want to be party to a deceit that goes against all I hold sacred. Love is one of the things I hold sacred.”

  Even Anna at her crankiest was not proof against that.

  14

  It was nearly three in the morning when Anna left Paul’s. He invited her to stay the night. As tempting as it was to wake up in his arms, murmur sleepily of domestic things, watch him shave and dress, Anna opted for the rain, the Rambler and home. She’d reached an age—or a philosophical plane—where the temptation of her own bed, real sleep and waking with her own cat were tough to beat.

  During the twenty-minute drive, Anna tried to keep the warm sweetness of the evening wrapped around her but her mind was as tired as her body and the demons found their way in. Who in Tupelo would verbally tear her down? Who in a beat-up Ford truck had tried to kill her? Was her job as well as her life in danger? There are other jobs, she thought, trying to comfort herself. It didn’t work. Rangering suited her. The work had found her nearly a year after Zach died. She’d gone west, her car packed with little besides her father’s old pearl-handled derringer and a case of cheap Yugoslavian red wine. In Utah she’d pulled off the road and driven into the rough sage-pocked hills. There were no people, no houses. With luck, nobody would find the body.

  Because the gods didn’t want her company, the body had been found. Anna’d inadvertently driven off road on National Park Service land. A ranger, Ellen Rictman, stumbled on her when she was two bottles down.

  Ellen had talked to her for seven hours. By the end of the night Anna had passed out. When she woke up Ellen was gone. A note was pinned to Anna’s collar. When she could focus, she read it. “Ask for me at Arches,” it read. “I promise to work you to death if that’s your desire.”

  That summer Anna worked as a volunteer repairing trails and fence line in 110-degree heat. Her sister sent her enough money for food and the rental of a fifteen-foot house trailer in Moab. By fall she’d found a way to live without her husband.

  People often joked about being married to their jobs. In Anna’s case, it wasn’t all that funny.

  “It is not necessary that you think so much,” Anna quoted a Chinese psychiatrist her sister admired. Settling in to the Zen of the rain and headlights on the road, by the time she reached her bed at Rocky Springs she was ready for sleep.

  In spite of the fact that Anna got less than five hours sleep, she woke refreshed and full of good cheer. The sky had not cleared but the rain had stopped and the weatherman promised temperatures in the high forties or low fifties. Cold for Mississippi. Used to winters at seven thousand feet in southwestern Colorado, Anna still considered fifty to be downright balmy for late November. As she got out of her car at the ranger station she realized she was whistling a happy little tune and stopped abruptly. In Port Gibson it was a good
bet her Rambler, parked in the sheriff’s drive until the wee hours of the morning, had not gone unnoticed, and in small towns everywhere, what was noticed was remarked upon.

  She had no wish to personify the cliché by being aggressively cheerful the morning after. She needn’t have worried. The antidote to happiness was hunkered down at his desk eating an Egg McMuffin with sausage and cheese. Another waited in a bag at his elbow in case the first should call for backup.

  Randy looked up from his steadfast munching as she let herself in. For a moment he stared at her, his face locked in an expression Anna couldn’t fathom: a witch’s brew of irritation, disappointment, rage, weariness, and maybe a touch of admiration. The mix made Anna feel as if he looked not at her, but at the memory of a bad time he was sorry had ended. Alcohol or insomnia puffed the soft tissue around his pale eyes, turning the red rims slightly out. His heavy jowls were shaven but he’d missed places, and rough stubble, darker than his hair, showed like the beginnings of mold on a blancmange.

  “I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” he said as she closed the door. He leaned back, his chair groaning in protest, and smoothed his mustache with thumb and forefinger. Some crumbs were brushed off onto his shirt front, others driven deeper into the course sandy thicket.

  Anna pulled out Barth’s chair and sat down. “Pick away,” she said. In her office nothing waited but paperwork, reports in quintuplicate that would generate a flood of questions from headquarters that, as yet, she had no answers for. A set-to with Randy Thigpen was just the thing to get her blood circulating, put her in fighting trim.

  “I thought I was in on the investigation. I’ve been in on it since the beginning,” Thigpen said belligerently.

  After that first peculiar look, he’d ceased making eye contact and gazed intently at the McDonald’s bag. “I’ve been working my tail off on this and now you go and shut me out. What have I done?”

  What Randy had done was louse up one interview and produce a list of names that were so patently worthless Anna and Clintus had agreed to waste no time on them and quietly consigned them to the wastebasket.

  Thigpen wasn’t done. The loose skin under his eyes quivered with barely contained emotion. Anger, Anna suspected. It was what he was good at. She waited.

  Randy finally reached the bone of contention he wanted to pick and began gnawing on it. “You interviewed Martin Crowley without me,” he said, undecided between sulleness and outright aggression.

  “It was your day off,” Anna replied mildly.

  His gaze finally came up from his breakfast and his eyes locked on hers.

  “You could have waited.”

  She’d’ve been more impressed if he’d said, “I could have come in on my day off.” His statement deserved no reply and she made none.

  Avoiding anything so provocative as prolonged eye contact, she studied her field ranger. Try as she might, it was hard to picture the fastidious Mrs. Davidson taking him to her bosom as a confidant. Still, Randy was the only park service employee she could think of who had anything to gain—and one could never underestimate the allure of petty revenge as a perceived gain—by trashing her professional reputation. Paul said his wife suggested her information had come from higher up, maybe Tupelo. Nobody at headquarters knew Anna well enough personally to hate her or to be able to dish the dirt on her with any accuracy. Barth did. Like Randy, he worked with her most days. That thought was so repugnant she shoved it under the rubble in the back of her mind. She and Barth had had their problems when she’d first come on board, but she liked to believe they’d reached a place of mutual respect bordering on friendship.

  The coffee pot announced it was done by a strangled gurgle. Doors slamming and muted voices let her know that the maintenance men had arrived at the shop attached to their offices.

  She waited a little longer. When it was clear Thigpen had nothing else to add, she said, “Would you like a report on the Crowley interview?”

  “I guess.” After the fuss he’d made he sounded singularly uninterested. As she began to tell him, he unwrapped his emergency backup breakfast and started stuffing it under his brush of mustache. Watching the greasy muffin crumbs lodge in the stiff hairs, Anna found herself hoping he’d spent the weekend in Bovina with his mistress of long standing. The man’s poor wife deserved a break.

  “Crowley’s a dead end,” Randy said when she’d finished. “That whole poker thing’s been a waste of time; Doyce never showed. Obviously he went elsewhere with somebody and got himself killed. You and Sheriff Jones have got us barking up the wrong tree.”

  “What else have we got?” Anna asked reasonably.

  “The list,” Randy said. “We never started checking out that list of names I came up with.”

  “Good point. Why don’t you get on that today. You’re our local man in Natchez.”

  Thigpen glared at her as if he’d been trapped, which he had. “What’re you going to do today?” The question sounded like an accusation.

  Anna got up. The conversation was over as far as she was concerned. She wanted to end it while she still retained a bit of the glow from the previous night. “Don’t know yet,” she said. “The day’s still young.”

  “You don’t have a car,” Thigpen’s voice pursued her into her office.

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “You better ride with me.”

  “I may just do that,” Anna lied. She wanted to close her door on the conversation but knew to do so would send a message of retreat so she left it open, the fumes of sausage fat leaking in along with Randy’s ill will. He wouldn’t be going anywhere soon, and he would probably make sure, if he could, that she didn’t go anywhere without him. Maybe he was afraid she’d catch Doyce’s murderer all by herself and the blaze of glory he hoped to retire in in seventy-three days would be snatched from his legacy.

  As the weather continued nasty, and no new leads presented, she wasn’t averse to remaining in a warm dry office catching up on the paperwork.

  The first order of business was dealing with the aftermath of having her car totaled. For convenience and safety, the wreck had been towed to the ranger station at Mt. Locust. National Park Service cars, like many pieces of government equipment, were leased from the Government Services Administration. GSA, which had a yard in Jackson, Mississippi, would send someone down for the car and dispose of it as they saw fit.

  Anna placed a call to them and another to the chief ranger’s secretary in Tupelo to keep John Brown Brown apprised of the incident and set the wheels in motion to get another vehicle. The next thirty minutes were dedicated to writing the “accident” report. The forms for accidents, incidents and criminal incidents were different. There was no question that this fell into the third category. Nothing about the destruction of her Crown Vic had been accidental.

  By half past nine the necessary forms were completed and a car had been found for her. A new one would be ordered from GSA, but it would be a week or ten days before it was delivered. Till then she would drive a patrol car from the Kosciusko District north of Steve Stilwell’s on the other side of Jackson. The district ranger there had a position yet to be filled. Until it was, there was an extra vehicle. It would be driven down to Port Gibson later that day.

  She drew up the schedules for the upcoming two weeks. Aware that she was taking the coward’s way out, she meticulously gave Randy everything he wanted: late shift Fridays and Saturdays, Sundays so he could get time and a half, and Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. With barely ten weeks left to deal with the man, she didn’t want to give him any excuse to make more mischief for her. Seventy-three days. Anna smiled. Randy wasn’t the only one counting the days till his retirement. Thanksgiving, a week away, made scheduling a bit trickier. Barth would want to be home with his family. Randy would want to be home with the turkey. That left only her to work the holiday. Anna preferred it that way. Ever since Zach had died and she’d joined the park service, she’d managed to work every Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s
and Valentine’s Day. If one couldn’t be snuggled in with one’s own family, arresting someone else’s was the next best thing.

  When it was completed, Anna printed the schedule and went into the outer office to use the copy machine. Randy, looking mildly guilty, probably annoyed at himself for being caught actually working, stood near the copier tamping a stack of fresh copies into alignment.

  “In the middle of something?” Anna asked politely.

  “Done,” he said. “It’s all yours.” Turning a vast acreage of backside to her, he crossed to his desk and secreted the pile of papers in a side drawer.

  Anna opened the copier. “Forgot your original.” Randy grunted like a stuck hog.

  She pulled out the page he’d been reproducing to hand it to him. When she turned it over Randy’s face was staring up at her in black and white. Emblazoned underneath was RANDALL THIGPEN FOR SHERIFF. EXPERIENCE COUNTS.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  Randy looked sheepish for a second, then whatever guilt he felt hardened into a self-righteous mask of entitlement.

  He stepped away from the desk and took the paper from Anna’s hand to put it in the drawer with two or three hundred other like flyers printed at government expense, on a government machine, on the taxpayers’ time.

  “I intend to pay for it, a nickel a page like at Office Depot. I just had no time to get into town to do it.”

  He lied. He’d been with the service long enough to know there was no system in place for collecting the nickels of pilfering employees. Not only that, but government employees were forbidden to run for elected office. The potential for conflict of interest was too great, as was the possibility of undue influence being used for leverage.

  Anna waited for Randy to say something. When he finally did, she was surprised at his demeanor. It wasn’t exactly contrite, but he was striving manfully for humility, and though his natural truculence poked through the thin places, he was nearly succeeding.