Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 08 - Deep South

by Deep South (lit)

  "Here we are," she said and, "We've got company." Parked in the driveway, neatly to one side so her patrol car was not blocked, was a battered and aging Toyota pickup. Arms folded across his chest, a man in khaki pants and pink polo shirt leaned against the rear fender.

  Had she not the faithful and ailing Taco to consider, Anna would have thrown the Rambler into reverse and fled to a Motel 6 for the night.

  Each religion had its own version of hell: fire, ice, an eternity without the love of God, pointy-tailed vermin with pitchforks and unsavory appetites. Anna's was a place where she had to talk to and be talked at by people day after day. A place where there was no solitude, no silence, no sacred meadows, nowhere one didn't feel the scrape of others' eyes upon one's skin. A place where words fell in a constant assault upon the senses.

  According to these lights, Anna bad had a particularly hellish day Words had battered down like bail. Threats, lies, excuses, hopes, dreams, packed into words and shoved from her and to her. Whoever had come up with the chant

  "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" had been an idiot. Words could hurt worse than any stone, and the bruises lasted longer.

  Harboring every intention of being rude, she cranked the wheel and turned into her driveway. Headlights, purposely left on high to be more offensive, raked across the intruder, He raised his hand to shield his eyes, and Anna realized it was Sheriff Davidson.

  Her intention to be rude joined other paving stones to hell. It wasn't merely that her mood lightened, her heart leapt in accordance with the rules of paperback romances. To Taco she said: "Hey, look, we've got a helper." Her voice was so downright chipper it annoyed her.

  "Fucking Pollyanna," she muttered to maintain equilibrium. Abreast of the defrocked lawman, Anna stopped and spoke through the window. "Are you up to carrying seventy pounds of man's best friend?" 1 can do that," Davidson agreed. "I take it you got your dog back."

  "Most of him," Anna said. She had inherited wide shoulders and a strong back. Working outdoors kept her fit. In a pinch she could bench her body weight but genetics decreed she was to be female, five-foot-four and a hundred twenty pounds. History had tagged more than forty years onto that package. Though Anna knew she could lift and carry Taco, she liked the dog well enough to admit she couldn't do it smoothly and painlessly.

  That was what she told herself even as a weasly little voice, muffled by layer upon layer of pride, reminded her it was a very old and very feminine form of flattery to ask a man to lift heavy objects.

  Davidson had gone around the car and opened the passenger door.

  "Hey old buddy, old pal, old doggie, old thing," he was murmuring kindly to the damaged pooch. He leaned in, and Anna leaned over to help scoop Taco into his arms. The faint aroma of shampoo came off the sheriff's hair and, when she brushed his arm during the canine transfer, his skin was warm and dry. Desire passed through her in a wave that left her feeling vulnerable and exposed. Even the marginal glow of the cabin light seemed enough to illuminate her nakedness. Pulling back suddenly lest rampant pheromones give her away, she cracked her head on the door frame. "Damn!"

  "Are you all right?" This was said with such warmth and concern that Anna felt compelled to snap his head off. "I'm fine. Watch it with the dog." Southern hospitality was evidently not something acquired by the simple expedient of moving south.

  Taco was an exemplary patient till Anna unlocked the front door and Paul carried him inside. Being home didn't soothe his doggie nerves. Once indoors, he began to whine, then growl low in his throat.

  Feebly, he tried to struggle free as if, bandaged and crippled, he needed to give chase.

  "Easy fella, easy boy," Davidson crooned in a way Anna had heard half a hundred cowboys croon to agitated horses. "Hold him a minute," Anna said, and hurried down the dark hallway toward the back bedroom. The light switches in the Rocky Springs housing had been installed by a mischievous electrician. None were located where reasonable homeowners had been taught to expect them. The light to the hall was at the far end. Having traversed the hallway without incident, Anna didn't bother to locate it but stepped into an even darker bedroom and felt her way around the end of the bed to the far side to switch on the reading lamp.

  With the sudden light, she felt relief and was surprised. She'd been strung tighter than she'd thought. Taco's growling didn't help. Either it carried a note of menace not accounted for by phantom pain in his severed leg or her imagination was working overtime. She sensed a wrongness about the house, or thought she did. But the lamp showed her bedroom just as she had left it, not terribly neat but comfortingly famillar even in its bleak Just-moved-in persona.

  Having gathered up the disreputable cushion that was the only keepsake Taco brought with him from his old life, Anna carried it back to the front room and arranged it by a stove she wouldn't need for six months.

  Careful and conscientious as a practical nurse, Paul settled Taco on his bed. The growling continued, an alert and hostile sound that made Anna want to follow suit though she didn't know what demons the dog was seeing. "Vets give them ketamine," the sheriff said. "Maybe they hallucinate just like people."

  "Flashbacks?" Anna asked.

  Ketamine was a powerful hallucinogen that anesthetized animals without depressing the respiratory system. "Who knows?" Davidson said philosophically. Taco pulled his lips back and showed teeth ugly with intent.

  Scrabbling with his forepaws, whining against the pain, he tried to pull himself off the cushion and across the hardwood floor toward the hall.

  The fur on the back of his neck was standing on end. So was Anna's.

  "Jesus, Taco," she said, then felt self-conscious, because Paul Davidson was a priest. "You're okay."

  "Maybe he misses his kitty," Davidson offered.

  Wben he said it, Anna remembered she had told the sheriff about Taco, about her cat. She'd told him about Molly and Zach, the husband she'd lost so many years back. Contrary to her usual practice, under the beneficent aura of the gun-toting man of God she'd talked a whole lot more than she'd listened. It had felt good at the time. Now it made her uncomfortable. Again the unwelcome feeling of exposure and vulnerability. "Piedmont," Anna called to take her mind off her neurosis. "Here kitty, kitty, kitty." No cat. Perhaps that was the wrongness she and the dog sensed. Piedmont was a personable feline.

  Unless occupied by nothing less irresistible than a mouse or lizard in another part of the house, the big orange tom never failed to meet Anna at the door.

  "Piedmont," she called again, afraid that her bonding with, of all things, a dog, had forever alienated her friend.

  Taco grumbled. Despite the warmth of the night, Anna got a chill.

  "Check the empty bedrooms," she said. "I'll get the kitchen and the backyard."

  "For the kitty?"

  "For anything. Bad juju." Davidson was on his feet. "Gut feeling?"

  "Feminine intuition." A floodlight declared the backyard empty of anything more sinister than two cottontail bunnies, neither bigger than the average softball. Skittering roaches contaminated the kitchen, but though they made Anna queasy, they didn't frighten her. "Bedrooms are clear," Davidson announced. "Now we look for the cat." Poking into the cramped spaces where a cat could secrete itself, Anna and Davidson worked from the living room down the hall to the study, to the room closed off for financial idiocy and finally to Anna's bedroom.

  With Paul Davidson in her boudoir, Anna wished it was more hospitable: curtains on the windows, pictures on the wall, at the very least the bed made and her dirty underwear somewhere other than on the floor.

  Covertly, she watched him scan the room and was relieved to note he looked with the eyes of a policeman, not of a date.

  "The window's open," he said. "I leave it open."

  "Without a screen?" Anna crossed around him. He stood near the double-sized futon she'd slept on for nine years. The thought that it was time for a real bed, a queen-size, crossed her mind. Then she was at the win
dow and the thought was forgotten. "There was a screen this morning." She raised the sash and leaned out. The screen lay on the ground a couple of feet away. Wriggling around till her rump was on the sill, her feet inside and her upper body outside, Anna looked up at the fastenings: two flattened metal hooks, the kind designed to make the removal of screens easy.

  Squirming back inside she banged her head again, just hard enough to make her mad.

  "Oooh. Ouch," came a sympathetic voice and a warm hand touched her.

  Anna flinched unbecomingly. "Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you." He removed his hand, and Anna wanted her flinch back but it was too late.

  "Are you okay?"

  "I'm fine," Anna said for the second time in twenty minutes. Fine. Her psychiatrist sister said when patients said they were fine too often it meant fucked-up, insecure, negative and evasive. One for the books, Anna thought sourly. "The screen's been taken off. Or it fell off," she amended.

  Davidson leaned out to see for himself. Anna couldn't get away without squishing passed his behind or climbing over the bed so she remained trapped in the little space between the wall and the bed, wondering why she felt the need to escape. "Was it latched?" he asked.

  "I don't know. I hadn't gotten around to vacuuming the dead flies out of the sills yet." Davidson laughed. Ducking, he managed to ease his bulk gracefully out the window and onto the grass. Looking lovely and man-about the-house in moonlight and penny loafers, he picked up the screen and brought it back to rehang it. Anna didn't ask him if there were any signs of its being forced. Old house, old screens, the latch could be slipped easily by the blade of a jackknife or a bit of stiff wire.

  While he rehung the screen, Anna looked at her room from a new perspective. If anyone bad broken into the house, they'd apparently not found anything worth stealing. Illogically, she was offended.

  Her television was old and small, her computer a dinosaur her sister had forced upon her. A boom box served as a sound system, and she had no microwave. The would-be thief, if there was one, could probably take her to court and sue her for being hopelessly out of sync with modern criminal needs. A lot of money was tied up in her Navajo rugs, but only a specialist would recognize what they were worth.

  Comfortably aware of her house being secured from without by a man who used nice-smelling shampoo, her mind free-floated as her gaze moved slowly around the room. Was the clutter on the dresser rearranged?

  Maybe. Was her book, face down on the nightstand, at a different angle?

  Maybe. Had she left the lid of her trunk open?

  Maybe. Maybe not. Things looked as if they'd been moved ever so slightly, but in the scatter of unpacking, she could not be sure.

  The sliding door to the closet was open about four inches. Odd. Open: not odd. Shut: not odd. Four inches, as though someone in a hurry had started to close it and left the job unfinished: odd.

  Naturally, Anna couldn't remember if that hurried distracted individual was her. She'd had a lot on her mind when she left to pick up her damaged dog.

  Events that were out of the ordinary tended to stick in the brain.

  Things done every day, done without thought were virtually impossible to remember. Hence questions like "Where were you at eigbt-thirteen P.m. the night of January 7, 1999?" were more or less unanswerable. Except by the evildoer in question. One could always hope, even to criminals, a truly heinous crime was sufficiently out of the ordinary to stick in memory.

  As she crossed the room, visions of bogeymen danced in Anna's bead.

  By the time she'd traveled the couple of yards to the closet door, she was scared to open it. Norman Bates might've left the motel business and moved south to go into ladies clothing.

  The front door opened and closed. Realizing she was waiting for Paul to return before she opened the closet, Anna was disgusted with herself.

  Since the age of four, she'd been checking under her own bed for tigers and witches. She wasn't going to ask for help now. In one sweeping move, she slid open the closet door, moving with it so when the butcher knife slashed down, it would miss her.

  Bates wasn't on duty. An array of uniforms in various stages of decay hung undisturbed. Paul came into the room, and all at once Anna was aware of how few pretty things hung amid the green and gray. "There he is," the sheriff said softly.

  Anna's fears rushed back with such force that for an instant she could neither move nor speak. Cowardice saved her from the more egregious sin of foolishness. Paul crouched down and reached in among the piles of cordovan dress boots, shoes and hiking boots.

  "The definition of a scaredy cat," he said as he lifted Piedmont from his hiding place. "Somebody's been in the house," Anna said with conviction. "That's the only time Piedmont hides in the closet. He's done it since he was a kitten." She took the cat from Davidson's arms and hugged him, pushing her nose into the fur on the back of his neck as much to comfort herself as the cat.

  Paul did not try to convince her that her house had not been invaded, and for that she was grateful. A screen off its hooks and a cat in the closet did not constitute much in the way of hard evidence.

  Instead, while she brought Piedmont out to visit with a much calmed Taco, Davidson checked the windows, outdoors and in and, after asking Anna's permission, closed and locked them.

  With far less awkwardness than she would have anticipated, She managed to offer him bread and wine and slip a CD in the boom box.

  She chose the soundtrack from Leap of Faith, feeling the mix of great gospel singers and Meat Loaf would set the proper tone for this makeshift communion.

  Davidson seated himself cross-legged on the floor near Taco.

  Piedmont was rubbing against him shamelessly. The St. Francis of Assisi pose suited the priest, Anna admitted, as she joined them on the floor.

  Davidson broke a Triscuit in two, popped half in his mouth and gave the other half to the dog. "Who'd want to search your house?" he asked.

  Anna didn't know. Unlike the alligator incident, this wasn't meant to scare her off. The intention had been to go undetected. Nothing appeared to be disturbed or missing. Had the intruder believed she had any information on the Posey murder, her study would have been the obvious place to look if he was too stupid to break into her office in Port Gibson.

  They belabored vague possibilities: kids looking for loose cash, campers intent on borrowing a cup of sugar, perverts who'd never outgrown panty raids. Finally they had to give it up.

  Anna poured herself a second glass of Merlot. Davidson was still working on his first. Silence settled between them. Anna thought the awkwardness she had narrowly avoided earlier would creep in, but it didn't. Davidson had sprawled out. Lying on his right side.

  Head propped on his hand, he dragged for Piedmont's entertainment a bit of weed one of them had tracked in.

  After a time he said: "This wasn't purely a social call." He looked up and added, "Though it was mostly." She wondered if he'd amended his statement because he glimpsed the flicker of disappointment she'd felt.

  "Leo Fullerton killed himself." Anna took a swallow of wine to aid in processing this. Alcoholics Anonymous was a distant memory only slightly tinged with guilt.

  Some vices had to be accepted that one's virtues, as the playwright of The Matchmaker said, could spring up modestly around them. "He took his bass boat out on the Big Black river, tied the transmission of an old VW bus to his ankles, and jumped overboard.

  My deputies found his boat half a mile downstream caught up in the roots of a drowned tree. The body hasn't been recovered yet." Anna was having trouble making sense of the story. She'd talked to the re-enactors that morning. They'd never said anything about Leo being dead. Maybe AA wasn't such a bad idea after all. "Downstream?

  How do you know where Fullerton went in?"

  "Found his truck parked on the riverbank. One of the pastor's favorite fishing spots." The pastor. Anna remembered that Fullerton and the sheriff had been friends-or at least knew one another. "I'm sorry to bear
that," she said.

  "A lot of people will be. Leo was well liked. He helped his flock in more than just spiritual ways. Leo looked after kids when people needed to go on job interviews. Reroofed houses. Dug new cesspools.

  He was trying to get one old lady's book published before she died. It was her dream. A black woman telling her story of the slaves butchered in Port Gibson during the war. This will hit everybody pretty hard." Anna let his words trickle down with another mouthful of red wine.