Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 08 - Deep South

by Deep South (lit)

  How to battle fear? She'd been told once. With faith, she remembered.

  Faith in what? Faith in herself had been battered out of her as the strength was battered from her body. Faith in her fellow men had proven a bad gamble. Mother Nature could only be trusted to do what was best for Mother. Father Time could be trusted to heal with annihilation.

  Faith was not going to save her. Stubbornness might. Too stubborn to move, though it hurt to lie still. Too stubborn to cry out, though knives in her skull tried to saw voice from her. Too stubborn to stop breathing, though each intake of air pushed ragged rib-ends into her chest wall.

  Time passed. Minutes or days or months. Consciousness rolled around again. The world had grown quieter. The storm had passed. The evil crashing of men had left the woods. Or waited in silence for her to give herself away.

  Evil crashing. Anna's memory was cut into pieces. She remembered to be afraid, remembered she must hide, remembered her left ankle was somehow important. What she could not remember was why.

  She decided to open her eyes and felt a creaking pain as she pushed swollen lids into bruised sockets but sight didn't come. Revealed as if in a flash of lightning, she saw herself kneeling in the rain staring down into an open grave.

  She had been buried alive. Suffocating. Forgetting the need to be still, she clawed at the dirt clogging her mouth and nose. Not dirt, cloth, canvas. And around her neck, a rope. That memory came back too. Not in a vision but in total recall of how the noose had felt tightening around her throat, forcing the stiff canvas folds into her flesh.

  Feebly, she fumbled at the executioner's hood with fingers that felt made of rotting wood. So much pain accompanied each tiny movement she mewed like a kitten.

  Pain cut through the panic and a thought surfaced-not because her brain worked, but because this had always been so, ever since she was a little girl. There was a jackknife in her pocket, the last in a long line of Swiss Army knives that served, were lost or broken, and replaced.

  It took a long time to remember how to remove an item from her pocket, an inquisition of pain to execute the task, another eternity to pry open the small blade, and the briefest of minutes to saw through the binding rope.

  Spent, Anna hadn't the strength to pull the canvas from her face, but lay panting shallowly, reveling in the seep of sweet air that came up under the edges now the rope was loosed.

  Maybe she browned out again. Time was proving itself as relative as old what's-his-name insisted it was. Anna knew she should remember the name, it felt important, as if it would prove she'd not lost too much gray matter, that her brain would not swell and squash personality against the unforgiving confines of her skull. Thoughts were falling apart, leaking away through cracks.

  With an effort that left her dizzy and nauseated, she lifted her hand and pulled the canvas off. Air, misted with minute warm droplets, touched her face like the end of a fever. Afraid of the pain in her ribs, she sipped at it, savoring it like a fine delicacy, while wanting to wolf it down as a starving woman might.

  Faint gray touched the sky somewhere, Anna could just make out a tracery of branches overhead. "Thankyoubabylesus," she whispered and laughed, a bark cut short by injured ribs. She was not blind.

  The beating her skull had taken had not robbed her of sight.

  Broken, covered in mud and blood and vomit, Anna was jubilant. Soon she was going to sit up. It would be easier to think then. She would sit up and wait for the light. That was all she needed to concern herself with.

  With the light would come knowledge of what the next right thing was and she would do that.

  Sitting up took an excessive amount of time and brought such pain that bile she hadn't the breath to spit out trickled from the corner of her mouth. I'm drooling, she thought, but that was the least of her worries.

  Her head felt as big and heavy as a medicine ball, and she was afraid.

  If her cervical vertebrae had been cracked, its weight would tear them apart, paralyze her from the neck down. Christopher Reeve, pray for me, tinkled through her troubled mind.

  As from a distance, through gun slits, she watched her hands pull her knee up and bind the canvas that had been her hood around her left ankle with fumbling care. She wondered why they did this. Her ankle, it seemed, was the only uninjured part of her entire body.

  Maybe her hands sought to preserve it for posterity.

  Darkness came again. Not the void she'd fallen into before but a troubled dream state, the shadow world the comatose could recall only in pieces.

  She'd been kneeling by a grave looking at bones, human bones. Why she'd been there was knocked from memory. A gold-colored belt buckle, her house searched, an old black woman complaining her book had been stolen.

  These things came and went on flashcards held up by a teacher patient with her stupidity. Mrs. White from second grade? Sister Mary Patricia?

  No matter. Teacher and cards were gone, replaced by a squad of Union soldiers, ghost riders, vanishing into thin air, followed by a three legged dog.

  Anna could not lose consciousness again. The ebbing and flowing of the life of the mind bespoke head injury. If she could stay awake, she believed she could hold on to her mind by the sheer power of her thoughts, thoughts in a stream like the drizzle from the faucet left running on viciously cold nights: movement to keep the pipes from freezing.

  Keep the pipes from freezing, she told herself. The flashcards, the ghost riders, the dog. Again and again she played them through her mind, a trickle, a flow. At some point they began to match up, one from column A and one from column B. Her brain wrote them on its damaged walls and drew lines between the matches as Anna had on countless tests throughout her life.

  The ghost riders; the buckle. The buckle; the search of her house.

  The old black woman's book; the ghost riders. Leo Fullerton; the missing book; Civil War soldiers; the buckle. Barth with his books; Civil War soldiers. Danni's popliteal artery; Anna's bound ankle. More lines and more till the map in her cranium was crisscrossed as a cat's cradle, and Anna knew all these things were part of a whole.

  "Got to move." She tried to speak aloud and felt her lips moving but heard no sound, A blow to the ear. Deafness. She remembered that. Fear rose and fell. She could hear morning birds. One ear.

  That was enough. "Help," she said and heard what was meant as a cry come out a tiny whisper. "Opening my eyes," she announced to her brain in hopes of greater cooperation. After a while, the message was delivered and her eyes opened. There was sunshine now, shadows on the ground. Time had passed since last she'd managed this feat.

  Thirst troubled her. Peeing wasn't an issue. She was too dehydrated.

  "Not good," she whispered. And: "Moving my hand." Seconds later, a puppet's arm under the guidance of a drunken puppetmaster floated up before her eyes.

  The arm was out of focus. A thing of green and brown, grass stains and mud. "Other arm," she commanded. Seconds passed, but pain disallowed compliance. The humerus was broken or cracked. Knelt on me, Anna remembered. Somebody knelt on me. A sensation flashed through her of being facedown in the dirt, a terrible weight on her arms.

  Voices wove through the woods, and Anna stopped breathing to listen.

  Under this sea of green, she was utterly lost. Though she knew she was probably no more than fifty feet from an improved trail, she could not guess fifty feet in which direction. She would not let the thought form, but her body knew she could not crawl much farther than that. Her mind knew she would not be found where she was, not for many days.

  One chance. Fifty feet. Toward fading voices. Anna listened with every fiber of her being. Aware of an ominous creaking of neck bones, she tried to turn her face in the direction whence the sound had come, but muscles were frozen.

  Moving her upper body, she rolled to hands and knees and pointed her head in the direction she wanted to go. Spinning, pain, vomiting, Anna waited it out. Standing up was not in the realm of possibility. There was no way she could force t
he injured muscles to so much as lift her head so she could look where she was going.

  For a minute, ten, maybe half an hour, she stared at the ground a foot from the tip of her bloodied nose. Even here at the bottom of the world, there were shadows, tiny, tangled, green, but shadows. If she focused, she could see they stretched ever so slightly to her left. Sure as compass needles, they would keep her on course.

  Whispering orders to her body, she crept along. Fallen logs she would have stepped over without thought the previous day loomed as formidable obstacles requiring great presence of mind, and more physical courage to surmount than she'd realized she had.

  Sweat poured off of her, then stopped, her body out of fluid.

  Winston Churchill: "Never, never, never give up." General George Patton: "Success is measured by how high you bounce when you hit bottom." And Anna kept on, knowing now, firsthand, that Christopher Reeve really was Superman.

  Watching the shadows, pushing ahead an inch at a time, she finally came to a place where the forest floor dropped away in a cliff of brown.

  She'd reached the Old Trace. She could lie down now and figure out why it was she was here.

  The sound of voices came to her, and she remembered. "Help me," she croaked. A woman screamed, and Anna knew why Danielle Posey had died.

  Robbed of dignity, clothing and memories, Anna woke. A kindly black woman in the trim white authority of an RN uniform told her she was at the Baptist Hospital, then asked her gently if she knew her name, who was president of the United States, what day it was and what state Jackson was in. The first two Anna got right. The last two she failed. A C- in sanity.

  Her brain took another holiday When next it returned, and she opened her eyes, she remembered she was in Mississippi. If it hadn't hurt so much to reach the call button, she would have summoned the nurse and asked if she could get her grade raised.

  "Hey," a voice said softly. "Welcome to the world of the living." Only a slot of vision was allowed Anna, and she searched the small room till she found the source of the voice. Sheriff Paul Davidson, smiling, was seated to the right of the bed, his chair thoughtfully moved so she didn't have to turn her head to see him. A window was behind him, blinds lowered.

  Distrust, so strong it threatened to become panic, engulfed her at the sight of him. Why, she couldn't remember. All she remembered was that they'd been friends. She didn't feel in the least friendly.

  She was scared. For a moment, she tried to ignite her fear, turn it to anger, but she hadn't the strength.

  Ignoring the fear and the sheriff, she tried to raise her left hand. The arm was immobilized. She had better luck with the right.

  Sensing it would be most unwise to move her head, she let the hand make its discoveries. Her face was swollen. One eye was closed beneath a tender and jellied mass that had once been an eyelid. The other was better. It would open. Her nose wasn't broken. Several teeth were loose, but running her tongue over the familiar mouth scape, she detected no gaps. Her skin had survived intact; no cuts or gashes that she could find.

  A woman is never too old for vanity, and Anna was relieved. For a few weeks, she might sport a visage that would give the kiddies nightmares, but she should heal. "What happened?" the sheriff asked, and once again Anna was filled with alarm.

  Had he been the one? Was that why she distrusted him? Bits of memory were floating up like the words in the window of the Magic 8Ball she'd owned as a child. She would share none of it with Davidson till she knew why the little hairs on the back of her neck were crawling. "You tell me," she managed. Her voice was cracked and whisperthin. "Would you like some water?" he asked solicitously. He put a plastic cup with a straw in it in her good hand.

  Anna's throat was so dry that she was surprised dust devils hadn't whirled out on her words, but she didn't feel thirsty. An odd sensation.

  As she wet her mouth and throat, she noticed she was on an IV Probably normal saline for dehydration. That would explain it.

  Paul Davidson took the cup from her and set it back on a rolling bed table, adjusting both so they would be near at hand when next she wanted a drink.

  Anna was unimpressed. Sleazeballs and dirtbags occasionally had excellent manners. It proved nothing. "Tell me what you know," she said and was pleased her voice sounded stronger. "I can't remember much." With that half-truth, she realized she'd joined Lyle, Brandon, Thad and Heather in the epidemic of amnesia that was sweeping the southland.

  "Some campers from Knoxville found you a little before ten this morning."

  "What time is it now?" she interrupted.

  Davidson looked at his watch. "Five-thirty-seven." Anna nodded. She was reassured. It wouldn't have surprised her if she'd been unconscious for six months. Half a day. Not bad. Not so frightening. "Keep going," she said. Then, because she was helpless and not because she was feeling polite, she added: "Please."

  "You scared them about half to death. You were up top the bank about a dozen feet from where we carried out the Posey girl. When you stuck your head out, the woman thought you were a bear."

  "I must look pretty bad," Anna said. It wasn't a question, and he didn't contradict her.

  "Her husband was a city fireman in Tennessee and knew first aid. He stayed with you while she ran back to the campground and found Frank.

  Frank got hold of Barth, and he radioed me. I called the ambulance out of Utica. You were dehydrated and not clear in the head, but you were a handful. You caught hold of the door frame and kept them from putting the stretcher in the ambulance. I got another call and didn't get to Rocky till you'd been taken away, but I heard an earful when the boys got back. They said you wouldn't let them load you till you'd talked with Barth. That you screamed 'my ankle, my ankle."

  " Her ankle. Wrapping it with canvas. The memory clattered through her head like a video on fast forward, leaving an ache behind. To her astonishment and relief, she also knew why she'd protected the ankle.

  Surreptitiously, she moved her cup of water behind the carafe out of Davidson's line of sight. "They said you fought like a wounded cat till they got scared you would hurt yourself more than a delay would and let you have your own way. They got ordered out of their own ambulance while you had a private ranger meeting. After that, they said you were the ideal patient."

  "Unconscious," Anna said, and he laughed.

  I strong-armed the doctor here into telling me how you were. Actually, it wasn't too tough; the doctor is my deputy's brother-in-law." Anna tried to roll her eyes, but it hurt too much. There was something unsettling about having Sheriff Davidson know more about her than she knew herself, to have him talk to a doctor she couldn't remember about her medical condition. Anger wriggled wormlike under her breastbone. She was too weary to feed it. "You've got a great-granddaddy of a concussion, moderate to severe soft-tissue injuries to your neck and shoulders. Four cracked ribs, one broken. The humerus bone in your left arm is cracked, and your left eardrum was traumatized but not ruptured.

  The hearing should return in a day or two. Abrasions and contusions, two black eyes, loose teeth. But for the soft-tissue injuries, you should be pretty much up to snuff in a month or so." Soft-tissue injuries would haunt her for a while. She knew that.

  She'd injured her neck and back a couple times before. Muscles had long memories and did not forgive as completely as bone. Paul was done talking. Anna had nothing to say and no energy to say it. Silence filled the room till small sounds from the hall crept into her awareness: a PA, wheels on linoleum, voices.

  At length Paul said: "What was all that with Barth about?" His voice was oh-so-conversational, but Anna continued to be infected with distrust.

  "I'll have to ask him," she replied. "He was pretty closemouthed about it to me," Davidson said. A note of professional irritation colored his voice. "If it has anything to do with the Posey murder or the attack on you, I'd appreciate being let in on it." They were on more formal ground now, down to the business of criminal investigation.

  Anna dutifully
related nearly everything she could remember. If he was there, she wasn't telling him anything new; if he wasn't, he needed to know. She'd been out walking. Rain had started. She'd stopped on the Old Trace. The grave, the bones, she didn't mention for a couple reasons: the fear she felt and the sensation she'd imagined it. Before she went out on that limb, she wanted to talk to Barth.

  Somebody had bagged her from behind, sat on her, slipped a noose around her neck and tried to beat her to death.

  "The canvas he put over your head probably saved you from deafness.

  You were lucky."

  "A veritable leprechaun," Anna said dryly.

  Paul had the good manners to apologize for his choice of words. "I got away and ran for it, Crawled for it," she finished. "My Lord!" Davidson had lost color under his tan, leaving his skin a pale muddy tone and his face looking old. "My Lord," he said again, then breathed slowly through his nostrils as if fighting a tidal wave of emotion. He looked like he was going to be sick, and some of Anna's distrust wavered and melted.