Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 08 - Deep South

by Deep South (lit)

  Steve and Barth were back in less than half an hour. They said nothing till the car was back on Highway 80 in the flow of traffic.

  Then Barth told the story. "Ian McIntire's uneasy about something.

  Couldn't tell what, but he's not a fella that can not show. He was upset. He looked to be healthy enough. Not like he'd look if he'd had-if you'd-if he'd suffered the kind of injury you said happened to the man assaulted you. And his hands and knuckles were clean: no bruises, no broken skin." Stilwell had his elbows on the seat back, sitting forward, his face near the cage. Anna could see his floppy bangs and one of his eyes in the mirror." Anna, he was real, real concerned about you," be said.

  "Genuinely concerned, seemed to me. The kind of concerned people are when they're scared because of another's injury. Are you and he special pals?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "Then he wasn't so much scared of what happened to you as scared of what might happen to him because of what happened to you, if you get my drift. Are you sure you had only one attacker?"

  "Only one," Anna said. "As I live and breathe, Let's visit our lawyer." Jimmy Williams wasn't at his office. Home sick, his secretary told Barth. Anna'd stayed in the car, Steve with her. She'd only thought she was in pain earlier. Now that the painkillers were wearing off, she found it hard to keep up appearances and not degenerate into whining and whimpering. Stilwell read the piece of paper a disapproving nurse had thrust upon her when she insisted on checking herself out of the hospital: persistent headaches, nausea, vomiting, loss of consciousness, unusual drowsiness. But for the headache, Anna was clear of alarming symptoms. "I'll live," she told Steve. "But right now that's not a whole hell of a lot of comfort." Because it was Mississippi, the last holdout in America against total paranoia, Williams' secretary gave Barth his home address and phone number.

  They opted for arriving unannounced, and after they'd wandered around Ridgeland lost for twenty minutes, Barth got them to Dinsmor Estates, a posh community on the northern edge of Jackson.

  Oversized homes on undersized lots, all looking more or less alike, formed a backdrop to the BMWS and assorted sport utility vehicles that would never see any off-road use, probably never even be shifted into four-wheel-drive. Stilwell summed up neatly: "Tr6 chic track shacks." The Williams residence was set on a manicured lot just a hair bigger than a house that looked, from the outside, to have given more than half its square footage to an impressive two-story foyer. Barth and Steve went to the door. Anna watched through a haze of pain as one of the double doors opened a crack and they were let inside. By the time they returned, she had slipped into a lethargy that left her barely enough energy to worry what, precisely, constituted "unusual drowsiness." Slamming doors and the jolt of Barth's considerable self plopping down on the bench seat roused her. "Something's screwy," Barth said succinctly.

  Stilwell leaned on the seat back, his mouth close to Anna's left ear.

  When he spoke, she realized she could hear a bit in that ear and was reassured. "Mrs. W said hubby was on a business trip. Left day before yesterday. Out of town when you were assaulted."

  "Allegedly out of town," Anna corrected him. "We asked why his secretary said he was out sick and she fumbled around a bit, then said it was personal family business.

  Then said she didn't know where. Not a practiced liar." I take it, then, the Mrs. is not also a lawyer," Anna said. "We got nothing." There was a mix of annoyance and finality in Barth's voice that indicated he was not committed to Anna's theory.

  "Without more to go on, we can't play hardball. No search. Can't make her tell us where Mr. Williams is."

  "You can bet she'll be on the phone to him in a heartbeat," Anna said.

  "By the time we get a handle on him, any evidence will be gone." The three of them sat without speaking. Anna could bear Stilwell wriggling around. Hands on the wheel in the ten and two position, Barth stared straight ahead. They'd come because Anna bad asked them, but the spark of faith her surmisings had ignited in them was pretty much dead. They were tired of chasing wild geese and wanted to go home.

  She was tempted to do the same. Pain, fatigue and the tail end of the painkillers had left her muzzy-headed. She was beginning to wonder if the answers that had burned so bright in her concussed cranium were just figments of a bruised imagination.

  Maybe if the lives of children hadn't been in the balance, she'd have given up. "She seem like a nice lady?" Anna asked. "Real nice," Barth said.

  "Got two little kids just as cute as the dickens."

  "Did she know why you were asking after her husband?"

  "I don't think so. She seemed more confused and scared than protective."

  "Time to play the sympathy card," Anna said. "Let's go show her my face."

  "It'll scare the kids," Barth said.

  He wasn't kidding. "The little buggers'll just have to get over it," she replied, and turned her attention to the painful business of getting out of the vehicle. Going up the walk, she leaned on Steve's arm. She pretended it was just for effect, and he pretended to believe her. Barth remained in the car. Three rangers, even if one was small and looking the worse for wear, would be too intimidating for Anna's purposes.

  Stilwell rang the bell, and they waited. The sun was high and hot. In the shade of the porch, mosquitoes pooled, pleased at having lunch delivered. Anna suffered a couple bites on her neck and face. With the wearing off of whatever Dr. Munroe had given her to ease the hurt, her upper torso had seizep up. She could barely raise her elbows. The blows to her neck had traumatized the muscles controlling shoulders and arms.

  "Maybe she slipped out the back," Steve suggested. He sounded hopeful.

  "No. She's here." Anna hadn't the energy to explain why she was so sure.

  The house just felt occupied, a faint tension generated by those hiding within. "Ring again." The second bell brought Mrs. Williams to the door.

  She wore that harassed angry look nice women get just before they go ballistic.

  Anna was familiar with the phenomenon. Anger, real red-hot anger, was not okay for females. Most learned to repress it so successfully that they didn't even know it was there till it erupted full-blown. It was one of the many things that made dealing with women more challenging than dealing with men. Women's anger went from zero to sixty in sixty secondsno warning signs, no time to get out of the way.

  The sight of Anna disarmed her before she went off on them. "Oh my goodness!" she exclaimed. Her hand flew to her cheek in a cliche of feminine concern that was as genuine as the shock in her eyes. "Do I look that bad?" Anna asked and smiled lopsidedly to keep Mrs. Williams' sympathy. "No. No. You look... I'm so sorry. Come in. Sit down. Can I get you anything? Goodness." From the kind flusterment of Mrs. James Williams, it was clear she had no inkling that Anna was the woman who'd tried to rip her husband's balls off. "We can't stay, but thank you," Anna said and didn't have to feign the weak and weary tone. "I was just hoping you could help me.

  "Of course," Mrs. Williams said promptly, then a look of fear scuttled across her even features. "If I can," she added cautiously. Anna guessed she worried about the lies her husband had asked her to tell. "A friend of mine," Anna said, "an elderly lady, has written a book.

  She's got no money and hopes this'll pay for her funeral when the time comes. Your husband said he'd take a look at it-you know, tell her what to do. Well, she's gotten to fussing and wants it back. Do you know if Mr. Williams has it here or at his office?" Such was Mrs. Williams's relief at not being asked again where her husband was or why, she fell all over herself to be of assistance.

  While Anna and Steve stood inside the front door, she bustled through the foyer twice and eventually returned with a brown lidless box that had once held canned goods but now contained a sheaf of handwritten pages tied in a neat bundle by two bits of kitchen string. "Is this it?

  Mrs. Ruby Tangeman?" She proffered the manuscript. Anna forced her arms up far enough to receive the box, holding it carefully by the edges.r />
  "That's it," Anna said, "Thanks a million. Ruby will be so glad to get it back." Anna insisted on carrying her prize herself. Steve hovered half a step behind her, one hand on her elbow as if she were a tottery old woman. It was annoying, but since falling over was a real possibility, she accepted Stilwell's kindness as the lesser of two evils. He opened the door for her. In order to regain her seat, she had to relinquish her prize. "Careful," she cautioned Barth as he reached across the seat to take it. "Edges only. Fingertip and thumb."

  "What's in it? Goldfish?" he grumbled, but did as she requested. "Are you going to tell us what we risked life and limb facing down a housewife and two toddlers for or are you going to torture us indefinitely?" Steve asked after they'd driven in silence for several miles. "If I'm not mistaken, this manuscript belongs to a lady in Leo Fullerton's congregation. It's the book she wrote that he was trying to help her get published," Anna said. "I think it's why Danni was killed.

  Why I got beat up." No great revelatory congratulations followed this assertion. Anna'd dropped down another notch on the credibility scale.

  Not only was she new, female and a Yankee; now she was an invalid as well. Head injury no less. Only slightly more believable than a raving lunatic. A couple more miles rolled by, then Steve said from the backseat: "Let me get this straight. You think Williams figured this was going to be a best seer so be steals it? Going to be the next Southern lawyer to make it big n the world of publishing? My limited experience would suggest even copyrights are a waste of time. Not only does nobody want to steal your work, you can't give the stuff away."

  "Besides, why not Just kill Ruby?" Barth put in. "The Posey girl's got nothing to do with the book."

  "Not the book itself," Anna said. "What's in it. You said that buckle I found was from Grant's vanished unit. I found it where Danni was killed, where they'd been digging all this time."

  "It's still not worth enough money to murder somebody over," Barth said.

  "What about all the stuff from that unit: swords, guns, buttons? What if he knew what happened to the soldiers?" Anna asked. "The entire unit?" Barth thought for a while. "Still not that much. Not for a man like Williams. I'm betting he makes good money."

  "There's something more to it besides buckles and swords," Anna said.

  "There's got to be.

  And it's in here." She tapped the papers tied up with string.

  Nobody argued with her. Not because they thought she was right but because they felt sorry for her. Shoot, she felt sorry for herself.

  "Maybe some hard evidence," Anna said when her mind focused again.

  That perked the boys up. "How so?" Barth asked cautiously.

  "Fingerprints. The box and the first and last page of Mrs. Tangeman's manuscript. We'll check the prints against those lifted from Danni's throat and my ankle. We get a match, we at least got Williams for assault." Steve Stilwell was left at his vehicle in Pearl. Anna and Barth threaded their way through Jackson's simple freeway system.

  At Barth's insistence, they stopped at Kroger and got her prescription filled. Too tired to put it away, she set it on the seat beside her and was increasingly glad to know it was there as the last vestiges of Dr. Munroe's drugs wore off and a blinding, thought-consuming ache settled into the bones of her skull.

  Ruby Tangeman's manuscript was still cradled on her lap. It weighed very little. Anna thumbed through it. Eighty-six pages. Not a short story, not a book. Not even the right length for a novella.

  Leo Fullerton's dreams of publishing on Ruby's behalf had been doomed from the outset.

  The manuscript was handwritten. Anna's head throbbed at the thought of reading it. "You want to go home or what?" Barth intruded into her thoughts.

  Anna was afoot, she remembered, newly rescued from the soul searing embrace of modern medicine.

  "What time is it?"

  "Two-forty," Barth read off the dashboard clock.

  Home sounded good. Lying down. Quiet. "No, pull into a gas station, Wal-Mart, anywhere we can park awhile. I want you to read this with me.

  My Civil War history is confined to what I remember from Gone With the Wind." Barth snorted in pointed agreement that her education had been severely lacking. "Randy's coming on at four. You want me to get him up here early?" Barth asked.

  Anna realized she was seared of Randy Thigpen. Not afraid he'd hurt her either personally or professionally. just afraid of the unpleasantness of being in the same life with a sexist asshole.

  Next week he'd be off the four-to-midnight shift. She'd be seeing a whole lot more of him. Probably to the good. Proximity would end the sense of hiding and avoiding that had grown up around her the past few days. "No," she gave Barth the short answer.

  He pulled the patrol car into a Conoco off Interstate 20, parked in the shade of the mini-mart and left the engine running. The air U my, she conditioning was stiffening Anna's muscles. Not wanting a in @in suffered in silence. "Here, you take the first forty-three and give me the last half." She set the manuscript on the seat between them. "Skim for content. Leo had access to this. Jimmy Williams took enough interest in it to spirit it out of the preacher's house."

  "Think Mrs. Tangeman has your answers?" Barth asked. "An old black woman, no teeth, no money, no education?" Barth was tired. His voice bad taken on an edge. "History. Memories. Isn't that what glues y'all together? Ruby's got those. Start." Ruby's story was not easily pieced together. The crabbed writing waxed hieroglyphic in places and the narrative wandered much as Anna suspected an old woman's mind, too full of stories, memories and dreams, might. She found she could not "skim for content" as she'd bade Barth do, but had to creep through one word at a time. From the huffing and resettling of haunches across the seat, Barth was doing the same.

  As the sense of it began to leak through the stilted prose, Anna lost her impatience and was drawn in, Half an hour passed before she reached the end. Then she looked up as if coming out of a trance. Barth was staring at her, his reading glasses squatting on the broad flat nose.

  "Give me the beginning," she said as he was saying: "Lemme see the end." They swapped halves and silence reclaimed them.

  Another thirty minutes and Anna put down the manuscript, rubbed her eyes. "Wow," she said. "Can I buy you a Coke?" Barth accepted. She creaked inside, pumped coins into the machine in the gas station and returned to the car with their drinks.

  It was an effort to hold the bottles, two in one hand, her left arm in its sling, and it was an effort to lift them up to place them on the seat. So much so, Anna grunted. "You okay?" Barth said as be rescued his Coke.

  "Right as rain. Tell me what you got out of that." She nodded at the manuscript. "It's quite some story," Barth said. "Gonna undo a lot of myths and goodwill if you push it."

  "Keep digging, you mean?"

  "Find the letters or what's got to be letters."

  "I don't need letters," Anna said. "And I've no taste for spoiling two sets of pretty stories. All I want's motive." Barth nudged his reading glasses into place and thumbed through the pages once again. "Here's what sounds like happened. Ruby Tangeman's great-grandmother was born a slave on a plantation in Natchez. When Grant's army came through here, she was around eight, maybe ten years old-old enough to remember."

  "Opal Tangeman."

  "Just Opal. House slave." The head Yankee gentleman and his angels of the Lord took to Miss. Alyssum,"

  " Barth read aloud. "Head Yankee gentleman? General Grant?" Anna ventured." Angels of the Lord: his Union army come to free the slaves.

  Who else?"

  "Beats me. What about Alyssum? Not a slave, I'm thinking."

  "No." Barth read on. "'There was comings and goings and everybody scared and polite but Miss. Alyssum. She happy like a girl and her husband, Opal said when I was little, like a storm cloud fixin'to rain on everybody." Then pages of cousins and whatever." Barth went through the loose sheaf. "Here she mentions it again. "Great-grandma Opal liked smelling letters Miss. Alyssum wrote to the Northern g
entleman."

  "Perfumed," Anna said. "Love letters."

  "And here." Barth had filtered through more of Ruby's memories. "Great-grandma told of the Angels of the Lord meaning the Yankee soldiers maybe down from Vicksburg and how they rode down and Miss. Alyssum giving them a bunch of papers tied in blue and green ribbons. Afterward going all to tears and the master kicking in the door.'"

  "What do you figure?" Anna asked. "Miss. Alyssum returning letters-let's guess love letters since she tied them up in ribbon and cried to be parted from them-to General Grant?"

  "Could be. Husband gets wind of it and starts kicking in doors."

  "Read that next part," Anna said.

  "I dog-eared the page.,, Barth turned the pages carefully till he found the place she referred to."

  "Great-grandma said that night seven of the field slaves run off except one boy what was shot in the head and lived but didn't talk no more. That also was the night Miss. Alyssum was dressed and killed and her husband killed, too."