Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  What a ham, Anna thought, but she said nothing.

  “God,” Heather said after a moment. “I can’t remember a bunch. I mean, like, it’s gone!”

  “Alcohol will do that if you drink enough of it,” Anna said. “Tell me what you do remember.”

  “The dance. I remember most of that. It was a real bore. The band was awful. Some of the boys had a bottle they were passing around. Then we all piled in some cars and left. That’s about it.” She looked at Anna in wide-eyed innocence. “That’s all I can remember.”

  Anna didn’t doubt much of the evening had been lost in a drug-induced blackout. She also knew the girl was hiding something. Not being her mother, Anna didn’t much care what. Adolescent peccadilloes were not even mildly amusing at eight-thirty A.M. after a short night. “Ah, well,” she said. “Maybe it’ll come to you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Heather said with finality.

  Mr. Barnes was not pleased but didn’t look homicidal. Mrs. Barnes seemed a little more likely to commit murder. Without fear to temper her mood, anger had taken over. If her mother could be believed, Heather would not be dating, talking on the phone, watching television or any of a dozen other things until she was twenty-one.

  Alone at last, Anna decided to take the day off—comp time for having been on duty the day before and half the night when she was not yet officially on the payroll. A second pot of coffee, and she was inspired to attack the boxes the maintenance men had helped her unload.

  It took an effort of will not to dwell on the charm of the stone tower house she’d left behind in Mesa Verde, and the paucity of her belongings caused her to suffer a few twinges of rootlessness, but her Navajo rugs looked good on the gleaming hardwood floors and her grandmother’s antiques lent interest to the boxy rooms.

  She’d just reached that most satisfying of chores, the hanging of pictures, when a car pulled into her drive and parked in front of the carport. A Claiborne County sheriff’s vehicle. Rocky Springs, she remembered, was in Claiborne County, one of the poorer counties in Mississippi and one having a high percentage of African-American households.

  Automatically stepping away from the windows into the shadow of the front door, she watched her visitor approach: in his forties, a bit soft around the middle but well suited to the uniform. Thick shoulders were crisped up by ironed khaki, and his gun belt rode on narrow hips over muscled thighs that stretched the crease out of his trousers when he walked. As he neared the front door he took off his hat, a wide-brimmed Stetson in warm-colored felt, and exposed a shock of sandy hair in need of cutting. His eyebrows were so blond they were almost white, lending dark blue eyes an appearance of wisdom and acuity.

  Judgment passed, Anna opened the door before he had a chance to knock.

  He looked startled, then, to her surprise, embarrassed. “Good afternoon, ma’am,” he said, not looking at her but at his boots. “I’m Sheriff Davidson. I’m looking for Phil Otis. He in?”

  Sheriff Davidson had a nice voice. Enough drawl to soothe but not so much as to be annoying.

  “Did he used to live here?” Anna asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. He was the ranger down here.”

  “He’s been replaced,” Anna said. “Now it’s me.”

  “Well then, it’s you I need to talk to, so I guess I’ve come to the right place.”

  Anna invited him in, offering a glass of bottled water because it was all she had, but he declined.

  “Much as I’d like to, I can’t stay,” he said. “We got a report from the Clinton police this morning of a missing girl. In cases like this—local kid, good reputation, probably not a runaway—we don’t wait to look into it. Somebody said a bunch of the kids came down to the old graveyard here after a dance they had. I was just wondering if you could shed any light on the subject.”

  “She’s home safe and sound by now.” Anna told him an abridged version of the night’s debauch.

  A smile creased his face, and the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled. Anna found herself smiling back, checking his left hand for a wedding band. There was none. The response was pure reflex, Anna guessed, brought on by Molly’s impending nuptials. It had been so long since Anna’d had a serious relationship she feared she’d be like a dog chasing cars: she wouldn’t know what to do if she caught one.

  “Now, that’s good news. I figured I was going to spend the day on a wild-goose chase. May I use your phone, let the Clinton PD know Danielle’s been located?”

  He was across the room and punching in numbers before the last bit of information sank in. “Hold it,” Anna said abruptly. “Hang up. My little drunk’s name was Heather.”

  “Drat,” the sheriff said. He gave Anna a description of the missing Danielle. She was struck by the overwhelming likeness of the young. But for hair color, the child described could have been Heather, right down to the skimpy black dress. At sixteen, life has yet to leave many identifying marks stamped into the flesh.

  Anna returned to hanging her pictures, but the sheriff’s visit left her mind unsettled and she couldn’t figure out why. Missing teenagers were a dime a dozen. A majority of them found their way home, maybe morally compromised, but physically in one piece.

  Having put down her hammer and nail, she perched on the edge of her grandmother’s unwelcoming Victorian settee and let her mind clear, so that she might see this thing lying under her thoughts like a cocklebur under a saddle blanket. Taco came over and began licking her ankles to assist the process. Despite the distraction, Anna found what was bothering her. Sheriff Davidson said the missing high school girl’s name was Danielle Posey. When Anna first found Heather retching into the graveyard weeds she had mumbled, among other things, “Running. Danny running.” Danny—or Danni—could be short for Danielle. Running from what? Just because the tuxedo-clad clowns had not assaulted Heather did not make them nice boys. Nice boys didn’t abandon girls in graveyards, drunk or sober.

  “Come on, Taco,” Anna said. “It’s time for a walk.”

  In the light of day, the old church and graveyard took on a different aspect. Anna could tell this would turn into one of her favorite haunts. A sense of history, undisturbed by the machinations of the modern world, hung over the place as palpably as the veils of Spanish moss hung over the old stones. Decay had set in above ground as well as below. Stones were broken, sinking, moss-covered, but even amid this slow reversion to the earth, an ongoing spark of the human heart showed in the bright flowers, mostly plastic but carefully arranged, that adorned the markers. People dead more than a hundred years and yet so dear to someone’s heart that the graves were decorated.

  The hum of insects—mostly bees—took the place of the night’s frog concert, making it more sleepy by day than by night. Fitting for a graveyard.

  There was little evidence of the previous night’s activities, but Anna did find Heather’s other sandal a couple of yards from the family plot where she’d ended her night’s revels. Eyes on the ground, Anna began to backtrack from the thrown shoe. Maybe she looked for something, but mostly she tracked just for the hell of it, to see what differences in spoor and soil there would be in this Southern clime.

  The floor of the graveyard was oddly barren, as if the ground had been sewn with salt by the wash of tears from those whom the dead had left behind. Even leaf litter, the inevitable carpet of any forest, was sparse, blown clear of stones and paths to collect in the exposed roots.

  Having loosed Taco to free herself of sloppy kisses and unpredictable lunges, Anna concentrated on the earth. The high-heeled shoe was a tracker’s dream. It had been bought new for the dance. Stitching was clearly etched into the toe, and the heel was of a sharp rectangular cut that dug deep at every step. Without much effort Anna was able to follow Heather’s progress of the night before. As would be expected from a girl stupid with drink, the trail wandered. Eleven heel marks back, Anna noted with interest another set of tracks and marks of a minor skirmish. The print of a man’s dress shoe, left foot, size ten o
r eleven, nearly obliterated the heel mark of the girl’s sandal. Anna stopped and, blessing Taco’s continued absence, studied this short symbolic history written in the soft earth. Maybe thirty inches away, too far for a natural stance, was the imprint of the man’s right shoe. Most of the weight was on the inside of his foot, smashing leaves into the ground and forcing up a tiny mound of mulch.

  Between these prints and a couple of feet in front of them, were two smooth oval indentations. Relaxing her eyes and mind, Anna continued to stare. Slowly the marks she knew had to be there emerged from the thin litter of leaves and sticks. Two partial handprints.

  Heather had not been alone. A man—most probably one of the tuxedoed boys—had been with her. At this place, Heather had either stumbled and fallen to her hands and knees or she’d been forced down by her companion. Stumbling was the likelier scenario. She was drunk, it was dark, she was wearing silly, teetery shoes. And, too, there were no signs of struggling or scrambling. At an educated guess, the male companion had lifted Heather up after she’d fallen.

  Stepping around the story, Anna continued on.

  The edges of the cemetery were delineated by the resurgence of forest. The chemistry that kept the cemetery floor barren changed abruptly and foliage rebounded with a vengeance. Tracks disappeared into ground-creeping vines. Vines covered fallen branches and logs in various stages of decay, forming a floor designed to impede the progress of invading bipeds. On the fallen tree trunks, pushing through the tapestry of leaves, were saplings, shrubs, new trees half grown. These in turn were greening from the roots up, covered in vines.

  Anna racked her brain for the rhyme that warned children away from poison ivy. Leaves of three, let it be. Or maybe it was leaves of two, bad for you. No matter how many times she saw the stuff it never looked the same and bore little resemblance to the benevolent strains of ivy that routinely died from neglect on her kitchen windowsill.

  In fiction and maybe somewhere in the world, there were trackers who could follow a trail through this kind of territory. Anna was not one of them. Perhaps, were she willing to crawl around with a pair of tweezers, inching up each vine to peek underneath, she might find another track or two, but she wasn’t tempted. Mississippi was way too full of life: one-celled, two-celled, four-, six-, eight-legged, life that slithered, flapped, entwined. Anna had a sense that if she were to get down on the ground for any length of time she would be bound up in that fecund shroud like a fly wrapped up for the spider’s larder.

  From deeper in the woods Taco barked and, treading carefully, she pushed on another few yards. Beyond a crosshatch of fallen logs, the side of the cemetery hill dropped away in a miniature version of South Dakota’s badlands, where the earth had fallen, melted or rotted. A bank thirty feet high and arcing away in both directions had formed. The wall of dirt was ragged with fissures. Root systems thrust out to scratch at insubstantial air. Trees hung precariously over the edge. A number had succumbed to weather and gravity and lay, heads down, tangled on the face of the embankment.

  It was a climb Anna would choose to avoid: the dirt was unstable, the anchors untrustworthy, and there were many things upon which a body might impale itself. Taco, being a dog and, so, having a brain about the size of an apricot, would have few trepidations about scrambling up the bank. Anna stopped well back from the lip of the drop and whistled. A series of excited barks answered her, then she saw his black form bounding gracefully over a landscape that would cripple a human being. For a moment, she watched the animal and felt pure unadulterated joy. When he ran, dappled sunlight blue on his midnight coat, ears streamlined, Taco was transformed into a creature of beauty.

  At the foot of the bank, he hesitated.

  “You got down there,” Anna reminded him unsympathetically.

  Fascinated, she watched as he picked and clawed and scrabbled his way up the ruined cut. She was so fixated on his progress that she didn’t notice he’d caught something until he was at her feet. Only its tail showed, trailing lifelessly from the corner of the dog’s mouth.

  “Oh, yuck!” Anna bent down in hopes of rescuing whoever belonged to the tail as Taco spun in gleeful circles. Anna’d thought, should she ever stoop to owning a dog, she would get a small frothy lady’s lapdog, a Lhasa apso or a shih tzu—some animal that had at least the vestigial charm of a cat. Big dogs had big mouths and loved closing them around the hapless and helpless. At any given moment, Taco was capable of hiding an entire tennis ball in his jaws and once—and this was rare given the pointy nature of dog teeth—Anna had pried his mouth open and retrieved a baby bunny, soggy with dog spit but otherwise unhurt.

  “Give it to me, doggone it. Down!” Looking deeply offended, Taco crouched on elbows and knees, his one trick. Anna gingerly took hold of the tail protruding from his doggy lips. Not fur, cloth. This was good. She had few qualms about putting injured socks out of their misery. “Open up,” she commanded. Getting no response, she straddled his head and made him open his mouth. The wet disgusting item was a scrap of chiffon-like material with rhinestones sewn on. Taco had it half swallowed and Anna had to drag it gently up his throat while he wiggled and gagged.

  “Serves you right,” she said but scratched his ears so he wouldn’t take it too personally.

  Once it cleared the insides of the dog, Anna could see it was a scarf, the kind worn over the shoulders with evening dresses. Remembering what Heather had been wearing, it could very well belong to her. Still on her knees, Anna spread the fabric over the ground, sparkly side up, to assess the damage. The dog dropped his chin near one corner but knew better than to try and reclaim his prize.

  The delicate fabric was in good shape, only punctured here and there where Taco’s teeth had penetrated, but the rhinestones on one end were dulled, the glittering facets muddied. Anna touched one, the mud made liquid by the dog’s saliva. Her finger came away stained with red. Half the scarf was drenched in blood.

  “Open your mouth,” she ordered the dog, then pried it open for him. Cheeks, tongue, roof and what she could see of his throat were all of a piece. There was too much blood on the scarf for it to be Taco’s. Had the rhinestones cut him enough to bleed that badly he’d have been foaming from his mouth and probably his nose. Heather had been unharmed. There wasn’t an inch of her Anna’d not checked. Therefore, the blood was not Heather’s. Chances were the scarf was not Heather’s either.

  Danielle was missing, gone from the prom in her party dress.

  Anna got a bad scared feeling. “If you were half the dog Lassie was, you’d lead me back to where you got this,” she said.

  Taco thumped his tail and looked at her with soft brown eyes.

  ★ 5 ★

  Though Anna felt she dithered, no time was lost. While her mind crashed through the thorny problem of whether to return for help or begin the search for the owner of the bloodied scarf, her body was piling rubble to mark the place on the bank from where she’d seen Taco coming out of the woods, and her mind was making a note of the peculiarities of the trees at the place he’d first appeared.

  She had yet to locate her handheld radio, another item for the ever-lengthening list. Her patrol car was in the church parking lot. To increase her familiarity with its idiosyncrasies, she’d driven it, rather than taking her Rambler.

  Ten minutes’ fast walk brought her to the lot below the church. Randy Thigpen answered her third call. Barth Dinkin, Randy said, was on lunch break in Natchez, forty-five miles and nearly an hour to the south of Port Gibson, where Thigpen was in the ranger station. Fleetingly, Anna wondered why he wasn’t out patrolling the road. She told him what the dog had dragged in; told him to call the Sheriff’s Department, keep trying to contact Dinkin and meet her at the Rocky Springs Ranger Station with a spare radio in twenty minutes. There followed a silence long enough Anna wondered if they’d lost contact, then he drawled, “Ten-four.” The drawl annoyed her. John Brown had filled her in on her staff. Randy Thigpen was from Smartswood, New Jersey. The drawl was pure affectation.<
br />
  Anna had opted not to try and follow the trail of the scarf alone. If an all-out search was called for, she would have wasted valuable time, and she was unfamiliar with the territory.

  Having returned home, she put on sturdy boots and her uniform, filled a backpack with an emergency first aid kit, compass and watch and, in just under nineteen minutes, was at the Rocky Springs Ranger Station at the entrance to the campground. Twenty minutes, twenty-five, passed and no Ranger Thigpen. At an even thirty, Anna radioed again and found he’d just left Port Gibson. Her sister, learned in things psychiatric and psychological, once told her tardiness was a form of covert hostility.

  Thigpen rolled in twenty-five minutes late and pulled up beside Anna’s car. He did not budge from his comfy seat behind the wheel, leaving her two choices: talk through car windows or get out and go to him. She’d intended to get out anyway and chose to split the difference. Putting down the electric window on the passenger side she said: “Hop on out and let me show you what I’ve got.” He sighed. She made a point not to notice.

  The ignition in his patrol car had been left on. A gust of cool air from the air conditioner followed him, and she could hear the strains of “The Shadow of Your Smile” from whatever easy-listening station he had his radio tuned to.

  As Thigpen pried himself from his automobile at her behest, Anna realized it was the first time she’d seen his bottom half. The sight of it did not raise him in her estimation. Moving slowly, not. because he was heavy but because it gave him the illusion of control, he closed the door and leaned one hip against the fender. Anna spread her map on the hood. Thigpen gave it a cursory glance.

  What she had was a glossy brochure of the Rocky Springs area, the kind of pseudo map with dashes to represent trails and hand-drawn pictures of the various wonders to behold at the end of them. On this unexceptional bit of cartography, she had penned an X where she estimated she’d been when Taco delivered the scarf.