by Nevada Barr
“Looks like you were between the graveyard and the Old Trace this side of Little Sand Creek.” He stated the obvious.
“That’s my guess,” Anna said. She traced the linear route Taco would have taken if dogs were linear beasts. “It’s not exact,” she admitted. “But it’s a place to start.” She glanced up to see if he followed her logic, to discover he was looking not at the brochure but at his fingernails, a parody of boredom.
Anna folded the map. “Sheriff Davidson. Did you get hold of him?”
Thigpen lost interest in his nails and became absorbed in a clatter of starlings in the treetop across the parking area. A few seconds ticked by and Anna’s blood pressure rose a couple of points.
“I thought I’d better wait on it,” Thigpen said, still studying the birds.
Anna said nothing. When one was new in town, waiting for explanations was good practice. Who knew what mysterious rules held true in the heart of Dixie? Thigpen wanted her to ask him why. Anna could almost smell his anticipation.
“Why’s that?” she asked to get it over with. Had a child not been missing she might have played the game, silence for silence. She was better at it than most. Today other tasks took precedence.
“Well, I don’t think we ought to go bothering Paul just because you dug up an old scarf you think might have blood on it. Could be anything. An old rag a hunter used to clean his knife.”
Black chiffon seeded with rhinestones; hunting in Mississippi must be a whole lot more glamorous than it was in Colorado. “Call him now,” Anna said in the even colorless tones she used shortly before she ripped someone’s head off. “Tell him exactly what was found. Do you need me to write the description down?”
Randy Thigpen looked as if he was going to argue, then thought better of it. Leaving the car door open, he grunted down into the driver’s side to radio the Sheriff’s Department. When he’d finished and Anna had been exonerated by the sheriff of Claiborne County’s immediate interest, she laid out her plan. It was rudimentary and she was understaffed, but though densely forested, the Natchez Trace was narrow. Fields bordered both sides of the green belt. If the search needed to be widened, farmers would be called and questioned. Anna had a sense that if Danielle had been with the other prom kids, she would be found near where Anna had seen them. At night, in dress clothes, even lunatics and teenagers tended not to wander too deeply into the woods. Anna would follow in the direction Taco had come from. Randy Thigpen would take the trail up through the sunken section of the original Trace that ran to the south of Little Sand Creek. According to the map, this segment was no more than half a mile long; then he’d turn west toward the cemetery. The wooded area was small enough she felt secure that neither of them could become lost. “I’ll radio Sheriff Davidson in fifteen or twenty minutes and let him know where we are. If he thinks it’s worthwhile, he can join us,” she finished.
“There’s a problem with that,” Thigpen said. He’d stayed in his car. The left seat was a good two inches lower than the right where his faithful attendance had broken down the springs.
“That being?” Anna hurried him along.
“I couldn’t find any batteries that were charged up. I got your radio, but it’s deader than a doornail.”
“That’s okay,” Anna said, needing to be in the woods. “I’ll take yours. Frank—the maintenance guy—is around here somewhere. Ask him to lend you his for the duration.”
Short of flat-out insubordination, Thigpen had little choice. With ill grace, he handed over his radio. Anna thought of taking his carrying case as well, but watching him take off his belt to unthread it was too gruesome to contemplate.
She collected Taco, not because he was a trained search-and-rescue animal but because he dearly loved treats. Since he’d considered the bloody scarf the most fabulous of finds, he just might remember and return to the source of the bounty. It was a long shot, but since the dog’s services could be had for a pat on the head, there was nothing to lose.
The day had warmed rapidly and, down in the trees, there was not a hope of a breeze. Leaves were as still as if painted on. Moisture breathed from the ground, from the dense greenery. Moving at an easy jog, Anna was drenched in sweat before she’d traversed the manicured trail between the parking lot and the church.
By the time she returned to her makeshift cairn at the top of the ragged embankment, the legs of her trousers were sticking to her thighs at every step. After one last meal at her expense, flying insects the size of pinheads were drowning in the sweat at her temples. She was careful not to think of the high desert, the open spaces and crisp dry winds.
Taco was leashed. Anna loosed him to let him make his own way down the treacherous bank, then followed, clinging to roots and keeping her fanny close to the dirt so any fall would be short-lived. Uncomfortable in the role of a female impersonator, the dog didn’t run off Lassie-like to help in the search but seemed content to stay at Anna’s heels. For a quarter of an hour, she picked her way through forest debris, down sudden gullies lined with soil that collapsed when she stepped on it. The whole state seemed to be rotting away, crumbling into whatever hell lay below the surface of the land.
The cycle of life was immediate in Mississippi. In the high deserts, dust-to-dust and ashes-to-ashes was the way of things. The fallen—plants, animals, people—became seared, desiccated, purified, reduced to fine arid molecules that were swept away, fed to the hills. With the rain’s clear magic they became spring’s new growth. Not so here. There was no phoenix-from-the-ashes mystery. Here the downed became fodder for new life before the body had grown cold.
Dead trees were rife with growth springing from the carcass before their own leaves had fallen. Older dead-wood lay beneath a carpet of burgeoning life so thick the logs were merely a mound beneath. And everything was green; the living and the dead carpeted with moss. Last year’s leaves were spiked through with this year’s grasses growing toward vines that dropped from overhead. In turn, the vines were misted with Spanish moss.
The bones of the earth did not show through: no rocky ridges, no escarpments. And the land did not lie sensibly, mountains to foothills to plains with water cutting always downhill. The forested ground behind Rocky looked as if it had been crumpled by a giant hand and thrown down. Ravines, going nowhere, intersected then dead-ended. Ragged hillocks furred with growth pushed up without rhyme or reason. Water did not carve the land in gravity’s rational manner as it did in the West, but sculpted at random as the winds of southern Utah sculpted the mountains.
Finally Taco began to bark and darted away from the narrow and fading deer trail they’d been following. Knowing he might be pursuing nothing more interesting than a panicked squirrel, Anna went after him. She found him in a vine-tangled clearing.
He’d located the source of his treat.
“Taco!” she yelled. “Get away from it.”
Cowed by her tone, he backed off.
“Holy shit,” Anna breathed and, shrugging out of her pack, she dug out the radio.
“Five-seven-nine, five-eight-zero,” she said into the mike.
Thigpen answered immediately and for that she was grateful. “Where are you?” she demanded.
The radio clicked as if he fingered his mike button before answering. “Down by the creek,” came the reply. Behind his words Anna could hear “The Girl from Ipanema” playing. The son of a bitch hadn’t even left his car. He was still squatting in the parking lot outside the ranger station.
“Stand by,” she said. Having changing frequencies, she put in a call to Sheriff Paul Davidson.
“Davidson,” came back quickly followed by, “My twenty is about a mile north of Rocky Springs.”
An efficient man. What his location was would have been her next question.
“I think I’ve found your missing girl,” Anna said.
She told him to meet Thigpen at Rocky and gave him directions from the graveyard. There was probably a quicker way to get to where she was, but not knowing the lay o
f the land, she wasn’t going to risk experimentation.
After tying Taco well away from the scene, ignoring his injured innocence at having been restrained through no fault of his own, she made three more calls: one to Randy Thigpen to bring an evidence collection kit, one to headquarters in Tupelo—chief rangers liked to know when dead bodies appeared in their parks—and the last to Steve Stilwell, the district ranger nearest her as the crow flies. She was going to need all the help she could get. This pathetic corpse had the earmarks of a political bomb. When it went off, she didn’t want to be alone, the sacrificial maiden. The image was too apt, and she felt the weight of thirty years of the women’s movement settle on her shoulders.
Sitting with her back to a tree trunk, Anna waited. But for the popliteal artery behind an exposed knee and the girl’s wrist, Anna’d touched nothing. There’d been no pulse, the flesh cool with the unreal feel of death. Rigor had gone off. The child had been dead more than twelve hours.
Panic rummaged around Anna’s insides. A stranger in a strange land, new to a job where she was not welcome. Reality—control—was trying to slip away. It alarmed her how anxious she was for Sheriff Davidson to show up and take command. Only that wouldn’t do. Not now. Now she was a district ranger; she was in charge. How she handled this would set the tone for her entire stay on the Natchez Trace. Lonely lies the head that wears the crown, the words came unbidden to mind. The quote was wrong, she knew that, and she had no idea what it was from. Zach would have known. Loneliness swept over her in a wave that made her weak. Someone to share with. God. It had been a long time.
Zach was an actor. “Must have been Shakespeare,” she said aloud to dispel the awfulness. Taco was unmoved.
Concurrent jurisdiction, she remembered. Law enforcement on the Natchez Trace was shared with the local constabulary. Some comfort in that.
“The timing sucks,” she said.
To stay in her own skin, she began to do her job. Without moving, she took stock of what she could see. One thing at a time. She could handle that.
Anna’d seen dead bodies before. A baker’s dozen or so who’d been taken out by automobiles, falls, fires and, once, a flash flood. She’d even seen corpses dispatched by human violence—not a lot, not like a “real” cop in a city. For the most part, parks were peaceful places, marauding raccoons and bad sunburns the staple of the crime-fighting units. Bodies didn’t show up on every shift. But she’d crossed paths with a handful. Nothing like this, though. This made her sick and angry and scared. She wondered, without looking forward to it, what they’d find when the noose was untied and the sheet removed. There was no telling what the girl had died of but it was clear there’d been head injury. The cloth covering her face was drenched in blood, black now, like the flies that feasted on it.
“Sort it out,” she told herself. “Sort it out.” She began her notes, unaware that her left hand was clamped firmly in the familiar warmth of the dog’s fur.
The body was in a wide space between the trees, not properly a clearing, but breathing space. Fallen logs interlocked with the living forest on two sides, forming a tiny natural amphitheater. The ground was green with vines and a low-growing plant thick with small, white, star-shaped blossoms. A delicate, sweet fragrance rose from somewhere, slightly masking the cloying smell of dead and fly-blown meat.
“Okay,” she said to Taco just because talking to someone, even a dog, made her feel less like a neutron lost in the far reaches of space. “What’s here? Two legs, encased in nylon—panty hose—obviously belonging to a young girl. From what I can see, the hose is undamaged. Sandals.” The shoes were so like those worn by Heather Barnes, Anna’s fragmented mind flashed on innumerable phone calls she and Sylvia had exchanged in high school. What are you going to wear? Heaven forbid one should be so unique as to cause untoward comment. The teenage struggle to fit in yet be special at the same time. Maybe Heather and Danielle—Danni—had had like conversations. Times changed. People didn’t.
Legs were exposed to the thigh. A border of black showed below the sheet. Probably Danielle—if this was Danielle—wore a micromini dress like the one Heather had on when she drank herself insensible. Above the blackness was the creepiest part, if the murder of a child could be broken down into degrees of creepiness: a white sheet, with holes cut out where the eyes might be, had been draped over the corpse’s head. The eyeholes, askew, showed only a nose and the flesh of one cheek. The sheet fell to just below the girl’s crotch and the hem of her minidress. Minidress, Anna thought, relevant of nothing. Did kids call them that anymore?
“Focus, Taco,” she admonished the unoffending hound. “Okay. A noose tied around the neck on the outside of the sheet. Heavy yellow line, nylon or plastic, like the kind used to moor boats.” It was as if the killer had intended to hang the girl but had been interrupted in the process. Who had added the sheet? In the South—in all of America—a sheet with eyeholes was the symbol of the Ku Klux Klan. Had the girl been wearing it and thus was killed? Or had the killer put it on to make a point? The frail-looking legs, not broken but sprawled in the ungraceful attitude of death, belonged to a white girl, a Caucasian. Did the Klan hang its own? Was there still an active Klan in Mississippi ?
Anna wished someone would come. Sheriff Paul Davidson, even the wretched Thigpen, would be a relief.
Davidson would know she’d found a body. Once he arrived, the machinery of investigation would follow: deputies, coroners, photographers. At least she assumed that’s how it would go. She’d never worked with Mississippi law enforcement. Sheriffs were elected, not necessarily brought up through the ranks. Good, bad or indifferent, though, people would show up. Probably great heavy-footed sods. She’d called Thigpen herself. District Ranger Stilwell was on his way, and Chief Ranger Brown. Soon the place would be a zoo.
With a sense of duty and with time running out, Anna shook off her self-pity and stood, careful to keep her feet in one place lest she prove to be a heavy-footed sod herself.
Mississippi was good at covering her sins—and her scars. The weave of plant and insect life didn’t provide a surface where the casual detective would easily find a clue, be it a button or a burned-out match. But given the crude violence of the girl’s attack, perhaps Anna was not dealing with a murderer of great subtlety and stealth.
Focusing eyes and mind, she studied the miniature glade. It was slightly sunken, as if a giant had pressed his thumb into the earth. The sheet-covered girl lay in the middle of the depression. Her legs sprawled to the east and her head—Anna dearly hoped there was a head inside the noose-tied sheet—to the west. Weeds and vines gave nothing up. To the eastern edge of the sunken area, maybe a yard from the patent-leather shod feet, was a thigh-high fallen log, covered with plate-sized mushrooms that jutted out from the sides. A swath cut through them where someone had scraped a boot or dragged something over the log.
Staying to the edge of the scene and studying each step before she took it, Anna worked her way around to the far side of the rotting timber. Bark on the log’s top, soft from decay, had been crushed.
Either the child had been found here or chased here and murdered, or she’d been carried here and dumped after she was dead. The sheet she was wearing, the noose tight around her neck, suggested an aborted hanging. Without more information, it was impossible to tell if the girl had dressed herself as KKK—or Casper the Friendly Ghost—and been killed for it, or if her killer had put the drape on her, attempted to hang her, when she ran and was clubbed down.
“Don’t speculate,” Anna told herself, aware of the danger of falling in love with a theory to the exclusion of the facts.
Standing with her back to the dead girl, she looked in the direction that she and her killer must have come from. The murdered girl wore square-heeled sandals, as easy to follow as Heather’s. Despite the creeping river of life that covered the ground, if she’d come this way on her own two legs, Anna would soon know it.
Backtracking could wait.
She turned
again to the green pocket holding the body. The feet looked so tiny and pathetic in their silly shoes. The patent leather of the sandals was specked with mud and the rhinestone-studded strap over the ankle of the left foot had been broken. Runs scarred the hose on both legs and smears of mud discolored the knees. This child had been chased, and not in fun. She had run hard enough and through rough enough country that she must have been terribly frightened. Considering the end she had met, the fear wasn’t unfounded. One of her hands was hidden beneath the folds of the sheet that had become her shroud but the other lay palm up, sad and white on the rich drop cloth of green. The nails were neatly painted, none broken or discolored. A few scratches crosshatched her forearms but they were thin, shallow; she’d probably gotten them from branches hitting her as she fled. From the looks of it, she had run, but she had not fought. Young ladies were not taught to fight. Not for the first time, Anna thought that was a crying shame. Especially in a world where young girls, like baby ducklings, were at the bottom of the food chain.
From where she stood, Anna could see the rest of the rope that formed the noose. Partially hidden in the grass and weeds, it snaked up from where it was tied around the neck to vanish into the undergrowth. Moving with care, she continued to circumnavigate the scene until she stood above the sheeted corpse, opposite the fungus-covered log. The rope was pulled this direction, pulled taut then dropped. The line of yellow nylon ran straight for about three yards, then the remainder lay all in a heap. Had the girl been dragged, half blinded by the sheet, a rope around her neck like an animal? Tears and bile mixed in Anna’s throat. Swearing softly, she turned away. She’d never given much thought to the hierarchies of murder, the good, the bad, the brutal. But this was the stuff of nightmares. This was why the NPS kept all those shrinks on tap to work with rangers after an ugly event. Anna’d always hated those sessions. Maybe this time it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
The sound of voices cut into her thoughts. She reminded herself she was a grown-up, a district ranger for Christ’s sake, glad to see them but not too glad. Then she hollered, “Over here.”