Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  “Morning,” Anna called, and left the pavement to enter their camp. Both men looked up, startled, as if she’d caught them doing something they oughtn’t.

  “Morning.” Captain Williams recovered first.

  “Morning,” McIntire echoed. The joviality Anna’d noted at their first meeting clicked on belatedly as she was treated to his V-shaped smile. Neither seemed particularly glad to see her but good manners, or some other impetus she couldn’t quite identify, forbade them from letting it show.

  “Your squadron has shrunk,” she said pleasantly. “Where’s Mr. Fullerton?”

  An awkward silence was born. Before it was ten seconds old, Ian slew it with a sudden gust of verbal energy.

  “Leo’s got to tend that flock of his. Visiting a hospital or hauling groceries to a sick old lady. It’s all we can do to pry him away for one weekend a month. Coffee?”

  No coffee was in evidence, no fire, not even any hot water. Captain Williams shot his lieutenant a hard look.

  “Wouldn’t take any time at all to brew some up,” Ian defended himself.

  “No, thanks,” Anna said, then remembered the buckle in her pocket. “Hey, this might interest you guys. Look what I found.” She dug the buckle out and held it in her palm. “Do you think it’s anything?”

  Williams wiped his hands on the thighs of his woolen trousers, then lifted the buckle. Ian crowded near, and the two men studied it. According to Anna’s limited interest in Civil War relics—if this was one—they studied it way too long.

  “Where’d you come across it?” the captain asked. He sounded as if he accused Anna of something. Since she did technically remove it from park grounds, though not yet from the park itself, she felt a stab of guilt.

  “Up on the Old Trace,” she said, trying not to sound as if she was admitting to shady activities.

  “These are pretty common,” Williams said. “Not like they used to be, of course, what with people picking ’em up over the years. But this one’s in pretty good shape. I’m a collector. And an honest one. I’ll give you two thousand dollars for it.”

  “Yikes,” Anna said, then added virtuously, “It’s not mine to sell. I’ll give it to the interpretive staff for the museum.” She didn’t even know if the Natchez Trace had a museum, but it sounded good.

  Williams hung on to it a minute more, loath to relinquish it to the impersonal fate of becoming museum paraphernalia. “Sure,” he said at last. “That’s the place for it.” He dropped it in Anna’s outstretched palm.

  “I hear you got in a fracas with a gator,” Ian said, his elfin eyes twinkling.

  “News travels fast,” Anna replied.

  Captain Williams took a smoke from his shirt pocket and lit it, not a cigarette but a thin black cheroot as befitted a man of the Civil War era. “Those Mississippi gators can be mean old boys,” he said and winked at Ian. “You hurt him any? I hear even varmints are protected on the Trace.”

  “He’s been relocated,” Anna said evenly.

  “I’ll bet. Relocated right into somebody’s freezer. Alligator’s good eating.”

  They seemed to take the whole thing as one terrific joke, and though Anna could see the appeal of that, this morning it grated on her nerves.

  “He got my dog,” she said.

  Immediately all traces of humor evaporated from their faces.

  “No kidding?” Ian said sympathetically. “Got your dog? That big old black dog with you the other day? That’s a terrible thing.”

  Evidently killing a person’s dog was a serious crime in this part of the country.

  “He didn’t kill him,” Anna said, somewhat mollified. “But the vet said he’s going to lose his leg.”

  “You said he wasn’t a hunting dog?” the captain asked.

  “Just a dog dog.”

  “He’ll be able to get around good enough for that.”

  Heartened by their dog-friendliness, Anna hazarded a question. “Any idea who might’ve put the alligator in my carport?”

  “Kids,” Williams said succinctly, the word coming out on a cloud of fragrant tobacco smoke.

  “They probably thought it was a good joke, you being a Yankee and all,” said Ian. “I bet they’d feel real bad knowing your dog got bit.”

  “That’s probably it.” Anna was inclined to believe him. Kids, in the way of kids, taking an action without much thought to what the consequences might be. Maybe it was enough that she was a Yankee and a woman and a ranger to boot. Maybe. And maybe this group of “kids” had a reason to want her scared or hurt enough to leave the death of Danni Posey alone.

  “Well, I’ve got work to do. Have a good day,” she said to announce her departure.

  Ian stopped her with a question. “Have you found out who killed that little girl?” he asked. From the depth of emotion in his voice, Anna guessed the murder of Danni Posey was what had put such a damper on the camp of Jeff Davis’s Avengers. It made sense. These men were locals, maybe fathers themselves. They’d been here when the girl died. They would feel it more keenly than campers just passing through.

  “The sheriff was talking to us,” Ian said as if his interest needed explaining.

  “The investigation is continuing.” Anna voiced the accepted code phrase meaning “Nope, we got nothing.”

  “The newspapers said it looked like some kind of colored thing,” Williams said.

  Anna had to quell a knee-jerk reaction. To what, it took her a second to discern. Then it came to her. A “colored thing” let everyone who wasn’t of color off the hook. It ghettoized the crime. “Did they?” she said.

  “Well, not said it.” Williams sounded annoyed at her pretended naïveté. “But that sheet and so forth. Like a colored wanting to make it look like a Klan killing maybe.”

  This was what Leo Fullerton had been talking about, the added evil of ripping open old wounds with the incendiary choice of draping the dead girl in a dirty bedsheet.

  “The Klan’s not big around here anymore,” Ian said. “They planned a big old march up in Canton and had to bus in boys from Indiana to fill the sheets.” Williams shot him a look that forestalled anything else he might have been going to say. No dissension allowed in the troops.

  Maybe the Klan was dead. But like so many things in Mississippi, its ghost was evidently not laid to rest.

  ★ 12 ★

  Anna looked the part. Her class A’s were pressed to a fare-thee-well and, since they were still in the month of transition where either summer or winter uniforms were acceptable, she’d opted for the long-sleeved shirt and mannish tie: tricks to gain the psychological edge. A knock came on the door. She waited for him to knock again. Instead, Barth poked his head in. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes. Please come in. Sit down.” Anna was well rehearsed. She’d gone over the manuals on disciplinary action. She’d prepared the questions she wanted to ask, the points she wanted to make. Now that the moment had arrived, she found herself feeling an entirely unexpected emotion: pity. Both her rangers were older, close to retirement, but because the new regs on twenty-year retirement hadn’t come through till the early nineties, both had another five or so years to serve. Too few years to go anywhere else. Too many to spend in a burnout job. Thigpen had only worked one other park. He’d begun his career in the Great Smokies. Barth had worked on the Trace his entire career. He’d actually started out twenty-three years before as that rarest of creatures, a male secretary, at headquarters in Tupelo. Randy and Barth between them had thirty-eight years in Port Gibson, driving the same ninety miles of road, eating at Gary’s Shell Station. They’d grown fat, literally and figuratively. Anna could understand it. Years of writing the same people the same speeding tickets, scraping new generations of drunks off trees—it was bound to burn anybody out. Now her. She didn’t know if either of them had applied for the post of district ranger but she’d gotten it; white, female and a Yankee, she’d gotten it.

  Leaning forward, she rested her elbows on her knees and looked up at
Ranger Dinkin. Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, saying to Strother Martin, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” shortly before he got a bullet in the brain flashed unpleasantly through her mind.

  “Barth,” she said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  He squirmed. “What problem is that?”

  Anna lost her taste for gamesmanship. “Yesterday, I . called you and Randy for backup. You never showed.”

  “We were at Mount Locust,” he began.

  Not wanting to let him hang himself with more lies, Anna cut him off. “No. You were here. Not more than five minutes away. You hung me out to dry. Why is that?”

  Barth looked around her office, but there were no Cheetos handy to soothe his nerves. He fastened his gaze on his leg where his ankle crossed his knee.

  “Randy said...” he began, stopped, then started again. “We thought, you being new and all, maybe it’d be good for you to get your own idea of what it’s like working down here.”

  Anna said nothing to that. The remark was so patently made up of nine parts bullshit to one part hatefulness that she just let it sit in the air between them and stink.

  She watched him and, rightly or wrongly, thought she saw him weigh and discard several lines of defense in favor of the truth. “I don’t know why we didn’t back you up,” he said at last. “I’ve been feeling bad about it. I’m just as glad to get it out in the open.”

  “Fair enough,” Anna said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I may start throwing in applications for other parks next month or I may stay here till I retire. Either way, right now we’re working together. We’re new to each other. We’ve got reservations. That’s fine. I don’t plan on riding in here like Matt Dillon into Dodge City. I want to learn my way around, get the feel of the place. I can do that without you, but it’ll take me longer and be considerably more painful, but if I have to, I will. What I will not tolerate is any conduct that endangers my safety or that of you or Randy. That means I must be able to count on you absolutely to do what you can to your best ability when I call for backup. You can count on the same from me. Anything else is negotiable.”

  Barth nodded slowly. “I’m sorry about last night.”

  Anna believed him.

  “Will this go in my personnel file?”

  “No, I’ll document that you’ve been warned and counseled. That you have agreed to alter this behavior and that you have been told that any further breach of conduct in this matter will be written up and put in your permanent file and that, at that time, an inquiry into relieving you of your duties will be requested by me.”

  Again Barth nodded. “It won’t happen again.”

  She believed that too, maybe against good sense, but Barth held himself like an honorable man; he took responsibility for what he’d done and accepted the consequences without whining. Anna wanted to like him.

  “While I’ve got you here, let me catch you up on the Danni Posey investigation.” She would have updated him and Randy at some point; that she did it now, and in detail, was her vote of confidence in him.

  “I’ve known Pastor Fullerton for years,” Barth said when she’d related the interview with him and the sheriff. “My wife and I belong to Southern Baptist. He’s our pastor.”

  Mississippi was, indeed, a small town. Anna was beginning to glimpse how small.

  “You not being from around here, you might think that’s ordinary but it’s not. Down here there’s black churches and there’s white churches. That’s just the way it is. Oh, you can go to a white church and white folks can go to our churches. Nobody much minds. You’d be made welcome and all. Folks just don’t much do it. Lots of churches—black and white—have been working to mix up the congregations, but people are set in their ways. People need comfort. You don’t blame them for that. But Pastor Fullerton has done it. Southern Baptist in Port Gibson’s about fifty-fifty. It’s a big deal. And he makes it not a big deal, if you know what I mean.”

  Anna did. She told Barth of the pastor’s parting words, of his concern that race not be dragged into the mix during this investigation.

  “He’d care,” Barth said.

  Anna moved on to the car stop. Barth knew Mike Posey. He’d pulled him over one night for spotlighting deer on the Trace. There was no hunting on federal park lands. Spotlighting deer, paralyzing them momentarily with high-powered lights, was a practice of slob hunters. Posey had been meaning to poach and was guilty of harassing wildlife. Barth had let him off with a warning.

  “Think you’ve got a rapport with him?” Anna asked. Mike Posey needed to answer some questions, but since she’d recently arrested him she wasn’t the obvious candidate.

  “Nobody’s got rapport with Mike Posey.”

  Anna was afraid of that. “How about a Sean or Jackson Doolittle?” she named the brothers who’d run from her the night before. “You know either of them?”

  Barth smiled for the first time since he’d come in. Maybe for the first time since Anna’d met him—she couldn’t remember. It suited him. His smile had a raffish-ness that the rest of him had outgrown. “Better than that,” he said. “I know their mama.”

  “Terrific,” she said. “I know where they work. Stay close. When I’m finished here, we’ll ride out there together.”

  Barth took that correctly as a dismissal. “Anna?” He stopped short of the doorway.

  “Yeah?”

  “Randy’s pretty good people mostly. His wife up and left him a month back. I might oughtn’t to be speaking out of turn, but he’s been kind of down on women ever since.”

  “Thanks,” Anna said.

  He left, closing the door behind him. For a couple of minutes, she rocked gently in her chair and reviewed their meeting. It had gone well. Unless Thigpen started working on Barth again, she suspected he’d be a good ranger. They could work together.

  Her radio crackled: Randy making a vehicle stop at mile marker thirty-four. He was on his way toward the ranger station working traffic. Rather than summon him into her presence via the radio, Anna decided to wait. However her meeting with Randy Thigpen went, she doubted it would go as well as the one with Barth. Barth seemed more of a get-along-go-along guy. Randy struck her as a hardcore malcontent.

  Twenty minutes later, she heard the door slam and left her office. She didn’t want Barth to talk with Randy before she did.

  Thigpen had come in with a cigarette in his hand. When he saw her, he made a show of suddenly remembering it, opening the door, and tossing the smoking butt outside, adding littering to his list of crimes and misdemeanors.

  “Randy,” Anna said. “Could you come into my office? There are some things we need to go over.” In one management book or another, Anna had read that publicly shaming an employee was a sure-fire morale breaker. Besides, capitalizing on the pack mentality went against the grain.

  “Lemme get a cup of coffee,” Thigpen said.

  Anna nodded and returned to her chair. Thigpen was playing his own version of the game she’d abandoned with Barth: making her wait, showing his independence. It bothered Anna not at all. She busied herself picking out the odd bits of paraphernalia previous district rangers had allowed to congeal in the shallow center drawer of the built-in desk.

  After about three times as long as it takes to pour and condiment a cup of coffee, Thigpen wandered in, smoothing his mustache as he came. He had a habit of stroking it down in such a way that it looked like he was smelling his fingers.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and close the door,” Anna suggested.

  “Ah. Fixin’ to get serious? Over one lousy cigarette?”

  Anna said nothing. Randy closed the door and took the chair Barth had recently vacated. Middle-aged, too much lard, most of it carried above the belt and in front, Randy was never going to be poster boy for the American Heart Association. He was a cardiac arrest waiting to happen. Dead-end job. Wife deserted him. New boss. Anna tried to let the ameliorating factors leaven her mood. She still didn’t like the guy.
>
  “How’s your dog?” Randy asked.

  “He’s going to make it, but he lost the rear leg the alligator bit.” Good start, asking about Taco. It was on the tip of her tongue to thank him for the help he’d given her that night, but she suspected that was what he was angling for, so she didn’t.

  “We got a problem,” she said, echoing her opening with Barth.

  Randy fought with filibuster, clogging the room with words, cruising easily from one excuse to another. Finally, when Anna pinned him down to the facts: she’d called, he’d been close, he hadn’t come, he painted a picture she could tell he liked. Using much in the way of implication and innuendo, he suggested that he knew Anna was in no real danger and in his infinite and benevolent wisdom he’d decided it would be good for her to learn to handle things by herself, help her gain confidence. Of course, had he known she was going to do a fool thing like draw down on those innocent lads, he’d have come right on out and taken over before she got herself in trouble.

  Anna thought wistfully about that heart attack, wondered what in the hell was taking it so long. But then, should he collapse, she’d be duty-bound to give him CPR and the thought of mouth-to-mouth was so vile she decided it was better he should live.

  “We’ll keep this simple,” she said, giving up hope of a meaningful conversation. “Another ranger calls for backup and you don’t move heaven and earth to get there in a timely manner, you will be given a written reprimand. Do it again, and you’ll be fired.”

  Randy sat back as if she’d slapped him—or woken him from a pleasant dream. “You can’t do that!”

  “I can,” Anna assured him. She had him sign the memo she’d prepared saying he had been counseled and he left.

  Maybe he’d shape up. Maybe not. No goodwill to lose, she didn’t care which way it went.

  The Bogachitta Lumber Company was situated four miles west of Port Gibson. It had once been on a navigable bayou, but over the years the Army Corps of Engineers had altered the course of the Mississippi, and now the mill sat near a swampy creek scarcely deep enough to drown a cottonmouth.