Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  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 scared 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-conditioning was stiffening Anna’s muscles. Not wanting a mutiny, she 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 had 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 he 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 gentleman.’ ”

  “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.’ ”

  “It makes sense,” Anna said. “You said that buckle I found was from a Union soldier, one of the squad that vanished. That, put together with Ruby’s story, explains it. Port Gibson wasn’t ‘too pretty to burn.’ Grant had a mistress there. I got to thinking about the vanished squad, the plantation owner who shot his slaves.”

  “This says ‘run off.’ ” Barth tapped the manuscript with his glasses.

  “What would you tell a little girl when six grown-ups she knew were shot?” Anna asked.

  “I’d tell her they run off,” Barth admitted. “Caught the freedom train.”

  “So that same night he dressed his wife as a Yankee soldier and killed her, then killed himself. The wife was Great-grandma Opal’s Alyssum. Her husband killed her for infidelity, then got his slaves to kill Grant’s men and bury them where they fell along the Trace at Rocky Springs,” Anna finished.

  “Then he killed the slaves to keep them quiet. Or because they knew he’d been shamed.”

  “You can check, can’t you? Find out the name of that Port Gibson alderman’s slain wife.”

  “Should be easy enough,” Barth said.

  “Jimmy Williams must have added it up the same way we did. He and his buddies were mining those dead soldiers.”

  “For artifacts? Hardly worth killing for.”

  “For handwritten letters from Ulysses S. Grant to a Southern wife not his own. Worth a fortune,” Anna said.

  “If they exist.”

  “If they exist. If they ever exi
sted. If an enraged cuckold didn’t find and burn them. Let’s get that search warrant for Williams’s place. Push it. See if we can get it for this afternoon. We’ll look for shovels, Civil War clothes, and papers. Any copies of notes, research, et cetera. Artifacts from the vanished squadron. Let’s do it before Williams gets home.”

  Barth looked as if he would protest the hour, the effort, the haste, but in the end, he didn’t.

  “I’ll call Sheriff Davidson, see if he can expedite this thing,” Anna said.

  It was after six by the time they got the warrant. Anna was so tired she was sick and the aches had penetrated to the bone, yet she dared not veil her mind with painkillers.

  Once the group was armed with the warrant, things moved quickly. Mrs. Williams had left town suddenly to be with her husband. The baby-sitter cooperated with a relish that didn’t speak well of loyalty to the family.

  Jimmy had left without the chance to cover his tracks. The artifacts from Union soldiers in Grant’s detachment were found meticulously cataloged and stored along with a photocopy of Ruby Tangeman’s manuscript and copious notes speculating on the letters from General Grant to Alyssum.

  The coup de grace was in an unlocked desk drawer in the captain’s study: Leo Fullerton’s suicide note.

  Anna found Barth at Jimmy Williams’s desk holding a single sheet of paper and looking stricken. “Pastor Fullerton killed the girl,” he said in a voice so devoid of emotion it rang hollow.

  “Let me see.” Anna crossed the uncarpeted floor. Williams’s home had been a dream to search. Furnishings were sparse and classy. Very few tchotchkes cluttered the shelves. A military orderliness was maintained despite the existence of small children.

  Barth handed Anna the note, Leo’s last communiqué on this side of the River Jordan. Though the light was good and the type of the usual size, letters blurred and Anna waited while a wave of dizziness passed and her vision cleared.

  Pastor Fullerton began with a plea for forgiveness: forgiveness from his flock for abandoning them, from his god for the sin of despair, and from his friends for betraying their part in the death of Danielle Posey.

  He told of how he’d struck her down in fear when she suddenly thrust herself out of the bushes above where he dug. He pleaded that whoever read this should know that in the dark and the fear he’d thought her a bear or a bobcat, not a girl. He wrote of how, when he and Ian had been sent back to camp for the rope and sheeting, he knew he could not live with what he had done and could not live with a deceit that would cause racial strife.

  “Danni Posey didn’t die of the blow to the head,” Anna said. “She died of a broken neck. Fullerton didn’t kill her, Williams did. While Ian and Leo went back for the sheet, Williams checked her carotid. We found his prints. She was alive and he snapped her neck.”

  “That just makes them both murderers,” Barth said sadly. “The fact Leo’s blow didn’t kill her doesn’t mean it couldn‘t’ve:’

  Anna could see the moral logic in that. “Bag it,” she said and handed Barth the suicide note.

  “The DeForest boy was telling the truth,” Barth remarked.

  “Eventually,” Anna conceded. “He and the other boys terrified and chased Danni, but she stumbled on death from another quarter.”

  “That makes them murderers in a way,” Barth said.

  “We are all murderers in a way. It doesn’t do to track the threads of death too far from their end.”

  “Why do you suppose they dropped the body where they did?”

  “My best guess?” Anna thought a moment. “I’d bet Williams instigated the half-assed KKK red herring. Ian and Leo couldn’t stomach it and backed out partway through. Williams couldn’t engineer it alone, so Danni was left where they dropped her.”

  “Sad for everybody,” Barth said. “Even the doers.”

  Ian McIntire was arrested as an accessory. Anna left as soon as he called for a lawyer, which was about the same instant he opened his door. Williams would be arrested when found and that wouldn’t be long. The baby-sitter kindly gave them a number Mrs. Williams had left where she could be reached in case of an emergency with the children. Two calls established that Williams was in Birmingham at the Methodist Hospital. He had undergone surgery for the removal of his left testicle. Barth winced at the news, but Anna was unmoved.

  It was nearly midnight when all was said and done. Anna was no longer able to hide either her pain or her fatigue and waited in the car while Barth finished up at the Madison County Sheriff’s Office, where they had taken McIntire.

  On the Crown Vic’s radio, she heard Randy Thigpen make a traffic stop. When he got wind of the fact that they’d had all the fun without him, he was going to be about as easy to get along with as a badger with a sore paw.

  When the time came, Anna would exhibit fairness and genuine concern for his issues. Faking that shouldn’t be a problem and it would give her the distance she needed to keep from challenging him to a duel.

  She’d fallen into a loose and miserable doze by the time Barth returned to the car, sleep full of dreams of spiders, rocks and things that gave the body dis-ease.

  Thoughtfully, he refrained from asking her if she was okay. Adjusting the radio to a station playing the gentlest strains of Ravel, he curled into his own thoughts and left her to hers.

  Moving through the darkness of the Natchez Trace, headlights cutting swatches of color to the sides of the road, fear nagged at Anna from the utter night of woods that pressed too close, felt too full of life.

  She was glad when the ride was over.

  “You gonna call Sheriff Davidson?” Barth asked. Davidson had assisted by phone, but an ugly domestic situation erupting in violence had kept him in Port Gibson. “He’s gonna want to know the details.”

  Anna pried herself painfully out of the Crown Vie. She still suffered from a vague feeling that Paul Davidson was a shit. Though she couldn’t remember why, she had no desire to talk to the man. “You do it,” she said. “If anybody wants me, tell them I died and went to a hot bath.”

  Clutching her painkillers to her bosom like an old drunk with his bottle of rotgut, she shuffled toward the sanctuary of home and Taco and Piedmont.

  ★ 19 ★

  Barth backed out of her drive and left. Soft clouds, gray in the moonlight, had materialized, wet and close to the treetops. There wasn’t a breath of air, and in this strange time between late night and dawn, even the forest was still.

  Anna slowed as she approached the now familiar red door that was to open on home. It didn’t feel like home. She heard the hum of Barth’s tires change in tone as he turned right on the Trace, headed south. When the sound was gone, she was still standing on her front step.

  She was scared. Craven, soul-sucking fear made her want to whimper and hide. She’d been beaten; blinded and beaten into the ground. An unseen man had tried to take her life with the brutal pounding of his fists. She was scared to stay out on her front walk, exposed, knowing another blow would undo her. And she was scared to go in her own house, scared of the shadows under the eaves and the dark places behind the door. She wanted to cry but was afraid a sound, even the smallest breath of a sigh, would call down some evil.

  Anna had been afraid before—many times. Fear was good, heightening the senses, adding fleetness to the feet. But never like this. Not the knowledge that she could be shattered into so many pieces that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put her back together again.

  The longer she stood in the waspish moonlight the more frightened she became, unable to go in, unwilling to stay out. Fleetingly, she had a picture of Frank finding her in the morning, cowering on the stoop, her mind gone. The image should have been absurd, but it wasn’t. It felt prophetic and loosed another bowel-jangling wave of terror.

  From within, Taco starting barking. The sudden staccato stab of sound hit her like a cattle prod, and she flinched. The animals. Even in the face of a paralyzing terror she’d not felt since childhood nightma
res, she would take care of her animals.

  “It’s me, Taco,” she said and pushed open the unlocked door. Her vocal cords had seized up along with the sphincters of her body and the words emerged as a high-pitched whisper. Despite the Minnie Mouse voice and Raging Bull face, Taco recognized her. She was greeted with a whine, a whapping of his tail against his bedding and the stink of an uncleaned kennel.

  Taco was a cripple. Frank went off duty at three-thirty. The poor animal hadn’t been out since breakfast. Guilt was added to the stew of emotions in Anna’s soul. Taco didn’t help any by taking the blame on himself, looking at her with shame in his dark eyes, his bedding stretched out where he’d pulled his bandage-swathed body as far from the scene of the crime as health and strength permitted. Shoulders and head were pushed up against the metal where the furnace had stopped his progress. Atop the heater, belly spread on the summer-cool tin, Piedmont had risen above the offal, but Anna noted with a second wave of guilt, the cat had not abandoned his friend.

  “Poor old guy,” she said to the dog, shamed by how joyfully he greeted her worthless self, grinning and trying to wriggle close enough to slather her with canine caresses. “It’s not your fault; it’s mine. Let’s not talk about it.” She knelt with great care, trying to keep her head balanced on its precarious perch at the apex of her spine. “Let’s get you outside. Your poor bladder must be the size of a weather balloon. What a guy. Superdog.” Anna crooned compliments to Taco for holding his water in hopes he’d forget he’d slipped in other areas as she worked her hands gently under his seventy-five pounds. Or was it now seventy? What did a dog’s leg weigh?

  Whatever it was it was too much. The blows to her shoulders and the side of her neck, the hairline fracture of her humerus combined to drain the strength from her arms. She could not lift Taco, and she started to cry.

  Kneeling on the hardwood, she rested her forehead against the lab’s side and wept because she was a terrible ranger, a damn Yankee, a woman, a cripple and a lousy pet owner, useless to man and beast. Had there been worms nearby she couldn’t even have eaten them; she was not worthy.