Hunting Season (20 page)

Thigpen and his weighty derrière would not be on duty till four. Anna decided to start with Shelly Rabine. Not only did she intimidate the little interpreter, she rather like her—two factors that would ease the questioning process. Besides that, at Mt. Locust, Taco could get in a good run if he were so inclined. The poor dog had been sorely neglected since the murder of Doyce Barnette had begun usurping most of Anna's time. only one car was parked in the lot in front of the visitors center, a '91 burgundy Honda Accord that belonged to Rabine. Anna pulled her Rambler American in beside it and sat for a moment enjoying the phenomenal stillness. If she skewed her reality just a few degrees, it was easy to believe the world had come to a full stop; that, like the first entrant into the thorn-shrouded castle of Sleeping Beauty, she was the only living thing not frozen in thrall.

Not the only living thing. Taco was bounding and slavering to be set free. Hauled back to the mundane, Anna leaned across to open the passenger door. The three-legged Lab leapt out with a speed and agility many four-legged dogs would have envied.

Shelly had evidently seen the Rambler through the visitors center window. She came out and waited for them on the concrete apron in front of the little building. Taco, who had never laid eyes on Shelly before, rushed over to greet her like a long-lost sister. The dog must have weighed nearly as much as the child-sized park aide, but Shelly was unthreatened and allowed him to express his saliva-laden devotion much longer than Anna would have.

Watching Taco's ecstatic tongue lap at Shelly's thin cheeks, Anna felt a mild stab of guilt. Where clogs were concerned, she was never going to get the Owner of the Year Award.

"Hey, Anna," Shelly called in her wispy voice. "Anything new? It's been dead around here since Saturday."

If the pun had been intended, the young woman gave no sign of it but chattered on happily. "Not one single visitor yet this morning. The big excitement here was old Mack fussing about poltergeists moving his stuff."

Mack, Anna remembered, was the oldest and most senior of the maintenance men in her district, maybe on the Trace. He was secretive about his age but he had to be near eighty. He'd been forcibly retired from driving the tractors used to mow the edges of the parkway when his sight began to make him a danger to automobile traffic. That had been a decade or more before Anna's arrival. Since then, he'd putzed, pottered and gardened the Mt. Locust site with the possessive fussiness of the little-old-lady cliché.

"Find any more bodies or anything neat?" Shelly asked with innocent ghoulishness.

"No more bodies," Anna said. "Want to close up shop for a few minutes and walk with me? Taco needs some space."

Shelly was only too glad to abandon the tedium of her post. She locked up the VC, and because it was the way traffic naturally flowed, they wandered up the path toward the stand. Taco bounded ahead, apparently bent on showing that the district ranger's dog was gloriously and illegally off leash.

For the first time in weeks, the succession of clear blue and gold autumn days was broken. The sky was overcast, hinting at the possibility of much-needed rain. A fog so thin it was second cousin to mist fell like a scrim over the meadow, giving trees and fences the vague outlines of things dreamed and poorly recalled on waking.

"You just busman's holidaying or what?" Shelly asked. The mist and the stillness didn't seem to oppress her one bit, just as seeing a dead body hadn't had any dampening effect on her spirits that Anna had noticed.

"Well, kind of," Anna replied. "I was wondering, you being here every day all day, if you'd maybe noticed something—any little thing—that we might have overlooked." The best way to get people to talk was to get people to talk. Words, like water, flowed better en masse.

Flattered and delighted with the question, Shelly wrinkled her smooth brow in concentration. Watching her, Anna flashed back to when she was in her twenties, when she and Zach had lived in New York City, he struggling to find work as a director and she dabbling in the world of acting. Cast in a role older than herself, she'd sat in front of a poorly lit mirror, the silver backing peeling off at the edges, in a dressing room of a ramshackle, roach-infested theater near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. With like concentration she'd screwed her face into wrinkles and painstakingly painted lines where the flesh folded. Now the lines were always there, a roadmap to her past.

Shelly's best effort failed, and to her credit, she didn't invent anything to cover the fact. Not the action of someone starved for attention. Anna pursued her inquiry anyway.

"The way you found the body—you know, in his underpants and all—was weird. Did anybody you told about it have a theory we might not have thought of?"

"I thought we were supposed to keep all that a secret," Shelly said. The affront in her voice was too genuine to be feigned, colored not with anger at being accused but disappointment that she'd been righteously withholding a terrific story that was hers by right while others were dining out on it.

Shelly wasn't the one who'd leaked the information to the newspapers. Anna decided to let the matter rest. "We were," she said. "But somebody screwed up. The details were in the morning's paper."

"I didn't tell them," Rabine said indignantly.

"I know," Anna said.

"I didn't."

"I believe you."

Shelly opened her mouth to protest her innocence again but chose to accept Anna at her word and said nothing. They reached the fork in the path below the inn. The wider trail led toward the bricked steps to the porch. Following Taco, they took the road less traveled and walked around the back to Eric Chamberlain's kitchen garden.

"Do you have any idea who might have told?" Anna asked.

"Shoot, no," Shelly said. "I don't even know those guys—the sheriff and that fat, tiny-footed guy."

"The coroner, Gil Franklin?"

"I guess. The only one besides you was Randy. And I only know him to say 'hi' to. It's not like law enforcement spends any time hanging around talking to lowly park aides."

The bitterness in her voice was not new to Anna. In most parks she'd worked there'd been friction, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, between the various disciplines. Of late it had been exacerbated. Once they were all known as park rangers. For reasons that escaped Anna, the NPS had decided to remove interpreters, naturalists and historians who brought the park to life for the visitors, from that proud and time-honored group, forcing them to be referred to as park aides. If they wished, at some point, by jumping through administrative hoops, they could regain the title of park ranger.

The bureaucratic logic of pay scales, promotional series and career development paths had been explained when the change took place, but the sense of disenfranchisement remained. Little boys and girls didn't dream of growing up to be aides. They dreamed of growing up to be rangers.

"Anyway," Shelly said, regaining the cheer that seemed her natural state. "Mississippi's like hometown central for stories. A good story'll spread like kudzu. Friday it's this deep dark secret and by Sunday morning half the preachers in the state are preaching a sermon about it. Down here we don't have to tell stories, we just sort of breathe them in and everybody everywhere knows."

Anna laughed. She couldn't argue with that. Southern secrets were kept from outsiders, but everybody else knew things by osmosis.

Taco was digging madly at the end of a row of corn plants, the leaves brown and papery. Anna shouted at him. He looked up, his tongue lolling out between muddy jaws. He then obediently left off what he was doing to come rub dirt and dog spit on her Levi's.

The interview was pretty much at an end. Chilly and gray, the day didn't tempt Anna to dawdle. Pushing away Taco's demonstrations of abiding love, she started to turn back.

"Barth's sure been working his tail off in the old slave cemetery," Shelly said quickly. "Wanna go and see?" Anna looked at the young woman. Her slightly protuberant eyes were further exaggerated by the wide hopeful stare. Rabine looked all of twelve years old and just as transparent. She didn't want to go back to standing behind the counter in a cramped visitors center waiting for visitors that never showed.

"You're as bad as Taco," Anna muttered.

Shelly said, "What?" and Anna was glad the park aide hadn't heard her impossibly grown-up condescension.

"Let's take a look," she said. Taco bounded off as if English was his second language and he understood every word. Seeing the childlike look of delight on Shelly's face, Anna wouldn't have been surprised if she'd bounded off after him.

"Maybe I should go into law enforcement," Shelly said as she walked across the broken field between the garden and the edge of the woods, following the dog and leading Anna. "You guys get to do all the fun stuff, and you don't have to work. I mean
work
work," she added, glancing back over her shoulder to see if Anna had taken offense.

She hadn't. She knew what Shelly meant. It was one of the things she loved about being a law-enforcement ranger; the freedom to move, car to horse to hiking trail, not being tied to a minute-by-minute schedule or weighed down by a desk or a tour group that could not be deserted. And, the greatest freedom of all, freedom from supervision. By the nature of the work, field rangers made most of their own decisions.

Anna'd always felt a mild guilt about the disparity in pay and promotional opportunities between park interpreters and park law enforcement, especially the seasonals. Interpreters were the backbone of the park service, yet by some twist in the power structure, they'd ended up near the bottom of the bureaucratic ladder.

"Hey. Barth cleaned it up good," Shelly said as she reached the edge of the cemetery. All that remained of the sign were the two upright four-by-fours. The broken and defiled boards were gone. "You know he had to do it all by himself. Mack's like a zillion years old, kind of entered the feather-duster stage of janitoring. Barth told Mack, though, and Mack told me what the vandals did. You know the ... mess... they left. Major mondo caca."

"Well put," Anna said with a smile.

They stopped by the skeletal sign and stared into the trees. Fog robbed the trees of what scraps of autumn brilliance they still clung to. Spanish moss, a favorite Yankee image of the South, hung gray and apparently lifeless from the branches of cedars more black than green. "Cemetery" or even "graveyard" didn't quite fit the picture. Unmarked, scattered, trees and shrubs choking the burial grounds, it put Anna in mind of that horrific crime scene where the evening news showed grim policemen carrying out body after body, excavated from shallow graves in serial killer John Wayne Gacy's backyard. Irrational fear grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and shook her. Feeling hunted, haunted, female, and frail, she stifled the urge to look over her shoulder, move closer to the slight figure of Shelly Rabine.

With an effort she shrugged off the image and the sudden hatred of slave owners it brought with it. Time had stolen the humanity of owner and slave alike. Before the Civil War, when the cemetery was in use, it wouldn't have looked anything like this forlorn scrap of land. Trees would have been cleared, wooden markers erected, probably flowers planted by loving hands. Without money for stones of granite and fences of wrought iron, the love of the living and the names of the dead had been reclaimed by the land.

Under strict mental discipline John Wayne Gacy's grisly garden receded from Anna's mind and with it the growing sense of creepiness.

Undaunted by human megrims, Taco loped gleefully into the mist. Because he was alive and happy and his glossy golden coat shone with color, Anna watched him. Half of him disappeared behind the dark gleaming leaves of an oak hydrangea. Supported by his one remaining hind leg, his feathery tail wagged in ecstasy and the dirt began to fly as he dug madly. Soft yellow-brown dirt of broken ground. In this sacred and yet profane place the land was settled, covered in duff, undisturbed for countless years.

"Taco's got something," Anna said, and remembering the last search the dog had accompanied her on when he'd led her to the corpse of a teenage girl, she moved into the dripping woods to investigate. Infected by Anna's unease or the soul-sucking silence of the place, Shelly followed without her usual running commentary.

"What the hell..." Anna took hold of the dog's collar. Taco had been burrowing in what looked to be a new grave. Earth had been removed—clods of Mississippi's hard clay littered the duff near the grave—then replaced. An attempt had been made to restore the ground to the existing pattern of the forest floor, leaves and needles raked back to cover the gout of turned soil. The camouflage might have worked had time and rain been able to do their work before the dog did. As it was, scars of a recent disturbance showed.

"Give me a hand." Anna began clawing the leaf and needle litter from around Taco's dig.

"Oh, gross." Shelly didn't move from her place half a body length from the site. "You don't think..."

"We'll think later," Anna said curtly. "All we're doing now is looking."

Distaste overcome by courage or curiosity, Shelly dropped to her knees on the damp leaves and helped scrape away the duff.

"Go easy," Anna said when, caught up in the moment, the young woman began to exhibit the uninhibited fervor of the dog, flinging bits of woodland flotsam out behind her. "Could find something useful in this mess," she explained.