Hunting Season (27 page)

His arm, still strong around her waist, brought her inside and closed out the night and the storm. "I've been half out of my mind. If I hadn't known you'd never forgive me for it, I'd've driven out there myself."

Anna let herself fall into a kiss that hit her like warm brandy on an empty stomach.

"I'm not all that late," she managed when her lips were free from more pleasant duties. "How did you know?"

Paul hadn't let her go and her words were muffled against the flannel of the shirt he wore. He held her like he never would, and Anna felt no compunction to wriggle away.

"I leave my radio on tuned to the park's frequency when you're on late," he admitted.

Radio.

Anna pulled back, breaking the comforting circle of his arms. Anyone who had a scanner and the park's frequency would have known it was her in that car: not Barth, not Randy, not an anonymous government representative. As was required by NPS regulations, she'd called in her location at the deer-stand meadow and called in again when she left. Not only her identity but where she was had been broadcast.

The attack was personal. Somebody had wanted to see her crushed and broken. Had Barth been a few minutes later, that person would have stepped from the safety of the truck and into the sights of her Sig-Sauer. She never thought she'd be cursing one of her rangers for responding too promptly to a backup call, but she did now.

"What is it?" Paul asked. "Are you okay?"

Anna told him: how cold she'd been, how scared, how angry, the noise the collisions made, the disorienting play of light and water. As she talked, Anna felt a growing understanding of the women she'd met during her career who had loused up schemes for both the law abiding and the law breakers by blabbing to "the boyfriend." At the time, these incidents had left her with a baffled contempt for the blabbers. Now, tonight, she experienced the heady liquor of sharing. That, coupled with the dangerous stuff of trust, could elicit secrets from just about any woman on the quick side of the River Styx.

During her recitation, they ate bowls full of curried chicken stew, the entire chicken, sans guts, brains and feathers, tossed in the pot for twelve hours, bones still to be picked out as they turned up in one's spoon. There was salad from a bag and good bakery bread.

From the dining table in the kitchen, they moved to the fireplace. Like many in the Deep South it was propane with fake logs, the two or three weeks of true winter not meriting the dirty business of cutting, hauling and storing wood.

Shoes off, feet on the stuffed arm of a couch with down pillows, her head on Paul's lap, she finished her tale as the grandfather clock at the base of the stairs was striking ten.

Paul asked questions as she went along, fueling the story, and Anna was content to be warm, lying in a man's lap, hearing a mellow bell marking the passage of time. After eleven strokes, when the gong fell quiet, there was a sweet aftertaste of sound soaking into the antique wood of the clock and the house. Then it, too, was gone and the sonorous rhythm of the pendulum and the tick of the seconds drifted back into the room.

"I've got my own story to tell," Paul said after a while. Warmth and the sound of the wind had sent Anna drifting peacefully. His words jolted her back. Suddenly no longer comfortable lying on her back, throat and soft white underbelly exposed, Anna struggled upright and propped an elbow on the back of the sofa. The down-filled cushions she'd enjoyed a few minutes earlier were now too soft, too yielding, like quicksand ready to trap and hold.

Paul turned slightly to see her face. "I had a long talk with Amanda last night." Amanda was his wife. For reasons Anna chose not to examine but which probably stemmed from vestigial adolescence, she never called or even thought of her by her first name. When forced to refer to her, Anna used "Mrs. Davidson." As an exercise in dignity and discipline, she always said it with neutral respect.

Hearing Paul say "Amanda" was jarring. Without appearing to do so, Anna took note of where she'd kicked off her moccasins and dropped her jacket in case she was leaving anytime soon. Perhaps Paul had said the name with a tinge of bitterness. Anna found herself hoping so. Paul never spoke unkindly about his estranged wife. At first Anna'd found that admirable. Lately it was beginning to get on her nerves.

These thoughts and others bandied about inside her skull. More than enough time elapsed for paranoia to be planted, sprout and flower; Paul had lapsed into a brown study. Much as she wanted to, Anna wasn't going to kick down the door. Or even lure him out from behind it with careful questions or listening sounds.

"She was different somehow," Paul said finally. "Softer in some ways. More malicious in others. It made me think."

Anna waited with feigned patience for these thoughts to turn into words.

"Amanda said a lot of negative things about you." Paul looked at her and smiled dryly. "No surprise there. We've been careful, but women have a way of divining these things."

"Why don't we call it off," she said, wanting to bring down the sword and slash open the Gideon's knot they'd made of their lives.

"No! That's not where this is going." Paul slid across the sofa and took Anna's hands in his. She was so strung out from the car crash and the conversation, it was all she could do not to snatch them away and run.

"I hated hearing her. I hated you being attacked, if only verbally. I hated myself for being a coward. That's why I invited you over. Half the people in my congregation are divorced. Half the men in the sheriff's department. And I've been cowering behind some mistaken propriety out of fear of who was going to throw the first stone. I told myself I was obeying God's law, that I was protecting you. I'm too old for that bullshit. I care about you too much. I'm trying to get a divorce I should have gotten three years ago. I'm courting the lady ranger. That's my life at present. That's what's important to me."

Having braced herself for the brush-off, Anna was unsure how to feel. Faced with the prospect of bringing their relationship out into the open, she was suddenly shy of her own privacy, her own reputation.

"What did she say about me?" Anna asked. She knew the question sounded self-centered and she knew she wouldn't want to hear the answer. She was playing for time.

"That's the second part of the equation," Paul said. He dropped her hands and stared into the fire. "And there is an equation. That's how Amanda's mind works: tit for tat, quid pro quo. I've never known her to do something without a reason, usually one that moved her in a direction she wanted to go. Her snipes weren't her usual stuff: bad hair, ugly clothes, loose morals."

The bad hair and ugly clothes stung. Anna resisted the urge to smooth the hair over her ears and tug Zach's decrepit sweater into more flattering lines. She consoled herself with the thought that it wasn't what one wore but how one wore it that counted.

"These were professional jibes," Paul went on. "Amanda wouldn't tell me who—she was secretive to the point of smugness about her source—but she's been talking to somebody in the Park Service who evidently has it in for you. Then she hinted that, for the right settlement, she might let the divorce go through uncontested. She's got something up her sleeve."

"Randy Thigpen?" Anna said. He was the only employee of the Natchez Trace who'd gone out of his way to be a major pain in the ass, but it was hard to see where a man of his style or lack thereof would connect with the fastidious Mrs. Davidson.

"Thigpen was my first choice, too," Paul said. "But I don't think it's him. Amanda didn't say it wasn't, but she implied it was somebody higher up, maybe one of the big dogs from Tupelo. She made it sound as if you were on the verge of getting fired." Paul looked at Anna questioningly. Firelight warmed the side of his face and touched his hair with flame orange.

"I don't think so," Anna replied carefully. In the nine months she'd worked the Trace she'd been part of two murder investigations, been sued for reverse discrimination and, now, totaled an expensive patrol car. Other than that, things had gone swimmingly. Her midyear review had been excellent in all categories. As far as she knew no one had it in for her up north. Chief Ranger John Brown Brown had been a bit testy of late but he continued to back her decisions. Still, an attack aimed at her professionally frightened her. out of anger she spoke unfairly: "So you decided to drag our relationship out of the closet—what? To defend me?"

Paul winced as if she'd slapped him. Anna was sorry, but for reasons she was unsure of couldn't bring herself to back down. She stared at him, hostility clear in her face.

"No," he said simply. "I did it for me. I honor you, but I did it for me. I don't want to be party to a deceit that goes against all I hold sacred. Love is one of the things I hold sacred."

Even Anna at her crankiest was not proof against that.

14

 It was nearly three in the morning when Anna left Paul's. He invited her to stay the night. As tempting as it was to wake up in his arms, murmur sleepily of domestic things, watch him shave and dress, Anna opted for the rain, the Rambler and home. She'd reached an age—or a philosophical plane—where the temptation of her own bed, real sleep and waking with her own cat were tough to beat.

During the twenty-minute drive, Anna tried to keep the warm sweetness of the evening wrapped around her but her mind was as tired as her body and the demons found their way in. Who in Tupelo would verbally tear her down? Who in a beat-up Ford truck had tried to kill her? Was her job as well as her life in danger?
There are other jobs,
she thought, trying to comfort herself. It didn't work. Rangering suited her. The work had found her nearly a year after Zach died. She'd gone west, her car packed with little besides her father's old pearl-handled derringer and a case of cheap Yugoslavian red wine. In Utah she'd pulled off the road and driven into the rough sage-pocked hills. There were no people, no houses. With luck, nobody would find the body.

Because the gods didn't want her company, the body had been found. Anna'd inadvertently driven off road on National Park Service land. A ranger, Ellen Rictman, stumbled on her when she was two bottles down.

Ellen had talked to her for seven hours. By the end of night Anna had passed out. When she woke up Ellen was gone. A note was pinned to Anna's collar. When she could focus, she read it. "Ask for me at Arches," it read. "I promise to work you to death if that's your desire."

That summer Anna worked as a volunteer repairing trails and fence line in 110-degree heat. Her sister sent her enough money for food and the rental of a fifteen-foot house trailer in Moab. By fall she'd found a way to live without her husband.

People often joked about being married to their jobs. In Anna's case, it wasn't all that funny.

"It is not necessary that you think so much," Anna quoted a Chinese psychiatrist her sister admired. Settling in to the Zen of the rain and headlights on the road, by the time she reached her bed at Rocky Springs she was ready for sleep.

 In spite of the fact that Anna got less than five hours sleep, she woke refreshed and full of good cheer. The sky had not cleared but the rain had stopped and the weatherman promised temperatures in the high forties or low fifties. Cold for Mississippi. Used to winters at seven thousand feet in southwestern Colorado, Anna still considered fifty to be downright balmy for late November. As she got out of her car at the ranger station she realized she was whistling a happy little tune and stopped abruptly. In Port Gibson it was a good bet her Rambler, parked in the sheriff's drive until the wee hours of the morning, had not gone unnoticed, and in small towns everywhere, what was noticed was remarked upon.

She had no wish to personify the cliché by being aggressively cheerful the morning after. She needn't have worried. The antidote to happiness was hunkered down at his desk eating an Egg McMuffin with sausage and cheese. Another waited in a bag at his elbow in case the first should call for backup.

Randy looked up from his steadfast munching as she let herself in. For a moment he stared at her, his face locked in an expression Anna couldn't fathom: a witch's brew of irritation, disappointment, rage, weariness, and maybe a touch of admiration. The mix made Anna feel as if he looked not at her, but at the memory of a bad time he was sorry had ended. Alcohol or insomnia puffed the soft tissue around his pale eyes, turning the red rims slightly out. His heavy jowls were shaven but he'd missed places, and rough stubble, darker than his hair, showed like the beginnings of mold on a blancmange.

"I've got a bone to pick with you," he said as she closed the door. He leaned back, his chair groaning in protest, and smoothed his mustache with thumb and forefinger. Some crumbs were brushed off onto his shirt front, others driven deeper into the course sandy thicket.

Anna pulled out Barth's chair and sat down. "Pick away," she said. In her office nothing waited but paperwork, reports in quintuplicate that would generate a flood of questions from headquarters that, as yet, she had no answers for. A set-to with Randy Thigpen was just the thing to get her blood circulating, put her in fighting trim.

"I thought I was in on the investigation. I've been in on it since the beginning," Thigpen said belligerently.

After that first peculiar look, he'd ceased making eye contact and gazed intently at the McDonald's bag. "I've been working my tail off on this and now you go and shut me out. What have I done?"