Hunting Season (8 page)

From the living room, Anna could hear the annoying rattle of Raymond Barnette's advice. Quietly, she closed the library door in the probably vain hope it would keep the man out.

The first order of business was light. Having threaded her way through the clutter to the bay window, she threw open the heavy drapes and was rewarded by a shower of dust. A spider, her web disarranged probably for the first time in generations, ran for cover. She was small and not overly alarming so Anna let her live.

The sheers were opened next. Though Anna did not handle them with undue violence one of them tore, the fabric so old it had become almost as fragile as the spider's web. The window shade was last. Finally, to Anna's relief, there was light.

It had been in her mind to throw wide the casement and let in the rejuvenating air of autumn, but one look at the paint-encrusted sill convinced her it wasn't worth the time and effort. She turned back to the room.

When the library had been forced into use as a bedroom no changes had been made, no closet added, a bed had just been jammed up against one of the built-ins. The books were long gone, and the cases were used to house an eclectic collection of the deceased's belongings.

The bed, a single that looked as if it had survived Doyce's childhood in the 1950s, was unmade. Blankets were tangled in a ball and the bottom sheet had come loose, exposing the mattress ticking. Adolescents were prone to crawling into nests of that sort rather than taking the trouble to make things neat. In an adult it spoke of a disregard or disrespect for one's self.

An unwelcome memory bloomed behind Anna's eyes. After Zach had died there'd come months she'd retired to just such a bed night after night. Usually fully dressed. Often too drunk to care. She shook off the image. It didn't surprise her Doyce lived as he did. From what little she'd seen, she didn't need a degree in psychiatry to know this was a seriously dysfunctional family.

The clothes scattered over the floor and the room's one chair told her little but that Doyce favored sweatpants, T-shirts and camo-patterned army fatigues. She supposed the former to be for at-home lounging and the latter for more formal occasions.

Half a dozen snapshots, unframed but propped up against old sneakers and a half-empty box of rifle shells, showed Doyce in his finery. He and two other men, also in full camouflage dress, posed around the empty-eyed carcass of a deer.

The rifles were equipped with night scopes. The men had traces of blacking on their faces, aping commandos on night maneuvers. Anna shook her head. The stealth and technology men put behind stalking a timid herbivore with the cognitive capacity of an eighteen-month-old child mystified her.

She turned the photos over but luck was not with her; no names had been scrawled on the backs. Still, she slipped one in her pocket for future use. Chances were good at least one if not all of his hunting buddies would also he a poker-playing buddy.

The room offered up little else. Doyce's personal life was evidently centered on eating and sleeping. There were no books, only magazines, two on hunting. A third, imperfectly hidden behind a shoebox half full of loose change, matchbooks and spent shotgun cartridges, was a Penthouse from August 1998. The little things that tell of life and interests, checkbooks, letters, lists, pictures, gifts from friends and family, were missing.

The door pushed open and Raymond "Digger" Barnette shoved his long face into the room. "Are you about finished up?" he asked. "I need to get back up and see how Mama's doing."

"Finished," Anna said. She fished the snapshot of the hunters from her pocket. "Mind if I take this?"

Raymond looked at it for a long time as if seeking to see if there was anything objectionable in it. "Go ahead," he said grudgingly.

"I'll get it back to you," Anna promised.

"Keep it."

Anna buttoned the photo back in her pocket.

Clintus met her in the foyer. "Anything?" he asked as Raymond hovered around, trying to urge them out the door.

"Not much," Anna admitted. "You?"

"A phone message left last night at six-forty-nine. 'Hey Doyce, Herm, you up for it? Come on down,'" the sheriff recited, dropping into a heavy southern drawl that made Anna smile. "A place to start," he said. "There's just not that many Hermans in this part of the country."

Raymond saw them to the front door, then closed it behind them.

Anna trotted down the front steps and suppressed an urge to spread her arms like wings, turn her face to the sky and spin in the childhood dance celebrating life, air and the sun. The misery embedded in the house wasn't static. It lived and grew. Anna could feel it like a fungus on her skin. The touch of the sun burned it away.

Clintus didn't dance but he tilted his face to the light then rubbed it with both palms as if he washed in light. "I'd never been inside before," he said. "Man. If this had been a suicide I doubt I'd even of questioned it."

"There's not enough Prozac in the world to induce me to live like that," Anna said. She'd seen dumps before. Clintus would have, too. Places eaten away by poverty or neglect. Rooms and buildings ravaged by the violence of those who lived there, reflecting it back on the residents. Homes of people too mentally ill to care for themselves or their property. It wasn't the disarray downstairs or the absence of light and fresh air that had struck at Anna. The Barnette house was closed up, shut off in some way. Keeping in old pain and old pride. Shutting out a flow of life that, in normal circumstances, would bring new emotions, new interests, to replace those time had used up.

The place was a mausoleum. Anna was reminded of
Great Expectations,
of the old woman in her decaying wedding dress presiding over a feast long go eaten by mice and worms. The analogy wasn't quite right, but as Anna did not choose to think any more about it, it would have to stand until she came up with something better.

"Ish," she said as they fled for the second time to the sheriff's patrol car. Clintus was in, and as Anna reached for the door handle, she was stopped by a faint insistent beeping.

Because of the bleak mental landscape the house had engendered, a sudden picture of bombs, the kind favored by filmmakers, with the last seconds ticking away before the explosion, filled her mind.

Standing stock-still, she listened. The beeping came from Raymond Barnette's Cadillac, a shining heap of Detroit iron painted, as befitted his calling, as funeral-black as any hearse.

"Hang on a second," she said to Clintus through the open window.

The undertaker's car was parked in the sun. Anna crossed the weedy gravel turnaround. In his haste to get to the house, Raymond had left the keys in the ignition and the driver's door ajar. In an act of automatic kindness, Anna started to close it for him to save his battery. On the passenger seat was a sheaf of neatly stapled papers. Last Will and Testament was blazoned across the top in oversized Gothic type.

Curiosity shouldered aside the good Samaritan. Anna leaned in and snatched it up.
"Plain view,"
she whispered to herself, quoting the rule that allowed law-enforcement officers to use things that might be claimed as protected by a citizen's right to privacy in evidence. Anything left in sight for any eyes that happened by did not fall under the privacy laws.

Kneeling on the driver's seat, she scanned the document. Florence Littleton Barnette's estate consisted of the house and property and little else: no stocks, bonds, mutual funds or other real estate. The whole of it had been left to her elder son, Doyce Felder Barnette. In the event that Doyce should die before his mother, the estate would then go to the younger son, Raymond Allan Barnette.

This, then, was why Raymond had been so long getting to his mother's house with the tragic news. He'd stopped off at his home or the lawyer's office to get a copy of the will.

Who better than a mortician to appreciate the notion that life is short, and one has to make hay while the sun shines?

4

 Clintus, Anna and the pretty young under-sheriff, Andre, gathered in Anna's office on the outskirts of Port Gibson in deference to the Trace's chief ranger, John Brown Brown. Brown had made the drive from Tupelo to monitor the festivities and had been left to cool his heels in the district office for three hours. His usually equitable disposition had suffered in transit.

The doors at either end of the long, dingy office space were propped open and, in lieu of the grinding of the decrepit air conditioner that had sawed at Anna's nerves throughout the summer, the soothing sound of a breeze in the pin oaks and an occasional birdcall drifted in.

Chairs had been brought out of the tiny office Anna claimed as district ranger. The chief had taken one, Clintus Jones the other. Anna and Andre stood, leaning against the walls for comfort.

Anna's field rangers, Randy Thigpen and Barth Dinkins, their desks shoved together to form one large working surface, took their own chairs by right. Barth, just back from a morning at the dentist's, watched the proceedings with a half-frozen face that gave him a deceptively stupid look. Barth was African-American with short, black hair sprigged with white and smooth, dark skin. He'd been teetering on serious obesity when Anna had first come to Mississippi. Since then he'd shed close to thirty pounds. He remained beefy and still soft but no longer fat. His eyes, a beautiful and startling feature, always had a mildly unsettling effect on Anna. They were clear gray-green, the sclera white almost to pale blue. They gave her the same sense she had when being studied by a blue-eyed Samoyed, that there were forces she could not completely understand at work behind them.

Randy Thigpen wasn't scheduled to come on duty until 8 p.m., but as the murder had taken place during his shift the previous night, Anna'd asked him in early. Thigpen, a middle-aged man from New Jersey posing as a southern-fried good old redneck, had chosen to be a thorn in Anna's side since she'd been hired as district ranger, a job he believed was owed to him.

Early on he'd sued her on the grounds of racism. Thigpen was a white man, with reddish brown hair of which he was inordinately vain and a healthy bush of mustache, which was used to collect donut crumbs and hide his upper lip: both attested to Scots-Irish ancestry. He'd accused Anna of giving scheduling preference to Barth because he was black. It had been proved that during the time of Thigpen's complaints, Anna had been following the schedule left in place by the previous district ranger and the lawsuit was dropped. Since then Thigpen had waged a war of petty insubordination. Today was no exception. Anna noted with the grim satisfaction one feels when an expected nastiness comes to pass that showing behind the open neck of Thigpen's uniform shirt was a bright purple undershirt. Thigpen had been on the Trace for close to thirty years. He knew he was out of uniform, knew the chief ranger would notice, knew he'd mention it to Anna, a sign her district was lax in discipline.

Even before the advent of the purple underclothes, Anna suspected she'd lost some of John Brown Brown's good will. He had been instrumental in getting her the job on the Trace. Since he'd brought her on board there'd been two murders in one year. Two murders on the 450-odd-mile-long Trace was rare. Two in the sleepy Natchez-to-Jackson district was unheard of. Not since the bad old days when it was a wilderness footpath beset by robber bands had there been this much violence. From the sidelong glances the chief cast in her direction, Anna had the feeling he somehow held her responsible.

Randy caught Anna staring at the offending purple. He hadn't quite the audacity—or the courage—to smile, but she did not miss the slight tightening of his one visible lip and the glint in his pale blue eyes.

She took comfort in the fact that, unlike his compatriot, he'd not lost weight. At six feet tall he weighed in at close to three hundred pounds, most of it carried in a great gut. Surely he'd have a massive heart attack one day soon.

To give the devil his due, Randy was on his best behavior this afternoon. For once he'd abandoned his sneering, lounging demeanor. He sat upright in the wooden office chair, his heavy elbows planted on his desk amid the clutter of unrecorded speeding tickets and unfinished reports.

He followed the conversation with apparent interest, and when the chores were being divvied up, he actually volunteered. Clintus took on the task of tracking down the "Herm" who'd left a message on Doyce's answering machine. Failing to get that assignment, Randy asked to be the one to find and question the friends—if there were any—of the victim.

"Since the wife and I moved to Natchez in June we've tied in with the community," he said sanctimoniously. "I think the folks there trust me. The men'll talk to me." Even in this new and surprising persona of the good and helpful ranger, he couldn't resist shading the emphasis and sliding a look to Anna to suggest the locals wouldn't be so forthcoming with her.

"Works for me," she said, wondering what Thigpen was up to. Maybe it was just the thrill of being in on a major murder case. The previous spring circumstances and Thigpen's own goldbricking had allowed her to keep him on the fringes of the investigation of the murdered girl. Evidently he was determined not to be left out of the excitement this time around.

For hard leads they were pretty much down to Herm and the elusive poker party.

The autopsy might turn up something, as might the lab reports on the victim's underpants and the bedspread where the corpse had been deposited. Anna didn't envy the technician, given the coverlet. The patchwork quilt that had unwittingly become Doyce Barnette's penultimate resting place hadn't actually belonged to Grandma Polly herself, but the thing was probably sixty years old. Too frail to wash, it had been gathering whatever effluvia drifted by from half a century of visitors and park rangers. Searching for trace evidence was bound to become a microscopic archaeological dig.