Hunting Season (37 page)

"Hey," he said cheerfully. "Look what the cat dragged in."

The warmth of the house drifted around him, carrying the scent of newly washed hair and good cologne. "Come in." Steve stood aside and gestured grandly. "Sorry I didn't hear you at first. I was gilding the lily."

Anna started. Men had so many euphemisms for masturbation mere woman could not keep up with them. Then she laughed. Steve was dolled up, hair clean and soft, beard trimmed. A fine broadcloth oxford shirt in rich burgundy was worn with pleated gray wool trousers.

"You even ironed your shirt," Anna said admiringly.

"Women can't resist a man who irons," Steve said. "It provides a hint of domesticity but doesn't commit you to a lifetime of it. The language of chores is like the language of flowers. Very subtle."

"I was hoping for dinner," Anna said. "But I've got a feeling this onslaught of personal beauty is not for me."

"It could have been," Steve said airily. "But you chose the inferior man and now it's too late. Your window of opportunity is closed. And all this masculine appeal is for you in a way. The sacrifices I make on your behalf..." He waved Anna toward a couch. The furniture was worn, mostly hand-me-downs from the previous tenant. Stilwell could afford better but nomads traveled light.

"We've got time for a drink but that's about it. Duty calls," he checked his wristwatch, "in seventeen minutes." He sighed dramatically. "As it happens, I may yet be hoist on my own petard. A petard lifted, I might add, for you." Again she suspected him of double entendre. With Stilwell one could never be sure.

He wanted Anna to cross-examine him. That's what the alluring hints were designed for. The game required at least two players. Anna chose to play disinterested. For a moment Steve waited, his eyebrows lifted invitingly. Anna wished she'd fallen in love with Steve. Chances are the ride would have been short but a whole hell of a lot of fun.

He laughed and she knew she'd gained a point in whatever game it was he was playing. During the remainder of their short visit she told him of the paltry pieces of information they'd turned up on the murder investigation.

"Corpse had a gun," Steve mused, clinking imaginary ice cubes. He took his whiskey neat: no water, no ice, but tended to shake the glass as if he sloshed the liquid over the cubes. A move he'd undoubtedly picked up from the movies thirty years before. The affectation had become habit at some point. Now, like a number of his other mannerisms, it merely added to his eclectic charm, the whimsical gentleman aspect of his complex persona. "So. He has a gun. He uses it. Yet he ends up ignobly dead. What do you figure? Either he shoots and misses or shoots and connects, in which case you should have a report of a gunshot wound showing up at a local hospital or a second corpse washing up in a bayou."

"Or he's shooting before the murder is committed."

"As in hunting?"

"As in hunting," Anna said.

"As in having to do with your pursuing poachers."

"Exactly."

"It fits better with the assault by the Ford truck. If it was done by the poachers—or at least one of them—killing to cover the crime of illegally taking the king's deer didn't make much sense. Covering up a murder's a different story.

"If Doyce had a gun, doesn't that suggest he would have tried to defend himself? According to what you said there was no indication of defensive wounds in the autopsy, that he'd been alive and probably compliant when he got strapped into whatever bruised him up."

"Two possibilities," Anna said. "Either the gun powder residue on his hands has nothing to do with the murder at all but only indicates he was shooting shortly before his death. Or he wasn't playing poker but out poaching with the boys and got himself killed, either by the boys or afterward by somebody else that he willingly played leather games with. Could be he was coerced into the leather games at gunpoint and nobody laid a hand on him till after he was dead."

Stilwell shook his head. "If I had a gun and an unholy urge I sure wouldn't waste them on a fat, middle-aged guy." Neither would Anna.

"Where does Brother Raymond fit into this scenario?" Steve asked.

"He doesn't," Anna admitted. "He's got an alibi both for the time of the murder and the evening the poachers chased me. And, far as I know, he's not a hunter."

"I guess working with the dead the thrill of the kill could get blunted. No more mystery: meat is meat."

"I don't know about the mystery but I doubt he'd agree with you on the meat issue. I believe Mr. Barnette takes his responsibilities to the deceased very seriously."

"As in building a fine wooden coffin for whoever he buried in the backyard?"

"Something like that."

Their allotted time was up. With an annoying air of secrecy about the event he'd been primping for, Steve walked Anna to her patrol car, then climbed into his glorious old truck.

The ice storm the forecasters had predicted with ill-concealed glee had backed off and Anna drove the fifty miles back to Rocky Springs without incident.

Again, shortly after midnight, her sleep was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Again the caller hung up. Again Anna slept behind locked doors.

19

 For three hours the following morning Anna was held hostage by the phone in her office. Waiting, biding one's time in the lee of a rock or undercover of a tree, until the unwary prey wandered by, had always been easy for Anna. The Zen of the huntress had survived eons of civilization and flowered in her soul. That morning, waiting in an office for unnamed bureaucrats and technicians to get around to phoning her was pure torture. She'd cast the toxic bread of this investigation upon the system's waters and could do little till it returned: lab reports to tell her if Martin Crowley's venison was from the same animal she'd found in the meadow by the deer stand, if the bark shaving from the tree she'd so assiduously scraped matched the bark found beneath Doyce Barnette's fingernails, what Clintus Jones had tracked down on the lead regarding the owner of the Ford truck that had battered her patrol car into tinfoil. When Paul Davidson called, she was thrilled. It would kill time and, girlishly, she wanted to hear his voice. For a while they exchanged the inconsequentialities of their lives, basking in the joy of sharing. To her delight and, on the undeniably cynical level of Anna's middle-aged mind, mild embarrassment, she heard herself saying "I miss you" and reveling in Paul saying it back after only thirty-six hours of separation.

"My wife came over last night," Paul said guardedly when a lull came into the conversation. "We had a good talk."

The doors that had been pushed open a crack around Anna's well-defended heart started to close. Hearing him say "my wife" with what sounded like real warmth hurt, physically, a sharp pinch beneath her sternum. Hating herself for it, Anna wondered if the "good talk" had been had between the sheets.

"Oh?" she said and was pleased that fear did not chill her voice.

"She drove down to get some of her things that were stored in our garage." our garage. His and his wife's. Again the pinch. Anna didn't trust herself to speak lest she reveal her emotions. Time and self-preservation had taught her not to show weakness. She let the silence speak for her.

"You've definitely got an enemy in the park service," Paul said. "That worries me a little."

So. The "good talk" had been composed at least in part of evil rumors in which Ranger Anna Pigeon was prominently figured. Curiosity and an odd component of self-loathing—mostly for her own vulnerability—urged Anna to ask what had been said. She resisted it.

"What was the bottom line?" she asked. Cold infected the reasonable tone she'd hoped for.

"Oh. Could you hold a sec?"

Before Anna could scream, "No, goddamn it. Talk to me," she heard vague mutterings as he spoke with someone else in the room. Had he called her from the office or home? Was he sitting in the kitchen of
their
house, talking on
their
phone with the Mrs. pottering domestically about? "Damn," Anna whispered.

Paul came back. "Anna, I've got to go. Can I see you tonight? We need to talk."

"We are talking," she said.

"I mean in person, face to face."

Anna wanted to say she was busy, leaving town, anything to avoid it.
Take the hit,
she told herself. "Sure. What time?"

"Seven okay?"

"Seven it is."

He hung up hurriedly, anxious to get on with whatever or whoever was interrupting the call.

Anna sat at her desk, in her miserable chair, and stared at the fragments of the puzzle she'd been so intent on solving ten minutes before. Now it seemed meaningless, the joy in her work sucked away by other concerns. "Getting a life is highly overrated," she muttered.

When Barth showed up with a plan and the task to go with it, she jumped at the chance to get out of the office and actually
do
something.

Barth didn't need her assistance nor did he seem to particularly want it, but Anna volunteered as a helper and followed him out to his car. The ice storm that had failed to materialize the previous night had not passed over but merely backed off. The day was in the mid- to high thirties with the low dark skies and intermittent rain squalls of the day before. Barth drove the forty odd miles to Natchez. Anna was content to sit in the passenger seat, warmed by the heater, mildly irritated by the Christian music on the radio, and cogitate.

There were many things her mind could have amused itself with, but she had unwittingly passed a psychological point of no return in her relationship with Paul Davidson. She was old enough to keep the obvious signs under wraps. Except with her sister Molly, who, as a psychiatrist with doctor/patient privilege could surely never be called to testify against her, Anna never, ever gave in to the temptation to chatter on and on about The Boyfriend. She hadn't gotten a face-lift, lost weight or started wearing new eye-catching outfits to work. Once, she'd regressed to the point of writing Anna Davidson on a sheet of scratch paper to see what it looked like. No one had caught her and she had destroyed the evidence. It had been merely a whimsical reflex predating high school. First married at high tide of the feminist movement, Anna had kept her own last name. At the time it had seemed terribly important. For better or worse, richer or poorer, it was the name she would die with. It had defined her for too many years ever to be abandoned. And, in a strange way, to change it would be an insult to Zach. She'd refused to take his last name, how could she take another man's? of the foolishnesses that besieged her sex in matters of the heart, the one she had been unable to avoid was thinking too much about the object of desire. As the gray and black patterns swept by the car windows and rain streaked the side window in horizontal squiggles, Anna found herself reliving their phone conversation and growing more depressed by the minute. She focused on the last painful aspect.

"I've heard from a reputable source that somebody—probably somebody on the Trace—is spreading rumors about me," she said to Barth, sounding more defiant and belligerent than she felt.

Barth snorted softly as he was jerked out of his own reverie. "Well, it's not me, if that's what you been thinking."

"No, not you." Anna dismissed the idea without apology. Sufficiently self-absorbed, she didn't note the fact that she'd offended him. "Maybe Randy," she said. "But I don't even think it's him. There's been a feel of conspiracy about this, like from higher up." As she talked, Anna stared out the window. Trees, flooding meadows, creeks, flashed beyond the glass with a hypnotic sameness.

"You mean like some sort of conspiracy in the brass up to Tupelo to stir up a scandal or something about you down around here for some secret reason?" Barth asked.

"Yeah."

"Boss, you're getting creepy on me here. Maybe you should go get that psycho stuff they keep harping on."

"Critical Incident Stress Debriefing?"

"That's it. Sounds like you're in need of some serious debriefing. Maybe because of the car and all. Whatever, I wouldn't go talking conspiracy to anybody but me."

Anna saw her reflection in the window smile. With Barth, finally, she felt among friends. Professionally speaking, this duty station had been the loneliest she'd ever known. She was the boss, the only woman and, until Barth had chosen to let her in, hated outsider to the very men she had to work with every day.

With an effort, she pulled her gaze from the passing scenery and shook herself free of the fog that had formed in her skull. "Nope. Not that kind of conspiracy," she said. "I've not quite been driven round the bend yet."

Barth's face, hardened into mask of concern, softened a little at the intentionally sane and cheery note she struck.

"This is something I've heard filtering down from an unexpected source in Jackson," she said. "No big deal."

"Sheriff Davidson's wife?" Barth asked bluntly, and Anna was reminded that, in a National Park, no one had any secrets.

"Yeah," she admitted. Denying it was useless and silence was worse.

"What did you expect?"

Though buried in respect and what Anna hoped was friendship, she heard the condemnation in Barth's voice. Christian music bleated its saccharine rock, and Anna damned herself for opening such a personal can of worms. Though Paul and his wife had been apart for three years, though half the people sitting in the pews come Sunday morning were divorced, though their own fucking Bible said let he who is without sin cast the first stone ...