Deep South (25 page)

She circled as well as she could the hollow where Danni'd been found. It was crumpled and cluttered, with no view of the sky, no landmarks, uphill and downhill as meaningless as that in a crunched-up ball of tinfoil, and she found it hard to keep her bearings. Each and every part of the whole steaming forest dripped, slapped, drooled, tickled or poked her. And, apparently overnight, a phenomenon of worms bad descended.

From every branch and twig little green worms hung down on long sticky fibers like spiders' webs. They numbered in the zillions, dangling like hung paratroopers, till Anna waded through them and carried them away in her hair and on her clothes.

And it was hot. Wet hot. Clothing itched and bound. Spiderwebs stuck.

Mosquitoes filtered up from stagnant water. Anna discovered patience in Mississippi was an entirely different discipline from what it was in the Southwest. Here, with the sliming and sweating and tickling, it was nigh on impossible.

After the better part of three hours, dehydrated and disgruntled, she gave up the hunt as a lost cause and walked back in the direction of the Old Trace. There at least she could move without having to break trail through suspended invertebrates.

In acreage-if not in living matter-the area in which she'd attempted to find tracks was mercifully small. Ten minutes' walk brought her to the top of the bank marking the perimeter of the ancient road. There she stopped to let the heat of her body and mind boil off before scrambling back down into the path of park visitors. Her circuitous ramblings had brought her back just fifteen feet to the west of where she and half a dozen other people-had tracked up the bank on the body retrieval. A great tree, roots exposed, doomed to topple in the next good windstorm, stood between her and the new-made trail to Danni's penultimate resting place. Anna stepped from sight behind this venerable pin oak and unzipped her shorts to do a quick tick check. The vile creatures seemed to have lost their taste for her. The parts of her anatomy she could see were free of blood-sucking intruders. Zipping up her fly, she noted the ground between the toes of her boots.

"Happiness is in your own backyard," she muttered, quoting Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Neatly between her lug soles was a puncture in the earth's soft brown skin. Beneath the sheltering oak, the ground was less overgrown and much of the rain had been deflected. Though the edges of the hole were not squared, melted as they had been by moisture, it was not a mark that came naturally Anna sat on her heels and studied it. If there'd been a corresponding toe print, the shallower mark had washed away, but next to it, close to the trunk of the tree, was another hole.

This one, even more protected by the elements, had one clear edge.

Danielle Posey had stood here, leaning against this tree, much as Anna had done.

For the next hour, Anna inspected each leaf and blade of grass in a fifteen-foot radius of her tree. One other mark that might have been made by the heel of the dead girl's sandal turned up two yards from the trail they'd carved during the body recovery. There was no way to tell if Danni had been traveling east or west, but she had been here and she'd been alive.

Having found all she was going to, Anna slid down the bank onto the bed of the Trace and sat in the soft earth to think. The claustrophobic embrace of the woods clogged her brain. Here there was a semblance of air and space. Idly playing dirt through her hands, she let pictures form. Danni was on the rim of the Trace, up where the going was hard, when down below was a gentle trail. Either she was lost, she was hiding, or she bad come from some other direction, as Anna had, and happened upon the old road. The places a high-heeled girl in total darkness could logically have come from were limited.

The Natchez Trace itself-even without a light, she could have found her way here from the campground. The trail was well marked and there might have been a moon on prom night. Anna couldn't remember, but it was easy enough to find out. Danni could have parted company with her pursuers at the campground and fled in this direction; maybe she escaped from one of the cars full of revelers the campers had complained of. Or the party could have moved up here and then turned ugly, Another possibility was that they had come down the Old Trace from where it ended near the church. Anna tended to discount this: too far for drunks in bad shoes, and had Danni traveled the Old Trace in either direction, Anna was pretty sure, she would have seen the girl's tracks. The paved road up to Rocky Springs Church ran roughly parallel to the Old Trace, with about half a mile separating them. It was conceivable that Danni had escaped a vehicle there, tried to run and hide in the woods, and been hunted down and killed. From the number of scrapes and scratches she'd sustained, that seemed the likelier scenario. But if she'd come cross-country from the paved road, why bad her body, in its grotesque impromptu costume, been found back in that same direction? Caught her here. Killed her.

Decided to carry her back to the car and hang her somewhere to make whatever twisted point the killer had in mind. Then tired, bored, or scared, dumped the body and cleared out?

That would have meant the killer had carried with him whatever he'd used to whack her, the dirty sheet, a knife or scissors to hack eye holes in it and twenty-two feet six inches of yellow nylon rope.

A bit cumbersome when crashing around in the inky night belly of the forest, chasing a girl.

If the plan had been to carry the body back to the car for the final robing and roping, then why cart the stuff along on the chase?

None of the stories hung together. Still, the morning hadn't been wasted. If Danni had been here, at the Old Trace, alive, then dead a ways back in the woods toward the main road, it made sense she'd been killed between here and there. Or killed here, right where Anna sat playing in the dirt. That thought was good for an unpleasant shiver and a quick look over her shoulder.

Time to go home and shower, Anna told herself, not liking to think she believed in ghosts.

Dusting the dirt from her hands, she noted a dull gleam in the embankment. Her mindless digging had uncovered a treasure. Thinking of the re-enactors' tales of General Grant, a faint dream of Union gold skittered through her skull. The South was a battlefield. War artifacts were found as commonly as arrowheads out West: buttons, musket balls, rusted wagon parts and weapons. Anna blew the loose dirt off her discovery. Not gold, brass: a tarnished belt buckle with an insignia engraved on the back of it, a circle, like a seal stamped on important documents. Maybe Civil War vintage, maybe Boy Scouts.

Park etiquette required the finder of indigenous treasures to leave them to be found and enjoyed by each visitor with sharp enough eyes and interest who happened along. Trouble was the next guy along was bound to steal it. The tragedy of the commons.

Rationalizations in place, Anna decided to keep it. he campground was awake, cars and dogs and people fiddling about, tents being erected and fires burning-not because it was cold or anyone was cooking but because campfires hooked so deeply into the human psyche that all the environmental preaching the park service could muster did little to stomp them out.

The Civil War camp had reappeared Brigadoon-like in the same place it had been previously. Captain Williams, shirtsleeves rolled up over nicely muscled forearms, was rigging a cast-iron tripod over a neatly constructed fire ring. As before, he was decked out in work clothes in a fashion more than a hundred years old. Ian, his stalwart frame draped over a tiny camp stool, was watching intently, the apprentice at the feet of the master.

"Morning," Anna called, and left the pavement to enter their camp.

Both men looked up, startled, as if she'd caught them doing something they oughtn't. "Morning." Captain'williams recovered first. "Morning," McIntire echoed. The joviality Anna'd noted at their first meeting clicked on belatedly as she was treated to his V-shaped smile. Neither seemed particularly glad to see her but good manners, or some other impetus she couldn't quite identify, forbade them from letting it show.

"Your squadron has shrunk," she said pleasantly. "Where's Mr. Fullerton?" An awkward silence was born. Before it was ten seconds old, Ian slew it with a sudden gust of verbal energy. "Leo's got to tend that flock of his. Visiting a hospital or hauling groceries to a sick old lady. It's all we can do to pry him away for one weekend a month.

Coffee?" No coffee was in evidence, no fire, not even any hot water.

Captain Williams shot his lieutenant a hard look.

"Wouldn't take any time at all to brew some up," Ian defended himself.

"No, thanks," Anna said, then remembered the buckle in her pocket.

"Hey, this might interest you guys. Look what I found." She dug the buckle out and held it in her palm. "Do you think it's anything?" Williams wiped his hands on the thighs of his woolen trousers, then lifted the buckle. Ian crowded near, and the two men studied it.

According to Anna's limited interest in Civil War relics-if this was one they studied it way too long. "Where'd you come across it?" the captain asked. He sounded as if he accused Anna of something. Since she did technically remove it from park grounds, though not yet from the park itself, she felt a stab of guilt. "Up on the Old Trace," she said, trying not to sound as if she was admitting to shady activities. "These are pretty common," Williams said. "Not like they used to be, of course, what with people picking 'em up over the years. But this one's in pretty good shape. I'm a collector. And an honest one. I'll give you two thousand dollars for it."

"Yikes," Anna said, then added virtuously, "It's not mine to sell. I'll give it to the interpretive staff for the museum." She didn't even know if the Natchez Trace had a museum, but it sounded good.

Williams hung on to it a minute more, loath to relinquish it to the impersonal fate of becoming museum paraphernalia. "Sure," he said at last. "That's the place for it." He dropped it in Anna's outstretched palm. "I hear you got in a fracas with a gator," Ian said, his elfin eyes twinkling. "News travels fast," Anna replied.

Captain Williams took a smoke from his shirt pocket and lit it, not a cigarette but a thin black cheroot as befitted a man of the Civil War era. "Those Mississippi gators can be mean old boys," he said and winked at Ian. "You hurt him any? I hear even varmints are protected on the Trace."

"He's been relocated," Anna said evenly. "I'll bet. Relocated right into somebody's freezer. Alligator's good eating." They seemed to take the whole thing as one terrific Joke, and though Anna could see the appeal of that, this morning it grated on her nerves.

"He got my dog," she said.

Immediately all traces of humor evaporated from their faces. "No kidding?" Ian said sympathetically. "Got your dog? That big old black dog with you the other day? That's a terrible thing." Evidently killing a person's dog was a serious crime in this part of the country. "He didn't kill him," Anna said, somewhat mollified. "But the vet said he's going to lose his leg."

"You said he wasn't a hunting dog?" the captain asked. "Just a dog dog."

"He'll be able to get around good enough for that." Heartened by their dog-friendliness, Anna hazarded a question. "Any idea who might've put the alligator in my carport?"

"Kids," Williams said succinctly, the word coming out on a cloud of fragrant tobacco smoke. "They probably thought it was a good joke, you being a Yankee and all," said Ian. "I bet they'd feel real bad knowing your dog got bit."

"That's probably it." Anna was inclined to believe him. Kids, in the way of kids, taking an action without much thought to what the consequences might be. Maybe it was enough that she was a Yankee and a woman and a ranger to boot. Maybe. And maybe this group of "kids" bad a reason to want her scared or hurt enough to leave the death of Danni Posey alone.

"Well, I've got work to do. Have a good day," she said to announce her departure.

Ian stopped her with a question. "Have you found out who killed that little girl?" he asked. From the depth of emotion in his voice, Anna guessed the murder of Danni Posey was what had put such a damper on the camp of Jeff Davis's Avengers. It made sense. These men were locals, maybe fathers themselves. They'd been here when the girl died. They would feel it more keenly than campers just passing through. "The sheriff was talking to us," Ian said as if his interest needed explaining. "The investigation is continuing." Anna voiced the accepted code phrase meaning "Nope, we got nothing."

"The newspapers said it looked like some kind of colored thing," Williams said.

Anna had to quell a knee-jerk reaction. To what, it took her a second to discern. Then it came to her. A "colored thing everyone who wasn't of color off the hook. It ghettoized the crime. "Did they?" she said.

Well, not said it." Williams sounded annoyed at her pretended naivete.

"But that sheet and so forth. Like a colored wanting to make it look like a Klan killing maybe." This was what Leo Fullerton had been talking about, the added evil of ripping open old wounds with the incendiary choice of draping the dead girl in a dirty bedsheet. "The Klan's not big around here anymore," Ian said. "They planned a big old march up in Canton and had to bus in boys from Indiana to fill the sheets." Williams shot him a look that forestalled anything else he might have been going to say. No dissension allowed in the troops.

Maybe the Klan was dead. But like so many things in Mississippi, its ghost was evidently not laid to rest. Anna looked the part. Her class Ns were pressed to a fare-thee-well and, since they were still in the month of transition where either summer or winter uniforms were acceptable, she'd opted for the long sleeved shirt and mannish tie: tricks to gain the psychological edge. A knock came on the door. She waited for him to knock again.