Deep South (8 page)

By the time she reached the parking lot, she was wringing wet with sweat. It poured in her eyes, stuck her shirt to her back and trickled between her breasts. In the West, sweat evaporated, thus performing its mission of cooling. In Mississippi, one merely contributed one's bodily fluids to the flow toward the nearest bayou.

After a bout of maneuvering, Anna got her charge dumped into the back seat of the patrol car and, at long last, got a look at the girl by the light of the overhead dome. She was young, sixteen or seventeen, and small-boned, with the charming unmarked face of a child. Anna felt old and stuffy as she realized she was a bit shocked by the scarcity of fabric in the girl's party dress. It was a tiny spandex number with rhinestone studded spaghetti straps and enough cut-outs on the sides to rattle the cage of any red-blooded male. Her hose had run, her dress and arms were muddied and she was missing one shoe. Other than that, she appeared undamaged. Around her neck was a gold cross. Anna snorted.

A meager talisman to ward off the kind of evils a dress like this was likely to invite.

No hope of ID. If she'd had a purse it was lost in the weeds, and there was no place in her brief costume to secrete so much as a driver's license. Anna would have to wait until she regained consciousness to find out who she was. Back at her house, Anna half dragged, half walked the inebriated child into the living room. Determined not to give up her own bed, she laid her out on the hard narrow cushion of her grandmother's couch, removed two ticks from the back of her patient's right knee, swabbed iodine on a scrape on her elbow and, having arranged her on her side so she wouldn't choke on her own vomit, threw a comforter over her.

Following a personal tick check, Anna went back to bed. Piedmont had come out of seclusion and lay on the rumpled sheets. As she wriggled in on the far side so as not to disturb him, Taco padded from the room. The retriever's instincts were in alignment with the law enforcement credo "to protect and serve." Anna didn't doubt that he would camp out next to the drunken prom queen and keep the bad guys at bay.

E excuse me, ma'am? Excuse me." Thin piping penetrated Anna's slumbers.

Claws on her arm jerked her more rudely from her dreams as a still-skittish Piedmont launched himself off the bed and back to the imagined safety of the closet, his hiding place of choice when strangers intruded. "Excuse me, ma'am. Do you have a phone I could use?" Anna sat up. Foreseeing just such an awakening, she'd done the unthinkable-and the uncomfortable. She'd slept in her emergency backup pajamas.

Peeking timidly through the bedroom door was her little drunk.

Mascara ringed the big brown eyes and the brown hair, done up to the nines and affixed with industrial-strength hair spray the night before, resembled a ruined cake. Around her shoulders she clutched the comforter against the cool of the morning-or the shame of the night.

One small white band was fiddling with the sable ear of her newly adopted protector, Taco. "What time is it?" Anna asked.

I don't know." The girl's voice faltered; then her face crumpled and fat tears rolled blackly through the makeup and down her checks. "I don't know where I am. I don't know what happened." Tears clogged the slender throat, making intelligible conversation impossible. She slumped to the floor, buried her mucky face in Taco's coat and bawled.

"Take it easy. Take it easy," Anna said and unwrapped herself from the sheets. "Doggone it, don't cry. You're okay." It annoyed her that she didn't have any tried-and-true soothing maternal phrases, and the annoyance made her voice sharper than she intended.

The girl cried harder. Anna sat on the edge of the bed and tried to scrub some sense into her tired mind by scratching her scalp good and hard. "Okay," she tried again. "My name's Anna. I'm the ranger here, as of yesterday.

I found you passed out drunk in the graveyard and brought t you here to my house. That's where you are and what happened. Now how about you tell me who you are and we call somebody to take you home?" The sobs changed tone. Anna could tell they were on the wane and sat quietly lest she trigger another storm.

Finally the girl lifted her head. Black tears glistened on Taco's coat but he stood his ground. "Start with your name," Anna suggested.

"Heather," came in a whisper. "Heather what?" A long silence followed then the girl said, "Barnes. Heather Barnes. My father's going to kill me!" She dove wetly back into the dog's fur.

Anna stood and tugged on the corner of the comforter. "Tell you what, Heather. Let's call your dad first. The sooner he finds out the less likely he'll be to kill you outright." Heather clung to the dog. "I'll talk to him if you like," Anna offered. "Give him some time to cool off.

Tell me your number, and I'll call while you take a shower.

You'll feel better. I'll feel better. Nothing wrong with that." Heather let Anna get her up then and show her into the bathroom. As a gesture of goodwill, Anna tossed in a pair of old sweats and a T-shirt so the girl wouldn't have to shimmy back into her handkerchief-sized dress.

At the joyous news her daughter was safe, Mrs. Barnes burst into tears.

Then, proving Heather might not be oriented to time and place but her sense of family was intact, the woman added: "Her father's going to kill her." The Barneses were from Clinton, a small town that butted up against the western edge of the state capitol of Jackson, a city of about 400,000. "We'll be there in half an hour," Mrs. Barnes told her.

She stopped for a moment while someone hollered at her-presumably the killer dad-then amended her statement. "We'll be there in about an hour.

I know the speed limit on the Trace is way low," she said virtuously.

Anna made coffee, then, remembering her first hangover, a pot of weak tea for Heather. Ten minutes later the girl emerged from the shower looking revived. And much younger. To Anna's jaundiced eye, Heather appeared to be all of twelve years old. "Do you have any makeup?" the girl asked pitifully. "Nope."

"A blow dryer?"

"Nope."

"You won't tell Daddy I was drunk, will you?"

"YUP."

"God, please don't." Anna ignored the wailed request and sipped her coffee. "Sit down.

I made you tea. After last night you'll be dehydrated. You need to drink something."

"Do you have a Coke?"

"Nope." Heaving an exaggerated sigh, the girl slumped into a chair. She was on the way to full recovery. "Tell me what brought you to my graveyard," Anna said. Heather's gaze wandered around the room. Taco came over to sit beside her, lay his chin on her thigh and look dreamily into her face.

What a ham, Anna thought, but she said nothing. "God," Heather said after a moment. "I can't remember a bunch. I mean, like, it's gone!"

"Alcohol will do that if you drink enough of it," Anna said. "Tell me what you do remember."

"The dance. I remember most of that. It was a real bore. The band was awful. Some of the boys had a bottle they were passing around. Then we all piled in some cars and left.

That's about it." She looked at Anna in wide-eyed innocence. "That's all I can remember." Anna didn't doubt much of the evening had been lost in a drug-induced blackout. She also knew the girl was hiding something.

Not being her mother, Anna didn't much care what. Adolescent peccadilloes were not even mildly amusing at eigbt-thirty A.M. after a short night. "Ab, well," she said. "Maybe it'll come to you."

"I don't think so," Heather said with finality.

Mr. Barnes was not pleased but didn't look homicidal. Mrs. Barnes seemed a little more likely to commit murder. Without fear to temper her mood, anger had taken over. If her mother could be believed, Heather would not be dating, talking on the phone, watching television or any of a dozen other things until she was twenty-one.

A lone at last, Anna decided to take the day off-comp time for having been on duty the day before and half the night when she was not yet officially on the payroll. A second pot of coffee, and she was inspired to attack the boxes the maintenance men had helped her unload.

It took an effort of will not to dwell on the charm of the stone tower house she'd left behind in Mesa Verde, and the paucity of her belongings caused her to suffer a few twinges of rootlessness, but her Navajo rugs looked good on the gleaming hardwood floors and her grandmother's antiques lent interest to the boxy rooms. She'd just reached that most satisfying of chores, the hanging of pictures, when a car pulled into her drive and parked in front of the carport. A Claiborne County sheriff's vehicle. Rocky Springs, she remembered, was in Claiborne County, one of the poorer counties in Mississippi and one having a high percentage of African-American households.

Automatically stepping away from the windows into the shadow of the front door, she watched her visitor approach: in his forties, a bit soft around the middle but well suited to the uniform. Thick shoulders were crisped up by ironed khaki, and his gun belt rode on narrow hips over muscled thighs that stretched the crease out of his trousers when he walked. As be neared the front door he took off his hat, a wide brimmed Stetson in warm-colored felt, and exposed a shock of sandy hair in need of cutting. His eyebrows were so blond they were almost white, lending dark blue eyes an appearance of wisdom and acuity.

Judgment passed, Anna opened the door before he had a chance to knock.

He looked startled, then, to her surprise, embarrassed. "Good afternoon, ma'am," he said, not looking at her but at his boots.

"I'm Sheriff Davidson. I'm looking for Phil Otis. He in?" Sheriff Davidson had a nice voice. Enough drawl to soothe but not so much as to be annoying. "Did he used to live here?" Anna asked.

"Yes, ma'am. He was the ranger down here."

"He's been replaced," Anna said. "Now it's me."

"Well then, it's you I need to talk to, so I guess I've come to the right place." Anna invited him in, offering a glass of bottled water because it was all she had, but he declined. "Much as I'd like to, I can't stay," he said. "We got a report from the Clinton police this morning of a missing girl. In cases like this-local kid, good reputation, probably not a runaway-we don't wait to look into it.

Somebody said a bunch of the kids came down to the old graveyard here after a dance they had. I was just wondering if you could shed any light on the subject."

"She's home safe and sound by now." Anna told him an abridged version of the night's debauch.

A smile creased his face, and the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled. Anna found herself smiling back, checking his left band for a wedding band. There was none. The response was pure reflex, Anna guessed, brought on by Molly's impending nuptials. It bad been so long since Anna'd had a serious relationship she feared she'd be like a dog chasing cars: she wouldn't know what to do if she caught one.

"Now, that's good news. I figured I was going to spend the day on a wild-goose chase. May I use your phone, let the Clinton PD know Danielle's been located?" He was across the room and punching in numbers before the last bit of information sank in. "Hold it," Anna said abruptly. "Hang up. My little drunk's name was Heather."

"Drat," the sheriff said. He gave Anna a description of the missing Danielle. She was struck by the overwhelming likeness of the young.

But for hair color, the child described could have been Heather, right down to the skimpy black dress. At sixteen, life has yet to leave many identifying marks stamped into the flesh.

Anna returned to hanging her pictures, but the sheriff's visit left her mind unsettled and she couldn't figure out why Missing teenagers were a dime a dozen. A majority of them found their way home, maybe morally compromised, but physically in one piece.

Having put down her hammer and nail, she perched on the edge of her grandmother's unwelcoming Victorian settee and let her mind clear, so that she might see this thing lying under her thoughts like a cocklebur under a saddle blanket. Taco came over and began ilicking her ankles to assist the process. Despite the distraction, Anna found what was bothering her. Sheriff Davidson said the missing high school girl's name was Danielle Posey. When Anna first found Heather retching into the graveyard weeds she had mumbled, among other things, "Running. Danny running.- Danny-or Danni-could be short for Danielle. Running from what?

Just because the tuxedo-clad clowns bad not assaulted Heather did not make them nice boys. Nice boys didn't abandon girls in graveyards, drunk or sober.

"Come on, Taco," Anna said. "It's time for a walk." In the light of day, the old church and graveyard took on a different aspect. Anna could tell this would turn into one of her favorite haunts. A sense of history, undisturbed by the machinations of the modern world, hung over the place as palpably as the veils of Spanish moss hung over the old stones. Decay had set in above ground as well as below.

Stones were broken, sinking, moss-covered, but even amid this slow reversion to the earth, an ongoing spark of the human heart showed in the bright flowers, mostly plastic but carefully arranged, that adorned the markers. People dead more than a hundred years and yet so dear to someone's heart that the graves were decorated.

The bum of insects-mostly bees-took the place of the night's frog concert, making it more sleepy by day than by night. Fitting for a graveyard.

There was little evidence of the previous night's activities, but Anna did find Heather's other sandal a couple of yards from the family plot where she'd ended her night's revels. Eyes on the ground, Anna began to backtrack from the thrown shoe. Maybe she looked for something, but mostly she tracked just for the hell of it, to see what differences in spoor and soil there would be in this Southern clime.