Deep South (9 page)

The floor of the graveyard was oddly barren, as if the ground had been sewn with salt by the wash of tears from those whom the dead had left behind. Even leaf litter, the inevitable carpet of any forest, was sparse, blown clear of stones and paths to collect in the exposed roots.

Having loosed Taco to free herself of sloppy kisses and unpredictable lunges, Anna concentrated on the earth. The high-heeled shoe was a tracker's dream. It had been bought new for the dance. Stitching was clearly etched into the toe, and the heel was of a sharp rectangular cut that dug deep at every step. Without much effort Anna was able to follow Heather's progress of the night before. As would be expected from a girl stupid with drink, the trail wandered. Eleven heel marks back, Anna noted with interest another set of tracks and marks of a minor skirmish.

The print of a man's dress shoe, left foot, size ten or eleven, nearly obliterated the heel mark of the girl's sandal. Anna stopped and, blessing Taco's continued absence, studied this short symbolic historv written in the soft earth. Maybe thirty inches away, too far for a natural stance, was the imprint of the man's right shoe. Most of the weight was on the inside of his foot, smashing leaves into the ground and forcing up a tiny mound of mulch.

Between these prints and a couple of feet in front of them, were two smooth oval indentations. Relaxing her eyes and mind, Anna continued to stare. Slowly the marks she knew had to be there emerged from the thin litter of leaves and sticks. Two partial handprints.

Heather had not been alone. A man-most probably one of the tuxedoed boys-had been with her. At this place, Heather had either stumbled and fallen to her bands and knees or she'd been forced down by her companion. Stumbling was the likelier scenario. She was drunk, it was dark, she was wearing silly, tectery shoes. And, too, there were no signs of struggling or scrambling. At an educated guess, the male companion bad lifted Heather up after she'd fallen.

Stepping around the story, Anna continued on.

The edges of the cemetery were delineated by the resurgence of forest.

The chemistry that kept the cemetery floor barren changed abruptly and foliage rebounded with a vengeance. Tracks disappeared into ground-creeping vines. Vines covered fallen branches and logs in various stages of decay, forming a floor designed to impede the progress of invading bipeds. On the fallen tree trunks, pushing through the tapestry of leaves, were saplings, shrubs, new trees half grown. These in turn were greening from the roots up, covered in vines.

Anna wracked her brain for the rhyme that warned children away from poison ivy Leaves of three, let it be. Or maybe it was leaves of two, bad for you. No matter how many times she saw the stuff it never looked the same and bore little resemblance to the benevolent strains of ivy that routinely died from neglect on her kitchen windowsill.

In fiction and maybe somewhere in the world, there were trackers who could follow a trail through this kind of territory. Anna was not one of them. Perhaps, were she willing to crawl around with a pair of tweezers, inching up each vine to peek underneath, she might find another track or two, but she wasn't tempted. Mississippi was way too full of life: one-celled, two-celled, four-, six-, eight-legged, life that slithered, flapped, entwined. Anna had a sense that if she were to get down on the ground for any length of time she would be bound up in that fecund shroud like a fly wrapped up for the spider's larder.

From deeper in the woods Taco barked and, treading carefully, she pushed on another few yards. Beyond a crosshatch of fallen logs, the side of the cemetery hill dropped away in a miniature version of South Dakota's badlands, where the earth bad fallen, melted or rotted. A bank thirty feet high and arcing away in both directions had formed. The wall of dirt was ragged with fissures. Root systems thrust out to scratch at insubstantial air. Trees hung precariously over the edge. A number had succumbed to weather and gravity and lay, heads down, tangled on the face of the embankment.

It was a climb Anna would choose to avoid: the dirt was unstable, the anchors untrustworthy, and there were many things upon which a body might impale itself, Taco, being a dog and, so, having a brain about the size of an apricot, would have few trepidations about scrambling up the bank. Anna stopped well back from the lip of the drop and whistled. A series of excited barks answered her, then she saw his black form bounding gracefully over a landscape that would cripple a human being.

For a moment, she watched the animal and felt pure unadulterated joy.

When he ran, dappled sunlight blue on his midnight coat, ears streamlined, Taco was transformed into a creature of beauty.

At the foot of the bank, he hesitated. "You got down there," Anna reminded him unsympathetically. Fascinated, she watched as be picked and clawed and scrabbled his way up the ruined cut. She was so fixated on his progress that she didn't notice he'd caught something until he was at her feet. Only its tail showed, trailing lifelessly from the corner of the dog's mouth. "Oh, yuck!" Anna bent down in hopes of rescuing whoever belonged to the tail as Taco spun in gleeful circles. Anna'd thought, should she ever stoop to owning a dog, she would get a small frothy lady's lapdog, a Lbasa apso or a shib tzu-some animal that had at least the vestigial charm of a cat. Big dogs had big mouths and loved closing them around the hapless and helpless. At any given moment, Taco was capable of hiding an entire tennis ball in his jaws and once-and this was rare given the pointy nature of dog teetb-Anna had pried his mouth open and retrieved a baby bunny, soggy with dog spit but otherwise unhurt.

"Give it to me, doggone it. Down!" Looking deeply offended, Taco crouched on elbows and knees, his one trick. Anna gingerly took hold of the tail protruding from his doggy lips. Not fur, cloth.

This was good. She had few qualms about putting injured socks out of their misery. "Open up," she commanded. Getting no response, she straddled his head and made him open his mouth. The wet disgusting item was a scrap of chiffon-like material with rhinestones sewn on. Taco had it half swallowed and Anna had to drag it gently up his throat while be wiggled and gagged. "Serves you right," she said but scratched his ears so he wouldn't take it too personally.

Once it cleared the insides of the dog, Anna could see it was a scarf, the kind worn over the shoulders with evening dresses.

Remembering what Heather had been wearing, it could very well belong to her. Still on her knees, Anna spread the fabric over the ground, sparkly side up, to assess the damage. The dog dropped his chin near one corner but knew better than to try and reclaim his prize.

The delicate fabric was in good shape, only punctured here and there where Taco's teeth had penetrated, but the rhinestones on one end were dulled, the glittering facets muddied. Anna touched one, the mud made liquid by the dog's saliva. Her finger came away stained with red. Half the scarf was drenched in blood. "Open your mouth," she ordered the dog, then pried it open for him. Cheeks, tongue, roof and what she could see of his throat were all of a piece.

There was too much blood on the scarf for it to be Taco's. Had the rhinestones cut him enough to bleed that badly he'd have been foaming from his mouth and probably his nose. Heather had been unharmed. There wasn't an inch of her Anna'd not checked.

Therefore, the blood was not Heather's. Chances were the scarf was not Heather's either.

Danielle was missing, gone from the prom in her party dress. Anna got a bad scared feeling. "if you were half the dog Lassie was, you'd lead me back to where you got this," she said.

Taco thumped his tail and looked at her with soft brown eyes.

Though Anna felt she dithered, no time was lost. While her mind crashed through the thorny problem of whether to return for help or begin the search for the owner of the bloodied scarf, her body was piling rubble to mark the place on the bank from where she'd seen Taco coming out of the woods, and her mind was making a note of the peculiarities of the trees at the place he'd first appeared.

She had yet to locate her handheld radio, another item for the everlengthening list. Her patrol car was in the church parking lot. To increase her familiarity with its idiosyncrasies, she'd driven it, rather than taking her Rambler.

Ten minutes' fast walk brought her to the lot below the church.

Randy Thigpen answered her third call. Barth Dinkin, Randy said, was on lunch break in Natchez, forty-five miles and nearly an hour to the south of Port Gibson, where Thigpen was in the ranger station.

Fleetingly, Anna wondered why he wasn't out patrolling the road, She told him what the dog had dragged in; told him to call the Sheriff's Department, keep trying to contact Dinkin and meet her at the Rocky Springs Ranger Station with a spare radio in twenty minutes. There followed a silence long enough Anna wondered if they'd lost contact, then he drawled, "Ten-four." The drawl annoyed her. John Brown had filled her in on her staff. Randy Thigpen was from Smartswood, New Jersey. The drawl was pure affectation.

Anna had opted not to try and follow the trail of the scarf alone.

If an all-out search was called for, she would have wasted valuable time, and she was unfamiliar with the territory.

Having returned home, she put on sturdy boots and her uniform, filled a backpack with an emergency first aid kit, compass and watch and, in Just under nineteen minutes, was at the Rocky Springs Ranger Station at the entrance to the campground. Twenty minutes, twenty-five, passed and no Ranger Thigpen. At an even thirty, Anna radioed again and found he'd just left Port Gibson. Her sister, learned things psychiatric and psychological, once told her tardiness was a form of covert hostility.

Thigpen rolled in twenty-five minutes late and pulled up beside Anna's car. He did not budge from his comfy seat behind the wheel, leaving her two choices: talk through car windows or get out and go to him. She'd intended to get out anyway and chose to split the difference. Putting down the electric window on the passenger side she said: "Hop on out and let me show you what I've got." He sighed. She made a point not to notice.

The ignition in his patrol car had been left on. A gust of cool air from the air conditioner followed him, and she could hear the strains of "The Shadow of Your Smile" from whatever easy-listening station he had his radio tuned to.

As Thigpen pried himself from his automobile at her behest, Anna realized it was the first time she'd seen his bottom half. The sight of it did not raise him in her estimation. Moving slowly, not because he was heavy but because it gave him the illusion of control, he closed the door and leaned one hip against the fender. Anna spread her map on the hood. Thigpen gave it a cursory glance.

What she had was a glossy brochure of the Rocky Springs area, the kind of pseudo map with dashes to represent trails and band-drawn pictures of the various wonders to behold at the end of them. On this unexceptional bit of cartography, she had penned an X where she estimated she'd been when Taco delivered the scarf. Looks like you were between the graveyard and the Old Trace this side of Little Sand Creek." He stated the obvious.

"That's my guess," Anna said. She traced the linear route Taco would have taken if dogs were linear beasts. "It's not exact," she admitted.

"But it's a place to start." She glanced up to see if he followed her logic, to discover he was looking not at the brochure but at his fingernalls, a parody of boredom.

Anna folded the map. "Sheriff Davidson. Did you get hold of him?" Thigpen lost interest in his nails and became absorbed in a clatter of starlings in the treetop across the parking area. A few seconds ticked by and Anna's blood pressure rose a couple of points. "I thought I'd better wait on it," Thigpen said, still studying the birds.

Anna said nothing. When one was new in town, waiting for explanations was good practice. Who knew what mysterious rules held true in the heart of Dixie? Thigpen wanted her to ask him why. Anna could almost smell his anticipation. "Why's that?" she asked to get it over with. Had a child not been missing she might have played the game, silence for silence.

She was better at it than most. Today other tasks took precedence.

"Well, I don't think we ought to go bothering Paul just because you dug up an old scarf you think might have blood on it. Could be anything.

An old rag a hunter used to clean his knife." Black chiffon seeded with rhinestones; hunting in Mississippi must be a whole lot more glamorous than it was in Colorado. "Call him now," Anna said in the even colorless tones she used shortly before she ripped someone's head off. "Tell him exactly what was found. Do you need me to write the description down?" Randy Thigpen looked as if he was going to argue, then thought better of it. Leaving the car door open, he grunted down into the driver's side to radio the Sheriff's Department. When he'd finished and Anna had been exonerated by the sheriff of Claiborne County's immediate interest, she laid out her plan. It was rudimentary and she was understaffed, but though densely forested, the Natchez Trace was narrow.

Fields bordered both sides of the green belt. If the search needed to be widened, farmers would be called and questioned. Anna had a sense that if Danielle had been with the other prom kids, she would be found near where Anna had seen them. At night, in dress clothes, even lunatics and teenagers tended not to wander too deeply into the woods. Anna would follow in the direction Taco had come from. Randy Thigpen would take the trail up through the sunken section of the original Trace that ran to the south of Little Sand Creek. According to the map, this segment was no more than half a mile long; then he'd turn west toward the cemetery.