Hunting Season (7 page)

"You said it." Clintus whistled and shook his head. "What do you figure that was all about?"

Anna looked at him sharply. Mama Barnette had appeared to recognize and hate the sheriff. She'd accused him of, among other things, trying to steal her land. In memory the sequence of events was so Hatfields-and-McCoys via 1950s TV that Anna laughed.

"What?" Clintus demanded.

Antebellum dry rot, the decimated oak lane and the shotgun had conspired to dislocate Anna culturally and, for the moment, she felt a stranger in a strange land, unsure whether Mississippians had TV in the fifties and sixties, if the images that shaped the rest of the country would evoke an emotional connection in this part of the country.

"Nerves," Anna made a long story accessible.

"Jiminy Christmas," Clintus hooted, continuing the theme of ersatz profanity. "I felt like an extra in a bad episode of the Beverly Hillbillies."

Again Anna laughed, American pop culture restored and binding. For a few moments they sat without speaking. Absently she scratched at a fire ant bite on her wrist. She'd gotten it more than a week before, but the toxin of these minute monsters was persistent.

"What's Mama Barnette got against you?" she asked finally.

"Beats me," Clintus said with all apparent honesty. He shrugged appealingly and turned his hands up. His palms were wide and soft. Anna found strong men with pillowed hands particularly gentle-looking for some reason.

"She thought you were someone else," she said, "That's my guess."

"Who?"

Again the sheriff said, "Beats me."

More silence. "We've got to go back in," Clintus said finally.

"I know." Anna felt like an idiot cowering in the car, facing the prospect of slinking back to the front door a second time. From the way the sheriff sat in a lump fiddling with a lacing on the leather steering wheel cover, she guessed he felt no better.

"I don't want to give her too much time with her number two son before we question her," he said. Anna nodded. Raymond the-last-word-in-honesty Barnette did not inspire confidence.

Clintus was the first to reach for the door handle. Anna had trailed him back into the shade of the neglected porch. As he stood before the door, presumably gathering his dignity for the coming interview, she enjoyed the timeless peace of a southern autumn.

Spring was a raucous season with the song of countless frogs and nesting birds creating complicated symphonies of new birth. By fall many of the birds had gone and the frogs, those who'd not given their leapy little lives that the birds might grow strong, had matured into middle-aged complacency and no longer sang.

This tucked-away place with its ancient oaks and magnolias hummed quietly. A moment of Indian summer, caught in amber by the perfect light and promising to last forever.

Not so the peace of the human animal. Clintus rapped on the door too sharply, overcompensating for the memory of their ignoble rout, and Anna was jerked back to petty mortality.

The wait before the knock was answered grew so long Anna began to ask that creepy question that comes to all law officers every now and then:
What will I do if they just won't play the game?
One can hardly batter down a grieving mother's door just to get an interview, and Anna couldn't picture herself or Clintus yelling, "We know you're in there. Come out and nobody will get hurt." Law and order, the day-to-day bread and butter stuff, was predicated on a cooperative citizenry. There are no policemen in an anarchy, only soldiers. Clintus knocked a second time. Another minute passed.

Ten minutes earlier she'd have been experiencing pure relief. Bringing tragic news to surviving relatives had never been one of her favorite parts of the job. Since the advent of the tardy son and the shotgun, her curiosity had been piqued. She wanted a go at the feisty old lady.

"Looks like we come back tomorrow," she said disappointedly.

"Wait," the sheriff replied. "Raymond's thinking, is my bet. Figuring the ramifications. How's answering versus not answering going to look in the local newspaper."

"Maybe he's hoping we'll bust the door down and find him protecting the privacy of his sainted mum."

Clintus laughed. "He'd love that." Local politics, for all that it seemed small-time to outsiders, carried much of the same low-down, mud-slinging, high-stakes ramifications as a bid for the presidency.

Anna promised herself never to run for office even if an adoring constituency begged her.

The sound of footsteps approaching announced the end of undertaker Barnette's cogitations. The heavy oak swung inward a foot or so, and Raymond extruded onto the porch pulling the door shut behind him. A mask of empathy was fitted over his features, but Anna sensed satisfied complacency beneath.

"How's your mama doing?" Clintus asked, southern manners at the fore.

Barnette shook his head in slow theatrical sadness. "It's a bad shock. I've called Doc Fingerhut. He's phoned in a prescription. Poor Mama is used to hard times. She'll weather." He tried a brave and understanding smile, but it was ruined by the oversized incisors.

"We need to ask her a few questions," Clintus pressed on. "See if she can shed any light on where your brother was last night, who he was with."

Barnette hesitated. Then, perhaps remembering he might hold the job of sheriff in the not-so-distant future, relented. "Don't be too long about it." Turning, he dug a set of keys out of his trouser pocket. He'd locked the front door behind him when he'd come out. Not since she'd lived in New York City had Anna seen such a paranoid display of personal security.

The inside of the house was so dark it took a moment for Anna's eyes to adjust. Blinds were drawn on the windows, then reinforced with heavy drapes, as if light was the enemy. Heavy furniture of antique design crouched in the gloom. Wallpaper was dark, a brown and pink background for pictures framed in dark wood, subjects indecipherable in the dim light.

Every available surface was cluttered with magazines, newspapers and cast-off clothing. Beer cans, half-eaten bags of chips and paper plates bearing crumbs finished the classic bachelor decor.

"Doyce lived downstairs," his brother explained as they threaded their way through the darkling mess. "Mama lives up."

Though the day was perfect, the temperature hovering in the low seventies with a slight breeze, the house was closed up tight. By the dusty fall of the heavy drapes, Anna doubted the windows had been opened in years. In place of the rich living air of the outdoors they were left with the chill flat touch of air-conditioning. It gave the Barnette ancestral home the same feel as Barnette's Funeral Home.

Remembering the dirty plates littering Doyce's lair, Anna looked on the bright side. Perhaps the air-conditioning kept the smells to a minimum.

Though the house was only two stories, the ceilings were close to fourteen feet high and to reach the upper floor they climbed two foreshortened flights. A window with a magnolia in stained glass shed green and yellow light on the landing where the stairs turned back on themselves. Below the window hung a flyspecked oil painting of the Last Supper.

Anna's knowledge of biblical history was sketchy at best but she seemed to remember the Last Supper was eaten somewhere in the vicinity of the Garden of Gesthemane.

"Sins against a holy God"; one of the lines circled in red at the murder scene. Anna shook off the thought. Probably half the homes in Adams County had religious images scattered across their walls. Besides, regardless of how tough old Mama Barnette was, she just wasn't big enough to lug around a piece of dead meat the size and heft of her older boy.

After the pizza crust and old gym socks ambience of the downstairs, Mama's realms were a heaven of order. The same overabundance of furniture prevailed, but above stairs it was at least clean and free of debris.

The upstairs consisted of three bedrooms and a bath clustered around a spacious landing at the top of the stairs. Two of the doors stood open and, by the light which filtered through the lace sheers, Anna noted the world Mama Barnette had preserved on the second floor. She glimpsed the bedroom to the right as they came up the last steps. The feel was prewar; not II or I, but Civil. A four-poster bed dominated the room. In lieu of a closet was a fine old armoire with mirrored doors.

"Mama's in here," Raymond said sharply, as if to pull Anna's prying eyes from the bedroom. He stood aside to the left of the landing and ushered them into another spacious high-ceilinged room. The second bedroom apparently served as Mrs. Barnette's sitting room. Careful arrangements of formal Victorian chairs flanked a small marble-topped table with carved legs bandied out from a pedestal. A high-backed cherry settee sat against the wall, and tufts of what may very well have been the horsehair of the original stuffing poked through the threadbare fabric. Crocheted doilies were pinned to the back and the arms in an attempt to hide the ravages of age.

Mrs. Barnette sat in a rocking chair by a fireplace. November had yet to get cold enough for fires and the opening was discreetly covered by a decorative paper fan.

Anna and the sheriff entered and stood awkwardly amid the fragile furniture, waiting to be received. Raymond scuttled over to his mother's chair. "This is the
sheriff,"
he said in a loud voice. "The doctor's called in a prescription for you."

The old woman turned her round blue eyes up at her son. From where Anna stood, they appeared to be free of tears or any other discernable signs of grief.

"I know who he is," the old woman snapped. "I don't need no doctor's poisons. And I ain't deaf."

Raymond smiled. Anna thought it smacked more of an undertaker sizing up a customer for a coffin than the understanding of a devoted son.

Evidently it struck his mother the same way. "Stop grinning like an idiot," she ordered her younger son. "Your big teeth are hanging out."

Raymond did as he was told. His face clung doggedly to a mask of benevolence, but his eyes mirrored the pure nastiness of his mother's.

Blood will tell,
Anna thought and glanced around her, an instinct to check for more vipers in the nest.

"We're real sorry about Doyce," Clintus began.

"Get on with it," Mrs. Barnette interrupted the condolences.

"Okay," he said. They'd not been invited to sit. As they stood like servants called on the carpet, Raymond started the interview. "We just need to ask you a couple of questions so we can figure out what happened."

"Ask them. Don't shuffle around all day scuffing up my good rug."

Anna heard Clintus sigh, before abandoning the delicacy he had thought the situation called for. "Do you know where Doyce was last night?"

"I don't. He got this bug to play poker all of a sudden." She said the word 'poker' the way a Carmelite nun might say 'sodomy.' "Friday nights he was off playing poker with his low-life friends. I don't know who they were and I don't want to know.

"He'd be out most of the night. He thought I wouldn't know but I heard him come in. I ain't deaf," she said again and glared at Raymond.

"He never mentioned who he played with?" Clintus tried. "Not even first names or anything?"

"I told you he didn't. I wouldn't have listened if he did. They were drinking and smoking and gambling. When that boy come in I could smell it on him all the way up here. That stink of sin coming right up the stairs.

"He was losing money, too. He lied about that but he was all right. Just throwing away all me and his daddy, God rest his soul, worked so hard for. The devil'd got hold Doyce and now he's dead."

Mrs. Barnette sounded as is she figured it served him right but venting the anger had melted something in her wizened old heart and at the word 'dead' tears flooded her eyes and ran down in a zigzag pattern through the time-carved creases in her face.

"Mrs. Barnette, do you mind if we take a look around downstairs, see if we can find out who he was with?" Clintus asked.

Mrs. Barnette gave no indication she heard.

They'd gotten what they were going to out of the old woman. Clintus gave his condolences. Mrs. Barnette did not accept them, though Anna's she acknowledged with a sniff and a nod. When they left she was in her rocker staring straight ahead, tears running down her cheeks, her stony old face as unchanged by the tempest as the stones the rain falls on.

Raymond reluctantly supplied the permission they needed. Anna hoped he'd remain with his grieving mother but no such luck. The undertaker's lanky angulated form followed them downstairs like Edward Gorey's uninvited guest, his dark work suit melting in and out of the shadows on the landings.

Resolutely, she put him from her mind.

"You take Doyce's room," Clintus said, ignoring murmured instructions from their attendant mortician that the investigation could be better served in a myriad of other ways. "I'll see if the living room has anything to offer."

The part of the house Doyce lived in consisted of a spacious living room, a formal dining room, a kitchen and what had once been a library, a perfectly square room with built-in bookcases from the floor to two feet below the ceiling. The bookcases, painted dark green, took up two walls. A fireplace claimed the third and a bay window the fourth.