Deep South (41 page)

"Got to move." She tried to speak aloud and felt her lips moving but heard no sound, A blow to the ear. Deafness. She remembered that. Fear rose and fell. She could hear morning birds. One ear.

That was enough. "Help," she said and heard what was meant as a cry come out a tiny whisper. "Opening my eyes," she announced to her brain in hopes of greater cooperation. After a while, the message was delivered and her eyes opened. There was sunshine now, shadows on the ground. Time had passed since last she'd managed this feat.

Thirst troubled her. Peeing wasn't an issue. She was too dehydrated.

"Not good," she whispered. And: "Moving my hand." Seconds later, a puppet's arm under the guidance of a drunken puppetmaster floated up before her eyes.

The arm was out of focus. A thing of green and brown, grass stains and mud. "Other arm," she commanded. Seconds passed, but pain disallowed compliance. The humerus was broken or cracked. Knelt on me, Anna remembered. Somebody knelt on me. A sensation flashed through her of being facedown in the dirt, a terrible weight on her arms.

Voices wove through the woods, and Anna stopped breathing to listen.

Under this sea of green, she was utterly lost. Though she knew she was probably no more than fifty feet from an improved trail, she could not guess fifty feet in which direction. She would not let the thought form, but her body knew she could not crawl much farther than that. Her mind knew she would not be found where she was, not for many days.

One chance. Fifty feet. Toward fading voices. Anna listened with every fiber of her being. Aware of an ominous creaking of neck bones, she tried to turn her face in the direction whence the sound had come, but muscles were frozen.

Moving her upper body, she rolled to hands and knees and pointed her head in the direction she wanted to go. Spinning, pain, vomiting, Anna waited it out. Standing up was not in the realm of possibility. There was no way she could force the injured muscles to so much as lift her head so she could look where she was going.

For a minute, ten, maybe half an hour, she stared at the ground a foot from the tip of her bloodied nose. Even here at the bottom of the world, there were shadows, tiny, tangled, green, but shadows. If she focused, she could see they stretched ever so slightly to her left. Sure as compass needles, they would keep her on course.

Whispering orders to her body, she crept along. Fallen logs she would have stepped over without thought the previous day loomed as formidable obstacles requiring great presence of mind, and more physical courage to surmount than she'd realized she had.

Sweat poured off of her, then stopped, her body out of fluid.

Winston Churchill: "Never, never, never give up." General George Patton: "Success is measured by how high you bounce when you hit bottom." And Anna kept on, knowing now, firsthand, that Christopher Reeve really was Superman.

Watching the shadows, pushing ahead an inch at a time, she finally came to a place where the forest floor dropped away in a cliff of brown.

She'd reached the Old Trace. She could lie down now and figure out why it was she was here.

The sound of voices came to her, and she remembered. "Help me," she croaked. A woman screamed, and Anna knew why Danielle Posey had died.

Robbed of dignity, clothing and memories, Anna woke. A kindly black woman in the trim white authority of an RN uniform told her she was at the Baptist Hospital, then asked her gently if she knew her name, who was president of the United States, what day it was and what state Jackson was in. The first two Anna got right. The last two she failed. A C- in sanity.

Her brain took another holiday When next it returned, and she opened her eyes, she remembered she was in Mississippi. If it hadn't hurt so much to reach the call button, she would have summoned the nurse and asked if she could get her grade raised.

"Hey," a voice said softly. "Welcome to the world of the living." Only a slot of vision was allowed Anna, and she searched the small room till she found the source of the voice. Sheriff Paul Davidson, smiling, was seated to the right of the bed, his chair thoughtfully moved so she didn't have to turn her head to see him. A window was behind him, blinds lowered.

Distrust, so strong it threatened to become panic, engulfed her at the sight of him. Why, she couldn't remember. All she remembered was that they'd been friends. She didn't feel in the least friendly.

She was scared. For a moment, she tried to ignite her fear, turn it to anger, but she hadn't the strength.

Ignoring the fear and the sheriff, she tried to raise her left hand. The arm was immobilized. She had better luck with the right.

Sensing it would be most unwise to move her head, she let the hand make its discoveries. Her face was swollen. One eye was closed beneath a tender and jellied mass that had once been an eyelid. The other was better. It would open. Her nose wasn't broken. Several teeth were loose, but running her tongue over the familiar mouth scape, she detected no gaps. Her skin had survived intact; no cuts or gashes that she could find.

A woman is never too old for vanity, and Anna was relieved. For a few weeks, she might sport a visage that would give the kiddies nightmares, but she should heal. "What happened?" the sheriff asked, and once again Anna was filled with alarm.

Had he been the one? Was that why she distrusted him? Bits of memory were floating up like the words in the window of the Magic 8Ball she'd owned as a child. She would share none of it with Davidson till she knew why the little hairs on the back of her neck were crawling. "You tell me," she managed. Her voice was cracked and whisperthin. "Would you like some water?" he asked solicitously. He put a plastic cup with a straw in it in her good hand.

Anna's throat was so dry that she was surprised dust devils hadn't whirled out on her words, but she didn't feel thirsty. An odd sensation.

As she wet her mouth and throat, she noticed she was on an IV Probably normal saline for dehydration. That would explain it.

Paul Davidson took the cup from her and set it back on a rolling bed table, adjusting both so they would be near at hand when next she wanted a drink.

Anna was unimpressed. Sleazeballs and dirtbags occasionally had excellent manners. It proved nothing. "Tell me what you know," she said and was pleased her voice sounded stronger. "I can't remember much." With that half-truth, she realized she'd joined Lyle, Brandon, Thad and Heather in the epidemic of amnesia that was sweeping the southland.

"Some campers from Knoxville found you a little before ten this morning."

"What time is it now?" she interrupted.

Davidson looked at his watch. "Five-thirty-seven." Anna nodded. She was reassured. It wouldn't have surprised her if she'd been unconscious for six months. Half a day. Not bad. Not so frightening. "Keep going," she said. Then, because she was helpless and not because she was feeling polite, she added: "Please."

"You scared them about half to death. You were up top the bank about a dozen feet from where we carried out the Posey girl. When you stuck your head out, the woman thought you were a bear."

"I must look pretty bad," Anna said. It wasn't a question, and he didn't contradict her.

"Her husband was a city fireman in Tennessee and knew first aid. He stayed with you while she ran back to the campground and found Frank.

Frank got hold of Barth, and he radioed me. I called the ambulance out of Utica. You were dehydrated and not clear in the head, but you were a handful. You caught hold of the door frame and kept them from putting the stretcher in the ambulance. I got another call and didn't get to Rocky till you'd been taken away, but I heard an earful when the boys got back. They said you wouldn't let them load you till you'd talked with Barth. That you screamed 'my ankle, my ankle."

" Her ankle. Wrapping it with canvas. The memory clattered through her head like a video on fast forward, leaving an ache behind. To her astonishment and relief, she also knew why she'd protected the ankle.

Surreptitiously, she moved her cup of water behind the carafe out of Davidson's line of sight. "They said you fought like a wounded cat till they got scared you would hurt yourself more than a delay would and let you have your own way. They got ordered out of their own ambulance while you had a private ranger meeting. After that, they said you were the ideal patient."

"Unconscious," Anna said, and he laughed.

I strong-armed the doctor here into telling me how you were. Actually, it wasn't too tough; the doctor is my deputy's brother-in-law." Anna tried to roll her eyes, but it hurt too much. There was something unsettling about having Sheriff Davidson know more about her than she knew herself, to have him talk to a doctor she couldn't remember about her medical condition. Anger wriggled wormlike under her breastbone. She was too weary to feed it. "You've got a great-granddaddy of a concussion, moderate to severe soft-tissue injuries to your neck and shoulders. Four cracked ribs, one broken. The humerus bone in your left arm is cracked, and your left eardrum was traumatized but not ruptured.

The hearing should return in a day or two. Abrasions and contusions, two black eyes, loose teeth. But for the soft-tissue injuries, you should be pretty much up to snuff in a month or so." Soft-tissue injuries would haunt her for a while. She knew that.

She'd injured her neck and back a couple times before. Muscles had long memories and did not forgive as completely as bone. Paul was done talking. Anna had nothing to say and no energy to say it. Silence filled the room till small sounds from the hall crept into her awareness: a PA, wheels on linoleum, voices.

At length Paul said: "What was all that with Barth about?" His voice was oh-so-conversational, but Anna continued to be infected with distrust.

"I'll have to ask him," she replied. "He was pretty closemouthed about it to me," Davidson said. A note of professional irritation colored his voice. "If it has anything to do with the Posey murder or the attack on you, I'd appreciate being let in on it." They were on more formal ground now, down to the business of criminal investigation.

Anna dutifully related nearly everything she could remember. If he was there, she wasn't telling him anything new; if he wasn't, he needed to know. She'd been out walking. Rain had started. She'd stopped on the Old Trace. The grave, the bones, she didn't mention for a couple reasons: the fear she felt and the sensation she'd imagined it. Before she went out on that limb, she wanted to talk to Barth.

Somebody had bagged her from behind, sat on her, slipped a noose around her neck and tried to beat her to death.

"The canvas he put over your head probably saved you from deafness.

You were lucky."

"A veritable leprechaun," Anna said dryly.

Paul had the good manners to apologize for his choice of words. "I got away and ran for it, Crawled for it," she finished. "My Lord!" Davidson had lost color under his tan, leaving his skin a pale muddy tone and his face looking old. "My Lord," he said again, then breathed slowly through his nostrils as if fighting a tidal wave of emotion. He looked like he was going to be sick, and some of Anna's distrust wavered and melted.

Some. Not all.

"So you have no idea who attacked you? None at all?"

"None," Anna lied. The sheriff's hands clenched on the wooden arms of the chair where he sat, the skin drawn and bloodless.

And unmarked. Anna's assailant had been bare-handed; she'd felt the heat from his skin when he'd grabbed her leg. The man who'd attacked her would have scraped knuckles. Her fear of Davidson didn't stem from the assault. Had Anna's ribs not been causing her so much pain, she would have breathed more easily. She took another sip of water, careless of the cup. She no longer needed to check out Davidson's fingerprints. "How did you get loose of this guy?" the sheriff asked.

Anna didn't know. She closed her one good eye. The effort of remembering sunk her back into a nightmare so vivid sweat stood out on her forehead, salt stinging in the abrasions made by fist and canvas.

The fingers of her right hand tingled and ached. She was so afraid she jerked, spiking pain in to her fragile cranium.

Anna opened her eye and told Paul how she had gotten away. "I hope the bastard never walks upright again," he said with unpriest-like viciousness, and Anna was pleased. "I'll put the word out to area hospitals to report any man seeking treatment for groin injuries."

"Good," Anna said wearily. "I think I ruptured one of his testicles.

That's got to be debilitating."

"Gee, you think?" Davidson said. Anna thought she heard a smile in his voice but hadn't the energy to open her eye and see. She wondered why she had a bad feeling about him. He seemed like a nice enough man.

"Tell Barth I need to see him first thing," Anna said. She hoped she'd said it aloud because she hadn't the strength to repeat herself.

At eight-thirty the following morning Barth Dinkin presented himself.

Anna's mind had cleared somewhat. More chunks of memory were returned.

Nothing from an hour or so before the attack, but much of what happened afterward had been restored. Other than that, she felt worse than ever, her muscles stiffened and her knitting bones angry. "You look...  " Barth was at a loss for words. He stood at the foot of her bed, his Stetson in his hands, his strange light eyes full of pain and awkwardness. "Like shit. I know," Anna said. "Did you get the print off my ankle?"