Deep South (7 page)

Cypress or cedar, they gave off a faint pleasant smell. To her left was a split-rail fence. Touching the top rail, she used it to guide her footsteps into the lightless interior of the forest. A litigation-weary park service could be trusted not to leave anything sharp or dangerous on a marked trail, so she moved quickly The ground beneath her inclined.

Cobwebs stuck and tickled on her face and arms. Faint sounds echoed her passage in the woods to either side. The skittering of small creatures foraging, the scuttle of a tiny night beast alarmed by her presence.

Subtly the smell of the forest altered. An earthy odor permeated the air, and, almost imperceptibly, the nature of darkness changed.

Wide-eyed to catch even the faintest hint of light, Anna stopped and looked up.

The canopy of trees had opened. She was at the base of a steep bank, maybe fifty feet high. Roots thrust out from its face. Trees clung precariously to its upper edge. Above, black against a sky made light with stars and a silver of moon, was the silhouette of a building with a tall central steeple. The old church.

Made of soft and crumbling soil, the embankment would be treacherous.

Anna stayed on the path. With a memory of light to go by, she covered the last angle where the trail doubled back up the hill toward the church, Methodist according to a weathered sign. A road curved nearby along with a tiny paved lot for cars.

Because of the thick curtain of trees to either side, the Natchez Trace created an illusion of isolation, wilderness. In reality, civilization in the form of roads, houses and fields pressed close on both sides.

Seen by night, Rocky Springs Church loomed black and monolithic.

Even so, Anna could tell it was a classic: simple and symmetrical in the way of many early American churches. Tomorrow-to day-after sunup, she promised herself a trip back. Now she used the old building for its shadow. Keeping close to the brick walls, she moved quietly to the back of the church, nearer where she thought the voices bad come from.

There she leaned against the still-warm brick and watched. Her reasons were twofold: to get an aural or ocular fix on her miscreants and to absorb the surreal scene that had unfolded as she rounded the corner.

Behind the church, in a clearing beyond a decrepit fence with a wire gate, was an ancient graveyard. Stones lay broken on the ground. Those still standing bad sunk into the earth, swallowed by the graves they marked. Moss, black in the weak light of the moon, erased names, dates, lives. On the far edge of the clearing, pushing into the night of trees, were monuments of marble, towers of once-white stone, ten and twelve feet high.

Beyond them a walled area, overgrown with vines, was just visible: a family plot, exclusive even in death. In the strange warm embrace of the night, trees close on every side and Spanish moss hanging in dense veils silvered by the faint breath of moonlight, for a heartbeat Anna was afraid. Not of the dead, or of the undead for that matter, but of having wandered into Rod Serling country, a twilight zone in the nineteenth century from which there was no way out. Unpleasant tingling started at the nape of her neck and crept up the back of her head hair by hair. It was time to get some sleep. She was so tired she was scaring herself.

A sharp "fucking bell!" from the shadows beyond the clearing brought her back into the twentieth century. "Fuck" might be a good Anglo-Saxon word dating from the Middle Ages, but to Anna it rang with indifferent modern malice. She tucked more deeply into the shelter of the church and waited.

A moment passed, filled with the promising sound of stumbling feet, then Anna's patience was rewarded. Two high-school-ago boys, emerged from the darkness on the far side of the graveyard.

Single file, unsteady on their feet, they threaded through the tombstones. It was too dark to make out their faces, but they were tallishfive-foot-ten to six feet. One had the wide shoulders and thick neck of an athlete. The other was the body type Anna remembered from her high school days: all neck and wrist and Adam's apple.

Both wore tuxedos. The skinny boy bad lost his J'acket and his white shirt glowed in the moonlight. Neither wore a tie.

Quiet as the tomb, Anna waited till they'd come through the gate and walked within a yard or two of her lair.

"Good evening, gentlemen," she said pleasantly.

The geeky lad in the lead screamed, "Jesus Christ," and fell to his knees. The boy behind tripped over him in his stampede.

Anna laughed. A little low comedy almost made up for her interrupted sleep. She stepped out of the shadows where they could see her.

Proving she was not an apparition but flesh and blood did not calm them as she'd expected it to.

The larger boy hauled his fallen comrade to his feet with an unsympathetic jerk on the latter's cummerbund. In the feeble light, she could see nothing but great dark holes where the eyes were and a black gash of mouth as they gaped at her. "What brings you boys out so late?" she asked. "Go, go, go," the bigger boy cried, and shoved the other before him. In an instant, they were sprinting down the path toward the road behind the church.

Anna had no intention of giving chase. They could outrun her without half trying. As she listened to their noisy retreat, she felt some genuine alarm for the first time that night. Over the years she'd interrupted a lot of kids in the midst of some sort of feral fun. Little kids ran.

Teenagers seldom did. Unless they had really done something wrong.

"Damn," Annamuttered. Tw o choices: go back to the house and find a working flashlight or wait till morning to see what damage had been done.

She'd pretty much talked herself into the efficacy of waiting till sunrise when she heard the crying.

Thoughts of bed were banished. The crying subsided to a low moan followed by pitiful retching. Anna took the ghostly path through the cemetery, retracing the footsteps of the boys. The sound of the dry heaves remained constant, making her progress toward the source sure, but it tickled her gag reflex and she had to keep swallowing lest the vomiting prove contagious.

The iounded headstones of the moonlit clearing behind her, she reached the near-perfect darkness of the woods. A tapered stone marker disappeared into the trees above. At her feet was an unusual burial stone, a wide flat slab, large enough to sleep on comfortably and raised up on four sturdy blocks so it formed an elevated dais.

Ahead was a walled enclosure, ramparts of brick roughly capped with concrete and about chest-high. This mortality exclosure was deep in the trees, shrouded in darkness and veiled with Spanish moss. Thin choking sounds emanated from within.

Picking her way over roots and an occasional shard of shattered stone, Anna eased toward the pale line of concrete topping the bricks. The puking came to a stop. By ones and twos and tens of thousands, frogs recovered their voices and began again to sing.

Music swelled until the night grew close with it, and Anna felt a twinge of claustrophobia.

The bricks were high enough she couldn't see over. Hoping there was nothing unutterably vile on the far side, she hauled herself up and swung one leg over to straddle the wall. Secure on her perch, she surveyed the tangled interior.

The enclosure was about fifteen feet square. Without light, Anna could make out nothing but an uneven mass of midnight. From the rich, slightly spicy smell, she guessed it was rank with weeds. A fine place to hide a body, dead or alive.

Near the west-facing wall were two narrow pale marks in the undergrowth.

Legs. Bare legs. Gingerly Anna lowered herself into the square. Plants crushed beneath her feet, and she smelled the scent of honey and licorice. Feathery tops reached to her armpits.

High-stepping like a woman walking in deep mud, she moved through the vine-clogged morass of plants.

The South was thick with life, crowded with it. There was a feel of sentience to the soil, the night, the forest, and now this corral of graveyard grass, as if, by a will neither good nor evil but merely indifferent to human life, these things could swallow a woman up.

Closer did not mean clearer. The darkness was too absolute. Bending down Anna touched the white smudge. Warm skin. This was good.

Her touch brought forth a moan. Another sign of life. The leg was smooth and shaved and coated with nylon. The stench of alcohol and the sour smell of vomit overlay the sweet sweat of youth and cheap hairspray. A young girl, Anna guessed, and began to talk. "My name's Anna. I'm a ranger here. Are you hurt?" Moaning was the only reply. Then even that stopped. Anna knelt in the weeds, feeling them close overhead tickling her neck and arms.

Tickling. Ticks. Ticks and the South were inseparable. The thought was fleeting, and she kept her attention on the girl under her hands.

There was no need to check for breathing. The girl had subsided into a deep and stentorian rhythm. "I'm going to touch you," Anna said, "to see if you're hurt, okay?" With the fleeing boys and the smell of booze, sexual assault was a real possibility. Quick and sure from practice, Anna palpated neck, skull and, finally, the face, legs, abdomen, back and arms. Though her patient was unresponsive, Anna kept talking, a soothing stream of information to let her know whose hands were all over her body and why.

The girl didn't seem to have sustained any serious wounds. Anna detected no deformities of bone or wetness of blood. Injury to the head was always a possibility, a blow that produced swelling inside the skull rather than out, but drunk was Anna's professional assessment. Dead, sick drunk.

The little inebriate was wearing a silly strappy little number that was barely long enough to cover her rear end if she didn't sit down.

Pantyhose were intact, and she had on one shoe. Anna's mood lifted.

Rapists of drunken children were not known for replacing undergarments.

Relief brought with it the luxury of irritation. "Oh for Christ's sake," Anna muttered. "What am I supposed to do with you?" A hand punched her feebly in the stomach making her jump. In a voice raspy with vomiting and crying her patient croaked: "Danny.

Running. Running." And something that sounded like: "Are you going to you're nice..." The rest was a mumbled slur. "That's right," Anna said. "I'm nice. And we're going to." Going to what?

She couldn't leave the girl in the weeds and ticks and, had she been assaulted, alone with her fears or possibly her attacker.

Consumed with checking the child for injury, Anna hadn't given much thought to danger. Careless. Had the boys in tuxedos injured this girl, there was no reason they couldn't circle back and do further damage. For a moment Anna tried for fear, a spurt of adrenaline to give her a boost, but couldn't manage it. Anger was there, at the boys for leaving, at the girl for being young and stupid.

Anna felt for her patient's face and tapped the cheek lightly.

"Come on. Wake up. Rise and shine." Dead weight. Dead moaning weight.

Anna rocked back on her heels and looked around.

The girl was crumpled against one wall. Above her was a lighter patch a couple of feet off the ground. A family plot would have to have an entrance. Leaning over the patient-never recommended for a number of perfectly good reasons pertaining to the well-being of both parties-Anna felt for the lighter section. Her guess was right, it was concrete capping the brick but built low to allow people in and out. Why it wasn't open to the ground, she didn't care to speculate, but the comings and goings of snakes and alligators would certainly be curtailed by this configuration. "Come on, honey, up you go. You've got to help me now.

That's my girl." With tugging, badgering, pleading and, once, in desperation, pinching, Anna got the girl's fanny up on the low part of the wall and her feet to the outside of the square.

Fortunately the girl didn't weigh much more than a hundred pounds, a hundred and one if you included her clothes. From the half wall, Anna knelt with her back to the little drunk, drew the slender arms around her neck and stood up. By bending forward, she could get the girl's toes clear of the ground.

Doubled over, carrying a body, Anna crept through the tombstones like a grave robber. Only the feverish heat of the bare arms and the warm breath on the back of her neck reassured her the child was drunk and not dead.

A hundred pounds was just twenty pounds shy of Anna's own body weight.

Even the short distance from the plot to the old church cost her dearly.

She was breathing heavily, and the muscles of her shoulders and thighs burned.

Trudging one baby step at a time, noting only the changes in footing, the coming of light to the path, the path becoming the asphalt in front of the church, the sudden downward slope, Anna entertained half a dozen plans: leaving the girl in the church while she fetched around the car, presuming there was an easy way around.

Driving back to Rocky Springs Campground and rallying the Confederate Army. Each plan she came up with that allowed her to dump her burden also required she leave it behind for a time. And one did not leave drunks, especially drunken children, alone. Wood chips came underfoot.

Anna walked near enough to the rail fence that she could touch it with her elbow and so keep on the path.

Several splinters shot home, but the pain was so minimal compared with that of her neck muscles that she scarcely noticed.