Hunting Season by Nevada Barr Page A

unsatisfying but, since she'd moved to a region where "What church do you belong to?" was as common a question as "where do you live?" she'd consciously tried to cut down on taking the Lord's name in vain.
    "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