Hunting Season by Nevada Barr Read Free Book Online

grinning visage of the mortician. "Barnette for Sheriff. The last word in honesty," was lettered across the bottom of the cardboard, white on patriotic blue.
    "The competition?" Anna asked as they passed a particularly prominent display.
    Jones grunted. "He's put his signs out way early. Way early." He was silent for a minute, as if fighting the desire to say something bad about somebody. The bad won. "The last word is right. I think Digger's last honest word was in nineteen eighty-nine when he'd had a few too many and admitted he got along better with the dead than the living."
    "Well, he ought to get along with his brother just fine now," Anna said callously.
    Jones shot her a sideways look, but she thought a hint of humor glinted through his careful exterior. "It'd be a first," he admitted.
    "Don't you have to have some kind of law-enforcement background to be a sheriff?" Anna asked.
    "No. Purely an elected position. Law enforcement helps, but it isn't a requirement. Raymond was an MP in the army. He did an eight- or twelve-year hitch—I don't remember which—in the seventies. He's been leaning hard on that. A return to discipline.'"
    As was his wont, Jones kept his voice even and cool, but Anna heard an echo of bitterness and remembered the sudden deep anger she'd seen at Mt. Locust. She wondered why, in all the chit-chat about notifying the deceased's family, he'd not bothered to tell her he was running against poor ol' Doyce's baby brother for the job of Adams County Sheriff. Vague, unfocussed suspicion flared, brought on more by a naturally cynical nature than by any untoward events. She doused it with logic. This was Mississippi. From Tennessee to Louisiana everybody pretty much knew everybody else's business. Clintus Jones might not have mentioned it simply because he assumed everybody already knew.
    "That's it." Clintus pointed with his chin. An odd habit that had a military feel.
    Like most funeral parlors Anna had seen, Barnette's was designed to look like an upscale home. A Mississippi native, Raymond had been unable to resist the antebellum lure. White columns covered in plaster suggesting dead Greek architects and Italian marble quarries fenced in the two-story portico.
    Either out of consideration or superstition, Clintus didn't park his patrol car at the front doors in the shade of the pillars, but pulled around back by a Dumpster, the contents of which Anna hoped never to become acquainted with. The two of them walked back around to the front of the building and let themselves in. oversized doors, with knobs higher than standard, always made Anna feel a little like the Lily Tomlin character Edith Ann: too little for this world. Maybe that was the point.
    Within the doors was a predictable foyer, lush in pseudo luxury with too many tasteful wall hangings. As befitted the place's function, it was as chill and silent as a tomb and smelled faintly of flowers. Not a pleasant smell, and Anna wondered fleetingly why flowers in hospital rooms and funeral homes carried a different scent than bridal bouquets and children's nosegays.
    Hard-soled shoes on plastic parquet sounded from the back of the building. Silence, ghost blooms and recent events conspired, and Anna would not have been surprised to see Vincent Price appear from the shadows.
    It was the only slightly more reassuring countenance of Raymond Barnette Anna had come to know from the posters. The grinning visage was composed in that delicate balance morticians master, somewhere between a welcoming greeting for those shopping for all eternity and a compassionate sympathy for those left behind.
    As soon as Barnette saw who'd called him forth, the professional mask crumbled. Even his gait changed, became looser, less formal.
    "Why, hey, Sheriff Jones, what brings you here? Not business, I hope? New recruit?" he said of Anna before Clintus could respond to his first question.
    Anna introduced herself and they shook hands. To her surprise his was warm, dry and