Hunting Season by Nevada Barr Read Free Book Online Page B

and stood to end the interview.
     

3
     For reasons the sheriff chose not to divulge to Anna, they were going, uninvited, to be in attendance when Raymond told "Mama" that her firstborn was dead. During the twenty-minute drive through green and rolling hills north of Natchez, Anna covertly watched Clintus Jones. Anything that might have been there to read was locked beneath a mask of professional stoicism.
    It crossed her mind that he went to the Barnette homestead merely to annoy a man he'd apparently never liked and who had recently become a rival. She might have believed it of another man, but Sheriff Jones just didn't seem the type. He had the anger, but it seemed reserved for moderately righteous causes.
    "This'll be the Barnette's," the sheriff said, and he pointed to what once had been a classic avenue of oaks leading off the road to the right. I here was neither sign nor mailbox, and Anna wondered if he had cause to know Doyce and his mama's home from previous visits or if it was merely the knowledge of all good small-town sheriffs of their constituency.
    "Why go to Barnette's?" Anna asked.
    "I don't know," Clintus confessed. "I got a funny feeling."
    Anna had great respect for funny feelings. Undertaker Raymond Barnette's reaction to the news of his brother's death had left her out of balance as well.
    Jones turned smoothly onto the gravel drive beneath the over-arching trees. The leaves of the live oaks never turned gold or scarlet or rained to the earth in autumn's annual celebration of death, but they did grow dry, the canopy thin-looking with coming winter. Many of the trees had been cut down, leaving gaps in a living sculpture that had been planted to endure centuries.
    "Some kind of disease get the trees?" Anna asked.
    "You might say that," the sheriff returned. "Hard times. Doyce and Ray's daddy died during the Depression. Their mama got on for a year or so with the help of the neighbors, but the neighbors were having hard times of their own. One day she sold half of 'em for lumber. Never planted new ones, never would let anybody dig out the stumps. Me, I wouldn't want to be reminded of the bad times every time I went to the mailbox. Takes all kinds, I guess."
    Anna said nothing. She was thinking of a far-away day in high school in Red Bluff, California. She and Sister Judette had witnessed some form of aberrant behavior. To seem worldly, Anna had expressed the old cliché. The sister had shot her a sour look and retorted, "It doesn't take that many kinds."
    The fractured avenue was short-lived, as though the original owner had the pretensions but lacked the acreage to carry them out with much aplomb. At the end of the corridor stood the homestead. It had never been a mansion—too small for that title—but once it had been a fine house. Two stories tall, it boasted a gracious front porch curving around a corner entrance. Rather than the long rocking-chair type, it was square, forming an outdoor room furnished with wicker sofas and chairs.
    Clintus executed a Y-turn on the dirt in front of the house and hacked the patrol car under the shade of a magnolia tree, the nose of the vehicle pointing back toward the road as if for a fast getaway. Ray Barnette's black Cadillac was nowhere to be seen.
    "Looks like the hard times never left," Anna said.
    "Never did, I guess. From what I've picked up over the years, Mrs. Barnette fell victim to about every get-rich-quick scheme that floated down the river and passed on the tendency to Doyce. Raymond's the only member of the family that ever did a lick of real work."
    They'd reached the porch. An old fan was festooned with spider webs. The cushions on the furniture had faded to mottled gray-brown; stuffing extruded through rents in the rotting fabric. Leaves patterned the painted plank flooring. The roof was supported by squat pillars with peeling white paint, revealing the gray of weathered wood beneath.
    This outdoor living space had not been used for a while. Anna and