And then the woman raised a hand in greeting, and her face broke into a spontaneous, devilish grin, a grin of shared joy and wild mischief. So unexpected was the smile that Jason found himself grinning back. At that moment Jason looked up to see an additional four helicopters, big ones, thundering over the water toward them.
The U.S. Cavalry, he thought. They’ve arrived.
“People seem to think I’m some kind of Tennessee Williams character,” said Mrs. LaGrande Shelburne Ashenden. “They think I spend my days languishing under a ceiling fan and dreaming about past glories. Well, they might have forgot that my family got where it is by knowing how to kill Indians and drive niggers, but I haven’t.”
General Jessica C. Frazetta gazed at Mrs. Ashenden with curiosity. What, she wondered, does a Southern gentlewoman of a certain age wear to a political assassination? A celadon chemise-cut summer linen dress. Straw summer hat with matching ribbon. Rolex with platinum-gold expansion band, tiny little earrings with freshwater pearls, sandals, and an Hermes tapestry clutch bag containing a very ladylike pearl-handled nickel-plated two-shot derringer.
Jessica was feeling decidedly outgunned, at least in the fashion sense. The fact that she could only see with one eye did nothing for her social confidence.
Mrs. Ashenden sat demurely in the straight-backed wooden chair in the coroner’s office in the parish courthouse. Knees and ankles together, hands in her lap, as she had no doubt been taught in dancing school. Her careful affect was only slightly spoiled by the plaster arm cast that had just been applied by Dr. Patel. The derringer had been loaded with .357 magnum rounds, which on discharge had broken Mrs. Ashenden’s wrist.
“The Paxtons were always trash, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Ashenden said. “And they’re not one of the older families, not really. They arrived just before the War.” She sighed. “It’s a pity about his wife. She’s a Windridge, you know. She married beneath her in choosing a Paxton.” She looked up at Jessica with bright birdlike eyes. “Do you think I should undertake her social rehabilitation? Perhaps I should invite her into my bridge club…” She looked uncertain as a thought struck her. “Oh dear, someone will have to tell poor Wilona about her husband’s demise. I fear that task may fall to me.” She looked at Jessica again. “Unless I am under arrest? I’m afraid I don’t quite know my status.” Jessica didn’t know, either. Ever since she’d flown into this situation, she’d been unable to decide whether she’d wandered into Gone with the Wind or one of the more macabre works of Edgar Allan Poe.
“If you can assure me,” Jessica decided, “that you’re not planning on shooting anyone else, then I suppose I can let you go home.”
Mrs. Ashenden gave a little purse-lipped smile. “Oh, I don’t imagine I’ll need to shoot anyone else, dear. Sheriff Paxton was the sole remaining obstacle to a resolution of the crisis. The only one who was still dangerous.” She rose, smoothed the straight lines of her dress. “I think now that Omar Paxton has gone where the woodbine twineth, you will find things much easier.”
“I hope so, ma’am.”
“I think you should just take all of those people away, you know, the refugees. In your helicopters, or whatever they are. I do not imagine they would be comfortable here, nor do I imagine the people in the parish would be comfortable with them present.”
“I’ll consider that,” Jessica said.
Mrs. Ashenden made her way to the door, then paused. “Oh by the way,” she said, “I hope I will get my gun back eventually? My husband gave it to me some years ago, so I could protect myself when he was away, and it has sentimental value.”
“That may not be up to me, ma’am,” Jessica said. “But I’ll see what I can do.” Mrs. Ashenden gave a smile and passed out of the room, leaving behind the faint scent of roses. Jessica paused a moment, trying to collect her thoughts, then followed. In her helmet, BDUs, and heavy boots, she felt very unladylike as she followed in the wake of the Mistress of Clarendon. And she knew she sure as hell didn’t smell like roses.
Less than two hours ago, one of her big Sikorsky helicopters had simply sat in the water and, with the power of its six titanium-edged composite rotor blades, towed the barge of Poinsett Island waste up the river to a meeting with its towboat. Another helicopter had taken the people off the little bass boat and carried them to Vicksburg along with the boat itself, which had been lashed to the hull of the chopper. By the time they landed, the crew chief of the copter had called Jessica on the radio and told her that, according to his passengers, there were some serious developments in Spottswood Parish, and she had better talk to the people off the bass boat. One of whom, the crew chief added, had been shot. Jessica had therefore abandoned the rescue of the barge, which seemed to be well in hand, and flown to Vicksburg to interview the boat’s passengers. One of them, the white boy, was carried off by medics the second he landed, but the rest were able to give Jessica a coherent and horrifying picture of the situation in Spottswood Parish.
Prime Power, as usual, was a problem. The Ranger unit that had liberated Rails Bluff had returned that morning to rubble-sorting duties in Greater Memphis, the military police unit that had replaced them was fully occupied, and all of Jessica’s other units were fully committed.
But the situation in Spottswood Parish demanded instant attention, so in the end Jessica flew in with everything she could scrape together: part of her headquarters staff, a few military police, and a platoon of engineers. They took off in four big Sikorsky helicopters so as to seem a more impressive force. By this point she was receiving distress calls from Spottswood Parish itself, from members of the parish council who had first called the Emergency Management people, then been shunted around the various departments of the federal bureaucracy until at last someone had thought to have them contact Jessica. Landing at Clarendon, she’d been met by local dignitary—a little white-mustached fellow who introduced himself as a judge named Moseley—who had then taken her to the courthouse, where she’d met Mrs. Ashenden, who calmly announced she’d shot the sheriff dead with her derringer and settled the whole problem.
Jessica thought it smelled hinky. She’d been involved with Army politics long enough to know the scent of a cover-up, and she had the feeling a whitewash was settling very solidly into place here, that blame had been preassigned and that certain people—who very conveniently were dead—were going to take the fall. But she didn’t have enough force to simply take over the parish—not yet, anyway—and she didn’t have enough properly trained personnel to launch an investigation. She decided that for the moment she’d settle for keeping all the locals from killing each other.
She called the field near Clarendon where the helicopters had put down, and she sent one of them to the refugee camp north of town, and told them to wait there and prevent any of the locals from disturbing whatever they found there.
Whatever happened, she could preserve the evidence.
She told the sheriff’s department to stand down. She ordered the auxiliaries to go home. She replaced the deputies at the barricades around the Carnegie Library with her own people.
Which put her own soldiers in the middle, between the library and the locals, and this was something she did not like. She made sure more soldiers were on the way—she called the Old Man and asked him to send her a battalion of MPs ASAP—but that still left a lot of armed people in the Carnegie Library who could lose their patience and start shooting up everything in sight whenever they decided to do so. Somebody needed to talk to them.