Forests of the Night

by James W. Hall

  “Jesus Romero was right. You’re so far gone, there’s no bringing you back to this world.”

  “Who made the initial ID on Panther?”

  “Local sheriff up there. Why’s that important?”

  “Once a name gets attached to a photo, it sticks. Things become self-perpetuating. One long, self-fulfilling prophecy. What you look for, you see.”

  “So the sheriff’s in on it, too?”

  “What about the profile?” Parker said. “What motive do they have?”

  “He’s an angry member of an oppressed minority. An outcast. He’s striking back at a symbol of authority.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Parker laughed.

  “And you buy that, Charlotte?”

  “I’ve seen people do worse things for more trivial reasons.”

  “He blows up banks because he’s a member of an oppressed minority? Jesus Christ. Then why aren’t a thousand banks being blown up every day? We’ve got enough oppressed, angry outcasts to sustain a hell of a lot of bank bombings. That’s crackpot forensic psychology.”

  Charlotte watched the heavyset man across the aisle chug the last of his Bloody Mary and raise his glass and clink the ice at the attendant. He caught Charlotte watching him and gave her a sloppy smile and a full-frontal wink.

  “Buy you a drink?”

  “They’re free up here,” Charlotte said. “Hadn’t you heard?”

  “Then, hell, I’ll buy you two.”

  She turned back to Parker. He had his reading glasses on and he’d turned his attention back to the volume spread open in his lap.

  “Two eyewitnesses,” she said, “picked him from photo spreads.”

  “I remind you, Charlotte, that Panther is only in those photo spreads because some local yokel sheriff made an initial ID.”

  “Two eyewitness agreed with him, Parker.”

  He stared down at the page and shook his head.

  “I assume the bombings all happened after midnight.”

  “Ranged between two and four A.M.”

  “Victims all rent-a-cops?”

  “Five security officers, one young couple passing by, and one employee working late.”

  “Those eyewitnesses, what were they doing out at that time of night? Maybe a bottle of wine with dinner? Just how intoxicated were they? How’s their eyesight? When was the last time they visited an optometrist? What were the weather conditions—windy, misty rain? When’s their bedtime? Were they tired, in a hurry, anxious to get home?”

  “Two different eyewitnesses, two photo spreads.”

  “Weak,” Parker said. “Never met a photo spread I couldn’t dismantle.”

  Charlotte groaned.

  “What’s wrong, I’m too sleazy for you?”

  And again Charlotte heard it, embedded in the question, the faint reminder of her long-ago deliverance from jail. When she was behind bars, she sure as hell hadn’t cared if Parker was sleazy or not. And she hadn’t given a good goddamn about the finer points of jurisprudence that secured her release.

  “Get serious, Parker. This is no setup. This is about Panther blowing up banks for his own twisted reasons. Real flesh-and-blood men and women dying, like that guy at the airport. I’d like to hear you explain that one away.”

  “That one’s different,” Parker said. “That one he did.”

  “You’re kidding? Panther did that, but not the banks?”

  “I believe Jacob killed the man as a last resort. This man, Martin Tribue, what if he was working in tandem with whoever killed Mother? Say Jacob knew what was coming down and he intercepted the killer before he could carry out his mission. He got one but not the other. Or maybe he didn’t know about the second killer. I don’t know.”

  “The son of a congressman is an assassin? That’s your premise.”

  “Gut instinct. Hunch, whatever you call it. It’s my operating theory. Jacob intercepted the man at the airport, then came immediately to warn us. He was just getting around to it when Sheffield and the Keystone Kops arrived.”

  Charlotte shook her head.

  “All that’s based on Jacob saying ‘You’re next’? Jesus, Parker, for a logical, rational man, you’re flying off into the ether.”

  “I have Cardoza looking into Martin Tribue. We’ll see where that goes. But that’s my guess. Jacob’s trying to save our lives.”

  Miriam Cardoza had been Parker’s investigator for more than twenty years. Pre-Charlotte. A police academy washout. Couldn’t take the pushups, the running. A large lady, out of shape and getting heavier every year, but as smart and dogged as Parker and with endless aunts and uncles scattered through Little Havana and Hialeah. An indispensable virtue in South Florida.

  “There’s something we need to discuss, Charlotte.”

  He set the book at his feet, and out of his briefcase he pulled out a manila envelope.

  “That thing Mother said on the phone.” He cleared his throat, his voice parched. “Her last words.”

  Nineteen

  “I might’ve got it wrong,” Charlotte said. “Diana was mumbling.”

  “You didn’t get it wrong.”

  “I said she should lie down. I was trying to keep her calm, and she called me a beloved woman.”

  Parker shook his head.

  “This wasn’t about you. She wasn’t giving you her blessing.”

  He unlooped the string on the envelope, opened it, and held it out. She looked inside, inserted a finger, and tugged the opening wider, then reached in and drew out a flat, woven disk of beaded embroidery the size and heft of a silver dollar. Solid red on one side, a design on the other in beadwork of black and white and red. A pattern that struck her as vaguely familiar.

  Staring at the bulkhead, Parker said, “This was in her safe-deposit box.”

  “Something you made at summer camp?” Charlotte said. “A treasure from her little boy that she saved all these years.”

  Parker looked at her and smiled, but his eyes were elsewhere, as if he’d sprinted a long way ahead of her on the logic path and was absorbing a different view entirely from what she saw.

  Charlotte held the disk at arm’s length and squinted.

  “What is this? Some kind of Nazi crap?”

  “That’s a swastika, yeah,” he said. “But they were around forever before Hitler perverted them. Roman, Greek, Chinese. A good-luck image, symbol of power. This particular version is Cherokee.”

  Charlotte recalled where she’d seen the design before, and a cold prickle radiated down her shoulders.

  “This was on Panther’s shirt.”

  He nodded.

  “All right, Parker, talk to me. What’s going on?”

  “This isn’t a kid’s summer camp project. Look at that beadwork—no gaps, perfect lines. You can’t see knots or any sign of thread. It’s seamless. This is as close to Cherokee high art as you can get.”

  Parker bent forward and scooped the book from the floor and flopped it open to the page he’d tagged. A glossy color photograph showed a collection of embroidered disks. He pointed at one identical to the one in her hand.

  “What are they?”

  “These are facsimiles. Archaeologists have never actually found a real one. Only drawings, oral reports.”

  “And this one, it’s real?”

  “I’m no expert, but my guess is that it is, yes.”

  “All right. So what is it?”

  Parker closed the book and slipped it back in his briefcase, and groaned as he hauled up a heavier volume. He paged through the book until he came to another section of color plates.

  Tilting the book in her direction, he pointed to the same design of thick interlocking lines she’d seen on Jacob’s shirt. The swastika shape was elegantly made, with rounded edges like the overlapping blades of two scythes.

  In the color plate the design decorated an Indian’s shield. The man wore a headdress of red and black feathers, and from the bottom of the shield d
angled several more feathers. His loincloth was red, a scarlet cape hung across his shoulder, and in his right hand he gripped a bow and quiver of arrows. His chest was wide and rippled with heavy muscles, and around his neck hung some sort of amulet.

  “A warrior,” she said.

  “Not just any warrior. That’s the Great War Chief in full regalia. For the Cherokees he was nearly a deity. President, general, pope, all in one.”

  Parker’s voice had grown raspy. She’d heard that happen during interrogations just before a hard-ass suspect broke down and confessed, as if so unaccustomed to admitting the truth, the words burned his throat with their own fierce bile.

  “What’s it doing in Diana’s lockbox?”

  Parker took extra care drawing a breath, as if priming himself for a tricky admission.

  “Okay,” he said. “The phrase she used on the phone, Beloved Woman, that’s an honorary title. It’s pronounced ‘Ghi-ga-u’ in Cherokee. A Beloved Woman was equal in status to this guy.” Parker tapped a finger against the Great War Chief. “Over thousands of years of Cherokee history, only a handful of women ever earned that title. Like a goddess, a kind of sainthood.”

  Saint Diana, the Haughty, was on her tongue, but she restrained herself.

  “A Beloved Woman might come along once every other century. She had to be extraordinary in some way. Distinguish herself, make some enormous sacrifice, take a heroic risk. She became the subject of legend, stories that were passed on for generations. Ghi-ga-u. The Beloved Woman.”

  Charlotte mumbled the phrase under her breath.

  “Your mother’s dying words were about Cherokee folklore?”

  “It’s not folklore. The Beloved Woman was real, she had true power. She sat in the Council of Chiefs. Had an equal say in all matters about the future of the nation. And she was the ultimate judge of all captured enemies. She decided their fate. Life-and-death authority. She was a central part of their culture for thousands of years, long before our benighted civilization built its first cathedral. The Beloved Woman was deciding who lived and who died.”

  “Thumbs up, thumbs down.”

  “Exactly.”

  Parker closed his eyes, and his head dropped back against the seat. His expression was such a complex mixture of sadness, frustration, and fear, she was certain even Fedderman couldn’t parse it.

  “The tradition died out centuries ago,” Parker said. “The last Beloved Woman was Nanye-hi of the Wolf Clan. You want me to read her story? How she achieved her status?”

  “Paraphrase is fine.”

  He laid his head back against the seat and stared straight ahead.

  “In a battle with the Creeks, when her husband was struck down, she ran onto the battlefield and took up his weapon and waded into the enemy, against overwhelming odds. Inspiring the other Cherokees, she single-handedly turned the tide and saved her people. For that, she was elevated to Beloved Woman.”

  “So she becomes an honorary man.”

  He gave her a swift, slicing look.

  “This isn’t about gender politics.”

  “So what is it about? Say it. Speak the words.”

  Parker shifted in his seat so he was facing her.

  “I think it’s pretty obvious, the common denominator here.”

  “Not to me it isn’t.”

  “Red war club,” he said. “Great War Chief. Beloved Woman. I don’t know who the combatants are or what it’s about, Charlotte, but it looks to me like we’re in the middle of some kind of war.”

  Charlotte was silent, staring at Parker, waiting for him to smile, give her the punchline.

  “That’s what Jacob’s trying to tell us. We’re at war.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Very serious.”

  “That’s nuts, Parker. Totally and completely wacko.”

  “I don’t think so. I think Diana was a casualty. And I think we’re out on the battlefield, too, in the line of fire.”

  “And what’s that make Gracey, a goddamn POW?”

  “I think Jacob’s trying to protect her. Get her out of harm’s way.”

  “By enticing her to run off to his cave in the forest?”

  “He’s on our side. I can’t prove it, but that’s what my gut says.”

  “Your gut always says that.”

  “This is different. We can trust Jacob.”

  He brushed invisible crumbs off the lap of his khakis. He turned to her, but his eyes dodged away. Not the gesture of a man about to tell a lie, but a man about to tell a truth that was more than he could bear.

  “There’s something I never told you about Mother.”

  “Oh, God, here we go.”

  Charlotte stuffed the pages of Panther’s file back in the folder. She looked across the aisle at the drunk. He was smiling at her. Not only flexing his zygomatic major, but also tightening his orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis, the muscle encircling the eye. A genuine smile, impossible to fake. A 100 percent, no-bullshit, big, sloppy, alcoholic grin.

  Charlotte raised her hand and caught the flight attendant’s attention, and pointed to the man’s Bloody Mary, then pointed at herself. The attendant nodded and set to work making her drink.

  “Okay,” Charlotte said, turning back to Parker. “Hit me.”

  “Diana’s father was Giovanni Parisi.”

  “Yeah, and her mother was Millie Walker.”

  “Walkingstick,” he said. “Millie Walkingstick. A full-blooded Cherokee.”

  The flight attendant came around the edge of the galley and handed her the drink. Charlotte thanked her and took a healthy taste, then another.

  “You sure you should be drinking?”

  “Damn sure,” she said.

  He sighed and brushed more crumbs from his lap.

  “Both my grandparents were dead by the time I was five. I may have met Millie Walkingstick once or twice, but I have no clear memories.”

  “I don’t get it. Your dad revered Cherokees. Why would he go along?”

  “Maybe Mother was ashamed of her heritage. I don’t know why, exactly. But Dad honored her wishes. That’s how he was.”

  “How long have you known this?”

  “A few years. She wanted me to know my roots. I got the feeling there was something more she wanted to say, but she lost her nerve.”

  “Your roots. So she was half Cherokee, which makes you, what, a quarter? And Gracey an eighth? That how it works?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “And this Beloved Woman thing, let me get this straight. Because this badge is in Diana’s lockbox, you’re suggesting she’s one of those? A female war chief?”

  “What I think is…” He reached out and took the drink from her hand and swallowed what was left and set it down between them. “I think Mother did something heroic, something extraordinary for her people. I don’t know what, I don’t know when, but it’s part of this thing.”

  “Part of this war, you mean.”

  He nodded and his eyes drifted shut. His lips flattened as if he were straining to hold back a howl.

  Twenty

  For the last hundred miles Steven Spielberg had been whispering inside Gracey’s head, challenging her to quit whining about the smell that rose from her unwashed body, the lanky mess that her hair had become, the broken nail, a small ragged tear that continually snagged on the bus seat beneath her. He wanted her to embrace her discomfort, learn from it. She mumbled back that she was trying. Try harder, he said. You want to open up the depths of your inner life, you need to be on a first-name basis with pain.

  Okay, okay, she was working on it. She was. Steven went on talking, same theme, same words, over and over.

  Gracey felt herself drifting away.

  She had no idea buses were so slow, that they stopped so often, let people off, took more on. She could have walked the same route almost as fast. After ditching the car, she’d gone to the Jacksonville bus station, sleeping on a bench for a while, then leaving at eleven, and now it wa
s late afternoon, the bus stopping at one little nowhere town after another. Ever since the stop in Hardeeville, South Carolina, she’d been wedged in beside a young black man in overalls and a white dress shirt buttoned to his throat. He was muscular and kept his hands cupped in his lap, and he smelled like a smokehouse where hams were cured or perhaps the insides of a barn where tobacco dried. He smelled like the Deep South, like red clay baking in the endless sun.

  Gracey’d been smelling the man and listening to Steven’s plans for her, his urgings, his wild flipping of the channels in her mind. She adored Steven and respected his artistic work but was beginning to have faint doubts about things working out between them. Their partnership.

  He was so different from her. So much older, so much more accomplished. She could hear Mr. Underwood talking, too, like a voice on a phone line bleeding in from the background.

  The bus stopped in downtown Columbia, but Gracey stayed in her seat, didn’t even get off to pee, stretch her legs, buy crackers, or anything, because Jacob Panther had begun speaking to her.

  His words were shaped with perfect edges, like photographs in super-sharp focus. Every word he’d spoken to her still hovered like a tangy flavor that wouldn’t die.

  She sat on the bus and finally it pulled away and chugged back onto the highway and she sat back and watched the miles.

  Gracey was tired and her back ached and she smelled the black man next to her. His honest scent. She listened to the voices flipping the channels in her head. Listening to them all, but she kept returning to Jacob’s words, which burned deeper, brighter, and seemed louder somehow than even Steven’s voice. Though she knew Jacob had made no movies, probably had not even seen a movie. Still, it was Jacob’s voice she heard above all else.

  He repeated everything he’d said in their one meeting. The exact words in the exact order, like a memory, only newer and more real than it had been the first time. He repeated it all—where she could find him, the names and numbers she should look for, the towns along the way, the mountain ranges, telling her all of it again in his fast, efficient, effortless voice. Jacob Panther. Her half brother.