An hour later, winding up the steep entrance drive to the Tribue estate, she said, “It’s possible Milford called Farris by now, and he knows we’re on the way.”
“So how do we play it?”
“Get Sheffield alone. Tell him what we know. What else is there?”
“He won’t buy it, nobody in their right mind would. All we’ve got is a bunch of disconnected facts. A booklet with our names in it, a locket with an old drawing. No clear connection to Mother’s murder. No connection to Jacob. Just a pound and a half of speculation. Nothing hard.”
“Gracey saw Farris shooting at her.”
“Put Gracey into the middle of this? You’re not serious. And is Sissy a reliable witness? Not on your life.”
“Okay, look, I’ve been studying this booklet, Parker. And the way it seems, at least three-quarters of the people in this book, Tsali’s ancestors, died before the age of twenty. Violent deaths, knife wounds, falls from high places. Gunshots. Disappearances are common. Three-quarters of them, Parker.”
He shook his head and half-closed his eyes, unimpressed.
“So you got a long history of accidents, high incidence of violent deaths, it could be random for all we know. Take that to a DA along with this crackpot tale, he’d laugh you out of his office, pure and simple. Who knows, maybe those death stats are the normal life expectancy for the tribe. These are hard-living people, not famous for their healthy lifestyles.”
“You don’t believe any of this?”
“Oh, I believe it,” Parker said. “But we need something a little more concrete. Like a signed confession.”
“One look at Farris, you know that isn’t gonna happen. Guy’s got antifreeze pumping through him.”
“Suggestions?”
“Get inside his house,” she said. “Locate the rifle he used on Jacob.”
“Come on. You’re going to steal a weapon from the sheriff’s house to run a ballistics test? Jesus, Charlotte. You’re not thinking straight.”
“There’s got to be something.”
“Give it to Sheffield. This is his world.”
“Sheffield,” she said and groaned. “God help us.”
He parked alongside a group of white Fords like the ones Frank’s people had been using. Through the hemlocks and pines, she could make out a grassy lawn where the two white poodles and a half-dozen local police were milling around.
“You sure about this?” he said. “Nothing says we have to do it now.”
“Why don’t you and Gracey stay in the car? I’ll lay it out for Frank, then the three of us can chew it over later.”
“I got to take a whiz, Mom. Big time.”
“Can you use the bushes?”
“No way,” Gracey said. “There’s snakes everywhere up here.”
Charlotte looked back at Gracey.
“I’m serious, Mom. I got to go like right now. I can’t hold it.”
“Okay, so you go with her,” Parker said. “I’ll handle Frank.”
Charlotte didn’t like it, but Gracey was squirming, so she hitched her backpack over her shoulder and they set off through the trees to join the gathering.
Halfway across the field, the two poodles spotted them and trotted over and gave them all a good sniff. The dogs homed in on Gracey, nosing her crotch, pawing her jeans for attention. She squatted down and they nuzzled her neck while she giggled and dug her hands into their coats.
A moment later Farris arrived with Frank at his side. Farris was dressed in black trousers and a dark collarless shirt. Frank sent Charlotte a strained and questioning look, but Charlotte made no attempt to respond.
“Once again,” Parker said, “our condolences for your loss, Sheriff.”
Farris bowed his head in mock gratitude.
“A release from his earthly pain. A better place and all that.”
Charlotte drew Gracey away from the dogs.
“Is there a bathroom we can use?” she said. “Gracey’s in need.”
“Forensics are finished,” Frank said, “the body’s out, you’re free to go inside. Long as Sheriff Tribue says yes.”
Farris said, “I’ll be happy to show you the way.”
“You’re most gracious.” She shot Parker a parting look—make it fast.
Trailed by the dogs, they walked in silence across the terraced lawn, and Charlotte halted at the front steps. She looked back to see Frank listening intently to Parker’s story.
“Mom, I gotta go. Come on.”
Farris raked Charlotte with a tight-lipped scowl, and for some reason she was reminded of the red-haired boy in Fedderman’s videotape, the single scenario she’d gotten wrong. The kid aiming his pistol at that cornered cat. Here, kitty kitty.
“Down the main hallway,” Farris said, “second door on the left. That’s the guest bath.”
She thanked him, and she and Gracey, trailed by the dogs, mounted the porch. When the two of them pushed through the screen door, the dogs halted outside.
Gracey went into the tiny lavatory, and Charlotte stood guard in the foyer, looking back through the screen. Parker and Sheffield were bent close, but when Farris arrived, they stepped apart and gazed out at the distant peaks. She tried to read Frank’s face, but at that distance his features were a blur.
Some of the FBI guys were out near the edge of what looked like a ravine, while Farris’s tribal police squatted down in the grass in the shade of a grove of poplars. It was a standard cooling-off time at a death scene. The work done, but nobody ready to leave the area quite yet.
The toilet flushed and a moment later Gracey reappeared.
“Better?”
“I heard a voice,” Gracey said.
“What voice?”
“Upstairs, a voice. Through the plumbing or something.”
“Gracey, come on, we’re leaving. We can’t stay here.”
“I recognized it. Lucy Panther’s in trouble.”
Charlotte took Gracey by the elbow and steered her toward the screen door, but she yanked away.
“I heard her voice, goddamn it, in the pipes, I heard her groaning, Mother. I did. I’m not hallucinating, okay?”
She was halfway up the stairs before Charlotte recovered and followed.
When she made it to the landing, she found Gracey standing still with her head cocked to listen. The room at the head of the stairs was crisscrossed with yellow police tape.
“She’s in there,” Gracey said and started toward the front bedroom.
“Gracey, we’ll send Sheffield in. It’s not our place.”
“You’re a cop, right? Isn’t this what you’re supposed to do, save people?”
Gracey stormed past her and halted outside the door and tried the knob, but it was locked.
She pressed her ear to the wood.
“Listen if you don’t believe me.”
Charlotte sighed and stepped beside her and flattened her ear to the door, and yes, there was a muffled grunt. Two feet away, the sound was lost.
“You inherited your father’s hearing.”
“I told you.”
“Okay, step back.”
The girl dodged away, and Charlotte retreated two steps and threw herself forward, planting her kick near the knob. The door gave but didn’t break. She repeated it and, on the third try, the edge splintered and the door flew inward. Gracey rushed inside with Charlotte two steps behind.
Spread-eagled on a double bed, Lucy Panther was naked, her wrists and ankles lashed to the posts, her mouth covered with layers of gray duct tape, her head tipped to the side near a tiny sink. Her grunts had not made it beyond the door, but somehow they’d found their way down the pipes to the floor below.
She looked at Charlotte and Gracey with a composure that belied her situation.
Charlotte peeked out the edge of the front window and saw Farris and Sheffield and Parker engaged in conversation.
Charlotte hurried back to the foot of the bed and pried a green comforter from beneath Lucy’s bound leg
s, then shook it out full length to cover her nakedness.
Lucy nodded her thanks.
Making a quick search of the dressing table for something sharp, Charlotte found nothing, then remembered the nail scissors in her bag.
When she snipped the gag loose, Lucy’s first words were, “Get the hell out of here, both of you. He’ll find you. Go now.”
Charlotte set to work on Lucy’s right wrist. As she sliced the gummy fabric, Gracey said, “What happened, Lucy?”
“More than I can tell. More than anyone should have to hear.”
“Like what?”
“You need to get out of here. I’m serious.”
“So am I,” said Charlotte.
She tipped her bag to the side and showed Lucy the Beretta.
Lucy Panther said, “Last night I got the whole damn history lesson. Back to the beginning of time. You wouldn’t believe the shit this family’s been up to the last two hundred years.”
“Oh, yeah,” Charlotte said. “We’ve been putting it together ourselves.”
She had the right wrist loose and was working on the ankle.
“You know about Molly Tribue?”
“Wife of Matthew,” Charlotte said. “The soldier Tsali killed.”
“You hear about the whorehouse?”
Charlotte said yes, she’d heard that part, too.
The tape on the ankle was thicker, five or six layers deep, straining the scissors.
“The reservation was the Tribues’ private hunting club, you know what I mean, one of those places where they stock all this wild game in a fenced-in area. They go out with their high-powered rifles and bag a rhino. Only it was Tsali’s bloodline they wanted.”
Lucy wriggled the right leg loose, and Charlotte moved around the bed to work on the other side.
“That gun loaded?” Lucy said.
“It is.”
“You’re going to need it. Getting out of here, you’re damn well going to need it. You can’t trust Farris’s deputies. Not one of them.”
Charlotte looked up and saw Gracey standing at the front window.
“Get away from there, Gracey, before someone sees you.”
The girl ducked aside and grinned.
“Nobody saw me,” she said. “Nobody but those stupid dogs.”
One of the poodles had begun a listless barking.
“Two more things I gotta tell you, in case I don’t make it out of here alive,” Lucy said.
“Don’t say that. You’re going to make it.”
“The gun Otis used on Parker’s dad, some old cheap-ass revolver, it’s in that drawer over there.”
As Charlotte worked on the remaining tape, she heard a distant crow cawing and another answering back in a minor key. Outside in the lawn, the poodle continued to woof in a lazy tempo like the background bass of late-night jazz.
“Mike Tribue’s the only one in the family worth a damn.”
“Far as the law’s concerned,” Charlotte said, “Mike’s an accomplice. He knew what was going on, but did nothing. He’d be treated the same as the doer of the deed.”
“That accomplice saved your life.”
“If he knew the truth, he should never have let it get as far as it did.”
“Old Mike was a gentle spirit,” Lucy said. “Men like that don’t come at things like you and me, head on. They’re roundabout. But that doesn’t make them guilty. It’s just a different approach. He sat on the sidelines, watching the rest of his family, knowing someday it might boil up again, and when it did, he came to me and Jacob and laid it out. I give him credit. Not much, but some.”
“And then he sent you off to do what he lacked the courage for.”
“Men do the best they can with the gumption God provided.”
Charlotte got back to work and stripped another layer of tape away.
“And the banks?” she said. “That was Farris and Martin, too?”
“Yeah, Jacob went and ran his mouth to the police about the Tsali story, and Farris got wind of it.”
“Why the hell blow up the banks?”
“Sons of bitches,” Lucy said. “Once Farris and Martin heard Jacob was yammering about that old conspiracy, those two boys figured a way to get Jacob on the run so nothing he ever said again would be believed. Or me either, for that matter.”
Charlotte jabbed her fingertip with the needle point of the scissors and had to suck away the blood before going on.
“And your father, Standingdog? He took the fall, why?”
“My goddamn fault,” Lucy said. “I got pregnant and he found out.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Standingdog went barging in to see Chief and Parker’s mom at the summer camp, ready to kill them for what their son did. And Diana had no choice but to tell him who she was. The whole Tsali thing. Her being an ancestor. Which meant my baby was going to be one, too.”
“So if the truth ever came out about who Jacob’s daddy was, Jacob would become a target.”
Lucy nodded.
“So your daddy went to prison to protect his grandson.”
“Far as I know,” said Lucy, “that was the one good thing he ever did.”
“It kind of outweighs a lot of bad.”
While she worked with the scissors, she ran through the snarl of secrets and motives and sacrifice and deceit and got stuck on one simple question.
“Why couldn’t Diana and Charles go to the police? A couple of upstanding people like them, they’d be taken seriously.”
“What’re they going to say? A boogeyman’s after me? I don’t care how upstanding they were, no cop I ever met is going to waste a second on that kind of superstition. Up here, where everybody’s married to their second cousin, isn’t any way to know who to trust. So Parker’s mom did the one thing she could after the fire, she ran off and hid herself and Parker. It’s what I would’ve done myself.”
Charlotte’s head swirled. Trying to imagine Diana’s daily dread as her son rose in his profession, became a subject of headlines and news stories.
“You said you had two things to tell us,” said Gracey.
Her left ankle was free, and Charlotte had the left wrist almost done.
Lucy started to speak, then grimaced and shook her head as if the words had thickened in her throat and lodged there.
“Go on, Lucy. It’s okay.”
Lucy puckered her lips and whistled down a long breath.
“A bunch of the Cherokees they killed over the years, Tsali’s people, the goddamn Tribues heaved their carcasses into that gorge out there. That’s where my own body was headed soon as Farris had enough of it. That ravine goes straight down a half-mile and ends in scrub pine. It would take a mountain climber with ropes and pulleys to get down there. Bones from a hundred years ago mingled with last week’s kitchen trash.”
Lucy Panther was free, struggling to rise. Charlotte gave her a boost, and Lucy sat up and began to rub at her hands and feet, getting the blood back.
“Someone’s coming up the stairs, Mom.”
Charlotte took a glimpse out the window and saw Sheffield and Parker still standing on the lawn. A single white poodle was pointing its snout up toward the window where she stood, barking and barking.
Forty-Four
When he saw the Monroe child in the front window, Farris knew it was finished. Not that he’d ever doubted it would end badly. His father’s autopsy would be impossible to explain. Gasoline in his veins. His fate was sealed.
Farris knew his mother would approve of that part at least. The IV, the torturous agony her husband had to endure. Although it fell well short of her own months of misery. As he walked toward the house, he looked through the trees toward the barn. When had he last emptied the rattraps? Their bodies rot, you know, and the smell, oh my God the smell, once it permeates those old pine planks, it will be there forever. And your teeth. The plaque, the floss, and the toilets. Don’t forget to clean below the rim. That’s where it accumulates, the scum. You’ve got
to stay on top of it, or the porcelain will be ruined. How many times had she told him? The toilets, his teeth, the rattraps. How many times?
Farris marched toward the house, knowing it was almost over. A relief of sorts. A quiet serenity suffused him. If all was lost and Farris was never again to see his boy and breathe his breath, then, at the very least, he would accomplish some last portion of what he’d been charged to do. One of the Monroes would die. Which one, it hardly mattered anymore.
If she’d had more than thirty seconds to plan it out, Charlotte would have devised something more creative. But as it was, she worked with what she had in the fleeting seconds available.
She stashed Gracey in one closet and Lucy in another.
Then she flattened her back against the wall, just beyond the range of the door’s inward swing.
All she wanted was a second of distraction, maybe two.
Lucy had barely shut herself inside her closet when Farris kicked the broken door open, his SIG Sauer coming through at shoulder height. There was a pause as he absorbed the scene before him. An empty bed, an empty room.
Charlotte chose her spot and hacked the pistol’s steel casing across his knobby wrist. His handgun went skittering across the floor, and she hopped away from the wall with a two-handed grip, sighting on his sternum. Giving him orders to put up his hands, turn around.
Farris obeyed without comment. She saw twin flickers pass across his face, the grim sag of defeat morphing into desperate fury and then back again.
Lucy came out of her closet wearing a green robe. Standing at a distance, Gracey looked on in a soundless rapture.
“Get his gun, Lucy. Cover him while I pat him down. And if he flinches, you empty that thing, okay? Don’t worry about hitting me.”
“I won’t be hitting you.”
With her Beretta jammed against his spine, Charlotte frisked him one-handed, feeling through the black funeral clothes the tense, wiry body beneath, but finding no more weapons, nothing, not even a wallet or keys.
But still her right first finger was curled with four pounds of pressure against a five-pound trigger. Twitch and he was gone.
Forests of the Night Page 34
