“This isn’t over,” Farris said. “As long as there are Tribues on this planet, there will be one to hunt you down.”
“He’s lying,” Lucy said. “The Tribues have played out their string. Now with Otis gone and Martin and Uncle Mike, there’s just this last one left.”
“What about this boy, Shelley?” As she spoke the name, Charlotte felt Farris’s back grow rigid against her gun barrel.
“Oh, him,” Lucy said. “You got nothing to fear from that one. Way I hear it, that boy can’t wipe the snot off his own nose.”
Charlotte prodded Farris forward with the pistol.
He took two steps into the hallway and said, “This isn’t finished. This will never be finished.”
“You may be right about that,” she said. “But you’re finished. That’s for damn sure.”
Charlotte walked him down the stairway and outside onto the porch and told him to go on down into the yard. Sheffield and Parker spotted them and came running, followed by a swarm of deputies and agents. Guns were drawn all about her, questions shouted, but Charlotte didn’t respond. Lost in the moment, watching Farris’s shoulders for any sign of that twitch.
She prodded him out into the center of the lawn. His men stepping forward to block her further progress. The two white poodles wriggled through for a view of the proceedings.
“Now halt right there,” she said. “Keep the hands up, don’t move.”
“They’re growing heavy,” Farris said.
“Lower them and you die.”
“What happened?” Sheffield said. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I’ll explain later. Somebody cuff this guy.”
“I gotta have a reason here, Charlotte. Talk to me.”
“It’s what Parker told you.”
“Not credible, Monroe. Now put the gun down.”
One of the deputies made a threatening feint in her direction, and Charlotte waggled the pistol at him. He halted, and she resumed her aim at the center of Farris’s back.
“Farris killed Parker’s mother. That morning when he learned his brother had been murdered, he ducked into the museum, stole Tsali’s hatchet, then flew down to Miami and killed Diana on Tuesday night and he was coming for Parker and Gracey, too, but it all got a little too messy, so he turned around and flew back home and slid behind his sheriff’s desk and decided he’d just bide his time. But, lo and behold, the next day he hits the jackpot, because the whole Monroe clan suddenly shows up right in his own backyard.
“Isn’t that how it went, Farris? Tell Agent Sheffield. Unburden yourself, Farris. Go on, let it out.”
“She’s insane,” Farris said. “Someone disarm her.”
“If that’s how it was,” Sheffield said, “then we can check the airline passenger lists. Fine. We’ll do that, Charlotte. But right now, you’re going to have to put that weapon down. Do you hear me, Officer Monroe? Now.”
A few feet to her right, the dogs watched, alert to the unfolding events but showing no inclination to protect their master.
“Keep your hands up, Farris, and turn around so I can see you.”
Farris revolved slowly, his hands sagging to his ears.
“Hands higher!” she said. “Above your head.”
“Won’t anyone stop this outrage?” Farris said.
“Somebody give me some goddamn cuffs,” Charlotte shouted at the officers.
But no one moved to help. Roth and his team had drawn their pistols as well and were in a standoff with the deputies. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to decide who threatened them most.
Farris got honey in his voice and said, “Gracey, your granny is over there in the trees. I see her.”
“Shut up,” Charlotte told him.
“Granny?” Gracey said.
“Parker, come get Gracey.”
But one of the deputies blocked his way, gripping him by the arm.
“Put your weapon down, missus,” the deputy said. “Or we’ll be forced to fire.”
“Nobody’s going to shoot,” Sheffield said.
“Your granny. She’s over in the trees. Don’t you see her? Diana.”
“Another word, Farris, and you’re dead. It’s that simple.”
He smiled at her, and Charlotte saw again the boy in the videotape, the redheaded punk, his flattened lips, the fixed, lightless eyes. Here, kitty kitty.
The circle of police officers was tightening around her. Ten feet and inching closer.
Gracey took several wandering steps toward the grove of poplars.
“No, Gracey, you stay here, right here. Go to your dad.”
“She’s calling for you, Gracey. Don’t you hear her, your granny?”
Her daughter turned her back on Charlotte and headed at a trot across the field toward the trees. The dogs stared at Farris, and Charlotte felt a clock begin to tick in her chest, twenty seconds, nineteen. Here, kitty kitty.
Farris held her eyes and dared her. An unarmed man standing five feet away, threatening no one, doing nothing.
Then she saw it. His right hand drifting downward to his ear, curving forward toward his forehead.
An unarmed man. A man endangering no one. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven.
“Where?” Gracey called out. “Where is she?”
Farris touched his right hand to his forehead, the beginnings of a salute, and Charlotte put two rounds in his gut that knocked him sideways and spun him to the ground.
The dogs shied back a step but continued to observe the fallen man.
The deputies were in a frozen panic. She panned the pistol across the group and behind the men saw Lucy Panther trot away toward Gracey.
One of the deputies in the back of the pack broke into a sprint for his patrol car. But Charlotte could tell from Farris’s wounds that he was beyond the help of paramedics.
“Mom!” her daughter screamed. “Mom, what’s going on?”
“Drop your weapon, Officer Monroe,” Sheffield called out. “That’s a goddamned order. Drop it now.”
“He was going to kill my daughter,” Charlotte said.
“The man’s unarmed, Monroe. You shot a defenseless man.”
Farris groaned and heaved up a stringy mix of blood and slime.
“He was going to kill Gracey. I read it in his face.”
“His goddamn face? Are you nuts? She’s over there, fifty yards away.”
Sheffield was coming toward her, one hand extended for her pistol, the other aiming his .357 at her chest.
Struggling onto his left elbow, Farris groaned and brought his hand up and completed the salute and the two white poodles loped away toward Gracey.
Charlotte fired twice more into Farris and settled her aim on the dogs, but before she could squeeze off a round, Lucy Panther stepped into their path and opened her arms wide. The dogs leaped onto her, knocked her to the ground, and tore at her head and neck and shoulders.
It lasted only seconds, then they fell away from Lucy’s broken body and ambled into the shade of the poplars and lay down to lick each other’s muzzles.
Lowering their pistols, the deputies parted for her and Charlotte sprinted across the field and dropped to her knees beside her weeping daughter. Parker and Sheffield were there seconds later.
“What?” Gracey sputtered through her sobs. “What did I do?”
“You were fine,” Charlotte said. “Just wonderful, Gracey. You did exactly right. It’s over now. It’s over.”
“Lucy Panther saved my life. She saved my life, didn’t she, Mother?”
“Yes, she did. Lucy was very brave. Very, very brave.”
Forty-Five
More than sixty skulls were found among the refuse at the bottom of Raven’s Gorge. Shattered human bones of every sex and age, and even the recent remains of a young woman from Congressman Tribue’s own staff. A mass grave of such proportion that it would take years to excavate and sort out.
Before they returned to Miami, Charlotte and Parker went to meet Shelley Tribue. Marg
ie Hornbuckle, his caretaker, led them out to a sunny field where they found Shelley sitting in an old lounge chair that someone had dragged into the middle of the meadow.
The gangly young man had a drawing pad balanced on his knees and was using a box of colored pencils to draw circles on the white sheet.
“He says that’s his father,” Margie said. “The boy can’t get enough of drawing his father.”
The circles were the size of quarters, and there were two dark dots in each one that Shelley must have intended to be the vacant eyes of Farris Tribue.
“He misses that man already,” Margie said. “Don’t ask me why.”
Officer Charlotte Monroe went back to work with Dr. Fedderman and applied herself to becoming one of his disciples, learning his mystifying muscle groups so she could teach others the skills she still didn’t fully believe she possessed. It was the bargain she’d made, so she honored it, but her heart wasn’t in the daily grind of videotapes and flashing microexpressions. The detailed diagrams of skinless faces, with strands of muscles and tendons and branching nerves, all to be memorized.
She decided she owed them a year. After that she would press the button on her ejection seat and parachute back to the streets. There’d be pressure for her to stay, but she could handle that. In the meantime, she watched faces for eight hours a day and learned what they asked her to learn.
In early July, Marvin Drury, the teenager Parker had successfully defended in the Miami High coach’s shooting, was involved in another incident.
A math teacher tutoring Marvin in summer school pissed the kid off and took two rounds in the shoulder for his misstep. The teacher survived, but Marvin was charged with attempted first degree. The boy’s mother pled with Parker to take her boy’s case, but Parker informed her that he wasn’t that kind of lawyer. Second chances were within his province, but beyond that he would not go.
In early July, Charlotte found a camp for Gracey out on Key Biscayne. Not a sleepover place like Camp Tsali, no charismatic director, but a good-hearted woman who specialized in artistic types. They would be performing Othello for the closing ceremony, and after a week of grueling auditions, Gracey won the female lead.
When the kids weren’t rehearsing or memorizing lines, they swam in the Atlantic and learned to scuba dive. Gracey seemed okay with it, as okay as she was with anything. Not ecstatic, not glum, but going dutifully each morning and coming home each afternoon smelling of salt water and sunscreen.
The beaded disk arrived in early August. It appeared in Charlotte’s mailbox at the Gables police department. The envelope was flimsy and water-stained. It was addressed in a scrawl that was barely legible, like the quaking hand of someone two hundred years old. No address, no zip code. Simply: TO CHARLOTTE MONROE, BELOVED WOMAN. CORAL GABLES POLICE DEPARTMENT. The disk was woven with a different design than Diana’s. A face with two large blue eyes staring out at the world with such simple wisdom that Charlotte could only wish that one day she might approximate such sight.
Middle of August, there was a hurricane out in the Atlantic. Harold, a Category 4, spinning their way. The TV weather guys were hyped. Its path looked like a direct hit on Miami, so Gracey’s dad was putting up the aluminum shutters. Him and the guy he used for yard work. Hernando Gonzalez, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, a Cuban rafter who’d made it across the ninety-mile stretch of open ocean so he could live in Hialeah with his cousins and do tree-trimming for her dad and people like him.
Gracey thought he was cute. Tall with long lashes and a funny smile. That smile would start to take shape on his lips, then he’d swallow, his big Adam’s apple bobbing, and he’d made the grin disappear like he was afraid someone might see how happy he was and deport him back to Cuba.
She was in her room studying Shakespeare. Trying to get her lines down. But something was nagging at her. How could Othello be so stupid as to fall for Iago’s bullshit? How could Desdemona love a guy that completely dumb? But she was trying to make herself believe it. Iago keeps whispering and whispering into Othello’s ear, making him crazier and crazier. Okay, so that was something she could identify with. A start.
Working on her lines while out her window Hernando Gonzalez and her dad did the shutters. Her part had her saying:
My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty
To you I am bound for life and education,
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you: you are the lord of duty,
I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband;
And so much duty as my mother show’d
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.
She understood some of it, the divided duty part anyway. Boyfriend versus Dad. But the rest was giving her trouble. Looking out the window at the skinny Cuban guy with those lashes. Then coming out of the goddamn blue, there was Steven Spielberg. After all these months of silence, then bang, there he was again like nothing had ever happened.
Telling her about that scene with Lucy sprawled naked on the bed. Wasn’t it better that she was naked? Didn’t that scene have a little extra oomph? Didn’t it? Come on, Gracey, admit it. I was right, wasn’t I?
What it had was a little extra tit, Joan said, if you call that oomph. But Joan sounded meek and far away, like her heart wasn’t in it anymore. Off in the clouds. And Barbara Stanwyck said, now, now, don’t let them bother you. Do your lessons. Read your play. Shoot higher, girl. Tits and ass, explosions, all that thrill-a-minute carnival ride bullshit, that’s written by little boys, for little boys. You’re a woman now. So start acting like one. ’Cause that’s how it is, right? You act a part well enough, you become that person.
But Gracey didn’t buy any of it. Not even the woman thing. As nice and supportive as Barbara Stanwyck was, Gracey told her, along with the others, that she was busy. She had work to do. A play to memorize. A part, a good part, juicy, something to sink her teeth into. Shakespeare, for godsakes.
And that boy out her window, there was him, too. That funny smile he had. Smiling, but sad somehow, like there were things he’d seen he’d never get over. Gracey knew about that. Oh, yes, she knew all about that.
Also by James W. Hall
Off the Chart (2003)
Blackwater Sound (2001)
Rough Draft (2000)
Body Language (1998)
Red Sky at Night (1997)
Buzz Cut (1996)
Gone Wild (1995)
Mean High Tide (1994)
Hard Aground (1993)
Bones of Coral (1992)
Tropical Freeze (1990)
Under Cover of Daylight (1987)
Hot Damn! (2001)
Acknowledgments
As usual I’m indebted to many individuals who helped in the creation of this book. I relied extensively on the extraordinary work of Paul Ekman for the facial coding information. Dick Heidgerd, a solid friend from forty years back, provided abundant assistance on legal matters.
C. Walton Johnson was my inspiration in so many matters having to do with the natural world of North Carolina, Cherokee Indians, and summer camps. His memory sustains me in so many ways that it is impossible to note them all. I also must give credit to Reynolds Price, whose masterful novel The Tongues of Angels was a guide back to those early days of Camp Sequoyah and its powerful role in my life and the lives of so many young men of that era.
And as always, Evelyn, my wife, sacrificed much during the months of the creation of this book. Her steady and clear advice, her literary perception, and her rigorous honesty kept me marching on the right path.
This book is dedicated to her father, William Francis Crovo, a man who had a stong passion for Native Americans and the natural world. I am grateful for the wisdom and generosity of spirit he imparted to his daughter, for it is through that legacy he bestowed on her that I am lucky enough to know him.
FORESTS OF THE NIGHT. Copyright © 2005 by James W. Hall. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hall, James W. (James Wilson), 1947-
Forests of the night: a novel / James W. Hall.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-312-27180-0
1. Policewomen—Fiction. 2. Mountain life—Fiction. 3. Runaway teenagers—Fiction. 4. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Fugitives from justice—Fiction. 6. Great Smoky Mountains (N.C. and Tenn.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A369F67 2005
813′.54—dc22
2004056650
Forests of the Night Page 35
