Forests of the Night (29 page)

“So what's the motive? Standingdog was battling with my father. But these other two guys, what in the hell is pushing their buttons?”

“I don't know,” she said. “We're still missing something.”

Parker leaned back in his chair and peered up at the ceiling.

“A hundred and fifty years ago an illiterate Cherokee sacrifices his life so his people can stay in their homeland. And because of that somebody kills my father, and thirty years later they murder my mother and now seem to be hunting down the rest of us? What the hell is this, Charlotte? What the hell?”

She logged off her computer and looked at him while it cycled down.

“If Uncle Mike was telling the truth, they were hunting Diana and you and Gracey, but not me. That tells me something, Parker.”

But he wasn't listening to her.

“
Ga-du-gi
,” he said. “Standingdog said that at the trial?”

He'd taken his eyes out of focus and didn't seem to be waiting for an answer. So she gave him none.

At a quarter after twelve, flustered and uncertain, Nancy Feather arrived at the Tribues' estate. Farris met her at her car, led her to the front porch, and installed her in a rocker that was angled away from the dog-training area.

He offered her a half-sandwich from the tray on the side table, and Nancy, somewhat unnerved by the enormity of the occasion, snatched it up and took an immediate bite. When she'd chewed and swallowed, she patted her mouth with one of the linen napkins and tried to compose herself.

Nancy Feather ruffled the fur of one of the dogs. Standing still with strict patience, the dog gazed off toward the wide view of wilderness, range after range of mountains stacked behind one another into the hazy distance. Another spring storm was darkening the southern sky, some distant rumbles rolling up the valley.

Sprawled nearby, the other dog assumed a position of tranquillity, but his eyes continually darted in his master's direction.

Farris extended the serving tray, and Nancy Feather selected one of the glasses of iced lemonade.

“I wish I had longer than an hour for lunch, Farris. But you know how it is. We working girls.”

She took an anxious peek at her watch.

“We have plenty of time. Not to worry.”

“I was kind of surprised, you calling. All hush-hush, don't tell anybody where I was going. Kind of scared me, I guess. Thinking maybe I'd done something wrong. I was going to get interrogated or something.”

Farris shared a laugh with the woman.

Nancy Feather wore white jeans and a green blouse that was rigidly ironed. Chopped short, her black hair lay flat and lifeless on her skull as if it, too, had been ironed until it had lost its will.

She had a round, homely face with a stubby nose, plump cheeks, and a chin with a deep cleft.

In his crisp blue uniform Farris sat down beside her, and had a sip of his lemonade. She took a dainty bite of her sandwich and made a “yum” noise.

“You're a good cook, Farris. Most men can't boil an egg.”

He gave her thanks and bit into his own sandwich.

Nancy, in her anxious desire to please, had not dared to change her chair's position. Though a simple turn of her head would have brought Shannon Muldowny into view, Nancy had shown no interest in looking beyond Farris's face or the mountain range.

They ate their sandwiches and drank their lemonade and watched the thunderstorm roll northward, dragging with it several long curtains of rain.

“It's so beautiful here,” Nancy Feather said. “I can't hardly imagine what it would be like to have every day free just to watch the weather and play with my dogs.”

“Are you applying for the position?” Farris said.

Some magazine or insipid friend had coached her to laugh frequently and with gusto at a suitor's remarks, and Nancy Feather applied the lesson with yet another whoop of laughter.

“Tell me about your work, Nancy.”

“Oh, it's nothing really. Typing contracts, filling out forms. Nothing very demanding. I always wanted to be a schoolteacher, but I didn't have much of a head for books.”

“But travel,” Farris said, bringing her flighty mind back to the issue. “Surely that must be an exciting benefit to your work.”

“No, I don't get to travel. I just buy tickets for other people.”

“I see.” Farris looked over at the dogs and they both stiffened.

“If I lived in a place like this, I'd never travel. Why would I want to when I could just sit out here all day and all night and never be bored?”

“Eating plate after plate of bonbons,” Farris said.

She looked at him with momentary alarm, then again resorted to a hearty laugh at his display of wit.

“I believe you handled my brother Martin's bookings, did you not?”

“Oh, poor Martin. Everybody is so shocked. Struck down like that right out in public in a big-city airport. I've heard terrible stories about Miami. I don't know why anyone goes there at all. Though if they came into the office saying they wanted to travel to Miami and I was to tell them how dangerous it was down there, Mr. Weatherby would fire me in a minute.”

“You arranged Martin's trip to Miami?”

She was not so dense that she failed to hear the harsh authority in his voice.

“Yes, sir. I did all his plans.”

“Call me Farris, please, Nancy. No need for such formality.”

Now Nancy was thoroughly befuddled. Was this police business or a social call or something else entirely? The moment had tipped precipitously, and her round face was pinched with worry.

“I didn't know young Mr. Tribue that good. But he always asked for me. I guess he thought I was nice or something.”

Nancy took a hurried sip of her lemonade and plucked the rest of her sandwich from the plate and bit into it in such haste that she appeared to believe she was about to be evicted.

“Do you have any friends, Nancy? Women you talk to sometimes?”

“Sure, I have friends.”

“Do you ever discuss your work with your friends?”

“It's usually so boring at work, there's nothing to talk about.” Then she laughed again.

One of the poodles stood up and walked over, its nails clicking against the oak planks. It stopped in front of Nancy and stared at her.

“I'm curious,” Farris said. “Mr. Weatherby told me he thought one of your friends might be Lucy Panther. Is that true?”

Nancy Feather looked at the poodle standing just two feet in front of
her. She reached out and patted its head with a hand so stiff she might have been flattening dough. The dog could tolerate her touch no longer and turned and rejoined its littermate.

“Me and Lucy were in the same class at reservation school. We knew each other from a long time back.”

“Do you still see her, talk to her?”

Farris watched as she wrestled with the question. She looked at the poodle, then out at the distant storm.

“I see her,” she said quietly. “Sometimes.”

“Did you by any chance discuss Martin Tribue's recent travel plans with Lucy Panther, your friend from long ago?”

She swallowed and set the remains of her sandwich back on the plate.

“I'm not supposed to talk about the personal affairs of our clients. That's one of the rules. Mr. Weatherby's very strict about his rules and regulations. They're on the bulletin board in big letters.”

“Don't worry about Julius. This discussion is strictly confidential.”

“Okay.” Her breathing had become shallow and irregular. “Well, yeah, I might have said something to her about Mr. Tribue going to Miami.”

“Why did you do that? Did she query you on the matter?”

“Query?”

“Did Lucy Panther ask you to keep her informed about Martin's plans?”

She shrugged and licked her lips and looked longingly at the remains of her sandwich.

“I guess so,” she said. “Lucy knew Martin, and I guess she was curious what he was up to. You know, his comings and goings.”

“Where can I find Lucy Panther?”

She shook her head, mouth clamped like a child refusing medicine.

“You won't tell me such a harmless thing as that?”

“Those FBI men, they've been hounding her for two years, tracking her everywhere she goes. I swore not to say where she was living, not tell anyone.”

“But I'm not just anyone,” Farris said.

Again Nancy Feather shut her mouth tightly.

When he stood up from his chair, both dogs rose in unison.

Farris reached down and gripped the back of Nancy Feather's rocker and wrenched it ninety degrees to the left.

She looked over her shoulder at Farris. Eyebrows arched, her mouth a dark, perfect hole of shock.

“Now watch,” he said.

Nancy turned her gaze to the clearing where Shannon Muldowny was gagged and bound to a wooden fence post, her arms and legs loose so she could make some attempt at defending herself.

Farris had taken care to plant the post in a shallow footing, so it would collapse when sufficient force was applied. Thus the dogs would be less likely to injure themselves when they flung their bodies at her.

With the dogs focused intently on his every move, Farris raised his hand to his forehead, held it there for a moment, then he saluted the young woman from Boston. His father's concubine, his mother's replacement.

Without hesitation, his two poodles rushed from the porch, scampered across the lawn, and did their silent duty.

It was the first time he'd substituted human flesh for the mannequin, and Farris was pleased to see the dogs appeared to notice no difference.

Martin would have been thrilled.

Nancy Feather closed her eyes and ducked her head, but Farris ordered her to open them and she obeyed, however briefly.

“Now tell me, Nancy, where I can find Lucy Panther.”

Getting out of the bathtub was the easy part.

Nancy Feather got her duct-taped feet over the edge of the tub, and she wedged her back against the other side and straightened out as much as she could. Inch by inch she shifted her balance farther toward the open side of the tub until she got her knees over it and scooched down toward her thighs, then she had to press hard with the back of her head and thrust her skull against the wall. With a loud grunt she seesawed out.

She crumpled onto the white tile floor. Outside, in the hallway, she could hear the dogs pacing. Their claws clacked on the wood as if they were standing guard.

She got to her knees and wriggled into a standing position.

Farris was gone. She'd heard his police cruiser pull out about ten minutes before. Only reason she was still alive was because he probably doubted she'd told him the truth, and wanted to be able to come back and torture it out of her later if she'd lied.

She hadn't lied. She told him where Lucy Panther was staying. So scared he was about to feed her to his devil dogs like he'd done that pale-skinned girl. Confused and telling herself it was her only chance, she'd confessed to this evil man where her friend was hiding.

She was mortified. She should've been smarter and sent him on a wild-goose chase, and tried to escape before he returned. But seeing the girl die made her head swirly, and she'd done the totally wrong thing.

Now her only way of fixing it was to get free and warn poor Lucy. It was maybe a twenty-minute drive down the mountain and into the town of Cherokee, past the casino and out a couple of narrow roads, then into the woods a piece to the campground. Maybe twenty-five minutes total if he did the speed limit. So Nancy Feather guessed she had somewhere around ten minutes left. Ten minutes to save her best friend's life.

Earlier, out on the porch, Nancy Feather watched the pale blond woman go down and watched her kick and wriggle in the dirt and smack at the dogs while she was crippled up and hopeless from being fastened to a pole. Farris made her watch the last part, when the two dogs got the woman's throat and face and yanked their heads from side to side and then they stopped all at once and walked away into the shade and licked each others' faces, more like they were comforting each other than because they liked the taste of human blood.

After the woman was dead, he dragged Nancy Feather over to the body and made her see it close up. Then he hauled it out to the lip of the gorge and heaved it over, and told Nancy that's where she was going if she didn't tell him where Lucy Panther was hiding out.

So she'd done a Judas on her only real friend.

Now she stood in the bathroom, hands duct-taped behind her, ankles taped, mouth wrapped up tight so she could barely breathe through her nose. She looked around for scissors or a nail file or anything sharp but saw nothing sitting out. With her chin she opened the medicine cabinet and found it empty.

On the landing the dogs were rustling around, making a little more noise than before, like they knew she was up and around. Nancy Feather didn't know if they'd go for her without a signal from Farris. But that was getting ahead of herself. What she needed now was some way to get free and do it fast enough so she could call Lucy's cell and warn her what godless thing was on the way.

Around the reservation there'd long been talk about Farris and his family, talk of evil doings, but she'd never taken it serious. Now she knew, by
God. Now she knew it was all true and more. More than anyone had guessed.

It didn't take her long to search the whole bathroom and see it was useless. Nothing anywhere. And the door was locked from the outside, so it looked like she was stuck. She went back to the sink and looked at herself in the mirror, her sad face, her eternal pudginess. Then the idea came to her. The one thing Farris hadn't thought about. Smart man, yes. But Nancy Feather saw something he hadn't seen. Little fat squaw like her, she saw a way to beat him. She saw herself. Her reflection.

She leaned her waist against the front edge of the sink and cocked her head back and bashed her forehead against the reflection, and the mirror spider-webbed. She saw about a hundred Nancy Feathers then, all with blood running from their hairline down their foreheads toward their eyes.

She bashed her head into the mirror again, and this time it all came loose.

She blinked the blood from her vision. Her head hurt bad, but it didn't make her groggy or slow her down. She saw a few likely pieces near the tub, so she lowered herself until she was kneeling on the cold tile and rummaged around behind her until she found a piece that felt long enough and sharp.

She couldn't get the angle right to saw at the tape on her hands, so she worked on her ankles. It was slow going. And she could feel the hundred pieces of broken glass under her knees and shins, slicing and jabbing through her jeans, but that was all right, too. Because now it wasn't just about saving Lucy, or herself, but about beating Farris. The prideful son of a bitch.

She rocked her body to put more pressure against the sticky, thick tape, then had a better idea and jabbed the pointed end through the tape, puncturing it and opening a hole in it, then backing out and opening another one and then connecting them. That worked. Still took a while, but eventually she could feel her ankles loosening, feeling the sticky, slimy film of blood on her hands and running into her mouth, tasting that. But she got it done.

And she was up on her feet with her hands still behind her.

Door locked, window locked. Hands still bound. She hadn't thought
that far ahead, but now it seemed stupid to be on her feet and still just as imprisoned as she'd been.

Then she figured it out. It was another special skill she had on top of her limberness. That thing with her toes that her ex-husband, Albert, hated so much. The way she could grip things. Prehensile, he said, malting an ugly face. He'd asked somebody about it at work, thinking she might be part ape. The way she could hold a fork with her toes, tweezer up pennies off a flat floor. A trick she'd been able to do since she was a kid.

She kicked off her shoes and got down on her knees again, and looked around her and picked the piece of mirror glass she wanted and then commanded her toes to pick it up and turn the piece around and get it set tight. The damn toes were bleeding before she'd even begun to saw at the tape around her hands. The skin between her toes was splitting but it looked worse than it felt. She had to lean way back, like some kind of swami on the yoga channel. Bent backward, hands out, toes gripping the glass.

Five more minutes at least. And the pain was finally starting to make her dizzy, and her stomach was moving around.

When she got the tape off her hands, first thing she did was pull the rest of it off her mouth, and then she didn't even bother with trying the door. Between the lock and the dogs, there was only one good choice.

She undid the window lock, raised the sash, and climbed out onto the rusty tin roof. A cold rain had started, and the roof was slick with it, shining like a playground slide except for one thing—the screw heads sticking up everywhere. Which at that point, hell, it didn't matter. What pain? Pain was burning her toes and her butt and every part of her, and even after wiping the blood out of her eyes, she could still only half see.

She pointed herself right, then let go and slid down the roof and got going so fast she couldn't stop at the gutter but went over and landed in a mountain laurel. One of the screw heads ripped her jeans and tore a chunk of meat from her thigh. But thank God for the laurel bush, or there'd have been bones broken.

The dogs were out the door by then, and they came for her.

Not looking mean, but then they hadn't looked mean when they killed the woman in the clearing. Real slow, like a sleepwalker, she headed toward her car. Not making eye contact, showing no fear, not saying anything. One
of the dogs got close behind her and started licking blood off the gash in her jeans, the other one nosing her butt. But she didn't push it away or acknowledge it. And she thought maybe the dogs had a conscience after all, were good and sweet and fine down in their dog hearts and the bad things they did were just because they were ordered to. Left to themselves, they'd just lick and play and howl at the moon like any old dogs.

She was only about ten yards from her car, thinking now that there wasn't no master alive could train a dog to do something later on, after he left, if X, Y, or Z happened, and expect them to remember to do it. No dog was that smart. No master, either.

She walked to her car, opened the door, and got in.

The dogs lay down beside the car in the light rain, finding comfortable positions, then closed their eyes, resting like dogs do when they've had an active day.

Nancy Feather got her cell phone out of the glove compartment and turned it on. Her bloody fingers were getting the keypad all red and gooey. And now her head was spinning, really spinning. Eyes fogged over so bad she had to scrub them with the back of her hand before she managed to punch in Lucy's number.

Then she listened while the phone rang and rang and rang again.