Forests of the Night (33 page)

Milford's office seemed to be professionally decorated, with pale blue curtains and marching chairs and an Oriental rug that felt two inches deep. Her cherry desk was wide and gleamed with fresh polish; her leather chair was high-backed and deeply padded. On her shelves, the books were lined up with the spines perfectly flush.

Moving with the languor of the weightless, Sissy eased around behind the professor's desk, slid open a drawer, and drew out a small booklet.

“That's good, Sissy,” Charlotte said. “Now pass it over here.”

Sissy slid a slim document to the edge of the desk. Printed in bold type on its cover was
THE TRIBUE PROJECT
.

Charlotte opened the booklet and found that the pages unfolded to triple their width. On each one was printed an intricate diagram. Names with dates of births and deaths on solid lines that branched into other solid lines. Cause of death was listed for many of them or else labeled “unknown.” Fathers and mothers and their children. From a quick look, it seemed that each page covered maybe a quarter century. The booklet was apparently a single family tree that ran back to 1800.

Charlotte paged through the document for several moments, then stopped near the end, tilted it up for Parker to see, and jabbed her finger at a name on one of the final pages.
Walkingstick
.

Gracey appeared in the doorway and came over to see.

“What is that thing?”

“What we've been looking for. The list you mentioned.”

Parker said, “The last page. Look.”

And there were the three of them, the final three branches of the tree.

Diana, Parker, and Gracey Monroe.

“This is why you insisted on coming here? You figured this out.”

“I had a hunch.”

“You were the hardest, Parker,” Sissy said. “You and your mother and your little girl. Like somebody went to the courthouse and stole all your birth records and other documents. That's what Dr. Milford thought, but she located everything eventually, on microfilm stored away in the basement of some courthouse. She's good, she doesn't give up. She found you like she always does. Sooner or later. Sooner or later. Sooner or later.”

“Oh, she found us all right,” said Parker.

Sissy watched the imaginary bee circle the overhead light.

“Aunt Roberta wasn't nice,” Sissy said. “She wasn't a good person.”

“She died last year about this time?”

“Everybody dies,” Sissy said. “My mother died, my father died. Everybody dies. Animals die. Pets and birds. There's nothing that doesn't die, unless you count rocks.”

“Tell us about Roberta. Why do you say she wasn't nice?”

Sissy scrubbed both hands hard across her face as if trying to wipe away a nightmare. She took her hands away from her reddened flesh and said, “When Aunt Roberta was sick, Farris and Martin went into her room and closed the door and she told them things and when they came out they were different.”

“How were they different?”

Sissy's eyes were growing cloudy and vague.

“They were angry after that. All the time. Angry, angry, angry.”

Sissy bent forward and chopped the side of her hand against Milford's desk several times to demonstrate what
angry
looked like.

“There's our major event,” Parker said. “The thing that set this off. Roberta dies.”

Charlotte nodded but kept her eyes trained on Sissy. The girl wouldn't meet her gaze, but somehow she seemed to know that Charlotte's eyes were bearing down on her.

“Do you know what your aunt told Farris and Martin?”

“My daddy told me. My daddy tells me everything. He never hides things from me like most people do. He treats me normal. He told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“There's sick blood in our veins. It's the reason I'm like I am and the reason Farris and Martin are like they are and the reason Shelley is like he is.”

“Who's Shelley?”

“He's retarded. He's got a mental deficiency.”

“Who is he?”

“He's my cousin Farris's little boy. Shelley. He's mentally deficient.”

“How old is Shelley? When was he born?”

“That summer,” she said. “The summer of the fire, when camp closed.”

Parker's jaw was working as if he were chewing a wad of gristle.

“Shelley was born, then the fire happened?”

“Yeah, Shelley, then the fire. Shelley's mentally deficient.”

Charlotte dug through her backpack until she found the silver locket. She clicked it open and passed it across the desk. Sissy snuck a look at it, then hid her eyes again, staring at the bookshelves.

“Who is that, Sissy? Do you know?”

“That's Molly Tribue. She was a prostitute. Lived in a cathouse and got syphilis. Aunt Roberta blamed everything on her, on the venereal disease she got. But my daddy said she was wrong, the sick blood was in her veins before Molly ever went to the whorehouse. There was something wrong with her, and she passed it on. And we all caught it.”

“But your cousins didn't believe that.”

“Martin and Farris were angry. Very, very angry.”

“And they blamed Tsali. And Tsali's ancestors.”

“They were very angry. Men do things when they get that way. Bad things.”

Gracey had moved to the window and was holding aside the curtain to stare out at the silent sashay of all those entitled young ladies. Their spring dresses glowed more vividly than the blooming flowers, brighter and cleaner than anything natural.

Charlotte moved over beside her and put her arm over her Gracey's shoulder. Her daughter, the last descendant of a Cherokee martyr.

The clack of heels echoed on the wooden floor of the corridor and Charlotte turned to see a rail-thin woman coming into the doorway. Her black hair was knotted in a bun, and her suit so severely cut it didn't give her room for a full breath.

“Sissy? Is there some good reason why you're in my office?”

Flustered, Sissy rose, and her face went scarlet. She took a deep breath and shut her mouth like a diver about to submerge. Eyes looking heavenward.

“And who are your friends?”

With painful shyness, Sissy began to sputter something, but Charlotte cut her short.

“We were just leaving.”

Milford had the impatient eyes and rigid mouth of a woman rarely challenged. There was nothing innocent in her face, and when she saw the pamphlet in Parker's hand, all vestiges of civility vanished.

“What have you been doing, Sissy?”

She reached out and snatched the booklet from Parker. Then rattled it at the petrified girl and was about to launch into a tirade when Charlotte stepped between the professor and Sissy Tribue.

She leaned in close and, though Milford held her ground, some of the arrogance in her expression took flight when she took a closer look at Charlotte's face. Charlotte twisted the booklet from her hand and passed it to Parker.

“Professor,” she said quietly, “when my husband and I are finished dealing with the rest of this, the two of us are going to sit down and research the law that applies to your accountability. And I promise, you'll be hearing from us again. In the meantime, I suggest you find yourself a very good attorney.”

They were heading out the college drive when Charlotte said, “Tsali and his ancestors were the Tribues' personal scapegoats. That's what Jacob was coming to tell you when I chased him away.”

“Don't go bending this around, looking for some way to punish yourself.”

“I know, I know. But still.”

“Go to the airport, or stay here and close this down?”

“Do we have a choice?” she said.

They were quiet for a minute, Parker steering them back the way they'd come, the narrow road through cow pastures and apple orchards.

Her cell phone rang, and Charlotte answered. Marie Salzedo again. Just a single bit of information. Charlotte thanked her and hung up.

“A fax from the North Carolina DMV,” she said to Parker. “A special application for a license plate with the last four digits of one seven seven three was made by Mr. Martin Tribue in June of last year.”

He nodded.

“Not like we needed anything else.”

“But when it goes to trial,” she said, “every little bit helps.”

“Something occurred to me on the motivation side,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“That play,
Unto These Hills
. Imagine how you'd feel if you were a Tribue and every night, all summer long for the last fifty years, thousands of people saw your ancestor reviled as a villain while Tsali, who actually murdered your blood relative—he's held up as a saint.”

Charlotte was quiet for a while, then said, “Now I see why Diana was so worried about you being in the limelight.”

“What?”

“I didn't mention it to you at the time, but she was anxious about your high profile. All the television and newspaper stories.”

“That's how Martin and Farris found us. My goddamn career.”

“They would have found a way, Parker. Sooner or later.”

“I'm ready to go home,” Gracey said.

“I know, honey,” Charlotte said. “I'm ready, too.”

“I'm sick of this place. I miss Miami. I miss the heat.”

“We do, too, sweetheart. We'll go as soon as we can, I promise.”

Parker drove for a while, then said, “Mr. Big, Jeremiah's partner.”

“Had to be Otis Tribue,” she said. “He nearly gets killed, loses his nerve, gives up the fight.”

“And it would've stayed that way,” Parker said. “Except that his beloved wife, Roberta, was dying and decided to poison another generation.”

Charlotte turned around to see if Gracey was paying attention, but the girl was looking out her window, muttering softly to one of the people who inhabited the scrambled universe within her.

“How's it possible?” Parker said. “Somebody can keep alive that kind of hate for all those years?”

“Seems pretty obvious to me.”

“I don't get it.”

“You and I had different backgrounds, Parker. You were a summer-camp boy. You had conscientious parents, nice spiffy prep-school friends. You didn't ride to Florida with Teddy Miles in a rusty Olds Cutlass, get sent to jail as an accomplice to felony murder. I knew a rough crowd.”

Parker concentrated on the thickening traffic.

“Take the people you work with, your clients,” she said. “You listen to their stories, you evaluate the evidence against them, then you do your magic rain dance and all their problems go away.”

“I wish it were that easy.”

“Thing I'm saying is, Parker, in a job like yours you have to keep a positive view. For you it comes natural. You believe people deserve a second chance because they're essentially good. Next time they'll get it right.”

“I know there's evil. Don't make me out as some idiot Pollyanna.”

“I wouldn't have you any other way, Parker. It's just that you're not as familiar as I am with what's out there. Not just the white-sheet crowd, some wacko in his apartment making pipe bombs to blow up women's clinics. I'm talking ordinary people so beaten down they know, goddamn it, there's a conspiracy working against them. They're pissed off, got all this frustration boiling and nowhere to put it. Searching for somebody to blame.”

“But this is different. So systematic. So long term.”

“Is it any different from racism, any other kind of bigotry?” she said. “Same low-grade fever festering below the surface, always ready to flare up when the right spark comes along to set it off. All it takes is some kind of trauma. A mother dying, bringing her boys close to her deathbed, spreading a hateful folktale. Your own son is mentally retarded, and now suddenly you have somebody to blame. That would be enough to light the fuse. A guy like Farris. His brother.

“I mean, look at that Drury kid you got off last week. Shooting the basketball coach. You think that kid sat down and sketched it out in his notebook, ran through the moral pros and cons? Should I, shouldn't I? Hell, no, he had so much hair-trigger rage and despair and God knows what else banging away inside him, all that coach had to do was yell at him one time that he was being lazy on defense, not moving his feet quick enough, and the kid runs home and gets his Glock. There's thousands of Drury kids. Millions. Just looking for the right cause, the right spark to set them off.”

“Your years on the beat,” he said. “That's darkened your view.”

“It's more than that, Parker. More than what I see on the street.”

She looked back at Gracey, but the girl had her eyes closed, still mumbling to herself.

“Mother should have told me the truth,” he said. “Told us all. Let us decide how to address it.”

“She thought it was over, Parker. She thought it had run its course and was finished. She didn't want to contaminate our lives with fear. I give her credit for that.”

Charlotte stared ahead at the mountains rising before them. Green and fresh and staggering in their dimension. A landscape that mocked human pretense, immense and ancient and unknowable.

She felt the words rise from her unbidden.

“I lied about the Qwik Mart.”

“What?”

“I knew it was going to happen. I knew exactly what Teddy was up to.”

“Come on, Charlotte, no reason to dredge all that up.”

“Let me finish, okay? Just let me get it out.”

He looked over at her with such undiluted dread it was as if he could see a web of cracks forming in her face, the woman he loved about to split wide open.

Charlotte hadn't thought this out, had never let the words take shape in any logical way, but they came in an unstoppable rush, a flood of truth that had gathered for so long against the bulwarks of self-control that, as painful as it was to admit, there was an equal measure of relief.

“I wasn't some innocent kid on a spring-break lark. I was eighteen, and every bit as pissed off and spiteful as Teddy Miles, right down at my core. Both of us headed nowhere. I was sick of the sour gray Tennessee winters, sick of my mother sleeping with guys for a six-pack of beer and a carton of Camels. Sick of picturing my future and seeing nothing but repeating the same damn life my mother had.

“We spent that thousand-mile drive cranking each other up, taking big slugs off the same bottle of venom. All the crap we hated, all the people standing in our way. This conspiracy of the haves against us poor pitiful have-nots. The unfairness of it all. Bitching about how we were trapped, like there was this big barbed-wire fence running around the city limits of our town. You could escape, but they'd track you down and drag you back and force you to stay the rest of your life there and do the same damn thing your mother did and your father. Live that same way.

“Then we hit South Florida, saw that skyline sparkling in the distance,
and both of us started howling, not from joy or excitement but like a couple of starved wolves ready to tear flesh from bone. When Teddy pulled over and walked into that Qwik Mart with a dead-eyed look, I knew it was going to happen. I read it in his face, Parker. This was the big breakout we'd been raving about for all those miles. I knew what was coming down. If that's not an accomplice, I don't know what is.”

Parker was quiet for a few seconds, then said, “Did you discuss the crime itself, plan it out with him in advance?”

“Oh, forget the lawyer crap. You already got me off once. But you can't sweet-talk the judge this time. I know what happened, how I felt. I know how Teddy felt and why he blew like he did.”

“Understanding someone's motive doesn't incriminate you, Charlotte.”

“It was more than that. I was rooting for him. Teddy was trying to change his luck. Attack the source of his misery. That's how it happens, Parker. Even if they become congressmen and sheriffs, it doesn't go away. That sense of injustice, of being wronged, that fury.”

Parker drove with his eyes fixed straight ahead. They were silent for a mile or two.

When he spoke, his voice seemed to come from far away, a foreign land where he'd just arrived, its landscape more harsh and severe than any he had prepared himself for.

“A hundred and fifty years,” he said. “It's unthinkable.”

“Welcome to the Confederacy. All that rebel blood soaked in the topsoil. People live and breathe it every day. The conquered nation, forced to serve a foreign master. Sure, there's a new South. But the old one's still there, too, living right alongside it.”

Parker looked over at her.

“Jesus, Charlotte.”

He hadn't known all that was inside her. She'd barely known it herself.

“Let me ask you something.” He cut a quick glance toward Gracey. The girl was still muttering to herself, but Parker lowered his voice anyway. “If somehow you found a person you were convinced was responsible for her condition, would you do what the Tribues have been doing? Would you?”

Charlotte looked out her window at the rolling countryside.

“No, I wouldn't,” she said. “But, by God, I'd have the urge.”

 

Gracey slouched in the seat and blocked out her parents' voices. She was feeling dull and stupid. Steven had gone off looking for a bimbo willing to strip naked for his new movie. He'd given up on her. And Mr. Underwood, he wasn't anywhere around. Joan and Barbara weren't ragging at each other anymore either. All quiet.

She looked out the window and thought about the college. All those girls with bright dresses and boyfriends and futures. She'd never have any of that and she knew it. The drugs were hammering her. Taking her down into the silent place. Sluggish and dreary and lightless.

She watched the hills turn to mountains and her father and mother yakking in the front seat while Gracey waited for something to happen inside her head. But the drugs had driven everyone away. Everyone, even Jacob Panther. Even her half brother wasn't speaking to her anymore. Off in heaven or wherever. She didn't know about any of that religious stuff. Didn't have a clue where people went when they died. She'd tried to imagine it, but all she could see were clouds. Lots of clouds. And she knew better than that. She'd been up on plenty of airplanes and there was no one sitting around. No harps. None of that.

The drugs were killing her. Making everything gray and stupid. She felt heavy in her seat. Like some big-titted goon that no one would ever love because she was too weird, too lost inside her own head, too doped up and dull and going nowhere. Not to any college. Not off on her own, living with roommates, going on dates, kissing boys and the rest. None of that. Maybe a mental hospital, that was where she was headed. Strap her down, do those shock treatments she'd seen in movies. Be a zombie with all the other zombies, wearing nightgowns all day.
Night of the Living Dead
for the rest of her life. The cuckoo's nest.

She waited for someone to speak. But the only voices were her mother and father talking and debating. The two of them doing what they always did, taking opposite sides.

She'd always be a little girl. She'd never grow into a woman. Her body
was there, but her head was never going to catch up. She knew that. She wasn't right. She was a strange little girl like they called her at school. Spacey Gracey.

Joan and Barbara and Steven and Mr. Underwood. They'd been good to her, treated her like she was somebody special. But nobody else did. And now they were gone. Driven off by the drugs, the stupid stupid pill her mother handed her, made her swallow. Her stupid stupid mother with her stupid stupid pills.

Gracey? Are you okay? You still on board?

The voice was so faint, she could barely make it out. She clenched her eyes tight to hear better. And good God, if it wasn't Steven.

He was saying the script was finally finished. He'd cut out the naked part, okay? He decided he could live without it.

Gracey had chills. It wasn't the drugs after all. Steven had just gone off to consider the issue. She'd challenged him, pushed him to change.

I've decided you're right about the nudity. And there's that age issue you mentioned. I mean, I didn't realize you're only sixteen. Sure, we could get in trouble. It would be controversial.

She sighed. She'd won him over, convinced him.

But then again, Steven said, controversy sure had a way of perking up the box office.

Gracey was quiet. Steven was starting to wobble back the other way. Giving it with one hand, two seconds later taking it back with the other.

Box office, Joan said. That's how it starts. They work around to money, profits, bottom line. Bottom line, my ass. It's tits. Always with the tits.

Gracey looked out the window as her dad drove. They were back in the mountains now, up and down, one switchback after another. She remembered the black guy on the bus. Excuse me, excuse me, every time they bumped. And she remembered that her grandmother had been murdered. And her half brother shot down five feet away. And Lucy shot and bullets whizzing by her head. And now her name was on a murder list. Being hunted by somebody. And she held that up alongside all the stuff Mr. Underwood and Steven were always saying about exposing herself to the harshness of the world, and here's what she thought: She thought they were both full of shit.