Forests of the Night (8 page)

Then Charlotte's daughter began to giggle.

“Gracey!”

Powerful hands gripped Charlotte's shoulders and struggled to force her down. Sheffield ordering them to stop. It was okay. This woman was a cop.

“I fooled you,” Gracey said. “I told him it would work. You're so smart, but you weren't smart this time, were you, Mom? Were you? You played by the rules and see where it got you. Jacob escaped, didn't he? He just walked down the sidewalk and left.”

“Gracey, good God, what were you thinking?”

She pulled open the door and hauled her daughter out.

Her eyes flaming, Gracey looked around at the circle of men, guns drawn. Her father with his face mashed into someone's lawn. In the blaze of the overhead light she extended her right forearm and admired it.

“Look,” she said. “It's turning blue.”

“What's she talking about?” Frank Sheffield was staring at the girl.

“This is awesome. Steven's going to love it. He's going to freak.”

After Gracey's scrapes were tended by the paramedics, she and Charlotte and Parker sat for an hour in Frank Sheffield's car while the hunt for Jacob Panther ran its futile course. Then Frank drove them to the FBI field office in North Miami Beach, and until well after midnight they were confined in a small conference room, grilled by Sheffield and two other agents and a female federal attorney, a prematurely gray woman in her forties who was annoyed she'd been summoned so late in the evening.

One of the agents wanted very much to press charges: aiding and abetting, reckless endangerment of federal officers for Parker's storming of their barricade. For well over an hour Parker quietly picked apart the agents' arguments with questions delicately phrased to suggest that the recklessness and endangering had been brought on by the FBI's failure to arrive at the correct address in a timely manner, and by their gross negligence in firing their weapons on innocent civilians. Parker had feared for his own life and his wife's life because of the mistaken identity, and he felt he had no recourse but to run the barricade. A suit for damages wasn't out of the question. The federal attorney said nothing, but kept shaking her head in reluctant admiration of Parker's rebuttals.

Early on, Charlotte managed to get Gracey excused from the interrogation. The girl sat in the waiting area watching Leno, while Parker and Charlotte were cross-examined. First and foremost, the agents wanted to know what information either of them had about Panther's current whereabouts, his plans, his destination, anything he might have said that could help them focus their dragnet while he was still in the vicinity. But the Monroes could offer nothing helpful. Sorry. Panther hadn't revealed any clues whatsoever about his destination or the location of his hideout.

Then the federal attorney joined in. She wanted very much to learn why a notorious fugitive, the subject of a yearlong national manhunt, would show up at the door of a well-known defense attorney. Was Parker Monroe by any chance offering his services to the young man, or had his services already been engaged by Panther?

Certainly not.

Well, be that as it may, was it possible that Mr. Monroe was in a position to negotiate a surrender of this man?

No, he was absolutely not in that position.

Then what the hell was the purpose of Panther's appearance at the Monroe home?

A simple social call, Parker had repeated, over and over. Panther's uncle Thomas and Parker had once been close friends, and Panther was simply stopping by to say hello. Charlotte kept silent on that one. Technically it was true. Throughout the whole ordeal, Parker continued to be scrupulously honest in answering every question, yet somehow he managed to avoid revealing that Jacob Panther was his son.

In a way she was grateful. Because Charlotte knew the revelation would keep them in that conference room for hours more, covering and re-covering the same ground. And their coming days and weeks were likely to be monopolized by more interrogations. She would no doubt be suspended from work until the FBI was satisfied that she and Parker had told all they knew. And, worst of all, Gracey would be subjected to a whole new set of stresses that were very likely to worsen her condition. So Charlotte had deferred to Parker's knowledge of the law and his skillful dodges, at least for the moment.

Withholding such information might or might not be illegal, though she
knew it was at the very least unethical. Even though it wasn't immediately clear to her how the FBI's investigation might be aided by knowing that Panther was related to Parker, she still had to work hard to restrain her cop instincts. Her training told her that every scrap of information mattered in an investigation. It was impossible to foresee how one fact or another might pay off.

But by that hour of the night she was exhausted and bewildered and wanted desperately to bring an end to their ordeal, and get Gracey back to the safety of her home. So she kept her mouth shut, telling herself it would be better to sort this out with Parker in private before she came clean with Frank Sheffield. There was time enough for that tomorrow.

After they returned home, Charlotte stayed by Gracey's bedside until her mutterings died away and she fell into a heavy sleep.

Then she went to their darkened bedroom and slipped into the sheets beside Parker.

“Okay,” she said. “Let's hear it.”

“Not now, Charlotte. We can do it tomorrow. You know I'm not going to bullshit you. I need to absorb this first, get it straight in my head.”

“Screw that, Parker. Talk to me.”

“Look, I know you're angry and you have every right to be, but please, let's do this tomorrow, okay? Whole truth, nothing but. I promise.”

She rubbed at her eyes, tried to soothe the thudding pain.

He rolled over and kissed her good night. A quick, dry touching of lips. Not the most memorable kiss, or the warmest. But it was their unspoken pact. Never in their seventeen years of marriage had they gone to sleep without that kiss. Whatever arguments may have estranged them during the day were to be resolved by bedtime. And the kiss had always served to put their petty squabbles officially behind them.

Although, on this night, no kiss on earth could have accomplished that.

“No, Parker,” she said. “It's going to be now. Not tomorrow, when you've had time to polish it up. I want the whole thing. Unvarnished. Now.”

A slant of moonlight cut across their sheets. Parker took a long breath and blew it out, then began the tale.

Charlotte had heard most of the story so many times before that it had
taken up residence in the recesses of her mind, living alongside her own memories with such heft and vividness that sometimes she found herself unintentionally mingling her own youth with Parker's.

The violence, the fire, the trial, all of it he told the same way she'd heard it a dozen times before. But tonight he added something new. The story of the Cherokee girl. The youthful love affair. And hearing that part, that missing thread that interwove the rest of the events of that terrible summer, changed everything.

Parker's father was named Charles Andrew Monroe, but to the two hundred boys who filled the log cabins of the summer camp he owned and operated for more than twenty years, he was known simply as Chief. Camp Tsali occupied two hundred acres of mountaintop land two days' hike west and south of Asheville, North Carolina. Meadows and old-growth forest laced with clear streams and ancient Indian trails, all perched on a craggy knoll that gazed out at the very heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. From the front porch of the tribal lodge or the open-air dining pavilion, a boy could stand and gaze out at the silhouettes of eight mountain ranges stacked back to back. Forty miles of misty wilderness in every direction.

Chief was six feet tall, with a mane of black Irish hair, wide shoulders, an outdoorsman's ruddy complexion, and the resonant voice, the hard blue eyes, and the quiet but commanding presence of a four-star general who had never lost a battle and by God never would.

Each June another crop of innocents journeyed up the steep gravel road and dragged their duffels from expensive cars and trooped like pilgrims before Charles Andrew Monroe. Their fathers and mothers stood shyly in the background, entrusting their sons to Chief with the understanding that he had two months to transform their boys into men, or at least accomplish
that part of the task they themselves were incapable of. And he rarely disappointed them. Before the summer was done, he would anoint each of his boys with a powerful dose of his manly charisma, a wafer of himself on every tongue.

As his only child, Parker could have expected some larger share of his father's attention, but instead he got only that one wafer, and only when it came his turn. But it was no hardship. For those summer months, he moved out of his own bedroom in his parents' two-story log house and blended in with the other campers, and he was more than content to bathe in the distant shine of his father's magnificence. The luckiest boy alive.

Until that moonless August night when Parker was fifteen.

Like all the other cabins, Parker's was constructed from oak logs, unchinked and unscreened, open to the cool night air. Eight simple canvas cots, arranged bunk bed-style. A single lantern hung from the ceiling, and big luna moths danced in its sputtering light until taps was blown each night.

That summer a college boy named Corky Bondurant was the counselor for Parker's cabin. Corky was a fleshy man whose flatulence was ceaseless and toxic. Consigned to the bunk below him was Nathan Philpot, a slender boy from Durham who had spent most of that summer whining to be removed from the gassy chamber beneath Corky. Across the cabin and well out of range of Corky's farts, Parker occupied a breezy top bunk by the door, and below him was Thomas Dark Cloud Panther, a full-blooded Cherokee.

Thomas Panther was one of the handful of hard-luck cases that Chief admitted to camp each summer. Thomas and his family lived in a one-room, tar-paper shack on reservation land down in the valley. Badly schooled, sullen, and unskilled in white man's sport, Thomas Panther clashed daily with one or another of the affluent kids from Atlanta, New Orleans, and Charleston who populated the camp, cocky boys with prep-school breeding and shocks of blond hair, who played expert golf and tennis on their private-school teams and studied diligently so one day they could partner up with their fathers in law practices or surgeries at the best hospitals in the South.

Thomas, like most of his tribe, seemed to know far less about the myths and history of his own people than Chief did. Parker's father was an ardent
student of all things Cherokee. He embraced the myths and lore and magic of those native people so fiercely it was as if he were determined to substitute their noble ancestry for his own Scotch-Irish lineage.

At Camp Tsali a large portion of every summer day was spent in diligent imitation of primitive Cherokee life. The boys bathed in the icy lake, prepared and cooked much of their own food. They felled giant poplars and locusts and maples, then worked the wood, turning the larger portions into logs to be used in building projects and the smaller pieces into bows and arrows, blowguns and hatchet handles. For two months those suburban boys prowled the forests like young warriors, their ears tuned to the slightest vibrations of animal life, slipping through the pathless woods as surreptitiously as moonlight.

They killed and skinned squirrels and other small game, and from the pelts they fashioned loincloths, vests, moccasins, and fur caps. From yellow pine they carved dugout canoes and tested them on the lakes and white-water rivers. They whittled dance masks from buckeye and basswood and once a week performed in the big ceremonial ring the Green Corn Dance or the Eagle Dance, chanting in Cherokee and whirling around blazing bonfires.

It was on a lightless evening at the end of August, only moments after Corky Bondurant began to snuffle and snore, that Parker Monroe ducked beneath his blankets and shone his flashlight on the slip of paper he had discovered moments earlier beneath his pillow.

Meet me
, it said, in her careful script.

Parker switched off his light. He lay listening to his cabinmates until he was certain they were all asleep, then he slipped from his bunk and dressed in jeans and sweatshirt and tennis shoes, and eased out the open door. In a light-footed sprint he zigzagged across the dark, familiar campground, ducked behind the infirmary, took a narrow footpath within yards of his parents' log home, then opened up to a full-speed dash down the gravel road toward the main highway.

Five miles he trotted down that hill, then another half-mile along the serpentine asphalt road that passed through the small town of Cherokee.

With his heart thrashing as it had from his first moment with her, he
climbed up the running board and slipped into the aromatic darkness beside Lucy, his Cherokee lover.

Parker had first glimpsed her two months before, in the outdoor pageant that ran all summer at the nearby amphitheater:
Unto These Hills
. The drama portrayed the history of the Cherokee Nation from the Indians' first encounter with white men till their forced removal from their native mountains and the violence and heroism that followed. It was required viewing for all Tsalimen, for it told the story of the camp's namesake, a simple Cherokee named Tsali who had sacrificed his life so hundreds of his people would be allowed to stay in their native hills. Tsali's sacrifice was the moral gold standard of Charles Andrew Monroe's summer camp—that every man must be ready when the crucial moment came to lay down his life for a greater good.

Though Lucy's role in the play was minor, when she first moved across the outdoor stage Parker was mesmerized. The footlights sparkled on her long black hair. She stepped lightly and spoke no lines, but she held herself with such artless dignity that she lodged deep in Parker's mind, and back in camp that night he could barely sleep.

The next evening he went AWOL for the first time. Stealing back to the amphitheater, he talked his way backstage and fumbled through an introduction so clumsy Lucy and her friends barked with laughter. But he persisted, and the two of them wound up strolling in awkward silence down a nearby footpath that meandered beside the Oconaluftee River. On that clear night the rippling water was coated with gold, and trout rose in multitudes as if to feast on the dense moonlight. Fireflies hovered in the grass, and the air was lush with honeysuckle.

Overpowered by the moment, he tried to kiss Lucy, but she shoved him roughly away. He blurted that she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, and she laughed at him again. Foolishly he reached out to touch her cheek, but she caught his wrist in a grip as powerful as any boy's and wouldn't let go until he apologized for his forwardness.

“You're an idiot,” she said. “You think because I'm Cherokee you can do or say whatever you want.”

“It's just that you…” He stared at her face gleaming in that gold light.

“I'm so exotic. So mysterious. My long black hair, my cinnamon skin. You're swept away and can't restrain yourself.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm not usually this way.”

“Yeah, Thomas says you're real polite.”

“Thomas?”

“My brother Thomas. I believe he sleeps below you.”

“You're Thomas Panther's sister?”

“That's right,” she said, and smiled. “But more important to you, I'm the oldest daughter of Standingdog.”

Parker stared at her speechlessly.

Standingdog Matthews headed a faction of Cherokees who had been campaigning fiercely to annex several parcels of land adjacent to the reservation—land they considered sacred. One of those parcels was the meadowy knoll on which Camp Tsali stood.

In the last year Standingdog and his people had organized the local merchants to boycott the landowners. Campers at Tsali were no longer welcome in certain shops, and several grocery stores had refused to supply Tsali's kitchen with fresh produce. That summer there was a sudden rash of vandalism around the campground. Fires broke out, and machinery failed and had to be replaced. The new camp bus blew an engine. An avalanche of boulders destroyed the archery range. It had reached the point where any mishap around camp was blamed on Standingdog Matthews and his gang.

“If he's your father, why does he have a different name?”

“My mother threw Standingdog out years ago and took back Panther.”

“Goddamn.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It complicates things, doesn't it, Romeo?”

Lucy Panther smiled at him and stepped back from Parker and turned to watch the river's golden passage.

“It doesn't have to.” He reached for her again, but she skipped away.

“What I suggest, Parker, is that you go back to your camp and get more practice being a Cherokee, and if you ever get any better at it, maybe we can talk again.”

That week he wandered in an airless trance. Nothing he knew about
girls had prepared him for her. Parker had a glib and easy manner, and he'd always found girls his age to be plentiful and compliant.

But Lucy was something else. She'd spoken to him with the scorn of an adult chiding a misbehaving child, and stared disdainfully at his white skin as if it were a fatal affliction.

Finally he cranked up his nerve and snuck down the mountain a second time and waited in the parking lot until the pageant was over. She was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, and her hair hung to her waist. She met his eyes but didn't alter her path to her pickup truck. She got inside, started the engine.

Parker stood nearby and waited. The truck idled for several minutes until the parking lot was clear. When finally the passenger's door squeaked open a few inches, he let go of a breath he'd been holding for the last week and moved quickly and slid into the seat beside her.

For the next hour he said little, but listened attentively as she told him of her younger brother who collected butterflies, a little sister who suffered from epilepsy.

As she talked, Parker stayed on his side of the truck, reining in his pulse as best he could. He spoke only when she posed a specific question. Late in the evening, after she parked on a bluff that looked west toward the dark mountains, Lucy went silent for a long moment, then suddenly leaned her face to his and rewarded his restraint with a kiss.

Another week of nights passed before their kissing deepened and Parker touched for the first time the dusky silk of her hidden flesh. Then in the unforgettable summer nights that followed they made love dozens of times in the tall, flickering grass beside the Oconaluftee. Her hair smelled like the river's lush perfume and her body surged like its dark currents and together they were swept along at the river's raging pace.

Lying together afterward in the high, fragrant grass, they watched the constellations shift and listened to the Oconaluftee move across the boulders with a deep, steady rumble, and Parker felt that new feeling steal through his body like that mysterious river noise, a deep resonance that swelled inside his chest and brightened the stars and gave the breeze an unbearable sweetness.

For two months their romance flourished, then on that moonless night
in August, an evening when they were not scheduled to meet, her note brought him racing down the hill, breathless and sweating and full of the amazing certainty that Lucy Panther had come to need him as much as he did her.

He climbed into the truck, gave her a quick kiss, and as she drove him silently to their spot beside the Oconaluftee, he felt again the airless heat of his passion, the mad roar fill his ears.

“How did you get the note to me?”

“Thomas,” she said simply.

When she parked the truck and swiveled on the seat, he saw from her expression that there would be no kissing tonight. No words of love. He drew a careful breath.

“What is it?”

She brushed the hair from her face, set her mouth, and looked away.

“Standingdog knows about us,” she said. “He knows everything.”

“How?”

“It's a small town, Parker. A small tribe. People talk.”

She stared out the windshield at the black, gleaming water, moving so quickly but moving not at all.

“I'm sorry, Parker. But this is finished.”

“He's not even your father anymore. He doesn't live with you. Why should it matter what he thinks?”

“He's my father. He'll always be my father.”

“Hell, I'll talk to him. I'll tell him how I respect you. How much I respect your customs, everything about you and your people. I'll just tell him.”

“He already knows who you are. He knows what you respect.”

She turned her head and showed him the other side of her face. Her eyes and lips were puffy, and a lump disfigured her forehead.

“He beat you.”

She didn't reply.

“Shit, I'll kill the son of a bitch.”

She raised her hand.

“No.”

“This isn't about you and me. It's about my father. The land.”