Forests of the Night

by James W. Hall

  Her maiden name was Parisi. And every so often, when a certain wistful look overcame Diana, Charlotte imagined that her mother-in-law was revisiting the grand family villa back in Tuscany, with its endless vineyards and happy peasants who tended the groves of olives and persimmons. The rich Mediterranean sun beamed down on all the dukes and countesses invited over for exquisite dinners in the rustic courtyard with its view of Parisi land stretching all the way to the sunset.

  “Charlotte, could I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “About the television appearances, Parker, I mean. All that coverage.”

  “What about it?”

  “Is it necessary? To have such a high profile? So much publicity.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “It’s just… I don’t know. Unseemly. I know he’s ambitious. But all that exposure…is it really necessary?”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  Behind them a taxi honked, and Diana glanced into the rearview mirror with a distracted air.

  “Oh, never mind,” she said. “I just worry about the silliest things. Don’t pay any attention to me. Forget I mentioned it.”

  Diana recomposed her face, but Charlotte could detect a lingering strain around the eyes, a wrinkle of anxiety that seemed rooted in some faraway thought. As if some haunted memory was dogging her.

  Charlotte guided Diana to the parking garage and the two of them, huddled beneath Charlotte’s umbrella, walked back to the school.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind if I come along? I’d really like to meet this man, too. Give you my impression.”

  Charlotte considered asking Diana to stay in the background, to let Charlotte handle this, but she knew even if Diana agreed, it wouldn’t matter because when she felt so moved, Diana Monroe could be as ballsy and assertive as any man she’d ever met.

  They climbed the stairs and entered the building. Charlotte led the way to the main office and spoke briefly with a secretary and learned that Mr. Underwood was in the auditorium at the moment but would be free to talk with her in fifteen minutes or so, after his ten o’clock class.

  Charlotte located the lecture hall and was choosing an out-of-the-way spot in the hallway to wait when Diana pushed open the doors and swept into the dark room.

  “Shit.”

  Charlotte followed and found her mother-in-law in a seat in the back row, leaving the aisle seat free.

  The movie was just wrapping up. Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Recently Gracey had rented the film and for the last week had been watching it in fits and starts, rewinding a section, playing it again, freeze frame. It was a forties melodrama, a mother-daughter movie that Charlotte had watched as a child, fantasizing that she had a mother like Joan Crawford who spoiled her daughter religiously, sacrificed her own marriage, worked endless hours so her Veda might have a fancy new dress, piano lessons, all the trappings of the wealthy upper classes that Mildred Pierce had been denied as a child. But as Charlotte watched a crucial scene play out, she realized that Gracey must have been viewing a totally different movie.

  In the confrontation between Veda and her mother on the stairway of their house, Veda damns Mildred, calls her a common frump. Throws back in her face all those years of wretched self-denial. And second by second, as the tirade unfolds, Joan Crawford’s rigid mask softens. Tears shine her eyes, and Veda, in a burst of utter contempt for her mother’s weakness, slaps her face.

  Then comes the moment the movie has been building toward. The instant that Charlotte must have discounted long ago because it didn’t fit with the fantasy she’d constructed around the film.

  At that insolent slap, Joan Crawford’s facade is torn away and her anger erupts with such raw pain that Charlotte pressed herself back in her seat and almost turned away. Crawford screams at her child, “Get out before I kill you.” But Veda ignores her and walks blithely up the stairs, and Joan Crawford, in full fury now, barks out the girl’s name with such terrible force the little brat, the vicious heathen, stops dead.

  And when Veda turns to face this terrifying woman that she has clearly underestimated, Joan Crawford slowly reassumes the neutral, zombie mask, a bit of acting that Charlotte had never noticed before, but that now chilled her to the core. That such monstrous rage could flash into view, then so quickly be concealed behind a bland half-smile seemed hideous and inhuman.

  When the lights came on and the rustling of the forty or so students had stilled, Underwood bounded up the stairs to the stage and looked out at his class. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and his long ponytail was clasped by some brightly colored bands.

  Underwood was silent for a moment, then he spread open his arms as if basking in a tumult of applause. Turning, he swept one hand at the empty screen.

  “Did you see that?” he shouted. “You see what she did? Joan Crawford, that last moment. Who saw it? Who can describe it?”

  In the second row, Gracey sat up so straight it was as if every cell of her being were focused on the young teacher. Underwood didn’t give the class time to answer, but hurtled on.

  “We’re acting all the time,” he said. “None of it is real. We make it up, all of it. Some of us are just better at it than others. There’s no such thing as an authentic gesture, a real smile, a true emotion. Everything we do and feel is awash in ambiguity and the thousand conflicting emotions. We’re liars, all of us. Lying twenty-four hours a day, even our dreams are lies. Joan Crawford knows that. That’s her genius. She shows that at the end of the film. She’s the terrible mother and the saintly mother. She’s beautiful and damned. Both slave and master. She can make her face do anything. She can scream and contradict that scream in the same instant.

  “Can you do that? No, of course you can’t. Only one or two of you can even come close. That’s why you’re here. That’s why I’m here. To guide you to that place. To teach you how to be anybody and everybody in the world. Not just the sad, limited person you were born as. Or the person your parents are trying to mold you into. Why would anyone surrender to a single identity when you could be an infinite variety of people? All people. But to accomplish that, you need to expand. Open like frail flowers to the ruthless sun, to expose yourself to the brutal poetry of the world, the lethality of reality.”

  He smiled triumphantly at his turn of phrase. And then his voice grew oily with sarcasm.

  “Unless you throw yourself into that harsh, soul-piercing struggle, you’ll never amount to anything. You’ll be normal. Normal. Think of it. Oh, what joy you’ll have being normal.”

  Titters ran through the room.

  “Normal, normal, normal. Is Joan Crawford normal? Is Ann Blyth normal? Or Barbara Stanwyck or Fred MacMurray or Bogart?”

  He was strutting now. A tyrant rallying his troops to battle.

  Charlotte stood up, stepped into the aisle. For a giddy moment, she considered pointing her umbrella like a lance and rushing to the stage to run the idiot through.

  Underwood squinted into the lights, and as he recognized her, his mouth arched into a smile.

  “I see we have an audience today,” Underwood said.

  Forty heads turned. Gracey glanced over her shoulder and when she saw her mother and Diana, her mouth turned sour and she crossed her arms over her chest and slumped down in horror at their grotesque intrusion.

  “Well, okay then, let’s give them something to see.”

  Underwood summoned a student onto the stage, a tall thin girl with braces and stringy black hair. He told her that she would be Veda. Did she know her lines? She nodded shyly that she did. And then he pointed at Gracey and curled his finger. With fuming reluctance she rose from her chair and joined her classmate on the stage.

  Underwood posed them, spacing them as movie mother and daughter had been, then showed them where they would pretend the stairway to be, then he stepped away and clapped his hands as if waking them from a trance.

  “Action!”

 
They played the scene, quietly at first, too fast and out of sync, but when the tall girl called Gracey a common frump, then cocked back her hand and unloaded a slap so hard that Gracey staggered back a step, the big room was hushed.

  Charlotte found herself drawn forward down the aisle, edging closer to see her daughter’s face, to intervene if necessary.

  But when Gracey shouted Veda’s name and the tall girl turned to stare at her “mother,” the fury in Gracey’s face was utterly real, and when it drained away to something approaching the same unnerving nonchalance as Crawford’s had, Charlotte was paralyzed, and it took the whispers of Gracey’s classmates to wake her from her daze and find herself only steps from the lip of the stage.

  “Bravo!” Underwood cried out as the scene ended. “Bravo, my little elves.”

  Charlotte turned and marched up the aisle and out of the auditorium. A minute later Diana joined her in the corridor.

  “Let’s go,” Charlotte said.

  “What about the conference?”

  “I’ve seen enough. I have the picture.”

  “She’s wonderful, isn’t she? A real talent for acting. That was something very fine indeed.”

  “That was a horror,” Charlotte said.

  Diana followed her out to the street. The rain had passed, and the sun was in full force, humidity so dense she was instantly sheened with sweat.

  “Well, you do have to agree he’s a charismatic young man.”

  “A fool,” Charlotte said. “A dangerous, self-absorbed adolescent.”

  “Oh, good,” Diana said. “Now everything can be Underwood’s fault.”

  Charlotte halted. Around them the manic hustle of downtown Miami rushed on. A man hawking plastic Baggies of limes weaved in and out of the logjammed traffic. By the front door of the pawnshop behind them, a mutt lifted its leg and pissed on the wall a few inches from a sleeping man. The harsh tang of high-octane coffee. And from a dozen tiny stores lining the street came competing rhythms and lyrics. Bob Marley and hip-hop, Sinatra and Dylan.

  “All you need to do is love her, Charlotte. Love the girl. That’s all.”

  “Is that right? And that’ll fix everything?”

  “Yes, it will. It will fix everything that can be fixed.”

  Charlotte’s chest was splitting like some deep-sea diver who’d gone down too far, then come up too fast.

  She nodded. The quickest way past this moment was not to engage. Take the advice in a silent gulp like a shot of hundred-proof wisdom.

  “Thank you, Diana. I’ll work on it. I’ll try to love her better.”

  And though she meant to keep the words free of irony, some of it must have seeped through, for Diana gave her a prim smile and nod, the way you might reply to a servant who has failed for the umpteenth time to perform the simplest of tasks.

  Eleven

  “You’re not concentrating, officer Monroe.”

  It was four-thirty and she’d been staring at faces for four hours. Mainly men. Small variations. Getting another lesson in the basic units of facial coding. She was supposed to master Dr. Fedderman’s jargon so she could communicate to him exactly what she saw and why she was anticipating the outcomes of the videos so accurately. He had a very precise set of terminology and her impressionistic shorthand was no help to him.

  “There’s a flicker in his smile,” she said. “It’s there for a half-second and then it goes away like a smoke signal.”

  “That’s another microexpression,” Fedderman said. “Now watch it in slow motion and tell me what you see anatomically. Use the right words, so later on you and I can communicate accurately.”

  Like that all afternoon. Learning the first few phrases of a foreign language, one that seemed hopelessly simplistic. Inner brow raiser. Outer brow raiser. Upper lid raiser. Lip tightener. Nose wrinkler. Dimpler. Lid droop. Fedderman gave her some of the physiological terms for the muscular actions but passed over them quickly. First things first. Layman’s terms, then the muscular transactions behind those terms. Forty-four different muscles in the face. Using just five of those forty-four muscles, a person could produce ten thousand discrete facial configurations. Some were meaningless, but most communicated some subtle emotional message.

  “Later on? Don’t get ahead of yourself, Doc. I haven’t decided yet if there’s going to be a later on.”

  Fedderman did a lip stretcher. Not quite a smile, not quite a frown.

  “I understood the offer had been made and accepted.”

  “Made, not accepted.”

  “Well, we’re all hoping you choose the right path.”

  “Let me ask you something, Doc.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got this natural ability, right? This instinctive skill.”

  He waited in silence.

  “What if all this jargon and study makes me so self-conscious, distorts things in my mind so much, it actually interferes with what I can do naturally? You ever thought about that?”

  “Doesn’t work that way,” Fedderman said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “The more you know, the more you see.”

  “It’s that simple, is it?”

  “It’s that simple.”

  Charlotte gave it fifteen more minutes, then pled a migraine. Fedderman told her they were almost to the end of the first cycle. Twenty more minutes.

  Charlotte rose and headed for the door. Behind her, Fedderman remained coldly silent.

  She marched directly to Rodriguez’s office. But according to his secretary, Marie Salzedo, the lieutenant was hashing out budgetary shortfalls with the mayor and couldn’t be disturbed.

  “Did the FBI guy find you?”

  “What FBI guy?”

  “The cute one with the tan. Body of a twenty-year-old.”

  “Sheffield?”

  “Yeah, Frank. Boy, oh, boy.”

  “Sheffield was looking for me?”

  “I told him you’d be out soon. I think he’s down in the Iobby.”

  She gave Charlotte a swoony smile.

  “He stays in shape, that one. Sensitive eyes, too.”

  “He’s married, Marie.”

  “Oh, I know. That writer, Hannah Keller. Yeah, I’ve read her books. They’re kind of slow for my taste. Anyway, a man like Frank, he looks like he might need more than one woman. A whole harem, probably.”

  “A little heads-up, Marie. You might want to cut back on the romance novels. Rodriguez hears you salivating over FBI agents, you’ll be in the warehouse alphabetizing cold-case files the rest of your twenty.”

  “Oh, don’t be that way, Charlotte. A girl can fantasize, can’t she?”

  When the elevator doors opened in the lobby, Frank was leaning against the water fountain near the front door talking to a couple of detectives. She’d intended to hit up Romero for another ride home. But she guessed it was going to be Frank.

  When he saw her, he broke away from the guys and held open the door.

  “Need a lift?”

  “Matter of fact.”

  He led her outside to a black Porsche parked next to a fire hydrant.

  “Borrowed it from my wife,” he said. “Little effeminate for my tastes, but my pickup had a flat.”

  She got in and he drove down the tree-lined section of the central Gables, then swung in at Alhambra and cut over to the Venetian Pool and parked in the shade of an oak, angling his car so they had a view through the fence of kids jumping from the coral boulders into the giant lagoon.

  With its caves and overhangs and dozens of nooks, the Venetian was a dream pool for kids and paddlers who wanted to dawdle in the shadows rather than swim laps. Gracey had once loved that pool, playing princess and dragon among those watery lairs, but now she could barely be coaxed outside into the sunshine. Swimming, like most things she’d once enjoyed, was for silly juveniles.

  “What’s on your mind, Frank?”

  She watched a small boy in blue trunks climb the tallest boulder at the pool and wait his turn b
ehind the bigger boys, a bunch of rowdies who were cannonballing some late-afternoon sunbathers.

  “Got an intriguing phone call this afternoon.”

  “Collection agency pestering you again?”

  “Caller made some pretty startling claims. I would’ve tossed it in the kook pile except for who it was, which gave the claims a little more credibility.”

  “Come on, Sheffield, you got something, just blurt it out.”

  “Now if a lawyer, especially one known for his genius in getting scum-suckers out of jail, if he were to withhold evidence in a criminal investigation, it might give us pause. Do we want to go after a guy who’s into fancy legal footwork and probably has some tricky explanation for why the fuck he withheld evidence? Guy like that could turn it all around and find some way to sue us for upholding the law. No, I think we’d probably think twice about that guy.”

  He polished his hand across the gleaming walnut shift knob.

  “But a sworn officer of the law,” he said, “now that’s another story.”

  Charlotte watched a heavy older woman in a skirted bathing suit from the last century pick her way up the boulder and join the teens on their perch.

  “Gracey called you, didn’t she?”

  “Yep, your daughter. Turned in her own mom. Did it reluctantly, she said, though she didn’t sound all that reluctant to me.”

  “I was tired last night, Frank. Confused. That’s no excuse, I know.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “First, I need to know if it’s true. Is Panther related to Parker Monroe?”

  She nodded.

  “Parker thinks so, yes.”

  “Well, then it’s a terrible plight I find myself in. I like you, Monroe. I even like your slimeball husband. But the law’s the law. Withholding evidence, that’s a hard one to just turn the other cheek on. Fugitive from justice, Top Ten Most Wanted, he’s your own stepson, and that didn’t strike you as potentially relevant?”