Forests of the Night

by James W. Hall

  He looked at her and nodded. Knew the place.

  “We’ll come now. We’ll come wherever you are, right this minute.”

  “Lucy and I have a few things to take care of first. Five o’clock.”

  She drew a long breath.

  “Let me speak to Lucy.”

  She heard Gracey relay the request.

  “She doesn’t have anything to say. Just meet us at the barbecue place.”

  “Your dad wants to talk to you.”

  “We gotta go. Tell him I love him.”

  Charlotte waited, listening to the silence.

  “This is fun, isn’t it?” Gracey said.

  “This is not fun, Gracey.” But her words were spoken to an empty line.

  “Fun?” Parker said.

  “She’s having fun. This is a game. Her and Lucy Panther.”

  Charlotte repeated the little Gracey had said, and Parker flinched and turned away.

  “So what do we do till five o’clock?” Parker said.

  “We go see Standingdog. What we planned.”

  “But that’s irrelevant. We get Gracey back, to hell with the rest of it. We’ll just go home and be a family and turn this over to the authorities.”

  “Give up on your son?”

  “This could be putting us in danger. And for what? We’re just flailing.”

  “In the first place, we don’t have Gracey back yet.” She walked to the bathroom, picked up his razor, and beckoned for him. He came into the room, and Charlotte steadied his chin with one hand and began to rake the blade through the dying foam.

  “And in the second place?”

  In the mirror he held her eyes while she drew the blade across his cheeks in long, smooth strokes. Then tipped his head back and worked on his throat.

  “In the second place, this son of yours appeared out of nowhere and warned us we’re in danger and the next evening your mother was murdered. We can’t slough that off, take our daughter home, pretend none of this happened. I don’t like it a damn bit, but we have to resolve it, follow through. Would you ever feel safe again if we didn’t?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You’re right. I just lost my nerve for a second.”

  Charlotte rinsed his razor, took the towel from the back of the door, and patted his face dry.

  “By the way,” she said. “Gracey told me to tell you she loved you.”

  “And you?”

  “She was silent on that issue.”

  She dabbed a fleck of foam away from his eye.

  “She loves you, Charlotte, she does. I see it all the time.”

  “In her way, sure. I suppose she does.”

  He slid his arms beneath hers and drew her to him. She dropped the hand towel on the floor, and for a moment she thought his fingers were moving to unsnap her bra. Then she felt on her shoulder the warm flow of his tears and, against her chest, the long, unbroken shudder of his release.

  Twenty-Three

  “I don’t think your phone call worked.” Parker was staring into the rearview mirror as they pulled into the hospice parking lot. “Sheffield’s still on our butt.”

  Charlotte checked the view in her outside mirror but saw nothing behind them for a mile or more.

  “A light-colored pickup truck,” Parker said. “Two cars back all the way from the motel over here. It just pulled over when we turned in.”

  “Or maybe somebody else,” Charlotte said.

  Parker gave her an impatient glance.

  “Like Jacob, you mean.”

  “Well, we are letting this killer lead us, Parker, from point A to point B.”

  “A few minutes ago you were gung ho to go ahead with this. What? You change your mind?”

  “Going ahead, yes, but let’s be realistic. Jacob Panther’s a murderer. There’s no way around that, Parker.”

  “He means us no harm. He wants to talk. What Gracey told you on the phone is what I’ve been saying all along. He wants to warn us about something.”

  “Your gut tells you that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, my gut’s not as confident.”

  Parker made one of his give-me-patience gestures, head hanging, one finger touching his forehead. Then he looked up, blew out a breath, and fit the car into a space near the building and set the hand brake against the steep grade.

  They got out and Charlotte scanned the lot and adjacent highway but saw no pickups.

  “Okay, I defer to your cop training. What do we do if it’s Frank back there?”

  “At this point it probably doesn’t matter. If it’s Sheffield, we should’ve never pulled in here in the first place. After we’re gone he and his people will be all over the hospice trying to figure out what we were up to.”

  “But you don’t think it is Frank.”

  “Let’s just be cool, okay? Maybe you saw something, maybe you didn’t. From here on we’ll do a better job of looking over our shoulders.”

  Although Standingdog Matthews would have been Parker’s father’s age, around seventy, the man at the hospice looked a hundred and ten. Severely shrunken from the dark-haired, blocky man that Parker described, he was now an emaciated, white-haired spirit with gaunt cheeks and bony hands.

  His wheelchair was parked beside a dim window with a view of a half-filled parking lot. Nearby, in the dayroom, a TV blasted the latest news and a dozen or so men sunk into padded chairs watched and smoked, the haze from their cigarettes hanging near the ceiling of the sunroom where Standingdog sat.

  The short, round nurse who led them down the hall spoke in a mountain drawl so dense it reminded Charlotte of the Chaucer fragments Gracey had to memorize for school. An ancient, nasal variety of the mother tongue.

  Apparently, Standingdog had been in the hospice’s care for a month. He was declining fast after his series of strokes. He seemed awake at times, but the one hand that could still move was palsied and he could no longer perform even the simplest bodily functions without assistance. The nurse told them she had to get back to the bedpan shift but if they needed anything else, just come get somebody at the front desk.

  “Is he asleep?”

  “Can’t rightly tell,” the nurse said “Jiggles his hand, ’at’s about it.”

  She pivoted and left, her rubber soles squeaking against the dismal black linoleum.

  Charlotte glanced at her watch, as she’d done every five minutes since Gracey’s call. Ten fifteen. Less than seven hours till they got her back. She fanned the cigarette smoke from the listless air and stepped back to let Parker handle the questioning.

  Standingdog’s eyes were a diluted blue, watery and distant. He stared out the window and seemed not to know they were there. The cane he held in his skeletal right hand shivered and tapped against the dusty linoleum. It was a blond wood, intricately carved from tip to handle like an elaborate totem pole, interlaced figures, bears and birds and other forest animals. Prison scrimshaw of the highest caliber.

  Parker caught Charlotte’s eye and shook his head at the futility of this.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  He squatted down in front of the old man and spoke his name.

  The quivering hand did its dance, the cane tip drumming the floor.

  From the dayroom a tall man in a red-and-white-striped gown drifted over. His legs were bony and bowed so severely he looked like he’d never recovered from an early bout with malnutrition. His eyes were gray, and his hair was black and lanky and brushed his shoulders. His cheeks smooth and tinted with the rouged tan of his race. From the tip of his chin a handful of silky hairs sprouted, the look of a Chinese mystic.

  “Ain’t no use,” the man said. “The Dog don’t talk.”

  “You know him?”

  “Shared a double cell with him for a while, till I got shipped to max.”

  Charlotte glanced at the man. He was sizing her up with an inmate’s highly refined radar.

  Parker leaned close to Standingdog’s ear.

  “It’s Park
er Monroe, Charles Monroe’s son.”

  Remember? Charlotte wanted to say. The man you burned alive.

  The cell mate leaned forward, entering Charlotte’s comfort zone.

  “You a badge, huh? Fucking law.”

  Parker stood up.

  “I can always spot you assholes. You can’t hide from me.”

  “Why don’t you go on back to your television. Have a smoke. We don’t need any help.”

  “Boss me around on my own fucking turf? Think you’re up to that, big man?”

  “It’s all right, Parker. I can handle this.”

  She’d caught a flash from behind the man’s angry facade, a crack of somber light showing through the attitude. Something closer to grief than anger.

  “My cover’s blown,” she said. “I’m a cop, yeah. But I’m on vacation.”

  “Fuck vacation. You guys never rest.”

  She laughed and the man tightened his fist at what he took as mockery.

  “Never rest is right,” she said. “All you tough guys getting in my face dawn to dusk.”

  That relaxed his eyes a fraction. Not disarmed, but backing off.

  “We just need to talk to Standingdog.” Parker edged between them. “A few questions and we’ll be gone.”

  “He don’t talk. He’s crippled up with a fucking stroke. You can’t see what’s sitting in front of you? That’s a dead man with a pulse.”

  Standingdog’s hand rattled against the arm of his chair.

  “Can he recognize you?” Charlotte asked. “His old cell buddy. Communicate in any way?”

  The man shook his head. He tugged at the hem of his gown as if suddenly self-conscious.

  “Blink his eyes yes and no? Anything like that?”

  “Fuck no,” the guy said. “He’s frozen. Just the hand shaking, that’s all. Had some fucking army veteran in here a couple weeks back, asshole thought the Dog was doing Morse code, tap tap tap, you know, with that fucking cane. Hung around him day and night, scribbling on his little pad, trying to figure it out. Tap, tap, tap. Didn’t get shit.”

  Parker stooped forward and examined the intricate carvings on the cane. Studied the floor next to the tip.

  The inmate dug a pack of Camels from his pocket and lit up. Blew his first drag over Charlotte’s head. As close to polite as this guy knew.

  “So you’re the Monroe kid? One of the fuckers that framed him.”

  “Nobody framed him,” Parker said.

  “Fuck they didn’t.”

  “He burned down my parents’ house. Killed three people.”

  “Not how I heard it.”

  “Everybody’s innocent,” Charlotte said. “Especially in the joint.”

  “Not me,” the inmate said. “What I went down for I did. And then some. Worthless shits had done their homework, gotten off their asses, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. They would’ve sniffed out the really bad shit, and dropped the cyanide on me.”

  Parker blew out a breath and stared down at Standingdog.

  “You got something you want to confess,” Charlotte said, “call a priest.”

  “Dog’s a goner,” the man said. “Why the fuck he’s hanging on, that’s the question.”

  Parker squatted down and spoke to Standingdog in his quiet courtroom voice. A faraway tone, as unthreatening as the croon of a sleepy child.

  “You have anything for us, Standingdog? Anything we need to know?”

  The crippled man was silent and still. Charlotte leaned forward for a better view of the old man’s face. Paralyzed but not empty. The eyes drained of spark and the facial muscles gone slack for so long that his flesh had begun a downward slide. But there was still something left. The remnants of a lifetime of tics and emotional habits embedded in the tissue. The smiles, the frowns, the laughter, the crippling boredom of prison life. What she saw was a face still full of thought. A man fading into darkness but holding to a rigorous integrity.

  Parker reached into his shirt pocket and drew out Diana’s beaded disk and held it in Standingdog’s range of vision.

  Nothing.

  Then a second or two later the old man’s hand began to rattle, and it rose from the arm of the wheelchair, hovering for several moments, spasms that struck Charlotte as eerily controlled, like a hand cupped over a computer mouse, the subtle twitches of a video gamer firing at a stream of ogres.

  “Dead man with a pulse.” The inmate expelled a blue gasp of smoke toward the window.

  “How long’s he been like this?” Charlotte was watching the hand rattle.

  “Like what?”

  “Frozen up like this. Can’t talk.”

  “Strokes been coming last couple months. It’s how he wound up here. About the same time I started puking blood.” He held up the glowing butt of his cigarette. “These fucking poison sticks.”

  “He had any visitors? Friends, relatives?” Charlotte glanced at Parker, but he was staring off at the television room.

  “Dog ain’t got no friends but me.”

  “What about relatives?”

  “The girl came once.”

  “Which girl?”

  “His little girl, all grown up. Nice-looking broad.”

  Parker shifted beside her, paying attention again.

  Charlotte said, “When was that—before or after he stopped talking? When his daughter was here?”

  “He talked okay then. Slurring a little, but you could figure him out. Couple more strokes, now he’s what you see.”

  “And the daughter hasn’t been back and seen him like this? No one’s notified her?”

  “You fucking cops and your questions, man.”

  “Has she been back and seen him like this?”

  “No.”

  “So they don’t know,” Charlotte said to Parker.

  “Dead end,” he said.

  Charlotte drew a business card from her backpack. Cell-phone number.

  “She comes back to see him, call us, okay? Or anything else you want to talk about. How Standingdog got framed, anything.”

  He looked at the card and made a spitting motion off to the side.

  She let it flutter from her hand, and it landed near his bare feet. He turned and walked back to the dayroom and the raucous TV.

  She looked at Parker and nodded that she was done. They headed back down the corridor, Charlotte glancing at her watch again. Five minutes later than her last look.

  As they were rounding the bend to the front desk, behind them something clattered on the floor. She stopped, came back a few steps, and saw that the old man had dropped his cane. It lay on the floor in a swatch of light from the window.

  Charlotte squinted and moved closer, stepping to the right, two yards away from the wheelchair. She tilted her head to one side as if peering around an obstruction.

  At first she saw only the layer of dust and crumbs on the dark linoleum and more dust sifting through an angle of window light. But from the fresh position it was clear.

  She drew a sharp breath.

  “What is it?” Parker was behind her.

  “The light,” she said. “The floor.”

  Parker came alongside her and traced her line of sight.

  “Not Morse code.” She pointed with her chin. “By the tip of his cane. A few inches to the right.”

  “Jesus.”

  In the film on the linoleum beside his wheelchair, the rubber tip of Standingdog’s cane had drawn a set of wavering lines. She moved a step closer, waited for a cloud to clear the sun, then the writing appeared again. The letters snaked and wobbled as though scribbled during a rough ocean voyage.

  She studied it, then said, “Is that Cherokee?”

  “Yes,” Parker said. “Echota. It means ‘refuge.’ ”

  “Refuge. I don’t get it.”

  “There’s a place at Camp Tsali. A cabin. It was called Echota.”

  Charlotte retrieved the cane and handed it back to the crippled man, and Standingdog locked it in his claw and held it firm.
She bent forward to peer into his eyes, to see if there was another message there, but his gaze was fixed on a spot far from that room, far from any place or time she had ever known.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

  A couple minutes later, as they were climbing in the rental car, Parker’s phone rang and Charlotte answered while he started up the car and drove.

  It was Parker’s investigator, Miriam, full of Miami hustle, a quick hello, then, when she discovered Parker was busy driving, without preamble she began to rattle off her notes. Nothing more on the airport killing, Martin Tribue, but still working that, and nothing else on Standingdog Matthews.

  “We got that one covered,” Charlotte told her.

  Miriam said the reason she’d called was to brief Parker on Lucy Panther.

  It was news to Charlotte that Parker had assigned her the task.

  “Go ahead,” she said, and Miriam filled her in.

  When she was done, Charlotte asked if there was any more.

  “I’m halfway down the counselor’s to-do list. I got some calls out, should be hearing anytime.”

  They said good-bye and Charlotte set the phone in a cup holder.

  “She have anything?”

  “Your old friend Lucy graduated from Appalachian State University with a teaching degree. Next twenty years she taught fifth-grade English at the tribal school. Tutored kids in the summer. Her credit history is spotty. Lot of late payments on her car. Never married. No police record.”

  He considered that a moment, then said, “Anything relevant?”

  “As for relevant,” she said, “a year ago, when her son started blowing up banks, she walked away from her job. Feds think she’s aiding and abetting Jacob’s bombing campaign. Every month or so they get a warrant, track her down, and toss the place where she’s living. But they haven’t turned up anything.”

  He was silent for a while, concentrating on the steep rise, the sharp turns. Tailgated by an SUV that finally barreled by in a short passing lane. She kept working over the rearview mirror, and thought once she saw a white pickup a long way back, but with all the twists in the road she wasn’t sure.

  “This Echota, what is it?”

  “Nothing special. A single-room log cabin on a little knoll my dad named Inspiration Point.”