With his mother gone, his cherished brother torn from him as well, Farris had lost forever the dual tethers that had anchored him to the practice of principled behavior. And what was left after those losses? His only remaining blood relations were a grimly defective son and a father who wallowed in self-indulgence.
There was no hope for Farris, no future he imagined or desired. Love was lost to him, joy of any kind had flown beyond his grasp. The ghastly knowledge his mother had given him in her last moments had seen to that. Farris Tribue had discovered himself to be a man poisoned by circumstance and history. For all these years, without his knowledge, a dark curse had festered in his blood. A silent worm gorging on his bowels.
But along with that dire knowledge came a liberation beyond any he might have imagined. He was now free to do and say whatever he would. Untroubled by inner commandments or the petty rules of law he was sworn by his profession to uphold. Emancipated of all earthly obligations.
Yet as emboldened as he was by his willingness to depart this world, he was nonetheless still dedicated to discipline and stealth. For he wanted to leave this earth with maximum effect. At a time and place of his choosing, he would pull down the pillars of the temple so when it collapsed around him, it would take as many of the guilty as possible.
“That’s your idea of a joke, Farris? Shooting at your own father and his guest. What the hell is wrong with you, boy?”
Otis Tribue met Farris at the bottom of the porch stairs, armed with a nine iron.
Shannon Muldowny hung back a dozen feet, her flesh a deathly pale. Gray trousers and a pink silk top, a sprinkling of gold and diamonds at her wrist and throat. Urban finery that was as grossly out of place in that rough country as she was herself.
“Amusing you, Father, was the last thing on my mind.”
At the hostile tone of Farris’s voice, his two white poodles roused themselves from their slumber in the damp grass nearby and approached the group. Shannon gave the dogs a nervous look—as well she should.
“You owe Shannon an apology, Farris. She’ll take it now.”
Farris’s lips formed a smile, and he gave the woman a cold and empty nod.
“I raised a heathen,” Otis said, and waved his hand as if dispersing a foul gas.
“Any raising that was done around here, sir, was accomplished by a woman ten times your equal.”
“I can see this was a grave mistake,” his father said. “We’ll be moving to a motel in town, so as not to intrude on your tender sensibilities.”
His father turned toward the porch.
“I know your secrets, old man.”
Otis halted and came around slowly.
His father’s mouth twitched, but his eyes remained dull and vacant. The politician in him could will his face to play a host of tricks.
“I saw you speaking to Parker Monroe yesterday. That must have aroused some poignant memories.”
“I don’t know what your game is, boy, but I’m not having any of it.”
“Did you realize, Father, that Parker Monroe is married now to a police officer named Charlotte? They have a daughter who is sixteen and apparently suffers from psychological instability. Now, isn’t that ironic? Wouldn’t you say, Father? Very ironic.”
“This conversation is at an end.”
“I know everything, Father. Every last secret.”
Otis blinked, then turned to stare out at the rim of the gorge.
“Your mother told you wild stories.”
“Wild, perhaps, but completely credible.”
“Your mother lived in the foul dust of the past.”
“You may try to wave this all aside, Father, like a puff of smoke. But it can’t be done. Whether we’re mindful of it or not, our history lingers about us. Some of us taste it in every breath.”
“Horseshit. We’re two centuries removed from all that nonsense.”
Shannon stared at the two men, her fine-boned face tightened into puzzlement.
“When you’re ready to discuss this, Father, you know where to find me.”
Farris turned away and the two dogs trooped behind him to their work zone, where Farris and Martin had long ago erected a mannequin that they used as the dogs’ target. Today the effigy was dressed in blue-jean overalls and a white shirt and baseball hat.
Some years earlier, it had been Martin’s idea to train attack dogs. He cast about for weeks before settling on that particular breed. Martin found it amusing to be a breeder of poodles.
With their white coiled fur, expressive eyes, and long, narrow snouts, they appeared deceptively harmless. A deception, Martin liked to say, that just might prove useful one day.
After a regimen of rigorous schooling and highly selective breeding, Martin corrected the poodles’ passive streak until this current crop of canines was every bit as fierce as any pit bull. Though Farris was slow to warm to the enterprise, eventually he came around, and now that Martin was gone, the dogs quickly transferred their loyalty to him.
Outwardly the pair was quiet and subdued. Visitors to his home rarely noticed the difference between his dogs and ordinary poodles. They relaxed around the canines, admired their poignant brown eyes and their soft coats, which were scented of freshly mown hay. And the dogs displayed a fondness for humans, licking faces, nuzzling. But all that folderol would cease in a heartbeat if Farris commanded the dogs otherwise.
On that early June morning, with Otis and his whore looking on, Farris retrieved the dummy’s head, replaced it on the slender neck, wedging the ravaged fiberglass skull back into its slot, then reset the baseball hat at a jaunty angle. With a hand sledge Farris fixed the mannequin’s feet to the soft earth with stakes. To knock the target over, the dogs had to be moving at a decent clip and then leap high, throwing themselves in tandem against the chest.
While Otis and Shannon huddled on the porch, whispering amid sips of morning coffee, Farris led the dogs across the lawn so he was in full view of the front porch.
Farris commanded them to sit and they obeyed promptly, with their eyes fixed on Farris’s every move.
For a signal, Martin had long ago settled on a simple salute. The inside edge of his right hand raised to his forehead and chopped forward a few inches in the direction of the target.
Now, as Farris raised his hand, the two animals quivered with excitement. After holding them for a few moments more, Farris sent his salute toward the dummy, and the dogs broke into casual lopes across the grass, just as they had been trained, no snarl, nothing savage in their demeanor to arouse suspicion or alarm, no sign that this was an attack until it was too late.
When the poodles reached the mannequin, they sprang in unison, high and hard, and knocked the dummy flat. Then the dogs heaved forward and fastened their jaws onto the throat and face and shook their heads from side to side. Five seconds, ten at most, and it was concluded. The mannequin’s head broke loose and spun away across the grass and lodged against the base of a sugar maple. The dogs trotted away from the decapitated dummy and lay down to lounge beneath the white, quivering blossoms of a dogwood tree.
“I wonder about your mental health, Farris,” Otis called.
Farris stood for a moment, holding his father’s stony gaze.
“Are you ready to discuss this matter, sir?”
Otis spoke a few words to Shannon and stood. He was wearing black jeans and a blue work shirt and boat shoes, the attire of a man who labored at appearing more youthful than he was.
Otis joined him on the lawn, and they strolled in silence toward the cliff edge. The congressman still clutched his nine iron in one hand and swung it idly, clipping the tips of the grass and beheading dandelions.
When they were safely out of Shannon’s hearing, Farris halted and looked out at the distant mountain ranges. The sweet green zest of spring was spreading across the peaks. Two hawks coasted high over the adjacent valley. On another day earlier in his life, Farris might have drawn in a lungful of that unsullied breeze and absorbed a strong dos
e of vitality from it. But now the endless spread of wilderness that stretched before him was a lifeless canvas, flat and dull and devoid of interest. Nature’s redemptive power, which had always sustained Farris in his darker moments, had lost its sway.
Farris turned his gaze from the miles of green and looked into his father’s dark eyes.
“My question to you, sir, is this. Why did you leave it to our mother to inform us of our condition? Did you lack the courage, Father?”
Otis sighed and dodged Farris’s eyes and shook his head sadly as if these were words he’d long dreaded.
“You left your children in ignorance of their damaged state. You told us nothing about our birthright. If it weren’t for Mother’s last-minute confession, Martin and I would never have known. How could you do that, Father? What possible reason did you have for hiding such a thing? Letting me marry without forewarning, bring my boy Shelley into the world. Was it cowardice?”
His father took another small swing at the tips of grass, and Farris reached out and twisted the golf club from his father’s grasp and tossed it into the yard. The poodles came to attention, focused on Farris’s hands.
Otis composed his face, though his cheeks darkened with fury.
“You should ask yourself, Farris, what your mother’s motives were in telling her outrageous stories. That woman devoted herself to keeping the embers of blame and guilt constantly aglow, searching always for scapegoats for her many complaints. Eventually I found it unendurable, but I had the good grace to wait till you and Martin were mature adults before departing. That wasn’t easy, knowing how close you were to the woman, risking the loss of my boys. But I could endure her no longer. Although her condition was never diagnosed, I believe the woman was unbalanced in some fundamental way.”
“Stop it,” Farris said. “I won’t hear your slurs. I’ll strike you down where you stand.”
Otis Tribue took a measuring look into his son’s eyes, then his gaze shied away toward the cliff edge, where his golf club lay in the grass.
Farris said, “Mother informed us of what you did, Father. The botched job you made of it. I know every detail of that fateful evening. In fact, it is the lingering aftereffects of your failed exploit that caused my brother’s murder. You may deny it all you want, old man, but the past haunts us still. And now it is left to me alone to finish what you failed at.”
“No, Farris. You must not do this. It’s not true. She lied to you.”
“It’s true, all right. I have the proof. My damaged son, a brother murdered. I have all the proof I need to finish what you so poorly began.”
He burned the old man with a final look, then marched over to the fallen mannequin and wrenched it from its moorings and hoisted the dummy over his shoulder and carried it thirty yards to the lip of Raven’s Gorge and heaved it over.
He stepped close to the rocky edge, and leaned forward to follow its flight until it crashed into the boulders and scrub pines a half-mile below. For several years the mannequin had served its purpose well, but it was now time to test the dogs on more challenging quarry.
Thirty-Four
Charlotte woke with a jerk at five that morning. Another dream of detached heads. These were floating bodiless in the air. And this time they were all jabbering at once, ridiculing her, cursing her ignorance, screaming at the pain she had caused them, or crying out in ecstasy as if to mock her pleasure of the night before.
She lay there for a while, staring up at the dark ceiling, and knew she would not be able to slide back into sleep. While Parker continued to snore, she rose quietly and dug her laptop from her bag and plugged it into the phone line.
She accessed her e-mail, then used the link Marie Salzedo sent her to retrieve the trial transcript from the North Carolina archives. Charles Andrew Monroe’s murder, the fire at Camp Tsali.
On the slow phone line it took several minutes to download the thirty-page document of supporting material Marie managed to sweet-talk from the State Bureau of Investigation. Police reports, autopsy files, even some handwritten notes of the detectives working the case that had been scanned and added to the electronic file.
Parker woke just as Charlotte was filling the last of her legal pad with notes. When he came out of the bathroom, he asked if she’d had any luck.
“I got a few things, yeah. Not quite finished.”
“I’ll go get coffee, maybe call Miriam on my cell, see what she has.”
“Good plan.”
He was back in fifteen minutes with two black coffees. He set one beside Charlotte’s laptop.
“Done yet?”
She nodded that she was.
“I got a little from Miriam. Who goes first?”
Charlotte straightened her notes.
“You,” she said.
He cleared his throat and reset his shoulders the way he did when he was about to make a summation before the jury.
“A year ago, about this time, something major happened. Something that set this whole thing off.”
She took a sip of the scalding java and set it down.
“I’m listening.”
“Last June, Lucy Panther was teaching her class at the tribal school, and Jacob was working in Cox’s sawmill a few miles from here. He’d been on the job for over ten years, ever since he graduated high school, already promoted to assistant foreman. Making almost twenty thousand a year, which is a damn good wage around here. New pickup truck, renting a trailer not far from his mother’s place. Had a few friends, dated some women. He’d had that one brush with the law. Stole a car, but that was years earlier, just out of high school. A kid thing. But otherwise, no sign of trouble in their lives. Then bam.”
“The banks started blowing up,” she said.
“Not exactly,” he said. “First thing that happened, Lucy quit her job and Jacob walked away from his.”
“Before the bombings?”
“Yeah, a month or two before. Left their homes, started moving around—motels, friends’ apartments. Vagabonds. Something happened, they reacted. Then seven, eight weeks later the bombings started. It was during that period that Jacob filed that police report in Cherokee County. Not with the tribal police, mind you, but the county police chief. Like maybe he didn’t trust Farris.”
“Can’t blame him.”
“Miriam got the same story Sheriff Tribue was selling last night. This whole murder conspiracy thing is old news. People had been bugging the cops on and off with this stuff for years. Some kind of urban legend that crops up every so often, Cherokees being murdered in some kind of plot. Somebody gets a wild hair and runs off to the police and starts babbling.”
“Where there’s smoke,” she said.
He nodded.
“So Lucy and her son were doing the good-citizen thing, living a normal life, then something happens, they go on the run, somewhere in there they take a shot at going to the cops for help, and get nowhere.”
“Then the banks start blowing,” she said. “And shortly thereafter the sheriff IDs Jacob for the crimes, and the entire U.S. Cavalry is chasing Jacob Panther.”
Parker closed his eyes and ran it through a couple of times, then opened them again and shrugged.
“This isn’t about banks and insurance fraud,” she said.
“No, it’s not.”
“Something bigger. Something weirder.”
“It’s about Tsali, the camp, the Tribue family.”
“That much we know.”
“And you? What’d you dig up?”
She drew a breath. This wouldn’t be easy.
“I did the trial,” she said. “People of North Carolina versus Standingdog Matthews.”
“Jesus, Charlotte. You just can’t let that go. Determined to prove he’s innocent.”
“He is, Parker. He didn’t do it.”
“You read the transcript and now you’re certain. This I got to hear.”
“First thing you should know—your dad didn’t die from the fire.”
“What?”
“He died of gunshot wounds. Same with Jeremiah Tribue. Gunshots.”
“Bullshit.”
“Gunshots, Parker.”
“Impossible. You got the wrong transcript.”
“Nope. I got the right one. State of North Carolina versus Standingdog.”
“Death by asphyxiation,” he said. “Injuries they suffered in the fire.”
“The Philpot kid, yes, that was his official cause of death, but not your dad. And not Tribue.”
Parker stared down at the carpet, shaking his head.
“You were fifteen years old, sweetheart, in shock, you’d just lost your father, almost died yourself, and you didn’t know anything about the law. It’s not surprising you’d get things wrong.”
“I remember every goddamn word, Charlotte. I don’t have it wrong.”
“Transcript’s right here. Check it out if you want. You understand the technicalities better than I do.”
He waved the thought away.
“Go on,” he said. “But damn it, there were no guns mentioned in the trial, I was there.”
“Well, that part you got right. The guns weren’t mentioned because Standingdog wasn’t being tried for your dad’s death or Tribue’s.”
“Do that again?”
“Standingdog was on trial for the Philpot kid alone. He took a plea deal, put up no defense, and took life in prison, but it was for the fifteen-year-old kid. Not your dad or Jeremiah Tribue.”
Parker stood up and did a quick turn around the room, then went back to his coffee, finished it off, and sunk into his chair.
“Because Philpot died of asphyxiation and there was lots of testimony about that, you probably assumed your dad’s cause of death was the same. But it wasn’t. They didn’t even introduce it in Standingdog’s trial.”
Charlotte shut down her laptop and stood up.
“I’m assuming,” she said, “the DA went with Philpot instead of your dad because they had an eyewitness. You might remember him, he was your cabinmate that summer. Jeremy Banks.”
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