The sky was a deeper tone of blue than Miami could manage. An icy cobalt that seemed to soar at a greater distance from the earth than any sky Charlotte remembered. More ancient, more vast, as if this was the same sky that had witnessed the first dawn.
The breeze was cool and scented with pine and last year’s decomposing leaves, with a faint undertone of wood smoke and old leather. Like the smell of a horse barn long abandoned.
As they crossed the Tsali campground, Parker and Charlotte took a quick look around before hiking the rest of the way up to Echota. The abandoned cabins appeared remarkably intact after decades of neglect. Some decay here and there, lots of head-high patches of jewelweed, and clumps of pines growing from the pitcher’s mound and more in center field. Only a few of the larger buildings were beginning to sag on their foundations.
The remains of Parker’s family home had been bulldozed to level ground. Over the years the charcoal from the fire had leached into the dirt and clay, and the grass grew patchy there. Jutting from the earth, a few large foundation stones formed the outlines of the old dwelling.
Parker’s pace slowed and his gaze swiveled from side to side.
“Lot of ghosts?” she said.
“Like you can’t imagine.”
The trail to Inspiration Point was only about a mile long, but far steeper and more rugged than the climb they’d tackled the night before. Her haunches were throbbing already and going to be worse tomorrow. Despite a temperature in the low fifties, she’d soaked through her green top. Parker wore a blue denim shirt, a different pair of khakis, same boots. Preppy woodsman.
When they mounted the final hump in the trail, the land leveled and spread into a grassy meadow with a tiny cabin perched near the edge of a drop-off.
Inspiration Point had a 180-degree panorama of mountain ranges, miles of jagged ridges stacked back to back, blurring away into the smoky distance. Charlotte started to count them, just to keep her mind busy, anything to distract herself from her wristwatch. She gave up at six ranges. There were more behind those, but her eyes were burning from the effort.
Above her head, in a maple tree, a mockingbird ran through its playlist. The first wispy leaves of the new season jittered in an accompanying breeze.
Parker was silent, absorbing the view, or perhaps traveling back to the thousand other moments he’d gazed out at those same timeless hills.
“Looks deserted.”
A small stone chimney ran up one side of the cabin, and a single window faced their direction. Its greasy panes were opaque, faintly reflecting the dull shine of the sun like a mirror that had lost its silver backing.
The cabin was two hundred yards off, no way to approach it except across that open field.
“Hear anyone in the woods on the way up?”
Parker shook his head, taking the question seriously.
“You knew those SWAT guys were out there last night, didn’t you? You heard them, but you kept on going.”
“I heard them,” Parker said.
“I never thought of you as having acutely sensitive hearing.”
“Apparently I’m more gifted than you know.”
“I’m finding that out.”
The rough edge between them was still there, but smoothing. His worry lines had loosened, his eyes letting go of the strain, the knot in his brow coming undone. She assumed it was because of their imminent reunion with Gracey, or maybe his crying jag in the hotel.
As they crossed the meadow, Parker continued to gaze out at the peaks, a solid span of green broken only here and there with giant boulders or cliff faces. A hawk circled the valley between their position and the closest hills.
“The name doesn’t do the place justice,” she said.
“I made a bunch of promises up here. Right in this field. Things I vowed to accomplish.”
“That’s the kind of place it is.”
“I haven’t done half of them yet,” he said.
“Those are hard promises to keep. Ones we made so young. When we didn’t know if the earth was flat or round.”
He looked at her, mouth drawn into a reluctant smile.
He looked at his watch, and damn it, she gave in and looked at hers. Another fifteen minutes burned. Still a long way to five o’clock.
She marched ahead, the final twenty yards to the cabin, Parker following. If there was anybody in there, they’d had plenty of time to get ready.
At the steps, she drew the Beretta from her backpack, set the bag in the grass, lifted the metal latch, and with a foot against the base of the door, she toed it inward. Creaking hinges and a rush of stale air.
She jammed her pistol into the opening, ducking in behind it, looked around, and drew back.
“Nobody’s home,” she said. “But somebody definitely lives here.”
She held the door open, then followed Parker inside, standing behind him while he surveyed the room.
Two stuffed owls sat high on a shelf. A kerosene lantern hung from a center beam, and books and magazines and newspapers littered the floor. In one corner a cot had been wedged flush against the log walls, the sheets rumpled and thrown open. In the center of the plank floor there was a red and green serape stretched out as a rug. Leather sandals and rumpled clothes were scattered here and there. The windows at the front were missing.
Charlotte drew open the door to a wardrobe and found a half-dozen pinstriped suits hanging neatly and a full shelf of shoes, black and cordovan polished to a high military gloss. On the back of the door were several clipon bow ties in floral prints and paisleys.
Parker looked at the clothes and shrugged.
She shut the door and turned back to the room.
Beneath the largest window was a solid oak table that had been converted to a desk. It was cluttered with papers and narrow green books that had the look of ledgers.
In the midst of the mess sat a laptop computer with a wire running from its modem to a bright blue cell phone, its aerial extended. On the computer screen was an elaborate spreadsheet, columns of numbers.
She said, “Those sure as hell aren’t Jacob Panther’s clothes.”
“Whoever it is, he has no right to be here. Property’s been closed for thirty years. It’s private land, no trespassing.”
“So arrest me,” a man said from the doorway.
Charlotte swung her aim to the man, but he held out his empty hands and she lowered it.
He was short and stooped, and his wispy white hair draped forward over his bent shoulders and brushed the middle of his chest. His clothes appeared to be stitched from animal skins, shapeless and loose. Simple moccasins, no jewelry or adornment. He had a hawkish nose and his face was a moonscape of crags and wrinkles. A desiccated Merlin in his mountain lair, his flesh as pale and filmy as an apparition’s.
He smiled at Charlotte and held out her backpack.
“This would be yours?”
She took it and slipped her pistol back into place as Parker was saying, “Uncle Mike? Is that you?”
“Thought I’d died?”
“My god.”
“A lot of people make that mistake. See me one day, can’t believe I’m around the next.”
Parker came forward and opened his arms and the man stepped into the embrace and returned it, both of them clapping the other on the back.
When they broke apart, Parker introduced the old man to Charlotte. No last name, just Uncle Mike. And he took her hand and held it in his dry grasp and looked into her eyes with such penetrating frankness that for a moment she thought she felt him roaming through her thoughts.
“I have so many questions.” Parker had begun to pace the tiny room, from desk to cot and back again.
Charlotte glanced at her watch. Three hours left.
“After the fire, and the camp closed, you stayed behind?”
He nodded. In a fey gesture, his left hand swayed through the air at waist level as if his palm was riding bumpy currents of wind.
“Nowhere else I wanted to be. Now I look after things around the old place. Chase off the occasional real-estate developer.”
Parker drew the beaded disk from his shirt pocket and extended it to Uncle Mike. The man held his ground but drew his head back an inch or two.
“You know what this is?”
“I do.”
“It belonged to Mother.”
“Apparently she was a Beloved Woman.”
“Why? What did she do to deserve this?”
“I suppose she did what all of them did. She was valiant and took grave personal risks that changed the course of Cherokee history.”
“You’re kidding,” Charlotte said. “Diana?”
“I don’t do much of that,” said Uncle Mike. “Kid.”
“Specifically,” Parker said. “What did she do specifically?”
“I’m not privileged to the inner workings of the tribe. A select group of elders make these decisions. Their identities are secret. But from what I gather, Diana showed great courage on the night your father died. And this honor was bestowed on her as a result.”
“You don’t know any more than that?”
“My guess would be no better than your own.”
But his eyes dipped as he spoke the words. A slippery man.
“You know something,” Charlotte said. “Go on, say it.”
Uncle Mike brought his gaze to hers and waved away the thought like a housefly.
“So tell me, Parker. Where did you and Diana go after you left Camp Tsali? Where in the world did you vanish to?”
“Florida,” he said. “Miami. But why do you say ‘vanish’?”
“Because Diana cut off all contact with her old friends. The two of you left and that’s the last anyone around these parts heard from her.”
“Maybe she couldn’t face the reminders of Dad’s death, even old friends.”
“Perhaps,” said Mike, looking away. “I’m sure she had her reasons.”
“What’re you driving at? You got something to say, stop being cute and say it.” Charlotte watched the stippled shadows move across Uncle Mike’s face from a cloud’s quick passage. He caught her scrutiny and dropped his eyes, ducking his chin, and Charlotte saw something flicker across his face in the half-second before his look was transformed by a smile.
It was a flash of some feverish emotion. A fleeting squeeze of brow, the fierce, unmistakable glitter in the eyes and the tightening around them, as though a wince of memory had knifed through him but he had shunted it aside.
And there was something else, a simpler observation based only on quantity of eye contact. He was favoring Charlotte two to one over Parker, as if he had sized her up as the greater threat or else the harder sell.
“Please, Uncle Mike. Mother was murdered and my daughter’s run away. She’s up here somewhere, and we believe she’s in danger.”
“Diana murdered? When did this happen?”
“Tuesday night,” Charlotte said. “What do you know about it?”
He looked at her and shook his head slowly and the inner corner of his eyebrows rose and his lower lip pouted out. The physiology of generic sadness. Honest enough, but the look passed too quickly to be deeply felt, the way one registered the death of someone who’d been gravely ill for years. A death already processed—meaning either he had known about her murder, or else suspected such a thing was imminent.
“Look, Uncle Mike.” Parker reached out and took hold of the old man’s sleeve. “Anything you might’ve heard about this Beloved Woman thing could be helpful. We’re running low on time.”
“And patience,” Charlotte said.
Uncle Mike’s expression relaxed to its neutral state. The half-smile of someone adroit at staying out of range of the difficulties of others.
Gently, he tugged his sleeve from Parker’s grasp and pulled out his chair and took a sideways perch, looking at Parker for one tick, Charlotte for two. His free hand continued to smooth the air like a conductor keeping the woodwinds on tempo.
“May I suggest that if you find yourself with some free time on your hands and a hankering for some enlightening entertainment, you purchase tickets to the pageant?”
“Pageant?” Charlotte looked at Parker.
“You mean Unto These Hills,” Parker said.
Uncle Mike nodded.
That particular drama was, as Charlotte knew, the reenactment of Cherokee history, with special emphasis on the life of the namesake of the summer camp where they stood. And it was also, of course, the site of Parker’s first encounter with Lucy Panther.
“I’ve seen it a dozen times, Uncle Mike. What am I going to learn I don’t already know?”
“A man sees different things at different stages of life. You’re familiar with the story they were telling, but I suspect you missed the hidden one.”
“What’s your game?” she said. “Why won’t you talk straight?”
Uncle Mike held Charlotte’s gaze.
“Did you happen to notice the view off Inspiration Point, young lady?”
She said yes, of course she’d noticed it.
“You hiked all the way up here, just over five thousand feet. Florida people like you, flatlanders, your legs must be sore.”
“We’re surviving,” she said.
“Think that view would look the same if you’d driven your car?”
As Uncle Mike’s hand undulated through the air, she heard a cardinal on a limb just outside and realized the old man’s hand moved in time with its song as though one of them, bird or man, was in service to the other.
“If you had used your car,” Mike said, “you wouldn’t appreciate the view half as much. It was a core belief of Parker’s father, as it is of mine. Unless you earn it, it’s not truly yours. Simple as that. The rest is spiritual burglary.”
“Come on, Parker,” she said. “This is a waste.”
“If I simply blurted out to you everything I know,” said the old man, “you would find it unfathomable. It would be like describing that view to a man blind from birth. A challenge that neither of us could meet.”
“Try us.”
Uncle Mike shook his head.
Charlotte stepped across the room and planted herself inches from the delicate man.
“Listen to me, Uncle Mike. If I find out you had anything to do with putting my daughter at risk or prolonging her distress, anything at all, I’m hiking back up here and I’m going to start by snapping little bones in your body and work my way up to the big ones till I get to your goddamn skull.”
“Your frustration is perfectly understandable.”
“You don’t understand shit. You’re some squirrelly creep who’s been hiding from the world so long, you forgot there was one. Blathering Zen hocus-pocus like a wise old man on the mountaintop.”
Parker stepped to her side and drew her back.
“We better go,” he said.
“Yeah, before I really lose my temper.”
“When you see the pageant,” said Mike, “remember there are two sides to every story.”
She was already out the door, Parker just behind her, when Uncle Mike said, “Wait.”
They came back inside, and Charlotte saw his mouth had tightened into an anguished scowl and his eyes were fogged over as if he were revisiting some unspeakable vision from his past.
“Last chance,” she said.
He resurfaced by slow degrees, lifting his gaze and settling it on the open window beside her, the green view.
“All right. Although it was my fervent hope that you would unravel the truth in your own way, I’m afraid there may not be time for that any longer.”
“Go on.”
He glanced around the cabin with a vague longing, as if searching for some reassurance from his collection of keepsakes. He took a swallow of air and spoke with his eyes floating from object to object throughout the room.
“First, you should know that not everyone is as courageous as Diana. Some of us will never win awards for heroism. But I want you both to understand that in my way I’ve always done what I could to help.”
“Like what?” Charlotte said.
The old man stared down at the planks of his cabin for a moment, then drew a breath and brought his eyes to Parker, and finally to her.
“Sometimes a sin can dwell so long in a man’s heart it burrows like a larva into the deepest tissues of memory. While it may have disappeared from view, it is always there, festering.”
“So let it out,” Charlotte said.
He licked his lips, and the hand that had been smoothing the air was now limp at his side.
“You’re in mortal danger, Parker. Your daughter as well.”
“What about me?” Charlotte said. “I get a pass?”
“Not you. Just Parker and your child.”
“How do you know this?” Parker said.
“A year ago my daughter, Sissy, alerted me. I’d taken care to position her in a job where she could spy on my behalf, fearing this very thing might happen. In that year since she warned me of the danger, I have been searching for you, Parker, without success.”
“Why? Who’s after us?” Charlotte said. “It’s Jacob Panther, isn’t it?”
“It is…” Uncle Mike closed his eyes and shook his head as if grappling with the dreadful words. “It is family against family.”
“What does that mean?”
As he opened his mouth to speak, something plucked hard at Charlotte’s backpack and she staggered to the left. And as though a phantom had seized him by the throat, the frail old man was tossed backward against the wall. A ragged hole burst open in his chest.
From the shelf above, a stuffed owl tumbled down and landed at his feet. Parker took a step toward the wounded man, but Charlotte grabbed his arm and dragged him to the floor. The second shot tore into Mike’s shoulder and sent him sprawling to his right, knocking over the makeshift desk.
Charlotte had the Beretta out and was on her hands and knees. She’d heard no rifle shot, so clearly the weapon was silenced.
Only one window of the four allowed a sight line on Uncle Mike—the one where she’d been standing. Rising from her position on the floor and peeping through the window, she made out a small knoll where pines mingled with boulders. Maybe a ten foot elevation above their own position, fifty yards off.
She scooted across the dusty planks and flattened herself against the wall beneath the window. She held in her mind a snapshot of the layout of the hill and the boulders, and spent a few seconds scanning it for the most likely sniper’s nest. But nothing stood out.
Parker was on his cell phone, frantically punching numbers, apparently getting nothing.
She set her grip on the Beretta and drew a breath. Before she could take her shot, two more rounds shattered the computer and the far window.
Slumped on his side, Uncle Mike wore a vacant smile.
She glanced around at the flimsy, decaying logs that formed the cabin’s walls. Hardly the Alamo. As isolated as they were, if the shooter had enough patience and ammo, he could riddle every square inch of the room. With only the eight shots in her Beretta, their best chance might come down to making a desperate sprint across open ground.
Charlotte rose up to the corner of the window. She inched her barrel upward, then brought one eye into the frame, cranked the pistol into position, and squeezed off two rounds, bracketing the hillside left, then right.
Before she ducked back down, she managed to glimpse the results of her shots. On the left she’d blown a gash into the trunk of a poplar tree, and on the right her shot had carved a chunk from a gray boulder.
Staying in a crouch, she heard no movement outside.
A bird was calling. Miles away a small plane droned. Cool air flooded through the cabin walls and, in the spears of sunlight dust churned.
Parker finally got reception on his phone and spoke to someone in harsh whispers. When he was done, he said, “Frank’s on the way.”
She touched a finger to her lips.
She was listening to the crackle of leaves and twigs, a shuffling, uncertain gait that was drawing closer. She inched to the doorway and stayed in a crouch, a two-handed grip on the pistol. As the rustle approached, she held the warm barrel next to her cheek.
When the noise halted a yard or two beyond the door, Charlotte took a grip on the door’s edge with her left hand, rehearsed a move in her head, gave herself a second more to still the rattle in her pulse, then threw open the door, flopped on her belly, and aimed out at an emaciated chocolate Lab.
She spun back to a position behind the log wall and stayed there while the dog wandered into the cabin and walked directly to a tin dish that sat in a corner and began to lap.
It drank until the bowl was empty, then turned, looked blankly at Charlotte and Parker, shuffled over to sniff at Uncle Mike’s cooling flesh, then shook itself hard and walked back out the door and headed into the woods.
They waited another fifteen minutes in aching silence before hearing Frank Sheffield shouting and a herd of federal agents trampling through the woods.