Hour of the Hunter

--1 Hour of the Hunter (1991)--

AVON BOOKS NEW YORK

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

To Bill, who brought us "the Bone," and to Diana Conway, wherever she is

AVON BOOKS A division of The Hearst Corporation 1350 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10019

Copyright C 1991 by LA. Jance Published by arrangement with the author

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-6945

ISBN: 0-380-71107-9

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

Published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, Inc.; for information address Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019.

First Avon Books Printing: September 1992

AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN other COUNTRIES, MARCA RISTRADA, RECHO EN CANADA

Printed in Canada

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE PAPAGO LEGENDS used in this book are retellings of the traditional oral tales of the Tohono O'othham, the Desert People. These are winter-telling tales, which must not be "told" during the summer when snakes and lizards are out, for if they hear the stories, Wamad, Snake, or Hujud, Lizard, may swallow the storyteller's luck and bring him harm.

There is, however, no prohibition against them in written form.

This book is set in the 1970's, long before the tribal council renamed the reservation to reflect the people's traditional name of the Desert People. References to the Papago Reservation are historically correct, although today's maps will refer to the reservation located west of Tucson as the Tohono othham Nation.

Writing this book would not have been possible without being able to use the works of Dean and Lucille Saxton as reference material: Legends and Lore of the Papago and Pima Indians and Papago & Pirna to English Dictionary, both first and second editions, all three of which were published by the University of Arizona Press.

I am also indebted to the inspired retellings of some of these stories by Harold Bell Wright in his invaluable and unfortunately exceedingly rare work Long Ago Told (New York: D. Appleton, 1929).

Both the King County Library and Seattle Public, through their wonderfully convenient interlibrary loan systems, supported my research by locating and helping me gain access to rare source material from libraries all over the country.

Of the "committee" who helped me on this book, I'd like to especially acknowledge Dick Sawyer, Carol and Charles Mackey, and Dan and Agnes Russell for their timely, deadline-type assistance.

In addition, I would like to say thank you to the splendid and delightfully humorous Tohono O'othharn themselves, who, during my five years of teaching on the reservation, made me feel both welcome and appreciated, even though I'm really, as Pauline once told me, "a member of another We are all hunters.

--Clayton Savage in A Less Than Noble Savage, an unpublished manuscript by Andrew Philip Carlisle

Prologue

IT IS SAID that after that I'itoi climbed the steps of arrows and went to Eagle Man's cave. The woman was sitting there with her baby. "I have come to kill Eagle Man," I'itoi told her.

"But you can't," said the woman. "He kills everyone."

"He will not kill me," said l'itoi, "because I have power. What time does he come home?"

"At noon."

"What does he do?"

"He eats."

"And after that?"

"He sleeps."

"And the baby?"

"He sleeps, too."

"Today, let it happen just that way," said I'toi. "Let him come home and eat and go to sleep. Let the baby sleep with him with his head facing in the same direction."

"Where will you be?" asked the woman.

"I will turn myself into a fly and hide in that crack over there." It happened just that way. I'itoi turned himself into a fly and hid in the crack. Eagle Man came home, ate his meal, and lay down with the baby to sleep. The baby was so small it had not yet spoken, but now it did.

"Papa, somebody came," the baby said.

"What did you say?" asked Eagle Man.

"Do not listen," said the woman. "You know the baby' cannot talk."

"Papa," the baby said again. "Somebody came." But every time, the woman told Eagle Man not to listen. Finally, she sang a song so the baby would go to sleep.

When they were both sleeping, the fly came out of the crack and turned back into I'itoi. He took a stone hatchet from his belt and chopped the baby's head off. Then he chopped Eagle Man's head off, too.

After I'itoi killed Eagle Man, the woman took him to a corner of the cave where there was a huge pile of bones. These were the bones of the people Eagle Man had killed.

First I'itoi woke up the people at the very top of the pile, the ones who had been dead for the shortest time. When they came back to life, their skin was a rich brown color.

They were gentle and hardworking and laughed a lot.

"I like you very much," Fitoi said. "You will be Toliono O'othham, my Desert People, and live here close to my mountains forever." The next people on the pile had been dead a while longer. When they woke up, they weren't quite so industrious, and they were a little quarrelsome.

"You're all right," I'itoi said. "You can live near me, but not too near. You will be the Pima, Akimel O'othham, and live by the river."

When the newt people woke up, they were lazy and they fought a lot among themselves.

"You will be Ohb, the Apaches," Titoi said. "You will be the enemy and live far from here in the mountains across my desert."

The bones at the bottom of the pile had been dead for such a long time that when they came back -to life, their skin had turned white.

"I don't like you at all," l'itoi said to them. "You will mingle with the whites. I will give you something to write with where you will be far away from me, then I want you to go across the ocean and stay there."

And that, nawoi, my friend, is the story of l'itoi and Eagle Man.

The Indian girl staggered slightly as she sidled up to the pickup.

"Mr. Ladd, are you going to the dance?"

Gary Ladd finished pumping gas into his pickup. He recognized Gina Antone, a young Papago who lived in Topawa, a village on the reservation that also housed the Teachers' Compound where he lived with his wife.

"Hi, Gina," he returned. "My friend and I thought we'd stop by for a while."

"Our truck broke down," Gina continued. She was slender and attractive and more than a little drunk. "Could you give us a ride? We've got some beer."

"Sure," Gary Ladd told her. "No problem." He hurried into the trading post to pay for the gas while a laughing group of young Papagos piled cheerfully into the back of the truck.

it was early on a hot summer's evening in June of 1968.

As they settled into the bed of the pickup, the young people laughed and joked about the coming dance. None of them guessed that before the sun came up the next morning, Gina Antone would be dead, and that death, for her, would be a blessing.

The woman sat in the detective's car. He had left the engine running, so the air-conditioning stayed on. The interior of the car remained cool, even on this overheated June night. The woman listened curiously to the crackling transmissions on the police radio, but she mostly didn't understand what the voices were saying. She didn't want to understand.

Instead of getting out of the car, she sat and listened and watched.

She saw the parade of flashing lights as the ambulances arrived. After that, she didn't want to see anymore. She turned away and focused instead on the luminescent hands of the clock on the dashboard as they moved from 8:00 to 8:10, from 8:10 to 8:15.

The detective hurried back to the car. "He's calling for you," the man said gruffly. "Do you want to go to him?"

"No," she said quickly. "No, thank you. I'd rather stay here, if you don't mind."

Chapter One

THE ROOM WAS square and hot, and so was the man sitting at the gray-green metallic desk. Sweat poured off his jowls and trickled down the inside of his shirt. Finally, Assistant Superintendent Ron Mallory yanked open his collar and loosened his tie. God, it was hot-too hot to work, too hot to think.

through his narrow window, Mallory gazed off across the green expanse of cotton fields that surrounded the Arizona State Prison at Florence.

It was June, and irrigated cotton thrived beneath a hazy desert sky with its blistering noontime sun. Maybe cotton could grow in this ungodly heat, but people couldn't.

Ron Mallory hated his barren yellow office with its view of razor ribbon-topped fences punctuated with guard towers. The view wasn't much, but having an office at all, particularly one with a window, was a vast improvement over working the floor in one of the units. Mallory didn't complain, but all the while, he busily plotted his own escape.

Assistant Superintendent Mallory had no intention of working in Corrections forever. It was Friday. Maybe sometime this weekend he'd find some time away from Arlene and the kids to work on his book.

There was a wall in Chapter 11, some kind of story-structure problem that made it impossible to move forward.

He took another swipe at his forehead with a damp paper towel and waited for a guard to bring Andrew Carlisle into his office.

"Damn legislature," he told a fly that sauntered lazily across the stacks of file folders on his desk. Why couldn't those idiots down in Phoenix find money enough to fix the prison's damn refrigeration units?

The air-conditioning always went on the fritz the minute the temperature climbed above 110.

Buildings in the capitol complex in Phoenix were plenty Cool. He'd damn near frozen his ass off when he'd gone there as part of the official delegation begging the legislative committee for more prison money.

They'd as good as said it didn't matter if it got hot for the prisoners.

After all, "Prisoners were supposed to be punished, weren't they?"

"What about the guards?" Warden Franklin had countered.

"What about the other people who work there?" -What about them?" the committee had said. They didn't give a shit about the worker bees.

Nobody did.

Irritably, Mallory slapped at the fly, but it eluded him and flew over to the window just as Mendez, Mallory's assistant, knocked on the door and put his head inside the sweltering office. "Carlisle's here," Mendez said.

Good. Send him in." Ron Mallory mopped his brow, knowing it wouldn't do any good. His face would be sopped with sweat again within moments.

God, it was hot!

Ron Mallory had conducted hundreds of prerelease interviews in the time he'd held the job. There was a standard protocol. Where are you going to stay? What kind of work do you have lined up? But this wouldn't be a standard interview, because Andrew Carlisle wasn't a standard prisoner.

As soon as the guard led Andrew Carlisle into the room, Mallory noticed that even in this terrible heat the man wasn't sweating. Guys who didn't sweat usually pissed Ron Mallory off, but he liked Andrew Carlisle.

"Is this when I get the 'go-and-sin-no-more' talk?" the prisoner asked good-humoredly.

Carlisle eased himself into a chair in front of Mallory's desk without waiting for either an order or an invitation.

Between assistant superintendent and prisoner, there existed a camaraderie, an easy give-and-take, enjoyed by no other inmate in the Arizona State Prison.

Ron Mallory appreciated Andrew Carlisle. Intellectually, he was several cuts above the other prisoners. Carlisle conversed about politics, religion, philosophy, and current events with equal facility and enthusiasm. Under the guise of working together as inmate clerk and warden, the two men had carried on six years' worth of wide-ranging discussions, exchanges that made Assistant Superintendent Mallory feel almost scholarly.

"That's right," Mallory responded with a chuckle. "'Go and sin no more." Couldn't have said it better myself. I'm sorry to see you go, though, Carlisle. Once you're gone, who's going to keep this office in order, and who'll help me finish my book? How about screwing up and coming back for a return engagement?"

"I won't screw up," Carlisle declared.

Mallory nodded seriously. "I'm sure you won't, Carlisle. You've more than paid your debt to society. As far as I'm concerned, you never should have been here in the first place. Don't quote me, but if every poor bastard who ever killed or fucked a drunken Indian got sent up here, we'd be more overcrowded than we already are. That judge in Tucson just got a hard-on for you. The important thing now is for you to put it all behind you and get on with your life. What are you going to do?"

Andrew Carlisle shrugged. "I don't know exactly. I doubt the university will take me back. Ex-cons don't quite meet the hiring and tenure guidelines."

"It's a damn shame, if you ask me," Mallory said.

"You're one hell of a teacher. Look at what you've done for me. Here I am on Chapter Eleven and counting. I'm going to finish this damn book, dedicate it to you, and buy my way out of this hellhole of a dead-end job, and you're the one making it possible."

Carlisle smiled indulgently, waiting in silence while Mallory studied the contents of the file folder in front of him. "Says here you plan to go back to Tucson. That right?"

Andrew Carlisle nodded. "I'll hole up in some cheapo apartment, maybe down in the barrio somewhere."

"And do what?"

"Work. I've got a book or two of my own to write."

For most "two-for-one, early-release prisoners," the word work should have included an employer's name, address, and telephone number, but Mallory regarded Carlisle as an exceptional prisoner. In his case, exceptions had been made.

"What will you live on in the meantime?"

"I still have some money left from when they sold off my house to pay attorneys' fees. As long as I don't live too high on the hog, I can survive until the first advance comes in."

Ron Mallory nodded his approval. "Good plan," he said.

"Hell of a plan. You'll make a fortune."

"I hope so," Andrew Carlisle replied.

Mallory pulled a small rectangular piece of shiny paper from the folder and passed it across the desk. "Here's your bus ticket to Tucson," he said. "The guard will take you to collect your personal effects and whatever money is in your account. Now get the hell out of here and knock 'em dead."

Carlisle accepted Mallory's abrupt dismissal with good grace. "I'll do that," he said, pocketing the ticket and then reaching back across the desk to give Ron's pudgy hand a firm shake. "And you keep on writing."

"I will," Mallory responded fervently. "Count on it."

Carlisle smiled to himself as he left Mallory's office.

Mendez, sitting at his desk in the outer office, noticed the smile and assumed it had something to do with his release, but it was really over Ron Mallory's unfortunate choice of words. Funny that he would say it just that way-knock.

For those were indeed Andrew Carlisle's'intentions. His version of "knocking 'em dead" had nothing to do with the literary endeavor that he had already been working on in secret during his enforced six-years' worth of spare time.

He would knock a certain someone dead, all right, although he didn't yet know how. He didn't yet know where to find his intended victim, either-if she was still on the reservation, or if she'd left there and moved on.

Finding her would take time, but he had plenty of that.

He had all the time in the world.

A guard took him to Florence and put him on the Tucson-bound Greyhound.

At Marana, he got off and walked back under the freeway to the entrance ramp on the other side.

He put down his bag and stuck out his thumb, angling for a ride northbound to Phoenix.

He'd go to Tucson eventually, when he was ready, but first he wanted to talk to his mother. Myrna Louise would be surprised and happy to see him. She was always good for a handout.

Davy Ladd knew his mother was working, so he spent the morning outside, along with Bone, a scrawny black-and-tan mutt with predominantly Irish wolfhound bloodlines. The dog, fierce-looking and bristle-faced, with a squared-off, rectangular head the size of a basketball, was never far from the boy's heels.

The two of them hiked up the mountain behind Davy's house, scrambling over warm red cliffs, straying further than they should have from the house. As the hot sun rose higher overhead, both boy and dog went looking for shade. Bone crept under a scrubby mesquite, while Davy hunkered down in the narrow band of shade at the foot of a perpendicular outcropping of rock.

It was there he found the cave with an opening so small he didn't see it for a while even though he was sitting right next to it. Poking his head in, he decided it wasn't a cave after all, because caves were flat, and this one went up and down like a tall chimney in the rock. A circle of blue sky showed at the very top. He wiggled through the small opening and found that, once inside, there was barely room enough for him to stand up straight. Despite its small, confined size, the place was surprisingly cool. Davy warily checked it for snakes.

People and dogs weren't the only ones who needed to escape the heat.

Suddenly, outside, Bone set up a frantic barking. Peering out, Davy saw the dog, nose to the ground, searching around wildly.

Hide-and-seek was a game they played sometimes-the solitary child and his singularly ugly dog pretending to be scouts heading off a band of marauding Apaches, maybe, or hunters stalking mule deer in the mountains.

With a joyous bark, the dog discovered the boy's hiding place.

Panting, he thrust his big head into the opening and tried to climb in as well. There wasn't room for both of them to be inside at once, and Davy came out laughing.

It was then he heard Rita calling him from far below.

"Come on, Bone," the boy said. "Maybe it's time for lunch."

But it wasn't. Rita Antone, the Indian woman who lived with them and took care of him, waited in the yard with both hands planted sternly on her hips as the boy and the dog returned from the mountain.

“Where were you?" she asked.

“Playing."

“It's time to come in now. I'm going to the reservation to sell baskets. If you want to go, you'd better ask your mother."

Davy's eyes widened with excitement. "I can come with you?"

"First go ask."

Worried about disturbing her, Davy crept into his mother's makeshift office. For a minute or so, the boy stood transfixed, watching Diana Ladd's nimble fingers dance across the keys. How could her fingers move so fast?

His mother's shoulders stiffened with annoyance when she sensed his presence behind her. "What is it, Davy?" she asked.

He sidled up beside her, standing with his fingers moving tentatively along the smooth wooden edge of the door that served as her desk. The child knew his mother wrote books at that desk during the summers when she wasn't teaching.

He didn't know exactly what the books were about-he had never seen one of them-but Rita said it was true, so it had to be. Rita never told fibs.

She had explained that his mother's work was important, and that when she was busy at her typewriter, he wasn't to interrupt or disturb her unless absolutely necessary. This time it must be okay. Rita had told him to do it.

"What is it, Davy?" Diana Ladd repeated sharply. "Can't you see I'm busy? I've got to finish this chapter today."

Sometimes his mother's voice could be soothing and gentle, but not now when she was impatient and eager to be rid of him. Hot tears welled up in Davy's eyes. He stood with his face averted so his mother wouldn't see them.

"It's Rita," he said uncertainly. "She's going to the reservation today to sell baskets. Can I go along, please?"

Davy's mother seemed to exist in a place far beyond his short-armed reach. He was never exactly sure how she would react. He had learned to maintain a certain distance, to be wary of her sudden outbursts.

Rita was far more approachable.

During the school year, Davy got home from school long before his mother arrived home from her teaching job on the reservation. The child spent most afternoons in Rita's single-roomed house, little more than a glorified cook shack, which was situated off the back of the kitchen of the main house. There, he ate meals at a worn wooden table, all the while devouring the stories the Indian woman told him.

Often he spent hours watching in fascination while she used her owij, her awl, to weave intricate yucca and bear-grass baskets. Other times he stood at mouth-watering attention while she patted out tortillas and popovers to cook on an ancient wood-burning range that she much preferred to the modern gas stove in the main house.

While she worked, Rita heard Davy's stories as well.

Unlike his mother's writing or paper-correcting, which demanded total concentration, Rita's manual tasks were performed automatically, while her heart and mind were free with the gift of listening. Rita's heavy, stolid presence was the single constant in Davy's young life. She was the healer of all his childish hurts, the recipient of his daily joys and woes For once Diana Ladd broke through her own self-imposed reserve and affectionately ruffled her son's lank yellow hair.

"Rita's going to turn you into more of an Indian than she is," Diana commented with a short laugh.

"Really?" the boy asked, his blue eyes lighting up at the prospect.

"Will my hair turn black and straight and everything?"

"It might," Diana returned lightly. "If you eat too many popovers at the feast tonight, it'll happen for sure."

"Feast?" Davy asked. "What feast?"

"Didn't Rita tell you? There's a feast tonight at Ban Thak. That's the other reason she's going today."

Ban Thak, Coyote Sitting, was the name of Rita's home village. Davy could hardly believe his good fortune. "You mean I get to go to the feast, too?"

Rita and Diana Ladd had evidently already discussed it and reached a decision, but the Indian woman always insisted that the child ask his mother, that he show her the respect she deserved.

The boy could barely contain his excitement as Diana kissed him and shooed him on his way. "Go on now. Get out of here. I've got work to do."

Davy Ladd scampered eagerly out of the room. Bone, black as a shadow and almost as big as his six-year-old owner, waited patiently outside the door. The two of them raced through the house looking for Rita.

Davy was quiet about it, though. He didn't shout or make too much noise.

Rita had taught him better manners than that. Children were never to shout after their elders. It wasn't polite.

He found Rita in the backyard loading boxes laden with finely crafted handmade baskets into the bed of an old blue GMC. She stopped working long enough to wipe the running sweat from her wrinkled brown face.

"Well now, Olhoni," she said, standing looking down on him with both hands folded over her faded apron. "What did your mother say?"

Only Rita called Davy Ladd by the name Olhoni, which, in Papago, means Maverick or Orphaned Calf. That name, the one he called his Indian name, was a jealously guarded secret shared by the boy and the old woman. Not even Davy's mother knew Rita called him that.

"I can go, Nana Dahd," he told her breathlessly.

Dahd was Papago for "Godmother," but the title was strictly honorary.

Davy had never seen the inside of a church, and there had been no formal ceremony. Like her name for him, however, Nana Dahd was a form of address Davy used only when the two of them were alone together.

Davy clambered up into the truck. He helped shove the last box of baskets down the wooden floor of the short bed to where part of a livestock rack had been spot-welded to the outside wall of the cab. He held the boxes tightly while Rita used rope to lash them firmly in place.

"She says I can go to the feast too. Shall I wear my boots? Should I get a bedroll? Can Bone come?"

"Oh'o stays here," Nana Dahd told him firmly. "Dogs don't belong at feasts. Go get a jacket and a bedroll.

Even with the fires, it may be cold at the dance. You'll want to sleep before it's over. I'll fix lunch before we go."

"Oh, no," Davy replied seriously. "I won't fall asleep. I promise. I want to stay up all night. Until the dance is over. Until the sun comes up."

"Go now," Rita urged, without raising her voice. That wasn't necessary.

The child did as he was told. He sometimes argued with his mother but never with Nana Dahd.

Finished packing, Davy stowed his small canvas bag in the cab of the truck and then made his way into Nana Dahd's room.

He found her busily patting a ball of soft white dough into a flat, round cake. When the dough was stretched thin enough, she dropped it into a vat of hot fat on the stove's front burner. Within seconds, the dough puffed up and cooked to a golden brown. Meantime, Rita patted out another. Davy had often tried working the dough himself, but no matter what he did, the ball of dough remained just that-a stubborn ball of dough.

Davy hurried to his place at the bare wooden table, while Bone settled comfortably at his feet. Rita placed a mound of thick red chili on the popovers, folded them over, and brought them to the table on plates.

In the center of the table sat a small bowl piled high with cooked broccoli. While Davy wrinkled his nose in disgust, Nana Dahd ladled a spoonful of broccoli onto his plate next to the steaming popover.

"You know I hate broccoli," he said, reaching at once for the popover.

Rita was unmoved. "Eat your vegetables," she said.

Davy nodded, but as soon as Rita turned her back, he slipped the broccoli under the table to a waiting and appreciative Bone. The dog liked everything-including broccoli.

It is said that long ago there was a woman who loved to play Toka, which the Mil-gahn, the whites, call field hockey. She loved it so much that she never wanted to do anything else. Even after her child was born, she would leave the baby alone all day long to go play hockey. One day she went away and didn't come back. The women in the village felt sorry for the baby, a little boy. They fed him and took care of him.

One day, when he was old enough, the little boy took four drinking gourds and went searching for his mother.

First he met Eagle. "Have you seen my mother?" the little boy asked.

"Give me one of your drinking gourds, and I will tell you where to find your mother." The boy gave Eagle a gourd, and he said, "Go toward those mountains. There you will find her."

The boy walked until he neared the mountains. There, he met Crow.

"Have you seen my mother-?" he asked.

"Give me one of your drinking gourds, and I will tell you where to find your mother." The boy gave Crow a gourd, and he said, "Climb these mountains, and you will find her."

The boy climbed in the hot sun until he reached the top of the mountains. There, he met Hawk. "Have you seen my mother?" he asked.

"Give me one of your drinking gourds, and I will tell you where to find your mother." The boy gave Hawk a gourd, and he said, "Your mother is at the bottom of these mountains. Go there, and you will find her."

The boy walked until he reached the bottom of the mountains. There, he met Mourning Dove. "Have you seen my mother?" he asked.

"Give me your drinking gourd, and I will tell you where to find her."

The boy gave Mourning Dove his last gourd, and he said, " Your mother is on the other side of this valley. Go there, and you will find her."

The boy walked until he met some children playing.

"Have you seen my mother?" he asked.

"Yes," the children said. "She is down on the field playing hockey."

"Go tell her that her son is here and that I want to see her." The children went to the woman and told her, but she was busy playing hockey and wouldn't come. When the children came back and told the little boy, he was very sad.

"Since my mother will not come to me, I will find a tarantula hole and go live there." He found a tarantula hole and started to go in it.

Just then his mother came, but the boy was already disappearing into the ground. The mother tried to pull him back, but it was too late.

The only thing left to see was a single bright feather that the little boy had worn in his hair.

The mother was very sad, and she began to cry. Ban, Coyote, was passing by, and he heard her. He went to see what the noise was all about. She told him that her son had just been buried in the tarantula's hole, and she asked Coyote to dig the child out, When Coyote began to dig, he found that the little boy was not far underground. Coyote was hungry with all his work, and he didn't see why he should take the child to a mother who had never done anything but play field hockey, so Coyote ate the little boy. When the bones were picked clean, Coyote gave them to the mother along with the bright feather. "Someone has eaten your child," he said. "This is all I could find," The woman was even sadder.

She kept the feather, but she asked Coyote to bury the bones of her child once more.

That night she watered the ground over the bones with her tears, and in four days a green thing began to grow out of the place where the bones were buried. It was a'alichurn hahshani or Baby Saguaro, the first giant cactus in the whole world. And that is the story of The Woman Who Loved Field Hockey.

As they neared Three Points, Rita Antone shifted down into second. The rickety '56 GMC creaked and shuddered.

Like the woman who was its owner, the twenty-year-old truck was showing signs of age. Despite a serious miss in the engine, Rita had every confidence it would limp along out to Sells and back to town with no problem, but she planned to stop by the gas station and talk to her sister's boy about it.

Rita still thought of Gabe Ortiz by his boyhood name of Gihg Tahpani, or Fat Crack, but her nephew hardly qualified as a boy anymore. He was middle-aged now, a well-respected reservation businessman, with flecks of gray leaching through his straight black hair. It was Gabe's faithful mechanical ministrations that kept the old Jimmy running.

Rita knew that when Fat Crack looked at the truck, he would wipe his hands on a grease rag, shake his head sadly, and scold her because the front end was out of alignment and the tires were nearly bald, but Rita would tell him as she always did, "No tires, not now, not this time."

More than once, Diana Ladd had offered to replace the truck or fix it, but Rita always declined. She had bought it new and kept it all those years. She didn't drive it much anymore, only a few times a year when she went out to gather the raw materials for her baskets-devil's claw from the reservation or bear grass and yucca from Benson. Then there were the anniversary tips, like this one, but because Diana Ladd didn't want to talk about that, Rita usually disguised her real intentions by saying she was going to a feast or taking her newest crop of baskets up to the top of Ioligarn, the mountain Anglos called Kitt Peak, to be sold in the observatory gift shop there.

Rita was determined to drive the old truck until one or the other of them stopped dead. If the truck happened to go first, she would leave it wherever it died, parked on the side of the road if necessary.

Three Points Trading Post at Robles Junction was thirty miles west of Tucson on Highway 86, the main road leading out to the reservation.

The trading post's primary claim to fame was its undisputed reputation for selling more beer on a weekly basis than all of Davis Air Force Base combined.

Charley Raymond, the most recent Anglo owner, hurried to the pumps as Rita stopped the truck. "What do you want?" he asked.

Deliberately, Rita eased her heavy frame out of the driver's seat.

"Five dollars' worth of regular," she said and went inside, with Davy trailing happily along behind.

Once inside the store, Davy made a dash for the refrigerator and grabbed his favorite treat-a carton of chocolate milk. Rita went to the cooler and withdrew a single can of Coors. She didn't drink much, but the day's real task promised to be hard, thirsty work, and she would need a beer when she finished. A single beer would be welcome.

It would also be enough.

Leaving the cooler, Rita steered Davy firmly past a beckoning display of Twinkies and led him to a shelf laden with plastic memorial wreaths and votive candies.

He watched curiously while she selected a wreath of bright pink roses.

"This one?" she asked, holding it up for his inspection.

"It's pretty," he said with a puzzled frown, "but, Nana, why are we getting flowers?"

Shaking her head, Rita didn't answer. Instead, she took the wreath, one tall, glass-enclosed candle with a picture of the Virgin Mary on the outside, and the can of Coors, then she threaded her way through the narrow aisles up to the cash register. From behind the counter, Daisy Raymond, a narrow-faced Anglo woman, eyed Rita suspiciously.

Buying the trading post had been Charley's idea, not Daisy's. She hadn't wanted to have anything to do with it, but Charley had convinced her that running the store for a few years was a good way to finish bankrolling their retirement. Now, months later, she reluctantly agreed he was right. In beer sales alone, the place was a gold mine.

The problem was, Daisy Raymond didn't like Indians.

Never had. She stood trapped behind the cash register day after day taking Indian money and trying, unsuccessfully, to conceal her dislike behind a barrage of inane chatter.

Being around Daisy Raymond made Rita draw back inside herself.

"Nice day out there, isn't it," Daisy said. "Real hot for so early in the year."

"Five dollars' of gas," Rita replied, refusing to be drawn into a conversation about the weather. She placed her other selections on the checkout counter. When all the purchases were rung up and totaled on the old-fashioned cash register, Rita painstakingly counted out the exact change from her purse. People running trading posts no longer routinely cheated Indians, but Rita was careful about it all the same, especially with people like Daisy Raymond.

"Need any matches for the candle?" Daisy asked.

Rita nodded.

"How come you people use so many wreaths and candles?" Daisy asked.

Rita shrugged. When the Indian woman made no reply, Daisy continued on her own. She was accustomed to carrying on these one-sided conversations.

"I told Charley just yesterday that we'd better order more-wreaths and candles, that is. He worries about running out of beer, and I have to keep track of everything else."

Daisy paused and looked down. Peering over the counter, she noticed Davy Ladd for the first time. He stood gazing up at her in an almost accusatory blue-eyed stare. She found the child's silence disturbing.

The Anglo woman expected that kind of behavior from the Indian kids who came through the trading post. That was bad enough, but since they came from the reservation, you could understand about their being shy and backward.

With this white kid, though, it was downright impolite.

Where were his parents? she asked herself. And who was going to pay for the carton of milk?

Glancing around the room, Daisy wondered if someone else had slipped into the store unnoticed, but there was no one with the boy except an ancient, withered crone of an Indian woman. It wasn't right. It just wasn't.

Daisy leaned down until her face and Davy's were or almost the same level. He looked dirty, with a ring of chocolate milk circling his mouth. The sharp odor of wood smoke emanated from his hair and clothing. Was there such a thing as a blond Indian?

"Hello there, young man. Where'd you come from?"

The woman wore bright red lipstick that made her mouth look like an angry red gash across a pale, skinny face.

Her darting green eyes reminded Davy of a lizard he'd seen once.

Without answering, Davy shrank away under the woman's nosy gaze and groped behind him for the comforting reassurance of Rita's callused hand.

"He's with me," Rita said.

"Oh?" Daisy replied. "What's the matter with him? Can't he talk? By the way, you still owe for his milk."

Once more Rita counted out exact change. Without a thank you, Daisy Raymond shoved the money into the register drawer.

"Oi g hihm," Rita said softly to Davy.

Literally translated, the words mean "Walk," but Davy understood the accepted current usage as "Let's get in the pickup and go."

Needing no second urging, he hurried to the door, relieved to escape the close confines of the trading post and the Anglo woman's prying eyes. He clambered up into the Pickup and settled back contentedly on the frayed plastic seat. Rita opened the door. With a grunt of effort, she heaved herself into the truck.

"Are we going to the feast now?" Davy asked.

Nana Dahd shook her head. "Not yet. A few stops first, then the feast."

Had Pima County homicide detective Brandon Walker been a drinking man, he would have left his morning vehicular homicide investigation, stopped off at the nearest bar on his way back to town, and got himself shit-faced drunk. He hadn't, but now, back in his cubicle at the Pima County Sheriff's Department and looking at the fanfold of messages in his hand, he wished he had. Just this once.

A day earlier, Aaron Monford, a seventy-five-year-old shade-tree mechanic, had been changing a tire in his front yard when he was struck from behind by a tipsy neighbor lady on her way home from a weekly luncheon bridge game.

Monford's head had been crushed nearly flat between the chrome-plated bumpers of his own jacked-up Dodge Dart and that of the neighbor's speeding Buick. He had died instantly, without ever being transported to a hospital. The driver, drunk and suffering from chest pains, had been taken to St. Mary's Hospital.

Early that morning, Brandon had spent two hours with the now-sober driver and her solicitous and well-paid attorney.

Then, from nine o'clock on, he had been in the Monfords' posh Tucson Estates mobile home listening to Aaron's devastated widow, Goldie, bewail the end of what she had expected to be their "golden years."

Low-key and polite, Brandon had worked patiently, diligently gathering the necessary information despite Goldie's periodic outbursts: How could Ari do this to her? Why had she let him go out to change the tire right then? Why hadn't he waited until evening when it was cooler like she had told him? Why had he left without giving her a chance to say good-bye?

Every time Goldie Monford opened her mouth, Brandon wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her head. He wanted to tell her that she should fall down on her knees and thank God that she was one of the lucky ones and so was Aaron. There was more than one way to be robbed of your golden years. In Walker's opinion, a quick death was far preferable to a slow one.

Slow deaths were the real heartbreakers.

But Brandon Walker didn't berate Goldie Monford, and he didn't stop off to get drunk, either. He left the widow wallowing in her grief and drove straight back to the office.

Now, standing in his dingy cubicle, he thumbed through his messages.

Those ominous yellow slips of paper weighed down his soul, telling him once more that he was right and Goldie Monford was wrong.

There were six messages in all. The clerk had nodded sympathetically as she handed them to him. "Your mother," she said.

There was no written message, only a check-mark beside "Please call," but Brandon clearly read between the lines to what hadn't been said.

One way or another, they were all about his father-about what Toby Walker either had or hadn't done. Brandon had learned to dread his mother's calls-hourly ones, it seemed at times-giving him constant updates on Brandon's father's latest transgressions; checks that had bounced or how Toby had once again lost his way driving home from the store-the same store they'd been going to for ten years, for God's sake!

What was the matter with him? What was he thinking or Brandon felt sorry for both his parents. His father's erratic behavior seemed to bother his mother far more than it did Toby himself. Louella Walker was someone who prided herself on keeping things "under control." In this case, it wasn't working. She vacillated between rage and despair.

Sometimes she made excuses, saying that there' was nothing at all wrong with Toby, that he just needed a little extra help. If Brandon were any kind of a decent son, he wouldn't begrudge his father that much.

At other times, she raged and railed that Toby was deliberately trying to drive her crazy.

If there was a middle ground in all this, Brandon wasn't able to find it. The role of parental peacemaker and crisis manager at home was a painful one. He didn't want to call home and hear either his mother's panicked tattling or her self-pitying whine. It was no surprise that Detective Walker hid out in his work. He wanted to be left alone, to go about living his life in a reasonable semblance of peace and quiet, to do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.

The cubicle was far homier than home was. He would stay late at the office again tonight, doing whatever mundane tasks he could dredge up to do, coming home long after dinner and hopefully long after his parents had gone to bed as well. That way he wouldn't have to listen either to his mother, who talked more and more, or watch his father, who spoke less and less.

With a sigh, Brandon dropped the six messages into his trash can.

Telling the clerk to hold all his calls, he pulled out the half-completed form he had started filling out earlier that morning, the one that recounted the unexpected death of Aaron Monford. Once, not so long ago, these very same reporting forms would have been anathema to him, something to be avoided entirely or put Off as long as possible.

Now, they were a refuge.

There were blanks on the paper-finite, measurable, boxed blanks on sturdy white paper-where clear-cut answers to simple questions were all that was required. He took more care with his penmanship these days, as though neatness and legibility were somehow next to godliness, as though his third-grade teacher might rise up from her grave and look over his shoulder again, checking the slant of each individual letter and measuring the crosses on each t.

Even as he was doing it, Brandon Walker was smart enough to step back and know why.

In a world where fathers become children again, writing a report is sometimes the only thing that makes sense.

Chapter Two

WITH A JOLT, the pickup lumbered over the rough cattle guard that marked the reservation boundary. Davy sat up straight, eager to see one of his favorite landmarks-a faded billboard advertising the tribal rodeo.

Rita had taken him twice.

"Can we go again this year, Nana DahP" he asked, pointing at the sign.

"It's fun."

"We'll see," she answered, shifting down while the pickup lurched drunkenly to one side.

"How come my mom stopped liking rodeos?" Davy asked. "She used to like them, didn't she?"

Nana Dahd looked at him shrewdly. "Why do you ask that?"

The boy shrugged and bit his lip, thinking about the picture that hung in the hallway. Smiling and surprisingly beautiful, his much younger mother was dressed up like a cowgirl with a jeweled tiara overlaying the feathered hatband of her Stetson. Looking at the picture, it was easy for Davy to imagine that long ago his mother had been a princess-a rich, happy princess. Of course, they weren't rich now, and his mother didn't seem to be very happy, either. He wondered sometimes if her unhappiness was all his fault.

"I saw her boots once," he added after a pause. "Pretty ones with diamonds on them. Bone and I found them in the back of her closet.

They're gone now."

The last was said matter-of-factly, but Rita heard the hurt beneath the words. Rhinestones, she thought to herself, not diamonds, but rhinestones. And yes, the boots were gone now, put away in one of the stacked boxes in the root cellar off the kitchen where Davy wouldn't see them again and be tempted to ask more questions. Only Olhoni's impassioned pleading had spared the picture of his mother as a seventeen year-old rodeo queen from disappearing into the same box.

Davy lapsed into uncharacteristic silence, his endless stream of questions quieted for the moment. Rita understood that many of the boy's questions were still too painful for his mother to face or answer, but it was time they were asked.

"You'll have to talk to your mother about that," Rita said.

Davy sighed. If Nana Dahd wouldn't tell him, he might never know. "I did ask her," he said. "She was too busy."

The truck's turn signals hadn't worked for years. Rita stuck her arm out the open window, signaling for a left-hand turn. Davy sat up straight and peered out the window.

"Where are we going now?" he asked.

"Up this road," Rita replied, turning onto a rutted, hardpacked dirt track that led off through the underbrush. Barely one car-width wide, the narrow trail wound through thick stands of newly leafed mesquite and brilliantly yellow palo Verde, up a slight rise, and then down through a dry, sandy wash. As the tires caught in the hubcap-deep sand, the steering wheel jerked sharply to the left. Rita clung to it with both hands and floorboarded the gas pedal, barely managing to maintain the truck's forward momentum.

Engine rumbling, the pickup emerged from the wash.

Ahead of them, the road gave little evidence of day-today use.

Whatever faint tire tracks may have preceded theirs had long since been obliterated by the hoofprints of wandering herds of cattle. A second dip in the road took them through a second dry wash. Beyond that, the long beside an empty streambed through clumps of brittle, sun-dried grass and weeds.

They drove past a place where the remnants of several adobe houses were gradually melting back into the desert floor. "Did this used to be a village?" Davy asked.

Rita nodded. "It was called Ko'oi Koshwa."

"Rattlesnake Skull?" Davy asked.

The old woman smiled and nodded. The Anglo child's quick grasp of Rita's native language always pleased her.

"Where did the people go?" he asked.

"Long ago, the Apaches came here. They surprised the village and destroyed it. They took most of the women and children away, although two--a boy and a girl--escaped. They hid in a cave up there in those hills."

Rita pointed to where the base of the mountain loligam, Kitt Peak, abruptly thrust itself out of the flat desert floor.

"After that, people said this was a bad place, a haunted place. No one wanted to live here anymore. When they made the reservation, they left the charco which once belonged to the village outside the boundary."

Davy immediately began looking for the charco, a man-made catchbasin used by the Papagos to catch the nutrient-rich summer-rain flash floods.

For centuries, water captured in these isolated charcos irrigated Indian fields and watered livestock.

"But why are we going to a charco, Nana Dahd? I thought we were going to a dance."

Rita stopped the truck where a barbed-wire gate barred their way. "To the charco first. Go open the gate," she said.

Proud to be assigned such an important task, Davy did as he was told.

He stood to one side, holding the gate until Rita had driven through.

Once the gate was closed and he was back in the truck, they continued to follow the faint track, stopping at last just outside a shady grove of towering cottonwoods clustered around the man-made banks of an earthen water hole.

Hard-caked mud, baked shiny by an unrelenting sun and shot through with jagged cracks and the hoofprints of thirsty cattle, was all that remained from the previous summer's life-sustaining rainstorms. It was June and hot.

Both people and livestock hoped the rains would come again soon.

Davy looked around warily. For some reason he couldn't explain, he didn't like this place. "Why are we stopping here?"

"We have work to do, Olhoni. Come. Bring the rake and shovel."

Carrying the wreath and the candle with her, Nana Dahd slid heavily out of the pickup and trudged toward the base of the largest of the cottonwoods.

The rake and shovel, half again as tall as Davy himself, were unwieldy and difficult for a six-year-old to carry, but he struggled manfully with them, making his way without complaint over the rough track from the truck to where Nana Dahd stood staring down at the ground.

It wasn't until Davy reached her side that he saw what she was looking at-a shrine of sorts, although he didn't know to call it that. In the middle of a circular patch of barren ground stood a small wooden cross.

On it hung a faded plastic wreath, and before it sat a smoky glass vase that had once contained a candle. Both cross and glass were framed by a broken circle of smooth white river rocks.

"What is this, Nana Dahd?" Davy asked. "A grave? Is this a cemetery?"

He looked up. Nana Dahd's usually impassive face was awash with emotion. A single tear glistened in the corner of her eye. In all his six years, Davy Ladd I had never before seen his beloved Nana Dahd cry.

Tears were precious and not to be spilled without good reason.

Something must be terribly wrong.

"Let's go," he begged, reaching up and tugging at her hand. "Let's leave this place. It's scary here."

But Nana Dahd had no intention of leaving. His touch seemed to jar her out of her reverie. Patting his shoulder, she reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out a huge, wrinkled hanky. She blew her nose and wiped her red-rimmed eyes.

"I'm okay, Olhoni. We will leave, but after, not right now. First we work."

Nana Dahd showed Davy how animals had scattered some of the white border stones into the brush. She directed him to find and rearrange as many as he could.

Meanwhile, she retrieved the hoe and began scraping the small circle clean of all encroaching blades of grass and weed. As soon as the clearing satisfied her, she carefully removed the faded wreath from the cross and replaced it with the new one.

It was summer, and the harsh early afternoon sun beat down on them as they worked. Davy rebuilt the stone circle as best he could. Rita nodded with approval as he moved the last piece of border into place.

"Good," she said. "Now for the candle."

While Davy watched, she placed the new candle before the cross, bracing it around the base with a supporting bank of rocks and dirt.

"This is to keep the candle from falling over by accident," she explained. "It would be very bad if our candle started a range fire.

Finished at last, she knelt before the cross one last time and examined their handiwork. It was good. She motioned for Davy to join her.

"Light the candle, Olhoni," she said gravely, handing him a book of matches.

Davy scratched his head in exasperation. How could grown-ups be so stupid? "But, Nana Dahd," he objected.

"It isn't even dark yet. Why do we need a candle?"

"The light is for the spirits, Olhoni," she told him. "It's not for us."

Davy had used matches a few other times, but always in the house, never outside. It took three sputtering attempts before his small fingers managed to strike a match and keep it burning long enough to touch the flame to the wick of the candle. Nana Dahd watched patiently and without criticism, allowing the child to learn for himself of the need to shelter the match's faltering flame from unexpected breezes.

At last the wick caught fire. Davy glanced at Nana Dahd to see what he should do next. When she bowed her head, closed her eyes, and crossed herself, Davy did the same, listening in rapt silence while the old woman prayed.

To most Anglos that prayer, murmured softly in guttural Papago, would have been incomprehensible, but not to Davy, not to a child whose first spoken word, uttered almost five years earlier, had been a gleeful shout of 11gogs"-Papago for dog--on the day Nana Dahd brought home an ungainly, scrawny puppy. She called the pup "Ohlo," Papago for "Bone."

From that small beginning, Davy had learned other Indian words at the same time he learned the English ones. He spoke his godmother's native language with almost the same ease as his mother's English.

Listening now, he heard Nana Dahd's prayer, a fervent one, for the immortal soul of someone Davy didn't know, someone named Gina. The child listened quietly, attentively. When the prayer was finished, the old woman discovered that her legs and feet were painfully swollen.

She had to ask Davy to untie her shoes and help her to her feet.

Once standing, Rita reached over and picked up the rake and hoe. "I'll take these. Get the old wreath, Olhoni. If we leave it here, hungry cattle may try to eat it."

He gathered the wreath and the empty candle glass, then followed the limping woman to the truck, straggling a few thoughtful paces behind her.

Only then, as they walked, did he ask the question.

"Who's Gina, Nana Dahd?"

"My granddaughter, Olhoni. She died around here."

Surprised, Davy paused and looked back at the grove of trees.

"Here?"

Rita nodded. "Seven years ago today. Each year, on the anniversary, I decorate her cross to let her know she's not forgotten."

"Is that why you lit the candle? Because it's the opposite of a birthday?"

It was a precocious question from a child whose mother gave him plenty of words to use but little of herself "Yes, Olhoni."

For a moment, Davy frowned, trying to assimilate this new and unexpected piece of information. He thought himself as much Rita's child as his own mother's. The idea that Nana Dahd had another child or a grandchild of her own came as an unwelcome surprise.

"What's the matter?" Rita asked.

"I didn't know you had a daughter," he said accusingly.

"Not a daughter, 01honi, a son. Gina was my grandchild, my son's only daughter."

"She's just like my father, isn't she?" he said.

Nana Dahd frowned. Had Diana told Davy about the connection between the two deaths? That didn't seem likely. "What do you mean?" Rita asked.

"Gina died before I was born," he answered. "So did my father. Why did everybody have to die before I was born so I couldn't meet them?"

The question was far less complicated than Rita had feared, and so was her answer. "If you had a father, little one," Nana Dahd said gently, "then you wouldn't be my Olhoni. Come. We still have to go up the mountain."

When she reached the truck, Rita turned and looked back at the disconsolate child shambling behind her, kicking up clouds of dust with the scuffed toes of his shoes.

"Now what's the matter?" she asked.

"Where's my father's cross?" he demanded. "Does my mother put flowers and candles on it?"

Nana Dahd shook her head. She doubted it. "I don't know," she said.

It was high time the boy knew the truth about his father, but telling him wasn't Rita's place. She wouldn't tell Olhoni about that any more than she would have told him about his mother's rhinestone-studded cowboy boots.

"That's another question you'll have to ask your mother, Olhoni. Now, climb into the truck. It's getting late."

Andrew Carlisle didn't have to wait long for a ride. The fourth car to whiz past him on the entrance ramp, a green Toyota Corolla, slowed and pulled over the side to wait for him. The set of yellow lights trapped to the top told him the car was an oversized-load pilot car. The driver, a woman, leaned over and rolled down the passenger window just as he reached the car.

"Where to?" she asked.

The woman, a faded, frowsy blonde in her late thirties or early forties, was moderately attractive. She wore shorts and a halter top and held a glistening beer can in one hand while a lipstick-stained cigarette smoldered in the ashtray.

"Prescott," he said.

Over the years, lying had become such a deeply ingrained habit that he never considered telling the truth.

She tossed her purse into the backseat, clearing a place for him. "I'm only going as far as Casa Grande," she said, "but it's a start. Get in.

Care for a beer? Cooler's in the back."

Andrew Carlisle hadn't tasted a beer in more than six years. "Don't mind if I do," he said, reaching around behind him to grab a Bud from the cooler. Personally, he would have preferred Coors, but beggars can't be choosers.

He took a long swig, then held the beer in his mouth, savoring the sharp bite of flavor on his tongue. Beer wasn't all he hadn't tasted in six years, he thought. Not by a long shot.

He stole a surreptitious glance at the woman. He'd heard stories about these pilot-car women, about how much they made on the job itself and how much they made moonlighting on their backs. Andrew Carlisle had spent so many years fantasizing about Diana Ladd and her swollen belly and what he'd do to her when he finally got the chance that he had almost missed this golden opportunity when it all but fell in his lap.

"Why Prescott?" the woman was saying.

"My dad's in the hospital up there," he said. "He isn't expected to make it."

The woman clucked her tongue in sympathy. "That's too bad."

"My car broke down in Lordsburg," he continued. "The mechanic said it would take at least two days to get parts and another day to put it back together. According to my mom, Dad doesn't have three days. So I decided to hitchhike there and go back for the car later."

Carlisle let his index finger stroke around and around the smooth lip of the can, sensuously wiping the beads of moisture off it and wondering how many places besides the door handle, the cooler, and the beer can he had touched.

Where else would he have left prints? He would have to remember all those places later so as not to miss any when he wiped the vehicle clean.

The woman set the beer can between her legs and reached for the still-burning cigarette. A few stray ashes rained down on the seat as she took a long drag, but Andrew Carlisle was conscious only of the cool beer can resting unselfconsciously between her deeply tanned legs.

Looking at it caused a sudden, insistent stiffening between his own.

"Do you do it for money?" he asked.

She looked at him and laughed. "Drive pilot cars? Of course I do it for money. Even with air-conditioning, working for mobile home-toters is a lousy job, but it's better than no job at all, which is where I was after they laid me off at Hecla."

Andrew Carlisle hadn't been talking about driving pilot cars. He had meant something else entirely. He liked the fact that she was too dumb to pick up on the double entendre. Women were stupid that way.

Sometimes you had to hit them over the head just to get their attention.

Ahead of them, Picacho Peak loomed in the distance, its rugged gray silhouette shimmering in the heat waves that rose off the freeway's pavement. Carlisle knew the mountain's name as well as he knew his own, but he didn't let on. "What's that?" he asked, pointing.

"The mountain?" the woman asked, looking at him dubiously. "I thought you said you're from Prescott. How come you don't know Picacho Peak?"

"My dad's in Prescott," he said. "In the VA hospital up there. I'm from El Paso. I've never been here before. What did you call it, Picacho Peak? It looks steep. Do people climb it?"

"All the time. I grew up around here. The mountain's one of my favorite places. Actually, there's a rest area partway up. We could make a pit stop there if you can spare the time."

"Sure," he said agreeably. "I'd like that."

The parking lot at the rest area was totally deserted.

A searing, hot wind blew down off the mountain and into their faces when they got out of the car. While the woman went to use the rest room, Andrew retrieved two more beers from the cooler and then sauntered over to a shaded picnic table. Across the desert came the whine of tires as vehicles sped along the Interstate several hundred yards away, but none of them slowed or stopped. Closer at hand there was no sign of life.

He took a leisurely sip from his second beer in six years.

The alcohol was making him a little giddy, giving him a slight but pleasant buzz. He sat with his back against the warm concrete picnic tabletop and thought about taking her right there in the heat, in broad daylight, as it were.

That excited him almost beyond bearing, but there was no sense in being stupid. Carlisle looked around. At one end of the rest area, he saw a small playground. Beyond it, a trail wound off up the mountain.

When the woman emerged from the rest room, Carlisle was gratified to see that she had applied a fresh coat of vivid red lipstick. He looked forward to the taste of it, anticipating how it would feel to crush those full lips against his own. He wondered if cosmetic companies had ever considered naming their lipsticks with his kind of flavors---Yielding Woman" would be a good one or maybe "Blood Red."

Maybe he could get a job writing advertising copy.

As she came walking toward him. he again noticed the deep tan on her legs and the easy, sensuous sway of her generous hips. Not unaware of her effect on him, she seemed, in fact, to enjoy it.

He handed her a beer, which he'd already opened. "Ever make any money on the side?" he asked.

She smiled coquettishly over the top of the can, but she made no movement away from him. He caught a whiff of freshened perfume with its hint of tacit agreement. "That depends on what you have in mind," she said. "Your place or mine?"

He almost choked. She was brazen as hell. Is that what had happened to women in the six-and-a-half years since 1968 when they'd locked him up?

Was that what "Women's Lib" was all about? A little reluctance might have been nice.

Carlisle liked reluctance in his women. Sex was always far more interesting when the woman had to give more than she intended. This broad, for instance, thought she was in complete control. He'd be only too happy to show her otherwise.

"Right here," he said, motioning toward the picnic table behind them.

She looked at him incredulously. "Right here? In the rest area? In this heat? What if somebody comes?"

Somebody'll come, he thought. "A quickie," he said, ashamed that it sounded so much like begging.

She laughed then. Something about him struck her as funny. The muscles along his jawline tightened with sudden anger.

"Sixty-five," she said easily. "It'd be more if we had to rent a room.

Let me see the money first."

Sixty-five? he thought. What kind of price was that for a piece of ass? But he counted out the bills slowly and deliberately, giving himself time to savor the sensation. He studied the fine lines of her upturned palm as he placed the money in her hand. Would a fortune-teller have been able to read the lifeline etched there and tell what was about to happen?

She took the money from him, folded it in quarters, and stuffed the wad of bills into the tight hip pocket of her shorts. "You mean right here on the table?" she asked.

"How about down the path," he suggested lamely, as though stricken with a sudden case of shyness. "Maybe far enough to be out of sight of the parking lot."

She laughed again. "So you are bashful after all," she teased.

"A little," he admitted.

Maybe he would have let her go if she hadn't laughed at him so much, but he doubted it. He knew himself better than that. The die had been cast the moment she slowed down to pick him up.

She set off at a brisk pace, leading him toward the path.

Fierce heat leaped off the rocks and burned their faces.

"It may be too hot," he said, dropping back as though he had changed his mind.

"There's a spring," she said. "Water and some shade.

I've been here lots of times. It's not far."

She was right, it wasn't far, but it was all uphill. About a quarter of a mile up the steep track, she swung off the main trail and followed another, fainter one off to the side. Andrew Carlisle struggled to keep up. By the time they neared the thick grove of mesquite trees, he was completely out of breath. His hard-on had melted into nothing.

He followed her as she disappeared into dappled shade.

The ground beneath them seemed almost pleasantly cool compared to the overheated air and shale outside. A tiny spring sent a trickle of water down a short streambed into a rocky basin. Near the basin, someone had cleared a flat spot in the cool, shaded dirt.

Without a word, the woman kicked off her sandals and stripped out of her clothes. She wasn't wearing a bra. Her breasts sagged a bit, but her figure wasn't that bad. There were no lines or light spots in the golden tan that covered her body. She looked good for her age, and she knew it.

"Me on top or you?" she asked perfunctorily.

"Me," Andrew Carlisle said.

"It figures," she returned.

He undressed quickly, and she pulled him down on her, kissing him eagerly, letting her tongue explore his, expert fingers stroking his hard-on back to life. She was a pro who knew all the right buttons to push. They worked all too well.

He had wanted to take his time, to savor every sensation, but his body worked against him. With a groan, it was over almost before it had begun, and she was laughing again, lying beneath him, giggling into the hot flesh of his shoulder.

"When you said quickie, you weren't kidding," He had planned to do it anyway, but he hadn't expected the blind rage that overcame him at the sound of that laughter. It may have been funny to her, but not to him.

Steadying himself on one elbow, he shoved his thumb into the delicate hollow at the base of her throat. Her eyes went wild, first with Mann and then with abject terror when she realized the extent of her danger.

She tried to cry out, but the terrible grinding pressure that starved her of oxygen also cut off her ability to scream.

Her body arched beneath him as she fought desperately to escape. She rolled from side to side and tried futilely to scoot out from under him, but he held her fast. Her sharpened, talonlike fingernails raked down his shoulders and back, but the pain that shot through him acted as a spur, exciting him, goading him With a sense of satisfaction, he felt himself stiffen once more.

Carlisle had learned the finer points of strangling from some of the boys on Death Row at Florence. You'd think from reading newspapers that those guys never mingle with the general prison population, but Carlisle had made it his business to make contact and take lessons.

The experts all said that once you start, you can't let up or back off, and he didn't. He rode her like a rodeo bronco while she writhed and bucked beneath him, carrying them both away from the dirt clearing, scraping his knees and tearing the flesh from her naked back and buttocks as she dragged them both onto jagged, unshaded, blistering shale. He rode her and came again, semen dribbling into her pubic hair, just as the woman's eyes rolled back into her head.

He knew better than to let go too soon. He held on, lying on top of her supine body with the rocks scorching his knees and shins, until he knew for sure she would never move again.

Only then, spent and gasping for breath, did he raise up on one elbow to examine his handiwork. Her perfect pink nipple lay invitingly exposed before him, inches from his face and teeth. It was the fantasy feast Andrew Carlisle had always dreamed about from the time he began dreaming of such things, but it was something he'd only sampled once before in his life. The temptation to do it again was all too powerful.

Leaning down, he took the still-warm nipple between his lips and sucked on it thoughtfully for a moment. Then he bit it-hard, bit until the soft flesh gave way beneath his teeth and the coppery taste of blood filled his mouth.

He let it linger on his tongue for only a moment before he spat it out.

It was far too salty. What Andrew Carlisle really wanted right about then was another beer.

Davy loved the drive to loligam, as Rita called the mountain that lay like a huge steeping lion overlooking a broad, flat valley. Nana Dahd had explained that ioligam means manzanita, a low-growing desert brush that thrives on the mountain's rocky sides. From a distance, the brush gives the mountain its bluish tint. Diana, however, always referred to the mountain by its Anglo name of Kitt Peak.

Davy preferred Ioligam.

He liked the way the air seemed to clear and the sky turned bluer as they came up the slight rise near the shaded rest area and the turnoff to the village of Ban Thak where they would be going later for the feast.

"Tell me again why they call it Coyote Sitting," Davy begged. "Do coyotes really sit there?"

Rita smiled indulgently. "Only in the winter," she said, when they tell one another stories."

As they continued on, Davy took a keen interest in the crosses that dotted the roadside here and there along the way. Like Gina's, many of them were now dressed up with vivid new wreaths and candles. In one place, four separate crosses were clustered together.

"Did four people die there?" he asked, testing the reliability of his newfound knowledge.

Nana Dahd nodded. "A car wreck," she answered.

She had told him they would have to hurry to get to the gift shop on top of the mountain before the road closed, but when they turned off the highway onto the much smaller one leading up to Ioligam itself, Davy puzzled over what would close it. The road with its Open Range sign seemed Straight enough, at least at first, and there was nothing wrong with the weather.

Davy knew, for instance, that during heavy rainstorms, running water could sometimes fill dry creek beds and washes and make roads impassable, but on this cloudless day, that seemed an unlikely possibility. He puzzled over the question as they wound their way up the mountain. A road closing for no reason seemed as mysterious as lighting a candle in broad daylight.

Finally, he broke down and asked. "Why will the road close, Nana Dahd?"

"Those men up there," Rita said, nodding her head in the direction of the observatory buildings, which shone in the sunlight like so many white jewels clustered in a rough crown around the top of the mountain.

"Those men who look at the stars through their big telescopes don't like light. They say headlights from cars make it so they can't see the stars."

"But doesn't I'itoi mind having all those white men living up there and making regular people stay away?" Davy asked.

The I'itoi legends were the Papagos' traditional winter telling tales.

Elder Brother stories were told only during those months when the snakes and lizards were hidden away from cold weather. It was said that if Snake or Lizard overheard someone telling an I'itoi story, the animal might swallow the storyteller's luck and bring him harm.

During the previous winter, while Diana Ladd was taking a graduate night course at the university in order to maintain her teaching certificate, Rita had entertained both Davy and herself by recounting all the traditional I'itoi tales she could remember. A few she had made up on the spot.

She had told Davy how in the old days loligam had been l'itoi's summer home, the place he went to relax when he left his regular home on Baboquivari, another peak many miles to the south. She had told him how, when the Anglo scientists had come to the tribe and asked for permission to build their star-gazing telescopes on the sacred top of Ioligam, the tribal council had insisted that a special clause go into the lease that declared that all caves on the mountain belonged to l'itoi. They were sacred, and not to be disturbed.

Now, though, as Davy's words slipped into her heart, Rita Antone realized that he regarded the Anglo scientists as different somehow, as a people apart from his own kind. For the first time, she wondered if she had done the right thing.

Nana Dahd loved her little Olhoni more than life itself, but had she gone too far? Did blond-haired Davy Ladd believe he was disconnected from "those white men" and their telescopes? Had she created an Anglo child who would always watch westerns on television and in the movies with an Indian child's inevitable dread of impending defeat?

Rita Antone had wanted desperately to pass on her legacy of wisdom, knowledge gleaned from her own grandmother, a much-respected Ban Thak wise woman. She had expected that wisdom to flow through her own son, Gordon, to Gina, her granddaughter. But Gina had been stolen from her, and during the terrible troubles that followed Gina's death, Diana Ladd alone had been Rita's constant ally.

That was a debt that demanded repayment, and she was paying it back in the only wealth she had at her disposal.

When O’honi was born, Rita had looked at the fatherless child and had known instinctively that Diana's ability to mother the child had somehow been obliterated with the death of the child's father. So Rita had stepped into the breach, taking on the role of godmother and mentor to the little bald-headed baby. She had been happy to find willing ears into which she could pour all that she knew.

The old woman had lavished on Davy the kind of love Diana Ladd couldn't wring from her own rock-hard heart.

At sixty-five years of age, Nana Dahd usually knew her own mind. She lived with a Papago's stolid and abiding faith in life's inevitabilities. This sudden attack of uncertainty caused new beads of sweat to break out on her forehead.

While Davy dozed contentedly in the sunlit rider's seat, Nana Dahd struggled with her conscience. Down by the shrine where Gina had died, Rita had crossed herself and prayed to the Anglo God, to Father John's God, her mother's God, asking for His blessing on Gina's eternal soul.

But here, on Ioligam, on I'itoi's sacred mountain, the Anglo God seemed far away and deaf besides.

"Ni-i wehmatathag I'itoi ahni'i," she whispered, her voice almost inaudible beneath the groaning engine of the laboring GMC. "Fitoi, help me."

But she wasn't at all sure He would.

Chapter Three

AT ALMOST SEVEN thousand feet, a brisk breeze struck their faces as Rita and Davy stepped down from the GMC. After the heat of the desert floor far below, the cool mountain air felt almost chilly.

In the sparsely occupied observatory parking lot, Rita left Davy to unload baskets while she limped toward the gift shop. A little blond-haired girl sitting on sun-soaked steps regarded the Indian woman curiously as she tapped lightly on the visitor center's side entrance.

At this hour, visitors inside would be watching a movie. Rita disliked walking past them on her way to the craft shop.

Edwina Galvan, manager of the shop, came to the door.

Edwina, a Kiowa transplant to the Papago, had fallen in love with and married a young Papago fire fighter who now, as a middle-aged man, served as tribal-council representative from Ban Thak. Indian even in her forties, Edwina's classic Plain features and good looks met and exceeded all the visiting tourists' "real Indian" expectations.

She augmented a stunning natural beauty with a varying wardrobe of antelope or squash-blossom necklaces that she wasn't shy about removing and selling on the spot if a likely purchaser showed sufficient interest.

Since coming to the Papago and assuming management of the Kitt Peak gift shop, she had developed a reputation as a shrewd and knowledgeable basket trader, one with an unerring eye for superior craftsmanship.

For years, the Kjowa woman had been Rita Antone's sole customer.

Edwina smiled when she saw Rita's broad weathered face waiting outside the door. "So," she said. "If you're here, it must be June. It's sure a good thing. Your baskets are all gone."

She didn't say that because of their unrivaled superiority, Rita Antone's baskets were always the first to sell.

Such high praise would be considered excessive and rude.

It was enough to say that Rita's baskets were gone. The old woman nodded a brief acknowledgment of the understated compliment.

Davy appeared just then, lugging the first box of has- ketS. He waved to Edwina, then hurried back after the next load.

"The bald-headed baby isn't bald anymore," Edwina observed as the door closed behind him. "He's sure big.

Is he in school?"

"He just finished kindergarten. He'll be in first grade next year," Rita answered.

Davy returned with the second box of baskets, smiling shyly at Edwina as he put it down on the floor.

Edwina had heard all the reservation grumblings about Rita Antone, often called Hejel Wi'ithag, or Left Alone, by other Papagos: - Gossips said it wasn't right for her to squander all her hard-earned knowledge on Davy Ladd, an Anglo at that-a boy whose father, convicted or not, was ultimately responsible for Rita's own grandchild's death No one could understand why she would abandon her people to go live in Tucson with the killer's Anglo widow and her white-skinned baby.

Edwina, still considered a reservation newcomer after a mere twenty years, accepted as a given the special bond that existed between Rita Antone and Diana Ladd. She remembered how the people had unaccountably closed ranks against the bereaved woman after Gina Antone's death, saying that the old woman was bad luck. Diana and Rita, united by nothing more than mutual grief, had been each other's strongest allies in that time of trouble. Edwina Galvan didn't fault either woman for their continuing alliance, nor did she begrudge Left Alone her devotion to the blond-haired boy. In fact, Edwina rather liked him herself.

It took Davy several more trips before all the baskets were assembled in a pile on the floor in front of the counter. By then, Rita was seated on a chair behind the counter drinking a glass of water and fanning herself while Edwina went through the boxes one by one, examining each basket in turn, writing the price on a piece of masking tape that she affixed to the bottom of each basket after first making a note in the ragged notebook that served as her master record.

"You've sure been busy," Edwina commented off handedly as she worked.

"What are you going to do with all your money?"

"Saving it for my old age," Rita answered. At that, both women laughed.

Rita was sixty-five years old. Among the of any known ethnic group in the world, one decimated by Papago, in a population with the highest blood-sugar count the ravages of both diabetes and alcoholism, Rita Antone was already well into a venerated old age.

Davy with a smile. He shook his head seriously. Edwina "Does she give you any of that cash?" Edwina asked reached into her pocket and extracted a quarter. "Here, I'll give you some," she said. "Go get yourself a Coke. The machine's right outside."

Davy dashed eagerly out of the gift, shop. Rita and his mother didn't let him have sodas often, so this was a special treat. He found the machine with no trouble and felt terribly grown up as he inserted the coin all by himself and pressed the selection button. A can rolled into the slot with a satisfying thunk. Grabbing it and turning at the same time, he ran headlong into the little Anglo girl who had watched him make trip after trip carrying loads of baskets. The impact of the unexpected collision knocked the soda can out of his hands. It fell to the ground and rolled away.

"Watch where you're going, dummy," he muttered. He retrieved the can, but when he opened it, half its contents blew into the air.

Disappointed, he flopped down onto the steps to drink what was left.

Moments later, the little girl joined him, bringing her own soda with her.

"Is that woman you're with a Indian?" she asked.

It was bad manners to ask such questions, but Davy answered anyway.

"Yes.- "Are you a Indian, too?" she persisted.

"Maybe I am," Davy answered, growing surly. "And maybe I'm not, either.

What's it to you?- With that, he stomped away, not sure what about the question had made him so angry. He hurried across the Parking lot to where two quarrelsome ground squirrels argued over an abandoned crust of bread. Suddenly, the automatic door of an outbuilding opened, and an ambulance eased into the sunlight.

At first Davy thought he was going to get to see it drive off with lights flashing and siren blaring. Instead, the driver parked directly outside the door, shut off the engine, then went back into the garage.

He returned moments later carrying a bucket of soapy water, a brush, and a fistful of rags.

Disappointed, Davy finished what was left of his soda and went looking for Rita.

Andrew Carlisle took his time. He was in no hurry to leave the scene of his triumph and return to the car.

After drinking his fill from the rocky pool, he washed the blood from his back, shins, and knees, letting the hot sun dry the moisture from his chafed skin. He took real pleasure in knowing that his victim had fought him and lost. He was a slight man, but the years of working out in prison, especially his total concentration on strengthening his hands, had paid off.

Only after he was fully dressed did he once more turn his attention to the dead woman. Andrew Carlisle was not a man accustomed to cleaning up his own messes, but in this case he made an exception. Dragging her by one arm, he hauled her into the shallow stream and washed her thoroughly, carefully rinsing off whatever traces of himself he might have left behind. Touching her now no longer aroused him, but he enjoyed looking at the ruined breast and knowing he had caused the damage. That was a trophy of sorts, something to be proud of.

When he finished cleaning her up, he dragged her back out of the water and arranged her to his liking, leaving her lying faceup in the searing sun, then he surveyed the area, gathering her clothing and sandals into a small, tidy stack.

He shook an almost full package of Winstons out of the woman's shirt pocket, and was happy to see that a book of matches had been shoved inside the cellophane wrapper.

He squatted there and smoked his cigarette. Little time had passed, but already a few alert flies and ants were beginning to do what flies and ants do with dead flesh.

He observed their purposeful movements with detached amusement, wondering idly how the insects knew about the unexpected bounty good fortune had laid at their doorstep. Was there some kind of secret signal, some code? Did an alert scout sound a special buzzing alarm that said, "Hey guys, follow me. Come see what I found"?

By the time Carlisle finished the cigarette, there were far more ants and flies than there had been when he first lit up. He ground out the cigarette and placed the butt along with the accumulated stack of clothing. He returned to the corpse and removed the jewelry-three rings, a Timex. watch, and a single gold-chain necklace-wresting them roughly from the body not because they might be valuable or worth selling but because any delay in identifying the body would work to his advantage.

Systematically, he went through the pockets Of her shorts and shirt, finding nothing but the car keys and his own sixty-five dollars. "You should have asked for more, honey," he said aloud to the dead woman as he returned the bills to his wallet. "Believe me, your pussy was worth it."

He returned to the pitiful stack of belongings and wrapped them as well as his discarded cigarette butt into a secure bundle, which he stuffed inside his shirt. The cigarettes, matches, and car keys went into a pocket. He made one last careful search of the area to make sure he had missed nothing.

Most of the terrain was rocky except for the hooker's makeshift earthen bed. With a mesquite branch, he swept the area clean of footprints, adding the branch to his bundle as well. When he was certain he had removed all visible incriminating evidence, Andrew Carlisle turned and walked away.

Welcome to the world, he thought. Payback time has started.

Diana Ladd leaned away from her typewriter and rolled her shoulders, trying to relieve the tension caused by several uninterrupted hours before her trusty Smith-Corona.

The writing wasn't going particularly well, but she refused to quit.

It was probably weariness that made her drop her guard for a moment, allowing the unwelcome, errant thought into her consciousness-if only Gary were here to give her a back rub.

Disgusted with herself, she choked the thought off smothering it as quickly as she could. Seven years after Gary's suicide, her mind and body both still played those kinds of tricks on her. She felt betrayed by the treachery of her own flesh, by the aching longings that sometimes awakened her in the middle of the night. Gary was dead, dammit, and she wouldn't have wanted him around any longer even if he weren't.

When the boy was gone, Mister Bone, as Diana often called the dog, lay at her feet. As soon as the typing stopped, he raised his head, hoping Diana might throw the ball for him. When she Pot up and padded to the kitchen, he followed, stopping by the kitchen sink to take a long, sloppy drink from his water dish while she retrieved a pitcher of warm sun tea from the patio.

Diana Ladd knew that her friends were losing patience.

One by one, they had all taken the trouble to tell her that it was high time she got over Gary's death, time that she dated someone else and found a father figure for poor little Davy. That was what they always called him--'poor little Davy." Well, she hadn't chosen very damn well the first time, and she didn't have any faith she'd do better the next time around. Besides, she had tried it--once.

She had gone out for one miserable evening with a traveling encyclopedia salesman who had made a presentation to the school faculty at Sells. He had taken her to dinner at the Iron Mask in Tucson and then to the Maverick, a country-western place on Twenty-second Street.

She had done all right until the band had played "The Snakes Crawl at Night." When they did that number, she had asked him to take her home, and she'd refused to go out with him again. Months later, he still called her periodically.

Taking the glass of iced tea back to her room, Diana settled down at the desk and read through the five pages she had written since Rita and Davy had left at noon. It was tripe, she knew it, but she resisted the temptation to wad it all up into a ball and throw it in the garbage.

Later, after she'd given it a rest, some of it might still be salvageable. If she was going to finish the book this summer-that was her stated goal-she couldn't afford to throw everything away.

Although she thought of the book as A novel, it was autobiographical, of course. Someone had said that all first novels are autobiographical. It was the story of a woman's attempt to go on living in the aftermath of her husband's betrayal and subsequent suicide. The problem was the main character. There was no joy in her heroine, no life.

Diana rolled another clean sheet of paper into the machine, then sat there staring at it. In the stillness of the darkened room, her parents' voices returned to haunt her. Once they started up, she had no choice but to let them Play On to the end of whatever tape had surfaced in her head. All of the arguments and battles were there, Preserved indelibly in her memory. The details varied occasionally, but the basic theme was always the same.

It had usually started around dinnertime when her father would come in from working in the woods near Joseph, Oregon.

"Where's that lazy daughter of yours, Iona? Why the hell isn't she down here helping you?" Her mother's voice would come drifting up the stairs to her then--calming and soothing, as always. "She's studying, Max.

Leave her alone. I don't need any help. Dinner's almost ready."

But Max Cooper was never one to be easily dissuaded.

He would come to the bottom of the stairs, and his voice would boom through the house like a clap of thunder announcing a sudden storm Over Oregon's Blue Mountains.

"Diana Lee, you get your ass down here. Now!" Knowing better than to argue Or fight back, Diana would hurry downstairs. Inevitably, he would be waiting for her at the landing, swaying dangerously, hiking up his pants, n tugging at his suspenders. She'd try to slip past him, but he would catch her by the braids, snapping her head back, pulling her hair until her eyes watered. She must have been twelve then, because her mother had cut off the braids right after her thirteenth birthday.

"What were you doing up there?" he demanded.

"Reading a book. For my book report. At twelve Diana Lee Cooper hadn't known that her father was illiterate. Diana didn't find that out until much later, when her mother was dying. Max Cooper's inability to read was part and parcel of the helplessness that bound Iona Cooper to him.

Aside from the fact that Diana wasn't a son, her love of reading was another reason for Max to despise their only child.

Diana's love of books and schooling both mystified and infuriated him.

Diana tried to slip away, but he yanked her braids again, shaking her, lifting her off her feet. The skin all over her head smarted, but she didn't cry out. Wouldn't cry out.

"How come you've always got that snooty nose of yours stuck in a book, young lady? You get your butt out into the kitchen, girl, and learn something useful for a change."

Twenty years later, Diana Ladd could still smell his stale, beer-saturated breath and see the spikes of stiff nose hairs in his flaring nostrils.

"Once you learn how to cook and clean and please a man, then's time enough for you to sit on your ass and read books."

He had shoved her away from him then, propelling her toward the kitchen.

Somehow she managed to keep her legs under her. In the kitchen, Iona Cooper, lips clenched, bent over the stove, concentrating on stirring the gravy or mashing the potatoes, refusing to meet Diana's gaze.

She never said anything aloud, never said anything her husband might overhear and use against them both, but a conspiracy of silence existed between the woman and her daughter.

Afterward, Diana Lee Ladd remembered that battle in particular and counted it as a watershed, A spark of rebellion caught fire that evening, one that Max Cooper was never able to stifle or beat out of his daughter no matter how hard he tried.

And twenty years later, Diana Lee Cooper hadd pushed aside her typewriter, put her head down in her arms, and cried because it wasn't worth it.

What good had it done to escape her ignorant father, to flee the brutal prison that had been her home in Joseph, Oregon? There was still no joy in her life. No joy at all.

Rita carefully maneuvered the truck down the winding road. It was a thirty-minute, twelve-mile drive, most of it with the road perched precariously on the steep flank of the mountain. She kept the truck in low gear to save the brakes. While Rita drove, Davy, more quiet than usual, hunkered down in his corner of the seat.

"What is it, Olhoni?" Rita asked.

"Will I be an Indian when I grow up?" His question mirrored her own concern, but she tried to laugh it off. "You already are," she told him.

"Really?" He brightened at once. "What kind? Papago, like you?"

Rita shook her head. "Big Toe," she said, smiling to herself because she knew the old joke would be new to Davy.

"I never heard of Big Toe Indians," he countered. "Where are they from?" "All over," she answered.

"Are you sure?- "They're People with so little Indian blood that the only thing Indian about them is their big toe."

"You're teasing me," he said, pouting.

She nodded. "That's one of the reasons l'itoi chose us for his People.

We tease and laugh and make jokes. So does he."

"But I still want to be an Indian," Davy insisted.

At the bottom of the mountain, the road straightened abruptly, dropping through the foothills on a stretch of reservation-owned open range.

Rita had driven on open range all her life, and she wasn't driving fast.

They were nearing the junction with Highway 86 when a started cow came crashing up onto the roadway out of a dry wash. With no warning, there was barely enough time to react. Rita jammed on the brakes.

The pickup swerved to one side, avoiding the animal by inches, but the right rear tire caught in the soft sand of the shoulder.

The GMC rolled over onto its side and then rolled again, end over end, coming to rest lying on its roof in the other lane, its hood facing in the wrong direction.

Without knowing precisely what had happened or how he got there, Davy found himself standing upright in the middle of the road.

He couldn't see anything. There was a terrible shrieking noise ringing in his ears, and another noise as well-a car's horn, honking one long, terrible wail.

Davy gasped for breath and realized that the first sound came from him-his own voice screaming. He put his hands to his face and brought them away bloody, but he could see again, could see the dust still flying, the tires still spinning uselessly in the air. The engine was still running, and the horn wouldn't quit. The blaring noise seemed to be all around him, coming up out of the desert floor, raining down on him from the very sky itself.

"Nana Dahd," he shouted. "Where are you? Are you all right?" There was no answer, only the horn-the terrible horn.

He scrambled over to the pickup and peered inside. Nana Dahd lay with her body crushed against the steering wheel, which jutted far into the cab. Blood gushed from a gaping wound on her left hand.

"Nana Dahd!" Davy shouted again, but she didn't hear him, didn't stir.

Just then a pair of strong hands gripped his shoulders and dragged him away from the truck. Davy looked up to see that an Anglo man, a stranger, was holding him. He fought the hands with all his might, kicking and screaming, "Let me go! Let me go!" But the man held him fast.

A second man was there now, crawling on his hands and knees, peering into the truck. He reached inside across Nana Dahd's still body and switched off the engine, then he tugged at some wires under the dash.

The waiting horn was instantly stilled, and the sudden silence was deafening.

"Can we get her out, Joe?"

The man by the truck shook his head. "I don't think SO.

She's pinned. We've got to get a tourniquet on this hand, then find some help. How far back to that little trading post?"

"Three Points? A long way. What about the other direction, toward Sells?"

"Up there!" Davy told them, pointing back up the mountain, but the men didn't hear him. After all, he was only a little kid. What did he know?

"You stay with her," one man was saying to the other, letting Davy go and heading back toward his car, a shiny red Grand Prix. The two men had been traveling past the turnoff on the highway just in time to see the GMC perform its spectacular series of acrobatics.

One of the two men started toward the car, but Davy ran after him, attaching himself to the man's knee like a stubborn cocklebur. The force of his tackle almost brought both of them down.

"Up there!" Davy insisted desperately. "We've got to, go up there!"

"Let go, kid. Don't waste time."

"But there's an ambulance up there. I know. I saw it!"

Finally, the boy's words penetrated. "An ambulance?

On the mountain?"

"Yes. Please."

"No shit! I'm going, but you stay here. You're hurt, too."

Beating him off with a club was all that would have kept Davy Ladd from clambering into the Grand Prix.

He sat in the front seat, not crying but shaking silently, his bloody face pressed to the inside of the windshield as the car raced up the steep mountain road, straightening the curves, clinging to the pavement on the outside edges.

At one point, the man tossed him a white handkerchief.

"Christ, kid, use this, will you? You're getting blood all over my car."

When they reached the top of the mountain, the car screeched to a stop in the parking lot.

"which way?" Davy pointed toward the garage. The door was closed.

Davy scrambled out of the car and ran toward the gift shop. It was after four and the place was closed, but Davy pounded on the side door, the one Nana Dahd had used earlier. when Edwina Galvan finally opened it, he flung himself at her.

"It's Nana Dahd! You've got to help her. She's hurt bad."

"What happened?"

The dam broke. Suddenly, Davy Ladd Was sobbing SO badly he could barely talk. "A cow," he mumbled. "A cow in the road."

,where?" Edwina demanded, but he didn't answer. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "Where did it happen?"

"Down on the flat. Almost to the highway."

Just then a piercing alarm sounded all over the complex at the top of the mountain. The man from the Grand prix dashed out of the garage followed by the ambulance. Two other men appeared from nowhere and ran for the ambulance.

It's at the bottom of the mountain," one of them shouted back at Edwina.

"Radio Sells for another ambulance."

Edwina nodded and turned to go back inside. Holding Davy's hand, she intended to take him with her, but he pulled free and darted away, climbing back into the front seat of the Grand Prix just as it started out of the Parking lot behind the Speeding ambulance.

No matter what, Davy Ladd's place was with Nana Dahd.

"The pain was bigger than she was and hotter than the sun. It burned through her, seared through her, until she couldn't think, couldn't breathe.

Where's 01honi? she wondered. She had called for him, but he didn't answer. Where was he? Was he dead? No.

That was impossible. That couldn't be, but where was he?

She asked the man, a man who was there trying to talk to her through the mangled window of the truck, but she could no longer translate the funny white words. The only words that made sense to her now were those of her childhood, the Papago ones. The man shook his head helplessly. He didn't understand, either.

"Where is Olhoni?" she murmured again and again.

"Where is my bald-headed baby?"

There were other cars now, other people. Rita could hear them, could see feet where faces ought to be. were they Upside down or was she?

What had happened? And where was Olhoni?

And then the pain. The pain that was bigger than she was grew even larger. It was a pain bigger than the stars and the sky and the universe. The pain was everything.

She heard a noise and realized that someone had cut a hole in the door of the truck. Her body was flowing out through that hole-her body and her blood.

They were moving her now, moving her out onto the ground and strapping her down to a board or a stretcher of some kind. That was when she started to fight them. The heavy white strap locked her to the board just as another strap long ago had once locked her to a bed.

She fought them like a smart cow fights when she knows she's being led to the slaughter. The pain was blinding, but she fought through it, fought beyond it. She might have won, too, but suddenly Olhoni was there, kneeling at her side, pleading with her to be still.

"Let them help you, Nana Dahd," he begged. "Please let them help you."

She looked up then and saw that beyond Olhoni some of the other faces swarming above her were Indian faces.

She wondered where they'd come from, or if they had been there all the time.

A few of the men were trying to pick up the stretcher with her on it.

She could tell from the looks on their faces that they thought she was too heavy. For some reason, this seemed funny to her, but when she tried to laugh, another searing pain shot through her.

One of the men tried to pry Davy away from her hand, but he clung to her and refused to budge.

"Let him come," one of the attendants said. "He's hurt, Could that be?

Olhoni hurt? Rita tried to look at him, to see what was wrong, but she blacked out then. The next thing she knew, she was riding in the ambulance, or rather on top of it. Over it somehow. She could see the two attendants huddled over a strangely familiar figure lying flat on a stretcher.

Olhoni was sitting off to one side. Rita called to him, but he didn't look up, didn't hear her. His eyes never left the face of the old woman on the stretcher. There was a bottle with some kind of liquid in it hanging above her.

A plastic tube led from the bottle to a needle pressed into the flesh of the woman's arm.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity. "We're losing her! We're losing her!" one of the attendants shouted.

Ruthlessly, the other man shoved Olhoni aside, pushing him roughly up into the front seat. The boy didn't protest.

He went where he was told and sat there, with his hands clutching the dashboard, staring out the window in front of him.

And that was when Rita saw the buzzards, three of them, sitting in a row on three separate telephone poles, their huge wings outstretched to collect the last warming rays of sunshine. Those buzzards, their heads still naked and bloody after I'itoi scalped them in punishment for betraying him, sat there soaking up the sun on their coal-black living wing tips.

The buzzards were alive and wanted to be alive. Suddenly, so did Rita.

Olhoni still needed her. Fitoi did not.

Clawing her way, hand over hand, Rita scrambled down from the roof of the movin vehicle, fought her way back inside the ambulance until she stood peering curiously down at the shrunken form still strapped to the stretcher.

For some time, she gazed dispassionately at the body, amazed by how terribly ancient that old woman seemed, by how worn and wrinkled and used-up she was, but not yet ready to be dead.

With a terrifying jolt, the electrical current passed through her body, hammering her heart awake once more, and she was home.

Andrew Carlisle took his time coming down the trail.

He searched back and forth, combing the Mountainside until he found the two empty beer cans they had dropped on the way up. No sense in leaving a set of identifiable fingerprints. He knew from what he'd learned in Florence that the chances of homicide cops finding a assailant were slim as long as the stranger was reasonably smart and played it cool.

The waning afternoon sun scorched the ground around him. No one had yet ventured into the deserted rest-area parking lot by the time he returned to his victim's car. He helped himself to another beer-still cold, thank God-and started the Toyota. He turned off the air-conditioning and drove down the freeway with the windows open, letting the hot desert air flow freely over his body. It was outside air.

He was free.

Fortunately, there was plenty of gas in the car, so he didn't have to stop before he got to Phoenix. He drove straight to the Park Central Mall in Phoenix proper and parked in an empty corner of the lot.

There, as afternoon turned to evening, he went through the woman's purse and removed all the cash, over two hundred dollars' worth.

Beneath the seat he discovered a gun, a Llarna .380 automatic. He had planned to take nothing that belonged to his victim, nothing that could tie him back to her, but the weapon was more temptation than he could resist. Trying to purchase a weapon if he wanted one later might cause people to ask questions. So he pocketed the gun.

Carefully, systematically, he went over every surface in the vehicle, wiping it clean of prints. Then he did the same to the beer cans and jewelry before he took them to a nearby trash can. The clothing he ditched in another can, this one at Thomas Mall on his way to the airport.

Sky Harbor was his last stop. Once there, he pulled into the long-term lot and took a ticket. One last time he wiped down everything he remembered touching since Park Mall-the door handle, steering wheel, gearshift, window knob, and keys. Then, placing the newly wiped keys back in the ignition, he got out of the car and walked away.

It was dark by then and much cooler. In the hubbub and hurry of the airport, no one noticed him walk away.

It would be a five-mile hike to his mother's new house in Tempe, but he wasn't afraid of walking. in fact, walking that far would be a real treat.

Chapter Four

AROUND SEVEN, BRANDON Walker emerged from his cubicle and ventured down the hallway, hoping to bum a cigarette and some company from Hank Maddern in Dispatch.

"Who knows. . ." Brandon began by way of greeting, walking up behind the dispatcher's back.

it ... what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" Maddern finished without turning. Both men laughed.

The intro to the old radio show The Shadow was a private in-crowd joke, shared among the grunts of the Pima County Sheriff's Department.

Professional police officers called themselves Shadows to differentiate between themselves and the political hacks who, with plum appointments, held most key jobs.

Sheriff DuShane, reelected over and over by comfortable margins, had himself one hell of a political machine, to say nothing of a lucrative handle on graft and corruption. One outraged deputy had printed up and distributed a bumper sticker that said, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF.

GET A MASSAGE. He had been all too right; he was also no longer a deputy.

DuShane may have been crooked, but he was also nobody's fool. He knew the value and necessity of real cops to do the real jobs. That's where the Shadows came in. They did all the work, got none of the glory, and most of them wouldn't have had it any other way.

Hank Maddern, who had reigned supreme in Dispatch for more than ten years, held the dubious honor of being the most senior Shadow. He worked nights because he preferred working nights.

"Hey, Hank, got a smoke?" Brandon asked.

Maddern pulled a crumpled, almost-empty pack from his breast pocket and tossed it across the counter. "Didn't quit smoking, just quit buying?"

"I'll even up eventually," Brandon said, shaking out the next-to-last cigarette.

"Right. You working on a case or hiding out?" Hank Maddern knew some of what went on in Brandon Walker's home life because he often fielded Louella Walker's calls.

"Hiding out," Brandon admitted, breathing the smoke into his lungs.

"Too bad it's so quiet."

"Give it time. It's Friday. Things'll heat up."

As if on cue, the switchboard buzzed, and Maddem picked up the line.

Brandon, with the cigarette dangling almost forgotten between his fingers, lounged against the counter. He gazed off into space, letting his mind go blank.

He wasn't ready to go back to his cubicle, and he sure as hell wasn't ready to go home.

Maddern, listening intently on his headset, made a series of quick notes. "What was that name again? L-A-D-D, first name Diana?"

Immediately, Brandon Walker's attention was riveted on Maddern. Even after six years, Diana Ladd's name was one he remembered all too well.

What was going on with her now?

"The boy's name is David," Maddern continued. "Yeah, I've got that, and you're Dr. Rosemead? Repeat that number, Dr. Rosemead, and the address, too."

Maddern reviewed his notes as the doctor spoke, verifying the information he had already been given.

"Sure," he said. "I understand, it's not life-threatening, but you've got to talk to the mother. Right. We'll get someone on it right away.

You bet. No problem."

He dropped the line and reached for the duty roster, running his finger down the list, checking the availability of cars and deputies%.

"What's going on?" Brandon asked.

"Car accident. Out on the reservation. A kid's been hurt, but not seriously. Needs a few stitches is all. Unfortunately, they took him out to the Indian Health Service in Sells. The doc there can't lift a finger because the kid's an Anglo.

They've tried reaching the mother by phone. Ma Bell says the line's off hook."

"I'll go," Brandon Walker offered at once.

"You? How come? You're Homicide. I already told you, the kid's not hurt bad."

"I'll go," Walker insisted.

"You really don't want to go home, do you? But don't bother with this.

I've got a car out by Gates Pass right now.

"Gates Pass?" Brandon said. "Doesn't she still live in Topawa?"

Maddem did a double take. "You know the lady?"

Walker nodded grimly. "From years ago."

"If you want to take her the bad news, then, be my guest," Maddem continued. "But the address they gave me doesn't say Topawa. It's out by Gates Pass somewhere.

The telephone number is a Tucson exchange."

The dispatcher scribbled the phone number and address on another slip of paper and handed it over to Brandon just as the switchboard lit up again. Maddern turned to answer it, waving Brandon away. "Later," he said.

Brandon Walker didn't return to his cubicle. Instead, he hurried directly out to the parking lot where his unmarked Ford Galaxy waited.

It was almost dark, but the temperature inside the closed vehicle was still unbearably hot. Before leaving the lot, Walker rolled down all the windows. Switching on the air-conditioning was pointless didn't work. Repairs on grunts' cars got shunted to the bottom of the priority list when it came to departmental mechanics.

The air conditioner was out of order, but the high-output, police-pursuit engine roared to life as soon as Walker turned the key in the ignition. He peeled out of the parking lot in a hail of loose gravel and headed for Gates Pass, driving on automatic, his mind occupied elsewhere.

Diana Ladd. It had to be her. It didn't seem possible that there would be two women in town by that same name. She had made a big impression on him. How long ago was it?

June? Jesus, it had to be almost seven years ago since the first time he saw her. He had forgotten about her between times-had forced himself to forget because some things are too painful to remember.

When had she moved to town? Not town exactly. The address on Gates Pass Road indicated an almost wilderness area well outside Tucson's city limits. She would have had more company in the Teachers' Compound in Topawa, living in the shabby mobile home where he had first met her.

Had she stopped teaching on the reservation then?

Maybe she had taken a job with District Number One in Tucson. God, she'd been pretty. Even six months pregnant she'd been pretty. And defiant.

He remembered the last time he saw her as though it were yesterday.

They were standing in the crowded hallway of the Pima County Courthouse after the judge announced Andrew Carlisle's plea-bargaining agreement.

The old Indian lady-what was her name?-was sitting on a bench off to the side. Diana Ladd came up to him, grasping his sleeve with one hand while the other rested on her bulging belly. He avoided her gaze, not wanting to see the betrayal and hurt in her eyes, but he couldn't evade the accusation in her voice.

"How could you let them do it?" she demanded, outraged, indignant.

"How could you let them get away with-" "There was nothing I could do," he answered lamely. "I didn't have a choice."

"We all have choices," she'd returned icily.

Drawing herself stiffly erect, she marched away from him, walking with the awkward dignity of the profoundly pregnant. She went straight to the bench and helped the old Indian lady to her feet. The two women walked past him, the younger carefully leading the elder, as though the old woman were blind or crippled or both.

And Brandon Walker, left alone in the midst of a milling crowd, looked after them and wondered what he could have done differently. Of course, that was years ago now. He was no longer as green, as naive.

He knew now that Diana Ladd had probably been right all along. There were things he could have done, arms he could have twisted, debts he could have called that might have made a difference.

A golden sliver of moon peeked over the jagged-toothed canyon as he drove the winding road to Gates Pass. He had no delusions that Diana Ladd would appreciate his coming to find her and tell her the news.

Hearing about the accident from someone she knew, even someone she didn't like, would be less hurtful than hearing it from a complete stranger.

In his gut, he understood that, but Brandon Walker wasn't looking forward to the meeting. He knew Diana Ladd hadn't forgiven him for what had happened, and that was no surprise. He hadn't forgiven himself.

At that time, long ago, Rattlesnake's bite had no poison.

The children laughed at him and played with him and tossed him in the air. Sometimes, for a joke, they would pull out all his teeth. This made Ko'oi, Rattlesnake, very unhappy.

One day Ko'oi went crying to First Born. "The children are always teasing me and making me miserable.

Please change me so I can go live somewhere else and be happy."

First Born had already changed many of the animals, so Rattlesnake, pulled out all his teeth, and threw them They fell in the desert, and overnight grew into the mountains we call Ko'oi Tahtami, or Rattlesnake's Tooth.

In the morning, First Born gathered up a few small, sharp rocks from these mountains and threw them into some water. They grew sharp and white and long, just the way rattlesnake teeth are today. First Born gave them to Rattlesnake and said to him, "Here. Now the children will no longer torment you, but from this day on, you will have no friends.

You must crawl on your belly and live alone. If anything comes near you, you must bite it and kill it."

And that, nawoj, my Friend, is the story of how Ko'oi, Rattlesnake, got his teeth.

In a lifetime of serial matrimony, Myrna Louise Spaulding had worked her way through a list of last names far too numerous to remember.

Like overly zealous Chicago voters, she cast her ballot in favor of marriage, voting early and often. She always married for love, never for money. She always divorced for the same reason--4me love--which may have been true at the time but never lasted long. Myrna Louise wasn't a risk-taker. She never slipped one wedding band off her much-used ring finger without having a pretty good replacement prospect lined up and waiting in the wings.

Her son, Andrew Carlisle, found his mother's peculiar penchant disturbing at first, humorous later, and ultimately boring. In his opinion, if Myrna Louise had been any good at the game, she would have seen to it that she picked up a few good pieces of change here and there along the way.

But no. With one minor exception, she always targeted bums and the'er-do-wells who were far worse off mentally and financially than she was.

Her last husband, Jake Spaulding-who also happened to be her late husband-had managed to roll over and die before the divorce was final.

Much to her stepchildren's dismay, Jake died without first revising his Will. He left Myrna Louise in sole possession of the little family house on Weber Drive.

As a neighborhood, Weber Drive didn't have much to recommend it, unless you liked the multicolored jack-in-the-box on the corner, but the house constituted a roof over Myrna Louise's head for a change. On her meager pension and with the widow's mite she had lucked into after Jake Spaulding's timely death, she figured she'd barely be able to cover both taxes and utilities.

A bit down-at- the-heels, Weber Drive still managed to be respectable enough, and even a bit self-righteous. Myrna Louise had made tentative overtures of friendship toward some of the neighbors. She was determined to fit in here, to really belong someplace at last. Her son's unexpected arrival was a definite fly in the ointment. Those very same neighbors might well puff the welcome mat right out from under the mother of an ex-con.

"Why, what in the world are you doing here?" a stunned Myrna Louise demanded, covering her dismay as best she could when the opened door revealed her son waiting on her doorstep.

"I came to see my mama," he said with a smile. "I thought you'd be glad to see me after all this time."

"Oh, I am. Of course I am. Come in. Come in here right now. But why didn't you let me know you were coming?"

"Because I didn't know, not for sure, anyway. They like to keep people guessing until the very last minute. It makes for better control."

She dragged Andrew into the living room and stood looking fuzzily up at him. Myrna Louise should have taken to wearing glasses years before, but she usually couldn't afford it, and besides, she was far too vain.

A driver's license might have forced her into glasses earlier, but she'd never owned a car, not until now. Jake's car was still out in the garage.

She planned to sell it if money ever got really tight.

"So are you out on parole, or what?" she asked petulantly.

"I'm out period, Mama. Free as a bird."

"Good," she said. She paused uncertainly. "Andrew I'd really like it if the neighbors didn't find out. About where you've been, I mean.

Not that I'm ashamed or anything, it's just that it'd be easier . . ."

"I'm still your son," he began.

"Don't let's be difficult. You see, you've been having all that mail sent here, all those things for Phil Wharton, whoever he is. I've been saving them, keeping them here for you just like you said. Who is he anyway, a friend of yours or what?"

"It's a pen name, Mama. I couldn't very well send things out with my own name on them, now could I."

"Thank goodness," she said.

:'What do you mean?"

'Well, that's sort of what I've been pretending. That you were him, or at least that Phil Wharton was my son."

"You've been telling your friends that I'm Phil?"

Myrna Louise cringed at the hard edge of anger in his voice. "I didn't mean any harm, Andrew. One of the ladies was here when the mail came one day. She saw it on the table and asked about it. I told her that you're a journalist who's been out of the country working on assignment and that you'd be home soon."

"So you've lied to them?"

"Please, Andrew, I. . ."

Andrew had her dead to rights, but the idea of his mother making up that kind of whopper was really pretty funny.

He decided to let her off the hook. After all, it was his first night home.

"It's okay, Mama. The name's Phil, remember?"

Breathing a sigh of relief, Myrna Louise smiled grate fully. He was going to go along with it and not embarrass her in front of her friends.

She wouldn't be expelled from the morning coffee break after all.

At once she switched into full motherly mode. "Have you had any dinner?

Are you hungry?"

Sure he was hungry. Why wouldn't he, be hungry? It had been a busy day, a tiring day. Besides, hiking up and down mountains always gives a man one hell of an appetite.

Diana waited until the sun went down before she tried going up on the roof to work on the cooler. No wonder people called them swamp coolers.

The thick, musty odor was unmistakable, gagging. Diana climbed up the ladder armed with a bottle of PineSol. She raised one side of the cooler and poured several glugs of powerful disinfectant into the water.

The oily, piny scent wasn't a big improvement, but it helped.

After returning the side of the cooler to its proper position, Diana stood for a few moments on the flat, graveled roof to survey her domain.

The wild and forbidding front yard remained much as it had been when she first bought the place. An overgrown thicket of head-high prickly pear cast bizarre, donkey-eared shadows in the frail moonlight.

She had spent far more effort in back, where both yard and patio were surrounded by a massive six-foot-high rock wall.

The end result was almost a fortress. Inside that barrier, she felt safe and protected.

The house and outbuildings, sturdily constructed in the early twentieth century and lovingly remodeled during the twenties, had originally belonged to one of Pima County's pioneer families. When family fortunes fell on hard times and when surviving family members dwindled to only one dotty eighty-year-old lady, most of the land, with the exception of the house, cook shack, and barn, had been deeded over to the county as payment for back taxes. That had been during the late forties. The old lady, who wasn't expected to live much longer anyway, had been allowed lifetime tenancy in the house, with her estate authorized to sell off the remainder after her death.

The old lady confounded all predictions and lived to a 101, refusing to leave the walled confines of the compound until the very end, but letting the place fall to wrack and ruin around her. She died, and the wreckage went up for sale at almost the same time Gary Ladd's life-insurance proceeds came into Diana's hands.

After spending her entire childhood in housing tied to her father's job, Diana Ladd wanted desperately to escape the mobile home in the Topawa Teachers' Compound housing, to bring her baby home to a house that belonged to her rather than to her employer. She jumped at the chance to buy the derelict old house. dissuade her, patiently The realtor had done his best to pointing out all the things that were wrong with the place.

it was full of garbage--of dead bread wrappers and empty tin cans and layers of old newspapers six feet deep. The plaster was falling off the lath in places, windows were cracked and broken, the roof leaked, and the toilet in the only bathroom had quit working. Throughout the house, falling wiring was a nightmare of jury-rigged repairs, but Diana Ladd was not to be deterred. She bought the place, warts and all, and she and Rita Antone set about fixing it up as best they could.

Six years later, the remodel was stalled for lack of Money. To solve that problem, Diana had temporarily set aside home-improvement projects in favor of finishing her book.

Writing it was pure speculation, of course. She had made some preliminary and reasonably favorable inquiries, but the book wasn't sold yet. She hoped that when she did sign a contract, she'd be able to hire a contractor to complete some of the heavier work.

Standing on the roof, she watched the approach of an oncoming pair of headlights on the road overhead Approaching her driveway, the vehicle slowed to a craw and the turn signals came on. As the unfamiliar car turned off the blacktop, Diana Ladd suffered a momentary panic.

For years, she had steeled herself against the possibility of Andrew Carlisle's coming after her in the same way she had prepared herself for the possibility of a snakebite. With Carlisle, as with the neighborhood's indigenous snakes, you assumed a certain amount of risk and did what you could to protect yourself.

Rattlesnakes rattle a warning before they strike, and so had Andrew Carlisle. The last time she had seen the man in the hallway at the courthouse, he had mouthed a silent threat at her when his accompanying deputy wasn't looking. "I'll be back," his lips had said noiselessly.

Over the years, she had learned to live with that threat, treating it seriously but keeping her fear firmly in the background of her consciousness. Most of the time, anyway, but the arrival of unfamiliar cars always brought it to the forefront.

The tires bounced down the rough, rocky road, and the headlights caught her in a piercing beam of light, blinding her, trapping her silhouetted against the night sky. She stood there paralyzed and vulnerable, while fear rose like bile in her throat.

From near the base of the ladder, she heard Bone's low-throated warning growl. The urgency of the sound prompted her to action, jolted her out of her panic. The headlights moved away. In sudden pitch darkness, she scrambled clumsily toward the ladder.

"Bone," she called softly, hoping to reach the ground in time to catch the dog's collar and keep him with her, but the tall, gangly hound didn't wait. Still growling, he raced to where the rocky, six-foot wall with its wooden gate intersected the corner of the house. The wall would have stopped most dogs cold, but not the Bone, a dog with the size and agility of a small mountain goat. Bounding from rock to rock, he scrambled up several outcroppings to the top, then flung himself off the other side.

As the car pulled to a stop in the front drive, the dog hurled himself out of the darkness toward the car, lunging like a ferocious, tooth-filled shadow at the front driver's side tire. Using the dog's attack as cover, Diana slipped into the house unnoticed. She was already in the living room when the trapped driver laid on the horn.

Cranking open the side panel of the front window, she called, "Who is it?"

The driver must have rolled down his window slightly, because the dog left off attacking the tire and reared up on his hind legs at the side of the car, barking ferociously.

."Call off this goddamned mutt before he breaks my window!" an outraged voice demanded.

"Who is it?" Diana insisted.

"Detective Walker," the voice answered. "Now call off the dog, Diana.

I've got to talk to you."

As soon as she heard the name, Diana recognized Brandon Walker's voice.

A sudden whirlwind of Memory brought the buried history back, all of it, robbing her of breath, leaving her shaken, unable to speak.

His voice softened. "Diana, please. Call off the dog."

She took a deep breath and hurried to the door. "Oh'o. Ihab," she ordered in Papago, stepping out onto the porch.

"Bone. Here."

With a single whined objection and a warning glare over his shoulder at the intruding car, the dog went to her at once and lay down at her feet.

Brandon Walker switched off the headlights and the engine. Cautiously, he opened the door, Peering warily at the woman and dog waiting on the lighted porch.

-Are you sure it's all right? Shouldn't you tie him up or something?

That dog's a menace."

"Bone's all right," she returned, making no move to restrain the animal.

"Why are you here? What do you want?"

"I've got to talk to you, Diana. There's been an accident."

"An accident? Where? Who?"

"Out on the reservation. Your son David's been hurt.

Not bad, but - - ."

"Davy? Oh, my God. Where is he? What's happened?"

Hearing the alarm in Diana's voice, the dog rose once more to his feet with another threatening growl. Diana grabbed Bone's collar and shoved him into the house, closing the door behind him.

With the dog safely locked away, Brandon Walker moved closer. "It's not as bad as it sounds," he reassured her quickly, "but the Indian Health Service doctor can't do anything about either treating him or letting him go until they talk to you. Your phone isn't working."

Diana's hand went to her throat. She looked stricken. "I forgot to put it back on the hook when I quit working."

She started toward the house, leaving him standing there.

"Wait. Where are you going?"

"To call the hospital and get my car keys," she said.

Two minutes later, she emerged from the house and headed toward her car, a tiny white Honda.

"Why don't you let me drive," Brandon offered, motioning toward the far more powerful Galaxy. "We'll make better time, especially if we use the lights."

She wavered for a moment, vacillating between driving herself and accepting his offer of help.

"What did the doctor say?" Brandon pressed.

"That Davy will have to go on into Tucson for stitches."

"See there? Let me drive. That way, you can take care of the boy."

The detective's good sense overcame Diana Ladd's stubborn independence.

Without another word, she headed for his car.

Later, as the Ford roared down the highway, lights flashing overhead, Diana noticed she was still holding the partially full bottle of PineSol. She clearly remembered putting it down when she used the phone, but in her frantic rush to leave the house, she must have unconsciously picked it up again. As unobtrusively as possible, she slipped the offending bottle out of sight under the seat of the speeding Galaxy. Diana Ladd was upset, and she didn't want the detective to realize exactly how upset she was.

Fat Crack Ortiz owned the only gas station in Sells. He also owned the only tow truck. Consequently, he was the first member of Rita Antone's family to be notified of the accident on Kitt Peak Road.

After towing the demolished Jimmy back to the station, he hurried straight to the hospital. One of a handful of Christian Scientists on the reservation, Fat Crack subscribed to neither medical doctors nor medicine men, but he was prepared to be open-minded as far as other people's beliefs were concerned.

As soon as he turned up in the emergency-room lobby, one of the nurses, Effie Joaquin, recognized him. "Is it serious?" he asked.

Effie nodded. "It sure is. She's ruptured her spleen and broken some ribs and one arm. There may be other internal injuries as well. She went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. Do you want to see her before she goes into surgery?"

"If I can," Fat Crack said.

The nurse ushered him into the emergency room. Rita, looking pale and shrunken, lay on a gurney with an IV bag draining into her flaccid right arm. The other arm was swathed in bulky, bloody bandages. He walked over to the gurney and bent close to Rita's head.

"Ni-thahth?" he whispered gently in her ear, speaking the traditional words for his mother's elder sister.

Her eyes fluttered open, darted around wildly for a moment, then settled on his face. "Ni-mad," she returned.

"Nephew."

"I will pray for you," he said, reaching out and touching her grasping fingers, feeling his own power flowing into her. His auntie did not believe according to his rights, but Fat Crack's faith was strong enough for both of them.

"Olhoni," she whispered.

Her nephew had not heard the name before. At first he didn't understand what she was saying, He thought she was still worried about the spooked steer that had caused the accident.

"He's fine," Fat Crack reassured her. "You didn't hit him at all."

Rita shook her head impatiently and wet her parched lips. "The boy," she said. "Davy. He's outside. Stay with him. Until his mother comes."

"Sure, Ni-thahth," he told her. "I will see that he isn't left alone."

Rita's eyes closed then as Effie came to get the gurney.

"The operating room is ready now," she said. "You'll have to wait outside."

"Yes," Fat Crack said. "I will wait."

Myrna Louise fixed her son a quick dinner of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, washed down with a tumbler of her own rotgut vodka, then she showed him into the tiny second bedroom.

"Jake's clothes are still in the closet there," she said. "I haven't gotten around to calling Goodwill to come pick them up. Maybe some of it will fit."

Andrew Carlisle waited until his mother left the room and closed the door behind her before he hurried over to the bed. He groaned with disappointment. Three large selfaddressed envelopes lay there on the chenille bedspread manuscript-sized envelopes-each address, written in his own clear hand, said Mr. Philip Wharton.

Damn! So none of the three so-called literary agents had had balls enough to take it. He ripped open the envelopes one by one. A copy of his manuscript, A Less Than Noble Savage, was in each, along with three separate form letters saying thanks, but no thanks. For obvious reasons, he hadn't used his old agent, but these jerks were treating him like a rank amateur.

Damn them all straight to hell anyway! Who the hell did they think they were, turning him down with nothing more than a form letter? Not even a personal note? They didn't know what they were missing-who they were missing but he'd show them.

Hands trembling with suppressed rage, he tore each of the rejection slips into tiny pieces and threw the resulting confetti into the garbage. Those stupid bastards didn't know good writing when they saw it. They were too busy selling the public on half-baked, vapid fantasy/mysteries written by limp-wristed creeps who never once bloodied their own hands.

What had Andrew Carlisle always drummed into his students' heads?

Write what you know. If you want to know how it feels to be a murderer, try choking the life out of something and see how hard it is, how much effort it takes, and see how you feel about it afterward.

He felt a sudden stirring in his groin as he remembered Margaret and how it had felt to drain the life out of her.

He knew now, from going through her purse and car, that the blonde's name was Margaret, Margaret Danielson. Margie for short.

The pulsing urge came on him suddenly. He forced himself to undress and lie on the bed and just think about her.

He allowed himself to masturbate until he found release, because it was far too soon for him to do anything else.

Rita opened her eyes. A brilliant white light was shining above her.

Around the periphery of her vision, several people in green caps and face masks stood over her. All she could see were eyes---eyes and a few anxious frowns, no one she recognized, no one she knew.

A man leaned over her. She smelled the sharp, pungent odor of aftershave. He patted her arm gently. "It's going to be fine, Rita.

Everything's going to be okay."

Dr. Rosemead meant his reassuring touch and softly uttered words to offer his patient some comfort. They had exactly the opposite effect.

She shrank away from his fingers, her whole body convulsing and struggling against the restraints that bound her to the operating table even though every movement sent sharp stabs of pain through her body.

"Anesthetic! " Dr. Rosemead ordered sharply. "For God's sake, give her something!"

Davy sat quietly in the busy waiting room next to the mountain of a man he knew to be Nana Dahd's nephew.

The cut on his head had mostly stopped bleeding, although his hair was still sticky in spots where more blood had oozed out since the last time someone had cleaned it off. One of the nurses had said he would probably need stitches. He wondered if they used a sewing machine or maybe just a needle and thread.

His head ached, and when he tried to move around, he felt dizzy, so he sat still. The man next to him spoke to him briefly in Papago when he first sat down, then he seemed to go away completely. His body was there, but his mind seemed far, far away. It made Davy think of the way his mother was sometimes when she was working, so he contented himself with sitting and watching.

Being in that room was almost like being invisible. The people around him glanced at him and then looked quickly away. They spoke to one another in Papago, and the things they said made him realize they didn't know he understood what they were saying. They called Rita by another name, Hejel Wi'ithag, which means Left Alone. They called him by another name, too-Me'akam Mad, or Killer's Child. He couldn't understand why they called him by such a strange, mean name, or why they seemed not to like him.

Davy was tired, and his head hurt. He wanted Rita, but the nurses said she was in surgery. They said she was badly hurt. And where was his mother? Why wasn't she here? Just thinking about it made fat tears try to leak out the corners of his eyes. He squinted hard to keep that from happening. He sighed and tried to swallow the huge lump in his throat.

For the first time in more than an hour, the huge man next to him stirred and looked down at the little boy. Then, raising his broad, bare arm, he pulled Davy against him.

At first Davy started to resist, but only when he was resting against the enveloping warmth of the man's massive chest did the boy realize how cold he was and how tired.

He stopped struggling and let his eyes close.

Pillowed against Fat Crack Ortiz's massive bulk, Davy Ladd fell fast asleep.

Chapter Five

THE CAR WINDOWS were open, allowing in the cool night air as well as a noisy, windy roar that made conversation impossible. That was fine with Diana. She had no desire to talk to Brandon Walker, whose very presence unleashed the disturbing flood of memories now surging through her awareness. Blind to the nighttime desert flowing by outside the speeding Ford, Diana was totally preoccupied with pieces of the past that jerked like disjointed figures caught in the brilliant flashes of a strobe of recollection. The spinning figures danced in her mind's eye without order or definition.

Diana Lee Cooper was hard at work in the ditto room that Friday morning when the news came. Everyone in the English Department was so stunned that they all abandoned ship without anyone thinking to come tell her, and she was far too busy to notice.

In addition to the regular batch of departmental quizzes and outlines, Dr. Hunsington, the diminutive head of the English Department, had a twenty-five-page syllabus to put out-seventy-five copies of each. Once she finished running off Halitosis Hunsington's syllabus, it had to be collated and stapled.

Well after noon, she finally completed the last of the stapling and emerged into a strangely deserted hallway.

Laden with an armload of slippery paper, she was surprised to find the door to the English Department closed and locked. A hastily hand-penciled note tucked in one corner of the darkened window announced, CLOSED UNTIL MONDAY. H. F. HUNSINGTON.

"Closed?" she demanded of the inexplicably darkened window and empty hallway. "What do you mean, closed?"

Diana looked around and found herself absolutely alone.

Where had everyone gone? Her first reaction was that maybe her father's dire predictions of nuclear holocaust had come true, and everyone had disappeared into bomb shelters, but she quickly talked herself out of that one. Had nuclear warfare broken out, surely she would have heard sirens or some other kind of audible warning. There had been nothing.

As a dollar-an-hour, fifteen-hour-a-week work-study student, Diana Cooper had no key to the University of Oregon's English Department office. What was she supposed to do with all the dittos she had run off, she wondered, take them home with her? On her bike?

That was crazy. The office had been full of people earlier when she left for the ditto room-Dr. Hunsington, his secretary, the receptionist, and a whole collection of professors, instructors, and teaching assistants, an milling around the receptionist's desk, waiting to collect their daily quota of departmental mail to say nothing of their semimonthly pay checks. So where were they now?

She started to leave the dittoed papers by the locked door while she went to find someone with a key. She quickly discarded that idea.

Several exams had been entrusted to her for dittoing purposes that morning. Diana took her charge of exam security very seriously, and she was unwilling to let the tests out of sight for even a moment.

Taking the entire stack with her, she started down the hall.

Halfway down the long corridor, she heard the echo of solitary footsteps coming up the stairs at the far end.

Diana was immensely relieved when Gary Ladd, one of the teaching assistants, materialized out of the stairwell and immediately started toward his office located in the bullpen at the far end of an adjacent wing.

"Mr. Ladd," Diana called. "Yoo-hoo."

He stopped, turned, and came back toward her, his head cocked questioningly to one side. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "I thought everybody went home."

Garrison Walther Ladd, HI, was by far the best-looking male teaching assistant in the English Department's stable.

With aquiline, tanned good looks and lank blond hair, he wore expensive but rumpled clothing with offhand, upper-class ease. Garrison Ladd knew he was hot stuff.

Breathless coeds who came within his sphere of influence found him irresistible. They tended to hie themselves off in search of obliging physicians willing to issue prescriptions for birth-control pills.

This was Diana's second year as an undergraduate student assistant in the English Department at the U. of O.

During that time she, too, had admired Gary Ladd, but only from a far.

For one thing, she had convinced herself that someone from Joseph, Oregon, could never be in Gary Ladd's league. For another, he was a graduate student while she was only a lowly sophomore.

He looked at her now with his tanned brow furrowed into a puzzled frown.

"Why didn't you go home when everybody else did?"

"I'm working," she said. "At least I'm trying to work.

I've got this whole stack of papers to deliver, but the door to the office is locked. Do you have a key? Where'd everybody go?"

Gary Ladd reached into a jacket pocket, extracted a key ring, then took two steps down the hallway before stopping and turning on Diana.

"Nobody told you, did they?"

"Told me what?" she returned. "I've been in the ditto room. When I came out, everything was closed up. Even the classrooms are empty.

What's going on?"

"Somebody shot President Kennedy."

"No!"

The very idea was incredible, unthinkable. Assassinations happened in other parts of the world-wild, terrible, jungle-filled places like South America or Africa--but not here in the good old U.S. of A.

"Where?" she managed to slammer. "When?"

"This morning. In Dallas. They already caught the guy who did it?"

"Is he all right?"

Garrison Ladd looked mystified. "He's fine. They've got him in jail."

"No, not him. I mean President Kennedy. Is he all right?"

Gary Ladd shook his head, while his gray-blue eyes darkened in sympathy.

"He's dead, Diana. President Kennedy is dead. They just swore in LBJ on the plane headed back to Washington. Come on. Let's go drop off your papers.

They must be heavy."

An Indian Health Services nurse hovered over Rita's bed-bound form, but the old woman's mind was far away in another time and place.

Dancing Quail hid behind her mother's skirts as the horse-drawn wagon pulled up beside the low-slung adobe house. It was the end of Shopol Eshabig Mashad, the short planting month. For days the children of Ban Thak had worried that soon Big Eddie Lopez, the tribal policeman, would come to take many of them away to boarding school.

Seven-year-old Dancing Quail didn't want to leave home.

She didn't want to go to school. Some of the other children had told her about it, about how they weren't allowed to speak to their friends in their own language, about how they had to dress up in stiff, uncomfortable clothing.

Her parents had argued about school. Alice Antone, who sometimes worked for the sisters at Topawa, maintained that education was important.

Joseph Antone disagreed, taking the more traditional view that all his daughter really needed to know was how to cook beans and make tortillas, how to carry water and make baskets-skills she would learn at home with her mother and grandmother and not at the boarding school in Phoenix.

But when Big Eddie's horse plodded into Ban Thak, Joseph Antone was miles away working in the floodplain fields. Big Eddie came over to the open fire where Alice stirred beans in a handmade pottery crock.

He wiped the sweat from his face. "It sure is hot," he said. "Where is your husband?"

"Gan," Alice said, nodding toward the fields. "Over there."

:'Will he be home soon?" Big Eddie asked.

'No," she answered. "Not soon."

"I have come for the children," Big Eddie announced.

"To take them to Chuk Shon to catch the train."

Dancing Quail had been to Tucson once with her mother and had found the town noisy and frightening. They had gone to sell her grandmother's ollas-heavy, narrownecked pottery crocks that kept water sweet and cool even through the heat of the summer. Alice had walked the dusty streets carrying a burden basket piled high with ollas, while Dancing Quail had trailed along behind. Once home in Ban Thak, the child had not asked to go again.

Quietly now, Dancing Quail attempted to slip away, but Alice stopped her. "Ni-niad. Daughter, come back. Go quickly and get your other dress. You are to go with this man. Hurry. Do not make him wait."

The huge policeman looked down at Dancing Quail with considerable empathy. He, too, had been frightened the first time he left home for school. Dancing Quail was one of those children who would have to be watched closely for fear she might run away before they could put her on the train. It would be better if Dancing Quail weren't the first child he loaded into the wagon.

"Give her something to eat," Big Eddie said. "I will go get the others.

It won't be so bad if she's not the only one."

He climbed back into the wagon and urged the waiting horse forward.

Alice turned to her daughter, who still hadn't moved. "Go now," she said. "Roll your other dress in your blanket."

"Ni-je'e," Dancing Quail began. "Mother, please..."

Alice stopped her with a stubborn shake of her head.

"The sisters say you should go. You will go."

Dejectedly, but without further argument, Dancing Quail did as she'd been told.

Her grandmother, Oks Arnichuda, which means Understanding Woman, had lived a full, busy life before coming to live, in her old age, with her son and daughter-in-law. No longer able to work and cook, Understanding Woman, Re other old women, had taken to sitting, either in the shade or the sun, depending upon the weather, and making pottery and baskets, which Alice was able to sell or trade.

From her pottery-making place, Understanding Woman had seen and heard that was said. Oks Amichuda sided with her son on the subject of Dancing Quail's education, but an old woman who lives under her daughter-in-law's roof must be circumspect. She got up and hobbled after her grandchild. In the shadowy adobe house, she went to the storage basket in which she kept her few treasures.

Understanding Woman extracted something and brought it to where Dancing Quail was rolling her dress into the blanket.

"Ve'eni," the old woman said urgently. "Here! Take it." Dancing Quail looked up. Her grandmother was holding out a small, tightly woven medicine basket.

The child's eyes grew large. "Ni-kahk," she said, shaking her head.

"Grandmother. Not your medicine basket."

"Yes," Understanding Woman insisted, "to keep your spirit safe."

So the medicine basket went into the bundle. When Dancing Quail emerged from the house, Alice handed her a rolled tortilla filled with beans.

Soon Big Eddie returned, bringing with him five other children from the village. Bravely, Dancing Quail climbed into the wagon behind him.

She didn't look back. She didn't want her mother to see that she was crying- - Brandon Walker found the noisy silence in the turbing.

His mother, Louella, who had never suffered an introspective moment in her whole life, spoke at tedious length about anything and everything.

women who didn't talk made the detective nervous. about as she sat there What was Diana Ladd thinking wind whipping wordlessly on the far side Of the car with the long tendrils of auburn hair around her face?

She seemed oblivious to it and made no effort to shift it away Finally, he could stand it no longer. "When did You quit teaching on the reservation?" he asked. direction, She didn't answer, and he glanced in her her eyes thinking she had drifted off to sleep, but no, were open. He tried again, almost shouting to be heard above the rushing wind.

This time Diana turned toward him in acknowledgment.

you think that?"

"I didn't quit," she replied. "What made you think that?"

"You're living in Tucson," he returned. "I thought you had free housing with the district as long as you taught out there?"

"I wanted a house of my own," she said, and turned her face away from him, effectively cutting off all further conversation.

In 1943, long before the era of sanitary landfills, garbage dumps were still called garbage dumps and bums still scrounged through the accumulated trash, living On whatever crumbs they could scavenge. it was then that the moderately progressive town fathers of Joseph, Oregon, bought the old Stevens place down by the creek to use as the town dump.

Through a fluke, the ramshackle old house Came with the deal.

Initially, the intention was to tear the house down, bulldoze it into the ground, but then someone came up with a better idea.

Anne Dade had made Everyone in town knew that Iona made a terrible mistake in marrying Max Cooper---everyone, that is, except perhaps Iona herself, who by then was already alarmingly pregnant with her daughter, Diana. In those days, when good Catholic girls made matrimonial mistakes, they had no choice but to stand pat and make the best of a bad bargain.

So when Max Cooper-an indifferent, sometime logger-was offered the position of garbage-dump caretaker in Joseph, Oregon, it was more as a humanitarian gesture toward his pregnant young wife than it was a vote of confidence about Max's own dubious job skills or work ethic. And when the Stevens house, such as it was, got thrown into the bargain, it was out of deference to Iona's daddy, the late Wayne Dade, who had spent many years loyally serving on the town council.

The ladies of Joseph in a rare show of true Christian charity, for once put aside their differences in creed, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work on the place. Baptists did most of the scrubbing and cleaning, Methodists painted, and Catholics sewed curtains. Even stand-offish Mormons signed on to braid rag rugs for the bare linoleum floors.

From the time Max and Iona Cooper moved into their newly refurbished quarters, Max was known in the town of Joseph as the Garbage Man. In the winter when it was too cold to work in the woods and in the summer when it was too hot, or when he wasn't down at the tavern too drunk to walk, Max Cooper minded the gate, collected the dump fees, and kept the riffraff out. The rest of the time his wife handled it.

Iona Cooper did her housework or garderung, all the while listening for the bell over her kitchen sink that announced someone's arrival at the garbage dump's locked gate. Rain or shine, summer heat or bitter winter's cold, she would drop what she was doing and hurry across the field.

People knew that she was the person who usually opened the gate, who collected the fees, and who returned the change, but no one ever thought of Iona Cooper as the Garbage Woman. She was always Iona Dade Cooper, Wayne's daughter, the lady who sold milk and eggs, who pickled tomatoes and canned peaches, and who always could find some little something in her pantry for the hungry bums who invariably turned up on her doorstep.

She baked wedding cakes for hire and sewed matching bridesmaid dresses.

And everybody respected her for what she did, because if you were married to a worthless oaf like Max Cooper, that's what it took to keep a roof over your head.

Nobody ever once mentioned the Word divorce, least of all Iona Dade Cooper.

When they came onto the Brandon Walker slowed the car w open-range part of Highway 86. He knew that in the cool of the evening, livestock would be making its nightly Way to water and forage. He didn't want to take any chances.

What was she thinking about, huddled over there against the far door?

Was she just worried about her son, or was she thinking about something else-about that time seven years ago when their lives had collided once before, about how he had told her back then that she should trust the System? Diana Ladd had been naive back then- So had he.

Driving along, Brandon himself rehashed the entire case in his head, how Gina Antone-he remembered her name now-was found floating facedown in a retention pond after an all-night rain dance at San Pedro Village. Initial presumption was death by drowning, but subsequent investigation indicated murder. Not only murder, but mutilation and torture as well.

She was found at the water hole. Since it was on the reservation boundaries, the Pima County Department was called in on the case. Dead Indians didn't count for much around Jack DuShane's Sheriff's Department. As a result, the case was delegated to the newest kid on the block-Brandon Walker, recently returned from Southeast Asia.

Even a novice Re Walker found it simple to follow the trail that led to Garrison Ladd, who had been seen at both the dead woman and a man dance in the company of professor of creative writing from i named Andrew Carlisle, a pro g arm of the the University of Arizona. As soon as the law threatened to close in on them, Gary Ladd took himself out to the desert and put a bullet through his head, leaving his buddy Carlisle to take the rap for both of them.

Under questioning, Carlisle maintained that the two men were just out to have a little harmless fun. "You know how things get out of hand at rain dances," he told the investigators. He maintained the girl was already drinking when they picked her up at Three Points. The three of them went to the dance, sat in the circle, and drank the cactus wine.

Afterward, at the girl's insistence, they left the village and stopped off at the water hole to polish off a few beers.

Carlisle claimed that he passed out only to waken later and be unable to find Ladd or the girl anywhere. He made his way back to the pickup and started it up, planning on driving home. He was still so smashed that he didn't realize Gary Ladd had, for some unaccountable reason, tied a rope around the girl's neck and fastened the rope to the bumper of the truck.

After driving only a few feet, he was startled to find Ladd, who had passed out in the bed of the truck, pounding frantically on the window, motioning for Carlisle to stop.

Too late they hurried back to check on the girl; Gina Antone was already dead.

Still drunk, the men took her back to the water hole and sat there, drinking warm beer and talking about what to do. Carlisle claimed to know nothing at all about what had happened to the girl's breast.

Carlisle took no responsibility for anything else that might have transpired between Gary Ladd and Gina while he himself was asleep.

Carlisle's claim of drunken innocence galled the detective, but without contradictory testimony, he couldn't shake the story.

Throughout the questioning process, Carlisle maintained that they put the body in the water, hoping no one would notice for a while, and that when they did, people would assume Gina had drowned. Things didn't work that way. As soon as the girl's grandmother reported her missing, the people of San Pedro remembered the two drunk Mil-gahn ad escorted Gina Antone at the dance. Word was who h passed along, first to the tribal police, and later to Brandon Walker of the Sheriff's Department.

Much to his dismay, Sheriff DuShane found himself stock with a solved murder and a very prominent murderer-a University of Arizona professor, no less. Those were complications DuShane hadn't counted on when he assigned Brandon Walker to the case. Offending the university community didn't bode well for DuShane's political future.

Several pointed damage-control suggestions Were made to Detective Walker advising him to back off. Rather than quitting, Walker renewed his efforts.

He called on Diana Ladd in the aftermath of her husband's suicide.

"What about the bite on Gina's breast?" a tearful Diana had demanded when he questioned her not only about the suicide, but also in regard to Gina Antone's death. Word on had somehow found its way into Of the grisly mutilated newspaper accounts of the murder.

,,what about it?" Brandon asked.

He would never do something like that. Never. Isn't there some way to check it, to do an impression Of the bite mark and compare it with Gary's dental records? They won't be the same, I know they won't."

Of course, the one ghoulishly mutilating bite wasn't all , not by any means. There were Gina Antone had suffered burns and cuts and signs of innumerable forced entries. But the bite itself could have provided the most telling testimony had Brandon Walker been able to check it, but pertinent information about the bite somehow had disappeared from that missing piece of Gina Antone's file. For years now, paper had haunted Brandon Walker- Would the Outcome have been different had it been found?

There was no way to tell for sure, but without it, Andrew the more serious Carlisle's lawyer managed to plea-bargain charges down to one of second-degree rape and voluntary on the case, hard-nosed Judge manslaughter. The judge immediate and intense dislike to Clarence Barker, took an Andrew Carlisle. Barker threw the book at Carlisle anyway, handing out eight years. That much of a stretch was a long time for a first-time offender, especially when the perpetrator was an Anglo and the victim was an Indian, but Barker made it stick, and no amount of appealing changed it.

For some reason Brandon Walker could never fathom, during the legal maneuverings, Diana Ladd became Rita Antone's constant companion and champion. All the while maintaining her own husband's innocence, she made it her business to see that Andrew Carlisle got what was coming to him. She was outraged by the plea-bargaining arrangement.

From her point of view, eight years in Florence was a mere pittance of punishment, almost as good as Carlisle getting off scot-free.

Years later, Walker could see that Gary Ladd hadn't exactly got off, either. Dead by his own hand, he went to his grave under a cloud, convicted of suicide and innocent of murder and rape only by the narrow technicality of never having come to trial. Walker considered both Ladd and Carlisle guilty as hell. Both were equally despicable, but most of the burden for their crimes had fallen on Diana Ladd's narrow shoulders.

Justice really was blind, Walker thought humorlessly.

Gary Ladd was dead, but his widow was still paying.

Back in the deserted English Department office, standing with his arms crossed, Garrison Walther Ladd leaned against the receptionist's desk regarding Diana's fetching backside with considerable interest while she distributed the packets of dittoed material to the various mailboxes.

Knowing he was looking at her made her nervous. A deep flush spread up her neck and across her cheeks, not stopping until it reached the roots of her auburn hair.

"You're serious about what you do, aren't you?"

"Why wouldn't I be?" After what Garrison Ladd had just told her, what else could he expect?

"Most girls your age are more ... well, lighthearted, I suppose."

She resented his making small talk. After all, the president was dead.

Shouldn't they be talking about that? "Most girls don't have to pay their own way," she returned.

"Do you? I Really? Pay your own way, I mean."

"No," Diana answered bitterly. "I'm just working to wear out my new clothes."

Garrison Ladd laughed then, blue eyes twinkling with hearty merriment, white teeth flashing in the fluorescent lighting. "You're something else!" he said. "You really are."

She wished he would go away and let her be, but he probably didn't want to be responsible for leaving her alone in the office after the place had been closed up and secured for the weekend. She had wanted to work all five of her scheduled hours that morning and afternoon. Her budget was so tight that she couldn't afford to miss work from any of her three jobs. She only had a few more paychecks to accumulate enough money to pay off next semester's tuition and books.

She finished distributing the dittos and checked the empty box where instructors sometimes left typing for her.

"So what are your plans for the afternoon?" he asked. She shrugged.

"Go back home, I guess. Nobody left any typing for me."

"Want to stop by the I-Hop for a cup of coffee?" he asked. "I don't much feel like working, either."

Diana wanted to point out that not wanting to work and not being able to were two entirely different things. "Sure," she said. "Why not?"

"The I-Hop puts me partway home," "No point in having to come all the way back here."

"You mean you live off campus and you don't have a car?"

She nodded.

"Like I said before, you're something." The gurney wheeled Rita down the hallway from the recovery room. When the movement stopped, Dancing Quail was standing beside a wagon in the broad, dusty street. She watched fearfully as a strange-looking Mil-gahn woman-the outing matron-moved toward the children.

She was tall and thin with short, bright-colored curls the color of red hawk's tail. Indian hair was usually long and black and glossy, like a horse's tail. Not only was the outing matron's hair red, it was curly, too. She peered sternly down at the children through two round pieces of glass that somehow stayed perched on her nose.

Big Eddie ordered the children out of the wagon. One by one, they tumbled down, taking their small bundles of belongings with them. They lined up alongside the wagon and waited expectantly while the outing matron examined each of them in turn. The woman stopped in front of Dancing Quail and glared down in disapproval. Dancing Quail shook under the white woman's fierce gaze. She stared at the ground, wondering what was the matter. What had she done wrong?

Beside her, some of the other children giggled and whispered. "Dancing Quail has no shoes," one of them said.

Instantly, the woman shushed the speaker, but by then Dancing Quail, too, knew what was wrong. Looking up and down the line, she could see that from somewhere in their bundles, all the other children had managed to find shoes. They were scuffed and ragged, but of all the children, only Dancing Quail still stood with her bare toes poking holes in the soft, dusty ground.

The woman spoke sharply in a strange language.

"She wants to know your name," Big Eddie said in Papago.

Dancing Quail swallowed hard. "E Waila Kakaichu," she began, but the woman cut her off saying something Dancing Quail didn't understand.

"Your papers at the agency say your name is Rita," Big Eddie explained.

"Here in Tucson and in Phoenix, that is your name."

Dancing Quail swallowed hard and tried not to cry. She didn't want another name. She liked her old name.

"Rita," someone was saying. "Rita. Wake up."

The old woman battled Effie Joaquin's summons. She didn't want to wake up. It would have been easier to stay where she was, back in that hot long-ago summer day with her toes warm and bare in the sandy dirt.

Rita's throat hurt. She felt sick. One arm wouldn't move at all.

It dangled uselessly above her head on some kind of rope and pulley.

"Wake up now. Would you like some ice?"

Effie held up a teaspoon filled with Crushed ice and ladled some of it into Rita's mouth. The cold slivers Of ice felt good as they slithered down her parched throat.

"Davy..." she whispered.

"He's all right," Effie assured her, "Dr. Rosemead is with him right now. So's his mother. She just got here a few minutes ago. They'll take him to a hospital in Tucson for stitches."

"He's not hurt bad?"

"No." Effie smiled. "Not nearly as bad as you."

Rita Antone breathed a huge sigh of relief. The pain it caused in her broken ribs brought tears to her eyes, but she didn't care. Davy was all right. Olhoni was all right.

Dancing Quail's long-ago tears, and Nana Dahd's new ones, coursed in matching tracks down Rita AntOne's weathered cheeks.

When Dr. Rosemead took Diana and David Ladd into an examining room, Brandon Walker made his way to the pay phone in the corner. It was almost nine, but even so, he had to wait his turn before he could use the phone. There were two Indians in line ahead of him.

His mother's answering voice was sharp and angry. He knew he was in trouble as soon as she picked up the phone.

"Hi, Mom," he said brightly. "How's it going?"

"Why did you take so long to call back?" LOuella demanded.

"I couldn't help it, Mom. I'm at work. We've been busy."

:'When will you be home?"

"That's hard to say. I'm out at Sells right now."

"Sells! Out on the reservation? Are those Indians busy killing one another again?"

"It's a car accident," he explained patiently. "I'm just helping out."

"Well, it's great that you have time to help those Indians.

What about your parents?"

"That's why I'm calling. What do you need?"

"Five checks are missing from the checkbook. I've asked your father what he did with them. He says he doesn't know."

"Is it possible that you wrote checks and forgot to write them down?"

Louella Walker's response was as predictable as it was arch.

"Certainly not! I don't forget to write down checks.

You know me better than that."

"Maybe you should take my advice and close that account."

Brandon and his mother had had several heated arguments about his parents' joint checking account since the previous month, when it had been seriously overdrawn by several checks. Without consulting anyone else, Toby Walker had made a number of wild purchases, including an even dozen Radio Flyer wagons and two new couches and chairs. Sending back the couches and chairs had been easy. Returning wagons to a mail-order house had been far more difficult.

."You know I can't do that," Louella countered. "I couldn't possibly do such a thing to your father."

Then you're going to have to suffer the consequences, Brandon felt like saying. Sometimes his mother seemed like a willful child-both his parents did-and he was losing patience.

"Write down the missing numbers," he said. "We'll call the bank in the morning and put a stop-payment on them."

"But that'll cost too much money."

"Not as much as sending back another set of wagons."

"All right," she agreed reluctantly. "When will you be home?"

"I don't know," he answered. "Late probably."

"Should I leave your dinner out on the counter?"

"No," he told her. By the time he got home, Brandon Walker didn't think he'd be hungry.

Andrew Carlisle waited until he thought his mother was asleep. Then, clad in Jake Spaulding's red flannel robe, he tiptoed back down the short hallway to the cluttered bathroom. He rummaged through a drawer until he found what he needed-a pair of scissors as well as a razor and a new package of blades.

One careful handful at a time, he began cutting off his hair, shearing it off as close to his scalp as he could. He didn't hear or see his mother come up to the open doorway.

The option of leaving even a bathroom door open behind him was still a sensation worth savoring.

"Andrew," Myrna Louise said with a frown. "What in the world are you doing?"

"Cutting my hair."

"I can see that, but it's terrible. It's all clumpy."

This is just the top layer. When I finish with the scissors, I'm going to shave the rest of it off with a razor."

"Why?"

"Because I want to be Yule Brynner when I grow up.

Don't all women think Yule Brynner is sexy?"

"I don't. I don't like bald men."

"But you'll still like me, won't you, Mama?"

"I suppose," she sighed.

He returned to the haircut while she continued to watch.

"You know, I still have it," she said musingly, almost dreamily.

"Have what?"

She hesitated before answering. "Your baby curl. From your very first haircut. I've kept it in my music box all these years. No matter where I've lived, I've always kept that curl with me."

This revelation surprised Andrew Carlisle. "No shit," he said. "Why, Andrew!" Myrna Louise exclaimed indignantly.

"You know better than to speak to your mother that way."

"Sorry," he returned. "After a while, you get used to not having a mother around."

He hadn't deliberately set out to hurt her feelings, but instantly her eyes filled with tears.

"You know I would have come to see you if I could have. Florence is so far away from here, and you know how I hate to ride buses. Besides, tickets cost so much."

She was crying now, leaning against the doorjamb and sobbin brokenly.

Andrew went to her and took her in his arms. "It's all right, Mama. I didn't expect you to show up there. It was a terrible place. It would have given you nightmares."

"It did anyway," she responded. "I had nightmares the whole time you were gone."

Chapter Six

THIS IS DETECTIVE Walker, Davy," Diana Ladd said, introducing her son to Brandon when the sesTsion in the Indian Health Service examining room was finally over. "He's giving us a ride back to Tucson."

"Detective?" Davy asked. He looked warily up at Brandon Walker through long blond lashes. "Are you a real policeman?"

"Yes, I am." The detective nodded. Little kids were usually dazzled once they understood they were talking to the genuine article. As far as children were concerned, detectives were something rare and wonderful who existed only in the exotic worlds of television or the comics.

"Not only that," Walker added with a grin, "you're going to get to ride back to Tucson in a real police car."

David Ladd's reaction was diametrically opposed to what Walker expected.

The child scuttled away from both the detective and his mother, pausing only when he had planted himself firmly beside a bemused Dr. Rosemead, who was still standing in the doorway of the examining room' "No," Davy declared adamantly. "I don't want to."

"We have to," his mother said. "You heard the doctor say you can't stay here."

Davy had listened while Dr. Rosemead explained why non-Indians couldn't be treated by the Indian Health Service. The boy couldn't understand why Big Toe Indians didn't count since that's what Rita said he was, but right then being a Big Toe Indian wasn't his biggest worry.

The alarming presence of a detective was.

"I'll go in Rita's truck," Davy insisted. "I'll go with my mom.”

"Rita's truck is broken, remember?" Diana explained patiently. "And I didn't bring my car."

The boy glared up at the tall detective with the funny short red brush of mustache marching across his upper lip.

"Are you going to take us to jail?" Davy asked.

"To jail? Of course not," Brandon Walker answered.

He wondered where Davy Ladd would have got such a strange idea.

Diana Ladd laughed outright. "Come on, Davy, don't be silly.

Detective Walker's just going to give us a ride back home, then I'll take you to the hospital in Tucson for stitches."

Davy didn't care about stitches. He remembered what the Indian women had said about him, speaking in Papago when they thought he didn't understand. If it was true, if he really was Killer's Child, then his mother must be a killer.

This tall, scary detective was probably going to arrest her, take her away to jail, and keep her forever. If his mother went away, what would happen to him? Other kids had two parents. Davy didn't. With his father dead and Nana Dahd hurt, how would he live? What would he eat?

How would he take care of Oh'o?

Davy stood his ground, shaking his head and refusing to budge. Diana lost all patience. "Come on," she ordered.

"Now! It's late, and I'm tired. This has gone on long enough."

She held out her hand. Rita had taught Davy never to disobey an adult's direct command. One tiny, reluctant step at a time, he inched toward her outstretched hand.

Dr. Rosemead smiled and nodded. "Good," he said. "I'm sure he'll be fine, but if you're worried about a possible concussion, Mrs. Ladd, you can always wake him up every hour or so for the next twenty-four, just to be on the safe side. We'll call on ahead so the doctors at St. Mary's are expecting you."

Diana and Davy led the way to the car, but Brandon could see that the boy was hanging back. He was clearly frightened, although the detective couldn't imagine why.

It offended him for little kids to be afraid of cops. Didn't they teach kids that policemen were their friends? Wasn't there some project called Officer Friendly working in the schools these days?

As he opened the car door, the detective tried once more to smooth things over with the boy. "Do you want to sit in front?" he asked.

"No," the boy asserted stubbornly, shying away from the detective's outstretched hand. "I'll ride in back."

Myrna Louise couldn't stand to stay there in the hallway and watch the entire hair-cutting process. It was too hard on her, brought back far too many painful memories. Even though Andrew was almost fifty-he would be in a few months since she had already turned sixty-five--she still thought of him as her little boy, her baby.

All her husbands had said she spoiled Andrew rotten, except the last one, Jake. He'd never met Andrew.

They'd fallen in love and married and almost got divorced while Andrew was-away. That's how she always thought of it-away. She never allowed herself to think about Andrew's last seven years in anything other than the vaguest of terms.

On reflection, she supposed it was true-she had spoiled Andrew, whenever she got the chance-That was her one regret in life, that she had seen so little of him after she lost custody. She'd never forgiven her first mother-in-law for that, for encouraging Howie Carlisle to go to court to take her little boy away from her, to have her-Myrna Louise an unfit mother. That was still a terrible blow even though the judge had softened it some by agreeing to let her see Andrew sometimes.

When she had a decent place to stay, she'd been able to have him with her during the summers for as long as a month or so and maybe again around Thanksgiving or Christmas, but that was all. In her mind, she'd never functioned as a real mother.

Myrna Louise leaned back in her rocker and closed her eyes, remembering Andrew as he had been when he was little-so cute, so smart, so mischievous. "Full of the devil," is what Howie used to call it.

Because of the tufts of soft gray hair spilling in a heap onto the bathroom floor, Myrna Louise recalled as if it were yesterday that long-ago time when Roger, her second husband, took her little boy to have his first haircut.

Roger was offended by Andrew's headful of adorable blond curls. He insisted it was time the child have a real boy's haircut, that the curls made him a sissy. Before the two of them left for the barbershop, Myrna Louise took her son aside and talked to him, telling him how he should behave.

"You mind your uncle Roger," she said. "You do everything he tells you."

"He's not my uncle," Andrew muttered stubbornly under his breath.

"What did you say?"

"He's not my uncle. Granny said so."

Any mention of her former mother-in-law threw Myrna Louise into unreasoning rage. "He most certainly is, too," she insisted, "and that's what you're going to call him."

"No," Andrew said.

"Yes," she returned.

"Say 'Uncle."

"Uncle," Andrew replied sullenly.

ay 'Roger'.

"Roger."

"Now say 'Uncle Roger."' "I can say 'Uncle,"' her son responded, "and I can say 'Roger,' but I can't say 'Uncle Roger."' And he never did. Not once.

Without humidity to hold it back, the heat peeled away from the desert floor like skin from a sun-ripened peach.

Brandon and Diana tried driving with the Ford's windows wide open, but it was too chilly on Davy, who had stretched out lengthwise in the backseat and fallen sound asleep, so they rode with the front windows barely cracked, making conversation possible.

"Davy's a cute kid," Brandon offered tentatively. Riding with this strangely silent woman still made him uncomfortable.

Diana nodded. "He takes after his dad."

Walker had noticed Davy's physical resemblance to his father, but he hadn't wanted to mention it. The boy's wide-set blue-gray eyes and blond good looks were a long way from his mother's brown-eyed, dark-haired features.

Brandon hoped, for Davy's sake, that looks were all he'd inherited from his father. If genetics were destiny, then David Ladd was doomed.

"Sometimes he does funny things, bizarre things," Diana mused, "and I wonder if it's anything like the way his father was when he was a child, but I don't have any way of knowing."

"You don't see your in-laws?"

Diana shook her head. "They wanted me to come back, -to Chicago and live with them, but I wouldn't do it."

"Why not?"

"Rita," Diana answered simply. "They didn't understand about Rita.

Since I couldn't bring her along, we didn't go."

Diana's in-laws weren't the only ones who didn't understand about Rita, Brandon Walker thought, about the strange bond that existed between the young Anglo woman and the much older Indian. It didn't make sense to him, either.

"Davy's grandparents don't stay in touch?"

"They send Christmas presents. That's about all."

"That's too bad."

"It's their loss," Diana added.

Garrison Ladd told Diana Cooper about his parents that very first November afternoon during their three-hour coffee marathon at the I-Hop.

"I don't like them much," he said. "Especially my dad."

This was something about Garrison Ladd that Diana Lee Cooper could relate to. She knew all there was to know about hating your own father.

"What's wrong with him?"

she asked.

"He's brilliant for one thing, and expects everyone else to be the same.

He's worked his way up to being a big-cheese executive with Admiral back in Chicago. He started out in electrical engineering between the wars after graduating from the Armour Institute of Technology, with honors and two degrees. He was determined that I follow in his illustrious footsteps."

Diana Cooper would have loved to have a father who was undeniably brilliant, someone who would encourage her to go on to school of any kind rather than being, like Max Cooper, a solid wall of resistance.

"Your father doesn't sound so bad," she ventured.

"Oh yeah? This man doesn't understand the word vacation. All he does is work, work, work, and make money.

He's probably richer than Midas by now. He and my mother live in this fantastic house on the shores of Lake Michigan. They have all these smart friends, but they're boring as hell, and they don't have any fun.

They don't know how."

"That still doesn't sound so bad," Diana laughed.

"Why? What does your father do?" Gary Ladd asked, leveling that disconcerting blue-eyed gaze of his on her.

Diana flushed, both because he was looking at her and because of the question. She knew that particular question would come eventually, and she dreaded it. When she told him about Max, would Gary Ladd stalk out of the restaurant and leave her to pay for her own coffee? Sick at heart but incapable of doing anything else, Diana felt, obliged to answer straight from the hip. If, after she told him, Garrison Walther Ladd, RI, walked out and left her sitting there alone at the table, then all she'd be out was a single cup of I-Hop coffee.

"He's a garbageman," Diana replied.

Garrison slammed his cup into the heavy china saucer, slopping coffee.

"You're kidding!"

"No.,'

"This is a joke, right?"

"It's no joke. My dad runs the garbage dump in Joseph, Oregon.

"Joseph? Where's that?"

"In the Blue Mountains. On the other side of the state, a town at the end of a road. You might say I'm a dead end kid."

It was easier for Diana to make fun of herself and Joseph first, rather than waiting for other people do it. From his initial reaction, she couldn't tell if Garrison was making fun of her or not. He seemed intrigued.

"Fascinating. How many people live in Joseph?"

"Eight hundred, give or take."

"My God! That's amazing."

"What's amazing about it?"

"Look, I'm from Chicago. When I came here, I thought Eugene was small, but eight hundred people? Jeez, that's wonderful."

"It doesn't seem particularly wonderful to me."

"Just think about it," Garrison Ladd continued, his face alight with enthusiasm. "It's hard to believe that there are still places like that in this country, wide-open spaces."

"It's wide open, all right," Diana returned dryly. "It's so open there's nobody there."

"So what do people do?"

"For a living? Fanning, ranching, logging."

"No mining?" he asked.

"No mining."

Garrison Ladd folded his arms across his chest, shook his head, and grinned at her. He had a very engaging grin.

"Too bad," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Did you ever listen to Stella Dallas, or are you too young?"

"Who's Stella Dallas?"

"That's what I get for messing around with younger women- Stella Dallas used to be on the radio back in Chicago when I was growing up. They said she was a girl from 'a small mining town in the West."always told my mother that Stella Dallas was the kind of girl I was going to marry.

Right up until you told me there was no mining in Joseph, I thought maybe I'd marry you."

At that Preposterous statement, Diana Lee Cooper burst out laughing.

She couldn't help it. The few other patrons in the restaurant that afternoon, the ones who weren't at home glued to their television sets, regarded her disapprovingly.

This was a day of mourning, a day of national tragedy, as citizens of the country, regardless of political leanings, began to come to grips with the bloody drama playing itself Out in Dallas. It was not a time for levity, but Diana laughed anyway.

Kennedy was dead, Johnson was president, and Diana Lee Cooper was falling in love.

Rita slept, and so did most of the Indian children, stacked like so much cordwood on the sweltering, screened-in wooden porch of the Outing matron's red brick home.

The children had been there for varying lengths of time, from several days to Only one or two, while Big Eddie completed his annual boarding-school roundup. The children from Coyote Sitting were the last to arrive. They lay in a miserable huddle at the far end of the long room.

As before, it was noisy in Chuk Shon, far too noisy for Dancing Quail to sleep. Just then another huge wainomikalit rumbled down the metal tracks a few blocks away.

The whole house shook, and Dancing Quail did, too. She shivered and clutched her grandmother's precious medicine basket close to her chest.

The sound terrified her. The other children had told her that the monster was called a train and that the next night they would travel to Phoenix riding on that huge, noisy beast.

To calm herself, she slipped her fingers inside the basket.

On the way to Chuk Shon, Dancing Quail had examined each of the precious items in Understanding Woman's basket. For the Tohono O'othham, four is a powerful number, and there were four things in the basket-a single eagle feather, a shell Understanding Woman's dead husband had brought back from his first salt-trading trip to the sea, a jagged piece of pottery with the sign of the turtle etched into the smooth clay, and half a round rock that looked like a broken egg.

The outside shell of the rock was rough and gray, but inside it was alive with beautifully colored cubes. The cubes reminded Dancing Quail of the sun setting behind dark summer rain clouds that sometimes wrapped themselves around loligam.

Now, as the iron beast's whistle once more screeched through the night, Dancing Quail's groping fingers closed tightly around the rock. She held it and willed herself not to cry. Gradually, a feeling of calm settled over her.

Somehow she knew that this mysterious rock was the most important gift in Understanding Woman's basket.

Nothing on the coarse gray outside hinted at the beautiful secret concealed within. That was her grandmother's secret message for her-to be like the magic rock, tough on the outside but with her spirit hidden safely inside.

No matter what the stern, tall woman with her fiery red hair said, no matter what strange name the Mil-gahn woman called her, Dancing Quail would still be Dancing Quail.

With the gem clutched tightly in her fingers, the child drifted into a fitful sleep.

"Look," Brandon said, as they sped around the long curve at Brawley Wash just before Three Points. "Why go all the way out to the house for your car? You'll have to drive on into town by yourself. I'd be happy to drive you to the hospital and bring you back home afterward."

"You've done enough already," Diana responded. "More than you should have."

But Brandon Walker didn't want the evening to be over, didn't want to go home to the house where his father, who didn't have a brain tumor and who didn't have anything definite wrong with him that the doctors could point to, sometimes didn't recognize his own son's face.

"The boy's asleep," Brandon continued. "If you change cars, you'll wake him up."

"I'll have to wake him up in half an hour anyway. That's what the doctor said."

"By then we'll already be at the hospital. Besides, you must be worn out."

Diana surprised herself by not arguing or insisting. "All right," she said, leaning back in the car and closing her eyes. It felt good to have someone else handling things for a change, to have someone taking care of her. That hadn't happened to her for a long time, not since her mother died.

With her daughter away at school, Iona Dade Cooper avoided telling anyone she was sick. Once Diana found out about it, Iona brushed aside all alarmed entreaties that she go someplace besides La Grande for tests, that she utilize one of the big-city hospitals in Spokane or Portland with their big-city specialists.

Too expensive," Iona declared futilely. "Besides, I wouldn't want to be that far away from your father."

Diana had bitten back any number of angry comments.

As usual, her father was a bent reed, not strong enough for anyone else to lean on. Max Cooper had refused to come to the little community hospital in La Grande the night before his wife's exploratory surgery, claiming that being around hospitals made him nervous.

"Well, stay here then!" Diana had flared at him. "For God's sake, don't go out of your way!"

In the old days, Max would have backhanded his daughter for that remark, but not with Gary, his brand-new son-inlaw, standing there gaping.

"I have an idea, Mr. Cooper," Gary Ladd said soothingly, stepping into the fray.

Max loved the fact that his son-in-law insisted on calling him "Mr. Cooper." No one in Joseph accorded the Garbage Man that kind of respect.

"Diana can go down to La Grande to be with Iona tonight, and I'll stay here. That way, neither one of you will be alone."

Max nodded. "I appreciate that, Gary. I really do."

So Diana spent the night in the hospital with her mother, sitting on a straight-backed chair near the bed, talking because her mother was too Lightened to sleep despite the doctor-ordered sleeping pills.

"You'll look after your father when I'm gone, won't you, Diana?" Iona asked.

"Don't talk that way, Mom. it's going to be fine. You'll see."

But Iona knew otherwise. "He'll need someone to take care of the bills.

No matter what happens, as soon as you get back to Joseph, go down to the bank and have Ed Gentry put you on as a signer on both the checking and savings accounts."

"That's crazy, and you know it. Daddy'll never agree to having me as a signer on his bank account."

"He'll have to," Iona replied. "He'll need someone to write the checks for him."

"Write the checks?" Diana echoed stupidly. the, Diana," "Your father doesn't know how to read or write." Iona explained. "He never learned.

He never wanted you or anyone else to know, but if something happens to me, if I die, he's going to need someone to look after him.

Diana was dumbstruck. "Daddy can't read?" "No. I tried to get him to learn before we were married, but he refused unable to get the letters correct."

"If he can't read, how did he keep his job all these years?"

"He's always been able to do math in his head, so nobody ever knew.

When there were receipts that had to be written up or reports of some kind, I always handled those."

"Will he lose his job?"

Iona nodded. "Probably, and the house, too. I'm worried about what will happen to him."

"I'll take care of him," Diana promised. "I don't know how, but I will."

Iona lapsed into silence. For a while, Diana thought maybe her mother had fallen asleep. Diana sat there stunned, still grappling with the sudden knowledge that her father was illiterate.

She remembered his angry tirade when she had told him she was going to go to the University of Oregon to learn how to be a writer.

"A writer!" he had roared. "You, a writer?"

"Why not?" she had spat back at him, daring him to hit her but knowing that he wouldn't because the rodeo was just days away. Max Cooper couldn't afford to give his daughter a black eye just before the Chief Joseph Days Parade and Rodeo.

"I'll tell you why not. You're a woman, that's why not."

"What does that have to do with it?"

"Was Shakespeare a woman?" he demanded. "Were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John women? I'll say not.

They were all men, every last one of them, and let me tell you, sister, they're good enough for me!"

She remembered the conversation word for word, and all the time that lying bastard had been berating her about how good Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were, he couldn't read a one of them. Sitting there in the darkened hospital room, Diana felt doubly betrayed, not only because her father had fooled her, but because her mother had helped him do it.

"I'm glad you married Gary," Iona said at length. "He seems like a very nice boy."

"He's not a boy, Mom. He's twenty-five, five years older than I am."

"I so wanted ,Well, I just wish you'd start a family I wish to have grandchildren." Iona's eyes filled with tears she wiped away with a corner of the sheet.

Diana didn't have the heart to tell Iona that her good Catholic daughter was a mortal sinner who had been taking birth-control pills for a year now, ever since the first week of December of 1963. Gary had just happened to know of a doctor who wasn't averse to giving single girls prescriptions for the Pill.

Now that they were married, she and Gary had agreed it wasn't time yet for them to consider starting a family, especially not until he finished his master's degree. He was thinking about applying for a creative-writing Program In Arizona. Diana still had two more semesters to go before she'd have her teaching credential "He's a lot like Your father, isn't he?" Iona said.

Diana was offended by the question and didn't answer.

Gary wasn't at all like her father. She'd gone to great lengths to find someone as different from Max Cooper as he could possibly be.

Gary was smart. He had a good education and a sense of humor, and he had never once raised a hand against her in anger. Maybe he was a little lazy. If there was a right way to do something and an easy way, Gary would choose the easy way every time- Maybe in that regard there was a certain similarity between her husband and her father, but other than that, Garrison Walther Ladd was as different from Max Cooper as day from night "Does he treat YOU nice?" Iona asked.

"He treats me fine, Mom. Don't worry."

Relieved, Iona Cooper finally relaxed enough to fall . . asleep.

They did the surgery early the next morning the doctor came looking for Diana in the small waiting ' lit Of the news' room, his shoulders sagged under the weight As soon as she saw the haggard look in his eyes, Diana knew the prognosis wasn't good.