Hour of the Hunter

One of the first to arrive on the scene after the single-vehicle rollover accident was Joe Baxter, a Tucson resident on his way to Rocky Point for the weekend. Baxter said that it was David Ladd's firm insistence that there was an ambulance available at the Kitt Peak Observatory that prompted him and a traveling companion to seek help there. Aid summoned from either Sells or Tucson probably would have arrived too late to save Mrs. Antone's life.

Years ago, when I was finishing my graduate degree in English at the University of Arizona, I was enrolled in a literature class with David Ladd's father, who, like many of our classmates, had delusions of being the Great American Novelist and creating a heroic masterpiece to leave as a legacy.

Mostly those dreams were just that-. dream and no action. However, I'm realizing now that there's more than one kind of masterpiece.

Gaarison Ladd's son, reticent about his own brave behavior despite injuries that required twelve stitches, is that heroic masterpiece, but he's certainly not the only hero In the drama.

Talking to him, I learned that Rita Antone, grandmother of the girl whose murder was linked to Garrison Ladd, is now a well-loved member of the Ladd family.

it strikes me as ironic (and more than a bit inspiring) that these two women, Diana Ladd and Rita Antone, an Anglo woman and an Indian, whose lives were first linked by death and mutual tragedy, have gone on to forge a relationship based on love and mutual respect.

It is an atmosphere in which two courageous women are raising a very responsible young man, one who in no way can be regarded as a chip off the old block.

In a world where bad news usually outweighs the good, where there are always far more questions than there are answers, it's refreshing to know this kind of thing can happen.

Longago, EvilSiwani, a powerful medicineman, became jealous of Titoi. Three times the medicine man and his wicked followers killed Titoi, and three times Titoi came back to life. the fourth time, when morning came, ntoi was still dead.

"That's all right," his followers said. "In four days, he will come back to life." But on the morning of the fourth day, Titoi was still dead.

Many years passed. One day some children from a village found an old man sitting next to a charco near where l'itoi's bones had been left to dry in the sun. The old man was making a belt to carry an olla. "What are you doing, old man?" the children asked.

"You must watch carefully," he said. "Something surPrising is going to happen."

So the children went home and told their parents. All the people from the village came to see the old man. They found him filling his olla with water. The people knew at once he was Titoi grown to be very old.

They wanted to talk to him, but before they could, he picked up his olla and started off toward the east.

There were many people along the way, but I'itoi knew these were the S-ohbsgam, the Apachelike followers of Evil Siwani, so he didn't speak to them. When Titoi arrived at the village in the East he asked to see the chief, then he sang his song and told them he was I'itoi, who had made them. He told them how the Ohb, the Enemy, had killed him four times, and how each time he had come back to life. The chief of the East listened to I'itoi's song. When it was finished, he said, "I may not be able to help you, but go to my brother in the West. Tell him your story. I will do whatever he says."

Fitoi traveled far until he found the chief of the West. He sang his song that told about how the medicine man and his followers, the S-ohbsgam, had killed him four times and how each time he had come back to life. The chief Of the West shook his head. "I don't know if I can help you. Go to my elder brother, chief of the North, and ask him. I will do whatever he says."

So Titoi went to the chief of the North, who listened to his song. "I do not know if I can help you," the chief said. "Go to my elder brother, chief of the South. I will do whatever he says."

Once more I'itoi traveled a long, long way, and once more he sang his song, about how Evil Siwani and the S-ohbsgam had killed him four times and how he had come back to life. As soon as the chief of the South heard this, he sent a messenger to the villages of all his brothers.

"Come," he told them. "Whoever wants to prove his manhood must come with me. This man has suffered much at the hands of Siwani and his S-ohbsgam. We must go and help him." And this, my Friend, was the beginning of the final battle between Evil Siwani and I'itoi.

Morning came and so did breakfast. Rita lay with her eyes closed, but she didn't sleep.

Understanding Woman went to the circle to visit with her friends while Dancing Quail gravitated to the younger women. Unfortunately, her new clothing and job at the mission didn't purchase what she wanted most-respect and acceptance from her peers. To the others, she was still Hejel Wi'ikam, still Orphaned Child. Girls who worked in Tucson still looked down on her.

Laughing easily, they gossiped endlessly about the latest one of their number who had "done bad" and been shipped home in disgrace. They giggled about exploits from their latest day off and speculated about who would marry next.

On the fringes of their laughter, Dancing Quail had nothing to say.

Several girls who were planning weddings were younger than she.

Finally, one of them turned on her, a mean girl she had known briefly in Phoenix.

:'What about you?" the girl asked. "Who will marry you?"

'I don't know," Rita answered despairingly, ducking her head.

The other girl giggled. "Since you already live with the sisters, maybe you should be one of them. If no O'othham will have you, maybe you should be a Bride of Christ."

At that, all the girls broke into gales of laughter.

Ashamed, Dancing Quail took her sleeping mat and blanket and fled into the night, far from the fires and songs of the feast, far from the other girls' deriding laughter. She stumbled up the mountain to a place where she had played and hidden as a child. There, she lay down and wept.

Much later, long after she'd quit crying, Dancing Quail heard someone calling her name. Worried when he found her missing from the group, Father John came looking for her.

"Here," she called in answer.

"What's wrong?" he demanded, blundering into the clearing. "Why did you run away? Is someone here with you?"

"I am hejelko," she answered. "I am alone."

"But why? What's wrong?" He knelt beside her. As he reached out to touch her face, the tears started again.

"I'm not brave enough to choose for myself. The girls say no one will choose me."

"Nonsense." Father John gathered her into his arms.

"You're young and beautiful, strong and healthy. Of course someone will choose you."

Despite his intention of making only an obligatory appearance at the dance, it had been necessary, in order to be polite, that Father John drink the thick, pungent wine.

He had sat in the circle while servers had come around several times, dispensing wine from ancient, wine-stained baskets. Without his being aware of it, the volatile drink had overtaken him. The comforting, fatherly caress with which he intended to console Dancing Quail soon evolved into something quite different.

The mutual but unacknowledged attraction between them had long been held at bay by sobriety and by the singular force of Father John's convictions. Now, those convictions crumpled. What passed between them then was as unanticipated and electrifying as a bolt of lightning on a clear, still night.

It happened once and only once, but as is so often the case, once was more than enough. The damage was done.

Again Andrew Carlisle took his time at the scene of his latest triumph.

He treated himself to a luxurious bath. Johnny Rivkin's bathroom held numerous wonderful bath potions. Finished bathing, Carlisle meticulously removed all body hairs from the drain and flushed them down the toilet. He went through the room, looting it at leisure, taking all the cash, leaving everything else, and thoroughly cleaning each surface as he finished with it.

The closet was another matter entirely. There were some things in there that he simply couldn't bear to leave behind, including a loose-fitting lush pink silk pantsuit that fit him perfectly. Two more wigs, these of much better quality than the one he had purchased, some underwear, and two pairs of hooker-heel shoes that might have been made for him.

After choosing some items to wear, Carlisle stowed the rest, including the clothing he'd worn into the hotel, in one of Rivkin's monogrammed Hartmann suitcases.

He took more than usual pains with his makeup, so that shortly after six that Sunday morning, when a welldressed woman walked through the lobby carrying a suitcase, nobody paid the slightest attention to her.

She paused outside the door long enough to pull a Sunday edition of the Arizona Daily Sun out of a vending machine, but nobody noticed that, either.

Three blocks away, totally out of sight of the Santa Rita, Andrew Carlisle climbed back into Jake Spaulding's waiting Valiant. As he drove north, he took perverse pleasure in anticipating the kind of effect his costume would have on his mother. Myrna Louise had never approved of him dressing up, not even when he was little.

Oh, well, he thought, dismissing her. Other than packing his lunch and maybe washing a few clothes now and then, what had Myrna Louise ever done for him?

Driving home from breakfast, Diana seethed with anger.

Some of it was aimed at Davy, but most was reserved for that damn full-of-business columnist. It was despicable for him to have taken advantage of an innocent child, to interview him and pry out information. Not only that, what, if anything, had he told Davy about his father? How much did George O'Connell know to tell?

Not as much as I do, Diana thought, with her whole body aching from the pain of remembering. Not nearly as much.

Garrison Ladd had slept the entire day away while Diana waited with her stomach roiling inside her. She wanted him to wake up and talk to her.

Feeling so physically ill bothered Diana. It wasn't like her to be sick. Since she wasn't feverish, she chalked it up to lack of sleep and a bad case of nerves. She steeled herself for what she regarded as the worst it could be another other woman, she supposed. The very thought of it sent her spinning into a dizzying wash of memory, of coming home to Eugene from Joseph unexpectedly one weekend during her mother's final illness, of walking into her own house and finding Gary in bed with one of the female teaching assistants.

Already worn by the constant strain of care-giving, Diana snapped, turning into a wild woman and running raving through the house. She screamed and threw things and broke them, while the terrified T.A. cowered naked behind a locked bathroom door. Gary followed Diana from room to room, trying to keep her from hurting herself, pleading with her to listen to reason.

Reason! He had balls enough to use the word reason on her, as though she were a child pitching a temper tantrum.

Still raging, she left the house vowing divorce. She went straight back to Joseph and to caring for her mother. What else was there to do?

Predictably, Gary appeared in Joseph two days later, bearing flowers and candy and gift-wrapped apologies. He begged and cajoled. He hadn't intended for it to happen, but he was so lonely with Diana gone all the time. It never would have happened if he hadn't missed her so much.

He'd change, he promised. As soon as Diana got her undergraduate degree, they'd leave Eugene, whether he was finished with his Ph.D. program or not. They'd go somewhere else and start over, if she'd please just take him back.

Christ! she thought, waiting for him to wake up and fighting back a wave of nausea. How could I have been so dumb? How could she possibly have believed him? she wondered, and yet she had. Why? Because believing was easier than admitting you were wrong, easier than telling your dying Catholic mother that her only daughter was getting a divorce.

But most of all, because believing was what Diana Ladd had wanted to do more than anything else. In spite of everything that had happened, she loved Garrison Ladd. She wanted him to love her back with the same unreasoning devotion.

At four that afternoon, Gary got up and came out into the living room of their shabby, school-owned thirteen-by seventy-foot mobile home.

"Hello," he said sheepishly.

"Hello," she returned. "How are you?"

"Hung over as hell. That cactus wine is a killer." Gary had uttered the words without even thinking, and then, as they registered, he turned ashen gray.

Diana didn't understand what was happening at the time, but she remembered the incident later with terrible clarity as the nightmare of Gina Antone's death began to unfold around her. What he said was nothing more than a slip of the tongue, but it was a clue. If she had paid attention, it might have warned her of what was to come, but she wasn't smart enough to pick up on it, and what difference would knowing have made? She couldn't have prevented what happened any more than she could have hoped to stop a speeding locomotive bare-handed.

She remembered Gary groping blindly for the back of a chair and dropping heavily into it. He had buried his face in his hands and wept. It was the first time Diana ever saw her husband cry.

Her own nausea totally forgotten, she hurried to comfort him and to bring him a glass of chilled iced tea. Whatever was wrong, she would do her best to fix it for him. Whatever it was, she would somehow smooth it over. After all, she had Iona's shining example to follow, didn't she? That's exactly what her mother would have done, had done for all those years, all her life. Smoothed things over. For everyone.

Fat Crack's tow truck looked at home among the others parked in the dusty San Xavier parking lot. Many of the vehicles had out-of-state licenses or rental stickers, but by far the majority were beat-up old pickups, station wagons, and sedans that belonged to the regular parishioners. Hard as it was for out-of-state guests to fathom, the musty-smelling mission still functioned as a church, with a regular schedule of well-attended masses.

While Looks At Nothing stayed in the truck, Fat Crack went to the door of the church and waited for Father John to come out. He did at last, accompanied by a somewhat younger-looking priest.

"Father John?" Fat Crack asked tentatively.

"Yes."

"My name is Gabe Ortiz, Juanita's son, Rita Antone's nephew."

A concerned frown furrowed the old man's forehead. "I hope your aunt's all right."

Fat Crack nodded. "She's fine. She's in the hospital, but fine. I have someone over here who needs to speak to YOU."

"Of course," Father John said, excusing himself from his colleague.

Fat Crack led the way. They entered the row of parked cars a few vehicles away from the tow truck just as Looks At Nothing climbed down from his seat. The old medicine man stood leaning on his cane. He seemed to stare right through them with his glazed and sightless eyes.

Father John stopped abruptly. "This is . . ." Fat Crack began.

"S-ab Neid Pi Has," Father John supplied, speaking Looks At Nothing's Indian name in perfectly accented Papago. "This old siwani and I have met before," he said.

Father John stepped forward, reached out, took Looks At Nothing's gnarled old hand, and shook it. "Nawoj," he said. "Welcome."

Brandon Walker was worn out with trying to find a comfortable position on the post-modern waiting room furniture, but he had nonetheless managed a few catnaps during the early morning hours while his mother came and went from brief visits with her husband. It was just like when President Kennedy died, Brandon thought. The doctors didn't tell everything they knew all at once for fear of starting a panic. Brandon suspected they had there was no hope of recovery they wanted to give the family the situation. Brandon took the of mercy from a God he was still believed in. Louella might wasn't true, couldn't possibly be true that Toby was dying, but her son knew better.

Each time a pale and shaken Louella emerged from the room, she was that much more entrenched in her disbelief.

"I want a second opinion," she announced ' at last.

Brandon rubbed his forehead. "What's a second opinion going to buy you except another doctor bill?"

His question provoked Louella to outrage. "How can you mention money at a time like this? That man in there, that known last night that for Toby Walker, but a chance to adjust to news as a direct act surprised to learn he continue to insist it so-called doctor, says we should turn off the respirator.

Just like that. As though it's nothing."

"Pop's not there, Mom," her son said gently. "He hasn't been for a long time, really. Turning off the machine would be a blessing."

He started to add "for us all," but thought better of it "No!

Absolutely not. I won't have it."

"If he lives, he'll be a vegetable, Mom. He won't know either of us.

He won't be able to eat on his own or stand or breathe."

"But he's still alive!" his mother hissed. "Your father is still alive."

Too tired to argue anymore, Brandon capitulated. "I'll go talk to the nurse about a second opinion," he said. _ He went to the nurses' station and asked to speak to the head nurse.

"She's on her break," the clerk said.

He nodded. "That's all right. I'm going to the cafeteria for some coffee. I'll talk to her when I get back."

He walked down the long breezeway to the cafeteria. It was midmorning now and hot, but he felt chilled inside and out. The air-conditioning seemed to have settled in his blood and bones.

How would he ever make Louella see reason? She was his problem now and no one else's. Toby was still breathing with the help of his respirator, but he was really out of the war zone. It didn't seem fair for the focus of the battle to be immune to it.

Brandon took his cup of muddy coffee and a cigarette he had finally bought a pack of his own---to a table in the far corner where someone had left most of a Sunday paper lying strewn with a layer of toast crumbs and speckles of greasy butter.

He started to toss the paper aside, and then stopped when he recognized Davy Ladd's serious picture staring out at him from the top of the page.

He read the article through twice before his weary brain fully grasped the material.

Why in the world would Diana Ladd have permitted Davy to be featured in the paper like that? He would have thought she'd want to preserve her privacy. After all, if she had an unlisted phone number, why go advertising her location on the front page of the second section of a Sunday paper?

Shaking his head, he tore out the page and stuffed it in his pocket.

Brandon Walker was the very last person to pretend to understand why women did some of the crazy things they did. If, prior to the fact, Diana Ladd had asked his advice, he would have counseled her to keep Davy's name and picture out of the paper at all costs. You could never tell what kind of fruitcakes would be drawn to that kind of article or how they would behave.

But the truth of the matter was, Diana Ladd hadn't asked his advice, so MYOB, buddy, he told himself. You've got trouble enough of your own.

The three men wandered over to one of the many ocotilloshaded food booths that lined the large dirt parking lot. In each shelter, two or three women worked over mesquite burning fires, cooking popovers in vats of hot grease, fining them with chili or beans, and then selling them to the hungry San Xavier flock, churchgoers and tourists alike.

Father John led them to a booth where he evidently had a charge account of sorts. The women took his order and quickly brought back three chili popovers on folded paper plates and three cans of Orange Crush.

No money changed hands.

"Shall we go into my office to eat?" Father John asked.

"It's much cooler in there."

They went to a small office hidden behind the mission bookstore where Father John was obliged to bring in two extra chairs so they could all sit at once. While eating his own popover, Father John observed the fastidious way in which the medicine man ate. Chili popovers, are notoriously messy, but Looks At Nothing consumed his meticulously, then wiped his entire face clean with a paper napkin.

Father John flushed to think that there had once been a time when he would have thrown a visiting siwani out of the mission compound, especially this particular siwani.

He had learned much since those early days, not the least of which was a certain humility about who had the most direct access to God's ear.

Over the years, he had come to suspect that God listened in on a party line rather than a private one.

Patiently, although he was dying of curiosity, the old priest waited to hear what Looks At Nothing had to say.

Father John knew full well that it was the medicine man and not Fat Crack who was the motivating force behind this visit. And he knew also that whatever it was, it must be a matter of life and death. Nothing less than that would have forced stiff-necked old Looks At Nothing to unbend enough to set aside their ancient rivalry.

It was August, hot and viciously humid. The summer rains had come with a vengeance, and the Topawa Mission compound was awash in thick red mud.

As Father John picked his way through the puddles from rectory to church, the Indian materialized out of the shadow of a nearby mesquite tree. He moved so easily that at first the priest didn't realize the other man was blind.

"Understanding Woman has sent me," the man said in slow but formal English. "I must speak to you of Dancing Quail."

Father John stopped short. "Dancing Quail. What about her? Is she OK?

She missed her catechism lesson yesterday."

The other man stopped, too, unexpectedly splashing into a puddle. As he struggled to regain his balance, Father John finally noticed that his visitor couldn't see.

"Dancing Quail will have a baby," he said.

"No! Whose?"

For the first time, the blind man turned his sightless eyes full on the priest. Without being told, Father John understood his visitor must be the young medicine man from Many Dogs Village, the one people called Looks At Nothing.

The blind man faced the priest, but he did not answer the question. He didn't have to, for under the medicine man's accusing stare. Father John knew the answer all too well.

His soul shriveled within him. His fingers groped for the comforting reassurance of his rosary.

"How far along is she?"

"Since the Rain Dance at Ban Thak, she has missed two mash-athga," Looks At Nothing said, "two menstrual periods."

"Dancing Quail has told you this?" Father John managed.

"Dancing Quail says nothing. It is her grandmother who has sent me.

We who have no eyes have other ways of knowing."

"I will quit the priesthood," Father John declared. "I will quit and marry her."

"No!" Looks At Nothing was adamant. "You will not see her again. She is going far away from here. It is already arranged with the outing matron. She will go to a job in Phoenix. You are not to stop her."

"I'll speak to Father Mark, I'll. .

"You will do nothing. A man who would break one vow would as easily break another." An undercurrent of both threat and contempt permeated Looks At Nothing's softly spoken words. "Besides," he added icily, "Father Mark has already been told."

"You want her for yourself!" The accusation shot from Father John's lips before he had time to think.

Looks At Nothing recoiled as though he'd been slapped.

In his earlier, hotheaded days, such an insult might have merited a fight to the death. The man he had killed in Ajo had died for much less, but now the medicine man simply stepped back, putting a yard or so of distance between them.

"I am mahniko," Looks At Nothing said, slowly and with great dignity, "a cripple, marked by Fitoi as a holy man.

You would do well to be the same." With that, he turned and walked away.

Determined to plead his case to his superior, Father John left at once for San Xavier. Father Mark refused to consider the idea of the younger priest renouncing his vows to marry the girl.

"What's done is done," he said. "She's gone. Forget about her. You have a vocation."

Father John returned to Topawa to find that both Dancing Quail and Understanding Woman had disappeared from the mission compound. He heard that the old woman died the following year, alone in her hut in Ban Thak. Father John didn't see Dancing Quail again for almost thirty years, but he prayed for her daily, for her and for her child as well.

Looks At Nothing pulled a cigarette and lighter from the cracked leather pouch he wore around his waist. Father John watched with some admiration as the blind man, with steady hands, used a Zippo lighter to fire the ceremonial cigarette, the Peace Smoke. as the Papagos called it.

The medicine man took a long drag and then passed it to the priest.

"Nawoj," he said.

"Nawoi," Father John returned. He had never learned to appreciate the sharp, bitter taste of Indian tobacco, but he inhaled without betraying his opinion. He passed the cigarette along to Fat Crack, who took his turn.

"We are here to talk about the boy," Looks At Nothing announced.

"What boy?" Father John asked, confused by the medicine man's statement.

Who was he talking about?

"His name is Davy Ladd," Looks At Nothing continued.

"He is the son of the woman Dancing Quail lives with."

Rita Antone's old name spun out of the past in a whirlwind of memory that gathered both old men into its vortex while Fat Crack was left temporarily mystified. Dancing Quail? Who was that? It was a name he'd never heard before.

Father John caught himself. "Oh, yes," he said. "Davy Ladd. I remember now. What about him?"

"He is unbaptized," Looks At Nothing answered. For a moment, nothing more was said as the cigarette once more made the rounds. "Unbaptized in both the Mil-gahn way and the O'othham way. He is a danger to himself, to his mother, and especially to Dancing Quail."

"Why do you tell me this?" Father John asked. "What does this have to do with me?"

"His mother was once a child of your church, your tribe.

She has fallen away and has never taken her baby to the church. You must fix this."

Father John's first impulse was to laugh, but he had long since learned to suppress those inappropriate inclinations.

"Siwani," the priest said placatingly. "Baptism is a complicated issue.

I can't just fix it, as you say."

Looks At Nothing rose, and for a moment stood over the other two men, leaning on his cane like a strange three-legged bird.

"You must," he said in a matter-of fact tone that brooked no argument.

"You must, or Dancing Quail will die."

With that the old medicine man turned and made his way out of the room, while Fat Crack followed closely behind.

Chapter Eleven

THEY SAY IT happened long ago that some quail were out eating during the harvest. Coyote crept Tup on them and ate them all except for one small quail who hid himselfunder the thick flat leave's of Ihbhai, of Prickly Pear. The frightened quail waited while Coyote ate up all his brothers and sisters. When it was safe, Quail ran home crying, "Coyote has eaten us all. He has eaten all my brothers and sisters."

One wise old quail heard this and decided to get even.

He waited until one day when Coyote was sound asleep.

He cut Coyote open and took out some of his tail fat, then Quail sewed him back up, filling the empty space with rocks. After that, Quail flew off somewhere, started a fire, and began roasting the fat.

Coyote woke up and sniffed the air. '7 smell something good," he said.

He started to follow the smell, but as soon as he moved, all the rocks inside him began to rattle. The sound made Coyote very proud. "That is the sound of my medicine drum," he said.

Rattling all the way, Coyote walked until he found the place where the quail were having their feast. "Your food smells good, Little Brothers.

Let me have a taste."

They gave him some, and Coyote liked it. "Where did you get this meat?" he asked.

"Way over there," Quail said. "Beyond the mountains.

Baskets are traded for it."

Coyote set off to go get some meat of his own, but as soon as he left, he heard the quail laughing and saying, "Look, Coyote has eaten his own tailfat."

Coyote came back. "What did you say?" he asked, but the quail wouldn't answer. Just then a cottontail came running by. "What did the quail say?" Coyote asked.

"They said, 'Coyote has eaten his own tailfat."

As soon as he heard this, Coyote knew he had been tricked, and he was very angry. He chased after the quail, who disappeared down a hole in which they had hidden a cactus all wrapped in feathers.

Coyote dug in the hole after them. When he pulled out the first quail, he asked, "Did you do this to me?"

"No," the quail answered. "It wasn't me."

Coyote dug further and pulled out another quail.

"Did you do this to me?"

"No," the second quail answered. "It wasn't me." And so it went until he pulled out the very last one.

"Did you do this to me?"

But the last quail didn't answer. "Ah-ha," said Coyote, since you don't answer me, you must be the one," and he bit hard on the quail, but he only hurt himself because that last quail was really the cactus.

And that, nawoj, is the story of how Quail tricked Coyote.

Andrew Carlisle was in no hurry to get home. Avoiding the freeway, he drove up the back way from Tucson to Tempe, coming into town through Florence junction and Mesa. He stopped at the Big Apple for 'a late breakfast.

As usual, the previous night's exertions left him feeling wonderfully alive and ravenously hungry.

He had been out of prison for only two days. Already two people were dead. One a day, sort of like multiple vitamins, he thought. It was only fair. He'd been saving up for a long time, but Margie Danielson and Johnny Rivkin had been mere appetizers, something to hold him until the main course came along.

Thinking about Margie Danielson made him remember the newspaper waiting in the car. He asked the waitress for one more cup of coffee and went out to retrieve The Arizona Sun. It was important to stay abreast of how the Picacho Peak investigation was going. If the cops suddenly moved away from their Indian suspect, if they somehow stumbled on a lead that would point them in the right direction Andrew Carlisle needed to know at once so he could take appropriate countermeasures.

He turned to the second section, the local news section, and the name Ladd jumped off the page at him. How lucky could he get? There he was, Garrison Ladd's own kid, complete with a picture and more than a few helpful details. Hardly able to contain his excitement, Carlisle read through the column. The names were all there, ones he'd thought he would have to search out, one by one, over a lengthy period of time-Rita Antone, Diana Ladd, and David Ladd. If the boy had been in a car accident, his name and address were now part of an active police report.

Carlisle knew from personal experience that, for a price, almost everything in the Pima County Sheriff's Department was up for sale.

Cash on delivery. Discretion advised.

Jubilant, he paid his bill, adding in an extra tip, and headed for Weber Drive. Maybe he'd take his mother out to celebrate that night.

She wouldn't have to know exactly what they were celebrating. He'd spend some of Johnny Rivkin's cash and take her someplace nice like Casa Vieja in old Tempe or maybe little Lulu's just up the street.

Myrna Louise was sitting in her rocker when he came into the house.

Fortunately, he had left the Hartmann bag in the car. His mother sniffed disapprovingly when she saw the pink pantsuit. "You shouldn't dress like that, Andrew.

What will people think? Roger was right. You should have had that first haircut much sooner."

Carlisle felt far too smug to let Myrna Louise draw him into that decades-old argument. "Don't look so upset, Mama. Your neighbors won't even notice. They'll think your sister came to visit, or your cousin from Omaha."

"I don't have a cousin in Omaha," Myrna Louise insisted.

"It was just a figure of speech," Andrew Carlisle told her.

"I don't know why this disturbs you so. It's like wearing a disguise.

Maybe you should try it sometime. It's fun, like playing dress-up.

Didn't you play dress-up when you were a child?"

"When I was a child," she replied stubbornly, "but not when I was fifty years old."

Carlisle went into his bedroom. He saw at once that the stack of manuscripts was missing from the bookshelf.

Turning on his heel, he charged back down the hall to the living room.

"Where are they, Mama?" he demanded.

"Where are what?"

"Don't give me that. You know what I mean. Where are my manuscripts, the ones that came in the mail?"

"I burned them," she replied quietly. "Every single page."

Carlisle's jaw dropped. "You what?"

"Outside. In the burning barrel. I burned them all."

Andrew Carlisle went livid, his hands shook. "What the hell do you mean, you burned them?"

"They were trash, Andrew. Smutty, filthy trash. You have no business writing such terrible things, about all those people killing and being killed. It made my blood run cold. Wherever do you get such terrible ideas!"

Andrew Carlisle sank into a chair opposite his mother, hoping she was lying, knowing she wasn't.

"Mama," he croaked. "Do you have any idea what you've done? Those were my only copies of A Less Than Noble Savage. I'll have to rewrite it from scratch."

"I'd set about getting started then, but try to write it a little nicer this time, Andrew. And leave out the woman who gets burned up, the one who gets set on fire with paint thinner. That was horrible. It reminded me of the Harveys' cat."

Even now she could remember the agonized screams of that poor dying cat, her next-door-neighbors' cat, after Andrew and some of his friends had lit it on fire with paint thinner and matches. Over the years, she had almost managed to forget about it, but reading the manuscript had brought it all back in vivid detail.

The remembered sound in her head had kept her awake for hours.

Temporary relief had come when. around midnight, she had donned a robe and gone outside to burn the book. It had taken a long time. Hours even. Myrna Louise had wanted to be sure that each page was properly disposed of, with every shred of it reduced to crumpled ash, so she had fed the manuscripts into the flame one typewritten page at a time.

The problem was, after she was finished and when she went back inside, the sound came back anyway. It was screaming in heir head even now as she sat staring at this stranger in the pink silk pantsuit who was supposedly her son.

Yes, the cat was back with a vengeance, and Myrna Louise was afraid it would never go away again.

They took away the breakfast tray without Rita's noticing.

This time Understanding Woman took her concerns straight to the convent's superior. After hearing what the old Indian woman had to say, Sister Veronica made arrangements for a hasty trip to San Xavier, where they spoke at length to Father Mark. He listened gravely and agreed to take immediate action.

The next afternoon while Dancing Quail was busy with her endless dusting, she heard visitors being ushered into the convent. Soon Sister Mary Jane came looking for her.

"Someone is waiting to see you, Rita."

Dancing Quail was thunderstruck when she came to the arched doorway of the living room and found her grandmother sitting on the horsehair couch with Sister Veronica. Across a small table. in matching chairs, sat Father Mark from San Xavier and the BIA outing matron from Tucson.

Dancing Quail stood transfixed for a moment, looking questioningly from face to face.

"Good afternoon, Rita," Father Mark boomed heartily.

"Come in and sit down."

Dancing Quail slipped warily into the room. She made for a small footstool near Understanding Woman. When she sat down next to her grandmother, she looked to the old woman's weathered face for answers, but Understanding Woman made no acknowledgment.

"We're here about you and your baby," Father Mark said brusquely.

Father Mark's loud, forthright ways were often offensive to the politely soft-spoken Papagos who made up his flock.

At this frontal attack, Rita's features darkened with shame, but she made no attempt at denial.

"You must go away at once, of course," he continued.

"Your staying here is entirely out of the question. To that end, I have contacted Mrs. Manning here. Between us, we've made arrangements for you to have a position with a good family in Phoenix. Isn't that right, Lucille?"

Over the years, the outing matron's once-red hair had faded to a muddy gray, but Dancing Quail still remembered the withering look the woman had given her years before when the Mil-gahn woman discovered that the little girl from Ban Thak had no shoes.

Lucille Manning nodded. "They are a very respectable family in Phoenix.

Under most circumstances, they wouldn't consider taking someone in your ... in your condition. But Adele and Charles Clark are old friends of Father Mark's. They're also very interested in Indian basketry.

When I told them you were a basket maker, they decided to make an exception."

"I don't understand. . ." Rita began.

The priest cut her off. "Of course you do, girl! You're not stupid.

It would be very bad for Father John if you stayed here to have this baby. It would drive him out of the priesthood, destroy him completely, leave him to rot in hell. You wouldn't want to do that, now would you?"

"No, but. .

"And we've found a place where you can go. It'll be a good job, one that pays more than the sisters can."

"But what about my grandmother?" Dancing Quail asked. "What will happen to her?"

"I will go home," Understanding Woman said, speaking for the first time.

"I will go home to Ban Thak and wait to die."

Father Mark told Rita to pack her things, that the outing matron would leave shortly to take her to Tucson and the train. The girl left the convent with Understanding Woman.

"Please, ni-kahk," Dancing Quail begged. "Grandmother, please don't send me away."

Understanding Woman was adamant. "You must go, she said firmly. "To lead a holy man or a priest away from his vows is very bad luck, for you and for him as well. You must go far away and never see him again."

Without further argument, Dancing Quail gathered her things. This time she didn't use a burden basket. The girls who worked in town said that burden baskets were old-fashioned and clumsy. One of the nuns had given her a cast-off leather case. Into this battered relic, she put her own meager possessions.

She was about to strap the case shut when Understanding Woman appeared at her side. "Ni-ka'amad," the old woman said. "Granddaughter, here.

This basket is not as good as that other one. Be careful not to lose it this time."

Tentatively, Dancing Quail picked up Understanding Woman's medicine basket, the last one the old woman ever made. She opened the top and peered inside. There were the things she remembered-a clay doll, another fragment of the same beautiful spirit rock, an arrowhead, and a hank of long black hair. Tears streamed down the young woman's face as she replaced the lid and carefully edged the basket in one corner of the case.

Because of Father John, her grandmother was sending Dancing Quail away, but with her blessing rather than without. The old woman's puny medicine basket could offer only the slightest protection against the outside world, but it was far better than no protection at all.

Besides, it was the only gift Understanding Woman had to give.

The two Indians left San Xavier and drove to the Pima County Sheriff's Department. Fat Crack had been here on business numerous times, and he knew his way around. He also understood the kind of treatment they could expect.

"I want to speak to Detective Walker," he said, going up to the glass-enclosed cage that separated clerk from waiting room.

"He's not in," the clerk said.

"Can you call him?"

"He's not on duty today."

"I need to talk to him."

"I'm telling you, he's not in."

"We'll wait," Fat Crack said, and showed Looks At Nothing to a chair.

An hour later, they were still there.

Sheriff DuShane didn't usually come in on weekends, but he had forgotten his golf clubs at the office, and he needed them now. He was surprised to find two Indians seated stolidly in the front waiting area. There were usually plenty of Indians in the cell-block, but not that many out front.

"What's with the powwow in the lobby?" he asked.

The clerk shrugged. "Who knows? They want to talk to Walker. I told them plain as day that it's his day off."

"Like hell it is," DuShane growled. "You call him and tell him to get in here to take care of it. I don't need a bunch of Indians sitting around stinking up the place."

"But he's at the hospital with his father. .

"I don't give a rat's ass where he is. You get him on the horn and tell him to take care of it. Brandon Walker's in deep shit with me about now. He'd by God better not drag his heels."

Brandon Walker was both mystified and relieved by the departmental phone call that summoned him from Tucson Medical Center. The relief came from having a legitimate reason to abandon his distracted mother who was still waiting for the appearance of the second-opinion doctor, a process that Brandon could neither stop nor speed up. He wondered why two reservation Indians would insist on seeing him this ragingly hot Sunday afternoon.

In the waiting room, he immediately recognized the younger of the two as the person looking after Davy Ladd in the hospital at Sells. The old man, blind and bent, leaning on a gnarled ironwood cane, was a complete stranger.

"Would you like to come back to my office?" Walker asked.

Fat Crack translated Brandon's words. The old man shook his head emphatically, speaking rapidly in Papago.

"He wants to talk outside," Fat Crack explained. "He wants to smoke."

The crazy old coot could smoke in here where it's cool, Brandon thought, but he shrugged his shoulders in compliance and followed the other two men outside into the ungodly heat. Fat Crack led them to a small patch of shade under a thriving mesquite tree. The old man sat cross-legged on the ground and opened the flap of a leather pouch that he wore around his waist. Removing a homemade cigarette, he started to light up.

Brandon reached for his own cigarettes, but the younger man stopped him.

"Looks At Nothing would like you to join him," Fat Crack said, sitting down next to the old man.

obligingly, walker left his package of filter-tips where they were. He squatted down Close to the other two and waited. He tried unsuccessfully to estimate ages. The id-to-late forties, but the younger man was probably in his m older one's sun-dried, weathered skin defied categorizing.

After deftly lighting his cigarette with a worn brass lighter, absorbed concentration.

the old man puffed on it. He reminded Brandon of the aged Vietnamese villagers he had seen during the war, venerated old wise men who had seen one regime topple after another, and who had waited patiently for the inevitable time when the Americans would disappear as well.

At last the old man turned his sightless eyes in Brandon's direction.

He held out the cigarette, offering it to the detective. ,Nawoj,11 he said.

Brandon's first inclination was to say thanks but no thanks, that he'd have one of his own, but instinct warned him that there was more at stake here than just refusing a certain brand of cigarettes, homemade or not.

,Take it,- Fat crack urged. "Say 'nawoi-" "Say what?"

I'Nawoj," Fat Crack repeated. "It means 'friend' Or 'friendly gift."'

"Now-witch," Brandon said hesitantly, mimicking the strange sounding word as best he could. He accepted the cigarette and took a deep drag while Fat Crack nodded approval. The smoke was far stronger than the white had anticipated. He managed to choke back a fit of man coughing.

Fat Crac explained as he in turn took "a puff on the cigarette.

This is crazy, Brandon thought What if someone sees me? But just then the old man started speaking in Papago. For a gringo, Brandon Walker was fairly fluent in Spanish, but this language wasn't remotely related to that. He couldn't understand a word.

When the old man stopped speaking, the younger one translated.

"He says he's sorry about your father, but that sometimes it is better to die quick than to be old and sick."

Brandon's jaw dropped. How did this aged Indian know about Toby Walker?

"How does he ... ?" Brandon sputtered, but the old man spoke once more.

Again Fat Crack interpreted.

"He's sorry to bother you like this, but we must speak to you about my cousin, about Gina Antone, who was murdered years ago."

The blind man's mysterious knowledge about Toby Walker was forgotten as Brandon's finely honed detective skills took charge. "Gina Antone?

What about her?"

"We want to know about the other man, the one who went to jail."

"He's still in prison. In Florence."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure."

"We would like you to check." This time Fat Crack spoke on his own without waiting for the old man.

"When? Now?"

Fat Crack nodded. The Indians showed no inclination to move. Shaking his head in exasperation, Brandon Walker rose to his feet and went back inside. He was gone a long time, fifteen minutes, to be exact. During that time, Looks At Nothing and Fat Crack sat smoking in the shade in absolute silence.

Finally, Brandon Walker returned. He stood over the other two men for a moment, examining each enigmatic face. Finally, he squatted back down next to them.

"I just talked to the records department in Florence," he said.

"Andrew Carlisle was released on Friday. Now tell me, what's this all about?"

Once more the hairs on Fat Crack's neck stood up straight beneath the weight of his Stetson.

"Do you remember when my cousin was killed?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Do you remember her wipih, her nipple?"

"I remember," Walker said grimly. It was something he had never forgotten. "But the man who did that is dead," Brandon added. "He committed suicide."

"He is not dead," Fat Crack declared quietly. "It has happened again, just like that. On Friday, near Picacho Peak. The sheriff has arrested an Indian, but an O'othham wouldn't do this, wouldn't bite off a woman's nipple.

Neither would a dead man."

A spurt of adrenaline surged into Brandon Walker's system, but his face betrayed nothing. "How do you know about this?" he asked.

"From an Indian who was in jail in Florence," Fat Crack answered.

"And why did you come to me? Why not go to the sheriff in Pinal County? They're the ones who have jurisdiction in the case."

"Because," Fat Crack said simply. looking at the second Indian. "My friend here is an old man. He doesn't like to travel so far."

To release her anger, Diana's first impulse on arriving home was to clean her house from top to bottom. Not that the house was dirty. She had to find something to occupy her hands and body. She swept and mopped and scrubbed. She even ventured into the root cellar behind a door she seldom opened where she still kept all those packed boxes-Gary's stuff and her mother's stuff--sitting there like ticking time bombs of memory, filled with things she couldn't throw away because she couldn't stand to sort them.

Against one wall were Gary's boxes. Rita had packed those for her. It was the first thing Rita had done for Diana, packed Gary's belongings into tidy stacks of boxes during the three days Diana was in University Hospital having Davy. And across the narrow room, stacked against another wall, labeled in Diana's stepmother's bold, careless printing, were the boxes that held all that remained of Iona Dade Cooper's worldly possessions.

The last month and a half, Iona Cooper was in the hospital in La Grande.

During that time, Diana's world shrank even smaller.

Sympathetic nurses brought Iona's food and looked the other way when Diana ate it, not that she ate much. She was listed as a guest in the La Grande Hotel, but she went there only to shower and change clothes.

Most of the time she slept sitting up in a chair beside her mother's bed.

The two women spent most days entirely alone, with sporadic interruptions by passing doctors and nurses. Max Cooper came by a few times during the first week or so, then he disappeared and didn't return. Iona asked for him sometimes, but Diana refused to call him and beg him to come. If he couldn't come on his own, the hell with him.

There was nothing Diana could do except be there with a comforting word and touch during Iona's occasional lucid moments, whatever hour those increasingly rare moments surfaced. The rest of the time, Diana's sole function and focus was as her mother's advocate, as an insistent voice in the bureaucratic wilderness, demanding medication and attention from busy nurses and attendants whose natural tendency was to ignore an uncomplaining patient.

During the last week, Diana prayed without ceasing for the struggle to be over, for it to be finished. The afternoon before Iona died, Diana went back to the hotel to shower and change clothes. She checked for messages, as she always did. There was one: See the manager.

Mr. Freeman, the manager, a bespectacled older gentleman who had always treated Diana with utmost kindness, came out from his little office behind the desk. He was carrying a check that Diana recognized instantly as one she had written only the day before.

"I'm very sorry, Mrs. Ladd, but there seems to be some problem with the check."

Diana was mystified. "How could there be a problem?"

she asked. "There's plenty of money in the account."

Constantly worried about money, her mother had waited far longer than she should have before agreeing to go to the hospital, but then she maintained that her daughter and son-in-law shouldn't have to shoulder any additional expenses on her account including Diana's at the hotel.

Since Iona's initial hospitalization, Diana had been a signer on her parents' checking account. Iona insisted Diana use that account and no other each week when she paid her hotel bill.

Tentatively, apologetically, the manager handed over the offending check. Stamped across the face of it scribbled red letters were the words ACCOUNT CLOSED!

"I don't know how this can be, Mr. Freeman. I'll have to check on it later. I need to get back to the hospital right now."

"Of course, Mrs. Ladd. Don't you worry. Later win be fine."

That afternoon, before the bank closed in Joseph, and while nurses were busy changing Iona's bedding, Diana called Ed Gentry. He was full of apologies.

"Your father came in and closed that account two days ago. Since he's a bona fide signer, there wasn't a thing I could do about it. If you're short, Diana, I'll be happy to advance you some cash."

"No," she told him. "I'm fine."

The next morning, when it was finally over, Diana prepared to have it out with Max Cooper. He hadn't even bothered to come tell his wife good-bye. She tried calling, but no one answered. Finally, after paying the bill with her own money, she checked out of the hotel and drove back to Joseph. She'd done what she could, but all other arrangements would have to wait until her father arrived in La Grande with his new checkbook.

Driving up to the house, Diana tried the door, but it was latched from the inside. She knocked, only to have the door opened by a complete stranger. The last thing Diana expected was to find a strange woman ensconced in her mother's place, someone Diana didn't recognize and who didn't know Iona's daughter, either.

"Yes?" the woman said tentatively, as though Diana were some kind of suspicious door-to-door salesman.

Something about the possessive way she opened the door warned Diana this wasn't some thoughtful neighbor come to help out in time of trouble.

"I live here," Diana said, pushing her way into the kitchen. "Who are you?"

Just then Max came into the room from the living room.

One thumb hooked under his suspenders, he carried a can of beer in his other hand. At nine o'clock in the morning, he was already swaying slightly from side to side. "What's going on here?" he demanded.

Diana looked at him with absolute loathing. "Who is this?" she spat, pointing at the woman.

"Francine. Francine Duncan. You mean you two haven't met? Francine, this is Diana."

Oh," Francine said.

"And where were you?" Diana demanded furiously, moving past Francine to stand directly in front of her father.

"Where've you been for the last month and a half?"

"Busy," he mumbled. "I been real busy around here.

Besides, like I told you and your mother both, I can't stand hospitals."

"You won't have to worry about it anymore," Diana said. "It's over.

She's gone."

Max Cooper sank to the floor as though someone had suddenly lopped him off at the knees. Francine rushed to his side. "Oh, Max, I'm sorry.

I'm so, so sorry."

"You stay out of this," Diana snapped. "Nobody asked YOU."

She left Joseph that afternoon and never went back.

The boxes came two months later, a week after Max and Francine's handwritten, after-the-fact wedding announcement. Diana came home from school and found the boxes sitting waiting for her on the patio of the apartment in Eugene. A note on the top one said, Your mother's things.

Ten years later, Diana had yet to crack the masking tape on even one of those boxes. Knowing Francine had packed them had somehow desecrated Iona Dade Cooper's possessions. Diana didn't know if she'd ever be able to bring herself to touch them.

Andrew Carlisle had looked down on Myma Louise for as long as he could remember, but this was the first time he ever remembered hating her.

He went to the tiny, spartan bedroom assigned to him in his mother's house and fell onto the narrow bed while his whole body throbbed with abhorrence.

How could she have done this to him? How could she?

A Less Than Noble Savage was gone, completely gone.

Oh, he still had a rough, rough draft, but six years of refinements had been obliterated. It was as though Myma Louise had amputated a part of his body. This was his baby, his creation, something he'd nurtured and suckled throughout the endless days in prison.

At times, polishing the exploits of his main character was all that had kept him sane. Carlisle had liked his brute of a protagonist, Clayton Savage, had related to him both as a man and as a character. This modem-day, selfappointed, bloodthirsty renegade had only one objective while slicing and dicing his way through double-spaced manuscript pages-making sure Custer Diedfor Your Sins, that powerful Native American polemic, was more than just a catchy title.

And now the new and revised Clayton Savage was lost to him, another sin to lay at Diana Ladd's door. Something else for which that bitch would be held accountable.

Practicing biofeedback, a trick they'd taught him in the Joint. Carlisle managed to get his breathing back under control. Don't get mad-get even, he told himself That was the secret.

Finally, with the embryo of a plan forming in his head, he got up and went over to the dresser. Deliberately, he felt along the front of it until he found a loose piece of fascia board. He tugged at it until it broke off in his hands, then he went out into the living room still carrying the broken piece. He walked past his mother, who had not yet moved from her rocker.

"Where are you going?" She asked the question mechanically, strictly out of habit, even though she didn't want to.

She had no need to know where her son was going or what he would do, but she was unable to change a lifetime's worth of asking.

"To the lumberyard," he said. "I need some glue. A piece of wood broke off the dresser in my room."

Away from the house, away from her, he was able to think more clearly.

He bought the glue for the dresser. He also bought some caulking compound and a caulking gun.

He told the man at the check stand that he was installing a tub in an add-on bathroom.

By the time he came back home, Andrew Carlisle was his old self again, his old charming self.

"Sorry I was so upset earlier, Mama," he said. "It's not that big a deal, really. Besides, you're right. It probably wasn't all that good a book in the first place."

"You're not mad at me anymore?"

"No," he lied. "Not at all. How about going out to dinner?

We could go someplace special, for a steak or whatever YOU like."

Myrna Louise's eyes lit up. She was always game for going out to dinner. "I really like that place over in the shopping center," she said. "Lulubelle's or whatever. They have good ribs."

"That settles it," her son told her with an easy smile.

"That's where we'll go then, and tomorrow, if you like, we could ride down to Tucson together. I have a few more errands to run. It's a long drive. It would be fun to have some company."

Late in the afternoon, Diana and Davy drove out to Sells. Right after they arrived, Diana took Davy around to the side of the building and held him up so he could speak to Rita through the open window. Then, warning him not to talk to anyone else in her absence, Diana left him in the lobby and went down the hall to Rita's room.

"Davy sure looks good," Rita said. "The cut on his head isn't too bad?"

"No. It's fine. He's proud of all his stitches."

The two women were quiet for a moment. Over the years, they had spent so much time alone together that long silences between them were not unusual. There was nothing in the older woman's placid countenance to warn Diana that a storm was coming.

"My nephew was here earlier," Rita said at last. "He came to give me some news."

"Oh? What's that?"

"Carlisle."

At the sound of the name, Diana's heart caught in her throat. ,what about him?"

"He's out."

"When?"

"Friday. Already he has killed again."

"No. Are you serious?"

Rita nodded. "Fat Crack told me. They have arrested an Indian, but it was Carlisle who did it. He bit her."

"My God," Diana breathed. "I'll have to get in touch with Detective Walker right away and let him know."

"No," Rita said. "Detective Walker already tried with Carlisle, and he failed. Gina is dead. Your husband is dead, and now Carlisle is free.

We will not give Detective Walker another chance."

"What are you saying?" Diana asked. She knew what Rita was thinking, but she didn't dare put it into words.

,,I remember what he said in the hallway," Rita continued slowly.

"When the deputy's back was turned and when he thought no one else was looking. He said he would come for you, for us. Let him."

"Let him? Do nothing and wait for him to come after us?"

Rita nodded. "That's right. I have one very old friend who is a powerful medicine man. He and my nephew win help us."

An involuntary shiver ran up and down Diana's spine.

"You're saying we should take care of Carlisle ourselves?"

"Yes."

"But how can we when we don't even know where he is?"

"He will come to us. We must let him."

"And then what?"

Rita considered her words carefully before she spoke.

"The Tohono, O'othham only kill to eat or in self-defense. If Carlisle comes after us, then it is self-defense, isn't it?"

It wasn't as though Rita Antone was attempting to talk Diana Ladd into something she had never considered on her own. Selling the idea wasn't necessary. For almost seven years now, Diana had longed to throttle Andrew Carlisle with her bare hands.

"How do we find him?" Diana asked.

"We don't," Rita answered. "Windmill doesn't go looking for Wind Man.

Neither will we. While we wait for him to come, we have much to do."

Chapter Twelve

IT IS SAID that long ago a young woman from the Desert People fell in love with a young Hiakim, a Yaqui, Indian went to live with his family far to the south. The mother of the girl, Old White-Haired Woman, loved her daughter very much and missed her. Every evening she would go out to the foothills and call to her daughter's spirit, and every night there was an answer. One night, though, she heard nothing. IVY That night she went to her husband and said, daughter needs me. I must go to her."

Her husband, who was also old and lame besides, shook his head. "You are a bent old woman, and the Hiakim live far from here. How will you find your way?"

"The Little People will help me," she said. So the next morning she got up and called to Ali Chu Chum O'othham, the Little People, in their own language, for old White-Haired Woman still remembered how to speak to them. As soon as they heard her call, the, animals came right away.

"What do you want, Old Mother?" the Little People asked.

"My daughter's spirit is calling me from far away in the land of the Hiakim. I must go to her, but I am old and do not know the way "We will help you, Old Mother. We will help you go to your daughter."

And so the birds brought Old White-Haired Woman seeds and grain to eat along the way. The bees brought her honey, and Coyote, who had once been in the land of the Hiakim, guided her footsteps. After many, many days, they reach the village where Old White-Haired Woman's daughter lived with her husband and her baby, but the bent old woman found that her daughter was very sick.

"Mother," the girl told Old White-Haired Woman, "my husband's people are waiting for me to die so they can take my baby off into the mountains and teach him to be a warrior. I want you to take him back home to the Tohono O'othham, so he can grow up to be kind and gentle.

You must leave tonight. Tomorrow will be too late."

Old White-Haired Woman was tired and wanted to rest, but she knew her daughter was right. Late that day, she loaded the baby into her daughter's burden basket and went through the village, this way and that, so people would think she was gathering wood. Then, when she was out of sight, she started back north.

Once more the Little People came to help her, but the next morning she could hear that a band of His kim warriors were following her trail.

When they were almost upon her, she called out to Titoi for help. He sent a huge flock of shashani, blackbirds, who flew around and around the Yaqui warriors' eyes until they could see nothing. Meanwhile, Titoi led Old White-Haired Woman and her grandson into a wash that became a canyon. In this way, they went north toward the land of the Tohono O'othham.

But Old White-Haired Woman was very tired after her long journey.

Finally, one day, she could go no farther.

"I must stop here," she said. So Titoi took the boy the rest of the way home. When he came back, he found that the old woman's feet had grown underground and all that was sticking up were two sticks of arms.

"You are a good grandmother," Titoi said. "You may stay here and rest forever, but once a year , you will be the , most beautiful flower on the earth." He touched the sticks.

Wherever & he put his fingers, beautiful white flowers grew.

"Once each year, " Titoi said, "during the night, Wind Man will be heavy with your perfume, but when the sun comes up in the morning, you will be gone."

And that, nawoj, is the story of Old White-Haired Woman and the beautiful flower that the Mil-gahn call the night bloomin cereus. The Desert People call it kok'oi 'uw, which means ghost smell, or ho'ok-wah'o, which means witch's tongs.

Brandon Walker never clocked in, but he worked all afternoon Sunday just the same. Trying to get a lead on Andrew Carlisle, he finally was put in touch with Ron Mallory, at home, taking the frustrated assistant superintendent away from his typewriter.

"My name is Brandon Walker," he said by way of introduction. "I'm a homicide detective with Pima County."

"What can I do for you, Detective Walker?" Mallory asked cordially enough, but all the while he was wondering who the hell had given this joker his home telephone number.

"I'm trying to locate Andrew Carlisle. Your records department couldn't give me a current address."

Carlisle! Mallory thought, alarm bells chiming in his bureaucratic, cover-thine-ass mentality. Carlisle had only got out on Friday, and somebody was already looking for him?

"He's in Tucson somewhere," Mallory answered. "I can probably have an address for you next week. What's this all about?"

The slight hesitation in Walker's answer alerted Mallory that everything wasn't entirely as it should have been.

"I was the arresting officer on that case years ago," Walker said.

"I'm concerned about him being released into the same area where some of the witnesses still live.

He may go after them.

Mallory took a deep breath and used his shirtsleeve to wipe the beads of sweat that suddenly dotted his forehead.

"Look, Detective Walker," he said, all trace of cordiality disappearing.

"Andrew Carlisle was an exemplary prisoner.

He never made a bit of trouble. He was released after paying his debt to society for that particular crime. It sounds to me as though you're out to harass the poor guy."

"Harassment's got nothing to do with it," Brandon Walker countered.

"I'm not the only one who'll be looking for him."

"What do you mean?"

"When they come asking," Brandon added, "I'd have that address handy."

He put down the phone and then sat there looking at it. He had wanted to have some solid information before he called Pinal County. He wondered how his information would be received once the homicide detectives knew it had been gleaned from some aging Indian medicine man over a ceremonial smoke of native tobacco.

Brandon had already looked up the phone number and even partially dialed it twice, hanging up each time before the connection was made.

This time, he dialed and let it ring. When the call was answered, he asked to speak to the detective in charge of the Picacho Peak case. It was Sunday.

Walker guessed correctly that the detective assigned to that case would be hard at work.

"Detective Farrell," a voice said gruffly into the phone.

"My name's Walker," Brandon told him. "Detective Walker from Pima County, just down the road apiece."

"What can I do for you?"

"I'm calling about your Picacho Peak case. I may have some relevant information."

"Shoot."

"I was the arresting officer years ago on a homicide that happened out near the reservation, the Papago. A young Indian woman was murdered.

Two Anglos were the perpetrators." Brandon Walker paused.

"So?" Farrell prodded.

"That case may be related to the new one."

"What makes you think that?"

"The young woman's breast was bitten. One nipple was completely severed."

Walker could hear the other man shifting in his chair, sitting up straight, coming to attention. "Wait just a goddamned minute here!" Farrell exclaimed. "We haven't released one particle of information about that. How the hell do you know about it?"

"That's not important," Brandon said. "How about if we meet and exchange information."

"Where?"

"the coffee shop at the base of Picacho Peak. I'd like to look over the crime scene if I could."

Farrell drew back. "That's a little irregular. Are you working a case?"

"The bastard already went to prison for my case. At the time, most of the blame was passed along to somebody else who happened to be dead.

Material evidence about the bite that would have linked this joker to that part of it mysteriously disappeared between the crime lab and the evidence room. It was never found again."

Detective G. T. Geet) Farrell was nobody's dummy. "I see," he said after a short pause. "You think this is the same guy, but because of double jeopardy, you can't lay a glove on him for the other case."

"You've got it."

"I'll meet you at Nickerson Fanns in one hour," Fan-ell said. "Bring everything you've got. We'll compare notes."

"Right," Brandon Walker said. "I'll be there."

Coming back from visiting Rita in Sells with Davy asleep in the backseat, Diana Ladd pulled into the driveway of her house and felt a sudden knot of fear form in, her stomach.

For the first time, she was daunted by the isolation, by the vast distance-two miles or more-from her house to that of her nearest neighbor. It hadn't seemed nearly so far with Andrew Carlisle locked safely away in prison, but now that he was out ... Bone's welcoming woof came from just inside the door. The sound made Diana feel much better.

Davy sat up. "We're home already?" he asked.

"We're home," Diana told him, but without the internal thrill those words still sometimes gave her. Knowing Andrew Carlisle could come looking for her any time made the house seem less a refuge and more a trap--a trap or a battleground.

But then Andrew Carlisle had been a battleground from day one, from the moment she first heard his name. She had almost finished earning her bachelor's degree by then.

Carrying extra loads and going to summer school she had graduated only one semester late. Gary was eager to get out of Eugene. He said he was only keeping his promise about going elsewhere and starting over.

She found out much later that he had nearly come to blows with his adviser over plagiarism in his dissertation. If he hadn't left the University of Oregon voluntarily, he would have been thrown out.

Gary was the one who first heard about the creative writing program being offered in Arizona. He claimed that a similar one being offered in Eugene wasn't nearly as good. Both Diana and Gary had applied, but only one was accepted. Diana still smarted at Gary's words the day the two matching envelopes came. They matched on the outside, but the contents differed. One said he was in while the other announced that she wasn't.

"I guess there's only going to be one writer in our family," Gary had said with that infuriating grin of his, "and I'm it."

Those words gnawed at her still, kept her tied to her desk when she ought to have been outside enjoying her child and her life. Later, when Gary learned how hurt she was over it and, more important, when he'd wanted her to find a job in Arizona to support them, he claimed it was all a joke, that he hadn't meant a word of it. But that was after his parents learned about the canceled dissertation at the U. of O., after they cut their fair-haired boy off from any further financial aid.

And so, in the spring of 1967, Andrew Carlisle entered Diana's and Gary's lives-insidiously almost, like some exotic, antibiotic-resistant strain of infection that ordinary remedies don't touch. Diana didn't like the man from the moment she met him at that first faculty tea, the only one to which spouses were invited. She had wanted to be there as a full participant, not as some extraneous guest. She resented what she regarded as Professor Carlisle's oily charm.

Gary, on the other hand, was captivated. Once classes started, that was all he could talk about-Professor Carlisle this and Professor Carlisle that. Sometime during that first semester, she couldn't remember exactly when, the "Professor" part was dropped, first in favor of last name only and later in favor Of "Andrew.,' Meanwhile, she found herself a job. Not in Tucson, where applicants outnumbered positions ten to one. She went to work in the boonies, teaching on the Papago for one of the most impoverished school districts in the entire country. The pay wasn't all that bad, and the job did come with housing, a thirteen-by-seventy mobile home parked in the Teachers' Compound at Topawa. It wounded Diana's pride to be forced to accept company housing, but with Gary in school full time, every penny counted.

At first Gary carpooled into Tucson with two other students, but then, as his days got longer, as he came more and more under Carlisle's spell, he bought himself a beater pickup so he could come and go as he liked.

Did Diana see trouble brewing? Did she read the writing on the wall?

Of course not, she was too much her mother's daughter, too busy maintaining a positive mental attitude in the face of mounting disaster, too busy believing that what Gary Ladd said was the gospel.

Every once in a while, the smallest splinter of doubt might worm its way into her consciousness, but she ruthlessly plucked it out. Gary was working hard, she told herself. The stack of typewritten pages on his desk grew steadily taller, offering mute testimony about work on his manuscript. Besides, Diana had interests enough of her own to keep her occupied.

There weren't any Indians living in Joseph, Oregon, when Diana was growing up. The Nez Perce had long since been exiled from their ancestral lands to the wilds of Oklahoma and back to a reservation in Idaho, but Diana had learned something about them in her reading, had discovered in books things about Chief Joseph and his loyal band of followers that would have given her father apoplexy. After all, to Max Cooper's unenlightened way of thinking, the only good Indian was still a dead Indian.

So the job teaching school on the Papago was good for Diana in more ways than one. It supported them while Gary was in school, it gave them a place to live, and it provided another avenue of attack in her unrelenting rebellion against her father. She threw herself into her work with all the enthusiasm and energy she could muster. If she was going to be a teacher for the time being, she'd be the best damned teacher the reservation had ever seen.

While doing that, she was also, unwittingly, giving Gary Ladd more and more rope-enough rope to hang himself, enough rope to destroy them both.

"Gary," she had pleaded finally. "For God's sake, tell me what's the matter!"

It was early afternoon the following Friday, a full week after he'd stayed out until broad daylight after the dance at San Pedro.

"I can't," he whimpered, "I don't know what to do."

She went to him then, held him and comforted him as she would have a small lost child or a wounded animal.

She couldn't believe those frightened, despairing words came from the lips of the man she loved, from the mouth of Garrison Walther Ladd, III, someone who always had a ready answer for everything.

It had been a terrible week for Diana, a debilitating, virtually sleepless week. She alternated between bouts of fury and bleak despair over what was wrong with her husband, all the while battling her own recalcitrant body, which seemed determined to throw off every morsel of food she attempted to put in her mouth.

Gary spent the week in front of the TV set, watching everything from news to soap operas to game shows with almost catatonic concentration.

He ate a bite or two of the food she brought him and sipped the iced tea or coffee, but he barely spoke to her, barely moved. With every passing moment, her sense of foreboding grew more overpowering, until she wanted to scream at the very sight of him.

Once, while he slept, she went out and examined the pickup in minute detail, looking for a clue as to what might have happened. She dreaded finding evidence that he had been in an accident, maybe a hit-and-run, but the combat scars on the Ford's battered body were all old, rusted-over wounds. In a way, finding nothing made Diana feel worse.

What was the matter? she asked herself.

What had panicked her otherwise self-assured husband to the point that he couldn't leave the house?

On Tuesday morning, Andrew Carlisle called to find out why Gary had missed class the previous day. Diana put her husband on the phone despite his desperately signaled hand motions to the contrary. He stammered some lame excuse about food poisoning that didn't sound at all plausible to Diana and probably not to Andrew Carlisle, either.

Gary promised faithfully that he'd be in class the next day, but Wednesday came and went without him moving from the couch other than to visit the bathroom.

On Thursday evening, Andrew Carlisle himself showed up at the door.

Diana was surprised to see him, amazed that he'd go so far out of his way in an attempt to talk Gary out of his stupor. She didn't like Andrew Carlisle, but she grudgingly gave the man credit. She wasn't privy to the conversation that passed between them, but she was grateful that Gary seemed in much better spirits after Carlisle left.

"What did he tell you?" she asked curiously, after the professor drove away.

"Mat all creative people go through black periods like this," Gary told her. "He says it's nothing unusual. It'll pass."

On Saturday morning, Diana went to the Store for groceries. The trading post on top of the hill was abuzz with talk about the murder and the now identified victim, Gina Antone. Diana bought a newspaper and read the ugly story for herself She was shocked to discover the victim was the granddaughter of someone she knew.

Diana worked at the school and so did Rita Antone-Diana as a classroom teacher and Rita as a cook in the cafeteria, although the two women were only slightly acquainted. Rita was known for striking terror in the hearts of children who came to the garbage cans to dump their lunch trays without first having tried at least one bite of everything on their plate.

Rita, standing guard over the garbage cans like a pugnacious bulldog and waving a huge rubber spatula for emphasis, would order them, "Eat your vegetables." Usually, the frightened Indian kids complied without a murmur. So did a few cowed Anglo teachers.

By the time Diana got back to Topawa with both the groceries and the newspaper, it was almost noon. She was in the kitchen fixing lunch when Gary turned away from the television cartoons and picked up the paper.

She saw his face go ashen. The knuckles on his hands turned white.

He let the paper fall to the floor and began sobbing into his hands.

She went to him. Kneeling on the floor in front of him, she begged him to tell her what was wrong.

For a long time, he sat weeping with his face buried on her shoulder.

The paper lay faceup on the floor with the headlines screaming at her.

Without his saying a word, she knew. Terror and revulsion took over.

She drew away from him, grabbed up the paper, crumpled it into a wad, and shook it in his face.

"Is it this?" she demanded, not caring that her voice had risen to a shriek. "Is this what the hell's the matter?"

And he gave her the only answer she ever got from him, an agonized three-word reply that offered no comfort even while she pinned her every hope for both the past and present on it.

"I don't remember."

Not, "Of course not!" Not, "How could you say such a thing?" Not, "That's crazy!" But, "I don't remember-a murderous kings X, as though he'd kept his fingers crossed while Gina Antone died.

The room reeled around her. Overwhelmed by nausea, she dashed for the bathroom and vomited, while her chicken-noodle soup cooked to blackened charcoal splinters on the kitchen stove.

When Diana came back out to the living room, Gary was gone. She ran to the door in time to see his pickup turning out of the Teachers' Compound onto the highway, headed for Sells. She could have driven like a demon and caught up with him on the highway, but what would she have done then, forced him off the road?

Behind her, an unearthly howl from the telephone receiver told her that the phone hadn't been hung up properly. At first, staring after the receding pickup, Diana was unable to respond. Soon a disembodied voice echoed through the house telling her to please hang up and try again.

Shaken and too spent to do anything else, she put the phone back on the hook.

Gary left the house, and she never saw him again, not alive anyway, and that last phone call, placed to Andrew Carlisle's home just before Garrison Ladd fled the house to go to his death, was one of the key pieces of evidence that linked the two men together.

Yes, Diana thought almost seven years later, going into the house in Gates Pass, closing and locking the door behind her, Andrew Carlisle was the invader here, the enemy. He had not yet set foot inside her home, but when he did, he would meet with implacable resistance, to-the-death resistance.

Rita Antone had said so, and so had Diana Ladd.

Detective Geet Farrell of the Pinal County Sheriff's Department was a cop's cop, someone who had been in the business a long time, someone who knew his way around people. Everyone in the Arizona law-enforcement community was familiar with the problems in the Pima County Sheriff's Department. At first Farrell was worried that Brandon Walker might be one of Sheriff DuShane's bad guys.

"You dragged me all the way down here with some cockamamy story, so tell me, who is this character?" Farrell asked, leaning back in the booth, eyeing Brandon Walker speculatively.

"His name is Andrew Carlisle," Walker answered.

"Formerly Professor Andrew Carlisle of the University of Arizona."

Years earlier, the professor's case had been notorious, statewide.

Farrell remembered it well. "If it's the same case I'm thinking about, he got himself a pretty slick plea-bargain."

"That's the one," Walker nodded. "The other guy, his student and co-conspirator, committed suicide rather than go to jail."

"Tell me about the bite."

"Like I said on the phone. One nipple was completely severed, and the key piece of evidence that could have been matched to a bite impression, the thing that would have determined once and for all who was responsible, disappeared off the face of the earth."

Farrell nodded. "You boys have a man-sized hole in your evidence room down there. Somebody ought to plug that son of a bitch." Both men knew Farrell was referring to DuShane himself and not some mythical hole.

"They ought to," Walker agreed, "but that's easier said than done."

"What makes you think Carlisle's my man?" Farrell asked.

"He was released from Florence at noon on Friday, put on the bus for Tucson. My guess is that he never made it that far."

"How'd you know about Margie Danielson's nipple?"

Farrell asked. The Pinal County detective didn't play games. He had already made a favorable judgment call about the quality of his Pima County colleague.

"From two Indians," Walker answered, "an old one, a medicine man, and a younger one, too. At least I think the younger one is a medicine man.

They'd heard you'd arrested an Indian."

"Arrested but not charged," Farrell agreed, "but how'd they know about that?"

"They didn't say, and I didn't ask. They were also the ones who came up with a possible connection between this case and the old one. They came to town this morning and asked me to find out whether or not Andrew Carlisle was out of prison."

"And he was," Farrell finished.

Walker nodded. "At exactly the right time. Florence released him Friday at noon."

Farrell blinked at that, as though he hadn't made the connection the first time. Noon Friday. From Florence to Picacho Peak a few hours later was indeed the right time and place. "So where is he now?"

"That I don't know. I talked to a guy named Ron Mallory who's assistant superintendent at Florence. He played real coy, acted like he had no idea where Carlisle might have gone, but the person in Records let something slip when I was talking to her. She mentioned that most of the time Carlisle was locked up, he worked as Mallory's inmate clerk, so chances are, Carlisle's got something on Mallory.

He's not going to lift a finger to help us."

"Unless somebody holds his feet to the fire," Farrell said.

"Now tell me, Walker, what's the real reason you're here?

What's your beep I can see how your ego might be hurt because this guy slipped off the hook once, but it seems like there's more at stake here than just the usual problem with the crook that got away."

"The other man's wife," Walker said. "The widow of the guy who committed suicide. At the time, I convinced her that we'd take care of Carlisle. All she had to do was trust the system."

"And the system screwed her over?"

"Without a kiss."

"So it is ego damage. That's something this old man understands," Farrell said with a sly grin. "I've been there, too. Finish your coffee, Detective Walker. We'll go have a look up the mountain."

Rita lay in the hospital bed and thought about her plan.

It was a daring trickster plan, one both I'itoi and Coyote would have liked. She was surprised Diana had agreed so readily. After all, Diana would run the greatest risk, for she was the bait, the one Carlisle would come looking for. They would lure Carlisle to the deserted cave by Rattlesnake Skull .Village and dispose of him.

Would he fall for it? Rita couldn't be sure, but she knew that people saw what they wanted to see, heard what they wanted to hear. She had already tried that once, and back home, in Tucson, she had Understanding Woman's original medicine basket stored safely away among her treasures as proof that it worked.

Mrs. Charles Clark wasn't particularly nice as she conducted the initial interview with her new employee. The Clarks were not accustomed to dealing with girls of dubious virtue, but Father Mark had begged them to make an exception in this case. Rita would be allowed to remain and work providing her behavior was absolutely above reproach. She must attend church regularly, do no drinking or smoking, and have no male visitors.

There was another young Tohono O'othham working in the household, a slender, shy girl named Louisa Antone.

Rita and Louisa shared the same last name, but they were not related.

Rita was from Ban Thak, while Louisa came from Hikiwoni, or Jagged Edge.

Although Louisa was two whole years younger than Rita, she was much more well versed in the ways of the Clark household. Louisa explained Adele Clark's complex housekeeping system that allowed every room in the house to be dusted at least twice a week. It wasn't until the third day that Dancing Quail opened the door to what was known as the basket room.

She remembered Father Mark saying that the Clarks were interested in baskets, but until she entered the sweet smelling room, she had seen no evidence of it. When she stepped inside, the clean, dry smell of yucca and bear grass overpowered her. Smelling them made her want to weep for her home, for her grandmother, and for all that was both familiar and lost to her. Tempted to cry, she forced herself to work.

Dancing Quail came from a society where baskets and livestock were signs of wealth. At home she had never seen so many baskets in one place.

Many were crammed together, stacked against walls or piled haphazardly in corners, as though they'd been gathered in a hurry and no one had yet taken the time to sort them. The girl recognized some of the designs and patterns as ones from the Tohono O'othham, but there were baskets of many other tribes as well-Hopi, Navajo, Yaqui, even some of the hated Apache.

Slowly, savoring the smell and touch of familiar objects, Dancing Quail worked her way around the room, coming at last to a glass-enclosed case where someone had bothered to arrange the fine baskets displayed there.

Cautiously, she opened one door, propped it up on its hinge, and began moving the baskets around on the shelf, gingerly dusting each basket as well as the shelf beneath it.

She had finished the first shelf and was ready to start on the next when she saw it sitting there, waiting-Understanding Woman's basket, not the crude one from the leather case upstairs, but the original one with its fine, straight seams and smooth, silky weave, the basket that had been taken from Dancing Quail's bedroll years before.

With trembling fingers, she took it in her hands and pried open the tight-fitting lid. Not only was the basket there, so were all of the things that had been inside, the sacred gifts her grandmother had given her, except for the missing geode. One at a time, Dancing Quail touched each precious item--the jagged piece of pottery with its etched turtle still clearly visible, the seashell her grandfather had brought back from the ocean, and the eagle feather Dancing Quail's father had brought to his own mother when he was still a boy.

They were all there and all perfectly safe, as though they had been waiting for Dancing Quail to find them. As she put each item back inside and carefully closed the lid, she felt Understanding Woman's spirit close beside her, guiding her.

Brandon swung by Tucson Medical Center on his way back through town.

Nothing had changed with Toby Walker. Louella refused her son's offer of a ride home.

"I've got to be going then, Mom," he said.

"Going?" Louella asked vaguely. "Where?"

"I'm working," he lied. "I'm on a case.,@ "Oh," she said distractedly.

"You go on then. I'll be fine."

"What did the doctor say?" he asked gently.

Louella's, eyes filled with sudden tears. "That it's up to me," she said, "and I don't want it to be. I want somebody else to make the decision, God or someone, just not me."

She fell sobbing into Brandon's arms. He held her for several long minutes. Louella didn't ask her son to make the decision for her, and he didn't offer. It wasn't his place. "We'll just have to wait and see then, won't we?" he said.

Louella gulped and nodded. "Yes," she said. "Wait and see."

Brandon left the hospital and drove to Gate's Pass. He had waited to contact Diana, hoping to have some definite news about Carlisle's whereabouts before he told her anything.

Once he talked to Mallory, there wasn't time to reach her before leaving for Picacho Peak to meet Detective Farrell.

Driving to Diana's house now, he worried about what he would say. He didn't want to alarm her unduly, but he was worried. If Andrew Carlisle was responsible for Margie Danielson's savage murder, and by now both detectives were fairly certain he was, that meant the man had somehow slipped over some critical edge. There was no telling who would be next.

A snippet of radio intruded into his thoughts, giving the first sketchy reports of a stabbing victim found dead that morning in a downtown Tucson hotel room. At least he wouldn't be called out on that case, Walker thought. The Santa Rita was well inside the city limits, so the county would have nothing to do with it. He switched off the radio and kept on driving.

Brandon heard the dog bark from inside the house as soon as he turned off the blacktop. Oh'o, as Diana called him, was a monster of an animal, a rangy, ugly specimen whose teeth could inflict real damage.

Right that moment, however, Brandon Walker smiled at the dog's menacing presence. If Andrew Carlisle decided to try coming after Diana Ladd, he'd have to get past the dog first. In a fair fight, Brandon would have put money on the dog any day.

He half expected the door to open, but it didn't. Remaining out of sight, Diana spoke to him through a partially opened window. "Who is it?"

"Brandon Walker. Is it safe to get out of the car?"

"It's safe," she called back. "Bone's with the."

Brandon waited outside while she unlatched a series of locks. That seemed strange. He didn't remember seeing multiple locks on the door before, but of course they might have been there without his noticing.

When the door opened, Bone sat directly behind Diana with Davy hanging on the huge dog's neck. "May I come in?" he asked.

"Yes.

He stepped over the threshold. "I've got to talk to you," he said urgently. "In private."

Diana Ladd stared up at him, her eyes fixed in turn on every aspect of his face as though examining him in minute detail. "Davy," she said, without looking away, "take Bone out back and throw the ball for a while. I'll call you in a few minutes."

The child left the room, shoulders sagging, head drooping, with the dog following dutifully behind. "What do you want to talk to me about?" she asked.

All his careful plans for telling her flew out the window.

"Andrew Carlisle." he replied. "He's out."

"I know," she said. "That's why I'm wearing this."

A raw recruit would have been drummed out of the academy for making such a mistake. It wasn't until she touched it with her hand that he noticed the gun and holster strapped to her hip. And not just any gun, either-a gigantic .45 Colt single-action revolver.

"Jesus H. Christ, woman! Is that thing loaded?"

"It certainly is," she told him calmly. "And I'm fully prepared to use it."

Chapter Thirteen

JANA USHERED BRANDON into the house and showed him to a seat on the couch. The detective still worried about the gun.

"You shouldn't do this, you know," he said.

"Do what, wear a gun, protect myself? Why not?"

"For one thing, if somebody gets shot with that thing, chances are it won't be Andrew Carlisle. In an armed confrontation with crooks, amateurs tend to shoot themselves, not the other way around. For another, it's 1975. We're not still living in the Wild West, you know."

"Somebody forgot to tell the woman at Picacho Peak," Diana returned.

"You know about that, too?"

"The reservation grapevine is pretty thorough."

"And fast. Andrew Carlisle was the first thing I was coming to tell you, and Picacho Peak was the second.

I've just come from there. I met with the detective on that case. His name's Farrell, Detective G. T. Farrell from Pinal County. He's a real pro. I've already pointed him in Carlisle's direction."

"I suppose that's only fair,',' Diana responded sarcastically, "since you're the one who helped Carlisle get off in the first place."

Diana Ladd's remark cut through Brandon Walker's usually even-tempered demeanor. "I didn't help him, goddammit!" Brandon Walker snapped.

The hard edge of anger in his voice surprised them both.

"How old were you seven years ago?" he demanded roughly.

"Twenty-four."

"I was a little older than that, but I wasn't much wiser.

When I told you to trust the system, I meant it, because I still did, too. I was young and idealistic and ignorant. I thought being a cop was one way to save the world. So get off your cross, Diana. You weren't the only one who got screwed. So did I."

Diana Ladd was taken aback by this outburst. In the brief silence that followed, Davy and Bone edged back into the room. "I'm hot," the boy said. "Can I have something to drink?"

His request offered Diana an escape from Brandon Walker's unexpected anger. "Sure," she said lightly, getting up.

"The tea should be ready by now. Would you like some, Detective Walker?"

He nodded. "That'll be fine."

After she left the room, Walker sat there shaking his head, ashamed of himself for lashing out at her. What she'd said hadn't been any worse than what he'd told himself time and again during the intervening years.

Diana Ladd didn't have a corner on the Let's-beat-up-Brandon-Walker market. He could do a pretty damn good job of that all by himself.

With effort, the detective turned his attention to the boy who sat on the floor absently petting the dog. Davy seemed decidedly less friendly than he had been the day before.

Wondering why, Brandon made a stab at conversation.

"How's the head?" he asked.

"It's okay, I guess," Davy muttered.

"Does it still hurt?"

"Not much. Will my hair grow back? Where they shaved it, I mean."

"It'll take a few weeks, but it'll grow. Have the barber give you a crew cut. It won't show so much then."

"Mom cuts my hair," Davy said. "To save money. I don't think she knows how to do crew cuts."

Brandon glanced toward the swinging kitchen door. It seemed to be taking Diana an inordinately long time to bring the tea.

"Did you know my daddy?" Davy asked.

It was a jarring change of subject. "No," Walker replied.

"I never met him."

"Was my father a killer?"

Brandon found the unvarnished directness of the boy's questions unnerving. "Why are you asking me?" he hedged.

"Everybody says my daddy was a killer," Davy answered matter-of-factly.

"They call me Killer's Child. I want to know what happened to him.

I'm six. That's old enough to know what really happened."

Brandon Walker realized too late that he'd been sucked into an emotional mine field. "What did your mother tell you?" he asked.

"That my daddy was afraid he was going to get into trouble about Gina Antone, and so he killed himself."

"That's right." At least Diana had told her son that much.

"Mom said you were the detective. Did you arrest him?"

"No," Brandon said. "By the time I got to the house, your father was already gone."

"Gone where?"

"Out to the desert."

"To kill himself? That's where he did it, isn't it? In the desert?"

"Yes.

Davy turned his immense blue eyes full on the detective's face. "Why didn't you get there sooner?" he demanded.

"Why didn't you hurry and stop him? That way, I could have met him before he died. I could have talked to him just once."

Your father was a scumbag, Walker wanted to say, looking at the wide-eyed boy. Garrison Ladd didn't deserve a son like you. Instead, he said, "I did the best I could, Davy.

We all did."

It is said that long ago in a small village lived a very beautiful young woman who was the daughter of a powerful medicine man. She was so beautiful that all the young men of the village liked to look at her.

This made her father so angry that he made her stay in the house.

If she went out, he scolded her. Whenever he found the young men of the village trying to spy on her, he scolded them, too.

In those days, Wind Man spent much of his time in that same village.

One day, the young men of the village went to Wind Man and teased him and said that since he was strong enough and clever enough, he should catch the girl when she came out to get water and take her up in the air so they could all see her. At first Wind Man refused, saying that it would be wrong to do this and make her father angry, but the young men begged and pleaded, and at last that is what happened.

When the girl came out of her house to get water, all the young men in the village were watching. Holding her in his arms, Wind Man took her high up into the air, very gently carrying her around and around. Her long hair was loosened. It fell down and wrapped itself around her until it touched the ground. Then it caught up the nearby leaves and dust and carried them back into the air with her.

And that is the story of the very first Whirlwind there ever was on the desert.

Brandon Walker remembered the whirlwinds.

A fierce wind was kicking up a line of them and propelling them across the desert floor as he drove south toward Topawa for the second time.

The first trip had been the day before to notify the victim's grandmother that Gina Antone was dead. The second time he returned to Topawa, he was looking for Gina's killer.

Walker was called in on the case as soon as it was determined that the water hole in which the body had been found was in the county rather than on reservation land. A dead Indian wasn't high on Sheriff DuShane's list of priorities. As a result, Walker wasn't assigned in a very timely fashion.

The body was discovered by a pair of city-slicker hunters out shooting coyotes mostly for the hell of it, and only incidentally for the bounty paid for each stinking coyote carcass. The two men found the girl floating facedown in the muddy pond and had called the sheriff's office to report it only after getting back to town. Walker theorized that some of their hunting may have been on reservation land and they hadn't wanted to call attention to either the body or themselves until after the dead coyotes were well away from Papago boundaries.

A deputy was dispatched to the scene. Not realizing that the fence with the cattle guard took him onto the reservation and the second took him back off, he left the girl where he found her and reported that it was up to the Papago Tribal Police. Only after all jurisdictional dust settled was Brandon Walker assigned the case. By then, someone had already collected the body. He went to the scene accompanied by a tribal officer named Tony Listo and discovered the crime scene area so picked-over that there was nothing left to find.

Tony pointed Brandon in the direction of the charco, but he himself was reluctant to leave his pickup. "This is a bad place," he said.

"People don't like to come here."

That hadn't stopped the great white hunters, Walker thought. "You mean Indians don't like to come here?"

"Yes," Listo nodded. "They sure don't."

"You're saying the girl wouldn't have come here on her own?" Brandon Walker asked.

No, I don't think so," Listo replied.

This short exchange happened prior to the autopsy, while speculation was still rife that the young woman was nothing but a drunk who had fallen in the water and drowned. Later, after the autopsy, the rope burns on her neck and wrists among other injuries had more than borne out Listo's initial theory. Gina Antone hadn't gone to the water hole because she had wanted to but because she was forced. The other things that happened to her weren't by choice, either.

Walker left the charco. Following the Indian police officer's directions, he made his way first to Sells and then south to an Indian village called Topawa where the dead woman's grandmother lived in an adobe shack behind a small mission church. He went to the rough wooden door and knocked, but no one answered. He was about to leave when a vintage GMC creaked into the yard behind him. A wide-bodied old woman stepped out.

He waited by the door. "Are you Rita Antone?" he asked.

She nodded. He held out his card, which she looked at but did not take.

"I'm with the Sheriff's Department," he said. "I came to tell you about your granddaughter."

"I know," the old lady said. "My nephew already told me.

Silent now, Brandon and the boy waited until Diana returned to the living room bearing a tray laden with glasses of iced tea and a plate of freshly made tuna sandwiches.

"We have to eat to keep up our strength," she said.

The air of false gaiety in her tone grated on Brandon's nerves. She still wore the gun. Who the hell was she trying to kid, Brandon wondered-him, her child, or, more likely, herself?

"I heard you two talking," she said, placing the tray on the table in front of the couch. "What about?"

Davy shot the detective a quick, meaningful look. "I asked him if my hair would grow back," Davy replied.

"You know, the part they shaved off. He said yes."

Brandon Walker was impressed. The kid was a talented liar. They had indeed talked about Davy's hair growing back, but they had talked about a lot of other things besides. Walker was surprised that Davy didn't mention any of them. Something was going on between the boy and his mother, an undercurrent, a tension that had been missing when he had seen them on Friday and Saturday.

"How long will it take?" Diana asked, chewing a bite of sandwich and falling completely for Davy's lie of omission.

It took a moment for Brandon to reorient himself to the conversation.

"To grow out his hair? A few weeks," he said.

"Not much longer than that. A crew cut would help."

"I don't do crew cuts," Diana said. "I don't have clippers.

And that was the end of that. Davy took his sandwich, tea, and dog, and melted ghostlike into another room, leaving the two grown-ups in another moment of awkward silence.

"I can't get over how you've changed," Brandon said, still thinking about the gun. "Since that first time I met you, I mean."

"Murder and suicide do that to you," she responded.

"They make you grow up quick. You're never the same afterward. No matter how hard you try, you can never be the same."

After watching Gary drive off and hanging up the phone, Diana stumbled blindly back to the couch and sat there for what seemed like hours, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Briefly, she thought about jumping in the car, driving into town, and looking for him, but where would she go?

Gary had mentioned lots of places where he and Andrew Carlisle hung out together, lowbrow places where Andrew said you could see slices of real life-the Tally Ho, the Green Dolphin, the Golden Nugget, the Grant Road Tavern, the Shanty. She knew the names of the bars, the joints, but she hadn't been to any of them personally and couldn't bear the humiliation of going now, of trailing after him, of being just another foolish, hapless wife asking jaded, snickering bartenders if they had seen her drunk of a husband.

Because Gary was drinking more now, she finally admitted to herself, just like her father, and she, just like Iona, continued to stand by him for no apparent reason. She could see now that she should have stayed in Eugene, should never have agreed to come to this terrible place where she would be without resources and where he would fall under the spell of that man.

That man-Andrew Carlisle. It was easy to blame all of Gary's shortcomings on Andrew Carlisle. Diana saw the professor as a sort of evil Pied Piper, as someone who had cast a terrible spell over her husband's psyche and bent it to his own purposes.

Some of Carlisle's catch phrases whirled back through her memory just as Gary Ladd had reported them to her.

"Write what you know."

"Experience is the greatest teacher."

"If you want to write about it, do it."

Do it? Do what? For the first time, she allowed herself to frame the question: What was Gary writing? She had never asked to look at his manuscript, had never interfered with his work. That was an act of faith on her part, a self-imposed test of her loyalty. Of course, she had passed the exam with flying colors. She was, after all, Iona Dade Cooper's daughter. How could she do anything else? She had buried her head in the sand and refused to see anything beyond the fact that the stack of manuscript pages on his desk in the spare bedroom had grown gradually taller. That had been the only proof she'd ever required to convince herself that Gary was working, that he was doing what he was supposed to and living up to his part of the bargain.

But now, trembling with fear, Diana sprang from the couch and went looking for the manuscript. Naturally, it wasn't there. The Smith-Corona still sat on the desk in the spare bedroom, and the blank paper was there where it should have been, but the manuscript itself was gone. She had seen it earlier in the day, when she'd been straightening up the house. That could mean only one thing. Gary had taken it with him when he left.

Why? she wondered. Why would he?

Diana looked at Brandon Walker across the top of her iced tea glass.

She seemed much more composed now, as though she had made up her mind about something while she was making the sandwiches.

"So why are you here?" she asked. "Why did you come all the way out here? Are you worried about me?"

"Yes," he admitted.

"And you're convinced, just like I am, that he may come looking for me?"

"Yes," he said again.

it was true, that was his concern. He could point to no concrete evidence to that effect, but all his cop instincts screamed out warnings that this woman was in danger. She laughed aloud in the face of his obvious distress.

"Me, too," she said. "At least we're agreed on that score.

Now tell me, if you don't want me to wear a gun, and if you don't want me to protect myself, what do you suggest I do?"

"Leave," he said simply. "Go away for a while. Stay with friends or relatives and give us a chance to catch him. Once Detective Farrell gets going on this case, Carlisle won't be on the loose for long. He has no way of knowing that we're already onto him, and if it weren't for the Indians, God knows we wouldn't be."

"What Indians?" Diana asked.

"Two Papagos came to see me this morning, an old blind one and a younger one, an enormous man whose name is Gabe Ortiz."

"Fat Crack came to see you?" Diana said incredulously.

"His name is Fat Crack? You know him? He's evidently some kind of relative of the murdered girl."

Diana nodded. "Her cousin. He's Rita's nephew, but I can't imagine him coming to town to talk to an Anglo cop about this."

"Well, he did," Brandon said defensively, "and he brought the old blind man with him. They tipped as off early, so we're on Carlisle's trail while it's still relatively warm. When I left him, Farrell was on his way to Florence to see if he could pick up any useful information-the names of Carlisle's relatives or friends in the area, for instance, someone he might turn to for help now that he's out.

"I remember his mother hanging around town during the time when his case was about to come to trial. It seems like she was from north Phoenix somewhere, maybe Peoria or Glendale, but I don't think she had the same last name.

Fan-ell will try to get a line on her as well."

"And meanwhile, you want me to run away and hide?"

"Right."

"Well, I won't," Diana declared stubbornly. "I'm going to stay right here in my own home. If he comes looking for me, I'll kill the son of a bitch! I'll put a damn bullet right between his eyes."

"That's premeditation," Brandon countered. "If you kill him, you'll be in big trouble."

"Too bad."

"It's a whole lot more likely, though, that you'll choke up when the time comes and not have nerve enough to pull the trigger."

"I'll have nerve enough," she replied.

She was determined, tough, and foolhardy. Brandon Walker wanted desperately to talk her out of it. He had only one other weapon at his disposal, and he didn't hesitate to use it.

"What will that do to Davy?" he asked.

Diana paused and swallowed. "Davy? He'll be fine," she said. "He'll have Rita."

"Will he? Will that be enough? People already call him Killer's Child."

Her eyes flashed with sudden anger. "How do you know that? Who told you?"

"Davy did," Brandon said, watching as shocked dismay registered on her face.

"You'd better leave now," Diana said.

Brandon Walker unfolded his long legs from the couch and got up to go, but first he stood for a moment, staring down at her.

"Think about it," he said gravely. "Davy's only a boy, Diana. How much of this do you think he can take?"

He paused at the end of the driveway and berated himself for betraying the boy's confidence, but it was the only possible means of pounding some sense into Diana's thick skull. Meantime, he looked around him in despair for other signs of civilization. No one else lived anywhere around here, for God's sake. She couldn't have picked a worse place.

Help would be miles away if and when she finally needed it.

Enclosed behind the forest of cactus and with a high wall surrounding the patio and backyard area, the house had a fortresslike appearance, but appearances were deceiving. Once someone breached that walled Perimeter, if the dog were taken out of the picture, for instance, the people in the isolated house would be totally vulnerable. Diana talked a good game, but Walker didn't believe for a moment that she'd actually use the gun. She would threaten, but then hesitate at the critical moment. Even veteran cops made that potentially fatal mistake at times.

But even as he worried about her, Walker was struck by the difference between Diana now--defiant and resourceful-and the way she was when he first saw her--broken and worried sick about that bastard husband of hers.

He had driven up to the mobile home in Topawa late in the afternoon of an oppressively hot June Saturday. The sky was blue overhead, but far away across the desert a red wall of moving sand topped by black thunderheads announced an approaching storm.

Diana came to the door wearing a shapeless robe. Her eyes were red, as though she'd been crying. Her face was drawn from lack of sleep and her coloring sallow and unhealthy. When he showed her his ID, she turned even paler.

"Does Garrison Ladd live here?" he asked. She nodded.

"Is he home?"

"No. He's not. He's gone."

"Do you have any idea when he'll be back?"

"No."

"Are you Mrs. Ladd?"

"Yes." "Could I come in and speak with you for a few minutes?

She stepped aside and held the door for him to come in without asking what he wanted or why he was there. As soon as he saw the crumpled newspaper on the floor, he guessed that she already knew.

He took a small notebook from his pocket. "I'd like to ask you a few questions. Mind if I sit down?"

"No. Go ahead."

He sat while she remained standing, her arms wrapped tightly around her body as if she were desperately cold, although the cooler was turned off and the temperature was stifling. Outside, the wind kicked up, and the first few splatters of rain pelted against the metal siding.

"Was your husband home last Friday night?" he asked.

"He was out," Diana answered woodenly. "He went to a dance.

"Where?" "One of the villages, San Pedro."

"What time did he get home?"

"Saturday. In the morning. The dance lasted all night."

"Did he go by himself?"

"No. His professor went with him, his creative-writing professor from the U., Andrew Carlisle."

"And did this Andrew Carlisle come home with your husband?"

"No. Gary came home by himself."

"How did he seem when he came home? Was he upset?

Did he act as though something was wrong?"

Diana had been answering his questions as though in a fog. Now, she seemed to rouse herself "I shouldn't be talking to you," she said evasively.

Brandon played dumb. "Why not?"

"You're going to trap me into saying something I shouldn't."

"So he was upset?"

"I didn't say that he was fine when he came home. Tired from being up all night and maybe from having had too much to drink."

"He was drinking?"

"A little."

Brandon stared meaningfully at the newspaper lying on the floor, its front page crumpled into a wad. He made sure there could be no doubt about where he was looking.

"You've seen the paper," he said. "Did you know the girl?"

In the stricken silence that followed, both became aware of the steady drum of wind and rain on the outside of the trailer. For the longest time, Diana Ladd didn't answer.

"No," she said at last. "I didn't know her."

"What about her grandmother, Rita Antone? She lives just across the way a few hundred yards."

Diana nodded. "I know Rita from school, but we're not necessarily friends."

"Did your husband know Gina?"

"Maybe. I don't know everyone my husband knows."

"Why did he go to the dance?"

"Why does anyone? To eat at the feast, to drink the wine."

"Is your husband a student of Indian customs?" he asked.

'My husband is a writer," she answered.

By the time the detective finally left the house, he drove into the teeth of a raging desert storm. Fierce winds shook the car, while sheets of rain washing across the windshield made it difficult to see.

Walker had been told that the dance at San Pedro had been a traditional rain dance. It worked with a vengeance, he thought, as he slowed down to pick his way through a dip already filling with fast-moving brown water. Two miles east of Three Points, he was stuck for forty-five minutes at one of the larger dips, waiting for cascading water to recede.

He was still there when a call came over the radio telling him to turn around and go back to the reservation. A pickup truck had been found in a flooded wash off Highway 86 west of Quijotoa. When the highway patrol was finally able to reach the.vehicle, they found a body inside-that of a male Caucasian with a single, self-inflicted bullet hole in his head.

That was how Brandon Walker first laid eyes on Garrison Ladd. As he told Davy years later, Garrison Ladd was dead from the bullet wound long before Walker met him.

Rita had hated living with the Clarks.

All that week, no matter what she did, the Mil-gahn woman found fault with Dancing Quail's work. She didn't work fast enough, she wasn't thorough enough, she wasn't good enough. And all that week, Dancing Quail kept silent in the face of Adele Clark's angry onslaughts, but she began planning what she would do.

"I'm very unhappy here," she told Louisa one night as they were getting ready for bed in their stuffy upstairs room. "I must go someplace else to find work."

"My brother Gordon is in California," Louisa offered. "I could write and ask him. He might know someplace you could go.".

"How far is California?" Dancing Quail asked.

Louisa shook her head. "A long way."

"How can I go there?"

"On the train, I think," Louisa answered.

"Will you write down where your brother is so I can find him?"

Louisa's eyes grew large. "You would go there? By yourself?"

"I can't stay here," Rita answered stubbornly.

Louisa wrote her brother's address on a scrap of paper, which Dancing Quail tucked inside the leather case. "What about Mrs. Clark?"

Louisa asked. "What will she say?"

"She won't know until after I am gone."

Dancing Quail surprised herself when she talked so bravely, but a river of courage flowed into her from Understanding Woman's medicine basket.

She was determined that once more she would have that basket as her own.

She waited impatiently for the next occasion when she would be scheduled to dust the basket room. At the appointed time, she took the other medicine basket with her, concealed under her apron. When she finished dusting, the new basket, now empty, had been exchanged for the other.

That very night important guests came to visit the Clarks and were shown through the basket room. Breathlessly, Dancing Quail waited to see if the switch would be discovered, but it was not. No one opened the glass case. The Mil-gahn woman either couldn't tell or didn't notice the difference in quality between the two medicine baskets.

Two days later on Thursday, girls' day, the domestic workers' traditional afternoon off, Rita declined Louisa's invitation to visit the park. Instead, she stayed behind. First she cut off her long braids, hiding the clipped hair in her leather case. Then, with her hair cut short and taking only the precious medicine basket with her, she made her way downtown. Going to one of the few stores that catered to Indians, she bought a set of men's clothing, telling the clerk she was buying it for her younger brother who was coming from the reservation to visit.

Dancing Quail took her purchases and slipped away into an alley where she donned the new clothing. At first it felt strange to be wearing stiff pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and heavy shoes, but she soon got used to it. That night, with the help of two young men, Papagos she met in the train yard, Dancing Quail headed west on a slow-moving, California-bound freight train.

It was hot on the train, and noisy, but not nearly as frightening as it had been long ago as she headed to Phoenix from Chuk Shon for the very first time. Dancing Quail told the two Indian boys she was traveling with that she was going to join her brother in California. A job waited for her there in a place called Redlands.

Each time the train slowed for a station, the Indians would jump off and hide so that when the railroad police-the boys called them bulls--checked, no one would be there. Then, as the train started up again, they would run and jump on it.

Sometimes the three were alone in the car. Sometimes other travelers-mostly Mexicans but also a few other Indians joined them.

For a long time, they rode and talked, but late that night, when the towns and stops got farther apart, Dancing Quail found herself growing sleepy. She was dozing when she felt something pressing against her.

Opening her eyes she found another Papago, smelling of alcohol and very drunk, tying to unfasten her pants.

"Stop," she hissed. "Stop now."

"Mawshch," he whispered back. "You are promiscuous.

You want it. If you did not, you would not be here."

But she didn't want it. What she had done with Father John was one thing. That she had wanted to do, but this was different. Struggling away from him in the swaying, noisy boxcar, she groped inside her shirt and frond the medicine basket. She pried off the tight-fitting lid as he came after her again.

In addition to the items that had been there originally and the ones she had added from the other basket, there was now one other item-4he owij, the awl, which Dancing Quail used to make her baskets. Her trembling fingers sought the awl, found it, and clutched it in the palm of her hand.

Her attacker reached for her again, grabbing her pants, fumbling them down over her hips, but as he leaned over her, thinking her helpless, he felt something hard and sharp press painfully into the soft flesh at the base of his throat.

He grunted in surprise.

"Pia'a," she whispered fiercely. "No!"

When he didn't back off, she increased the pressure on the awl. Any moment, she would cut him, and then what would he do? Cry out? kill her?

She should have been terrified, but Understanding Woman's spirit was still strong inside her.

For a long time, they stayed frozen that way in the darkened boxcar, with him above Dancing Quail pinning her down, and with the awl pricking his neck. Finally, he pulled away.

"Ho'ok," he said, backing off. "Monster."

But it didn't matter to Dancing Quail what he called her, as long as he left her alone. Once he was gone, she pulled her pants back up and refastened them. She lay there then, wide awake, waiting for morning, afraid to close her eyes for fear he would come after her again.

Finally, as the orange sun rolled up over the rocky, far horizon, she did drift off for a little while. She woke up with a start a few minutes later. The awl was still clutched firmly in her hand. Only later did she realize that the arrowhead had disappeared from the opened basket.

Andrew Carlisle waited until he was sure his mother was asleep before he crept out of the house. He drove until he found a pay phone at an all-night Circle K. His hand shook as he dialed the old, familiar number and then waited to see if it would ring. It had been so many years, perhaps the phone had been disconnected by now, perhaps the system no longer worked.

The telephone was answered on the third ring. "J.S. and Associates," a woman's voice said.

He plugged the required change into the phone. "I'm an insurance investigator," he said. "I'll be in town tomorrow, and I need a copy of a police report on the double. I don't want to have to wait around for it once I get there."

"Have you done business with our firm before?"

"Yes, but it's been several years."

"Are you familiar with our new location?"

"No.

"We're on Speedway, just east of the university, in a house that's been converted into offices."

Just the thought of being close to the university made Carlisle uncomfortable. He was always afraid of running into someone he knew.

"Will you be coming by in person?"

"No," he said. "Someone will be in to pick it up."

"Fine. What report is it you need?"

"The accident that happened on the Kitt Peak Road last Friday."

"Case number?"

"I don't have it with me."

"Anything else?"

"No. That's all."

"Very good. That'll be one hundred-fifty dollars, cash on delivery.

Please place the cash in an envelope. We'll have another envelope here waiting for you. What name should I put on it?"

"Spaulding," he said, suddenly unable to resist the joke.

"Myrna Louise Spaulding. She'll be in to pick it up around noon."

"Very good. Anything else?"

"No, ma'am," Carlisle responded cheerfully. "It's a pleasure doing business with you."

Fat Crack brought Looks At Nothing home to his house where Wanda Ortiz, the younger man's unfailingly cheerful wife, served them a dinner of chili, beans, and fresh tortillas.

She was mystified about her husband spending so much time with the old medicine man, but she said nothing. As a good husband and provider, Gabe was allowed his little foibles now and then.

"We will need some clay," Looks At Nothing said, "white clay from Baboquivari to make the gruel."

Fat Crack nodded. "Right. I know where to find such clay."

"And the singers?" Looks At Nothing asked.

'I know nothing at all about singers."

:,The best ones for this come from Crow Hang. It will be expensive.

You must feed them all four days."

Fat Crack nodded. "My aunt says she will pay whatever it costs from her basket money. The singers can stay here at my house. Wanda will do the cooking. I will see about them tomorrow when I pick my aunt up from the hospital to take her home."

"Your wife is a good woman," Looks At Nothing said.

"You are lucky to have her."

"I know," Fat Crack agreed.

They were sitting outside under the stars. Looks At Nothing lit another crooked cigarette from his seemingly endless supply. He took a puff and passed it. "Nawqj," he said.

"Nawoj," Fat Crack replied.

Far away from them, across the horizon, a bank of clouds bubbled with lightning. The rains were coming, probably before the end of the week.

"You would make a good medicine man," Looks At Nothing said thoughtfully. "You understood how the enemy could be both Apache and not Apache long before I did.

Perhaps I am getting too old."

"You are old," Fat Crack returned, "but not too old.

Besides, in my religion I am already a medicine man of sorts, a practitioner."

"What kind of religion is this? White man's religion?"

"Christian Scientist."

"Christian I understand. That is like Father John. What is Scientist?"

Fat Crack considered for a moment. "We believe," he said, "that God's power flows through all of us."

Looks At Nothing nodded. "You are not a practitioner," he insisted firmly. "You are a medicine man."

Fat Crack smiled into the night at the old man's stubborness. "Perhaps you are right," he said laughing.

"A medicine man with a tow truck."

Chapter Fourteen

WITH BRANDON WALKER gone and Davy fast asleep in his room, Diana was wide awake and stewing. It had been easy to turn on the bravado when the detective was there, to act as though she were ten feet tall and bulletproof, but it was a lie. She was petrified.

Having Walker confirm that he, too, believed Carlisle was coming for them gave form and substance to a once vague but threatening specter.

Walker's fear added to Rita's as well as her own created in Diana a sense of fear squared, terror to a higher power. What before had seemed little more than a fairy tale was now disturbingly real.

Brandon Walker wasn't in the business of fairy tales. Cops, particularly homicide cops, didn't joke about such things.

Diana went to bed and tried to sleep, but found herself tossing and turning, hounded by a series of waking nightmares, each more terrifying than the last. What was it like to die? she wondered. What did it feel like? Did it hurt?

When her mother had died, it had been a blessing, a release from incredibly agonizing pain and worse indignity. But Diana wasn't terminally ill, and she wasn't ready to die.

Not yet.

That hadn't always been the case. In those first black days right after Gary's death, she hadn't much cared if she lived or died. She was so physically ill herself that sometimes death seemed preferable.

that was before she found out the cause of her raging bouts of nausea, before she knew she was pregnant-newly widowed and newly pregnant.

Max Cooper didn't come to Gary's memorial service for the simple reason that he and his second wife were neither notified nor invited. Gary's folks flew in first class from Chicago and took over. Gary's mother, Astrid, wanted a big funeral at home in her home church with all attendant pomp and circumstance. Diana respectfully demurred. All she could handle was an unpretentious and poorly attended memorial service at the faded funeral home on South Sixth. Afterward, Gary's parents left for Chicago and the real production number of a funeral, while Diana skulked back home to the reservation and shut herself up inside the trailer.

By the time the authorities finally got around to releasing the bodies, Gina Antone's funeral was scheduled two days after Gary's hurried memorial service. With no one to offer guidance, Diana Ladd spent the two days agonizing over what she should do about it. Should she go or stay away?

Would her appearance be considered an admission of guilt or a protestation of Gary Ladd's innocence?

For Diana Ladd believed wholeheartedly in Gary's innocence. She believed in it with all the ferocity of a child who clings desperately to his soon-to-be-outgrown belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

She could not yet look at who and what her husband really was.

Accepting the burden of his guilt, the only option offered her by Brandon Walker, the detective on the case, would have forced the issue.

Instead, she took the line of least resistance. Gary's three-word, equivocal statement transformed itself into full-fledged denial. "I don't remember," became "I didn't do it," guilt became innocence, and fiction became truth.

With all this boiling in her head, Diana peeked out between threadbare panels of drapes and looked across the muddy quagmire that separated the Topawa Teachers' Compound from the village proper. The church parking lot was filling rapidly with cars and pickups as Indians gathered to pay their final respects. It was time for Diana to make a decision, and she did.

Dressing quickly, she put on the same blue double-knit suit she had worn to Gary's memorial service, the same suit he had picked out as her going-away dress for their honeymoon. She pulled her hair back in a bun and fastened it up with hairpins the same way Iona used to wear hers.

Wearing it that way made Diana look older, much older.

It made her look like her mother.

Dressed in the suit, but with sandals on her feet because of the mud, Diana Ladd started across the hundred yards or so of no-man's-land, the vast gulf between the Anglo Teachers' Compound and the Indian village, between her home and Gina Antone's funeral, between Diana's past and what would become her future. Once she set foot on that path, there was no turning back.

The mission church was filled to capacity, but people in the back row shifted aside just enough to let her in. She wanted to be small, invisible, but her arrival was greeted by an inevitable and whispered notice. Everyone knew she was there. She felt or maybe only imagined the stiffening backs of people around her. She flushed, sensing that they disapproved of her presence although no one had the bad manners to say so outright.

Topawa mission itself was small and plain and reminded Diana of the church back home in Joseph, Oregon. There was no side room where Gina's mourning relatives could have grieved in private. They sat stolidly, shoulder to shoulder, in the front row next to Rita. In addition to the grandmother, there were two couples, an older one and a younger.

Were two of them Gina's parents? Did they know she was here in church with them? Diana wondered. What would they do when they found out?

Spit at her? Throw her out?

The service started. Gradually, Diana allowed herself to be caught up in the familiar strains of the mass, the sounds and smells of which came back from the dim reaches of her childhood.

Iona Anne Dade Cooper's daughter, Diana Lee Bernadette, had been a devout child growing up in Joseph, but she had left the church without a backward glance in early adulthood, not only over the issue of birth control, but also over her marriage to a non-Catholic. Garrison Walther Ladd, III, the only son of staunch Lutherans, never would have consented to his child being brought up in the Catholic Church.

Somehow, in a way Gary's memorial service hadn't, Gina's funeral became a requiem for everything Diana had lost-her childhood as well as her marriage, her husband, and her mother. When the mass was over, instead of bolting out first as she had intended, she was too overcome to leave until after Rita and the others had already trudged down the aisle and were waiting at the door to greet the attendees.

There was no escape. As soon as she stood up, the people parted around her as though she were a carrier of some contagious, dread disease.

And that was how she arrived in front of Rita Antone, isolated and alone, in the midst of the crowd.

The old Indian woman held out a leathery hand and grasped Diana's smooth one. The younger woman looked up and met Rita's fearsome bloodshot gaze. "I'm so sorry," Diana whispered.

Rita nodded, pressing her hand. "Are you coming to the feast?" the old woman asked.

"The feast?" Diana stammered uncomprehendingly.

"At the feast house after the cemetery. You must come.

We will sit together," Rita said kindly. "You see, we are both hejel wfithag."

"Pardon me?"

"We are both left alone. You must come sit with me."

Behind them, people in line shifted impatiently. Stunned by such kindness and generosity, Diana could not turn it down. "I'll come," she murmured. "Thank you."

Detective G. T. Farrell arrived in Florence in the late evening and set about putting the Arizona State Penitentiary on notice. Farrell was a man unaccustomed to taking no for an answer. When one person turned him down, he automatically moved up to the next rung on the ladder of command and turned up the volume. By two o'clock in the morning, he had done the unthinkable-Warden Adam Dixon himself was out of bed and working on the problem. When the warden discovered that Ron Mallory's home phone was either conveniently out of order or off the hook, he sent a car to fetch him.

Ron Mallory made his way into the warden's well-lit office feeling distinctly queasy. Obviously, he should have paid more attention to the guy on the phone, the one who had been looking for Andrew Carlisle earlier, because whoever was looking for him now had a whole lot more horses behind him.

"What seems to be the problem?" Mallory asked, putting on as good a front as possible.

"Carlisle's the problem," Warden Dixon growled.

"Where the hell is he?"

"Tucson, as far as I know, sir," Mallory answered quickly. "We put him on the bus to Tucson."

"Where in Tucson?"

"He had rented an apartment, down off Twenty-second Street somewhere, but that fell through the day of his release. The landlord called me while I was waiting for a guard to bring in the prisoner. The guy told me Carlisle couldn't have the apartment he wanted after all. Since he was already half signed out, there wasn't much I could do but let him go. He said he'd check in as soon as he found some other place to stay."

"Has he?"

"Not so far as I know, sir. I glanced at my messages on the way in. I didn't see anything from him, although I'll be glad to go back and check."

"You do that," Warden Dixon said. "You go check, and if you don't find it, you might consider cleaning out your desk. Come tomorrow morning, you're going to find yourself back on the line, mister. I kid you not."

In the cell-blocks? Mallory's jaw dropped. "I don't understand.

What's going on?"

"I'll tell you what's going on. This detective here thinks Carlisle went on a rampage within minutes of checking out of this facility. Do you hear me? Within minutes! We've got one woman dead so far, a dame over by Picacho Peak with her tit bitten in two. Does that ring any bells with you, Mr. Mallory? Because if it doesn't, it by God should!"

Mallory took a backward step, edging toward the door.

"Furthermore," Dixon added ominously, "you shake up whatever clerks there are on duty around here and you start them looking through every goddamned record we have for any name or address that might give this detective a lead.

You're in charge, Mallory. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir. Perfectly."

"Get moving then."

Mallory bolted from the room. As he panted toward his soon-to-be-former office, he swore under his breath. If he ever got his hands around Andrew Carlisle's neck, Assistant Superintendent Ron Mallory would kill the bastard himself. Personally.

Diana fell asleep at last and dreamed about Gina's funeral, except it wasn't Gina's at all, it was her mother's.

The two were all mixed up somehow. Instead of being in the mean funeral home in La Grande where Max had held the funeral in real life, with half the mourners having to stand outside the doors because there was no more room, it was in the mission church at Topawa. Even the graveside part was in Topawa.

And that, too, was like Gina's. Instead of a mortuary's canopy, four men from Joseph had stood as corner-posts holding up a sheet to provide shade while someone else, she couldn't tell who, intoned a prayer.

Although he hadn't attended Iona's real funeral, one of the four sheet-holders i" was George Deeson, her rodeo-queen mentor, another was Ed Gentry from the First National Bank. There was Tad Morrison from Pay-and-Tote grocery, and George Howell from Tru-Value Hardware.

At Gina's graveside, an old blind man in Levi's and cowboy boots had offered a long series of interminable Papago prayers that, out of deference to Diana, the only Anglo in attendance, were translated into English by someone else. This was true in her dream as well, except instead of a blind man in cowboy boots, the main speaker was a priest praying in what seemed to be Latin. After that, they moved on to the feast.

Like the rest, this, too, was a strangely muddled mixture of Topawa and Joseph, of near past and far past, of Anglo and Indian. Instead of traditional Indian fare, the food was like the food at the Chief Joseph Days barbecue, with grilled steaks and corn on the cob, homemade rolls and fresh-fruit pies. People were dressed in their Chief Joseph Days finery, including Diana in her rhinestone boots and her coronation Stetson with its rhinestone tiara.

Diana was visiting with someone, an old lady, when her father came striding over to her, grabbed her hat, and held it just out of reach while she tried desperately to reclaim it.

"Couldn't you find something better than this to wear? he sneered down at her, shaking the hat but still holding it well beyond her fingertips. "Did you have to come to your mother's funeral all tarted out in your hussy clothes?"

"I'm not," she said. "I'm not a hussy. I'm the queen. I get to wear these clothes. You can't stop me."

"You're not the queen," he leered back at her. "Not really. You cheated. You cheated. You cheated."

Diana woke up drenched in sweat with the hateful words still ringing in her ears. Her father had shouted those words at her in real life and left them echoing forever in her memory, but not then, not at her mother's funeral. When was it? When had it been?

"It would sure as hell be nice if I had a little help with the chores around here of a Saturday morning," Max Cooper had grumbled. "I'm sick and goddamned tired of you getting all tarted up and taking off every goddamned weekend."

"Dad," she said, "I'm the queen, remember. I have to go. I signed an agreement saying that I'd represent Joseph in all the rodeo parades around here."

"I'm the queen," he mocked, imitating her. "My aching ass you're the queen! Like hell you are! You're no more the queen than I am. You cheated."

"Max," Iona cautioned.

"Don't you 'Max' me. How long are you going to go on letting her believe she's Little Miss Highness, God's gift to everyone? How long?"

"Max."

He turned on her then. Diana knew he wouldn't hit her.

Not anymore. He'd only really come after her once after George Deeson-that "goddamned coffee-drinking Jack Mormon," as Max called him-appeared on the scene.

It happened early on in the course of Waldo and Diana's training.

George was just coming up the outside steps that led to the kitchen to collect his morning coffee and biscuits when all hell broke loose.

Diana never remembered what that particular fight was about and it didn't matter really. She said something to her father, and Max hit her hard across the mouth with the back of his hand, sending her spinning into the corner of the kitchen. She waited, head down, expecting the next blow, which never came. When she finally dared look, George Deeson had a choke hold around her father's collar, holding him at arm's length with a knot of fist twisted into her father's protruding Adam's apple.

"Don't you ever do that again, Max Cooper, or so help me God, I'll kill you!" George was old enough to be Max's father, and he didn't raise his voice when he said it, but Max went stomping out of the house like a whipped dog, while George calmly sat down to butter his biscuits and drink his coffee.

Evidently, Max Cooper took George at his word. He never struck Diana again, not once. Not ever, although he tried the night she came home with her clothes torn to pieces.

Later, much later, in the hospital in La Grande when her mother was dying, Diana had asked Iona about it. Why had her father called her a cheater?

"Because of George," Iona said.

"George? What did he do?"

"He bought two hundred dollars' worth of rodeo tickets the last day of the contest," Iona said. "He gave them away to a bunch of poor kids here in La Grande who couldn't have gone otherwise."

"He didn't buy them from me," Diana said. She had sold tickets until she was blue in the face, but she didn't remember selling more than one to George Deeson.

"I gave him the tickets and took the money, but they were from your ticket allocation. Even though you didn't sell them yourself, that batch of tickets put you over the top.

Remember, there was only a quarter of a point difference between you and Charlene Davis."

"So Dad was right," Diana said, feeling her one moment of triumph, her rodeo-queen victory, slip through her fingers in retrospect. "I did cheat after all."

"No, Diana," Iona had said firmly, squeezing her daughter's hand despite the pain it caused her. "You've earned every damn thing you've ever gotten."

It was the only time Diana ever remembered hearing her mother use the word damn. As years went by, she was beginning to understand it a little. Her name, not Charlene's, had been the name on the scholarship at the registrar's office at the university in Eugene. Her name.

Diana's name, was what it said on the two degrees, one from the University of Oregon and now a master's from the University of Arizona.

She had earned it all, with the timely help of both George Deeson and her mother.

Lying in bed at her home in Gates Pass, Diana's eyes misted over. What would have happened to her if George Deeson hadn't driven into her life, bringing Waldo with him? Where would she be now? Married to some drunken logger in Joseph Re Charlene was, or else still living in the house by the garbage dump. Would her life have been worse or better?

There was no way to tell.

Her grief for George Deeson, dead now these four years, spilled over into grief for Waldo, who had broken a leg during her first semester in Eugene and had to be put down.

While she was at it, she shed a tear for her mother, and finally a few for herself as well. What if Brandon Walker was right? What if she didn't have guts enough to pull the trigger? What if Andrew Carlisle killed her? What kind of legacy would she leave for her child?

Still wide awake, she thought of all those boxes sitting in the root cellar, waiting for someone to sort through them-her mother's boxes and, more than that, her husband's. Whose job was that? Who was the person whose responsibility it was to go through them, to sort the wheat from the chaff so Davy or someone else wouldn't have to do it later? There were things in those boxes that should be kept and saved for him and others that should be thrown away and never again see the light of day.

It was weeks before she could face returning to Gary's office, weeks before she could approach the desk again with its stilled typewriter and haunting stack of blank paper She started with the bottom drawer, thinking that would be the least painful but of course, she was wrong.

Had Gary been smart enough, he would have got rid of it, would have destroyed it, but she found the damning envelope with its University of Arizona return address almost immediately.

Curious, she pulled out the sheaf of loose papers and scanned through them, recognizing at once the clumsy effort of one of her own early short stories, the one she had submitted as part of her application to the Creative Writing program.

At first she noticed only the stilted phrases, the graceless prose that flows at tedious length from the minds and hearts of beginning writers, but then her eyes were drawn to the handwritten comment at the end.

"Gary," it said, "Your work here is, naturally, a beginning effort, but it shows a good deal of promise. We'll discuss the possibilities for this manuscript in greater detail once you're enrolled in the program and fully underway." it was signed, "A. Carlisle."

For a full minute, she stared down at the paper, trying to make sense of it all. Then the full weight of Gary's betrayal thundered over her, burying her in a landslide of emotion.

Gary had gained admission to Andrew Carlisle's program using her story, not his own. Not that she would have wanted to be in it after all, she thought bitterly, but the rejection had caused her to doubt her own ability, to retreat into teaching, to settle for second best rather than following her own aspirations.

Up to that very moment, in spite of everything else, Diana Ladd had grieved for her dead husband. Now she exploded in a raging fit of anger.

"Damn you!" she screamed in fury at Gary Ladd's unconcerned Smith-Corona. "Damn you, damn you, damn you!"

Having once allowed herself to succumb to anger, it never once left her.

It functioned as a whip and a prod, goading her to succeed at writing no matter what obstacles might fall in her path.

Diana dropped the papers, scattering them like leaves across the desk and floor. She fled Gary's office and never returned. Only as she left for the hospital to have Davy, with the arrival of the movers barely minutes away, did she give Rita permission to go into Gary's abandoned office and pack up whatever she found there.

With the exception of appropriating the typewriter for her own, in the intervening years, Diana had never examined any of the boxes, but Rita was nothing if not thorough.

Therefore, that purloined short story must still be there, carefully packed away among all of Gary Ladd's other books and papers. That story was one of the things that demanded both attention and destruction, although there were probably plenty of others. Only Diana could tell the difference. It was her job, her responsibility, and nobody else's.

"Mom?" a small voice asked from the doorway. "Are you awake yet?"

"I'm awake, Davy."

"I'm hungry. Are we going to have breakfast? We're still out of tortillas."

"We're going to have breakfast," she said determinedly, getting out of bed. "I'm going to fix it."

While Myrna Louise was making breakfast, Andrew Carlisle made a quick survey of her room. He found her extra checkbooks and the savings-account book in the bottom of her lingerie drawer, the same place where she'd always kept it, along with a fistful of twenties in hard, cold cash. The balance in both accounts was pitifully small in terms of lifetime savings for someone of her age. It was just as well she wouldn't be around to get much older, Carlisle thought. He was actually doing her a favor. Maybe she was planning to land on his doorstep when the time came, expecting her son to support her in her old age. Fat chance.

Out in the garage, he eased Jake's partially opened bag of lime into the trunk, careful not to spill any of it on Johnny Rivkin's Hartmann bag.

Garden-variety lime probably wouldn't be enough to strip all the meat off the bones, but it would help kill the odor.

They had breakfast, a cheerful, family-style breakfast.

Myrna Louise was careful not to fuss too much. Afterward, while she cleaned up the kitchen, Andrew loaded the car.

Lida Givens, that nosy old bat from next door, came over to the fence to see what he was doing and to chat for a while. "Going on a trip?" she asked.

He nodded. "It's been a long time since Mama had a chance to get out of town. We're going to drive up past the Grand Canyon and maybe on up through the canyon country of Utah. That's always been one of my favorite places."

"Never been there myself," Lida Givens asserted.

"Wouldn't know it from a hole in the ground. I much prefer California."

Andrew started for the car, then paused, snapping his fingers as if at a sudden afterthought. "Say, are you going to be in town for the next week and a half to two weeks?"

"Reckon. Don't have any place to go at the moment. The kids are busy with their own jobs and families. They don't like me dropping in unless I give them plenty of advance warning. Why?"

"Would you mind bringing in the mail? And if you see the paper boy, tell him to put us on vacation until we get back."

"Sure thing. I'll be happy to."

"I'd appreciate it," Andrew Carlisle told Lida Givens with a sincere smile. "Living far away, it's been a real blessing for me to know my mother's in a place with such terrific neighbors."

"Think nothing of it," Lida said. "That's what neighbors are for."

Myrna Louise was delighted to get in the car and go for a ride someplace, even if it was just an overnight jaunt. Excited as a little kid, she packed a bag and had it waiting by the door for Andrew to load while she did the breakfast dishes.

Years ago, not even that long ago, she would have left the dishes sitting in the sink to rot while she went away, but not anymore. Not in her cozy little house on Weber Drive. What would the neighbors think if they happened to glance in a window and see that she'd left without doing the dishes?

She was pleased that Andrew seemed to have forgiven her for burning up his stupid manuscripts. She probably shouldn't have, really. Writing had to be a lot of work, but he seemed totally at ease this morning, whistling to himself as he loaded the car. She watched out the window as he stopped briefly to chat across the fence with Lida Givens, the lady from next door.

Thank God Andrew was making the effort to be sociable for a change, Myrna Lou] thought, and than le hadn't done anything to dispel the Phil Wharton myth. Lida Givens had a son who was a dentist and a daughter who sold real estate out in California somewhere. It was particularly important that Andrew keep up the Phil Wharton charade with Lida Givens even if he didn't do it with anyone else.

At nine they headed for Tucson. The heat was incredibly oppressive, and the Valiant had no air-conditioning. They drove with the windows open and the wind roaring in their ears. Far to the south and east, thunderclouds edged over the horizon, but they were only teasers, hints of the coming rainy season that would bring blessed relief from some of the heat but they would bring additional humidity as well.

"Have you made any plans?" Myrna Louise shouted over the noise of the car.

It was fine for Andrew to come and visit for a day or two, but she certainly didn't want to be saddled with him on a permanent basis. She was eager to know how soon he'd be moving on.

"I'm looking for a place somewhere around Tucson, someplace I can afford, so I can get back to writing."

"Good," Myrna Louise breathed. Tucson was both close enough and far enough away.

"I don't like oatmeal," Davy complained, picking at the cereal in his bowl.

"Not even with brown sugar and raisins?" Diana asked.

Davy shrugged. "They help, I guess. I just like tortillas better.

Why don't you fix tortillas?"

"I don't know how."

"Will Rita make tortillas for us when she gets home today?"

Diana thought of the huge cast covering Rita's smashed left arm. "She won't be doing that for a while," Diana said.

"At least not until after her arm comes out of the cast."

"You mean we can't have any until she gets better? That could take a long time."

"Maybe I could try making some," Diana offered tentatively. "I mean, if Rita were here to coach me and tell me what to do."

Davy's jaw dropped. "Really? You mean you'd learn to make them yourself?"

"I said I'd try."

"Do you swear?"

Davy's unbridled enthusiasm was catching. This was the first sign of life Diana had seen in her son for several days. She put her hand over her heart and grinned at him.

"I swear," she said.

Davy helped clear the table, then went to feed the dog, fairly skipping as he did so. He had been so strangely subdued that it pleased her to see him acting like his old self.

It was such a small thing, really, promising to make tortillas, but it signified something else, she realized, something much more important.

Promises made meant they would have to be kept, and that implied a future-a future with her in it.

Before, she had thought about sorting Gary's and her mother's things as an ending, as a means of putting her house in order in preparation for yet another catastrophe.

Now, for the first time, she saw the other side of the coin.

It could go either way. She might just as easily be doing it as a beginning, as a way of putting the past behind her and finally getting on with her life.

I'll do the dishes first, she thought, then I'll get started.

It is said that on the Third Day, l'itoi gave each tribe a basket.

When all the women were busy learning how to make baskets, I'itoi saw that it would be good for each one to mark her baskets in a different way so they would know who had made each different basket and what it should be used for.

So 1'itoi brought the women seed pods from the planting, which the Mil-gahn call devil's claw. He showed all the women how to weave the black fiberfrom the seedpods into their baskets to make a pattern to mark their baskets, and by each pattern, the baskets would be known.

Now while all the women were working so hard learning to make the baskets, many of the Little People were watching as well. The birds especially, watching from a big mesquite tree, were curious about what I'itoi and the women were doing. Finally, u'u whig, the birds, came down from the tree and stole some of the fiber for making baskets.

They flew back to the tree with it and tried to make a basket of their own. But they had not watched Fitoi closely enough, and when their basket was finished, it slipped around and hung upside down on the bottom of the branch.

When this happened, the birds began to laugh. I'itoi heard them laughing and came to see what was so funny.

When he saw what they had done, Titoi was very pleased.

He told the birds that they might make baskets for themselves. He said they should call their baskets nests and use them for homes.

And that is why, my friend, the u'u whig, the birds, make nests even to this day, and all this happened on the Third Day.

Diana had barely moved the first stack of boxes out of the root cellar and into the kitchen when the phone rang. She looked at it warily, afraid of who might be calling. Her number was unlisted, but there were probably ways to get unlisted numbers if you knew how to go about it.

"Hello," she said.

"Diana Ladd?" questioned a strange male voice.

"Who's calling please?" she asked, while her heart hammered in her throat and her knees wobbled.

"My name is Father John. I'm the associate priest, semiretired actually, out at San Xavier Mission on the reservation. Is Diana Ladd there? I need to speak to her."

A priest? She didn't know any priests, not any at all.

Why would a strange priest be calling her? Was this a trick? Was it Andrew Carlisle pretending to be a priest?

She wouldn't put it past him.

"This is Diana," she said at last.

"Good. I'm sure this is all going to sound very strange," the man continued, "but I was wondering if it would be possible for me to stop by and pay you a visit?"

Pay a visit? At the house? Did he know where she lived?

"Why?" she asked.

"We have a mutual friend," he said mysteriously. "Rita Antone, the lady who lives with you."

Funny, Diana returned. "I don't recall her ever mentioning your name."

"I'm not surprised. We had a falling out years ago. I'm just now getting around to mending fences."

"Look," Diana said impatiently. "Rita isn't here. If you want to talk to her when she gets back. . ."

"It's you I need to talk to, Mrs. Ladd," the priest interrupted.

"It's about Rita, but I don't need to see her. In fact, it would probably be better if I didn't. I saw her in the hospital yesterday.

I'm afraid my visit upset her."

He sounded priestly. The inflections were right, the tone of voice, the attitude. "Father," Diana said, "I'm very busy right now.

Couldn't this wait a few days?"

"It's a matter of life and death," he insisted. "I must see you today."

"Where?"

:'I could come there."

'No," she said at once. "Absolutely not." She wasn't dumb enough to invite a strange man into her home. "I could come out to the mission, I suppose," she suggested.

If the caller had been Andrew Carlisle posing as a priest, that would have been the end of it. Instead, he agreed readily. "Good," he said, "but would you please not bring the boy?"

"I have to bring him," Diana told him. "Rita is my only sitter. She isn't here."

"Well," he said, "all right then, but I must speak to you in private.

Perhaps the boy can go over to the convent and visit for a little while.

One of the nuns over there, Sister Katherine, is particularly good with children. I'm sure she would be happy to watch him for us if I ask her to. How soon can I expect you?"

"By the time we get cleaned up and ready to go, it'll probably be around an hour."

"Fine," he said. "I'll be waiting in my office, which is just behind the bookstore. Ask anyone, and they'll direct you."

Diana hung up the phone. So Father John wasn't a fake, but why would a former friend of Rita's want to talk to Diana? That was more than she could understand.

She went to the back door. Davy was swinging high on the metal swing set his grandparents from Chicago had sent as his previous year's Christmas present. On her own, Diana never could have spent that much money on a single toy.

"Come on, Davy," she called. "You have to come in now and get cleaned up."

"How come? Me and Bone are playing."

"Bone and I," she corrected firmly. "Come on. We have to go to church."

He came to the door, frowning and sulking. "To church?

I didn't know this was Sunday," he said. "And why do we have to go anyway? Rita goes to church. You never do."

"Today's an exception," she said. "And it's Monday, not Sunday, so wipe that frown off your face and let's get going. If you're lucky, maybe somebody out there will be selling popovers."

"Popovers?" he asked, brightening. His mother might just as well have waved a magic wand.

"That's right. We're going to San Xavier. There are usually ladies selling popovers in the parking lot."

The very mention of popovers put Davy in high gear.

Tortillas and popovers. Beans and chili. He much preferred Indian food to Anglo. Maybe she would have to break down and learn to cook Indian food after all, and not just tortillas, either.

Chapter Fifteen

THEY SAY THIS happened long ago. Cottontail was sitting next to a tall cliff when Ban, Coyote, saw him sitting there. Coyote was very hungry.

"Brother," he said to Cottontail, "I am going to eat you up."

"Oh, no," said Cottontail. "This you must not do, for I am holding up this cliff. If you eat me up, it will fall down and crush us both."

Coyote looked up at the tall cliff, and he was afraid that Cottontail was right. "Come over here, Coyote," said Cottontail. "You stand here and lean against the cliff. You hold it up while I go around to the back of the mountain and find a big stick to help hold it up."

"All right," said Coyote, and that's just what happened.

He came over and stood beside Cottontail to help hold up the cliff. As soon as Coyote was standing there, Cottontail ran off somewhere.

Coyote stood there for a long, long time, leaning against the cliff, holding it. He waited and waited, but Cottontail didn't come back.

Finally, Coyote got tired of just standing there. He thought that if he ran very fast, perhaps he could get out of the way before the cliff could fall on him. So Coyote let go of the cliff and ran as fast as he could. But when he let go, the cliff didn't fall down after all. That was when Coyote knew Cottontail had tricked him.

This made Coyote very angry. "I will follow Cottontail's trail," he said. "The next time I see him, I will eat him UP."

And that, nawoj, is the story of the first time Cottontail tricked Coyote.

They stopped in front of an old two-story house along Speedway.

"What's this?" Myrna Louise asked.

Andrew reached in his pocket and pulled out an envelope.

"Run this inside for me," he said. "They'll give you another envelope."

"But what is this place?" she asked again.

"It's a rental agency," he said. "They're helping me find a place to live. I'll wait here in the car. Give them this and tell them your name."

Myrna Louise started to say that she was a lot older than he was, and if anyone was going to sit in the car, it ought to be her, but it didn't seem worth starting an argument when the day was going so well.

She got out of the car.

Inside, behind a counter, a young woman was busy talking on the phone.

Myrna Louise grew impatient standing there because the receptionist was only talking to her boyfriend. While waiting, she looked around.

Nothing indicated that this was a real estate office. Shouldn't there have been signs, something that said what kinds of properties they rented?

Finally, the young woman hung up. "May I help you?" she asked.

Wordlessly, Myrna Louise handed over the envelope.

The receptionist opened it, removing a blank sheet of paper that had been wrapped around a small stack of bills. She counted them out, one at a time. "And what is your name?" she asked, when she'd finished counting out $150.

"Myrna Louise Spaulding, but it's probably under my son's name, which is..."

"Here it is,,, the young woman interrupted, taking another envelope from a drawer. Louise was surprised to see her name, not Andrew's, neatly typed on the envelope. So he really had intended for her to pick it up.

"Was that a deposit?" she asked, trying to make sense of the transaction.

The young woman laughed. "You could call it that."

"Well, shouldn't you give me a receipt or something?"

"No," the receptionist replied. "That's not the way we do business around here."

Rebuffed, Myrna Louise took the envelope and went back to the car.

Andrew looked decidedly unhappy. "What took so long?" he demanded.

"I was afraid something had gone wrong." "She was on the phone," Myma Louise said.

Andrew reached out to take the envelope, but his mother Placed it in her lap, letting both hands rest on it. Something was wrong with that place, she thought. "They didn't give me a receipt," she said.

Andrew laughed. "That's all right. I won't need one."

How could Andrew afford to throw away a whole $150 in cash like that and not even get a receipt? Myma Louise wondered. She had rented houses and apartments before, and she always got a receipt, especially when she paid cash. Why wouldn't Andrew insist on one--unless he had lied to her and the money was for something else entirely, not for a rental at all.

Suspicion born of years of being lied to made her hands itch with curiosity about what was in that envelope. She, wished she had opened it for a peek before she ever came back out to the car.

"Where are we going now?" she asked.

"To the storage unit. I want a few things from there."

"Couldn't we stop and get something to drink first?" she asked. "I'm thirsty."

Andrew sighed. "I suppose. What do you want?"

"A root-beer float would be nice. The Dairy Queen isn't far."

They stopped at a Dairy Queen, and Andrew went inside where several people were already in line ahead of him.

Cautiously, keeping the dashboard, between his sight line and her hands, Myma Louise slipped a bony finger along the flap of the envelope. It came loose, tearing only a little along one edge. Inside were two pieces of paper.

She scanned through them in growing confusion. There was nothing at all about renting a house. She found herself reading some kind of police report about an auto accident.

Finally, she noticed the names-Rita Antone and Diana Ladd, and someone else named David. The names of those two women were branded into Myrna Louise's memory.

David had to be Diana's son, her baby. Why had Andrew paid so much money to have something about them? You'd think he'd want to forget all about them.

Hastily, she stuffed the papers back in the envelope and licked the flap. After a lifetime's worth of snooping, she knew there would be enough glue left to make the flap stick fairly well. By the time Andrew returned to the car, the envelope was once more lying innocently in her lap.

He brought the root beer to the window on her side of the car. "Here," he said, holding out his hand to take the envelope. "Let me have that before you spill something on it."

Reluctantly, Myrna Louise handed it over. She worried that he would notice the frayed flap, but he stuffed it in his shirt pocket without even glancing at it. Myma Louise drank her root-beer float with her mind in turmoil, still trying to understand. Andrew was up to something, but what? He had paid good money for those two pieces of paper, more than he should have, but why? To get their addresses, said a tiny voice at the back of her mind. To find out where they live.

Why? Why would Andrew be interested in knowing that?

For an answer, she heard only the nightmarish sound of a long-ago neighbor's cat, screaming and dying.

Brandon Walker woke up late and got ready to go to work. The house was empty. His mother had spent the night at the hospital. He had offered to bring her home, but again Louella refused. She would stay there as long as it took, she told him. He wondered how long that would be.

At the office, his clerk shook her head as he walked in the door.

"You're in real hot water this time," she said.

"The Big Guy wants to see you."

The Big Guy was Sheriff Jack DuShane himself. If one of the Shadows received a curt summons to the sheriff's private office, it probably wouldn't be for a pleasant, early morning social chat or a hit from the bottle of Wild Turkey from the sheriff's private stash.

"On my way," Brandon said, turning away.

"How's your dad?" the clerk asked.

"Hanging in there," he responded, "but that's about all."

Sheriff DuShane sat with an open newspaper spread out on his desk.

"This is a hell of a note," he said, glancing up as his secretary escorted Brandon Walker into the room.

He pointed to the upper left-hand corner of the page. "You realize, of course, that this makes us all sound like a bunch of stupid jackasses?"

"Sorry," Brandon said. "I haven't seen a paper yet this morning."

Nonetheless, he had a pretty good idea about the contents of that offending article. He was sure it reported Toby Walker's unauthorized use of a police vehicle.

"You in the habit of letting your whole goddamned family use county cars whenever they damned well please?"

. "it never happened before," Brandon began. "I had no idea my father would take the keys off the . . ."

"I don't give a good goddamn how it happened, but let me tell you this. If it ever does again, you're out of here, Walker. We don't need this kind of shit. Can't afford it.

Lucky for you the car wasn't damaged, or you'd be on administrative leave as of right now. So keep your damn car keys in your damn pocket, you hear?"

Brandon had seen news clips of DuShane out in public charming both the media and his constituents. He wondered if those people knew that, on his own turf, DuShane was incapable of speech free of profanity.

The detective waited to see if there was anything else.

DuShane didn't exactly dismiss him, but he turned back to the newspaper as though Walker had already left the room. The younger man stood there wavering, wondering if he shouldn't let DuShane know of the possible problem brewing over Andrew Carlisle.

"Well," the sheriff said. "What are you waiting for?"

"Nothing," Brandon replied, deciding. "Nothing at all."

If DuShane didn't even have the good grace to ask how Toby Walker was doing, why the hell should Brandon tell him anything? After all, it wasn't his case, not officially.

Sister Katherine met them in the office when Diana and Davy arrived at San Xavier. The nun, taking Davy under her wing with a promise of popovers, left at once. Diana was shown into a sparsely furnished office. She sat down on a rickety visitor chair facing a spare, balding old man who introduced himself as Father John.

"I hope my telephone call didn't alarm you, Mrs. Ladd," he said, "but I wanted you to understand that I consider this a matter of utmost importance."

"About Rita?" Diana asked.

He nodded. "You see, her nephew and another man, a medicine man called Looks At Nothing, came to see me yesterday. . . ."

"They came to see you, too?" she asked in some surprise. "I knew they had spoken to Brandon Walker, but why you?"

Father John seemed taken aback. "You mean they discussed this situation with someone else?"

Diana nodded. "With a detective at the Pima County Sheriff's Department. He came to the house last night and told me."

Father John folded his hands in front of him, thoughtfully touching his fingers to his lips. "How very odd," he said.

"Why would a detective have any interest in Davy being baptized?"

Now, it was Diana's turn to be puzzled. "Davy? Baptized? What are you talking about?"

"About the accident, Rita's accident."

"What does that have to do with Davy?" Diana asked.

"And what does his being baptized have to do with anything?"

"How long have you been here on the reservation?" he asked.

"Since sixty-seven."

"Doing what?"

"Teaching."

"Have you made any kind of study of the Papago belief system?" the priest asked.

"I'm a schoolteacher, Father John, a public schoolteacher. I don't interfere in my students' spiritual lives, and they don't fool around in mine."

"That may be where you're wrong, Mrs. Ladd," the priest said quietly.

"It's my understanding that you were raised in the Catholic Church, but that you've moved away from it as an adult."

"Really, I don't see what that has to do with. .

"Please, Mrs. Ladd, hear me out. It is true, isn't it?"

"Yes," she answered reluctantly. "My husband was a Lutheran, for one thing, but there were other considerations as well."

"Your husband is dead," he pointed out.

"I'm well aware of that, Father, but I haven't changed my mind about the other things."

"I see," he said, nodding.

"What do you see?" Diana didn't try to conceal her growing impatience.

"You still haven't told me what this is about."

"As I said earlier, it's about Dancing Quail. . .

"Who?"

"Excuse me. About Rita. You know her as Rita Antone.

Dancing Quail was her name when she was much younger, when I first knew her. She was still a child then, not many years older than your own boy. But to get back to what I was saying about Papago beliefs, these are people with a strong spiritual heritage, you know. They have accepted much the whites have to offer while at the same time keeping much of their own. The reverse hasn't always been true."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning we Anglos haven't always been smart enough to learn from them.

As a race, we've been very pigheaded, all caught up in teaching others, but not bothering to learn from our students. It's a problem I've been trying to rectify in my old age. For instance, I've learned something about Indian beliefs concerning illness and shamanism.

"In his youth, Rita's friend Looks At Nothing, that blind medicine man, probably was a victim of what the Indians call Whore Sickness, which results from giving way to the temptations of your dreams. Eye troubles in general and blindness in particular are considered to be the natural consequences of succumbing to Whore Sickness. Looks At Nothing could see as a child, but after he lost his sight in early adulthood, he went on to become a well-respected medicine man.

"Whore Sickness?" Diana repeated dubiously. "Do you really believe that?"

"Maybe I don't, not entirely, but the Papagos do, and that's the point.

There's tremendous power in belief, especially in ancient beliefs, and that's what we're dealing with as far as Davy is concerned-ancient beliefs. Looks At Nothing is convinced that Rita's accident occurred because she lives in close proximity to an unbaptized baby. As such, your son is a danger to her, and will continue to be so until something is done to fix the problem."

"This is outrageous!" Diana grumbled. "It sounds like some kind of trick to trap me into coming back to church."

"Believe me, young lady, it's no trick. My concern is far more straightforward than that. In addition to the accident which has already happened, Rita is evidently suffering from what the Indians call 'Forebodings." These pose an additional danger, a threat not only to Rita, but to Davy and yourself as well."

"So what are you saying?"

"Would you have any objections to your child being brought up in the church?"

She shrugged. "I never thought about it that much one way or the other."

"Mrs. Ladd, what I'd like to propose is this. Allow me to come give the boy some religious instruction. At his age, he ought to have some say in the matter. Once he's baptized, we can work together to solve the catechism problem and prepare him for his first communion."

Diana Ladd remained unconvinced. "This is the craziest thing I've ever heard."

Father John sat forward and hunched his meager frame over the desk.

"Mrs. Ladd," he said earnestly. "I have been a priest in the Catholic Church for over fifty years. Priests are expected to live celibate, godly lives, and for most of my career, that has been true. But once, very early on, I made a terrible mistake. I fell in love with a beautiful young woman.

I almost quit the priesthood to marry her, but an older priest, my superior, took matters into his own hands. He shipped her far away.

Years later, I finally realized that I had a rival for her affections, a man of her own people. When she was sent away, not only did I lose her, so did he."

"This is all very interesting, but I don't see ..."

Father John held up his hand, silencing her. "No, wait.

Let me finish. Afterward, the other man, the rival, swore that he and I were enemies. I always believed that would be true until our dying day, but yesterday he came to see me here at San Xavier. We smoked the Peace Smoke, and he asked me for my help."

"The blind medicine man?" Diana asked, finally beginning to grasp the situation. Father John nodded.

"Believe me," he said, "Looks At Nothing never would have come to me for help unless he believed Dancing Quail to be in mortal danger.

Naturally, I agreed to do whatever I could."

The old priest fell suddenly silent. He turned away from her and sat gazing up at the rough saguaro-rib crucifix hanging on the wall behind his desk. He averted his gaze, but not before Diana detected a telltale trace of moisture on his weathered cheek. She could only guess what telling that story had cost him, but she knew it wasn't an empty ploy.

He had told her only as a last resort. Now, she sat quietly, trying to assimilate it all and understand exactly how it applied to her and to her situation.

First and by far most important was the fact that Father John, right along with everyone else, believed that Rita and she were in danger.

On that score, Diana and the priest were in complete agreement, although she had difficulty accepting the idea that Davy's being unbaptized was somehow the cause of it all.

Diana's first choice of weapon to deal with the problem was a fully loaded .45 Peacemaker, but maybe a gun wasn't the only weapon she should consider using. Diana Ladd wasn't prepared to ignore anything that might prove helpful.

"When would you like to come speak to Davy?" she asked finally.

Father John's shoulders sagged with relief. He wiped his eyes, said a brief prayer of thanksgiving, and then crossed himself before turning back to face her. "Today?" he asked.

"Would later on this afternoon be all right?"

Committed to action, she saw no point in delay. "Yes," she said.

"That'll be fine. I'll give you the address."

As soon as they tried to leave the Dairy Queen, things started going wrong. The Valiant wouldn't start. The battery was dead. In a huff, Andrew Carlisle stalked around the parking lot looking for someone with jumper cables.

Then, as they drove toward the storage unit, Myrna Louise began chattering away in her typically inane manner.

"Do you ever think about them?" she asked.

"Think about whom?"

"About those women, the ones from the reservation."

There had been times in his life when Andrew Carlisle could have sworn that his mother could read his mind. Part of her ability to do that, he discovered much later, had been related to her secretly devouring daily installments of his diary. He wondered now about the envelope in his pocket.

Had she looked at the contents? If so, had she somehow guessed his intentions? He hadn't really examined the envelope when he took it from her. It had seemed all right at first glance, but he couldn't very well drag it out now and check it again in the middle of traffic.

"No," he said eventually. "They're in the past, and the past is over and done with. I've got my future to think about."

"I wonder what kind of a baby she had, a boy or a girl."

"For Chrissakes, Mama, does it matter?" he demanded, his voice rising despite his intentions of staying calm and collected, of not letting her provoke him. "Do we have to talk about this?"

"Don't yell at me, Andrew. I was only wondering. Maybe I wouldn't be so curious if I'd ever had any grandchildren of my own, you know."

Well, you didn't, he thought savagely. And you're not ever going to, either, by the time I get through with you.

"Give it a rest, Mama," he said. "I always told you I wasn't the marrying kind."

"You should have been. You're a smart man, Andrew, and smart men should father lots of babies. It's our only hope, you know. only hope."

It was an old, old argument, one they'd had countless times before, but this time, under pressure, anxious to get on with the tasks at hand and worrying about whether or not the Valiant would keep on running, it was too much.

"Jesus Christ, Mama! Would you please just shut up about that?"

About that time, they arrived at the U-Stor-It-Here lot.

There, Andrew Carlisle encountered the straw that broke the camel's back. The gate was locked. Closed and locked.

Afraid to turn off the ignition, he put the Valiant in neutral, set the emergency brake, and left it running. He swore a blue streak as he headed for the small converted RV that served as an office. The door was latched with a metal padlock and bore a hand-lettered sign that said, BACK in thirty MINUTES.

Frustrated and fuming, he headed back toward the car.

He turned just in time to see the Valiant lurch forward and knock down the gate. For a second, he thought the emergency brake must have slipped, but then, in a cloud of dust, the Valiant roared into reverse.

Myrna Louise was definitely at the wheel.

"Mama!" Carlisle yelled. "Stop!"

Instead, the Valiant charged out of the driveway and shot all the way across the street, smashing into a rubber dumpster before coming to a stop. Carlisle took off after the Valiant at a dead run. He almost caught it, too, but as he reached for the door handle, the car blasted forward and careened drunkenly away, leaving him in a cloud of dust.

As the car swerved crazily down the flat, two-lane roadway, Myrna Louise clipped a brown El Camino on one side of the street and a second dumpster on the other.

Neither one was enough to stop her.

In fact, they barely slowed her down.

It was the last straw for Myrna Louise as well. Not the locked gate-she didn't care at all about that-but having Andrew yell and curse at her and tell her to shut up, that was just too much. It was supposed to be a fun trip for her, a vacation, he had told her. But this wasn't fun at all.

As soon as they started having car trouble, he grew more and more surly and upset. She knew from personal experience that Andrew had a vile, mean temper. Myrna Louise didn't want it turned on her. And if he was already angry with her, what would happen if he ever figured out she had looked at those two precious $150 pieces of paper?

When he got out of the car to go to the storage-unit office, Myrna Louise was still smarting. How dare he talk to her that way? No matter how old they were, children shouldn't tell their parents to shut up. How could he show her so little respect? She deserved better than that.

After all, how many other mothers would have opened their homes and their arms to a son when he came dragging home from doing a stretch in prison? She gave herself high marks for being loyal and broad-minded both, for not holding a grudge, although God knows, she could have.

Myrna Louise saw Andrew turn away from the door, shaking his head in disgust with his mouth twisted into an angry grimace. He was coming back to the car, madder than ever. Seeing him like that scared her, and that's when she decided not to wait.

The keys were there, the engine already running. So what if she didn't know how to drive a car? She had been riding in them for sixty years.

She had seen other people do it, hadn't she?

Sliding across the bench seat, she peered nearsightedly down at the gearshift and read the letters: P. R. N. D. L. The car was stopped and the needle pointed to P. That probably meant Park, she theorized. R would mean Reverse, D Drive, and L Low. Maybe she should start out in that, Low.

Cautiously, she moved the gearshift to L, and then Put a tentative foot on the gas. The engine raced. The car rocked in place, but it didn't move forward. Something was wrong. Then she remembered-the emergency brake.

Jake had always talked about the importance of using the emergency brake.

Without letting up on the gas, she released the hand brake. At once, the Valiant crashed forward into the gate, breaking the lock, knocking the gate itself loose from its hinges. She glanced in Andrew's direction. The noise had alerted him, and he was coming after her, running hard.

Frightened now, desperate to get away, she shoved the gearshift to R, and found herself backing up at a terrifying speed. She tried turning the steering wheel, but the car went in exactly the opposite direction of what she intended. She heard rather than saw the dumpster crumple under the weight of the Valiant's rear bumper.

Andrew vaulted forward. Almost at the car, he reached out to grasp the door handle. Myrna Louise had never before seen such looks of unmasked fury distorting her son's face.

What would he do to her if he caught her? Not waiting to find out, she shoved the gearshift needle over to D--D for Drive, D for Disappear-hit the gas pedal, and took off.

She never looked back.

Slowing but not stopping at the intersection, she made it into traffic on Alvernon only because three other alert drivers managed to dodge out of her way.

It served Andrew right, Myrna Louise thought, gripping the steering wheel for all she was worth and seesawing it back and forth. Sons should never talk to their mothers that way, no matter what!

Fat Crack arrived at the hospital in Sells and found Rita sitting in a wheelchair on the front sidewalk. "Are you ready to go?" he asked.

She nodded. "I didn't like it in there. I didn't want to wait inside."

Actually, knowing his aunt's opinion about Mil-gahn doctors, Fat Crack was surprised she had stayed put in the hospital for as long as she had.

His mother had told him that ever since returning from California, Rita had adamantly refused to visit an Anglo doctor for any reason.

She would have done the same thing after the accident, too, but arriving unconscious by ambulance made refusing admission impossible.

Fat Crack helped his aunt into the truck. She winced at the high step necessitated by the tow truck's running board. "How are you?" he asked.

"All right, but the cast is heavy, and my arm aches."

"I'll try not to hit too many bumps," Fat Crack told her. "We have to stop in Crow Hang to see about the singers. Are you sure you want to start with that tonight?

Wouldn't it be better to wait until you've rested some more?"

"No," Rita said. "Tonight will be fine's At Hawani Naggiak, Crow Hang Village, Fat Crack left Rita in the truck while he went to negotiate with the singers. Rita leaned her head back against the cab window and closed her eyes. She felt weak and tired. She hadn't felt this weak since that long-ago time in California when she got so sick.

Late that September morning when she jumped off the freight train in Redlands, she asked directions and walked the eight miles out of town to the Bailey orange farm. She didn't know what else to do. Telling everyone she was going to meet her brother was fine as far as it went, but the truth was, she didn't have a brother. Gordon Antone was Louisa's brother. He didn't know Dancing Quail at all.

Still, he was someone with a name, someone who would speak her language, and maybe, if she asked him, he really would help her find a job.

The sun was going down when she finally found her way to the right ranch. The people she saw working there were mostly Mexicans. When she tried asking them about Gordon Antone, they didn't understand either English or Papago.

Almost ready to give up, she tried speaking English to a young Mil-gahn child. As soon as she asked about an Indian, he grinned and nodded.

"Sure," he said. "You must mean the chief He's working in the toolshed." He pointed off toward a small outbuilding. "Over there."

Dancing Quail found Gordon Antone bent over a file, sharpening the edge of a hoe. He looked up as she stepped into the doorway, blocking out the sunlight and turning the place into dusty gloom.

"Are you the one they call Chief?" she asked, speaking softly in Papago.

"Hell'u," he replied. "Yes."

Gordon Antone put down the hoe and file. The figure silhouetted in the doorway was that of a young male, but the voice definitely belonged to a female. "Who are you?" he asked.

"A friend of your sister's, of Louisa's. She said if I came here, you might help me find a job."

"You know Louisa? But she's in Phoenix. How did you get here?"

"On the train," Rita replied simply. "Last night. I ran away.

"You came all that way alone? From Phoenix?"

"I rode the freight train with some others."

Gordon got up and walked over to the doorway so he could see her better.

"What is your name?"

"My people call me Dancing Quail, but the Mil-gahn call me Rita, Rita Antone."

"Your name is the same as mine."

Now that she was here, talking to Gordon, she could tell he was someone who was easy to talk to. Just being with him made her feel much better.

His saying that made her laugh.

"Yes," she said. "We share the same name. I told the men on the train that you were my brother."

With her hair cut short, dressed in a boy's clothing, and grimy from travel, Dancing Quail was still a very beautiful young woman. For Gordon Antone, far from home and missing his family and friends, the real miracle was finding another person who spoke his own language.

That made her more than beautiful.

"Not your brother," Gordon Antone said, "but I will be glad to be your friend."

At least Andrew Carlisle didn't lose his head. He was furious with Myrna Louise, outraged was more like it, but he had sense enough to melt into the background before all hell broke loose. The owner of the El Camino charged out of an apartment across the street and looked up and down the road in both directions, but by then Myrna Louise had disappeared around the corner.

When the U-Stor-It-Here manager showed up a few minutes later. cops were already on the scene taking their reports. Carlisle chose that momentary confusion to reappear, walk past everyone, and head for his locker.

Despite the stifling heat, he went inside his unit and closed the door.

He had to think, to plan.

By now he had opened the envelope and suspected that Myrna Louise had also opened it, damn her straight to hell.

So what the fuck was she thinking when she grabbed the car and took off like that? he wondered. Would she turn him in? No, that didn't seem likely. Would she know what he was up to? Maybe, maybe not. That was a tough call.

After all, she was his mother, and mothers often refuse to believe bad things about their precious darlings no matter how convincing the evidence.

No, she probably wouldn't turn him in, but would she try to stop him?

Damn her, she had already done that, just by taking the car. What the hell was he supposed to do now?

Did she think he'd just give up? Not bloody likely. Go after her and get the car? How could he? For one thing, where would she.go? Home, probably, if she could make it that far. He doubted it. The Valiant seemed to be pretty much on its last legs.

Actually, the more he thought about it, the more he decided it was just as well Jake Spaulding's car was gone.

He'd have to get a new one, and that might be inconvenient at the moment, but for what he was planning, he couldn't risk using an undependable vehicle. No, what he needed was a new car. Not necessarily brand new, but certainly different----@'reliable transportation," as they say in car dealer's parlance. Once he had another vehicle, he'd figure out some way to make his plan work anyhow.