Hour of the Hunter

Chapter 18

As Diana and Davy returned home from San Xavier, Fat Crack’s tow truck was parking in the front drive. Diana was momentarily concerned about the presence of a strange vehicle, but Davy was ecstatic when he caught sight of Rita. He was ready to leap from the car well before it stopped.

“Be very gentle with her, Davy,” Diana cautioned. “She had surgery, you know. She has stitches, too.”

“On her head?”

“No, on her tummy.”

“I’ll be careful,” Davy promised, scurrying toward the truck. Reaching the door just as Fat Crack handed Rita down, Davy stopped short, daunted at first by the huge Indian’s presence. Then, remembering who the man was, he stepped forward. “Hi,” he said shyly to Fat Crack.

Davy’s first instinct was to throw himself at Rita, but remembering his mother’s warning, he hung back until Rita raised her good arm and beckoned him to her. He hugged her gingerly around the waist while she patted the top of his head. The gesture activated his “On” switch. With a grin, he jumped away from her and pointed to the shaved spot on his head.

“See my stitches?” he boasted. “How many do you have? Can I see them?”

Rita smiled and shook her head. “No, you can’t see them, and neither can I. I’m too fat.” She laughed, and so did Fat Crack.

During this exchange, Fat Crack pulled several loaded hospital-issue plastic bags from the truck. “I’ll take these inside,” he said.

Fat Crack went on ahead. Rita limped after him with Davy holding tightly to her good hand. Diana waited at the front door, holding it open. “Welcome home,” she said.

“Thank you.”

There was a strange formality between the two women, as though neither knew quite how to behave in the presence of Rita’s blood kin. “Do you want him to take your things out back?” Diana asked.

Rita nodded. “I’ll go, too. I want to rest.”

Davy started to follow her, but Diana called him back. “You and the dog go outside and play,” she said. “Rita’s tired.”

His face fell in disappointment, but Rita came to Davy’s rescue. “It’s okay. They can both come along. I missed them.”

Despite DuShane’s ass-chewing, Brandon still hung around the office. He wanted to be there in case his mother called, and he didn’t want to miss any messages from Geet Farrell. He took the time to read the Arizona Sun cover to cover, including both the brief account of Toby Walker’s ill-fated joy-riding incident, and the much longer front-page article about the brutal stabbing of Johnny Rivkin, a well-known Hollywood costume designer, knifed to death in his downtown Tucson hotel room.

Brandon read about the bloody Santa Rita murder with a professional’s interest in what was going on, to see what his competition at Tucson PD was doing on the case. He routinely read about homicides committed in the city in case something in the killer’s MO coincided with one of his unsolved county cases. In this instance, nothing rang a bell.

Several times he was tempted to call Diana Ladd to check on how she was doing, but each time he reconsidered. He’d been summarily thrown out of the woman’s house both times he’d been there. She wasn’t exactly keeping the welcome mat out for him. Brandon Walker knew he was a dog for punishment, but Diana Ladd dished out more abuse than even he was willing to take.

Every time he thought about that exasperating woman, he shook his head. He wanted so much to make her see reason, to help her understand the error of her ways. It was crazy for her to hole up in that isolated fortress of hers and wait for disaster to strike. Supposing her idea did work. Supposing Andrew Carlisle showed up, and she somehow managed to blow him away. What would happen then? Maybe Carlisle would be dead; but so might she. Whatever the outcome, Walker was convinced an armed confrontation would irreparably harm Davy.

Diana didn’t realize that her son was a fragile child, Brandon decided. Women always thought their male offspring tougher than they were in actual fact. Davy needed something from his mother, something he wasn’t getting. Brandon couldn’t tell quite what it was, but he sat there thinking about it, wishing he could help.

Gradually, as time passed, a plan began to form in his mind. He would help, after all, whether or not Diana Ladd wanted him to, whether or not she even knew it. As soon as Brandon got off work that afternoon, he would take the county car home, borrow his mother’s, stop by the hospital long enough to check on his parents, and then head out for Gates Pass. He’d lie in wait outside Diana’s house all night long if necessary. If Andrew Carlisle actually showed up out there, he’d run up against something he didn’t expect-an armed cop rather than some wild-eyed latter-day Annie Oakley packing a loaded.45.

In fact, the more Brandon Walker thought about the idea, the better he liked it. As a cop, he had behaved responsibly in doing what he could to talk Diana Ladd out of her foolhardy scheme. But since she was too hardheaded to give up, Walker would use her as a magnet to draw Andrew Carlisle to him. Diana might be the tender morsel necessary to lure Carlisle into the snare, but Brandon Walker would be the steel-jawed trap.

Diana went into the kitchen to fix herself a glass of iced tea. The one dusty box she had carried in from the root cellar still sat on the kitchen table. Diana looked at the box and sighed. “There’s no time like the present,” she said aloud, quoting one of Iona’s old maxims.

Squaring her shoulders, she found a butcher knife and attacked the aging layers of duct tape that sealed the box shut. The labeling may have been done by Francine, her stepmother, but the profligate use of duct tape was Max’s specialty. Diana remembered the stack of boxes he had brought down to the car on the morning she left for school in Eugene.

Some of the other girls in her class had got real cedar chests for high school graduation, “hope chests” they called them. When Max came with the boxes, Diana had no idea what they were.

“Those aren’t mine,” she said. “I can’t take all that stuff.”

“Your mother says you’re taking it,” Max said sourly.

She left, taking the boxes with her. It wasn’t until she was unpacking in her tiny apartment over the garage that she discovered Iona had made a hope chest for her, too, one in cardboard not cedar, but with hand-embroidered tea towels and napkins, crocheted doilies and tablecloths, a brand-new service-for-four set of Safeway-coupon Melmac dishes, and a heavy hand-pieced quilt. There were a few pots and pans, some cheap silverware, and a brand-new percolator.

Opening each box was an adventure, a reprise of a dozen Christmas mornings. Cloth goods were neatly ironed and folded, the edges crisp and straight. Glassware-there was even some of that-was individually wrapped in store-bought tissue paper.

One at a time, as she took out each item and admired each bit of handiwork, Diana wondered how and when her mother had managed to amass such a treasure without arousing Diana’s suspicions. After opening the last box, she rode her bike over to the Albertsons’ and called home from the grocery-store pay phone.

“What’s wrong?” Max demanded when he heard her voice. “Long distance calls cost money. Did you get in a car wreck, or what?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Diana told him. “Just let me talk to Mom.”

But when Iona came on the phone, Diana was so overcome with emotion that she could barely speak. “When did you have time to make all that stuff, Mom? It’s wonderful, but how did you do it?”

For years, Diana kept her mother’s answer buried in the furthest reaches of her memory. Now, it came back to her. “Love always makes time,” Iona had said.

Remembering those words now left Diana awash in a sea of guilt. Love always makes time. Measured against her mother’s performance, Diana’s relationship with Davy seemed a gigantic failure. She was too busy with her own concerns and ambitions to pay attention to Davy’s day-to-day needs. Stung by guilt, she was still so busy justifying her continued survival in the face of both her mother’s death and her husband’s suicide that she forgot to pay attention to the quality of that survival. Luckily for her and for Davy, Rita was there to take up the slack.

I’ll do better, Diana promised herself. If I live long enough, I swear I’ll do better.

She peeled the final layer of tape from the box, releasing the lid. In moments, Diana went from remembering her cardboard “hope chests” to what could only be called hopeless chests, from boxes filled with promise to ones packed with crushed dreams and dashed hopes. That’s all Iona Dade Cooper’s boxes contained.

All the while the unopened boxes are stored in the root cellar, Diana had imagined them packed with her mother’s few prized possessions, the treasures arranged with the same loving care Iona had used to pack the boxes she sent to Eugene. Except those boxes held no treasures. What was stowed there hardly qualified as personal effects.

Francine Cooper had gone through her new husband’s house, Iona’s house, packing up only what she didn’t want-the inconvenient onion chopper with its broken blade, the battered metal pie tins Iona used only as a last resort when the season’s current crop of fruit-pumpkin in the fall, mincemeat in the winter, rhubarb in the spring, and fresh peach in the summer-had swamped her supply of good Pyrex pie plates. There were ragged hot pads and oven mitts, not the good ones Iona had used for company meals and church dinners, but the old ones she had used only for canning, and that, by rights, should have been thrown out with the trash long before they were stuffed into boxes.

Resolutely now, Diana ripped open the tape on each succeeding box. One rattled ominously as soon as she picked it up. At the bottom of that one, she found the smashed remains of the only really nice thing Iona Dade Cooper had ever owned-a Limoges salt-and-pepper-shaker set she had inherited from her own Grandma Dade-clattered brokenly around in the bottom of the box without even a paper towel as protection against breakage.

Grim-faced, Diana set a few things aside on the table to keep. The rest was swept into a waiting trash can. Only in the bottom box, the heaviest one, did Diana strike gold. There were books in there-the whole frayed green set called My Book House from which Iona had read her daughter countless fairy tales and poems and fables.

Seeing the books, Diana felt a flash of recognition. From these volumes, she had gained her love of reading, her fascination with the written word. She pulled out each book individually, thumbing through the pages, glancing at the familiar illustrations, remembering her favorite stories, wishing Davy knew them the way she did.

And then, in the very bottom of the box, stuffed in hastily perhaps so Max wouldn’t see, was the real treasure, the one item of her mother’s that Diana had really wanted and had counted lost-her mother’s well-worn Bible. Reverently, she picked it up. One corner of the cover had been permanently bent back. She opened the book gently, trying to smooth out the wrinkle.

As she did so, a paper fell out. Picking it up, she found it was actually three papers, welded by age into a tightly folded, brittle mass. Carefully, she undid them. The outside was a letter. Folded into that were two other pieces of paper-a yellowed newspaper article and a small, flower-covered funeral program dated August 16, 1943.

She glanced at that first, wondering whose it was-Harold Autry Deeson. Harold Deeson? Who was he? She had never heard of anybody by that name, although she read right there on the program that Harold’s parents were George R. and Ophelia Deeson.

George had a son? Diana wondered. How come she never knew about him? How come nobody ever mentioned him by name?

She turned to the newspaper article. The paper was brittle and flaked apart in her hand, but it was from the La Grande Herald on August 11, 1943, and it told how Harold Autry Deeson, only son of George R. and Ophelia Deeson, had died in a one-car crash on the highway halfway between Wallowa and Enterprise. Heading back to base at Fort Lewis, near Seattle, after being home for a weekend, Harold’s car had slammed into the highway embankment and then skidded across the road, ending up in the river. There was no clue as to what caused the accident, although the sheriff theorized that he may have braked to avoid hitting an animal that had wandered onto the road or else he had fallen asleep. Either way, Harold Autry Deeson was dead on impact.

Reading through the account of the accident, the whole picture of Diana’s family history suddenly shifted into focus. She started crying long before she ever picked up the letter. It was little more than a note, but Diana knew instinctively what was written there-not exactly, not the details, but the general outline.

“Dearest Iona,” Harold had written in a hastily scrawled, immature hand. “Thank you for tonight. I don’t care what my mother says. You may be Catholic, and my mother’s Mormon, but that doesn’t matter, not to me, and it’s not a good enough reason for us not to be together.

“I can’t make it home from Seattle again for at least a month, but when I do, we’ll run away together to La Grande or Pendleton, or maybe even all the way to Spokane. If we come back married, no one will be able to do anything about it, not even my mother. Please be ready. Love, Harry.”

Diana let the paper drift from her hands onto the table. She didn’t need to count on her fingers. Max and Iona Cooper were married in September of ’43. She was born in May of ’44. No wonder George Deeson had brought her Waldo. George Deeson had been her real grandfather, but why hadn’t someone told her the truth?

Under normal circumstances, Davy would have fought tooth and nail at any suggestion of a nap, but that day, when Rita lay down on her old-fashioned box spring mattress with its frail metal headboard, Davy climbed up onto the bed, while Bone settled down comfortably on a nearby rug. Because of the cast, Rita lay on her back with her arm elevated on pillows. Davy nestled in close to her other side and fell sound asleep.

Davy slept, but Rita didn’t. She looked around the room, grateful to be home, glad to have survived whatever the Mil-gahn doctors had dished out. To be fair, Dr. Rosemead was a whole lot different from the first white doctor she’d met, an odd-looking little man with strange, rectangular glasses and huge red-veined nose who had been called in for a consultation when she first got sick in California.

The Baileys hadn’t needed another girl-of-all-work, so Gordon found her a job at a farm a few miles up the road. There, barely a month later, she began to feel tired. A cough came on, accompanied by night sweats. She tried to hide the fact that she was sick, because she didn’t want to risk losing her job and being sent home, but finally, when the lady found her coughing up blood, she sent Rita to bed and summoned the one itinerant doctor who treated the valley’s Indian and Mexican laborers.

Dr. Aldus was his name, and Rita never forgot it, no matter how hard she tried. He came to see Dancing Quail in the filthy workers’ shack where she lay in bed, too sick to move. He examined her and then spoke to the foreman who waited in the background to take word to the farm owner’s wife.

“We’ll have to take the baby,” the doctor said. “The girl may live, but not the baby. Go bring my things from the car. Ask the cook to set some water boiling.”

The doctor came back to the bed and loomed over Dancing Quail. “It’s going to be fine,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

Those were the exact same words Dr. Rosemead had used all these years later, but with Dr. Aldus, everything was definitely not okay. His breath reeked of alcohol. He swayed from side to side as he stood next to her bed.

“No,” Dancing Quail pleaded, struggling to get up. “Leave my baby alone,” but he pushed her back down and held her pinned until the foreman returned, bringing with him the doctor’s bag and a set of thick, heavy straps. Somehow the two of them strapped her to the bed frame, imprisoning her, holding her flat. The doctor pressed an evil-smelling cloth to her face. Soon Rita could fight no longer.

She woke up much later, once more drenched in sweat. The straps were gone. She felt her flattened belly and knew it was empty. She was empty. The straps were gone, and so was her baby.

She cried out. Suddenly, Gordon was there, leaning over her in the doctor’s stead, his broad face gentle and caring. “Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, speaking in Papago. “Why didn’t you send someone to tell me you were sick so I could come take care of you?”

Rita couldn’t answer. All she could do was cough and cry.

Around four, Rita shook Davy. “Wake up,” she said. “Fat Crack will come soon and I must be ready.”

Davy sat up, rubbing his eyes, “Ready for what? Where are you going?”

“To Sells. For a ceremony.”

“What kind of ceremony? Do you have to leave again? You just got here.”

“It’s important,” she said. “The ceremony’s for you, Olhoni.”

His eyes widened. “For me? Really?”

She smiled. “Really. The singers will start tonight. On the fourth night, you will be baptized. A medicine man will do it.”

“A real medicine man? What will he do?”

“Don’t ask so many questions, Little One. You will see when time comes. He will baptize you in the way of the Tohono O’ odham. Have you spoken to the priest yet?”

“Priest?” Davy returned. “Oh, the one out at San Xavier?” Rita nodded. “Mom saw him, this morning. She said he was coming to see me today, this afternoon, I guess. I don’t know why.”

Rita sighed in relief. Father John had asked, and Diana had consented. “I do,” she said. “Listen, Olhoni, you must listen very carefully. You are very old not to be baptized, not in your mother’s way and not in the Indian way, either. Most people are baptized when they are babies. This is not good, so we are going to fix it. I asked Father John to speak to your mother, because where the Anglo religion is concerned, it is better for Mil-gahn to speak to Mil-gahn. Do you understand?”

Davy nodded seriously, but Rita doubted she was making sense. “When Father John comes to see you, do whatever he asks.”

“But what will he ask?”

“He will speak to you of the Mil-gahn religion, of your mother’s religion.”

“But I thought you said a medicine man. .”

“Olhoni,” Rita said sternly. “You are a child of two worlds, a child with two mothers, are you not?” Davy nodded. “Then you can be a boy with two religions, two instead of none, isn’t it?”

Davy thought about it a moment before he nodded again.

“So tonight,” Rita continued, “whenever Fat Crack comes to get me, I will go out to Sells and be there for the start of the ceremony. I will return during the day, but each night I must go again. On the fourth night, the last night, you will come, too. Either your mother will bring you, or I will come back for you myself.”

“Will there be a feast?” he asked.

“Yes, now get up. I need your help.”

Davy scrambled off the bed. “What do you want, Nana Dahd?”

“Over there, in the bottom drawer of my dresser, there is a small basket. Bring it.”

Davy did as he was told, carrying the small, rectangular basket back to the bed. “What’s this?” he asked.

“My medicine basket.”

As he handed it to her, something rattled inside. “What’s in it, Nana Dahd? Can I see?”

With some difficulty, Rita had managed to pull herself up on the side of the bed. Now, she patted the mattress, motioning for Davy to sit beside her. “You’ll have to.” She smiled. “I can’t.”

Davy worked at prying off the tight-fitting lid. It was a testimony to Understanding Woman’s craftsmanship that even after so many years, even with the repairs Rita had made from time to time, the lid of the basket still fit snugly enough that it required effort to remove it. When it finally came loose, Davy handed the opened basket back to Rita.

One at a time, she took items out and held them up to the light. After looking at each one, she handed it to Davy. First was the awl, the owij, Rita called it. Davy knew what that was for because he had often watched her use the sharp tool to poke holes in the coiled cactus to make her baskets.

Next came a piece of pottery.

“What’s that?” Davy asked.

“See the turtle here?” Rita asked, pointing to the design etched into the broken shard. Davy nodded. “This is from one of my great-grandmother’s pots, Olhoni. When a woman dies, the people must break her pots in order to free her spirit. My grandmother kept this piece of her mother’s best pot and gave it to me.”

Next she held up the seashell. “Grandfather brought this back from his first salt-gathering expedition, and this spine of feather is one my father once gave to his mother when he was younger than you are now. The clay doll was used for healing.”

Next, Davy saw a hank of black hair. “What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s something we used to use against the Ohb, the Apaches,” Rita explained. “Something to keep our enemies away.”

At the very bottom of the basket were two last items-a piece of purple rock and something small made of metal and ribbon.

“What are those?”

“A spirit rock,” Rita answered, holding up the fragment of geode. “A rock that’s ordinary on the outside, but beautifully colored on the inside.”

“And that?” he asked.

“That is my son’s,” she said softly, fingering the frayed bit of ribbon. “Gordon’s. His Purple Heart. The army sent it to me after the war.”

“What war?”

“The Korean,” she said.

“Did your son die, too?” Davy asked.

“I guess,” she answered. “He joined the Army during World War II and stayed in. He never came home after Korea. The Army said he was missing, but he’s been missing for twenty-six years now. I don’t think he’s coming home. His wife, Gina’s mother, ran off some place. With no husband, she didn’t want a baby. I took care of Gina the same way I take care of you.”

Rita looked down at the little cache of treasure lying exposed on the bedspread. “Put them all back for me now, Davy. I want to take them with me.”

One at a time, with careful concentration, Davy put Rita’s things back in the basket then he fitted the lid on tight.

“I’ve never seen this basket before, have I?” he asked, handing it back to her.

She took it and slid it inside the top of her dress, where it rested out of sight beneath her ample breast and above her belt. “No, Olhoni. You have to be old enough before you can look at a medicine basket and show it proper respect.”

“Am I old enough now?”

“You have not yet killed your first coyote,” she said, “but you are old enough to see a medicine basket.”

By four o’clock that afternoon, Carlisle had set up camp on the rocky mountainside overlooking Diana Ladd’s home in Gates Pass. Using Myrna Louise’s cash, he had bought an AMC Matador from a used-car dealer downtown who claimed to be “ugly but honest.” So far that seemed to be true of the car as well. The layers of vinyl on the roof were peeling off and the paint was scarred, but the engine itself seemed reliable enough.

He had constructed a rough shelter of mesquite branches. The greenery not only provided some slight protection from the searing heat, it also offered cover from which he could spy on the house below without being detected. Sitting there with his high-powered binoculars trained on the house, he watched the comings and goings, counted the people he saw, and planned his offensive. During the long hours, he had to fight continually to stave off panic. In all his adventures, this was the very first time things had gone so totally wrong. He bitterly resented the fact that his own mother was the main fly in the ointment.

In taking the Valiant, Myrna Louise had complicated his life immeasurably. For one thing, she had forced him to spend some of his limited cash on a new vehicle. More seriously than that, Margie Danielson’s gun was still in the trunk of the car Myrna Louise had stolen right out from under his nose. So was Johnny Rivkin’s suitcase, for that matter-the bag containing the clothing and wigs Andrew Carlisle had planned to use for his getaway.

But far more serious than all the others put together was the loss of time. Everything had to be compressed and hurried, without opportunity for the kind of careful planning Andrew Carlisle considered to be the major prerequisite for getting away with this particular murder. Instead of having days to work out the logistics of his attack against Diana Ladd, it would have to be done in a matter of hours. He would have to retrieve the damning evidence from his mother either before or after the main event.

Carlisle knew that his mother hated staying in hotels, and she had severely limited resources besides. Like an old war-horse, she would, in all likelihood, head directly back to the barn, unless of course the cops picked her up for reckless driving somewhere along the way. The very thought of that possibility caused his heart to beat faster. Damn that woman anyway! He’d teach her to interfere.

A door opened in the yard below. He trained his binoculars on a long-legged Diana Ladd. Tanned and wearing shorts and a tank top, she emerged from the back of the house carrying a tall plastic trash can that she emptied into a rusty burning barrel at the far end of the yard. Then, using a series of matches, she set fire to the contents of the barrel and stood watching them burn.

While she tended the fire, a huge black dog gamboled up to her and dropped a tennis ball at her feet. Obligingly, the woman picked it up and threw it across the yard. The dog raced off at breakneck speed to retrieve it. They played like that for several minutes, When the woman went inside a short time later, so did the dog, still carrying the ball and leaving Andrew Carlisle sitting alone on the mountain, pondering this newest wrinkle in his well-laid plans. That dog would have to go, he thought. He worried about the gun she was wearing. Someone might have warned her. Why else would Diana Ladd be walking around with a leather holster strapped to her hip?

Of the two, the gun and the dog, the dog was really far more serious. Surprise could take away any advantage having a weapon gave her, but the dog could bark and rob him of the initiative. Andrew Carlisle thought about the problem for some time, considering the issue from every angle like a scientist dealing with some small but pesky detail that stands in the way of completing a major project. When the idea finally came to him, he acted on it at once.

Sticking to the thin cover as much as possible, he made his way down the mountainside and back to the Matador, which he had left parked at a shooting-range parking lot half a mile away. Once in the car, he headed for the nearest grocery store. Cheap hamburger was easy to find in any part of town, but liquid slug bait wasn’t. For that, he would have to go a little father afield to a top-notch nursery halfway across Tucson proper.

He hurried through traffic, careful not to speed, not calling any undue attention to the all-too-distinctive red-and-black car. A nice white Ford would have been better, but the Matador’s price was right. Besides, he didn’t expect to keep it for long.

Driving was easier than sitting on the mountain watching the house. It calmed his nerves. The more he thought about it, the more determined he was that he would be careful. Just because he’d been forced to telescope his plans didn’t mean he had to blunder around or make any more costly mistakes. Letting Myrna Louise slip away was bad enough, but if things worked out the way he hoped, he’d soon have her back in hand.

They say it happened long ago that a woman lived near the base of Baboquivari Mountain with her husband and her baby. During the day, the husband would go to work in the fields that were close to the village. After working hard in the fields, he often did not want to make the long trip home, so he would stay in the village and visit with friends. This made the woman sad, but she stayed with her baby and waited for her husband, who did not come home.

One night, when the woman was all alone, she heard Ban, Coyote, call, but this was not the usual call of Coyote, so she went out to look for him. It was very dark. At first she could not see, but finally she saw his eyes, glowing like coals in the firelight. He was a large old Coyote, but even when she came close to him, he did not move. At last she came close enough to see that he was lying beside a pool of water.

“Brother,” she said, for this was when the Tohono O’odham, the Desert People, still knew I’itoi’s language and could speak to the animals. “Large Old Coyote, why did you call to me?”

“I came to this pool to drink the water,” he told her. “This rock shifted and trapped my foot. Will you help me?”

So the woman moved the rock, but by then the Large Old Coyote’s foot was so badly injured that he still could not walk. So the woman fed him and watered him and nursed him back to health. She called him Old Lame Coyote.

In the evening, when the woman’s husband did not come home and she was very lonely, Old Lame Coyote would tell her news of the desert-where to find honey, when the rains would come again, where the best pinon nuts could be found. In this way, the lonely woman and Lame Old Coyote became good friends.

Once she got out of the car, it was all Myrna Louise could do to make it into the house and down the hall to her room. Without taking off her clothing, she fell sideways across the bed. She was no longer angry with Andrew, and she hoped by now that he was over being angry with her. It was too bad that whenever they spent any time together, they always ended up quarreling.

She was awakened by a knock on the door, and there was Lida, from next door, holding the newspaper and two pieces of mail.

“Back so soon?” Lida asked. “From the way Phil talked this morning, I thought you’d be gone for at least a week. I already told the newspaper boy to stop delivery, just like Phil said, but he had to deliver today’s and maybe tomorrow’s. Here’s your mail. I picked that up, too. No sense leaving it for someone to go snooping through.”

Myrna Louise stared blankly. Lida’s words made no sense. She had stopped the paper and was collecting the mail? What was going on? “I’m sorry, Lida,” Myrna Louise said. “I’m not feeling well.”

“No wonder you came back. I was afraid the kind of trip Phil was planning would be too much for you. Driving to the Grand Canyon isn’t my idea of a picnic.”

Grand Canyon? Myrna Louise thought. Who’s going there? It was more than Myrna Louise could stand. “You’ll have to excuse me, Lida, I’ve got to go back and lie down.”

Brandon Walker took off right at five. He drove straight to the house. He parked the Galaxy and pocketed the keys, then he drove his mother’s Olds to the hospital. Louella was sitting in the ICU waiting room. Brandon had planned to stay at the hospital for only a few minutes, but as soon as he saw his mother’s ravaged face, he knew there was trouble.

She ran to him and buried her head against his shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she sobbed. “I’ve done what the first doctor said, I’ve turned off the machine. The nurse told me I could go in now and wait, but I’m afraid to be there alone. Stay with me, Brandon, please. Stay until it’s over.”

What could he do, tell his mother he had a prior commitment? Taking Louella gently by the shoulders, he looked down into her grief-stricken face. “I have to make a phone call,” he said.

“You won’t leave me, will you?”

“No, Mom,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll be right back.”