Kiss of the Bees

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

It was a month before Mitch received a summons to the library. Noreen Kennedy, who was almost as wide as she was tall, smiled broadly at him. “You’ll never guess what I found,” she said, holding up a shabby volume Mitch instantly recognized as a much-used copy of the Nicolaïdes book.

“I got it from a used-book dealer in Phoenix who’s an old friend of mine,” she said. “We went to Library School together. Jack said he’s had it in inventory for years and he only charged me five bucks. Can you afford to buy it, or should I just go ahead and put it in the collection?”

“I’d really like to have my own copy, if you don’t mind,” Mitch said.

“I thought you would,” Noreen said, handing it over.

The book had been a godsend. When Mitch was sketching, the hours seemed to fly by. As the months went past, it was easy to recognize the increasing skill in the way he executed the exercises. While he sketched, Andrew Carlisle talked. It was as though he had an almost physical need to share his exploits with someone. Mitch Johnson became Andy’s chosen vessel.

Andy’s bragging about the tapes was how Mitch first heard about them. At first it made him uneasy that Andy had taken such pains to make a record of all he had done, but in the long run, Mitch realized that recordings were just that—mechanical reproductions. They didn’t allow for any artistic license. Painting did.

There was a locked storage unit under the bed in the Bounder. In it were two 18-by-24-inch canvases. Each oil painting was of Larry Wraike, one before and one after. The first was of a moderately handsome overfed businessman in a well-pressed suit, the kind of dully representative portrait that an overly proud wife might have commissioned in honor of some special occasion. An art critic seeing the second painting would have assumed, mistakenly, that this was an imaginative rendition of a soul in torment.

Only Mitch Johnson knew that that one, too, was fully representational. He thought of them as a matched pair—“Larry Wraike Before” and “Larry Wraike After.”

Half an hour after returning to the RV, when he held the unfinished drawing up to a mirror to examine it, the artist was pleased with the likeness. Anyone who knew Quentin Walker would have recognized him. The picture showed him sitting slump-shouldered, his elbows resting on the bar, his eyes morosely focused on the beer in the bottom of the glass in front of him. Quentin Walker Before.

Looking at the picture, though, Mitch Johnson realized something else about it—something he had never noticed before that moment—how very much the son resembled the father. That hadn’t been nearly so apparent when Quentin first showed up in Florence as it was now. He had come to prison as nothing but a punk kid. The hard years in between had matured and hardened him into what Brandon Walker had been when Mitch first knew him.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Mitch said to the picture reflected back from the mirror. “If you aren’t your daddy’s spitting image, Mr. Quentin Walker. Imagine that!”

5

They say it happened long ago that the weather grew very hot—the hottest year the Tohono O’othham had ever known. And all this happened in the hottest part of that year.

For many weeks the Indians and the animals had looked at the sky, hoping to find one cloud that would show them that Chewagi O’othham—Cloud Man—was still alive. There was not a cloud.

The water holes had been dry for a long time. The Desert People had gone far away to find water. The coyotes had followed the Indians. The wolves and foxes had gone into the mountains. All the birds had left. Even Kakaichu—Quail—who seldom leaves his own land, was forced to go away.

Gohhim Chuk—Lame Jackrabbit—had found a little shade. It was not much, just enough to keep him from burning. The tips of his ears and his tail were already burned black. And that, nawoj, is why that particular kind of jackrabbit—chuk chuhwi—is marked that same way, even today.

As Gohhim Chuk—Lame Jackrabbit—lay panting in his little bit of shade, he was wondering how he would manage the few days’ journey to a cooler place. Then he saw Nuhwi—Buzzard—flying over him.

Now it is the law of the desert to live and let live, that one should only kill in self-defense or to keep from starving. The animals forget this law sometimes when their stomachs are full and when there is plenty of water, but when the earth burns and when everyone is in danger, the law is always remembered. So Lame Jackrabbit did not run away when he saw Buzzard circling down over him. Buzzard knew the law of the desert as well as Lame Jackrabbit did.

Nuhwi flew in circles, lower and lower. When he was low enough, he called to Lame Jackrabbit. “I have seen something very odd back in the desert,” Nuhwi said. When he was high up over the part of the desert which was burned bare, he told Lame Jackrabbit, he saw on the ground a black place that seemed to be in motion. He had circled down hoping it was water. But it was only a great crowd of Ali-chu’uchum O’othham, the Little People.

As you know, nawoj, my friend, the Little People are the bees and flies and insects of all kinds. Buzzard said these Little People were swarming around something on the ground. He said Nuhwi and Gohhim Chuk must carry the news together because it might help someone. It is also the law of the desert that you must always help anyone in trouble.

Lame Jackrabbit agreed that what Buzzard had seen was very strange. Little People usually leave early when the water goes away. Lame Jackrabbit said he would carry the news.

But Gohhim Chuk, whose ears and tail were burned black, being lame, could not travel very well. So he found Coyote and told him what Nuhwi—Buzzard—had seen.

Ban—Coyote—was puzzled too. He said he would carry the message on to the Tohono O’othham—the Desert People.

It was still dark when Lani’s alarm buzzed in her ear. She turned it off quickly and then hurried into the bathroom to shower. Standing in front of the steamy mirror, she used a brush and hair dryer to style her shoulder-length hair. How long would it take, she wondered, for her hair to grow back out to the length it had been back in eighth grade, before she had cut it?

From first grade on, Lani Walker and Jessica Carpenter had been good friends. By the time they reached Maxwell Junior High, the two girls made a striking pair. Lani’s jet-black waist-length hair and bronze complexion were in sharp contrast to Jessie’s equally long white-blond hair and fair skin. Because they were always together, some of the other kids teasingly called them twins.

Their entry into eighth grade came at a time when Lani Walker needed a faithful ally. For one thing, Rita was gone. She had been dead for years, but Lani still missed her. When coping with the surprising changes in her own body or when faced with difficulties at home or in school, Lani still longed for the comfort of Nana Dahd’s patient guidance. And there were difficulties at home. In fact, the whole Walker household seemed to be in a state of constant upheaval. Things had started going bad when her older stepbrother, Quentin, had been sent to prison as a result of a fatality drunk-driving accident.

Lani had been too young to realize all that was happening when Tommy disappeared, but she had watched her grim-faced parents deal with the first Quentin crisis. She had been at the far end of the living room working on a basket the night after Quentin Walker was sentenced for the drunk-driving conviction. Brandon had come into the house, shambled over to the couch, slumped down on it, and buried his face in his hands.

“Five years,” he had groaned. “On the one hand it seems like a long time and yet it’s nothing. He killed three people, for God’s sake! How can a five-year sentence make up for that, especially when he’ll probably be out in three?”

“That’s what the law says,” Diana returned, but Brandon remained unconvinced and uncomforted.

“Judge Davis could have given him more if he had wanted to. I can’t help thinking that it’s because I’m the sheriff . . .”

“Brandon, you have to let go of that,” Diana said. “First you blame yourself for Quentin being a drunk, and now you’re taking responsibility for the judge’s sentence. Quentin did what he did and so did the judge. Neither one of those results has anything at all to do with you.”

Lani had put her basket aside and hurried over to the couch, where she snuggled up next to her father. “It’s not your fault, Daddy,” she said confidently, taking one of his hands in both of hers. “You didn’t do it.”

“See there?” Diana had smiled. “If Lani’s smart enough to see it at her age, what’s the matter with you?”

“Stubborn, maybe?” Brandon had returned with a weak smile of his own.

“Not stubborn maybe,” Diana answered. “Stubborn for sure.”

So the family had weathered that crisis in fairly good shape. The next one, when it came, was far worse. As near as Lani could tell, it all started about the time the letter arrived from a man named Andrew Carlisle, the same person Nana Dahd had always referred to as the evil Ohb. Within months, Diana was working on a book project with Andrew Carlisle while Brandon stalked in and out of the house in wounded silence.

Lani was hard-pressed to understand how the very mention of Carlisle’s name was able to cause a fight, but from a teenager’s point of view, that wasn’t all bad. The growing wedge between her parents allowed Lani Walker to play both ends against the middle. She was able to get away with things her older brother Davy never could have.

It was during the summer when Lani turned thirteen that the next scandal surfaced concerning Quentin Walker. Still imprisoned at Florence, he was the subject of a new investigation. He was suspected of being involved in a complex protection racket that had its origins inside the prison walls. By the time school started at the end of the summer, a sharp-eyed defense attorney had gotten Quentin off on a technicality, but all of Tucson was abuzz with speculation about Brandon Walker’s possible involvement with his son’s plot.

The whole mess was just surfacing in the media the week Lani Walker started eighth grade. At home the inflammatory newspaper headlines and television news broadcasts were easy to ignore. All Lani had to do was to skip reading the paper or turn off the TV. At school that strategy didn’t work.

“Your father’s a crook.” Danny Jenkins, the chief bully of Maxwell Junior High, whispered in Lani’s ear as the yellow school bus rumbled down the road. “You wait and see. Before long, he’ll end up in prison, too, just like his son.”

Lani had turned to face her tormentor. Red-haired, rednecked, and pugnacious, Danny had made Lani’s life miserable from the moment he had first shown up in Tucson two years earlier after moving there from Mobile, Alabama.

“No, he won’t!” Lani hissed furiously.

“Will, too.”

“Prove it.”

“Why should I? It says so on TV. That means it’s true, doesn’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t, s-koshwa—stupid,” she spat back at him. “It just means you’re too dumb to turn off the set.”

“Wait a minute. What did you call me?”

“Nothing,” she muttered.

She turned away, thinking that if she ignored him, that would be the end of it. Instead, he grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked it hard enough that the back of her head bounced off the top of the seat. Tears sprang to her eyes.

“Leave her alone, Danny,” Jessica Carpenter ordered. “You’re hurting her.”

“She called me a name—some shitty Indian name. I want to know what it was.”

Lani, with her head pulled tight against the back of the seat, clamped her lips shut. But just because Lani stayed quiet, didn’t mean Jessica Carpenter would.

“I’m telling,” Jessica yelled. “Driver, driver! Danny Jenkins is pulling Lani’s hair.”

The driver didn’t bother looking over her shoulder. “Knock it off, Danny,” she said. “Stop it right now or you’re walking.”

“But she called me a name,” Danny protested. “It sounded bad. Koshi something.”

“I don’t care what she called you. I said knock it off.”

Danny had let go of Lani’s hair, but that still wasn’t the end of it. “Why don’t you go back to the reservation, squaw,” he snarled after her as they stepped off the bus. “Why don’t you go back to where you belong?”

She turned on him, eyes flashing. “Why don’t you?” she demanded. “The Indians were here first.”

Nobody liked Danny Jenkins much, although over time his flailing fists had earned him a certain grudging respect. But now, the kids who overheard Lani’s retort laughed and applauded.

“You really told him,” Jessica said approvingly later on their way to class. “He’s such a jerk.”

Going home that afternoon, Lani and Jessica chose seats as far from Danny as possible, but after the bus pulled out of the parking lot, he bribed the girl sitting behind Lani to trade places. When Lani and Jessica got off the bus twenty minutes later, they found that a huge wad of bubblegum had been plastered into Lani’s hair.

They went into the bathroom at Jessica’s house. For an hour, the two of them struggled to comb out the gum, but combing didn’t work.

“It’s just getting worse,” Jessica said finally, giving up. “Let’s call your mother. Maybe she’ll know what to do.”

Lani shook her head. “Mom and Dad have enough to worry about right now. Bring me the scissors.”

“Scissors,” Jessie echoed. “What are you going to do?”

“Cut it off.”

“You can’t do that,” Jessie protested. “Your hair’s so long and pretty . . .”

“Yes, I can,” Lani told her friend determinedly. “And I will. It’s my hair.”

In the end Jessica helped wield the scissors. She cut the hair off in what was supposed to be a straight line, right at the base of Lani’s neck.

“How does it look?” Lani asked as Jessica stepped back to eye her handiwork.

Jessie made a face. “Not that good,” she admitted. “It’s still a little crooked.”

“That’s all right,” Lani said. “It’ll grow out.”

“So will mine,” Jessie said, handing Lani the scissors.

For a moment, Lani didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

“Cut mine, too. People tease us about being twins. This way, we still will be.”

“But what will your mother say?” Lani asked.

“The same thing yours does,” Jessica returned.

Fifteen minutes later, Jessie Carpenter’s hair was the same ragged length as Lani’s. Before they left the bathroom, Lani gathered up all the cuttings into a plastic trash bag. Instead of putting the bag in the garbage, however, she loaded it into her backpack along with her books.

“What are you doing?” Jessica asked.

“I’m going to take it home and use it to make a basket.”

“Really? Out of hair?”

Lani nodded. “Nana Dahd showed me once how to make horsehair baskets. This will be an o’othham wopo hashda—people-hair basket.”

Hair had been the main topic of conversation that night at both the Walker household and at the Carpenters’ just up the road.

“Whatever happened to your hair?” Brandon Walker demanded. “It looks like you got it caught in the paper cutter at school.”

“It was too long,” Lani answered quietly. “I decided to cut it off. Jessie cut hers, too.”

“You cut it yourself?”

Lani shrugged. “Jessie cut mine and I cut hers.”

Silenced by a reproving look from Diana, Brandon shook his head and let the subject drop, subsiding into a gloomy silence.

The next day was Saturday. With the enthusiastic approval of Rochelle Carpenter, Jessie’s mother, Diana collected both girls and took them to her beauty shop in town to repair the damage.

“You both look much better now,” Diana had told them on the way back home. “What I don’t understand is why, if you both wanted haircuts, you didn’t say something in the first place instead of cutting it off yourselves.”

Jessie kept quiet, waiting to see how Lani would answer. “We just decided to, that’s all,” she said.

Since Lani didn’t explain anything more about the fight on the bus, neither did Jessie. As for Diana, she was so accustomed to the vagaries of teenagers that she let the matter drop.

Several weeks later, Lani emerged from her bedroom carrying a small flat disk of a basket about the size of a silver dollar. Diana Ladd had spent thirty years on and around the reservation. Over those years she had become something of an expert on Tohono O’othham basketry and she recognized that her daughter, Rita Antone’s star pupil, was especially skilled. As soon as Diana saw this new miniature basket, she immediately recognized the quality of the workmanship in the delicate pale-yellow Papago maze set against a jet-black background.

“I didn’t know you ever made baskets like this,” Diana said, examining the piece. “Where did you get the horsehair?”

“It’s not horsehair,” Lani answered. “It’s made from Jessie’s hair and from mine. I’m making two of them, one for each of us to wear. I’m going to give Jessie hers for her birthday.”

Diana looked at her daughter. “Is that why you cut your hair, to make the baskets?”

Lani laughed and shook her head. “No,” she said, “I’m making the baskets because we cut our hair.”

“Oh,” Diana said, although she still wasn’t entirely sure what Lani meant.

It was another month before Jessie’s maze was finished as well. Each of the baskets had a tiny golden safety pin fastened to the back side. Lani strung a leather thong through each of the pins, tied her necklace around her neck, and then went to Jessica’s house carrying the other basket in a tiny white jeweler’s box she had begged from Diana.

“It’s beautiful,” Jessie said, staring down at the necklace. “What does it mean?”

“It means that we’re friends,” Lani answered. “I made the two baskets just alike so we can still be twins whenever we wear them.”

“I know that we’re friends,” Jessie giggled. “But the design. What does that mean?”

“It’s a sacred symbol,” Lani explained. “The man in the maze is I’itoi—Elder Brother. He comes from the center of the earth. The maze spreads out from the center in each of the four directions.”

In the years since then, the black-and-gold disk had become something of a talisman for Lani Walker. She called it her kushpo ho’oma—her hair charm. The original leather thong had been replaced several times over. Now when she wore it, the basket dangled from a slender gold chain Lani’s parents had given her on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday.

The people-hair charm served as a reminder that some people were good and some were bad. Lani didn’t wear it every day, only on special occasions—only when she needed to. There were times when she was nervous or worried about something—as on the day she went to the museum to apply for the job, for instance—that she made sure the necklace went with her.

Having the basket dangling around her neck seemed to give her luck. Every once in a while, she would run her fingertips across the finely woven face of the maze. Just touching the smooth texture seemed to calm her somehow. In a way Lani couldn’t quite explain, the tiny basket made her feel more secure—almost as if it summoned Nana Dahd’s spirit back and brought the old basket maker close to her once more.

Coming out of the bathroom with her hair sleek and dry, Lani looked at the clothing she had laid out on a chair the night before—the lushly flowered Western shirt with pearl-covered snaps, a fairly new pair of jeans, shiny boots, and a fawn-colored cowboy hat. Walking past the chair, Lani went to her dresser and opened her jewelry box. She smiled as the first few bars of “When You Wish Upon a Star” tinkled into the room.

Taking her treasured maze necklace from its place of honor, she fastened it around her throat.

Mr. Vega—that was the name the artist had signed in the bottom right-hand corner of the sketch, (M. Vega)—had asked her to wear something Indian. Of all the things Lani Walker owned, her o’othham wopo hashda—people-hair basket—was more purely “Indian” than anything else.

Mr. Vega might not know that, but Lani did, and that’s what counted.

David Ladd was still reeling from the effects of yet another panic attack that Saturday morning as he finished packing his things into his new Jeep Cherokee for the long road trip back to Arizona. Even though it was a bald-faced lie, he had told his grandmother, Astrid Ladd, that he wanted to get an early start that morning.

As expected, Astrid came out of the main house to watch the loading process. She stood in the driveway between the main house and the carriage house, leaning on her cane and shaking her head as he closed the rear hatch on his carefully packed load.

“All done?”

Davy nodded. “I should probably hit the road pretty soon.”

“This early?” Astrid objected. “You can’t do that. I wanted to take you to the club one last time before you go. Not only that, if you’re going to be driving all that way by yourself, it’s important for you to keep up your strength. You should start out with a decent breakfast under your belt.”

What David knew but didn’t mention to Astrid right then was that on the first day of his trip he would be driving only as far as downtown Chicago. There, just off North Michigan Avenue on Pearson, he and Candace Waverly—his girlfriend of six months’ standing—planned to spend their farewell night ensconced in a deluxe suite at the Ritz Carlton. It was a graduation gift from Candace to Davy, compliments of the Gold AmEx card Richard Waverly provided for his darling daughter.

“Sure, Grandma,” David said, accepting his grandmother’s invitation gracefully, as he had known in advance that he would. “I suppose I can stay long enough to have breakfast,” he added.

Evanston, the town, is dry. Evanston, the golf club—across the line in Skokie—is definitely wet. That was the other thing David Ladd was both smart and discreet enough not to mention. The reason Astrid Ladd wanted to have breakfast at the golf club—which she did several times a week—had less to do with the quality of the food than it did with the inevitable Bloody Mary or two that would accompany her order of eggs Benedict.

At seventy-eight, Astrid Ladd was old enough to still observe the strictures against solitary drinking. According to her long-held beliefs, only problem drinkers drank alone. Astrid and her late husband, Garrison Walther Ladd II, had been part of the fashionable drinking set their whole married life. Living in a dry town, they had done their drinking at home, in other people’s homes or in private clubs. David’s grandfather had been dead for five years now. He had hemorrhaged to death, dying as a result of esophageal varices which were most likely related to all those years of social drinking.

With her husband and best tippling buddy gone, Astrid Ladd still wanted to drink, but she was terrified of being caught in the very unladylike trap of drinking alone. As a consequence, she spent her days plotting a vigorously active social calendar that usually involved suckering some poor unsuspecting chump into driving her out to the club early for her daily ration of grog. Later on, she would prevail on somebody else to chauffeur her home.

On this hazy, and already hot summer morning in early June, David Ladd drove both ways. Leaving behind his upstairs carriage house apartment with its magnificent view of Lake Michigan, he pulled up to the side entrance of his grandmother’s oversized mansion in Astrid’s aging but equally oversized 1988 DeVille. She came out onto the porch and stood waiting, leaning heavily on her cane, while David hustled out of the car and helped her into the rider’s side.

“I can’t believe you’re done with school already,” Astrid said as he eased her into the leather seat. “Three whole years! The time just flew by, didn’t it? I’m going to miss you desperately, Davy. You don’t know how much.”

Actually, Davy did know. The drafty old house was far too big for Astrid. In fact, most of the upstairs and part of the ground floor had been closed off for years, since long before Davy appeared on the scene. Several times during his sojourn at Northwestern, David Ladd had hinted to his grandmother that maybe it was time for her to consider unloading the family home. He suggested that she might enjoy moving into a more reasonably sized condo, one that didn’t require nearly as much upkeep. Astrid had dismissed the idea out of hand, and after the second rejection Davy hadn’t mentioned it again.

“And I’m going to miss that lovely Candace,” Astrid continued. “I probably shouldn’t, but I can’t help thinking of her as a granddaughter.”

That wasn’t news. Astrid Ladd had never been one to keep her feelings or opinions to herself. Her unbridled enthusiasm for Candace Waverly—of the Oak Park Waverlys, as Astrid was fond of adding when introducing Candace and Davy to one of her upscale friends—was also well known.

“I’m going to miss her, too,” David managed.

“How much?”

“What do you mean, how much?”

“You know what I mean,” Astrid said slyly. “Are you or are you not going to give her a ring before you leave town?”

Astrid Ladd had promised her grandson a free ride at Northwestern’s law school if he wanted to go there to study. That “free ride” had included everything—tuition, books, living expenses, food, a place to stay, laundry privileges, and even a car—but it had been far from free. The cost had come in terms of three years spent living his life under Astrid Ladd’s watchful scrutiny, under her eye, ear, and thumb. Astrid’s far too conscientious mothering as well as Chicago’s uncompromising weather—summer and winter both—were the main reasons David Ladd was anxious to go back home to Arizona.

Candace Waverly was the single reason he wanted to stay in Chicago.

“No, Grandma,” he said. “No ring. We’re not ready for that yet.”

“But you told me that you’re . . . what did you call it?”

“Going out,” David supplied. “But that doesn’t mean we’re serious.”

“I wish it did,” Astrid said wistfully. “Because I’m willing to help, you know.”

Davy kept his eyes on the road. “Grandma,” he said patiently, “you already put me through law school. And you just gave me a Jeep Grand Cherokee for graduation. How much more help could you be?”

“You’d be surprised, Davy,” Astrid Ladd said determinedly. “There are one or two more things I could do.”

“Grandma, believe me, you’ve done enough.”

They turned off Sheridan Road onto Dempster. Astrid waited until they stopped for a light. “Hold out your hand,” she commanded.

Sighing, David Ladd obeyed. With a deft twist, Astrid removed a knuckle-sized diamond ring from her finger and dropped it into the palm of her grandson’s hand. “You could give Candace this,” she said.

“That’s your engagement ring, Grandma,” Davy protested. “I can’t take that.” He tried returning it to her. Astrid took it, but instead of keeping it, she leaned over and dropped it into his shirt pocket.

“Why not?” she returned. “Who else is there? You’re my grandson and my only living heir. Who else would I leave it to but you? That’s why I don’t want to sell the house, either. I plan to give it to you and Candace as a wedding present, you see.”

Her voice broke. She sounded close to tears. With a lump in his own throat, David almost drove the DeVille into a passing truck. “You can’t be serious, Grandma,” he protested.

“I’m serious as can be, Davy. If you pass the bar in Illinois and go into practice, in five years, you’ll make partner, especially with Richard Waverly’s connections. You and Candace will need an address like mine to help establish your place in the community. You’ll need to fix it up some, decorate it to suit you and all that, but that’ll be a lot less expensive than buying new.”

“Grandmother,” David Ladd said carefully, wanting to be firm, but not wanting to hurt her feelings. “I don’t want to practice law here. I want to go home, to Arizona.”

Astrid tossed her head. “I can’t imagine why,” she said crossly. “I don’t know how regular people can tolerate living in that godforsaken place. I remember when your grandfather Garrison and I went out there for your father’s memorial service—it wasn’t even a funeral, mind you. It was so ungodly hot. I don’t know when I’ve ever been more miserable.”

It would have been simple to talk about the weather. David Ladd was an expert on that. He had suffered more from both heat and cold during his three years in Illinois than he could ever remember enduring in the desert back home. Although this was only the second week of June, Chicago was already soldiering through the first real heat wave of summer.

During the previous week, afternoon daytime temperatures had hovered in the mid-nineties with humidity much the same—mid-nineties. And although the humidity was that high, the weather forecasts held no hope of rain or relief. Davy was looking forward to Arizona. At least there, the heat was honest. When the summer rainstorms came, evening temperatures could drop as much as twenty degrees in a matter of minutes. In Chicago, the sweltering, smothering heat never let up. And rain, when it came, seemed to make things worse, not better.

At that moment, however, David Ladd couldn’t afford the luxury of a digression into weather. His grandmother had issued a serious challenge, one that had to be met head-on.

“It’s a wonderful offer, Grandma,” he said at last. “It really is, and it’s a wonderful house. But I can’t see myself living there.”

“You can’t?” She sounded shocked. “Why not?”

“Because it wouldn’t ever be really mine,” David answered. “I wouldn’t feel like I had earned it.”

“That’s not it,” Astrid said sharply. “It’s because of your mother, isn’t it? Diana has always resented me, and now she’s turned you against me, too.”

“That’s not true, Grandmother. Not at all.”

David turned into the club entrance and then stopped at the front door to let Astrid out. The place wasn’t all that full, so there were plenty of parking places. Even so, by the time he made it into the dining room, Astrid had already finished her first Bloody Mary and had started on the second.

David Ladd sighed. For a farewell celebration, it was not an auspicious beginning.

Lani Walker left a note for her parents on the kitchen table. “Have fun at the banquet. Remember, Jess and I are going to that dueling bands concert at the Community Center tonight. Her parents are giving us a ride both to and from. I shouldn’t be too late, but don’t wake me for breakfast. Tomorrow’s my day off.”

The Tucson Mountains loomed in deep shadows against a rosy sky when Lani rode her bike up to Mr. Vega’s parking place. She had worried overnight that maybe he wouldn’t show up, but he was there with his easel already set up by the time she braked the mountain bike next to his station wagon.

“Nice hat,” he said. “And nice shirt, too, but you’re right. Those clothes make you look more like a cowgirl than an Indian.”

“Hardly anybody wears feathers anymore,” Lani told him. “And most of the people who go around in leather ride motorcycles.”

“Point taken,” he said, with a mock salute. “I think maybe I’ll have you sit over here on this rock with the saguaro in the background. By the way, do you want anything to drink before we get started? I brought along orange juice just in case you didn’t have time for breakfast.”

Lani took off her hat and smoothed her windblown hair. “Some orange juice would be great,” she said. She settled onto the rock and tried to get comfortable while he brought her a glass of juice.

“What do I need to do?” she asked.

“Relax and try to look natural,” he said.

“That’s a lot easier said than done,” Lani said, taking a long drink of the juice, hoping it would settle her nerves. “I don’t like having my picture taken, either. That might be part of what was wrong with the kids you tried to draw out on the reservation. When the white man first came west and tried taking pictures of Indians, people believed that the photographer would somehow end up capturing their spirits.”

“No kidding.” Mr. Vega was busily sketching with a stick of charcoal now, pausing every few moments and studying Lani’s face. “And you’re saying that some people out on the reservation still believe that’s true?”

“Probably some of them do,” she said.

Lani had no idea how much time passed. She was aware of a sudden buzzing in her head, like the angry hum of thousands of bees. Her first thought was that she was dreaming, that something had brought to mind the old story of Mualig Siakam.

“Mr. Vega,” she said, reaching out to steady herself as the mountains around her spun in a dizzying circle.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. Mr. Vega left his easel and walked toward her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel strange, like I can’t sit up, like I’m going to fall over. And hot, too.”

“Here,” he said, reaching out to her. “Let me help you.”

The last thing Lani felt was Mr. Vega’s arms closing tightly around her and lifting her off the ground. Weaker than she could ever remember feeling in her life, Lani let her head drop heavily against his chest.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she mumbled. “I’m so tired, so sleepy.”

“You’re okay,” Mr. Vega said soothingly as he carried her toward the back of the Subaru. “You close your eyes and relax now, Lani. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

He knows my name, Lani thought. How come he knows my name? Did I tell him?

She couldn’t remember telling him, but she must have. How else would he have known?

Thirsty as hell, Manny Chavez woke up under a mesquite tree. Fighting his way through an alcohol-induced fog, he sat up and tried to figure out where he was. He remembered stopping off at the trading post at Three Points sometime after dark. He had gone there with a terrible thirst and the remains of his paycheck. Now the sun was high overhead, but the thirst remained.

The rockbound walls of Baboquivari rose up out of the desert far to the south while Kitt Peak was directly at his back a few miles away across the desert. From the looks of the mountain looming over him, Manny figured he was probably somewhere off Coleman Road.

Frowning, he tried to remember how he had come to be there. He had ridden to Three Points with his son, Eddie, and some of Eddie’s friends. They had bought some beer—several cases—and some Big Red fortified wine—and then they had gone off somewhere in the desert, off the reservation rather than on it, to drink it in peace. Now that Delia, Manny’s daughter, had returned to the reservation, Manny could no longer afford to be picked up by Law and Order. Delia had come to the jail and bailed him out once, but Manny’s pride still writhed in shame at the name she had called him.

“Nawmk!” she had spat at him. “Drunkard!”

Delia had been away from the reservation for so long that he was surprised she still remembered any of the language. But that particular word was probably indelibly printed in Delia’s brain, imprinted there by Ellie, Delia’s mother.

Feeling a lump under him, Manny rolled over and was relieved to find that a pint bottle—still half-full—lingered in his hip pocket. He unscrewed the top and took a long swig, hoping that the wine would help clear his head. It didn’t, but at least it did help slake his thirst. Struggling to his feet, he walked out to a small clearing where mounds of empty cans and bottles as well as the deep impressions of tire tracks told him where Eddie’s truck had been parked.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t there anymore. For some reason, Eddie and his friends had taken off, leaving Manny alone. In the early morning cool, the desert was very still. Far to the north, he could hear the occasional whine of rubber tires on pavement. From the sounds of distant vehicles speeding by, it probably meant the highway wasn’t all that far, especially not as the crow flies. Striking out across the low-lying desert, Manny headed for Highway 86.

Once he hit that, someone was bound to pick him up and give him a ride back home to Sells. There he’d be able to find Eddie and ask him why he had taken off and left Manny there alone. It wasn’t a nice thing for a son to do to his father, even if the father did happen to be drunk.

Quentin Walker woke up fairly early that Saturday morning, hung over as hell and in a state of blind panic. What if someone had broken into his rented room overnight and stolen the money? Or worse, what if the money didn’t exist at all? What if it was a figment of his imagination—a drunken delusion of some kind? Thinking about it, though, Quentin didn’t believe he had been that drunk when Mitch Johnson showed up in the bar looking for him.

And it turned out the money was there after all, still hidden in the toe of his mud-spattered work boots, exactly where Quentin had left it before going to bed. He took the bills out and examined them again. One by one he held them up to the light from the grimy bedroom window. There was nothing about the bills that smacked of counterfeit. The vertical, copy-proof strip was there—the one feds had announced they were putting in bills to counter the counterfeiters.

Quentin’s inspection proved that the bills were real enough, but they also posed a real dilemma. Existing from paycheck to paycheck as he did, Quentin Walker had no bank account. Somebody who dressed and looked the way he did couldn’t very well walk into the nearest Wells Fargo bank branch and make a five-thousand-dollar deposit with five bills. If somebody like him turned up in a bank with that kind of money, the teller was bound to notice and remember. While he was there or after he left, people would wonder and ask questions. Pretty soon, his parole officer would be asking questions, too.

On a week-to-week basis, Quenton cashed his paychecks in the bars he frequented—usually ones in his immediate neighborhood—places he could walk to. Quentin had lost both his pickup truck and his driver’s license in the aftermath of that damned DWI accident that had landed him in the state prison.

Cashing a paycheck was one thing, but nobody in a bar was going to fork over change for a thousand-dollar bill. Besides, even if they had that kind of cash in a safe, changing the money in a bar in that marginal neighborhood was far too risky. Somebody might see what was going on and decide to relieve him of the cash the moment he stepped back outside. Quentin Walker knew too well that not all bartenders were honest.

Unable to decide how to proceed, Quentin stood for some time holding the bills in his hand. Finally he stuffed them into his pocket and then moved from the tiny bedroom of his furnished apartment to the equally tiny kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and took out the remainder of the loaf of bread that he kept there to protect it from marauding cockroaches. There were only two slices of bread left in the loaf. His first instinct was to throw them out. He had the two dried crusts in his hand and was ready to drop them in the garbage when he realized what a mistake that would be. The slices of bread themselves were the makings of the perfect hiding place.

Quentin took the bills out of his pocket and placed them between the two slices of bread, folding them small enough so no pieces of paper showed on the outside of the bread. Then he put his freshly assembled money sandwich back inside the plastic bread bag. Convinced that his hiding place was absolutely brilliant, he shoved the plastic bag into the small frost-filled freezer compartment of his refrigerator and shut the door.

Enormously pleased with himself, Quentin left the apartment, locked the door, and then walked as far as the McDonald’s on the other side of the freeway. There, he splurged on breakfast. He treated himself to coffee, orange juice, and two Egg McMuffins.

Over breakfast, Quentin’s worries about taking Mitch Johnson to the cave surfaced once again with a vengeance. If he had still owned his truck, it wouldn’t have been a problem. He could simply have driven out to the cave well in advance and checked things out for himself. If there was a problem, he could take care of it . . .

The answer came to him like a bolt out of the blue. He could buy a car. One of the major roadblocks to buying a car had always been a chronic lack of money. In order to buy a car on time—in order to get a loan—it was necessary to show proof of insurance. Without it, no bank in the universe would even let him drive an uninsured car off the lot. With his driving record, car insurance was something else Quentin Walker didn’t have and wasn’t likely to get.

But now he had the money—as much or even more than he would need—to buy a car. And if he was paying cash for something like that, the people at the dealership probably wouldn’t even blink at the thousand-dollar bills, as long as the total amount was less than the ten-thousand-dollar limit that would cause all kinds of scrutiny.

With growing excitement Quentin paged through the automotive section of an abandoned Arizona Sun he grabbed off a neighboring table. He wanted to find something that would be rugged enough to suit his needs and cheap enough to fit his budget. He circled three that seemed like possibilities—an ’87 Suzuki Samurai soft-top, a rebuilt 1980 Ford Bronco, and a ’77 GMC Suburban—all of them in the thirty-five-hundred range. That would just about do it—use up his little windfall, leave him some change, and get him some wheels all at the same time.

By the time he headed back to his apartment to shower, the day had taken on a whole new promise. He was finally going to have something to show for all his years of struggle. And if he ever ran into either of his so-called brothers again—Davy Ladd or Brian Fellows—he would tell them both to go piss up a rope.

Diana was lying awake in bed when she heard the side gate open and close as Lani mounted her bike and left for work. Glancing at the bedside clock, Diana was surprised by how early it was—just barely five-thirty. Why was Lani leaving for work so early when her volunteer shift didn’t start until seven?

Next to her, Brandon seemed to be sleeping peacefully for a change, so Diana was careful not to wake him as she crept out of bed herself. Wrapping a robe around her, she padded silently down the tiled hallway, through the living room, and into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. She found Lani’s note on the kitchen table.

Diana read it and tossed it back on the table. She didn’t remember any discussion about Lani’s going to a concert. That meant Lani had asked her father for permission rather than her mother. But then why wouldn’t she? Despite Brandon’s tough-guy act and protestations to the contrary, the girl had had him buffaloed from the very beginning.

“Being foster parents is one thing,” he had told his wife the night before Clemencia Escalante was due to arrive at their house after being released from Tucson Medical Center. “Obviously the poor little kid needs help, and I don’t mind pitching in. But just because Rita managed to bend the rules enough to have Clemencia placed with us on a foster child basis doesn’t mean it’s going to lead to a permanent adoption. It won’t, you know. It’ll never fly.”

“But Rita wants her,” Diana said.

“Regardless of what Rita wants, she’s seventy years old right this minute,” Brandon pointed out, taking refuge in what seemed to him to be obvious logic. “And considering it was neglect from an elderly grandparent that sent the poor little tyke to the hospital in the first place, nobody in the child welfare system is going to approve of Rita as an adoptive parent.”

“I wasn’t talking about Rita adopting her,” Diana said quietly. “I was talking about us.”

Brandon dropped his newspaper. “Us?” he echoed.

Diana nodded. “It’s the only way Rita will ever be able to have her.”

“But Diana,” Brandon argued. “How long do you think Rita will be around? She already has health problems. In the long run, that little girl will end up being our sole responsibility.”

“So?” Diana answered with a shrug. “Is that such an awful prospect?”

Brandon frowned. “That depends. With your work and my work, and with the three kids we already have, it seems to me that our lives are complicated enough. Why add another child into the mix?”

“We have yours, and we have mine,” Diana returned quietly. “We don’t have any that are ours—yours and mine together.”

“A toddler?” Brandon said. He shook his head, but Diana could see he was weakening. “Are you sure you could stand having one of those underfoot again?”

Diana smiled. “I think I could stand it. I can tell you that I much prefer toddlers to teenagers.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, most toddlers turn into teenagers eventually.”

“But there are a few good years before that happens.”

“A few,” Brandon conceded.

“And Rita says she’ll handle most of the child-care duties. She really wants this little girl, Brandon. It’s all she’s talked about for days—about how much she could teach her. It’s as though she wants to pour everything into Clemencia that she was never able to share with her own granddaughter.”

“Diana, replacing one child with another doesn’t work. It isn’t healthy.”

For the space of several minutes, Diana was silent. “Living your life with a hole in it isn’t healthy, either,” she said finally. “Garrison Ladd and Andrew Carlisle put that hole in Rita’s life, Brandon. Maybe you don’t feel any responsibility for Gina Antone’s death, but I do. And now I have an opportunity to do something about it.”

“And it’s something you really want to do? Something you want us to do?”

“Yes.”

Again there was a long period of silence. “I guess we’ll have to see,” he said finally. “I’ll bet it doesn’t matter one way or the other what we decide because I still don’t think the tribal court will go for it.”

“But we can try?”

“Diana,” he said, “you do whatever you want. I’ll back you either way.”

Brandon made a point to come home from work early the next afternoon when Wanda Ortiz arrived with Clemencia. Diana went to answer the door, leaving Brandon and Rita in the living room. Brandon was sitting on the couch and Rita was in her wheelchair when Wanda carried the screaming child into the room.

“She’s been crying ever since we left the hospital,” Wanda said apologetically, setting the weeping child down in the middle of the room. “Too many strangers, I guess.”

Clemencia Escalante looked awful. Most of her woefully thin body was covered with scabs from hundreds of ant bites. A few of those had become infected and were still bandaged. She stood in the middle of the room, sobbing, with fat tears dripping off her chin and falling onto the floor. She turned in a circle, looking from one unfamiliar face to another. When her eyes finally settled on Rita, she stopped.

“Ihab—here,” Rita crooned softly, crooking her finger. “Come here, little one.”

Still crying but with her attention now riveted on Rita’s kind but wrinkled face, Clemencia took a tentative step forward.

“Come here,” Rita said again.

Suddenly the room was deathly quiet. For a moment Diana thought that the child was simply pausing long enough to catch her breath and that another ear-splitting shriek would soon follow. Instead, Clemencia suddenly darted across the room, throwing herself toward Rita with so much force that the wheelchair rocked back and forth on its braked wheels. Without another sound, Clemencia clambered into Rita’s lap, burying her face in the swell of the old woman’s ample breasts. There the child settled in, clinging desperately to the folds of Rita’s dress with two tiny knotted fists.

Shaking his head in wonder, Brandon Walker looked from the now silent child to his wife. “Well,” he said with a shrug, squinting so the tears in his eyes didn’t show too much. “It looks as though I don’t stand a chance, do I?”

And he didn’t. From that moment on, the child named Clemencia Escalante who would one day be known as Dolores Lanita Walker owned Brandon Walker’s heart and soul.

6

After traveling a long way, Coyote reached a village where there was a little water. While Ban was hunting for a drink, an old Indian saw him. Old Limping Man—this Gohhim O’othham—still talked the speech all I’itoi’s people understood. So Coyote told him what Buzzard had seen in that part of the desert which was so badly burned.

Old Limping Man told the people of the village. That night the people held a council to decide what they should do. They feared that someone had been left behind in the burning desert.

In the morning, Gohhim O’othham and a young man started back over the desert with some water. They traveled only a little way after Tash—the sun—came up. Through the heat of the day they rested. When Sun went down in the west, they went on.

The first day there were kukui u’us—mesquite trees, but the trees had very few leaves, and those were very dry.

The next day it was hotter. There were no trees of any kind, only shegoi—greasewood bushes. The greasewood bushes were almost white from dryness.

The third day they found nothing but a few dry sticks of melhog—the ocotillo—and some prickly pears—nahkag.

The fourth day there seemed to be nothing left at all but rocks. And the rocks were very hot.

The two men did not drink the water which they carried. They mixed only a little of the water with their hahki—a parched roasted wheat which the Mil-gahn, the Whites, call pinole. This is the food of the Desert People when they are traveling. While they were mixing their pinole on the morning of the fourth day, Old Limping Man looked up and saw Coyote running toward them and calling for help.

The carpenter who had helped refit the Bounder had questioned why Mitch needed a complex trundle-bed/storage unit that would roll in and out of the locker under the regular bed. “It’s for my grandson,” Mitch had explained. “He goes fishing with me sometimes, and he likes to sleep in the same kind of bed he has at home.”

“Oh,” the carpenter had grunted. The man had gone ahead and made the bed to specs, tiny four-posters and all, and now, for the first time, Mitch was going to get to use it. Leaving Lani Walker asleep on the bed above for a moment, he pulled the trundle bed out of the storage space and locked the four casters in place. Then, with the bed ready and waiting, Mitch turned his attention to the girl.

She was limp but pliable under his hands. Undressing her reminded him of undressing Mikey when he’d fall asleep on his way home from shopping or eating dinner in town. One arm at a time, he took off first her shirt and then the delicate white bra. The boots were harder. He had to grip her leg and pull in one direction with one hand and then pry off the boot with the other. On her feet were a pair of white socks. Mitch was glad to see that her toenails weren’t painted. That would have spoiled it somehow in a way he never would have been able to explain. After the socks came the jeans and the chaste white panties. Only when she was completely naked, did he ease her down onto the lower bed.

Just as he had known it would be, that was a critical moment. He wanted her so badly right then that he could almost taste it. His own pants seemed ready to burst, but he knew better. That was the mistake Andy had made. Mitch Johnson was smart enough not to fall into the same trap.

“I’ve spent years wondering about it,” Mitch remembered Andy saying time and again. “I had her under control and then I lost it.”

You lost control because you fucked her, you stupid jerk, Mitch wanted to shout. How could anyone as smart as Andy be so damned dumb? Why couldn’t he see that what he had done to Diana Ladd had made her mad enough to fight back? In doing that, Andy had lost his own concentration, let down his guard, and allowed his victim to find an opening.

But if Andy wasn’t brainy enough to figure all that out for himself, if he had such a blind spot that he couldn’t see it, who was Mitch to tell him? After all, students—properly subservient students—didn’t tell their teachers which way was up, especially not if their teachers were as potentially dangerous as Andrew Philip Carlisle.

In her dream Lani was little again—four or five years old. Her mother had just dropped Nana Dahd, Davy, and Lani off in the parking lot of the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Davy was pushing Rita’s chair while Lani sat perched on Nana Dahd’s lap.

It was a chill, blustery afternoon in February, the month the Tohono O’othham call Kohmagi Mashad—the gray month. Davy, along with other Tucson-area schoolchildren, was out of school for the annual rodeo break, but as they came through the parking lot, they wheeled past several empty school buses.

“You see those buses?” Nana Dahd asked. “They’re from Turtle Wedged, the village the Mil-gahn call Sells. Most of the children from there are Tohono O’othham, just like you.”

Not accustomed to seeing that many “children like her” together in one place, Lani had observed the moving groups of schoolkids with considerable interest and curiosity. They were mostly being herded about by several Anglo teachers as well as by docents from the museum itself.

They were in the hummingbird enclosure when Nana Dahd began telling the story of the other Mualig Siakam, the abandoned woman who would eventually become Kulani O’oks—the great medicine woman of the Tohono O’othham. As Nana Dahd began telling the tale, one of the schoolchildren—a little girl only a year or two older than Lani—slipped away from the group she was with and stopped to listen. Drawn by the magic of a story told in her own language, she stood transfixed and wide-eyed beside Nana Dahd’s wheelchair as the tale unfolded. Rita had only gotten as far as the part where Coyote came crying to the two men for help when a shrill-voiced Mil-gahn teacher, her face distorted by anger, came marching back to retrieve the little girl.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the teacher shouted. Her loud voice sent the brightly colored hummingbirds scattering in all directions. “We’re supposed to leave soon,” the woman continued. “What would have happened if we had lost you and you missed the bus? How would you have gotten back home?”

Instead of turning to follow the teacher, the child reached out and took hold of Nana Dahd’s chair, firmly attaching herself to the arm of it and showing that she didn’t want to leave. “I want to hear the rest of the story,” the little girl whispered in Rita’s ear. “I want to hear about Mualig Siakam.”

“Well?” the teacher demanded impatiently. “Are you coming or not? You must keep up with the others.”

As the woman grasped the child by the shoulder, Nana Dahd stopped in mid-story and glanced up at the woman’s outraged face. “You’d better go,” she warned the little girl in Tohono O’othham.

But the little girl deftly dodged away from the teacher’s reaching hand. “Are you Nihu’uli?” she asked, taking one of Rita’s parchmentlike hands into her own small brown one. “Are you my grandmother?”

Lani never forgot the wonderfully happy smile that suffused Nana Dahd’s worn face as she pressed her other hand on top of that unknown child’s tiny one.

“Are you?” the little girl persisted just as the teacher’s fingers closed determinedly on her shoulder and pulled her away. With a vicious shake, the woman started back up the trail, dragging the resisting child after her and glaring over her shoulder at the old woman who had so inconveniently waylaid her charge.

Rita glanced from Davy’s face to Lani’s. “Heu’u—Yes,” she called after the child in Tohono O’othham. “Ni-mohsi. You are my grandchild, my daughter’s child.”

Confused, Lani frowned. “But I didn’t think you had any daughters,” she objected.

“I didn’t used to, but I do now.” Rita laughed. She gathered Lani in her arms and held her close. “Now I seem to have several.”

The dream ended. Lani tried to waken, but she was too tired, her eyelids too heavy to lift. She seemed to be in her bed, but when she tried to move her arms, they wouldn’t budge, either. And then, since there was nothing else to do, she simply allowed herself to drift back to sleep.

Breakfast took time. It was almost eleven by the time David was actually ready to leave the house. Predictably, his leave-taking was a tearful, maudlin affair. Yes, Astrid Ladd was genuinely sorry to see him go, but she was also half-lit from the three stiff drinks she had downed with breakfast.

David knew his grandmother drank too much, but he didn’t hassle her about it. Had she been as falling down drunk as some of the Indians hanging around the trading post at Three Points, David Ladd still wouldn’t have mentioned it. Over the years, Rita Antone had schooled her Olhoni in the niceties of proper behavior. Among the Tohono O’othham, young people were taught to respect their elders, not to question or criticize them. If Astrid Ladd wanted to stay smashed much of the time, that was her business, not his.

“Promise me that you’ll come back and see me,” Astrid said, with her lower lip trembling.

“Of course I will, Grandma.”

“At Christmas?”

“I don’t know.”

“Next summer then?”

“Maybe.”

Astrid shook her head hopelessly and began to cry in earnest. “See there? I’ll probably never lay eyes on you again.”

“You will, Grandma,” he promised. “Please don’t cry. I have to go.”

She was still weeping and waving from the porch when David turned left onto Sheridan and headed south. He didn’t go far—only as far as the parking lot of Calvary Cemetery, where both David Ladd’s father and grandfather were buried. He rummaged in the backseat and brought out the two small wreaths of fresh flowers he had bought two days ago and kept in the refrigerator of his apartment until that morning.

Knowing the route to the Ladd family plot, he easily threaded his way through the trackless forest of ornate headstones and mausoleums. He didn’t much like this cemetery. It was too big, too green, too gaudy, and full of huge chunks of marble and granite. Davy had grown up attending funerals on the parched earth and among the simple white wooden crosses of reservation cemeteries. The first funeral he actually remembered was Father John’s.

A Mil-gahn and a Jesuit priest, Father John was in his eighties and already retired when Davy first met him. He had been there, in the house at Gates Pass and imprisoned in the root cellar along with Rita and Davy, on the day of the battle with the evil Ohb. Father John had died a little more than a year later.

In all the hubbub of preparation for Diana Ladd’s wedding to Brandon Walker, no one had noticed how badly Father John was failing. And that was exactly as he had intended. The aged priest had agreed to perform the ceremony, and he used all his strength to ensure that nothing marred the joy of the happy young couple on their wedding day. Of all the people gathered at San Xavier for the morning ceremony, only Rita had sensed what performing the ceremony was costing the old priest in terms of physical exertion and vitality.

Honoring his silence, she too, had kept quiet about it—at least to most of the bridal party. But not to Davy.

“Watch out for Father John, Olhoni,” Nana Dahd murmured as she straightened the boy’s tie and smoothed his tuxedo in preparation to Davy’s walking his mother down the aisle. “If he looks too tired, come and get me right away.”

The admonition puzzled Davy. “Is Father John sick?”

“He’s old,” Rita answered. “He’s an old, old man.”

“Is he going to die?” Davy asked.

“We’re all going to die sometime,” she had answered.

“Even you?”

She smiled. “Even me.”

But Father John had made it through the wedding mass with flying colors. He died three days later, while Brandon and Diana Walker were still in Mazatlán on their honeymoon. The frantic barking of Davy’s dog, Bone, had awakened Davy in the middle of the night.

Keeping the dog with him for protection as he peered out through a front window, Davy saw a man climbing out of a big black car parked in the driveway. As soon as the man stepped up onto the porch, Davy recognized Father Damien, the young priest from San Xavier.

Even Davy knew that having a priest come to the house in the middle of the night could not mean good news. He hurried to the door. “What’s wrong?” he demanded through the still-closed door as the priest’s finger moved toward the button on the bell.

“I’m looking for someone named Rita Antone,” Father Damien said hesitantly, as though he wasn’t quite sure whether or not his information was correct. “Does she live here?”

“What is it, Davy?” Rita asked, materializing silently out of the darkness at the back of the house.

“It’s Father Damien,” Davy answered. “He’s looking for you.”

Nana Dahd unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door. “I’m Rita,” she said.

The priest looked relieved. “It’s Father John, Mrs. Antone,” he said apologetically. “I’m sorry to bother you at this hour of the night, but he’s very ill. He’s asking for you.”

Rita nodded. “Get dressed right away, Davy,” she said. “We must hurry.”

They left the house a few minutes later. There was never any question of Davy’s staying at the house by himself. Ever since Andrew Carlisle had burst into the house on that summer afternoon, there had been an unspoken understanding between Rita and Diana that Davy was not to be left alone. On their way to town, Rita rode in the front seat with the priest while Davy huddled in the back.

“Where is he?” Nana Dahd asked.

“He was at Saint Mary’s,” the priest answered. “In the intensive care unit, but this afternoon he made them let him out. He’s back at the rectory.”

At the mission, Rita took Davy by the hand and dragged him with her as Father Damien led the way. They found Father John sitting propped up on a mound of pillows in a small, cell-like room. He lifted one feeble hand in greeting. On the white chenille bedspread where his hand had rested lay Father John’s rosary—his losalo—with its black shiny beads and olive wood crucifix.

Davy Ladd was an Anglo—a Mil-gahn—but he had been properly raised—brought up in the Indian way. He melted quietly into the background while Rita sank down on the hard-backed chair beside the dying man’s bed. Out of sight in the shadowy far corner of the room, Davy sat cross-legged and listened to the murmured conversation, hanging on every mysterious word.

“Thank you for coming, Dancing Quail,” Father John whispered. His voice was very weak. He wheezed when he spoke. The air rustled in his throat like winter wind whispering through sun-dried grass.

“You should have called,” Rita chided gently. “I would have come sooner.”

Father John shook his head. “They wouldn’t let me. I was in intensive care. Only relatives . . .”

Rita nodded and then waited patiently, letting Father John rest awhile before he continued. “I wanted to ask your forgiveness,” he said. “Please.”

“I forgave you long ago,” she returned. “When you agreed to help us with the evil Ohb, I forgave you then.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

There was another long period of silence. Nodding, Davy almost drifted off to sleep before Father John’s voice startled him awake once more.

“Please tell me about your son,” the old man said quietly. “The one who disappeared in Korea. His name was Gordon, I believe. Was that the child? Was he my son?”

Rita shook her head. There was a small reading lamp on the table beside Father John’s bed. The dim light from that caught the two tracks of tears meandering down Rita’s broad wrinkled cheeks.

“No,” she answered. “I lost that baby in California. When I was real sick, a bad doctor took the baby from me before it was time.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from the man on the bed, followed by a fit of coughing. “A boy or a girl?” Father John asked at last when he could speak once more.

“I don’t know,” Rita said. “I never saw it. They put me to sleep. When I woke up, the baby was gone.”

“When I heard about the murder, I assumed Gina was . . .”

Again Rita shook her head. “No. Gina was my husband Gordon’s granddaughter, not yours. Gordon took care of me when I was sick in California that time when I lost the baby. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have died, too. Gordon was a good man. He was a good husband who gave me a good son.”

“Gordon Antone.” Father John said the name carefully, as if testing the feel of the words on his lips. “Someone else I must pray for.”

“Rest now,” Rita said. “Try to get some sleep.”

Instead Father John reached out, picked up the rosary, and then dropped it into the palm of Rita’s hand before closing her fingers over it.

“Keep this for me,” he urged. “I have used it to pray for you every day for all these years. I won’t need it any longer.”

Without a word, Rita slipped the beads and crucifix into her pocket. Father John drifted off to sleep then. Eventually, so did Davy. When he awakened the next morning, the room was chilly, but Davy himself was warm. Overnight someone had put a pillow under his head and had covered him with a blanket. Rita, with her chin resting on her collarbone, still sat stolidly in the chair beside Father John’s bed, dozing. She woke up a few minutes later. The priest did not.

At age seven, this was Davy Ladd’s first personal experience with death. He had thought it would be scary, but somehow it wasn’t. He knew instinctively that in the room that night he had shared something beautiful with those two people, something important, although it would be years before he finally figured out exactly what it was.

In the three years David Ladd had been in Chicago, he had come to Calvary Cemetery often in hopes of establishing some kind of connection between himself and the names etched into the marble monuments of the Ladd family plot. The worldly remains of Garrison Walther Ladd II and III lay on either side of a headstone bearing his grandmother’s name. The only difference between Astrid’s grave marker and the other two was the lack of a date.

Respectfully, David put the wreath on his grandfather’s grave first. He had come to Chicago several times to visit his grandparents, first as a youngster and later as a teenager, flying out by himself over holidays along with all those other children being shuttled between custodial and non-custodial parents during school vacations. The flight attendants who had been designated to transfer him from plane to plane or from plane to the Ladds had always assumed that Davy was the product of a cross-country divorce. And some of the time he had gone along with that fiction, making up stories about where his father lived and what he did for a living. That was easier and far more fun than telling people the truth—that his father was dead.

Finished with his grandfather’s grave, David turned to his father’s. Breakfast with Astrid had lessened the impact of the latest visitation of the recurring dream. Vivid and disturbing, it had come to him every night for over a week now. Each time it came, he awakened the moment he saw his sister’s lifeless body in the middle of the kitchen floor. And when his eyes opened, his body would launch off, sweating and trembling, into yet another panic attack.

Night after night, the two events came together like a pair of evil twins—first the dream and then the panic attack. One followed the other as inevitably as night follows day. Davy went to bed at night almost as sick with dread at what was bound to come as he would be later when it did. As the days and virtually sleepless nights went by, anticipating the attacks became almost as shattering as the attacks themselves.

Up to that moment in the cemetery, the attacks themselves had always happened at night, in the privacy of his own room and always preceded by the dream. But right then, kneeling beside the marker bearing the name of Garrison Walther Ladd III, David felt his pulse begin to quicken. Moments later, his heart was hammering in his chest, knocking his ribs so hard that he could barely breathe. His hands began to tingle. He felt dizzy.

Not trusting his ability to remain upright, David sank down on the ground next to his father’s headstone and leaned against it for support. He tried to pray. As a child, the old priest, Father John, had taught him about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And Rita had taught him about I’itoi.

But right then, in Davy’s hour of need, there in the hot, still air of that Chicago cemetery, all he could hear through the trees was the sound of traffic buzzing by on Lake Shore Drive. From where Davy sat, both Heavenly Father and Elder Brother seemed impossibly remote.

David had no idea how long the attack lasted. Eventually his breathing steadied and his heartbeat returned to normal. Weak and queasy, he returned to himself bathed in his own rank sweat.

Nothing to worry about, the doctor had said after running all those tests weeks before. After learning that Davy was about to embark on a cross-country drive, the emergency room physician had declined to prescribe any sedatives or tranquilizers that might have caused drowsiness.

“If you’re still having difficulties when you get back home to Arizona,” the doctor had told him, “you should consult with your family physician.”

If I get home, David Ladd thought. What if one of these spells came over him in the middle of a freeway somewhere when he was driving by himself? What would happen then?

David staggered to his feet. Still somewhat unsteady, he stood for some time, staring down at his father’s grave. This was one of the reasons he had come to Evanston in the first place, one of the reasons he had accepted his grandmother’s generous offer and applied to Northwestern. He had hoped that by coming here, he might somehow come to understand his father’s side of the story. After all, he had grown up and spent most of his life hearing his mother’s version of those long-ago events.

But the laudatory tales about Davy’s father that his grandmother told him were no help. Davy sensed that there was no more truth in them than there had been in his own mother’s clipped, bare-bones answers in the face of her son’s never-ending curiosity. And as for visiting the grave itself? That had told him less than nothing.

Shaking his head, David Ladd turned and walked away, wondering what to do with the solitary hours before the three-o’clock check-in time at the hotel. But by the time he reached the car, he had an answer.

Almost without thinking, he drove to the Field Museum of Natural History. There he wandered slowly through galleries of lighted displays that told the stories, one after another, of vanished and vanquished Native American cultures.

David Ladd blended into the throngs of tourists that surged like herds of grazing buffalo through the museum’s long hallways. Most were Anglos of one kind or another, with their loud voices and bulging bellies. For most the displays were clearly something foreign and outside their own experience. A few of the visitors were Indian. They came to the displays with a sense of understanding and a reverence that here, at least, their past still existed.

And standing in the midst of all those different people, David Ladd felt doubly alone. Cheated, almost. He was a blond-haired, blue-eyed outsider. He felt no connection, no sense of brotherhood, with the Mil-gahn tourists with their Bermuda-shorts-clad legs and their ill-behaved children. But here in this place, he felt no connection to The People—to the Indians—either.

Then, almost as though she were standing beside him, he heard Rita Antone’s voice once more, speaking to him out of the distant past. She sat at a kitchen table with the fragrant, newly dried bear grass and yucca laid out on the table. There was a fistful of grass in one hand. Her awl—her owij—was poised but still in her other hand. The raw materials for Rita’s next basket lay arrayed on the table, but the old woman’s real workbench was forever her ample, apron-covered lap.

“The center must be very strong, Olhoni,” she had said, “or the basket will be no good.”

Whenever Rita had started a basket, she always said something like that. The words reminded him of the words that usually accompanied taking the Holy Sacrament. The words were almost always the same, and yet they were always different.

With tears misting his eyes, David Ladd fled the museum. I have lost the center of my basket, he thought despairingly. I don’t know who I am.

With Lani Walker there in the Bounder with him, Mitch tried to keep Andy’s failure clearly at the forefront of his mind. Much as he wanted her, much as he physically ached to use that slender body, he was equally determined to deny himself the pleasure. Andrew Carlisle had allowed his base nature to overwhelm his intellect. Mitch Johnson had no intention of making the same mistake.

Watching Lani sleeping peacefully on the bed, Mitch’s physical need for her was so great that he forced himself to turn his back on her and walk away. That was the only reasonable thing to do—put some distance between himself and what he knew to be an invitation to disaster.

For a time he busied himself with his art materials, setting up his easel and getting out his paper. He waited until he was once more fully under control before he turned to look at her once again, before he allowed himself to gaze down at her. Her long dark lashes rested softly on bronze cheeks. It surprised him to notice, for the first time, that here and there on the bronze skin of her body were occasional light spots, reverse freckles, almost. He wondered vaguely what might have caused those blemishes, but he didn’t worry about them long. It was time to tie her, to use the four matching, richly colored teal-and-burgundy scarves he had bought for that precise purpose.

He had bought them in four separate stores, paying for them in cash. “It’s for my mother’s birthday,” he had told the first saleslady, who waited on him at Park Mall. “For my Aunt Gertrude’s eightieth,” he told the second one in a store at El Con. “For my next-door neighbor,” he explained, smiling at the third salesclerk in the first store in Tucson Mall. “She takes care of my two dogs when I’m out of town.” By the fourth store Mitch was running out of imagination. It was back to his mother’s birthday.

As an artist, Mitch Johnson possibly could have done without the scarves altogether and painted them in later from either memory or imagination. But when it came to this particular picture, Mitch Johnson was a perfectionist. He wanted to do it right. He took care to arrange the scarves properly, so that it was clear they were restraints, holding the girl against her will, but beautiful restraints nonetheless. He arranged the loose ends of the scarves in drapes and folds around her as an opulent counterpoint to the naked simplicity of the girl’s body. Contrast, of course, is everything.

He also spent a considerable period of time creating just the right angle and perspective. For that he finally settled on three pillows. Two he used to raise her head and neck enough so that both her face and that funny necklace at the base of her throat were clearly visible. The third pillow went under her buttocks, raising her hips high enough so that what lay between her spread legs was fully visible. To Mitch, anyway.

That was the whole tantalizing wonder of this particular pose. Had Mitch been an ancient Greek sculptor, he would have opted for the use of fig leaves, perhaps. The painters of the Renaissance had gone in for the strategic drape of robes to conceal what shouldn’t be seen. Mitch was a purist. He wanted to use the girl’s own body to create the desired illusion. Nicolaïdes had taught him to look for edges and to draw those.

Afraid the shock of cold water might awaken her, he dampened his fingers with warm water from the tap. Then he petted the wild tangle of soft black pubic hair, teasing and coaxing it into place. He used the hair itself to create a concealing veil until it curved around and over what he wanted to hide from any other casual viewers if not from himself. No one else would be able to see under it, but any person viewing the picture would know unerringly that the artist himself had drunk his fill.

His hand still reeked with the heady, musky smell of her when, weak-kneed, he returned to his easel and began to work on the quick gesture sketch, using broad lines and circles to capture the general form of her.

As the charcoal scraped comfortingly across the paper, he felt himself settling down once more. As he worked, the chorus of an old Sunday-school hymn came unbidden to his mind. “Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin.” Smiling to himself, he sang as many of the words as he was able to remember.

The strange combination of drawing and humming didn’t amount to quite the same thing as taking a cold shower, but the physical effect on his body was much the same. At least his damned persistent hard-on went away, enough so that he was able to concentrate on what he was doing.

David Ladd left the Field Museum and went directly to the Ritz. Carrying one small suitcase, he left the car with the attendant and walked inside. He figured he was still too early to check in, but Candace had told him to stop by the concierge desk to check for a message whenever he arrived.

“Why, Mr. Ladd,” the concierge said with a welcoming smile. “Welcome to the Ritz. I’m so glad you could join us today. Your wife left a note here for you and asked that I give it to you as soon as you arrived.”

His wife? Blushing furiously, David took the note and retreated to a chair at the far end of the lobby before he tore open the envelope. Inside were a note and a room key.

David,

I had some last-minute shopping to do. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Our room is 1712. See you there.

Love,

Candace

So he already was checked in. Pocketing the note and palming the key, David headed upstairs. Leave it to Candace to figure a way around those 3 P.M. check-in rules, he thought with a rueful grin, but he was supremely grateful. Not only was he emotionally drained by his dealings with Astrid Garrison and his trip to the museum, he was rummy from days of almost no sleep.

Upon entering the room, he was surprised to see four suitcases, two arranged on the bed as well as one on each of the room’s two folding metal luggage racks. Four suitcases did seem a little much for an overnight at the Ritz, especially since the bathroom was already fully stocked with robes, hair dryer, and a selection of toiletries. Evidently the female side of the Oak Park Waverlys didn’t believe in traveling light.

Hoping he had time for a quick nap, he closed the black-out curtains and then undressed. Before stripping off his shirt, he discovered Astrid’s diamond engagement ring still lurking in his pocket. He had meant to give the ring back to his grandmother before he left, but he had forgotten.

Shaking his head, he put the ring on the nightstand along with his watch. He thought about leaving a wake-up call so he could be showered and dressed before Candace’s arrival. In the end he decided to sleep until he woke up or Candace arrived, whichever came first. Lying down on the bed, he tried to relax, but that wasn’t easy. He was smitten by an attack of conscience.

If you don’t want to marry her, he thought, then what the hell are you doing here?

Hopefully screwing your brains out was the short answer, he decided, grinning ruefully up at the darkened ceiling overhead. But for that—for plain old getting your rocks off—most any place would do, from Motel 6 up. The Ritz had been Candace’s idea. And even if Candace had sold him on the proposition that this special night on the town was both a graduation and a going-away gift from her, he had the distinct feeling that Candace’s daddy’s law firm was actually picking up the tab.

Despite Astrid Ladd’s none-too-subtle lobbying, things weren’t all sweetness and light between David Garrison Ladd and Candace Eugenia Waverly.

They had met the previous December, when they had both been participants in what they still laughingly referred to as the wedding from hell. Candace had been maid of honor and David best man at a pre-Christmas wedding that had fallen victim to an unseasonal but vicious mid-December blizzard. The storm had stalled prospective guests—including most of the groom’s family—at airports all over the country while O’Hare and Midway airports were shut down for four solid hours.

As “best” people, Candace and David had both had their hands full. Candace had been stuck baby-sitting a somewhat hysterical bride and her mostly hysterical mother while David was closeted with an exceedingly nervous groom who had been close to bagging the whole idea well before the snow started falling. By the time they finally made it through the wedding, the maid of honor and best man were comrades-in-arms.

From that beginning, it was a simple step for Candace to invite her new friend to her parents’ traditional Christmas party the following week—the night before David Ladd was due to fly home to spend his winter vacation with his family in Tucson.

The prospect of meeting the Oak Park Waverlys—as Astrid Ladd soon took to calling them—wasn’t nearly as daunting to David Ladd as it would have been had he gone straight there from his mother’s and stepfather’s place in Gates Pass. Following Candace’s directions through the still ice-rutted streets, he arrived at a house that was much the same size as his grandmother’s lakeshore mansion, only this one was alive with lights visible in every window of all three floors.

The gateposts at the end of a long curving drive glowed a holiday welcome with hundreds of white Christmas lights. The house itself was outlined with thousands more. Handing his Jeep off to a valet-parking attendant, David rang the doorbell. One glimpse of the tux-clad butler who opened the door and relieved arriving guests of their coats made David more than happy that he’d gone to the trouble of renting a tuxedo himself.

For fifteen or twenty interminable minutes he was there on his own, trying to make acceptable small talk with people he had never met and most likely would never see again. Just when he was ready to bolt back the way he had come, Candace appeared in a slick, low-cut red dress with a slit that came halfway up her thigh.

“I see somebody put a drink in your hand,” she said. “Have you tried the buffet?”

“I was waiting for you. Are you hungry?”

Candace made a face. “Not really. Mother uses the same caterer every year, although I’ve never quite figured out why. The food reminds me of those breakfast sausages they serve at hotels in England. They look great but they taste like they’re made of sawdust.”

David couldn’t help laughing at that. Encouraged by an appreciative audience, Candace continued. “My two older sisters and I learned early on to load up a plate and carry it around awhile just to keep peace in the family. I suggest you do the same, but you don’t have to eat it. Later on, we’ll go up to my room and order a pizza.”

“Order a pizza?” David echoed.

“Sure. I have my own entrance. The delivery people know to bring it there instead of to the front door. My sisters and I have been doing it for years.”

“Your parents have never figured it out?”

Candace grinned at him conspiratorially from behind her champagne flute. “Never. Come on. I’ll introduce you to my folks, but don’t breathe a word about the pizza. If you do, I won’t let you have any.”

It turned out there was a whole lot more waiting for David Ladd in Candace Waverly’s upstairs room than a thin-crust pepperoni and cheese. For one thing, it wasn’t a room at all, but a three-room suite, complete with bedroom, sitting room, and Jacuzzi-equipped bath. And Candace Waverly wasn’t particularly interested in staying in the sitting room.

David Ladd had taken his time with school, changing majors several times before finally finishing his BA and deciding on law school. At twenty-seven, he certainly wasn’t a virgin, but he hadn’t encountered anyone like Candace Eugenia Waverly, either. Slipping out of her bright red dress along the way, she led him into her bedroom. Davy was still nervously fumbling with his cuff links when a naked Candace stepped forward to help him and to drag him, unprotesting, into her bed. Two frenetic hours later, she sat up in bed, propped herself upright on a mound of pillows, and matter-of-factly reached out for the phone to order a pizza. By then David Ladd had experienced several exotic sexual activities he had previously only imagined. Or read about.

Candace might look delicate and ladylike, but in bed she was anything but, and in the six months since, David Ladd had found himself deeply in lust if not in love. He and Candace spent a good deal of time together—as much as possible, considering his course load. And because of Astrid Garrison’s prying eyes, most of their fun and games had happened in Candace’s chaste-appearing bedroom.

The sex had been great. The problem was, David Ladd still didn’t feel as though he was remotely in love. During the last few weeks, tension had been building as Candace Waverly dug in her heels over David’s stated plan of returning to Tucson to go to work.

“I don’t see why you’re taking this internship out on an Indian reservation,” she had pouted one day early in May as the two of them sat sipping late-evening lattés in downtown Evanston’s Starbucks.

With an important paper due in two days, this wasn’t exactly the time for Davy to work his way around such a complex issue. Candace already knew that David’s sixteen-year-old sister was adopted and that she was a full-blooded Native American. School-trained as a disciple of cultural diversity, Candace hadn’t batted an eyelash when David had given her that bit of information, but she had cautioned him that he maybe ought not mention it to her folks. Like the secret Christmas-party pizza, as well as some of the other things that went on in Candace’s upstairs bedroom—this was something Candace’s mother might be better off not knowing, and it made David Ladd wonder if the elder Waverlys of Oak Park might be somewhat bigoted when it came to dealing with Indians.

Maybe Candace was, too, for that matter, he thought as he grappled with how to make her understand exactly what the internship meant to him. Should he try to tell her about Nana Dahd? By working on the reservation he hoped, in some small way, to repay Rita Antone for all she had done for him, all she had meant to him, but the words to explain that refused to bubble to the surface.

“I’m smart,” he said at last, knowing it sounded limp and probably stupid as well. “I speak the language, and I think I can make a contribution.”

“You mean make a contribution like people do in the Peace Corps?”

It wasn’t at all like the Peace Corps, but David didn’t know where to begin explaining that, either. Peace Corps volunteers, armed with the very best intentions, went off and spent a few years of their lives ministering to the unfortunate before returning to their real homes, jobs, and lives. As far as David Ladd was concerned, the people on the Tohono O’othham, with all their history and tradition, were in his blood. They were a part of him. He had learned about them at Rita’s knee and in the teachings of both Looks At Nothing and Fat Crack. They were his real life far more than the years of exile in Evanston had ever been.

“But what kind of a job would the internship lead to?” Candace had continued. “Is there any kind of career path? And do they pay anything?”

At twenty-five, Candace was two years younger than David. She had a good job in Human Resources at her father’s firm—a job that probably paid far better than anything she could have found on her own with nothing more than a BS in psychology. Out of school for four years herself, she talked about someday returning to school for a graduate degree. In the meantime, she still lived at home and drove the bright red Integra her parents had given her for Christmas to replace the Ford Mustang convertible that had been her college-graduation present. The kind of grinding poverty that existed on the Tohono O’othham was so far outside the realm of Candace Waverly’s sheltered Oak Park existence that there was no basis for common ground. Had David Ladd attempted to explain it to her, she probably still wouldn’t have understood.

“The tribe doesn’t pay much,” David allowed with a short laugh. “And I doubt there’s much room for advancement.”

“But would you make enough to start a family?” she asked.

That sobered him instantly. “Probably not,” he said.

“Well then,” Candace continued in a tone that sounded as though there was no further basis for discussion. “Daddy will be glad to give you a job. I know because I already asked him. He’s always looking for smart young men.”

“But, Candace,” David had objected. “I don’t want to work in Chicago. I want to go home—to Tucson.”

“But what’s there?” she had shot back at him. “And what would I do for a job? Nobody knows me there.”

Behind them, the espresso machine had hissed a noisy cloud of steam into the air. The sound reminded David Ladd of quicksand pulling someone under. No doubt he should have made a clean break of it right then, but the paper was due and finals were bearing down on him and he didn’t want to provoke a confrontation.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. “I’ll think it over and let you know.”

“You goddamned gutless wonder,” he berated himself now, lying there on the bed in the darkened room at the Ritz Carlton.

Honesty’s the best policy.

Honesty’s the best policy. Growing up, those were words he’d heard early and often from his stepfather. He had been only seven the first time he had heard them spoken, but he remembered the incident as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.

“That old lady’s not just an Indian,” his stepbrother had shouted. “She’s a witch.”

From the very beginning, Quentin Walker was always able to get Davy’s goat, and there was nothing that drove the younger boy wild faster than someone saying bad things about Rita Antone.

“She is not.”

“Is to. And I can prove it.”

“How?”

“Look.”

Quentin pulled something black out of his pocket. As soon as Davy saw it, he recognized the scrap of black hair. He knew what it was and where it had come from.

In the bottom drawer of the dresser in her room, Nana Dahd kept her precious medicine basket. Rita had told Davy the story a hundred times about how her grandmother, Understanding Woman, had given Rita the basket to take with her when the tribal policeman carted her off to boarding school. Back then she had been a little girl named Dancing Quail. Davy had wept at the part of the story where, on the terrifying train trip between Tucson and Phoenix, clinging to the roof of the moving train, Dancing Quail had lost the precious spirit rock, a geode, that Understanding Woman had given her granddaughter to protect her on the journey. Not only was the rock lost, but later, once she arrived in Phoenix, the basket itself had been confiscated by school matrons who had a ready market for such profitable artifacts. Years later, when Rita was sent from the reservation in disgrace, Oks Amichuda once again gave Rita a basket to take with her. This one, although far inferior to the first, nonetheless contained yet another spirit rock, a child’s fist-sized chunk from that same geode.

Years later, working as a domestic in a Mil-gahn house in Phoenix, Rita had stumbled across that original medicine basket, complete with all its contents, sitting in a glass display case. On the night she fled the house for faraway California, Rita had exchanged the one basket for the other.

Having heard the stories countless times, David recognized at once that the hank of human hair in Quentin’s hand was one of Rita’s medicine-basket treasures—her great-grandfather’s scalp bundle.

“You shouldn’t have that. Nobody’s supposed to touch it,” Davy said. “Put it back.”

“What’s she going to do to me if I touch it?” Quentin taunted. “Turn me into a toad?”

“I said put it back.”

“Who’s gonna make me?”

Quentin was four years older than Davy and almost twice as big, but Davy flew at him with such ferocity that the older boy was caught off-guard. He fell down, cracking his head on the rock wall behind him while Davy pummeled his unprotected face with flailing fists. Once Quentin recovered from the initial shock, the fight was short but brutal. Davy took the brunt of the physical damage. When the battle was over, his nose was bloody, his shirt had been torn to pieces, and one bottom tooth dangled by a thread.

Brandon had arrived in time to put an end to the hostilities. He lined all four boys up in order of size. His own sons, Quentin and Tommy, were at the head of the line, followed by Davy and then by Brian Fellows, Quentin and Tommy’s half-brother.

Janie, Brandon Walker’s first wife, had been three months pregnant with Brian when she divorced Brandon in order to marry Don Fellows, Brian’s father. Janie’s second marriage didn’t last any longer than her first one had. Don Fellows disappeared into the woodwork when Brian was three. By the time Brian was four, he would come and stand forlornly on the porch, watching whenever Brandon came by to take his own sons for an outing.

Over time, that lost, affection-starved look had worn down Brandon Walker’s resistance. By the time Davy appeared on the scene, Brian came along with Quentin and Tommy as often as not. Brian was a few months younger than Davy. He was small for his age and still prone to wetting the bed. Quentin and Tommy jeeringly called him “the baby.” Brandon Walker often referred to him as “the little guy.”

“All right now,” Brandon Walker growled on the day of the fight over the medicine basket. “Tell me what happened, and remember, honesty’s the best policy. I want the truth.”

“I was trying to help him learn to ride my bike,” Quentin said. “The big one, not the one with training wheels. He fell, and so did I. The bike landed on top of me.”

The lie came so easily to Quentin’s lips that the two younger boys, Brian and Davy, looked at one another in shocked amazement. Meanwhile Brandon moved down the line to his second son. “Is that right, Tommy? Remember, what I want from you is the truth.”

Tommy nodded. “Yup,” he said. “That’s what happened.”

Next Brandon leveled his gaze on Davy. “What do you have to say, young man?”

Davy shrugged his scraped shoulder and hung his head. “Nothing,” he said.

“And you, Brian?”

“Nothing, too,” he said.

Convinced he still didn’t have a straight answer but unable to crack the four boys’ united front, Brandon turned back to Davy. “Do me a favor, Davy. Stick with the training wheels for a while, son. Thank God that’s only a baby tooth. If it were a permanent one, your mother would kill us both. Go see Rita. She’ll help clean you up.”

The last thing Davy wanted to do was see Rita right then. Part of him wanted to tell her what had happened. But he didn’t know what to say. For a week he kept quiet, watching Nana Dahd’s broad features for any sign that she had discovered her loss.

The next weekend, when the three boys again came to visit, Brandon took the two older boys to see Rocky, a movie that was deemed too old for Brian and Davy.

As soon as the two younger boys were left alone in Davy’s room, Brian Fellows unzipped his knapsack. “Look,” he whispered, emptying the contents of his bag out onto the bottom bunk.

On top of the heap were the extra clothes Brian always had to bring along in case he had an accident. But underneath the clothing, scattered on the bedspread, lay a collection of items most people would have dismissed as little-boy junk—the denuded spine of a feather; a shard of pottery with the faint figure of a turtle etched into the red clay; a chunk of rock, gray on one side and covered with lavender crystals on the other; the hank of long black hair; Rita’s owij—her basket-making awl; Rita’s lost son’s Purple Heart. Last of all, Davy spied Father John’s losalo—the string of rosary beads—that the old man had given Rita the night he died.

For a moment Davy gazed in wondering, hushed silence at the medicine basket’s missing treasures. “Where did you get them?” he asked finally.

“I stole them,” Brian said casually. “Quentin had them hidden in his sock drawer, and I stole them back.”

“When he finds out, he’ll kill you.”

“No, he won’t,” Brian answered. “He’ll only beat me up. He does that all the time. It’s no big deal.”

For the first time in his life, Davy Ladd realized he had a friend, a real one—a friend whose name wasn’t Rita.

“But Tommy and Quentin are so mean,” Davy said. “Aren’t you afraid of them?”

“Not really,” Brian replied with a cheerful shrug. “They’re so afraid of getting caught, they never hurt me enough so it shows.”

7

Coyote had listened to the council in the village before Old Limping Man and Young Man started on their journey across the desert. Ban had decided that anything important enough to take men back into the burning lands was worth examining. When Coyote’s stomach is full of food and water, his curiosity is very active. So Ban had gone ahead of the two men to find out for himself what it was that Buzzard had seen and Jackrabbit had told him about.

But now in that burning desert, Coyote was running for his life. The Ali-chu’uchum O’othham—the Little People—were after him—the bees, flies, ants, wasps, and insects of all kinds. Gohhim O’othham—Old Limping Man—could still speak the language of I’itoi which all the animals and all the Little People understand. He called out to the Pa-nahl—the Bees—and to the Wihpsh—the Wasps—to ask what was the trouble.

The Little People were very angry, but they stopped. They told Gohhim O’othham that the two men must go with them and that they must keep Coyote away. But there was no danger from Coyote anymore. Ban was too busy rubbing his sore nose in the dirt.

And so the two men—Old Limping Man and Young Man—followed Ali-chu’uchum—the Little People. After a time the men saw a strange cloud made up of the flying ones—the bees and flies and wasps. They looked down and saw the ground covered with moving specks. And the moving specks were ants of all kinds—big and little, brown and black.

The word of the coming of the men became known. The cloud of Little People spread out and parted. Then the men saw a woman lying with her eyes closed. The woman was being kissed by the wings of hundreds of bees. They were fanning her and keeping her cool, and all the while Pa-nahl—the Bees—were singing very softly.

At first the men were afraid. They knew that while the Little People are very, very wise, they are also very quick-tempered. But Old Man listened to the song the bees were singing. The song was a prayer for help for this woman who was their friend. So the two men went to the woman and gave her water.

The woman moved and spoke, but the men could not understand what she said. She did not open her eyes. They gave her pinole and water. Then they raised her up and began the return trip to the distant village.

Driving to his appointment, Mitch Johnson couldn’t help gloating. All morning long he had made a conscious effort not to rush, even though the clock had been ticking inevitably toward his scheduled appointment with Diana Ladd Walker. Gradually—vaguely, at first—the girl’s form had taken shape on the paper. The perspective was masterful—graphic without being anatomical. He wanted her to be sexy in this one. The dissection part, the one that peeled away the outside layers—would come later.

For Mitch, one of the most difficult aspects of the drawing came when it was time to detail the girl’s softly rising and falling chest. With Lani sound asleep, the virginal breasts had gone so soft and flaccid they were almost flat. The only solution for that was for Mitch to touch them and caress the nipples until they stood at attention. The difficulty and thrill of that was bringing the body to wakeful attention without necessarily disturbing the girl. If she had awakened and started struggling and fighting right then, it might have done irreparable harm to the pose. It would have spoiled the whole mood, destroyed the magic exhilaration of creation.

But of course, the full force of the drug was still upon her, and she hadn’t awakened. Lying there still as death, she had stirred only slightly beneath his touch, an unconscious half-smile on her lips as though, even in sleep, Mitch’s tender caress on her body somehow pleasured her. That almost drove him crazy. Breathing hard, Mitch once again retreated to the safety of his easel, forcing himself to regard her inviting body as an artistic challenge, as an enticing morsel to be avoided at all costs rather than as defenseless territory begging to be conquered and exploited.

And the fact that he could do that—put her on paper without giving in to the raging river of temptation—left him with a feeling of power and incredible superiority. Touching her body without immediately tearing into it was something Andy Carlisle never could have done. Mitch had the pleasure of knowing right then that he was a better man than his teacher. Godlike, Andy had tried to mold Mitch in his own image, but in this instance the created had moved beyond his creator.

After the breasts it had been time to do the face and hair. If anything, he wished the girl’s hair had been a little longer than it was. That way the dark edge of the hair would have concealed some of the breasts rather than simply falling across the shoulders. But that couldn’t be helped. This was to be a study of the actual girl, and so he copied the line of hair exactly as it presented itself.

The final item on his morning’s agenda had been the necklace. Mitch had been around Tucson long enough to know that the maze design on her necklace had something to do with Indians, but he wasn’t exactly sure what. He took great pains to see that he got it right, that he copied it exactly. You never could tell when . . .

As soon as the thought came to mind, it had left him shivering. That was a way to top Andy’s tapes, something Andy never would have conceived of. Andy had talked a good game—murder as art—but he wouldn’t have had the skill to execute such a breathtaking idea.

Mitch would re-create the design on the flat plane of the girl’s belly, carving it into her flesh so that slowly oozing blood would be the actual ink. That meant Mitch would have to do that final act while the girl was still alive—maybe drugged again so she wouldn’t move and mess things up. One question in Mitch’s mind was whether or not, working free-hand with an X-Acto knife, he would be able to get the nested concentric circles right. The other difficulty would be placement. The most artistically unifying concept would be to use that fine little belly button of hers as the head of the man in the maze.

That would see Andy’s goddamned tapes and raise him one better.

It was on that note that he walked into the hotel to meet with Lani Walker’s mother.

With her hair, nails, and makeup all professionally attended to, Diana Ladd Walker headed for La Paloma and the scheduled Monty Lazarus interview. His wasn’t a byline she recognized, but that didn’t mean anything. The magazines he wrote for were name brand, and Megan had been delighted to schedule an interview with him.

As Diana wended her way through Tucson’s relatively light summertime traffic, she smiled at the idea that she was going to a fashionable hotel to be interviewed by a reporter with a national audience. As a general rule, interviews were something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Still, considering Diana’s humble origins, the very fact that she was being interviewed at all had to count as its own peculiar miracle.

Diana Cooper Ladd Walker had spent her early life in the clean but shabby caretaker’s quarters at the garbage dump back in Joseph, Oregon. Diana’s mother had scrubbed and fussed and worked to keep the place up, but it had remained indelibly “the old Stevens place”—a run-down one-house slum that was theirs to use only as long as Max Cooper managed to hang on to his unenviable position as Joseph’s garbageman.

The job was anything but glamorous. Other than the house, it paid little more than a pittance, but it kept a roof over their heads. With a marginally motivated and often drunk husband, it was the best Iona Dade Cooper could hope for. Max kept both the job and the house for years—far longer than anyone expected—but only because Iona carried more than her share of the load. Max owned the official title of garbageman. Iona did most of the work—his and hers both.

As a child Diana hadn’t been blessed with many friends. The few she did have usually found dozens of excuses to explain why they could never come play at her house. For years Diana had searched for ways to make her house more acceptable, more welcoming.

Once when she was ten or so, she had sat at the kitchen table after dinner, poring through the exotic pages of one of the several Sears and Roebuck catalogs that came to the house each year with her mother’s name on them.

“Look at these,” Diana had said, pointing to a set of sheer, frilly pink curtains. The curtains could be purchased as part of a set along with a matching bedspread. “Wouldn’t those look nice in my bedroom?”

Diana’s question had been intended for her mother’s ears, but at that precise moment, Iona had stepped across the kitchen to the pantry where she was just taking off her apron. Before she could finish hanging up her apron and return to the table, Max Cooper had banged down his beer bottle and then leaned toward Diana. He peered over her shoulder, glowering at the page in the catalog.

“Won’t matter none,” he announced morosely. With a quick jab, he grabbed the catalog out of Diana’s hand and dropped it into Iona’s box of kitchen firewood. “Curtains or no, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And all those hoity-toity girls from school still won’t have nothin’ to do with you. You know what they say,” he added with a leer. “Once a garbageman’s daughter, always a garbageman’s daughter.”

He had leaned back on his chair then, watching to see if she would try to rescue the catalog from the trash heap which, of course, she did not. Even at that age, she already knew better than to give Max Cooper’s meanness the kind of satisfaction he wanted.

In the books Diana had devoured every day—fictional stories peopled by the likes of Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton and the Dana girls—the heroines had slick rooms, speedy little roadsters, loving parents, and enough money to do whatever they liked. If they wanted something, they bought it themselves or some nice relative gave it to them. Diana Cooper’s life wasn’t like that. She never had a matching set of curtains, sheets, and pillowcases until after she had been married and widowed and was living alone in the little rock house in Gates Pass.

She had left the catalog where her father threw it, but she had never forgotten what he had done. And she had never forgiven him either.

Now, driving toward her interview with Monty Lazarus, Diana Ladd Walker was struck once more by how far she had come from those bad old days. It was a long way from the garbageman’s house in Joseph, Oregon, to the lobby of the La Paloma in Tucson, Arizona. A damned long way.

When she pulled into the covered driveway in front of the hotel, a valet-parking attendant stepped forward to open the door and claim her car. “Are you checking in?” he asked, helping her out of the seat.

“No,” she said. “I’m here for a meeting.”

“Very good,” he said, handing her a claim ticket.

She stood for a moment watching as he took the Suburban and drove it out of sight. The miracle was that she didn’t feel as though she were out of her league or that she had somehow overreached herself. No, she was here at a first-class hotel, and she felt totally at ease.

Smiling, Diana smoothed her dress and started inside, nodding a thank-you to the attendant who opened the door.

Not only was it a long way from Joseph to here, she thought, but every single step had been worth it.

As she entered the room a tall, gaunt-looking man with a headful of bushy red hair, slightly stooped shoulders, and an engaging grin rose and came toward her. “Mrs. Walker?” he asked.

Diana nodded and held out her hand. “Mr. Lazarus?” she asked.

“That’s right,” he said with a courtly bow. “Monty Lazarus at your service.” He led her toward a low, comfortable-looking couch. “I’ve managed to corral this little seating area for just the two of us. I thought it might be nicer for talking than the restaurant would be. Would you care for a drink?”

“A glass of wine might be nice. A drink sometimes helps take the edge off.”

“In other words, you’re not looking forward to this.”

She smiled and shook her head. “About as much as I look forward to having a root canal,” she told him.

For some strange reason, that answer seemed to tickle his funny bone. Monty Lazarus laughed aloud.

“The lobby bar isn’t open yet,” he said. “You hang on right here. If you’ll excuse me for a few seconds, I’ll go get you that glass of wine, then I’ll do my best to make this as painless an interview as possible.”

Diana sat back, closed her eyes, and waited, forcing herself to relax, to forget how nervous being on the subjective side of an interview always made her feel.

“Have you ever been to a bullfight?” Andy had asked Mitch once.

“A long time ago,” Mitch answered. “Down in Nogales back in the early seventies. Lori and I went together. I wasn’t especially impressed.”

“The Nogales ring wasn’t noted for the quality of its fights,” Andy replied. “It’s like small-town sports everywhere. The bush leagues. You get the young guys who aren’t quite good enough to make it in the majors and a few major-league has-beens that aren’t tough enough to cut the mustard anymore. But bullfighting, if it’s done right, is a thing of beauty.

“The bullfighter has to be able to kill. That goes without saying, but the art of it is all in the capework, in the bullfighter controlling the drama with his cape. The whole point is to bring the bull’s horns so close that physical injury or even death are less than a fraction of an inch away and yet, when the fight is over the bull is always dead, and usually, the bullfighter walks away unscathed. It’s fascinating to watch.”

Mitch Johnson remembered every word of that conversation, and he had taken them all to heart. This was his capework, then. He had set up the interview and the whole Monty Lazarus fabrication just to prove to himself that he could do it, that he could take the girl, do whatever he wanted with her, and still talk to her mother with complete impunity. There was power in that.

Mitch stood at the bar waiting for the bartender to finish dealing with some kind of inventory issue. Even that slight suspension in the action was annoying. Now that the interview was about to begin, his whole body was alive with anticipation. The moment when Diana Ladd Walker had come across the room toward him was already one of the high points of his life. He would never forget the cordial smile on her face as he rose to meet her or the way she had held out her hand in greeting. The touch of her fingers had been absolutely electrifying because, like the poor, unfortunate bull, Diana Ladd Walker didn’t suspect a thing.

She had no idea that her precious daughter belonged to the man whose hand she was shaking. She didn’t have a glimmer that he had spent almost the entire morning with Lani Walker spread out before him as a visual feast for his sole enjoyment. The girl was his, both physically and artistically. Lani was a prisoner of his charcoal and paper as surely as her hands and feet were secured to the trundle bed’s sturdy little corner posts. Diana Ladd Walker had no idea that her interviewer had spent several delightful morning hours being alternately tortured and exhilarated by the process of re-creating that delectably innocent body on paper; that, by controlling his aching to take Lani—because it would have been so easy to do so—he had reveled in the rational victory of denying that physical craving, that fundamental bodily urge. So far Mitch’s violation of Lani Walker had been mainly intellectual, but that wouldn’t last forever.

“Sorry about the delay, sir,” the bartender said. “Can I help you now?”

“A glass of chardonnay for the lady,” Mitch Johnson said. “And a glass of tonic with lime for me.”

For the first half hour of the Monty Lazarus interview, the questions followed such a well-worn track that Diana could have given the answers in her sleep.

“How long have you been writing?” he asked.

“Twenty-five years, give or take.”

“You must have studied writing in school, right?”

Diana shook her head. “No,” she said. “I applied for the creative writing program here at the university, but I wasn’t admitted. I became a teacher instead.”

“That’s right,” Monty said. “I remember something about that from the book. Your husband was admitted using material you had actually written while you weren’t allowed in, and Andrew Carlisle turned out to be the instructor.”

Diana nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything to add.

“Did you and he ever talk about that?” Monty asked.

“About what?”

“About the fact that he had admitted the wrong student, that he had given your place to someone who turned out to have far less talent.”

“We never discussed it,” Diana said. “There wasn’t any need. After all, I won, didn’t I?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Professor Carlisle didn’t let me into his class, but I got to be a writer anyway.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“The University of Oregon,” she answered. “I got my M.Ed. from the University of Arizona.”

Monty Lazarus continued to ask questions that reeked of numbing familiarity. Diana had answered the same questions dozens of times before, including two weeks earlier on The Today Show.

“How did you sell your first book?”

“I submitted it to an agent I met at a writer’s conference up in Phoenix.”

“And how long have you been writing full-time?”

“Until I married my husband Brandon, my second husband, I had a full-time teaching job out on the reservation and only wrote during the summers. That’s Tohono O’othham—spelled t-o-h-o-n-o new word o’-o-t-h-h-a-m, by the way. The school where I taught is in Topawa, south of Sells, about seventy or so miles from here. After Brandon and I married, I cut back to substitute teaching. I did that for about three years, and I’ve been writing full-time ever since.”

As Diana went through the motions of answering the questions, it occurred to her that if Monty Lazarus had actually read her book, he would have known the answers to some of those questions without having to ask. She remembered dealing with many of them as part of the “back” story in Shadow of Death.

She bit back the temptation of mentioning to her interviewer that it might have been a good idea for him to do his homework. It wasn’t at all smart to tell an interviewer how to do his job, not unless she wanted a hatchet job to appear in the periodical in question. Instead, Diana Ladd Walker answered the questions with as much poise and humor as she could muster.

Having filled several pages with cryptic notes, Monty Lazarus finally put down his pen. “Okay,” he said. “Enough of that. Now, let’s turn to the more personal stuff.

“Where do you live?”

“Gates Pass, west of Tucson.”

“For how long?”

“Since 1969. I moved there right after my first husband died. Brandon Walker came to live there after we got married in 1976.”

“Where were you from originally?”

“Joseph, Oregon,” she said. “My father ran the town garbage dump. We lived in the caretaker’s house the whole time I was growing up.”

“So yours is pretty much one of those Horatio Alger stories,” Monty Lazarus offered.

Diana smiled. “You could say so.”

“And do you have children?”

“Yes.”

For the first time in the whole interview, she felt suddenly wary and uneasy. That was stupid, because she had answered all these same questions time and again. She took a deep breath.

“In 1975 I was a widow raising an only son, a six-year-old child. In 1976, Brandon and I married. He had two children, two sons. In 1980 we adopted a fourth child, our daughter, Lani.”

“Four,” Monty Lazarus repeated. “And where are they all now?”

Maybe knowing that question would automatically follow the first one was the source of some of her anxiety. She opted for putting all the cards on the table at once.

“The two older boys were Brandon’s. My one stepson disappeared years ago while he was still in high school.”

“He ran away from home?”

“Yes. At this point, he’s missing and presumed dead. His older brother got himself in trouble and ended up in prison in Florence. I believe he’s out now, but I have no idea where he’s living. We don’t exactly stay in touch. The two younger ones, my son David, and our daughter, Lani, are fine. David just graduated from law school in Chicago, and Lani is a junior at University High School right here in Tucson.”

Monty shook his head sympathetically. “It’s tough,” he said. “Raising kids is always a crapshoot. So it sounds as though you’re running about fifty-fifty in the motherhood department.”

“I guess so,” Diana agreed. Fifty-fifty wasn’t a score she was proud of. She would have liked to do better.

Monty Lazarus glanced down at his watch. “Yikes,” he exclaimed. “We’ve been at this for over an hour. I’ll go flag down a waitress. Can I get you anything? Another glass of wine, maybe?”

Diana shook her head. “I’d better switch to iced tea,” she said. “No sugar, but extra lemon.”

As Monty Lazarus sauntered away, Diana was left mulling his sardonic words about raising kids. Crapshoot. That just about covered it.

Tommy, Brandon’s younger son, had walked out of their lives one summer afternoon between his freshman and sophomore years in high school. Over the years they had gradually come to terms with the idea that Tommy was probably dead—he had to be. The situation with Quentin wasn’t nearly as clear-cut. Diana sometimes thought they would have been better off if Quentin had died as well.

The moment she met Quentin Walker, Diana recognized he was both smart and mean. Even as a ten-year-old, his conversation had shown intermittent flashes of intellectual brilliance. No, lack of brainpower had never been one of Quentin’s problems. Curbing his tongue was, his tongue and his temper. He was manipulative and arrogant, angry and unforgiving. Not only that, by the time he was in high school, he had already developed a severe drinking problem.

Five years earlier, he had been driving drunk. He had crashed his four-wheel-drive pickup into a compact car, a Chevette, killing the woman driver and her two-year-old child. As if that weren’t bad enough, the woman was six months pregnant. The baby was taken alive from his dead mother’s womb, but he, too, had died three days later.

Brandon was still sheriff at the time of the trial, and the whole ordeal had been a nightmare for him. Not that he was responsible. Quentin was an adult and had to deal with his own difficulties. Brandon Walker’s whole life had been committed to law and order, yet here was his son, a repeat drunk-driving offender, who had blithely killed three people. And when the judge had shipped Brandon Walker’s son off to Florence for five years on two counts of vehicular homicide (the dead unborn fetus didn’t count), it had almost broken Brandon’s heart. It had seemed at the time that things couldn’t get any worse. And then they did.

Three years and a half years after he was locked up, shortly after Diana had started work on Shadow of Death, Brandon had come home from work and told her the latest bad news in the Quentin Walker department.

The moment Diana caught a glimpse of his face as Brandon stumbled into the house, she knew something was terribly wrong. His face was so gray she initially thought he might be having a heart attack.

“What’s happened?” she had asked, hurrying to his side. “What’s going on?”

Shaking his head, he walked past her proffered embrace, opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a pair of beers—one for each of them. He sank down beside the kitchen table and buried his face in his hands. Concerned, Diana sat down beside him.

“Brandon, tell me. What is it?”

“Quentin,” he groaned. “Quentin again.”

“What’s he done now?”

“He’s hooked up with a gang of extortionists up in Florence,” Brandon answered. “They’ve been operating out of the prison, supposedly accepting bribes on my behalf. It’s a protection racket. They’ve been telling people that if they don’t pay up, something bad is going to happen to their building or business, without any cops being there to take care of things. In other words, if the marks don’t fork over, they don’t get any patrol coverage.”

“But that’s outrageous!” Diana exclaimed. “They’re claiming you’re behind it?”

“That’s right.”

“But that’s the whole reason you were elected in the first place,” Diana protested. “To clean things up and put an end to that kind of crap.”

“Right.” Brandon, staring into the depths of his beer bottle, answered without looking Diana in the eye.

“How did you find out?”

“Hank Maddern told me.”

“Hank!” Diana echoed. “He’s been retired for years. How did he find out?”

“One of the deputies—Hank wouldn’t say which one—went to him with it and asked for advice as to what he should do about it. The deputy evidently thought I was in on it.” Brandon’s voice cracked with emotion. It took a minute or so before he could continue.

“Considering the well-known history of graft and corruption during Sheriff DuShane’s watch, you can hardly blame the guy for thinking that. Thankfully, Hank and I go back a long way. He came straight to me with it.”

“What are you going to do?”

Brandon sighed. “I already did it,” he said. “I went straight to Internal Affairs and told them to check it out on the off chance that some of my officers are involved. I told them I’ll cooperate in any way necessary, and that they should do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of it.”

“What’ll happen to Quentin?” Diana asked.

Brandon shook his head. “We’re talking felonious activity, Diana. If the prosecutor gets a conviction, he’ll spend a couple more years in prison. And when you’re already in the slammer, what’s another year or two? He won’t give a damn, but it’s going to be hell for us. Our lives will have to be an open book. We’ll have to turn over all our bank records. The investigators will want to know just exactly how much money came in, where it came from, and where it’s gone. I told them to have a ball. We’ve got nothing to hide.”

In the bleak silence that followed that last statement, Brandon Walker slipped lower in his chair, leaning his weight against an arm that had dropped onto the table. “No matter what we did for that kid, it was never enough.”

Diana reached out and put one hand over her husband’s. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He nodded. “I know,” he murmured. “Me, too.”

“It’s not your fault, Brandon,” Diana said. “You did everything you could.”

He looked up at her then, his eyes full of hurt and outrage. And tears. “But he’s my son, for Chrissakes!” he croaked. “How the hell could my own son do this to me? How could he go against everything I’ve ever stood for and believed in?”

“Quentin isn’t you,” she said. “He made his own choices . . .”

“All of them bad,” Brandon interjected.

“. . . and once again, he’s going to have to suffer the consequences.”

Even as Diana uttered the too pat words, she knew they were a cop-out. She was hurt, too, but the real agony belonged solely to Brandon. After all, Quentin was his son. With Tommy evidently out of the picture for good, Quentin was the only “real” son Brandon Walker had left, which made the betrayal that much worse.

For years they had listened while Janie, Brandon’s ex-wife, made one excuse after another about why Quentin and Tommy were the way they were. In Janie’s opinion, the critical missing ingredient had always been Brandon’s fault and responsibility, one way or the other, although whenever Brandon had tried to exert any influence on the kids, Janie had continually run interference. Any attempt on Brandon’s part to discipline the boys had met with implacable resistance from their mother. Diana had seen from the beginning that it was a lose/lose situation all the way around.

“Can you imagine what Janie’s going to say when she gets wind of this? She’s going to blame me totally, just like she did with the accident.”

“You’re the sheriff,” Diana had said. “You have to do your job. Remember, Quentin’s a big boy now—a grown-up. If he’s turned himself into a criminal, then it’s on his head, not yours.”

But that wasn’t entirely true. Quentin was the one who was prosecuted for his part in the extortion scheme, and a slick lawyer got him off but when the next election came around, Brandon Walker lost. His opponent, Bill Forsythe, managed to imply that there had to be some connection between Quentin’s illegal but unproven activities and his father, the sheriff.

Diana thought that Brandon could have and should have fought back harder against the Forsythe campaign of character assassination, but somehow his heart wasn’t in it. When the fight ended in defeat, he retreated into the Gates Pass house and lived in virtual seclusion while focusing all his energies and frustration on cutting and stacking wood.

Monty Lazarus returned to Diana trailed by a waitress bearing a tray laden with glasses of iced tea as well as a bowl of salsa and a basket of chips.

“I thought I’d order a little food—something to keep up our strength.” He grinned. “Now where were we? Oh, that’s right. You were telling me about your daughter. University High School. That’s a prep school of some kind, isn’t it?”

Diana nodded.

“So she must be smart.”

“Yes. She hopes to study medicine someday.”

“And pretty?”

Once again she felt that vague sense of unease, but she shook it off.

“I suppose some people would say so,” Diana said dismissively. “But aren’t we getting a little off track?”

“You’re right,” Monty Lazarus said. “Have some chips and salsa. When I’m hungry, my mind tends to wander.”

Buying the car had been fun for Quentin Walker. Early on he had settled on a faded orange, ’79 Ford Bronco 4-by-4 XLT, with alloy wheels, a cassette deck, towing package, a newly rebuilt 302 engine, and a slight lift. He’d had to go through the usual car-buying bullshit with that cocky bastard of a salesman who acted like he was working for a Cadillac dealership instead of hawking beaters at a South Tucson joint called Can Do Deals Used Cars.

Winston Morris, in his smooth, double-breasted khaki-colored suit and tie, had taken one look at Quentin’s mud-spattered boots and figured him for some kind of low-life without a penny to his name. Quentin had willingly put up with all the crap, waiting for the inevitable moment when Winston would finally get around to saying, “What’s it going to take to put you in this car today?”

Quentin had leaned back in his chair and casually crossed one leg over the other. “You’ve got it listed at forty-two hundred. I’ll give you thirty-five, take it or leave it.”

The sad look that came over Winston’s face was as predictable as his initial closing question. “You can’t be serious. We’re in this business to sell cars, not give them away.”

But when Quentin got up to leave, the bargaining had begun in earnest. Quentin ended up paying thirty-six fifty. But the most fun came when the dickering was done and Winston had said, “How do you intend to pay for this?”

That was the supreme moment, the one Quentin had been salivating over all morning. Nonchalantly, he had reached for his wallet and opened it. One by one he drew out four of the thousand-dollar bills and laid them down on the desk in front of the salesman. “You can give me change, can’t you?”

The look on Winston’s face as he scooped up the four bills had been well worth the price of admission. He had taken the money and disappeared into his sales manager’s office. He was in there for a long time. No doubt, everybody there was busy trying to figure out whether or not the money was counterfeit. Eventually, though, he came back out and finished up the paperwork.

Leaving the lot, Quentin still felt good. After not driving a car for six years, it was strange to be back behind the wheel again, odd to be in his own vehicle. Knowing what would most likely be waiting for him in the desert, he stopped at a grocery store and picked up a six-pack of beer, a flashlight, and several spare batteries, as well as a large box—an empty toilet-paper box. Then he headed out of town.

The good mood lasted for a few miles more, but as soon as he crossed the pass and could see the mountain ahead of him, a pall of gloom settled over him. He popped open the first can and took a sip of beer, hoping to hold off the blanket of despair that was closing in on him.

If only his father hadn’t made him take Davy out to the charco that day. Then, none of the rest of it would have happened.

“Do I have to?” Quentin had whined to his father on the phone. “Me and Tommy have better things to do today than haul Davy Ladd out into the desert to put a bunch of plastic flowers on something that isn’t even a grave.”

“Listen here, young man,” Brandon Walker said. “We’re not talking options here. Where did you get that car you’re driving?”

“From Grandma,” Quentin conceded grudgingly. “You bought it for us from Grandma Walker.”

“That’s right. Diana and I both bought it for you,” Brandon corrected. “As long as we’re paying for gas and insurance, you’d better straighten up and help out when required to do so. Is that clear?”

“I guess,” Quentin said. “But do we have to do it today?”

“Yes. Today is the anniversary of Gina Antone’s death. Rita’s too busy with Lani to take care of the shrine herself and it would be too hard on her anyway, so Davy’s agreed to do it for her. It’s very important to Rita that the work be done today.”

“Well, I’m not doing any of it.”

“Nobody’s asking you to. Davy will do whatever needs doing. Brian will probably help out too, if he can come along.” Now that Quentin was being slightly more agreeable, Brandon was willing to be conciliatory as well. “I’ll send along enough money so the four of you can stop off at the trading post and have a hamburger or a burrito on your way back. How does that sound?”

“Okay, I guess,” Quentin said.

Showing off, Quentin had driven the aging ’68 New Yorker like a maniac on the way out to the reservation. Tommy was game for anything, but Quentin was waiting to see if he could scare either Davy or Brian into telling him to slow down. Neither one of them said a word. The bad part came, though, when they turned off Coleman Road and headed for the charco.

Quentin was still going too fast when they came around a blind curve that concealed a sandy wash. He jammed on the brakes. Seconds later, the Chrysler was mired in sand up to its hubcaps. By then they were only half a mile or so away from the charco and the shrine. Brian and Davy had set off with their flowers and candles. Meantime, Quentin left Tommy to watch the car while he hiked out to the highway to find someone to pull the Chrysler out of the sand.

That took time. He was gone over an hour. When he came back with a guy with a four-wheel-drive pickup and a chain, Tommy was nowhere to be found. The car was out of the sand, the guy with the pickup was long gone, and Brian and Davy were back from doing their shrine duties before Tommy finally showed up.

“Where the hell have you been?” Quentin growled.

“I got bored,” Tommy told him. “But you’ll never guess what I found. There’s a cave up there,” he said, pointing back up the flank of Kitt Peak. “It’s a big one. I tried going inside, but when it got too dark, I came back.” He wrenched open the passenger door, opened the glove box, and took out the flashlight Brandon Walker insisted they keep there in case of trouble.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

“We can’t do that,” Davy said.

“Can’t do what?”

“Go in the caves on Ioligam,” Davy told him.

“Why not?”

“Because they belong to the Indians. They’re sacred.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it!” Tommy said. “Caves belong to everybody. What about Colossal Cave? What about Carlsbad Caverns? Besides, it’s Kitt Peak anyway, not ‘chewing gum.’ ”

“Ioligam,” Davy repeated, but by then Tommy was already headed back up the mountain. Quentin paused for a moment. He himself wasn’t wild about exploring caves, but the idea of doing something Davy was against proved to be too much of a temptation. “If Tommy’s going, I’m going,” he said. With that, Quentin set off after his brother.

“Why are the caves sacred?” Brian asked as he and Davy trudged reluctantly up the mountain after the others.

“Nana Dahd told me that it’s because that’s where I’itoi goes for summer vacation,” Davy answered. “But Looks At Nothing told me once that back when the Apaches attacked the village that used to be here, the village called Rattlesnake Skull, the only people who lived were some little kids who hid out in a cave. Later on, the Tohono O’othham found out that one of the girls from Rattlesnake Skull had betrayed her people to the Ohb. Some hunters went looking for her. When they found her, they brought her back and shut her up in one of the caves on the mountain to die.”

With three older brothers, Brian Fellows was used to having his leg pulled. “Is that the truth or is that just a story?” he asked.

Davy Ladd shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Looks At Nothing told it like it was the truth, but maybe it is just a story.”

They had followed the older boys to the entrance of the cave and then waited outside until the flashlight gave out, forcing Tommy and Quentin to emerge.

“It’s beautiful in there,” a gleeful Tommy reported. “Unbelievable! It’s too bad you’re both chickens.”

“We’re not chickens,” Davy said quietly.

Quentin laughed. “Yes, you are. Come on, chicky-chicky. Let’s go have that hamburger. I’m starved.”

During the next couple of weeks, Tommy had persuaded Quentin to spend every spare moment exploring the cave. When they ran out of money for gas and flashlight batteries, they stole bills from their mother’s purse. And even Quentin was forced to agree it was worth it. The cave was magnificent—magnificent and awful at the same time. It was so much more than either of them had imagined and yet it was terribly frustrating. They had found something wonderful and amazing, beautiful beyond all imagining. Gleaming wet stalactites hung down like thousands of rocky icicles. Stalagmites rose up out of watery pools like so many gray looming ghosts. Here and there, pieces of crystal reflected back light like a thousand winking eyes. Tommy was dying to share their discovery.

“You know what’ll happen if anybody finds out,” Quentin had warned his brother. “They’ll kick our asses out of there and we’ll never get to go back.”

“Will they ever open it up? Maybe charge admission like they do at Colossal Cave?”

“Don’t be stupid, Tommy. You heard what Davy said. It’s sacred or something.”

It wasn’t the first time Quentin and Tommy had squared off against the rest of the world. The two of them had been keeping secrets—some worse than others—all their lives. They were used to it, and they kept this one, too.

Three weeks after finding the cave, they ventured far enough inside the first chamber to locate the narrow passage that led to the second. The first room had been so rough and wet that it was almost impossible to walk in it. Starting in the passage, the second one seemed dryer, and it had a dirt floor, as though someone had gone to the trouble of covering the rough surface so it would be easier to walk on it.

Inside the second chamber they had discovered the rock slide barring most of what had once been a second entrance to the cavern. And over against the far wall, much to both their horror and fascination, they had found the scattered pieces of a human skeleton.

“Hey, look at this?” Tommy said, picking up a bone and flinging it across the cave. “Maybe they left this guy here to guard these pots and to cast a spell over anybody who tries to take them.”

Tommy Walker’s imagination and his fascination with magic had always outstripped his older brother’s. “Shut up, Tommy,” Quentin said. “And leave those bones alone. What if they still carry some kind of disease or something?”

Shrugging, Tommy leaned down and picked up the first pot that came to hand. In the orange glow from the flashlight it looked gray or maybe beige. A black crosshatch pattern had been incised into the surface.

“I’ll bet something like this would be worth a lot of money,” he said thoughtfully. “How about if we take it to the museum over at the university and try to unload it? Whaddya think of that idea?”

“It might work,” Quentin had agreed. “With all the gas we’re buying these days, our budget could use a little help.”

Together they had discussed which pot might best serve their immediate monetary purposes, settling eventually on the one Tommy had picked up in the first place. Carrying the pot in one hand and his flashlight in the other, Tommy had started back toward the main cavern. Quentin was several feet behind him, so he never saw exactly what happened. All he knew was he heard a noise, like something falling. He also heard the pot breaking into what sounded like a million pieces. When he came around the corner, Tommy was nowhere in sight.

“Tommy,” he yelled. “What happened? Where’d you go?”

For an answer, he heard only dead silence, broken occasionally by the drip of water.

“Tommy, come on now. Don’t play games,” Quentin said, fighting back a sudden surge of fear. “This is no time for jokes. We have to get out of here and head home. It’s getting late.”

But still there was no answer. None at all.

Slowly, carefully, Quentin had begun to search the area. After ten minutes or so, he found the hole, almost killing himself in the process. Just off the path they had used to get to the passage, there was something that looked like a shadow. But when Quentin shone his light that way he found instead a shaft, some twenty feet deep, with Tommy lying still as death at the bottom with his feet in a murky pool of water.

“Tommy!” Quentin shouted again. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?” But Tommy Walker didn’t answer and didn’t move.

Terrified, Quentin raced out of the cave. In honor of their spelunking adventures, the two boys had managed to amass a fair collection of discarded rope. Gathering an armload of rope, Quentin dashed back up the mountain. Inside the cave, working feverishly, he managed to rappel himself down the side of the shaft. Once there, he was relieved to find that Tommy was still alive, still breathing.

“Tommy, wake up. You’ve gotta wake up so we can get out of here.” But there was no response. Finally, desperate and not knowing what else to do, Quentin tied the rope around his unconscious brother’s chest—fastening it under both his arms so it wouldn’t slip off. Then he climbed back up to haul Tommy out.

It had worked, too. With almost superhuman effort and after a half-hour struggle, Quentin finally dragged Tommy’s dead weight up out of the shaft. He heaved him out of the hole and rolled him onto the jagged floor of the cave like a landed fish, but by then Tommy Walker wasn’t breathing anymore. He was dead.

“Goddamn it!” Quentin had screamed, gazing down at his brother’s still and rapidly cooling form. “How dare you go and die on me! How dare you!”

He had started to go for help even then, but halfway to the car the second time, he changed his mind. What if, in the process of pulling Tommy up and out, Quentin had done something to him—what if he had broken something else, caused some other damage that hadn’t happened in the fall? What if it was Quentin’s fault that his brother was dead? And maybe it was anyway. After all, Quentin was the one who had driven them there in the first place. It was Quentin’s car, Quentin’s driver’s license, and Quentin’s gas.

And finally, because he didn’t know what else to do; because he didn’t know how to go about beginning to face the enormous consequences of what he had done, he climbed into the car and drove away. He went home. Later that night, when Janie asked where Tommy was, Quentin said he didn’t know. He claimed he had no idea.

And a day later, Quentin Walker had reluctantly agreed, right along with everyone else, that for some unknown reason his brother Tommy must have run away.

From that day on, no amount of drinking ever held the awful memories quite at bay. In his sleep, Quentin Walker often dreamed about his brother lying limp and lifeless on the floor of the cave. And now, after all the intervening years, for the first time, Quentin Walker was headed back there.

He didn’t know for sure if Tommy’s body was still in the cave. It probably was, but by the time Mitch Johnson arrived on the scene, it wouldn’t be there anymore. Quentin couldn’t afford for Tommy to be found now. Back at the beginning, when it first happened, people might have believed it was an accident. If they found out about it now, who would believe that story, especially if it was coming from Quentin Walker, from somebody who was an ex-con?

Tommy Walker had been missing all these years, and his brother Quentin was determined that he stay that way—missing forever.

8

As the two men led the woman back toward the village, many of the Little People went away, but there was always a swarm of bees or wasps to guard the woman. On the fourth day of the journey, the woman pointed to the sky and began to dig holes in the ground. And the bees were very excited. They sang, “Rain, rain, rain!”

In two more steps of Tash—the Sun—in what the Mil-gahn would call hours, the clouds appeared, and the rains came. The two men filled their water baskets and were glad. But the happiest of all was Jeweth—the Earth.

When the rain was over, the two men wanted to continue on, but the woman would not go. So the two men left the woman some pinole and went back to their own people. After a time the Indians returned to their own country. When they came to the place where the two men had left the strange woman, they found many houses. This kihhim—this village—had been built by people from the south. They said they had come to be near the great Medicine Woman of the Tohono O’othham. Gohhim O’othham—Old Limping Man—was curious and asked where this Medicine Woman lived. The people of the village took him to a house made of sticks of ocotillo and covered with mud. There were two rooms in this house. The inside room was dark with an odd noise in it—a strange kind of buzzing.

When Kulani O’oks—Medicine Woman—came out, Old Limping Man saw it was the same woman whom the Little People had saved. And so this great Medicine Woman, whose name was Mualig Siakam—Forever Spinning—told Old Limping Man how she had been among strangers in the south. When she had returned alone to join her own people, the Tohono O’othham, she found her home village deserted. All the Desert People were gone. There was no water. The animals had gone too, and so had all the birds.

And so this woman, who had been left alone in the burning desert, sent up a prayer for help. Pa-nahl—the Bees—were the first to come. The Bees sent for help and brought Wihpsh—the Wasps. Then came Mumuwali—the Flies, Komikam—the Beetles, and Totoni—the Ants. They all came to help her, all the Little People who had not yet left the burning desert.

The woman said the Little People had told her to go to sleep and they would watch over her. That was all she knew.

As the endless questions droned on, Diana was more than slightly bored. Megan, her publicist in New York, had given her such glowing advance notices on Monty Lazarus that Diana had expected him to be someone who would come up with an original take on the standard author interview. Then, just when she was about to decide the whole thing was destined to be a flop, Monty surprised her.

Sitting back in his chair, studying her over his glasses and under steepled fingers, he finally asked one of the questions she had been waiting and wanting to answer.

“Tell me,” he said. “After all this time, what made you finally decide to write this book?”

“I wanted answers,” she said. “And some closure.”

“After almost twenty years?”

“It’s twenty-one now. It was seventeen when I started. That’s the thing about being a victim of violent crime. I don’t think you ever get over it, not completely. If you let your guard down, the memories are always there, just under the surface, waiting to come flooding back and zing you when you least expect them. I thought that by facing Andrew Carlisle down, by once and for all confronting everything he did to me, that I could put it in the past. I thought that maybe I’d be able to finally reach the other side of the nightmare and gain some perspective.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t know. The jury’s still out. I still dream about him sometimes.”

“About the rape itself? We could talk about that if you like.”

After all the innocuous questions that had gone before, that one rocked her. It meant that Monty Lazarus had read Shadow of Death after all. Diana felt blood warming her cheeks.

“I’ve talked about the rape all I’m going to—in the book itself. Megan was supposed to tell you that subject was off limits. Not only that, if you’ve already read the book, why did you ask me all those other questions?” she asked. “You must have known the answers to most of that stuff.”

Monty Lazarus smiled. His eyes were very blue—a startlingly intense sky blue that was almost the color of Garrison Ladd’s. Almost the color of Davy’s.

“When you’re writing, how many drafts do you do on a book?” Monty asked.

Diana shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. Three—four maybe. I can’t tell. Every time I open up a chapter on the computer, I end up changing something. Maybe it’s nothing more than shortening a sentence here and there or breaking up a paragraph in a different way so the words look better on the page. Sometimes I find places where I’ve used the same word twice within two or three lines. At that rate, everything’s a different draft.”

“And you’re polishing as you go.”

“Yes, always.”

“Do things ever change in all that polishing?”

“Well, probably, but—”

“You see,” Monty Lazarus said with a smile, “the reason I like to do in-depth interviews is that I want to hear what the person is saying in his or her own words—without all the polishing. Without all the real feelings and emotions cleaned up and taken out. Those are the things that never show up on the pages of a book.

“For instance, a little while ago we were talking about your marriage to Brandon Walker. When I asked how long you’d been married, you said twenty years. Were you aware, though, that when you told me that, there was a little half-smile playing around the corners of your mouth?”

“No,” Diana conceded. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

“And when I asked you about your children and you started discussing your stepchildren, you looked as though you’d put what you thought was a piece of candy in your mouth and discovered, too late, that it was really dog shit. See what I mean?”

Diana smiled. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do.”

Monty Lazarus smiled in turn and then leaned back in his chair, regarding Diana thoughtfully over the low coffee table between them. “I want you to tell me a little about the process of this book. Did you seek out Andrew Carlisle, or was it the other way around?”

“He asked me,” Diana said. “He wrote to me in care of my publisher.”

“Let me get this straight. The man who killed your husband, and raped you, wrote you a letter and asked that you write his story? And despite everything that had happened before, despite all that history, you still agreed?”

“Shadow of Death tells both stories,” Diana corrected. “His and mine.”

“I’d have to say that the book is generally pretty unflinching,” Lazarus said. “Blazingly so at times, but there’s a gap that I find puzzling.”

“Which gap is that?”

“You barely mention the interviews themselves,” Monty Lazarus said. “I’m assuming they took place in the state prison up at Florence, since that’s where Carlisle was incarcerated. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Diana said. “In the visiting room up there to begin with. Then later on, when he was hospitalized for symptoms related to AIDS, they let me interview him in the infirmary.”

“But why didn’t you talk about that?” Lazarus persisted. “It seems to me that’s an important part of the story, for the victim to triumph over the perpetrator, as it were. For you to see your tormentor laid low—blind, crippled, horribly disfigured, and finally dying of AIDS. I’m surprised you didn’t share that satisfaction with your readers, that sense of vindication.”

“I didn’t write about satisfaction or vindication because they weren’t there,” Diana answered quietly.

“They weren’t?” Monty Lazarus asked. Then, after a moment, he added, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. What did you feel then, when you met him again after all those years?”

“Horror,” Diana said simply.

“Horror?” Lazarus repeated. “At the way he looked? Because of the burns on his face and chest? Because of his mangled arm?”

Diana shook her head. “No,” she replied. “It had nothing at all to do with the way he looked. It was because of what he was—what he stood for.”

“Which was?”

“Evil,” she said. “Outside catechism classes, I had never actually met the devil before, somebody who could pass for Satan. I was afraid that if I wrote about him that way, no one would believe me. He seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect on people, certainly on my first husband. If Andrew Carlisle told Garrison Ladd that black was white and vice versa, I think Gary would have gone to his death trying to prove it was true.”

“I see,” Monty said, writing something down in his notebook, but Diana Ladd Walker wasn’t at all sure he understood. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure she did, either.

The morning of Diana’s first scheduled interview with Andrew Carlisle had dawned clear and dry and hot. Already dressed for work himself, Brandon Walker lounged in the doorway between their bedroom and the master bath, drinking a cup of coffee and watching as his wife carefully applied her makeup.

“I could always take the day off and come along with you,” he offered. “That way I’d be right there in case anything went wrong.”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong, Brandon,” Diana said, trying to sound less anxious than she felt. “It isn’t as though I’ll be alone with him. There are guards. There’ll be other visitors in the room as well. I’ll be fine.”

For a time after that, Brandon Walker sipped his coffee in silence. “Are you going to try to see Quentin while you’re there?”

Diana put down her mascara brush. Her gaze met Brandon’s in the neutral territory of the bathroom mirror’s steamy reflection. “I could,” she said finally. “Do you want me to?”

Brandon’s older son had been locked up in the state penitentiary at Florence for months now. On occasion, Brandon and Diana had talked about driving up there to see him, but each time, Brandon had changed his mind and backed out at the last minute.

“I guess,” he said hollowly. “I do want to know how Quent’s doing. I just can’t bring myself to go there to see him. Still, no matter what he’s done, he’s also my son. Nothing’s going to change that. Since we’ve already lost Tommy, we can’t very well just abandon Quentin, can we?”

Brandon looked away, but not before Diana glimpsed the anguished expression on his face. She tried to read that look, tried to fathom what was behind it. Betrayal? Despair? Pain? Anger?

“No,” Diana agreed at last. “I don’t suppose we can. I can’t promise I’ll see Quentin today. It depends on whether or not there’s enough time left in visiting hours after the interview with Carlisle is over. If they’ll let me, though, I will.”

“Thanks, Di,” Brandon said gruffly. “I appreciate it.”

And it turned out that there had been enough time for Diana Ladd Walker to see both prisoners that day. She had been waiting in the Visitation Room, amidst a group of other women who, armed with whatever difficulties were besetting them on the outside, had come either to rail at or to share their woes with their husbands or boyfriends or sons. Diana had brought only a yellow pad and a pencil, along with a pervasive sense of dread.

As one door after another had clanged shut behind her, Diana felt a sudden resurgence of that long-ago fear. In her ignorance, she had thought of the house in Gates Pass as a safe haven, yet Carlisle had found a way inside the house and had attacked her there, despite her careful precautions and numerous locked doors. Maybe, here in the prison, despite the reassuring presence of guards and iron bars, her presumed safety might once again prove illusory.

Andrew Carlisle was here, and so was Diana Walker. She was already locked inside the same complex. Soon the two of them would be within the same four walls. Would she be able to stand it? For the first time, Diana’s courage wavered. At that moment it would have taken only the smallest nudge from Brandon to convince her to walk away and forget the whole project.

Quaking, fighting an almost overpowering urge to bolt and run, Diana followed the escorting guards into the grimly functional prison Visitation Room. It was lit by sallow, artificial light that gave everyone in the place a jaundiced, sickly look. The walls were posted with rules and regulations, many of them made illegible by layers of graffiti. The chairs in the room were all bolted to the floor. It was a hard, desperate place where people with no hope waited to see loved ones who had even less.

The guard leading Diana took her directly to the far side of the room, where the wall was made of thick Plexiglas so yellowed and scratched that looking through it seemed more like peering through a veil of smutty L.A. smog than anything else. Directed to a chair, Diana sat and waited.

The last time she had seen Andrew Carlisle had been years earlier at his double murder trial. One of his arms—the one Bone had snapped in two at the wrist—had been encased in a heavy plaster cast, and his face had still been swathed in bandages. The prison warden had told Diana in advance of that first visit that the injured arm had been permanently damaged, leaving him with only limited use of his fingers.

The mangled arm was one thing—more Bone’s doing than Diana’s. What she dreaded seeing was his unbandaged face, the one into which she had flung a frying pan full of searing-hot bacon grease. That grease had been Diana’s last desperate line of defense against Andrew Carlisle’s brute force and sharp knife. The grease had worked far better than she could have hoped. He had fallen on the slick floor, clawing at his scorched face and howling in agony.

This day, though, when Carlisle was led into the room, there was no such mummylike mask to lessen the horrible impact of what she had done to him. The guard brought him into the room, seated him on a chair across from Diana, and then placed the intercom receiver, one used to communicate through the Plexiglas barrier, in his good hand. All the while, Diana could only sit and stare. The third-degree burns had molded his once chiseled features into a grotesquely twisted, lumpy grimace. They had also ruined his eyes. Andrew Carlisle was blind.

No amount of anticipation could have prepared Diana for the way he looked. It stunned her to think that she had intentionally inflicted that kind of injury on another human being. Still, faced with the same set of circumstances, she knew she would have made the same decision and fought him again with the same ferocity.

“I’m told I’m quite ugly these days,” Andrew Carlisle said into the intercom mouthpiece as Diana picked up hers to listen. “They’re supposedly doing remarkable things with skin transplants and plastic surgery these days, but not for convicted killers with AIDS. Nobody exactly jumped to the plate and offered to get me the best possible care back then, or now, either, for that matter. Come to think of it, I wonder? Doesn’t denying someone proper medical care constitute cruel and unusual punishment? What do you think? Maybe I could take the Pima County Sheriff’s Department to court and sue them for damages.”

“I have no idea,” Diana said. “That’s up to you.”

He laughed then. “You sound quite sure of yourself, Ms. Walker. Have you changed much then since I saw you last?”

“Changed how?”

“Anything,” he replied. “You haven’t turned into one of those born-again Christians, by any chance, have you?”

“No.”

“Good.” He sounded relieved. “After you agreed to come see me, I started worrying that maybe you had transformed yourself into one of those religious zealots. They are all eager to come pray over me to save my immortal soul. Some of them even want to grant me forgiveness.”

Diana took a deep breath and managed to find her conversational sea legs. “No,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about that, Mr. Carlisle. I’ve never forgiven you, and I never will.”

“Good,” Andrew Carlisle replied. “Very good. I’m delighted to hear it. Now, tell me about the way you look.”

“What about the way I look?”

“Are you very different from the way you were that night we were together? You’re the last person I ever saw or ever will see,” he added, as his puckered mouth twisted into an oddly one-sided smile. “As a consequence, Ms. Walker, I remember everything about that night as vividly as if it had happened yesterday or the day before. I remember every detail about you, and I would suppose that you remember me in much the same way. We were both operating in what the experts call a non-drug-induced altered state of consciousness.”

“My hair is turning gray,” Diana answered, carefully keeping her voice even. “I’m over fifty. I wear glasses. Two pairs of glasses, actually—one for distance and one for reading.”

“I’m far more interested in your body,” Andrew Carlisle said.

Some blind people seem to gaze off into the far distance when they speak. Andrew Carlisle’s opaque, sightless eyes seemed to pry directly into Diana’s very being. She could barely breathe. An involuntary shudder ran up and down her spine while a hot flush covered her face. She wanted nothing more than to race to the door. She wanted out. She longed to be away from this monster, to be back outside in the straightforward discomfort of the hot desert air.

This must be what Brandon was trying to warn me about, she thought, fighting back panic.

When Brandon had said she would be putting herself at risk, he must have seen that even though Andrew Carlisle would not be able to harm her physically, he might still be able to invade her mind and infect her soul.

Pulling herself together, Diana sat up straight and squared her shoulders. When she spoke, she willed her voice not to quaver.

“Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Carlisle,” she said. “I’m the one calling the shots here. If you want to do this project, we’re going to do it my way. Basic ground rule number one is that we don’t talk about that night. Not now, not ever!”

“But that’s pretty much the whole point, isn’t it?” Carlisle said, smiling his ruined smile. “Everything that happened before led up to it, and everything afterward led away from it.”

“That night isn’t my point,” Diana returned. “And I’m the one writing the book. If you don’t like it, hire yourself another writer.”

“Hire?” Carlisle croaked. “What do you mean, hire? I already told you I can’t afford to pay you anything.”

“I’m being paid, all right,” Diana answered. “My agent has pitched the idea to my editor in New York. The book I’m writing will be written, and I will be paid. The only question is whether or not any of your point of view actually appears in print. That depends on how well you behave, on whether or not you agree to do things my way.”

Diana suspected that Andrew Carlisle was a vain man who was prepared to go to any length in order to be immortalized in print. He must have realized that Diana Ladd Walker was his best chance for getting there. In this case, Diana’s instincts were good. Her threat of cutting his perspective out of the project immediately delivered the required result.

“All right,” he agreed grudgingly. “I won’t mention it again. So where do we start?”

“From the beginning,” Diana said. “With your family and your childhood. Where you were born and where you grew up. I’d also like to interview any living relatives.”

“Like my mother, you mean?” he asked.

Diana remembered being told that Andrew Carlisle’s mother had been there in the yard at Gates Pass the night of her son’s attack. Myrna Louise Spaulding had ridden down to Tucson from her home in Tempe with a homicide detective named G. T. Farrell. At the time Diana had been too preoccupied with everything else to notice. Later on, during the trial, Myrna Louise had been conspicuous in her absence. Diana had mistakenly assumed the woman was dead.

“You mean your mother’s still alive?” Diana asked.

“More or less. She lives in one of those marginal retirement homes in Chandler. From the sound of it, I’d say it’s a pretty awful place, but I doubt she can afford any better.”

“Does she come here to see you?”

“Not anymore. She used to. The first time I was here. Still, once a year, on my birthday, she sends me a box of chocolates. See’s Assorted. I’ve never bothered to tell her I hate the damn things. She’s my mother, after all, so you’d think she’d remember that I never liked chocolate, not even when I was little.”

“If you don’t like the chocolates she sends you, what do you do with them, then?” Diana asked. “Give them away?”

Carlisle grinned. “Are you kidding? The guy in the cell next to me would kill for one of ’em, so I flush them down the toilet. One at a time. It drives him crazy.”

Another shiver of chills flashed through Diana’s body.

“Getting back to establishing ground rules,” Andrew Carlisle continued. “How do you want to do this? We could probably sit here chatting this way, or else I could let you review some of the material I’ve already put together. Some of it is taped, some is on disk. I could print it out for you. That way, you could take it with you, go over it at your leisure, and then you could come back later so we could discuss it.”

“How did you get it on disk?” Diana asked.

He gestured with his damaged arm. “I’ve learned to be a one-handed touch typist,” he said. “Fortunately, this is one of those full-service prisons. Inmates are allowed to have access to computers in the library so they can prepare their own writs. I do that, by the way. Compose writs for those less fortunate than myself—the poor bastards who mostly can’t read or write. Someone else has to do the editing and run the spell-checker. In a pinch, you could probably do that.”

“I suppose we can try it that way.” Diana did her best to sound reluctant, although in truth she was delighted at the prospect of any option that might spare her spending unlimited periods of time, shut up in this awful room, sitting face-to-face with this equally awful man.

“When can you have the first segment done?” she asked.

“A week or so,” he said. “Sorting out the details of my childhood shouldn’t take too long. It wasn’t particularly happy or memorable. I doubt there’ll be very much to reminisce about.”

Diana raised her hand and beckoned to the guard. “I think we’re through here,” she said.

The guard glanced at his watch. “There’s still plenty of time,” he said. “Would you like to see your stepson, then?”

“Yes, please,” Diana said.

Ten minutes after Andrew Carlisle was led from the room, the guard returned with Quentin Walker in tow.

“Oh,” he said, his face registering disappointment as soon as he saw her. “It’s you. I was hoping it was my mother. What do you want?”

A year and a half in prison had done nothing to diminish Quentin Walker’s perpetual swagger.

“I came to see someone else, but I thought I’d stop by and check on you to see if there’s anything you need.”

“What exactly do you have in mind?” Quentin returned. “An overnight pass would be great. Better yet, how about commuting my sentence to time served? That would be very nice. And you might bring along a girl next time. Since I’m not married, I don’t qualify for conjugal visits, but I’ll bet my dear old dad could pull a string or two and help me keep my manhood intact.”

“I don’t think so,” Diana replied. “Your father’s not involved in this in any way. I was thinking more in terms of books or writing materials.”

The superior smile on Quentin Walker’s face shifted into a chilly sneer. “Writing and reading materials?” he asked. “Are we suddenly focused on educating poor lost Quent? Trying to make up for the difference between what you guys did for precious little Davy and that baby squaw you dragged home and what you two did for Tommy and me? I don’t think it’s going to work. Let’s say it’s too little, too late.”

If sibling rivalry was bad, Diana realized, stepsibling rivalry was infinitely worse.

“This has nothing to do with David and Lani,” she said evenly. “And I didn’t come here to argue.” She stood up. “Why don’t we just forget I asked.”

“Good idea,” Quentin returned. “We’ll do that. I don’t need anything from you, not now and not ever.”

“Good,” Diana said. “At least that makes our relationship clear.”

“So that’s how you did it then?” Monty Lazarus asked. For a moment Diana wasn’t sure what he was asking. “He gave you access to the material he had written?”

“Yes.”

“But there’s not really any acknowledgment of that in your book, is there? Shouldn’t there have been?”

The question was a sly one, and Monty Lazarus kept his eyes focused on her face as he asked it. Realizing she was about to fall victim to a case of ambush journalism, Diana tried to play dumb.

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.”

“If you used Andrew Carlisle’s written material, shouldn’t you have said that instead of passing it off as your own work?”

It took real effort to hold off a reflexive tightening of the muscles across her jaw. “It is my own work,” she said coldly. “All of it. I did my own research, conducted my own interviews.”

“Sorry,” Monty Lazarus said. “I didn’t mean any offense.”

The hell you didn’t, you bastard! Diana thought. She took a careful sip of her iced tea before she trusted herself enough to speak. “Of course not,” she said.

Her reaction was so blatant that it was all Mitch Johnson could do to keep from bursting out laughing. And if she was prickly when it came to questions concerning her literary integrity, he wondered what would happen when they veered off into more personal topics.

“What kinds of interviews?” he asked.

“I tracked Andrew Carlisle’s mother down at her retirement home up in Chandler. I thought hearing about him from her might help me understand him better. But he was already several moves ahead of me there.”

Mitch Johnson knew exactly what Diana Ladd Walker was leading up to—the tapes, of course. He and Andy had discussed Andy’s giving them to her in great detail, long before it happened. But he had to ask, had to convince her to tell him.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Andrew Carlisle was a master at mind games, Mr. Lazarus,” Diana answered. “At the time we started the project, I still didn’t understand that.”

“Games?” he repeated. “What kind of games are we talking about?”

“Andrew Carlisle was toying with me, Mr. Lazarus, the same way a cat torments a captive mouse.”

So am I, Mitch Johnson thought, concealing the beginnings of an unintentional smile behind his iced-tea glass.

“In the beginning,” Diana continued, “I don’t think he had any intention of my writing the book.”

“Really. That’s surprising,” Monty returned. “Why, then, did he bother to write to you in the first place?”

“Of all his victims,” she said slowly, “I’m the one who got away. Not only that, even before this book, I had achieved a kind of prominence in writing that Andrew Carlisle could never hope for. I think that ate at him for years. After all, I’m somebody he didn’t consider worthy of being one of his students.”

“That’s right,” Monty Lazarus said. “I remember now. Your husband was admitted to the writing program Professor Carlisle taught, but you weren’t. Your husband—your first husband, that is—was he a writer, too? Did Garrison Ladd ever have anything published?”

“No,” she answered. “He never did.”

“But he was enrolled in Carlisle’s class at the time of his death. Presumably he was working on something, then. What was it?”

Diana shook her head. “I have no idea,” she answered. “I’m pretty sure there was a partially completed manuscript, but I never read it. The thing disappeared in all the confusion after Gary’s death. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what was in it?”

Mitch asked the speculative question deftly like a picador sticking a tormenting pic into the unsuspecting bull’s neck. And it did its intended work. It pleased him to see her struggle with her answer. She took a deep breath.

“No,” she said finally. “I don’t think knowing that would serve any useful purpose at all. Whatever Gary was writing, it had nothing at all to do with Andrew Carlisle’s focus on me, which, in my opinion, boils down to nothing more or less than professional jealousy.”

Oh, no, Mitch wanted to tell her. It’s far more complex than that. Instead, Monty Lazarus looked down at his notes and frowned. “Let’s go back to something you said just a minute ago, something about Carlisle being a couple of moves ahead of you. Something about him never really intending for you to write the book. If that was the case, what was the point?”

“He was hoping to humiliate me publicly,” Diana answered. “I think he thought he could get me to make a public commitment to writing the book and then force me to back out of it. But it didn’t work. I wrote the book anyway.”

For the first time, Mitch was surprised. Diana’s answer was right on the money. Andy had told him that he didn’t think she’d have guts enough to go through with it. That was another instance, one of the first ones Mitch had noticed, where Andy Carlisle’s assessment of any given situation had turned out to be dead wrong.

“It still doesn’t make much sense,” Monty said, making a show of dusting crumbs of tortilla chips out of his lap.

Diana knew it did make sense, but only if you had all the other pieces of the puzzle. Monty Lazarus didn’t have access to those. No one did, no one other than Diana. Those were the very things she had left out of the book, the ugly parts she had never mentioned to anyone, including Brandon Walker.

She had absolutely no intention of telling the whole story to Monty Lazarus, either. Those things were hers alone—Diana Ladd Walker’s dirty little secrets. Instead, she tossed off a too-casual answer, hoping it would throw him off the trail.

“Let’s just say it was a grudge match,” Diana said. “Andrew Philip Carlisle hated my guts.”

Almost a month after that first interview with Carlisle up in Florence, Diana was still waiting for the first written installment, which had taken far longer for him to deliver than he had said it would.

Davy was home from school for a few weeks. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Diana and Brandon had planned to take Lani and Davy up to the White Mountains to visit some friends who owned a two-room cabin just outside Payson. The four-day outing was scheduled to start Thursday afternoon, as soon as Brandon came home from work. Fate in the form of a demanding editor intervened when the Federal Express delivery man came to the door at nine o’clock Thursday morning. The package he delivered contained the galleys for her next book, The Copper Baron’s Wife, along with an apologetic note from her editor saying the corrections needed to be completed and ready to be returned to New York on Tuesday morning.

“I’d better stay home and work on them,” she said to Brandon on the phone that day when she called him at his office. “You know as well as I do that I can’t do a good job on galleys when we’re camped out with a houseful of people up in Payson. I have to be able to concentrate, but you and the kids are welcome to go. Just because I have to work doesn’t mean everybody else has to suffer.”

Brandon had protested, but in the end he had taken Lani and Davy and the three of them had gone off without her. Once they were piled in the car and headed for Payson, Diana had locked herself up with the galleys and worked her way through the first hundred pages of the book before she gave up for the night and went to bed. The next morning, when she went out to bring in the newspaper, she found an envelope propped against the front door. Although it was addressed to her, it hadn’t been mailed. Someone had left it on the porch overnight.

Curious, she had torn the envelope open and found a cassette tape—that and nothing else. No note, no explanation. She had taken the tape inside to her office and popped it into the cassette player she kept on the bookshelf beside her desk.

When the tape first began playing, there was no sound—none at all. Distracted by a headline at the top of the newspaper, Diana was beginning to assume that the tape was blank when she heard a moan—a long, terrible moan.

“Please,” a woman’s voice whispered. “Mr. Ladd, please . . .”

Diana had been holding the newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. As soon as she heard her former husband’s name, she dropped both the paper and the cup. The paper merely fell back to the surface of the desk. The cup, however, crashed to the bare floor, shattering on the Saltillo tile and sending splatters of coffee and shards of cup from one end of the room to the other.

Diana leaned closer to the recorder and turned up the volume. “Mr. Ladd,” the girl’s voice said again. “Please. Let me go.”

“No help there, little lady,” a man’s voice said. “He’s out cold. Can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

The voice was younger, but Diana recognized it after a moment. Andrew Carlisle’s. Unmistakably Andrew Carlisle’s and . . . the other? Could it be Gina Antone’s? No. That wasn’t possible! It couldn’t be!

But a few agonizing exchanges later, Diana realized it was true. The other voice did belong to Gina Antone all right, to someone suffering the torments of the damned.

“Please, mister,” the girl pleaded helplessly, her voice barely a whisper. “Please don’t hurt me again. Please . . .” The rest of what she might have said dissolved into a shriek followed by a series of despairing sobs.

“But that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? Don’t you remember telling us that you were taking us to a bad place? It turns out you were right. This is a bad place, my dear. A very bad place.”

There was a momentary pause followed by another spine-tingling scream that seemed to go on forever. Diana had risen to her feet as if to fend off a physical attack. Now she slumped backward into the chair while the infernal tape continued to play. Gradually the scream subsided until there was nothing left but uncontrollable, gasping sobs.

“My God,” Diana whispered aloud. “Did he tape the whole thing?”

Soon it became clear that he had. It was a ninety-minute tape, forty-five minutes per side. Halfway through the tape, the girl began passing out. It happened over and over again. Each time he revived her—brought her back to consciousness with splashes of water and with slaps to her face so he could continue the terrible process. Sick with revulsion, Diana realized he was orchestrating and prolonging her ordeal so the whole thing would be there. On tape. Every bit of it, even the horrifying finale where, after first announcing his intentions for the benefit of his unseen audience, Andrew Carlisle had bitten off Gina Antone’s nipple.

Shaken to the core, Diana listened to the whole thing. Not because she wanted to but because she was incapable of doing anything else. She sat in the chair as though mesmerized, as though stricken by some sudden paralysis that rendered her unable to make the slightest movement, unable to reach across to the tape player and switch it off. Unchecked tears streamed down her face and dripped unnoticed into the mess of splattered coffee and broken china.

And when it was finally over, when Gina Antone’s awful death was finished at last and the recorder clicked off, Diana leaned over and threw up into the mess of coffee and broken cup.

For a while after that she still couldn’t move. Carlisle had made it last that whole time. He had tortured the girl for a carefully calculated ninety minutes. And that was just the part he had taped. From the sound of it there must have been some preliminaries that had occurred even before that. And for inflicting that kind of appalling torture, for premeditating, planning, and savoring every ugly moment of that appalling inhumanity, what had happened to Andrew Carlisle?

A superior court judge had allowed him to plead guilty to a charge of second-degree manslaughter. The torture death of Gina Antone hadn’t even merited a charge of murder in the first degree. The State of Arizona had extracted a price of six short years from Andrew Carlisle in exchange for Gina Antone’s suffering. Six years. After that, he had been allowed to go free. Free to kill again.

Stunned, Diana sat for another half-hour, trying to decide what to do. There was no sense in turning the tape over to the authorities. What would they do with it? What could they do? Preposterously light or not, Andrew Carlisle had already served a prison term in connection with Gina Antone’s death. Double jeopardy would preclude him from being tried again for that same crime.

So should she keep the tape? Comments made by Andrew Carlisle during the tape seemed to make it clear that Diana’s former husband, Garrison Ladd, had been present at the crime scene but drunk and passed out during most of that terrible drama. Twenty-two years after the fact, Diana Cooper Ladd Walker finally had some understanding of her former husband’s involvement in Gina Antone’s death. It would seem that Garrison hadn’t been actively involved in what was done to Gina, but that didn’t mean he was blameless. Mr. Ladd. Gina had called him by name. No doubt he was the one she knew. That meant Garrison was probably the one who had lured her into the truck in the first place.

When he did that, when he had offered her a ride, had he known what was coming or not? There was no way of unraveling that now, and listening to the tape again or a hundred times, or having someone else listen to it wouldn’t have provided an adequate answer to that haunting question.

Getting out of the chair at last, Diana set about cleaning up the mess of vomit, spilled coffee, and broken pottery. Down on her hands and knees, for the first time ever she was grateful that Rita was dead. Had Gina’s grandmother still been alive, Diana would have had to face the moral dilemma of whether or not to play the tape for the old woman. With Rita dead, that wasn’t an issue.

But what about Davy? What would happen if he heard it? That thought hit her like a lightning bolt. Diana’s son—Garrison Ladd’s son—was still alive. If he ever came to know what was on that tape, it would tell him far more about his father than he ever needed to know.

Finally, there was Brandon to consider. He had headed the investigation into Gina Antone’s death and he had eventually arrested Andrew Carlisle. The plea bargain that had followed the arrest had been negotiated behind Brandon Walker’s back. If he had to endure listening to the grim recorded reality of Gina Antone’s death, Diana knew Brandon would be devastated. He would blame himself for the unwitting part he had played in allowing Andrew Carlisle to slip off the hook and escape what should have been a charge of aggravated first-degree murder.

Thinking about what exposure to the tape would do to both Brandon and Davy was what finally galvanized Diana Ladd Walker to action. Brandon was already carrying around a big enough load of guilt. His son Quentin was in prison due to a fatality drunk-driving charge. As another source of free-flowing guilt in Brandon Walker’s life, that tape was the last thing he needed.

With a fierce jab of her finger, Diana ejected the offending tape. She popped it out of the player and then carried it out to the living room. It was the first weekend in July. At eight o’clock in the morning, the air conditioner was already humming along at full speed when Diana knelt in front of the fireplace and opened the flue. Carefully, she laid a small fire with kindling at the bottom, topped by a layer of several wrist-thick branches of dried ironwood.

Once the kindling was lit, she sat on the raised hearth and waited until the ironwood was fully engulfed before she tossed the tape into the crackling flames. As the heat attacked it, the clear plastic container began to curl and melt. Like a snake shedding its skin, the magnetic tape slithered off its spindle and escaped the confines of the dwindling case. The tape writhed free, wriggled like a tortured creature, burst into flames, and then withered into a glowing chain of ash.

Only when there was nothing left of the tape and container but a charred, amorphous blob of melted plastic did Diana turn her back on the fireplace. Hurrying into the bathroom, she showered and dressed. Then, after raking the remainder of the fire apart, she left the house and drove straight to Florence. That day, Diana Walker Ladd was the first person inside the Visitation Room when the guard opened the door at ten o’clock in the morning.

Andrew Carlisle was led to his side of the Plexiglas divider a few minutes later. “Why, Mrs. Walker,” he said, sitting down across from her. “To what do I owe this unexpected honor? I don’t remember our setting an appointment for today.”

“We didn’t, you son of a bitch,” she said.

He brightened. The puckered skin around his mouth stretched into a pained imitation of a smile. “I see,” he said. “You must have received my little care package.”

“Why did you send it to me?”

“Why? Because I wanted you to know what this was all about.”

“That’s not true. You wanted someone to know the truth about what you did and what you got away with. You wanted to gloat and rub somebody’s nose in it.”

“That, too,” he conceded. “Maybe a little.”

“Where was it all this time?”

“The tape? That’s for me to know and for you to find out,” Andrew Carlisle answered.

“Who brought it to my house? Who dropped it off? And how many more ugly surprises do you have in store for me?”

“One or two,” he answered. “Or does that mean you’re quitting?”

“No,” Diana told him. “It doesn’t mean I’m quitting. You think this is some kind of a game, don’t you? You think this is a way to get back at me for what I did to you. Well, listen up, buster. I’m not a quitter. I’m going to write this damned book. By the time I finish, you’re going to wish you’d never asked me to do it.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It is a threat.”

“In other words, you’re abolishing the ground rules.”

“I’m writing this book regardless.”

“That will make the process far more interesting for me. More hands-on, if you’ll pardon the expression. Especially when it’s time to talk about the time we spent together.”

“Go fuck yourself, Mr. Carlisle!” She stood up, turned her back on him, and stalked over to the door. She had to wait in front of the door for several long moments before a guard opened it to let her out. While she was standing there she glanced back. Behind the Plexiglas barrier he was doubled over. And even though she couldn’t actually hear him without benefit of the intercom—the sound nonetheless filled her head and echoed down the confines of the prison hallway long after the heavy metal door had slammed shut behind her.

That ghostly sound was one she would never forget. It was Andrew Philip Carlisle. Laughing.

9

While Mualig Siakam and Old Limping Man were talking, some Indians came carrying a child. The child seemed asleep or dead. The people said she had been that way for a long time. They laid the child on the ground in the outer room of Medicine Woman’s house.

Mualig Siakam took a gourd which had pebbles in it that rattled. She took some small, soft white feathers, and she took a little white powder. Then she sat down at the head of the child and she began to sing.

The Indians could not understand Medicine Woman’s song because she used the old, old language which is the one I’itoi gave his people in the beginning. All the animals understand this language, but only a very few of the old men and women remember it.

As Medicine Woman sang, she rattled the gourd which had on it the marks of shuhthagi—the water—and of wepgih—the lightning. For a long time Mualig Siakam sang alone, but when the people who were sitting around had learned the song, they sang with her.

And then Medicine Woman took some of the white feathers and passed them softly over the child’s mouth and nose. She passed the feathers back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes she passed the feathers down over the child’s chest. Then again she passed them back and forth across the child’s face.

And the face of the child changed. Her body moved. Medicine Woman gave a silent command to the child’s mother, who brought water. The child drank, and everyone looked very pleased.

The next morning Old Limping Man went to the house of Mualig Siakam. Medicine Woman was feeding the child, who was sitting up. And that day, the child’s people took her home.

Halfway to the highway, walking in scorching midday heat, Manny Chavez took a detour. The wine was gone. He was verging on heatstroke. In the end it was thirst and the hope of finding water that drove him off-track.