Kiss the Bees

1

They say it happened long ago that the whole world was covered with water. I'itoi-Elder Brother-was floating around in the basket which he had made. After a time, Great Spirit came out of his basket and looked around. Everything was still covered with water, so I'itoi made himself larger and larger until shuhthagi-the water-reached only to his knees.

Then, whileI'itoi was walking around in the water, he heard someone call. At first he paid no attention, but when the call came the fourth time, Elder Brother went to see who was shouting. And so I'itoi found Jeweth Mahkai — Earth Medicine Man-rejoicing because he was the first one to come out of the water.

Elder Brother said, "This is not true." He explained that he himself was first, butJeweth Mahkai was stubborn and insisted that he was first.

NowI'itoi and Earth Medicine Man, as they were talking, were standing in the south. They started toward the west. As they were going through the water-because there was as yet very little land-they heard someone else shouting.

Ban- Coyote-was the one who was making all the noise.I'itoi went toward the sound, but Elder Brother went one way, and Ban went another. And so they passed each other. Coyote was shouting that he was the very first one out of the water and that he was all alone in the world.

I'itoi called to Ban, and at last they came together. Elder Brother explained to Coyote that he was not the first. And then the three-Great Spirit, Earth Medicine Man, and Coyote-started north together. As they went over the mud,I'itoi saw some very small tracks.

Elder Brother said, "There must be somebody else around." Then they heard another voice calling. It wasBitokoi — Big Black Beetle-which theMil-gahn, the Whites, call stinkbug.Bitokoi toldI'itoi that he was the very first to come out of the water.I'itoi did not even bother to answer him.

And then the four-Elder Brother, Earth Medicine Man, Coyote, and Big Black Beetle-went on together toward the east because, as you remember,nawoj, my friend, all things in nature go in fours.

June 1996

Dolores Lanita Walker's slender brown legs glistened with sweat as she pumped the mountain bike along the narrow strip of pavement that led from her parents' house in Gates Pass to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum several miles away. Lani wasn't due at her job at the concession stand until 9 A.M., but by going in early she had talked her way into being allowed to help with some of the other duties.

About a mile or so from the entrance, she came upon the artist with his Subaru wagon parked off on the side of the road. He had been there every morning for a week now, standing in front of an easel or sitting on a folding chair, pad in hand, sketching away as she came whizzing past with her long hair flying out behind her like a fine black cape. In the intervening days they had grown accustomed to seeing one another.

The man had been the first to wave, but now she did, too. "How's it going?" he had asked her each morning after the first one or two.

"Fine," she'd answer, pumping hard to gain speed before the next little lump of hill.

"Come back when you can stay longer," he'd call after her. Lani would grin and nod and keep going.

This morning, though, he waved her down. "Got a minute?" he asked.

She pulled off the shoulder of the road. "Is something the matter?" she asked.

"No. I just wanted to show you something." He opened a sketch pad and held it up so Lani could see it. The picture took her breath away. It was a vivid color-pencil drawing of her, riding through the sunlight with the long early-morning shadows stretching out before her and with her hair floating on air behind her.

"That's very good," she said. "It really does look like me."

The man smiled. "It is you," he said. "But then, I've had plenty of time to practice."

Lani stood for a moment studying the picture. Her parents' twentieth wedding anniversary was coming up soon, in less than a week. Instinctively she knew that this picture, framed, would make the perfect anniversary present for them.

"How much would it cost to buy something like this?" she asked, wondering how far her first paycheck from the museum would stretch.

"It's not for sale," the man said.

Lani looked away, masking her disappointment with downcast eyes. "But I might consider trading for it," he added a moment later.

Lani brightened instantly. "Trading?" she asked. "Really?" But then disappointment settled in again. She was sixteen years old. What would she have to trade that this man might want?

"You're an Indian, aren't you?" he asked. Shyly, Lani nodded. "But you live here. In Tucson, I mean. Not on a reservation."

Lani nodded again. It didn't seem necessary to explain to this man that she was adopted and that her parents were Anglos. It was none of his business.

"I've tried going out to the reservation to paint several times," he told her, "but the people seem to be really suspicious. If you'd consider posing for me, just for half an hour or so some morning, I'd give you this one for free."

"For free? Really?"

"Sure."

Lani didn't have to think very long. "When would you like to do it?" she asked.

"Tomorrow morning?"

"That would work," Lani said, "but I'd have to come by about half an hour earlier than this, otherwise I'll be late for work."

The man nodded. "That's fine," he said. "I'll be here. And could I ask a favor?"

Lani, getting back on her bike, paused and gave him a questioning look. "What's that?"

"Could you wear something that's sort of… well, you know"-he shrugged uncomfortably-"something that looks Indian?"

Lani grinned. "How about the cowgirl shirt and hat I wore for rodeo last year? That's what Indians all wear these days-cowboy clothes."

"Whatever you decide," the man said. "I'm sure it'll be just fine."

"I have to go," she told him, putting one foot on the pedal and giving the bike a shove as she hopped on. "Or else I'll be late today, too. See you tomorrow then."

"Sure thing," he called after her, waving again as she rode away.

Once Lani was out of sight, Mitch Johnson quickly began gathering up his material and stowing it back in the car. Soon the Subaru was headed back toward Gates Pass and toward the lookout spot up over the Walker house where he would spend the rest of the morning, watching and pretending to draw.

How was that, Andy?he asked himself as he unpacked his gear once more and started limping up the steep hillside. It worked just the way you always said it would. Like taking candy from a baby.

The dream that awakened David Ladd shortly before sunrise on the morning he was scheduled to leave his grandmother's house in Evanston was the same dream that had been plaguing him and robbing him of sleep for weeks. It had come for the first time the night before he was to take his last law school exam-his final final as he thought of it-although he knew that the hurdle of passing the bar was still to come.

The recurring nightmare was one he'd had from time to time over the years, but the last time was so long ago that he had nearly forgotten it. In the dream he was standing alone in the dark-a terrible soul-numbing blackness without even the comfort of a single crack of light shining under the door.

He listened, waiting endlessly for what he knew must come-for the sound that would tell him the life-and-death battle had begun, but for a long time there was nothing at all from beyond that closed door but empty, breathless silence. Once there had been other living people trapped in the dark prison with him. Rita Antone had been there with him, as had the old priest, Father John. But they were both dead now-dead and gone-and Davy Ladd was truly alone.

Finally, from outside the terrible darkness, he heard a faint but familiar voice calling to him from his childhood. "Olhoni, Olhoni."

Olhoni!Little Orphaned Calf-his secret Tohono O'othham name-a name David Ladd hadn't heard spoken in years. Only Rita Antone-the beloved Indian godmother he had called Nana Dahd — and his sister Lani-had called him that. For years Nana Dahd had used Davy's Indian name only when the two of them were alone and when there was no one else to hear. Later on she used it in the presence of Davy's baby sister as well.

Once again Nana Dahd 's song flowed through the darkness, bolstering him, giving him courage:

"Listen to me, LittleOlhoni.

Do not look at me, but do exactly as I say."

David Ladd held his breath, straining to hear once again the comforting chanted words of the Tohono O'othham song Rita had sung that fateful day while the life-and-death battle between his mother and the strange bald-headed man had raged outside that closed and locked root cellar door. The man who had burst into their home earlier that afternoon was Mil-gahn- a white, but in the song Rita had used to summon I'itoi to help them, she had called Andrew Carlisle by the word Ohb. In the language of the Tohono O'othham — the Desert People-that single word means at once both Apache and enemy.

Nana Dahd 's war chant had cast a powerful spell, instilling a mysterious strength in Davy and in other members of the embattled household. That strength had been enough to save them all from the Ohb' s evil that awful day. Davy, Rita, the priest, Davy's mother, and even the dog, Oh'o — Bone-had all been spared. At least, they had all lived. And at age six going on seven, Mil-gahn though he was, it had been easy for Davy Ladd to believe that I'itoi — Elder Brother-had interceded on their behalf; that the Spirit of Goodness had heard Nana Dahd 's desperate cry for help; that he had descended from his home on cloud-shrouded Baboquivari to help them vanquish their enemy.

Twenty years later, that was no longer quite so easy to accept. Even so, a grown-up David Ladd strained to listen and to gather strength from Rita's familiar but almost forgotten words. She had chanted the song in soft-spoken, guttural Papago-a language the evil Ohb hadn't been able to speak or understand. Back then Nana Dahd 's war song had served the dual purpose of summoning I'itoi to help them and also of telling a terrified little boy exactly what he had to do-what was expected of him.

But at the point where Rita's song should have been rising to a crescendo, it dwindled away to nothing. And now, with Nana Dahd gone, Davy was once again alone in the dark-a helpless, terrified child listening from one side of a door while on the other his mother fought for her life against the evil Mil-gahn intruder.

In his dream, David waited-for what seemed like hours-for the shocking roar of gunfire that would signal the beginning of the final stage of that deadly battle. But the gunshot never came. Instead, for no apparent reason, the door fell silently and inexplicably open, as though it had been unlatched by a ghost, or by a sudden stray gust of wind.

In real life, when the door had crashed open, the Ohb had been lying on the floor, screaming in rage and agony, with his face burned beyond recognition by a pan full of overheated bacon grease. His skin had blistered and bubbled, leaving his features horribly distorted like a strange wax mask that had been left to melt in the searing sun. Injured and bleeding, Davy's mother had stood over the injured man, still clutching the smoldering frying pan in her one good hand.

A terrified Davy had fled that awful scene. He had escaped through the slick, grease-spattered kitchen just as he had been ordered to do. Pushing open the sliding glass outside door, he had opened the way for his dog to get inside. Bone, outraged and bent on protecting his humans from the intruder, had hurtled into the room, going straight for the injured Ohb 's vulnerable throat.

Twenty years later in David's dream, the heavy cellar door fell open silently on an equally silent kitchen. And on the floor, instead of a defeated evil Ohb, Davy saw his sister. Lani hadn't even been born on the day Andrew Carlisle broke into the house in Gates Pass, and yet here she was, lying still and bloody, in the middle of the room. Without moving forward to touch her, without even emerging from the darkness of his cellar prison, David Ladd knew just from looking at her that Dolores Lanita Walker was dead.

He had awakened from the awful dream with his heart pounding and with his bedclothes soaked in sweat. He could barely breathe. For a while, he thought he was having a heart attack-that he was actually dying. Later that night, a jovial and not overly sympathetic emergency room physician told Davy that what had happened to him was an ordinary panic attack. Nothing serious at all, the doctor assured him. With the pressure of law school finals and all that, Davy was probably overstressed.

Nothing to worry about, the doctor said. He'd get over it.

The stress of those final exams was long gone. He had spent the last few weeks working around his grandmother's place, painting the things that needed painting, refinishing furniture, clearing out dead tree branches, and generally making himself useful. He did it in no small part to repay his grandmother, Astrid Ladd, for the many kindnesses she had offered him during the years he had been in Chicago going to school. The whole time he had lived there, he had stayed in the small chauffeur's apartment over his grandmother's garage.

He had hoped that a few days of hard physical labor would help relieve whatever was causing the panic attacks, but as he lay in bed, gasping for breath that early Friday morning, he knew it hadn't worked.

Brandon Walker was cutting wood. Cutting and stacking wood. Once a week-on Friday afternoons-a ramshackle old dump truck would arrive. Filled to the rim with a drying tangle of creosote, greasewood, palo verde, and mesquite, the truck would turn off Speedway, rumble down a steep incline, and then labor slowly up a rock-scattered sandy track that led to a house perched on a mountainside in Gates Pass west of Tucson, Arizona.

Out behind the house with its six-foot-high river-rock wall, the truck would disgorge another sorry load of doomed desert flora. For months now, Brandon Walker had waged a dogged one-man war, working to salvage the throwaway wood that had been bulldozed off the desert to make way for yet another thirsty golf course. He knew he was powerless to stop the burgeoning development that was eating away the beautiful Sonora Desert that he loved, but by cutting and stacking the wood, Brandon felt as though he was somehow keeping faith with the desert. In some small way he was keeping what the bulldozers destroyed from simply going to waste.

Late on those Friday afternoons, the empty dump truck would pull away, leaving behind its ruined mound of wood. Throughout the following week, Brandon would pull one log after another out of the snarl, saw it, and stack it. He had bought a gasoline-powered grinder that chewed up the smaller branches into chips. Someone had told him that those could probably be used as mulch, so each day he gathered the leavings into a growing mountain of shredded wood chips. The mound of drying chips and the stack of wood grew along the outside of the rock wall that stretched around the backyard perimeter of Brandon and Diana Ladd Walker's secluded desert compound.

The hard physical labor was good for him. He had sweated off the flab that was the natural outgrowth of four four-year terms as sheriff. His blood pressure was down, as were his triglycerides and his cholesterol. He ignored the fact that some of his neighbors thought him peculiar. During the hours when other men his age and in his position might have been out whacking endless golf balls around artificially grassy courses, Brandon fought his solitary battle with himself and with that week's messy jumble of wood, gradually bringing the dead mesquite and palo verde to order, even if he wasn't able-with a chain saw and ax-to work the same miracle on his own life.

Brandon worked on the wood in the early morning hours while the sun was still relatively cool. He put in another shift in the late afternoons and evenings, just before sunset. During the middle of the day, he slept.

It was funny that he could go into the bedroom in the late morning after a quick shower, tumble onto the bed, and fall fast asleep. At night he tossed and turned, paced and thought, and did everything but sleep. At regular bedtimes, as soon as he lay his head on the pillow, his mind snapped into overdrive, tormenting him with every perceived or imagined flaw in his life. During the day, with the sun on his back and with the sweat pouring off his face, he knew how lucky he was. Diana's increasing success meant that, after losing the election, there was no need for him to eat humble pie and go looking for another job. He'd even had offers. Roswell, New Mexico, had tried to entice him there with the job of police chief-a position he had been more than happy to turn down.

As soon as it was time to go to bed at night, however, his cup was half empty rather than half full. In the dead of night, Diana's growing monetary success merely underscored his own overriding sense of failure, his belief that he had somehow not been good enough or provided well enough. Diana never said anything of the kind, of course. She never even hinted at it. In the cold light of day he could see that his nighttime torment was merely a replay of his mother's and his ex-wife's old blame-game tapes. At night, however, that clear-cut knowledge disappeared the moment he turned out the lights.

In the darkness he wrestled with the reality of being fifty years old and let out to pasture. On his fortieth birthday, he had counted himself as one of the luckiest men in the world. He had a wife who loved him and, according to his lights, a reasonably well-blended family-his two sons, Diana's son, Davy, and the baby, Lani. The icing on the cake had been his job. The chance to be elected sheriff had fallen into his lap in a way he hadn't anticipated, but the job had suited him. He had been damn good at it.

Now, ten years later, most of his "dream" life was gone, wiped out of existence as if it had never existed in the first place. The job had disappeared with the results of the last election. Bill Forsythe was the new Pima County sheriff now, leaving Brandon Walker as an unemployed fifty-year-old has-been. He still had Diana, of course, but there was a cool distance between them now-probably one of his own making and one he doubted they'd ever bridge again. Careerwise, she had moved beyond him-beyond anything either one of them had anticipated. She no longer needed him, certainly not the way she had in the beginning. As for the kids-the boys were pretty much lost to him. Tommy was gone-dead, most likely; Quentin was a lying, cheating, boozing ex-con; and Davy was off in Chicago being beguiled by his paternal grandmother's money and the myth of his long-dead father. In this bleak landscape, Brandon Walker's only consolation, his sole ray of sunshine, was Lani-the baby he had once argued fiercely against adopting.

Now, though, laboring over the wood, he felt the need to distance himself from her as well. She was sixteen and still dependent, but she wouldn't be for long. She had a job now and a driver's license. It was only a matter of time before she, too, would grow up and slip away from him.

And when that happened, Brandon wondered, would there be anything left for him, anything at all? Well, maybe that never-ending mountain of wood, waiting to be chopped and stacked and salvaged. There would probably always be plenty of that.

He worked until it was too hot to continue, then he went in, showered, and threw himself onto the bed. Only then, at eleven o'clock in the morning, was he able to fall asleep.

From his perch high up on the mountain, Mitch Johnson had a perfect view of the Walkers' river-rock compound in Gates Pass. He liked to think of it as a God's-eye view. If he'd had a rifle in his hand right about then instead of a damned stupid sketch pad, Brandon Walker standing out by his woodpile would have been an easy shot. Bang, bang, you're dead. But as Andy had pointed out, killing Brandon Walker wasn't the point. Destroying him was. If the United States was going to continue to survive as a nation, people who contributed to that destruction-people who helped the job-eating illegal scum-had to be destroyed themselves.

"Mr. Johnson," Andy had asked him once, early on, "why do you suppose the cat toys with the mouse?"

Mitch Johnson had already learned that Andrew Carlisle was sometimes an irascible teacher. Even his most oddball question required a thoughtful response. "I suppose because it's fun," he had answered.

"For whom?" Andy had persisted.

"Certainly not for the mouse."

"Don't be so sure. You see, in those moments, the mouse must have some moments of clarity, when it may possibly see through its own terror and imagine surviving. Continuing. There's a real beauty in that, a sort of dance. The mouse tries to escape. The cat blocks it. The mouse tries again, and the same thing happens. As long as the mouse keeps trying, it hasn't lost hope. Once it does, the cat becomes bored and simply eats it. End of story."

They lay on their bunks in silence for a while, Mitch Johnson in the upper bunk and Carlisle in the lower so he could get to the toilet more easily during the night.

Mitch didn't want to seem stupid, but he couldn't see where Andy was going on this one. "So what's the point?" he finally asked.

"Did you enjoy shooting those guys in the back?" Andy asked.

A peculiar intimacy existed between the two men that Mitch Johnson was hard-pressed to understand. If somebody else had asked that question, Mitch would have decked the guy, but because it was Andy asking, Mitch simply answered. "Yes," he said.

"But wouldn't it have been better," Andrew Carlisle asked, "if they'd had the chance to ask you-to beg you-not to do it and you did it anyway? Wouldn't that have been more fun? Have you ever done it that way?"

"What do you mean?" Mitch said. "I did it the way I did it. I shot them and that's it."

"But it doesn't have to be," Andrew Carlisle told him. "You have a mind, an imagination. All you have to do is rewrite the scenario. Change your mind and change your reality. Close your eyes and see them walking again. Only this time, instead of pulling the trigger, you call out to them. You order them on their hands and knees. It was hot, wasn't it? The middle of summer?"

"Yes, almost the end of June."

"So imagine them on their hands and knees in the sand, with the hot earth blistering their skin. They're going to beg you not to shoot them. Plead with you to let them stand up again so they'll have the protection of their shoe leather between their skin and the sand. But if you wait, if you don't let them up off their hands and knees, eventually, they'll belong to you in the same way the mouse belongs to the cat, you see. In exactly the same way."

In the upper bunk, Mitch Johnson closed his eyes and let Andrew Carlisle's almost hypnotic voice flow over him. Mitch was right there again, standing on the bank of Brawley Wash, calling down to the wetbacks marching ahead of him.

"Stop," he shouted at them, and they did.

"Down!" he ordered. "Get down on your hands and knees." And they did that, too, all three of them groveling in the burning sand before him, all of them scraping their faces in the dirt. This must be what it feels like to be a king, Mitch thought. Or maybe even a god.

"Please," the older one said, speaking to Mitch in English rather than in Spanish. "Please, let my grandsons be. I'll do whatever you want. Just let my daughter's boys go free. Let them go."

"What would you do, old man?" Mitch asked him.

"Anything. Whatever you say."

"Put the barrel in your mouth."

For Mitch, that was such a sexually charged image that it almost broke the spell, but Andy's voice, washing over the whole scene, kept the images in play. Reaching up tentatively, the old man took the barrel of the gun and lovingly, almost reverentially, put it into his own mouth. And with the grandsons cowering there on the ground, and with the old man's eyes full on his face, Mitch Johnson pulled the trigger.

"And this time," Andrew Carlisle finished, "you can be sure the bastard is dead. What do you think?"

Mitch opened his eyes, unsure of what had happened but with the tracks of a wet dream still hot on his belly and between his legs.

"It beats jacking off, doesn't it?" Andrew Carlisle asked.

Yes, it does,Mitch meant to say, but, for some strange reason, he was already asleep.

Diana Ladd Walker was at work in her study. On that Friday morning she was supposed to be writing, working on the outline for her next book, Den of Iniquity. What she was doing instead was fielding phone calls. The month before her previous book, Shadow of Death, had won a Pulitzer. Even though the book had been out for nine months, the whirl of publicity surrounding the prize had pushed the book into numerous reprints. Not only that, it was back on the New York Times Best Sellers list as well, sitting at number eight, for the third week in a row.

Which is why, at a time when Diana should have been writing, she had been sucked instead back into book-promotion mode. She had left her desk and was on her way to shower when the phone rang again.

"It's me," Megan Wright announced. Megan was a publicist working for Diana's New York publisher, Sterling, Moffit, and Dodd. She was young-not more than twenty-five-but she was businesslike on the phone and brimmed with a kind of boundless energy and enthusiasm that suited her for the job.

"I'm calling with your weekend's marching orders," Megan continued. "I just wanted to double-check the schedule."

Obligingly, Diana hauled out her calendar and opened it to the proper page.

"First there's the University of Arizona Faculty Wives Tea this afternoon at two o'clock."

"I know," Diana observed dryly. "As a matter of fact, I was on my way into the bathroom to shower and dress when the phone rang."

"I'll hurry," Megan said. "And then there are the two appointments for tomorrow. I'm sorry about filling up your Saturday, but I didn't have any choice. Tomorrow's the only time I could schedule the Monty Lazarus interview. Don't forget, he's the West Coast stringer for several different magazines, so it's an important interview. My guess is he'll be pitching the story to all of them."

"Where's that interview?" Diana asked. "I wrote down his name but not where I'm supposed to meet him."

"In the lobby of the La Paloma Hotel at noon. I don't have either an address or a map. Can you find it, or will you need a driver?"

Tucson may have been totally foreign territory to Megan, but Diana had lived in the Tucson area for more than thirty years. "Noon, La Paloma," Diana repeated as she jotted the words into the correct slot on the calendar under the name, "Monty Lazarus."

"And don't worry about a driver," Diana continued. "Believe me, I can find La Paloma on my own."

"Mr. Lazarus likes to take his own pictures, so you'll need to go prepared for a photo shoot. I warned him that he'll have to finish up no later than four, though, so you'll have time enough to get back home, change, and be at the El Dorado Country Club for the Friends of the Library banquet at six. Mrs. Durgan, your hostess for that event, called just a few minutes ago to make sure your husband will be attending. She wanted to know if she should reserve a place at the head table. Brandon is going, isn't he?"

"He'll be there," Diana said grimly. "If he isn't, I'll know the reason why."

"Good," Megan said, sounding relieved. "I told her I was pretty sure he was planning to attend."

When the phone call finally ended, Diana headed for the shower once more. On her way through the bedroom, she found Brandon sound asleep on the bed. She tiptoed by without waking him. No doubt he needed it. He barely slept at night these days, passing the nighttime hours prowling the house or pacing out on the patio. The midday naps he took between woodcutting shifts were pretty much the only decent rest he seemed to get.

Closing the door between the bathroom and bedroom, she undressed and then stood in front of the mirror, observing her reflection. She wasn't that bad looking for being a couple of years over the half-century mark. The face and body reflected back at her bore an amazing resemblance to what her mother, Iona Dade Cooper, had looked like just before she got so sick.

In the past few years Diana had put on some weight, especially around the hips. Her softly curling auburn hair had two distinct streaks of white flowing away from either temple. But her skin was still good, and with the help of a little makeup she'd look all right, not only for today's afternoon tea, but also for the photo shoot and banquet tomorrow.

Stepping into the shower, though, she was still chewing on what was going on between Brandon and her. It was too bad that if she was going to win some big prize that it had to be for Shadow of Death, a book Brandon had never wanted her to write in the first place. Not only that, it was unfortunate that what should have been her finest hour, the pinnacle of a writing career that spanned more than twenty years, should come at a time when Brandon, after being tossed out of office, was at his very lowest ebb.

The last month and a half, in fact, had been pure hell. She and Brandon had been at one another's throats ever since the engraved invitation had arrived, summoning them both to the awards festivities in New York.

Brandon had backed away from the gold-embossed envelope with both their names on it as though that rectangular piece of paper were a coiled rattlesnake.

"No way!" he had declared. "No way in hell! I'm not going to New York for that, not in a million years!"

"Why not? It'll be fun."

"For you, maybe. People are interested in you; they want to meet you. And while you're busy talking, someone will turn to me and say, 'What is it you do, Mr. Walker? Are you a writer, too?' And when I tell them I used to be sheriff but I don't do anything anymore, their eyes will glaze over and pretty soon they'll wander away. It's a ball doing that. I love it."

Diana had winced at the sarcasm in his voice, but she also knew the perils of playing second banana. She had felt the same way about attending political gatherings-the rubber-chicken luncheons and living room campaign coffee hours-back when Brandon had been a candidate for public office. But she had gone. She had kept her mouth shut, she had put on her good clothes and company manners, and she had gone. She had served as the proper political wife and had behaved the way political wives the world over are expected to behave.

Part of what had made that easy to do was the fact that she had believed so strongly in what Brandon Walker stood for. She had backed his plans for cleaning up the sheriff's department, for getting rid of the crooks and putting an end to the graft and corruption.

To be fair, back when she was first published, he had been there for her, as well. Those first few book tours when he had sometimes been able to join her for a few days at a time had been a ball. Back then, his going to functions with her had been easier for him because he had been more sure of his own place in the scheme of things. The ego damage associated with losing the election-from being booted out of a job he loved-seemed to have knocked the emotional pins out from under him. It was almost as though there had been a death in the family, and the grieving process had left him lost and directionless.

But to Diana's way of thinking, the main problem with the Pulitzer and everything associated with it was that the accolades were all coming to Diana over Shadow of Death, a book Brandon Walker had opposed from the very beginning.

"Don't bring all that stuff up again," he had warned her on the day Andrew Carlisle's letter had arrived from the Arizona State Prison. "Let sleeping dogs lie."

But she hadn't followed his advice. She had gone ahead and written the book anyway. And now, based on that, Diana Ladd Walker's stock had shot way up in the world of publishing. Sandy Hawkins, Diana's editor at Sterling, Moffit, and Dodd, was downright ecstatic. Requests for interviews and public appearances were flowing in. Meanwhile, Diana's marriage was in the toilet.

She and Brandon had argued bitterly over the trip to New York, with him citing any number of plausible but nonetheless phony excuses for not going. He didn't have a tux. With only one of them working, he couldn't see squandering all that money on his airfare. He hated being locked up in an airplane seat without enough room for his long legs. Most of all, in his opinion, Lani shouldn't be left home on her own, not with the end-of-school party season heating up.

"Why don't you say what you mean?" an exasperated Diana had demanded finally when she tired of arguing. "Why don't you just admit it? You don't want to go."

Brandon complied at once. "You're right," he had said. "I don't want to go."

"Fine!" Diana had stormed. "Suit yourself, but one of these days you're going to have to get over it, Brandon. One of these days you're going to have to realize that losing that election was not the end of the world."

She regretted her outburst almost immediately, but she had retreated to her office without an apology while Brandon had made tracks for his damned woodpile. And two weeks later, when Diana Ladd Walker flew off to New York, she had done so alone, with the quarrel between them still unresolved. A month and a half later, his role as "author consort" was still a bone of contention.

When the invitation came for her to speak at the annual Friends of the Library banquet, there had been yet another firefight. This time, though, Diana had dug in her heels.

"Look," she had told him. "I can see your not going to the faculty tea. If I could get out of that one myself, I would. But the library banquet is something for the whole community, the community that elected you to office for sixteen years. People expect you to be there. I expect you to be there. We're married, Brandon. I don't want to spend my life out in public as one of those married singles."

"But I hate all that crap," he argued. "I hate standing around with a drink in my hand, looking like a sap, and listening to some little old lady talk about something I've never heard of."

"Get over it," Diana had snapped back at him. "If you were tough enough to face down armed crooks in your day, you ought to be able to stand up to any little old lady in the land."

Stepping out of the shower, Diana stood toweling her hair dry. Suddenly, out of nowhere, something her mother had told her once came back to her as clearly as if she had heard the words yesterday instead of thirty years earlier.

Iona Dade Cooper had been at home in Joseph, Oregon, dying of cancer. Diana, away at school at the University of Oregon in Eugene, had finally been forced to drop out temporarily to care for her. Diana had been sitting in the chair next to her mother's bed telling of her secret ambition not only to marry Garrison Ladd but also to become a writer.

"You can't have it all, you know," Iona had said quietly. "If you try to do too much, something is bound to suffer."

Standing in the bathroom thirty years later, Diana had to swallow a sudden lump in her throat. She remembered arguing the point with her mother back then, telling Iona passionately exactly how wrong she was.

"These are the sixties," Diana had said with the absolute conviction of a know-it-all twenty-one-year-old. "Women are moving into their own now, Mother. Everything is possible, you'll see."

Iona Dade Cooper had died a few months later without seeing anything of the kind. And Diana, now several years older than her mother had lived to be, was forced to acknowledge that Iona's assessment was one hundred percent accurate.

Mom, you were right, after all,Diana Cooper Ladd Walker admitted to herself. You really can't have it all.