Kiss the Bees

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 werekukui 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, onlyshegoi — greasewood bushes. The greasewood bushes were almost white from dryness.

The third day they found nothing but a few dry sticks ofmelhog — 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 theirhahki — a parched roasted wheat which theMil-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 Mazatlan 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. Nicolaides 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 lattes 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."