by J. A. Jance
"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 affor
d 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 ofTash — the Sun-in what theMil-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 wasJeweth — 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. Thiskihhim — this village-had been built by people from the south. They said they had come to be near the great Medicine Woman of theTohono 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.
WhenKulani 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 wasMualig 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, theTohono 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 broughtWihpsh — the Wasps. Then cameMumuwali — the Flies,Komikam — the Beetles, andTotoni — 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 Deathtells 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.
