Hour of the Hunter: With Bonus Material: A Novel of Suspense

by J. A. Jance

  “Because of George,” Iona said.

  “George? What did he do?”

  “He bought two hundred dollars’ worth of rodeo tickets the last day of the contest,” Iona said. “He gave them away to a bunch of poor kids here in La Grande who couldn’t have gone otherwise.”

  “He didn’t buy them from me,” Diana said. She had sold tickets until she was blue in the face, but she didn’t remember selling more than one to George Deeson.

  “I gave him the tickets and took the money, but they were from your ticket allocation. Even though you didn’t sell them yourself, that batch of tickets put you over the top. Remember, there was only a quarter of a point difference between you and Charlene Davis.”

  “So Dad was right,” Diana said, feeling her one moment of triumph, her rodeo-queen victory, slip through her fingers in retrospect. “I did cheat after all.”

  “No, Diana,” Iona had said firmly, squeezing her daughter’s hand despite the pain it caused her. “You’ve earned every damn thing you’ve ever gotten.”

  It was the only time Diana ever remembered hearing her mother use the word damn. As years went by, she was beginning to understand it a little. Her name, not Charlene’s, had been the name on the scholarship at the registrar’s office at the university in Eugene. Her name, Diana’s name, was what it said on the two degrees, one from the University of Oregon and now a master’s from the University of Arizona. She had earned it all, with the timely help of both George Deeson and her mother.

  Lying in bed at her home in Gates Pass, Diana’s eyes misled over. What would have happened to her if George Deeson hadn’t driven into her life, bringing Waldo with him? Where would she be now? Married to some drunken logger in Joseph like Charlene was, or else still living in the house by the garbage dump. Would her life have been worse or better? There was no way to tell.

  Her grief for George Deeson, dead now these four years, spilled over into grief for Waldo, who had broken a leg during her first semester in Eugene and had to be put down. While she was at it, she shed a tear for her mother, and finally a few for herself as well. What if Brandon Walker was right? What if she didn’t have guts enough to pull the trigger? What if Andrew Carlisle killed her? What kind of legacy would she leave for her child?

  Still wide awake, she thought of all those boxes sitting in the root cellar, waiting for someone to sort through them—her mother’s boxes and, more than that, her husband’s. Whose job was that? Who was the person whose responsibility it was to go through them, to sort the wheat from the chaff so Davy or someone else wouldn’t have to do it later? There were things in those boxes that should be kept and saved for him and others that should be thrown away and never again see the light of day.

  It was weeks before she could face returning to Gary’s office, weeks before she could approach the desk again with its stilled typewriter and haunting stack of blank paper.

  She started with the bottom drawer, thinking that would be the least painful, but of course, she was wrong. Had Gary been smart enough, he would have got rid of it, would have destroyed it, but she found the damning envelope with its University of Arizona return address almost immediately. Curious, she pulled out the sheaf of loose papers and scanned through them, recognizing at once the clumsy effort of one of her own early short stories, the one she had submitted as part of her application to the Creative Writing program.

  At first she noticed only the stilted phrases, the graceless prose that flows at tedious length from the minds and hearts of beginning writers, but then her eyes were drawn to the handwritten comment at the end. “Gary,” it said. “Your work here is, naturally, a beginning effort, but it shows a good deal of promise. We’ll discuss the possibilities for this manuscript in greater detail once you’re enrolled in the program and fully underway.” It was signed, “A. Carlisle.”

  For a full minute, she stared down at the paper, trying to make sense of it all. Then the full weight of Gary’s betrayal thundered over her, burying her in a landslide of emotion.

  Gary had gained admission to Andrew Carlisle’s program using her story, not his own. Not that she would have wanted to be in it after all, she thought bitterly, but the rejection had caused her to doubt her own ability, to retreat into teaching, to settle for second best rather than following her own aspirations.

  Up to that very moment, in spite of everything else, Diana Ladd had grieved for her dead husband. Now she exploded in a raging fit of anger.

  “Damn you!” she screamed in fury at Gary Ladd’s unconcerned Smith-Corona. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

  Having once allowed herself to succumb to anger, it never once left her. It functioned as a whip and a prod, goading her to succeed at writing no matter what obstacles might fall in her path.

  Diana dropped the papers, scattering them like leaves across the desk and floor. She fled Gary’s office and never returned. Only as she left for the hospital to have Davy, with the arrival of the movers barely minutes away, did she give Rita permission to go into Gary’s abandoned office and pack up whatever she found there.

  With the exception of appropriating the typewriter for her own, hi the intervening years, Diana had never examined any of the boxes, but Rita was nothing if not thorough. Therefore, that purloined short story must still be there, carefully packed away among all of Gary Ladd’s other books and papers. That story was one of the things that demanded both attention and destruction, although there were probably plenty of others. Only Diana could tell the difference. It was her job, her responsibility, and nobody else’s.

  “Mom?” a small voice asked from the doorway. “Are you awake yet?”

  “I’m awake, Davy.”

  “I’m hungry. Are we going to have breakfast? We’re still out of tortillas.”

  “We’re going to have breakfast,” she said determinedly, getting out of bed. “I’m going to fix it.”

  While Myrna Louise was making breakfast, Andrew Carlisle made a quick survey of her room. He found her extra checkbooks and the savings-account book in the bottom of her lingerie drawer, the same place where she’d always kept it, along with a fistful of twenties in hard, cold cash. The balance in both accounts was pitifully small in terms of lifetime savings for someone of her age. It was just as well she wouldn’t be around to get much older, Carlisle thought He was actually doing her a favor. Maybe she was planning to land on his doorstep when the time came, expecting her son to support her in her old age. Fat chance.

  Out in the garage, he eased Jake’s partially opened bag of lime into the trunk, careful not to spill any of it on Johnny Rivkin’s Hartmann bag. Garden-variety lime probably wouldn’t be enough to strip all the meat off the bones, but it would help kill the odor.

  They had breakfast, a cheerful, family-style breakfast Myrna Louise was careful not to fuss too much. Afterward, while she cleaned up the kitchen, Andrew loaded the car. Lida Givens, that nosy old bat from next door, came over to the fence to see what he was doing and to chat for a while. “Going on a trip?” she asked.

  He nodded. “It’s been a long time since Mama had a chance to get out of town. We’re going to drive up past the Grand Canyon and maybe on up through the canyon country of Utah. That’s always been one of my favorite places.”

  “Never been there myself,” Lida Givens asserted. “Wouldn’t know it from a hole in the ground. I much prefer California.”

  Andrew started for the car, then paused, snapping his fingers as if at a sudden afterthought. “Say, are you going to be in town for the next week and a half to two weeks?”

  “Reckon. Don’t have any place to go at the moment The kids are busy with their own jobs and families. They don’t like me dropping in unless I give them plenty of advance warning. Why?”

  “Would you mind bringing in the mail? And if you see the paper boy, tell him to put us on vacation until we get back.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll be happy to.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Andrew Carlisle told Lida Givens with a
sincere smile. “Living far away, it’s been a real blessing for me to know my mother’s in a place with such terrific neighbors.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Lida said. “That’s what neighbors are for.”

  Myrna Louise was delighted to get in the car and go for a ride someplace, even if it was just an overnight jaunt Excited as a little kid, she packed a bag and had it waiting by the door for Andrew to load while she did the breakfast dishes.

  Years ago, not even that long ago, she would have left the dishes sitting in the sink to rot while she went away, but not anymore. Not in her cozy little house on Weber Drive. What would the neighbors think if they happened to glance in a window and see that she’d left without doing the dishes?

  She was pleased that Andrew seemed to have forgiven her for burning up his stupid manuscripts. She probably shouldn’t have, really. Writing had to be a lot of work, but he seemed totally at ease this morning, whistling to himself as he loaded the car. She watched out the window as he stopped briefly to chat across the fence with Lida Givens, the lady from next door.

  Thank God Andrew was making the effort to be sociable for a change, Myrna Louise thought, and thank God he hadn’t done anything to dispel the Phil Wharton myth. Lida Givens had a son who was a dentist and a daughter who sold real estate out in California somewhere. It was particularly important that Andrew keep up the Phil Wharton charade with Lida Givens even if he didn’t do it with anyone else.

  At nine they headed for Tucson. The heat was incredibly oppressive, and the Valiant had no air-conditioning. They drove with the windows open and the wind roaring in their ears. Far to the south and east, thunderclouds edged over the horizon, but they were only teasers, hints of the coming rainy season that would bring blessed relief from some of the heat but they would bring additional humidity as well.

  “Have you made any plans?” Myrna Louise shouted over the noise of the car.

  It was fine for Andrew to come and visit for a day or two, but she certainly didn’t want to be saddled with him on a permanent basis. She was eager to know how soon he’d be moving on.

  “I’m looking for a place somewhere around Tucson, someplace I can afford, so I can get back to writing.”

  “Good,” Myrna Louise breathed. Tucson was both close enough and far enough away.

  “I don’t like oatmeal,” Davy complained, picking at the cereal in his bowl.

  “Not even with brown sugar and raisins?” Diana asked.

  Davy shrugged. “They help, I guess. I just like tortillas better. Why don’t you fix tortillas?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Will Rita make tortillas for us when she gets home today?”

  Diana thought of the huge cast covering Rita’s smashed left arm. “She won’t be doing that for a while,” Diana said. “At least not until after her arm comes out of the cast.”

  “You mean we can’t have any until she gets better? That could take a long time.”

  “Maybe I could try making some,” Diana offered tentatively. “I mean, if Rita were here to coach me and tell me what to do.”

  Davy’s jaw dropped. “Really? You mean you’d learn to make them yourself?”

  “I said I’d try.”

  “Do you swear?”

  Davy’s unbridled enthusiasm was catching. This was the first sign of life Diana had seen in her son for several days. She put her hand over her heart and grinned at him. “I swear,” she said.

  Davy helped clear the table, then went to feed the dog, fairly skipping as he did so. He had been so strangely subdued that it pleased her to see him acting like his old self.

  It was such a small thing, really, promising to make tortillas, but it signified something else, she realized, something much more important Promises made meant they would have to be kept, and that implied a future—a future with her in it.

  Before, she had thought about sorting Gary’s and her mother’s things as an ending, as a means of putting her house in order in preparation for yet another catastrophe. Now, for the first time, she saw the other side of the coin. It could go either way. She might just as easily be doing it as a beginning, as a way of putting the past behind her and finally getting on with her life.

  I’ll do the dishes first, she thought, then I’ll get started.

  It is said that on the Third Day, I’itoi gave each tribe a basket. When all the women were busy learning how to make baskets, I’itoi saw that it would be good for each one to mark her baskets in a different way so they would know who had made each different basket and what it should be used for. So I’itoi brought the women seed pods from the planting, which the Mil-gahn call devil’s claw. He showed all the women how to weave the black fiber from the seed pods into their baskets to make a pattern to mark their baskets, and by each pattern, the baskets would be known.

  Now while all the women were working so hard learning to make the baskets, many of the Little people were watching as well. The birds especially, watching from a big mesquite tree, were curious about what I’itoi and the women were doing. Finally, u’u whig, the birds, come down from the tree and stole some of the fiber for making baskets. They flew back to the tree with it and tried to make a basket of their own. But they had not watched I’itoi closely enough, and when their basket was finished, it slipped around and hung upside down on the bottom of the branch.

  When this happened, the birds began to laugh. I’itoi heard them laughing and came to see what was so funny. When he saw what they had done, I’itoi was very pleased. He told the birds that they might make baskets for themselves. He said they should call their baskets nests and use them for homes.

  And that is why, my friend, the u’u whig, the birds, make nests even to this day, and all this happened on the Third Day.

  Diana had barely moved the first stack of boxes out of the root cellar and into the kitchen when the phone rang. She looked at it warily, afraid of who might be calling. Her number was unlisted, but there were probably ways to get unlisted numbers if you knew how to go about it.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Diana Ladd?” questioned a strange male voice.

  “Who’s calling please?” she asked, while her heart hammered in her throat and her knees wobbled.

  “My name is Father John. I’m the associate priest, semi-retired actually, out at San Xavier Mission on the reservation. Is Diana Ladd there? I need to speak to her.”

  A priest? She didn’t know any priests, not any at all. Why would a strange priest be calling her? Was this a trick? Was it Andrew Carlisle pretending to be a priest? She wouldn’t put it past him.

  “This is Diana,” she said at last.

  “Good. I’m sure this is all going to sound very strange,” the man continued, “but I was wondering if it would be possible for me to stop by and pay you a visit?”

  Pay a visit? At the house? Did he know where she lived? “Why?” she asked.

  “We have a mutual friend,” he said mysteriously. “Rita Antone, the lady who lives with you.”

  “Funny,” Diana returned. “I don’t recall her ever mentioning your name.”

  “I’m not surprised. We had a falling out years ago. I’m just now getting around to mending fences.”

  “Look,” Diana said impatiently. “Rita isn’t here. If you want to talk to her when she gets back…”

  “It’s you I need to talk to, Mrs. Ladd,” the priest interrupted. “It’s about Rita, but I don’t need to see her. In fact, it would probably be better if I didn’t. I saw her in the hospital yesterday. I’m afraid my visit upset her.”

  He sounded priestly. The inflections were right, the tone of voice, the attitude. “Father,” Diana said, “I’m very busy right now. Couldn’t this wait a few days?”

  “It’s a matter of life and death,” he insisted. “I must see you today.”

  “Where?”

  “I could come there.”

  “No,” she said at once. “Absolutely not.” She wasn’t dumb enough to invite a strange
man into her home. “I could come out to the mission, I suppose,” she suggested.

  If the caller had been Andrew Carlisle posing as a priest, that would have been the end of it. Instead, he agreed readily. “Good,” he said, “but would you please not bring the boy?”

  “I have to bring him,” Diana told him. “Rita is my only sitter. She isn’t here.”

  “Well,” he said, “all right then, but I must speak to you in private. Perhaps the boy can go over to the convent and visit for a little while. One of the nuns over there, Sister Katherine, is particularly good with children. I’m sure she would be happy to watch him for us if I ask her to. How soon can I expect you?”

  “By the time we get cleaned up and ready to go, it’ll probably be around an hour.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be waiting in my office, which is just behind the bookstore. Ask anyone, and they’ll direct you.”

  Diana hung up the phone. So Father John wasn’t a fake, but why would a former friend of Rita’s want to talk to Diana? That was more than she could understand.

  She went to the back door. Davy was swinging high on the metal swing set his grandparents from Chicago had sent as his previous year’s Christmas present. On her own, Diana never could have spent that much money on a single toy.

  “Come on, Davy,” she called. “You have to come in now and get cleaned up.”

  “How come? Me and Bone are playing.”

  “Bone and I,” she corrected firmly. “Come on. We have to go to church.”

  He came to the door, frowning and sulking. “To church? I didn’t know this was Sunday,” he said. “And why do we have to go anyway? Rita goes to church. You never do.”

  “Today’s an exception,” she said. “And it’s Monday, not Sunday, so wipe that frown off your face and let’s get going. If you’re lucky, maybe somebody out there will be selling popovers.”