by J. A. Jance
“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 sa
id.
Convinced he still didn’t have a straight answer but unable to crack the four boys’ united front, Brandon turned back to Davy. “Do me a favor, Davy. Stick with the training wheels for a while, son. Thank God that’s only a baby tooth. If it were a permanent one, your mother would kill us both. Go see Rita. She’ll help clean you up.”
The last thing Davy wanted to do was see Rita right then. Part of him wanted to tell her what had happened. But he didn’t know what to say. For a week he kept quiet, watching Nana Dahd’s broad features for any sign that she had discovered her loss.
The next weekend, when the three boys again came to visit, Brandon took the two older boys to see Rocky, a movie that was deemed too old for Brian and Davy.
As soon as the two younger boys were left alone in Davy’s room, Brian Fellows unzipped his knapsack. “Look,” he whispered, emptying the contents of his bag out onto the bottom bunk.
On top of the heap were the extra clothes Brian always had to bring along in case he had an accident. But underneath the clothing, scattered on the bedspread, lay a collection of items most people would have dismissed as little-boy junk—the denuded spine of a feather; a shard of pottery with the faint figure of a turtle etched into the red clay; a chunk of rock, gray on one side and covered with lavender crystals on the other; the hank of long black hair; Rita’s owij—her basket-making awl; Rita’s lost son’s Purple Heart. Last of all, Davy spied Father John’s losalo—the string of rosary beads—that the old man had given Rita the night he died.
For a moment Davy gazed in wondering, hushed silence at the medicine basket’s missing treasures. “Where did you get them?” he asked finally.
“I stole them,” Brian said casually. “Quentin had them hidden in his sock drawer, and I stole them back.”
“When he finds out, he’ll kill you.”
“No, he won’t,” Brian answered. “He’ll only beat me up. He does that all the time. It’s no big deal.”
For the first time in his life, Davy Ladd realized he had a friend, a real one—a friend whose name wasn’t Rita.
“But Tommy and Quentin are so mean,” Davy said. “Aren’t you afraid of them?”
“Not really,” Brian replied with a cheerful shrug. “They’re so afraid of getting caught, they never hurt me enough so it shows.”
7
Coyote had listened to the council in the village before Old Limping Man and Young Man started on their journey across the desert. Ban had decided that anything important enough to take men back into the burning lands was worth examining. When Coyote’s stomach is full of food and water, his curiosity is very active. So Ban had gone ahead of the two men to find out for himself what it was that Buzzard had seen and Jackrabbit had told him about.
But now in that burning desert, Coyote was running for his life. The Ali-chu’uchum O’othham—the Little People—were after him—the bees, flies, ants, wasps, and insects of all kinds. Gohhim O’othham—Old Limping Man—could still speak the language of I’itoi which all the animals and all the Little People understand. He called out to the Pa-nahl—the Bees—and to the Wihpsh—the Wasps—to ask what was the trouble.
The Little People were very angry, but they stopped. They told Gohhim O’othham that the two men must go with them and that they must keep Coyote away. But there was no danger from Coyote anymore. Ban was too busy rubbing his sore nose in the dirt.
And so the two men—Old Limping Man and Young Man—followed Ali-chu’uchum—the Little People. After a time the men saw a strange cloud made up of the flying ones—the bees and flies and wasps. They looked down and saw the ground covered with moving specks. And the moving specks were ants of all kinds—big and little, brown and black.
The word of the coming of the men became known. The cloud of Little People spread out and parted. Then the men saw a woman lying with her eyes closed. The woman was being kissed by the wings of hundreds of bees. They were fanning her and keeping her cool, and all the while Pa-nahl—the Bees—were singing very softly.
At first the men were afraid. They knew that while the Little People are very, very wise, they are also very quick-tempered. But Old Man listened to the song the bees were singing. The song was a prayer for help for this woman who was their friend. So the two men went to the woman and gave her water.
The woman moved and spoke, but the men could not understand what she said. She did not open her eyes. They gave her pinole and water. Then they raised her up and began the return trip to the distant village.
Driving to his appointment, Mitch Johnson couldn’t help gloating. All morning long he had made a conscious effort not to rush, even though the clock had been ticking inevitably toward his scheduled appointment with Diana Ladd Walker. Gradually—vaguely, at first—the girl’s form had taken shape on the paper. The perspective was masterful—graphic without being anatomical. He wanted her to be sexy in this one. The dissection part, the one that peeled away the outside layers—would come later.
For Mitch, one of the most difficult aspects of the drawing came when it was time to detail the girl’s softly rising and falling chest. With Lani sound asleep, the virginal breasts had gone so soft and flaccid they were almost flat. The only solution for that was for Mitch to touch them and caress the nipples until they stood at attention. The difficulty and thrill of that was bringing the body to wakeful attention without necessarily disturbing the girl. If she had awakened and started struggling and fighting right then, it might have done irreparable harm to the pose. It would have spoiled the whole mood, destroyed the magic exhilaration of creation.
But of course, the full force of the drug was still upon her, and she hadn’t awakened. Lying there still as death, she had stirred only slightly beneath his touch, an unconscious half-smile on her lips as though, even in sleep, Mitch’s tender caress on her body somehow pleasured her. That almost drove him crazy. Breathing hard, Mitch once again retreated to the safety of his easel, forcing himself to regard her inviting body as an artistic challenge, as an enticing morsel to be avoided at all costs rather than as defenseless territory begging to be conquered and exploited.
And the fact that he could do that—put her on paper without giving in to the raging river of temptation—left him with a feeling of power and incredible superiority. Touching her body without immediately tearing into it was something Andy Carlisle never could have done. Mitch had the pleasure of knowing right then that he was a better man than his teacher. Godlike, Andy had tried to mold Mitch in his own image, but in this instance the created had moved beyond his creator.
After the breasts it had been time to do the face and hair. If anything, he wished the girl’s hair had been a little longer than it was. That way the dark edge of the hair would have concealed some of the breasts rather than simply falling across the shoulders. But that couldn’t be helped. This was to be a study of the actual girl, and so he copied the line of hair exactly as it presented itself.
The final item on his morning’s agenda had been the necklace. Mitch had been around Tucson long enough to know that the maze design on her necklace had something to do with Indians, but he wasn’t exactly sure what. He took great pains to see that he got it right, that he copied it exactly. You never could tell when . . .
As soon as the thought came to mind, it had left him shivering. That was a way to top Andy’s tapes, something Andy never would have conceived of. Andy had talked a good game—murder as art—but he wouldn’t have had the skill to execute such a breathtaking idea.
Mitch would re-create the design on the flat plane of the girl’s belly, carving it into her flesh so that slowly oozing blood would be the actual ink. That meant Mitch would have to do that final act while the girl was still alive—maybe drugged again so she wouldn’t move and mess things up. One question in Mitch’s mind was whether or not, working free-hand with an X-Acto knife, he would be able to get the nested concentric circles right. The other difficulty would be placement. The most artistically unifying concept would be to use tha
t fine little belly button of hers as the head of the man in the maze.
That would see Andy’s goddamned tapes and raise him one better.
It was on that note that he walked into the hotel to meet with Lani Walker’s mother.
With her hair, nails, and makeup all professionally attended to, Diana Ladd Walker headed for La Paloma and the scheduled Monty Lazarus interview. His wasn’t a byline she recognized, but that didn’t mean anything. The magazines he wrote for were name brand, and Megan had been delighted to schedule an interview with him.
As Diana wended her way through Tucson’s relatively light summertime traffic, she smiled at the idea that she was going to a fashionable hotel to be interviewed by a reporter with a national audience. As a general rule, interviews were something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Still, considering Diana’s humble origins, the very fact that she was being interviewed at all had to count as its own peculiar miracle.
Diana Cooper Ladd Walker had spent her early life in the clean but shabby caretaker’s quarters at the garbage dump back in Joseph, Oregon. Diana’s mother had scrubbed and fussed and worked to keep the place up, but it had remained indelibly “the old Stevens place”—a run-down one-house slum that was theirs to use only as long as Max Cooper managed to hang on to his unenviable position as Joseph’s garbageman.
The job was anything but glamorous. Other than the house, it paid little more than a pittance, but it kept a roof over their heads. With a marginally motivated and often drunk husband, it was the best Iona Dade Cooper could hope for. Max kept both the job and the house for years—far longer than anyone expected—but only because Iona carried more than her share of the load. Max owned the official title of garbageman. Iona did most of the work—his and hers both.
As a child Diana hadn’t been blessed with many friends. The few she did have usually found dozens of excuses to explain why they could never come play at her house. For years Diana had searched for ways to make her house more acceptable, more welcoming.
