Hour of the Hunter (43 page)

But far more serious than all the others put together was the loss of time. Everything had to be compressed and hurried, without opportunity for the kind of careful planning Andrew Carlisle considered to be the major prerequisite for getting away with this particular murder.

Instead of having days to work out the logistics of his attack against Diana Ladd, it would have to be done in a matter of hours.

He would have to retrieve the damning evidence from his mother either before or after the main event.

Carlisle knew that his mother hated staying in hotels, and she had severely limited resources besides. Like an old war-horse, she would, in all likelihood, head directly back to the barn, unless of course the cops picked her up for reckless driving somewhere along the way. The very thought of that possibility caused his heart to beat faster.

Damn that woman anyway! He'd teach her to interfere.

A door opened in the yard below. He trained his binoculars on a long-legged Diana Ladd. Tanned and wearing shorts and a tank top, she emerged from the back of the house carrying a tall plastic trash can that she emptied into a rusty burning barrel at the far end of the yard.

Then, using a series of matches, she set fire to the contents of the barrel and stood watching them burn.

While she tended the fire, a huge black dog gamboled up to her and dropped a tennis ball at her feet. Obligingly, the woman picked it up and threw it across the yard. The dog raced off at breakneck speed to retrieve it. They played like that for several minutes. When the woman quit a short time later, so did the dog, still carrying leaving Andrew Carlisle sitting alone on the mountain, pondering this newest wrinkle in his well-laid plans. That dog would have to go, he thought.

He worried about the gun she was wearing. Someone might have warned her.

Why else would Diana Ladd be walking around with a leather holster strapped to her hip?

Of the two, the gun and the dog, the dog was really far more serious.

Surprise could take away any advantage having a weapon gave her, but the dog could bark and rob him of the initiative. Andrew Carlisle thought about the problem for some time, considering the issue from every angle like a scientist dealing with some small but pesky detail that stands in the way of completing a major project. When the idea finally came to him, he acted on it at once.

Sticking to the thin cover as much as possible, he made his way down the Mountainside and back to the Matador, which he had left parked at a shooting-range Parking lot half a mile away. Once in the car, he headed for the nearest grocery store. Cheap hamburger was easy to find in any part of town, but liquid slug bait wasn't. For that, he would have to go a little farther afield to a top-notch nursery halfway across Tucson proper.

He hurried through traffic, careful not to speed, not calling any undue attention to the all-too-distinctive red-and-black car. A nice white Ford would have been better, but the Matador's price was right.

Besides, he didn't expect to keep it for long.

Driving was easier than sitting on the mountain watching the house. It calmed his nerves. The more he thought about it, the more determined he was that he would be careful.

Just because he'd been forced to telescope his plans didn't mean he had to blunder around or make any more costly mistakes. Letting Myrna Louise slip away was bad enough, but if things worked out the way he hoped, he'd soon have her back in hand.

They say it happened long ago that a woman lived near the base of Baboquivari Mountain with her husband and her baby. During the day, the husband would go to work in the fields that were close to the village.

After working hard in the fields, he often did not want to make the long trip home, so he would stay in the village and visit with friends.

This made the woman sad, but she stayed with her baby and waited for her husband, who did not come home.

One night, when the woman was all alone, she heard Ban, Coyote, call, but this was not the usual call of Coyote, so she went out to look for him. It was very dark. At first she could not see, but finally she saw his eyes, glowing like coals in the firelight. He was a large old Coyote, but even when she came close to him, he did not move. At last she came close enough to see that he was lying beside a pool of water.

"Brother," she said, for this was when the Tohono O'othham, the Desert People, still knew l'itoi's language and could speak to the animals.

"Large Old Coyote, why did you call to me?"

"I came to this pool to drink the water," he told her. "This rock shifted and trapped my foot. Will you help me?"

So the woman moved the rock, but by then the Large Old Coyote's foot was so badly injured that he still could not walk. So the woman fed him and watered him and nursed him back to health. She called him Old Lame Coyote.

In the evening, when the woman's husband did not come home and she was very lonely, Old Lame Coyote would tell her news of the desert-where to find honey, when the rains would come again, where the best pifion nuts could be found. In this way, the lonely woman and Lame Old Coyote became good friends.

When she got out of the car, it was all Myrna Louise could do to make it into the house and down the hall to her room.

Without taking off her clothing, she fell sideways across the bed. She was no longer angry with Andrew, and she hoped by now that he was over being angry with her. It was too bad that whenever they spent any time together, they always ended up quarreling.

She was awakened by a knock on the door, and there was Lida, from next door, holding the newspaper and two pieces of mail.

"Back so soon?" Lida asked. "From the way Phil talked this morning, I thought you'd be gone for at least a week.

I already told the newspaper boy to stop delivery, just like Phil said, but he had to deliver today's and maybe tomorrow's. Here's your mail.

I picked that up, too. No sense leaving it for someone to go snooping through."

Myrna Louise stared blankly. Lida's words made no sense. She had stopped the paper and was collecting the mail? What was going on?

"I'm sorry, Lida," Myrna Louise said. "I'm not feeling well."

"No wonder you came back. I was afraid the kind of trip Phil was planning would be too much for you. Driving to the Grand Canyon isn't my idea of a picnic."

Grand Canyon? Myrna Louise thought. Who's going there? It was more than Myrna Louise could stand. "You'll have to excuse me, Lida, I've got to go back and lie down.

Brandon Walker took off right at five. He drove straight to the house.

He parked the Galaxy and pocketed the keys, then he drove his mother's Olds to the hospital. Louella was sitting in the ICU waiting room.

Brandon had planned to stay at the hospital for only a few minutes, but as soon as he saw his mother's ravaged face, he knew there was trouble.

She ran to him and buried her head against his shoulder.

"I'm so glad you're here," she sobbed. "I've done what the doctor said, I've turned off the machine. The nurse told me I could go in now and wait, but I'm afraid to be there alone. Stay with me, Brandon, please. Stay until it's over."

What could he do, tell his mother he had a prior commitment? Taking Louella gently by the shoulders, he looked down into her grief-stricken face. "I have to make a phone call," he said.

"You won't leave me, will YOU?"

"No, Mom," he said, shaking his head. "I'll be right back."

Chapter Seventeen

SORTING THROUGH IONA'S boxes was all the emotional baggage Diana could handle for one day.

Gary's would have to wait. When she finished, she carried the garbage outside, dumped it, and set fire to the trash barrel. As she stood there watching it burn, she felt a peculiar satisfaction, the lifting of a lifetime's burden.

Diana watched the flames lick through Iona's ancient oven mitt and understood at last why her mother considered herself "damaged goods," why she had stayed with Max Cooper no matter what. Iona owed him. He grudgingly lent Iona the use of his name for her baby, for Diana, thus saving Iona's family and reputation from savaging by Joseph's sharp-tongued scandalmongers, but Iona paid a heavy price for that dubious privilege, paid with every waking and sleeping moment of her life.

The flames in the burning barrel soared higher, kicking up and over the surrounding metal. In the leaping flames, something else caught fire, something more than just Francine Cooper's useless castoffs. Max Cooper's hold on his supposed daughter was being consumed as well.

At last Diana grasped why Max had despised her so, why he had hated her and berated her for as long as she could remember. She understood now why he had so resented the rodeo-queen escape hatch that a resourceful Iona, with George Deeson's timely help, had managed to open for her.

But knowledge brought with it an ineffable sadness. If only she had known the truth earlier, while there was still time to ask her mother about her real father or maybe even ask George Deeson himself. Would he have told her, if she had asked him on one of those endless Saturday mornings when it had been just the two of them out in the corral with Waldo? Would things have been different if she had known the old man was really her grandfather?

What was it the Bible said? "The truth will set you free." Was Diana Cooper Ladd free now? Maybe. She felt lighter than she had in years.

As the flames charred through the debris, not only did Max lose his grip on her, so did the past.

Just then, Bone dashed up and dropped a tennis ball at her feet. With a laugh, she ruffled the dog's shaggy head, then threw the ball for him as hard as she could. Eagerly, he raced off after it, returning with it, prancing and proud, tail awag.

"You funny old dog," she said, and threw the ball again.

Over and over she threw the ball. Over and over he brought it back.

It surprised her to find that each time Bone retrieved the ball, the silly, pointless game made her laugh. Laughter felt good, and so did the hot sun on her back.

"Come on, Mister Oh'o," she said at last when the dog was panting so hard his scrawny sides shook. "Let's go inside, cool off, and figure out what's for dinner."

After their naps, Davy and Rita entered the main house to the surprising but familiar smell of baking tortillas. In the kitchen, they found Diana struggling with stiff wads of tortilla dough, waxed paper, and a rolling pin. A stack of misshapen tortillas sat on a platter next to a smoking electric griddle. The tortillas were amazingly ugly-thick in some places, punched full of holes in others.

Some were more than slightly burned, but for a first attempt, they weren't too bad.

Rita touched one of the balls of dough still sitting in a mixing bowl, on the countertop. "A little more shortening next time," she suggested.

"Then you can pat them out by hand instead of using a rolling pin."

"Mom, did you make these all by yourself?" Davy asked wonderingly.

"Can I have one?"

"If you're brave enough," Diana told him. "They're pretty pitiful.

Slathering a load of peanut butter on one side, Davy tried a bite and diplomatically pronounced the tortilla "almost as good as Rita's."

With a second peanut butter-covered tortilla in one hand and a plain one for Bone in the other, Davy and Oh'o went outside to play.

Rita sat down beside the kitchen table and watched Diana work. The Anglo woman seemed self-conscious under the Papago's scrutiny, but she kept on rolling the dough and tossing the resulting crooked sheets onto the waiting griddle.

"While I was just lying there in Sells," Rita began, "I was thinking about how you helped me after Gina died, when people wanted me to leave because I was bad luck."

"Forget it," Diana said determinedly. "What they thought doesn't matter. I've been delighted to have you with me.

With us," she added.

"But it does matter," Rita returned. "I thought I was leaving there just to go somewhere and die, but helping you and taking care of Davy gave me back my luck. It made me young again. The other day, the doctors said I was dead in that ambulance, but thinking about Davy made me want to live, made me want to come back."

Diana Ladd put down the rolling pin and brushed hair from her sweat-dampened face, leaving a white smudge of flour on her face.

"Rita, Davy has always been as much yours as he is mine.

You're the one who's spent all the time with him, who's taught him things, and taken care of him. If you're worried about the Indian baptism, don't be. Father John told me about it this morning when I saw him at San Xavier."

"He did?"

Diana nodded. "He explained the whole thing."

"Good," Rita said. "You don't mind?"

"How could I mind? When will it happen?"

'Because of the . . ."

Rita paused, groping for the proper word. What she felt coming toward them was far more serious than mere danger.

Weak as it sounded, that was the only Mil-gahn word she could think of to express the problem. Diana Ladd would not understand the word ohb.

"Because of the danger to us all," Rita continued, "the baptism ceremony starts tonight. It will continue for four days and nights.

Four nights from now, we go to Sells for the last night of singing and for the feast. On that night, the medicine man feeds the child's parents gruel made from corn and clay."

Diana made a face. "That sounds even worse than my tortillas, but it won't kill me, will it?"

Rita smiled. "No, it won't kill you."

"What about you?" Diana asked. "You said parents. I'm only one.

Will you eat the gruel with me, Rita? The two of us can be Davy's parents together."

The offer came from a generous heart and caused a dazzling smile to suffuse Rita's worn face. She looked twenty years younger. "Yes, nawqj," she said softly, "we will eat the gruel together."

Just then, out in the yard, Bone started up a noisy racket.

They heard him scrabbling over the high stone wall just as Davy burst in through the back door.

"A car's coming," Davy announced. "Oh'o went after it. I couldn't stop him."