Hour of the Hunter (52 page)

The doctor had grumbled, but in the end he had let the old man have his way.

The cigarette passed from the priest to Fat Crack to the detective, and back, at last, to the medicine man. Far to the west, a thundercloud rose over the desert. Periodically, lightning lit up the cloud's billowing interior, but the rains had not yet come. The California river toads still slept quietly in their hardened mud beds.

"He is a good boy," Looks At Nothing said, "but I am worried about one thing."

"What's that?" Father John asked.

He was sure it would be some complaint that the other part of the bargain, the Mil-gahn baptism, was going too slowly, but he had only just got out of the hospital that very afternoon. Davy Ladd was scheduled to be baptized during the eleven o'clock mass at San Xavier the day after tomorrow. What more did the old man want?

But Looks At Nothing's objection had nothing to do with that. "Edagith Gohk Je'e," he said, calling Davy by his new Indian name. "One With Two Mothers, this boy, has too many mothers and not enough fathers.

"There are four of us," Looks At Nothing continued, "and all nature goes in fours. Why could we not agree to be father to this fatherless boy, all four of us together? We each have things to teach, and we all have things to learn."

As soon as Brandon heard the words, he knew Looks At Nothing was right.

No matter how much Rita Antone and Diana Ladd loved Davy, they could not be his father.

A lump caught in Brandon Walker's throat as he listened.

Fatherless himself for three days now, Brandon Walker felt for Davy Ladd almost as much as he hurt for himself.

It grew quiet in the circle. No one said aloud that he would or wouldn not accept the assignment. That was a foregone conclusion. The decision had been made for them long before they were asked. Looks At Nothing had decreed it so, and that was the way it would be.

Davy himself came running up just then. "What are you guys doing?" he demanded. "I looked around the feast house, and you were all gone."

"We were talking," Brandon Walker said.

"What about?"

"You.

“About me? What were you saying?"

"That somebody needs to take you into Tucson for a haircut," Brandon said, affectionately ruffling Davy's hair, but being careful about the stitches.

"You mean it?" Davy asked. "Honest? To a real barber?"

"That's right," Brandon Walker replied with a slight grin.

"You see, Davy, mothers don't give crew cuts. Barbers do."

About the Author

J. A. Jance is the American Mystery Award-winning author of the J.P. Beaumont series as well as eight enormously popular novels featuring small-town Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady. She has also written two critically acclaimed thrillers, Kiss of the Bees and Hour of the Hunter. Jance was born in South Dakota, brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington.

More about J. A. Jance

A s a second-grader in Mrs. Spangler’s Greenway School class, I was introduced to Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. I read the first one and was hooked and knew, from that moment on, that I wanted to be a writer.

The third child in a large family, I was four years younger than my next older sister and four years older then the next younger sibling. Being both too young and too old left me alone in a crowd and helped turn me into an introspective reader and a top student. When I graduated from Bisbee High School in 1962, I received an academic scholarship that made me the first person in my family to attend a four year college. I graduated in 1966 with a degree in English and Secondary Education. In 1970 I received my M. Ed. in Library Science. I taught high school English at Tucson’s Pueblo High School for two years and was a K-12 librarian at Indian Oasis School District in Sells, Arizona for five years.

My ambitions to become a writer were frustrated in college and later, first because the professor who taught creative writing at the University of Arizona in those days thought girls “ought to be teachers or nurses” rather than writers. After he refused me admission to the program, I did the next best thing: I married a man who was allowed in the program that was closed to me. My first husband imitated Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little. Despite the fact that he was allowed in the creative writing program, he never had anything published either prior to or after his death from chronic alcoholism at age forty-two. That didn’t keep him from telling me, however, that there would be only one writer in our family, and he was it.

My husband made that statement in 1968 after I had received a favorable letter from an editor in New York who was interested in publishing a children’s story I had written. Because I was a newly wed wife who was interested in staying married, I put my writing ambitions on hold. Other than writing poetry in the dark of night when my husband was asleep (see After the Fire), I did nothing more about writing fiction until eleven years later when I was a single, divorced mother with two children and no child support as well as a full time job selling life insurance. My first three books were written between four a.m. and seven a.m.. At seven, I would wake my children and send them off to school. After that, I would get myself ready to go sell life insurance.

I started writing in the middle of March of 1982. The first book I wrote, a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that happened in Tucson in 1970, was never published by anyone. For one thing, it was twelve hundred pages long. Since I was never allowed in the creative writing classes, no one had ever told me there were some things I needed to leave out. For another, the editors who turned it down said that the parts that were real were totally unbelievable, and the parts that were fiction were fine. Myagent finally sat me down and told me that she thought I was a better writer of fiction than I was of non-fiction. Why, she suggested, didn’t I try my hand at a novel?

The result of that conversation was the first Detective Beaumont book,
Until Proven Guilty.
Since 1985 when that was published, there have been fourteen more Beau books. My work also includes eight Joanna Brady books set in southeastern Arizona where I grew up. In addition there are two thrillers,
Hour of the Hunter
and
Kiss of the Bees
that reflect what I learned during the years when I was teaching on the Tohono O’Odham reservation west of Tucson, Arizona.

The week before Until Proven Guilty was published, I did a poetry reading of After the Fire at a widowed retreat sponsored by a group called WICS (Widowed Information Consultation Services) of King County. By June of 1985, it was five years after my divorce in 1980 and two years after my former husband’s death. I went to the retreat feeling as though I hadn’t quite had my ticket punched and didn’t deserve to be there. After all, the other people there were all still married when their spouses died. I was divorced. At the retreat I met a man whose wife had died of breast cancer two years to the day and within a matter of minutes of the time my husband died. We struck up a conversation based on that coincidence. Six months later, to the dismay of our five children, we told the kids they weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they’d do, and we got married. We now have four new in-laws as well as three grandchildren.

When my second husband and I first married, he supported all of us—his kids and mine as well as the two of us. It was a long time before my income from writing was anything more than fun money—the
Improbable Cause
trip to Walt Disney World; the
Minor in Possession
memorial powder room; the
Payment in Kind
memorial hot tub. Seven years ago, however, the worm turned. My husband was able to retire at age 54 and take up golf and oil painting.

One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that everything—even the bad stuff—is usable. The eighteen years I spent while married to an alcoholic have helped shape the experience and character of Detective J. P. Beaumont. My experiences as a single parent have gone into the background for Joanna Brady—including her first tentative steps toward a new life after the devastation of losing her husband in
Desert Heat
. And then there’s the evil creative writing professor in
Hour of the Hunter
and
Kiss of the Bees
, but that’s another story.

Another wonderful part of being a writer is hearing from fans. I learned on the reservation that the ancient, sacred charge of the storyteller is to beguile the time. I’m thrilled when I hear that someone has used my books to get through some particularly difficult illness either as a patient or as they sit on the sidelines while someone they love is terribly ill. It gratifies me to know that by immersing themselves in my stories, people are able to set their own lives aside and live and walk in someone else’s shoes. It tells me I’m doing a good job at the best job in the world.

Other Books by JA Jance

J. P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES

1   Until Proven Guilty

2   Injustice for All

3   Trial by Fury

4   Taking the Fifth

5   Improbable Cause

6   A More Perfect Union

7   Dismissed with Prejudice

8   Minor in Possession

9   Payment in Kind

10 Without Due Process

11 Failure to Appear

12 Lying in Wait

13 Name Withheld

14 Breach of Duty

15 Birds of Prey

JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES

1   Desert Heat

2   Tombstone Courage

3   Shoot/Don’t Shoot

4   Dead to Rights

5   Skeleton Canyon

6   Rattlesnake Crossing

7   Outlaw Mountain

8   Devil’s Claw

9   Paradise Lost

10 Exit Wounds

AND

Hour of the Hunter

Kiss of the Bees

Partners in Crime

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE PAPAGO LEGENDS used in this book are retellings of the traditional oral tales of the Tohono O'othham, the Desert People. These are winter-telling tales, which must not be "told" during the summer when snakes and lizards are out, for if they hear the stories, Wamad, Snake, or Hujud, Lizard, may swallow the storyteller's luck and bring him harm.

There is, however, no prohibition against them in written form.

This book is set in the 1970's, long before the tribal council renamed the reservation to reflect the people's traditional name of the Desert People. References to the Papago Reservation are historically correct, although today's maps will refer to the reservation located west of Tucson as the Tohono othham Nation.

Writing this book would not have been possible without being able to use the works of Dean and Lucille Saxton as reference material: Legends and Lore of the Papago and Pima Indians and Papago & Pirna to English Dictionary, both first and second editions, all three of which were published by the University of Arizona Press.

I am also indebted to the inspired retellings of some of these stories by Harold Bell Wright in his invaluable and unfortunately exceedingly rare work Long Ago Told (New York: D. Appleton, 1929).

Both the King County Library and Seattle Public, through their wonderfully convenient interlibrary loan systems, supported my research by locating and helping me gain access to rare source material from libraries all over the country.

Of the "committee" who helped me on this book, I'd like to especially acknowledge Dick Sawyer, Carol and Charles Mackey, and Dan and Agnes Russell for their timely, deadline-type assistance.

In addition, I would like to say thank you to the splendid and delightfully humorous Tohono O'othharn themselves, who, during my five years of teaching on the reservation, made me feel both welcome and appreciated, even though I'm really, as Pauline once told me, "a member of another We are all hunters.

--Clayton Savage in A Less Than Noble Savage, an unpublished manuscript by Andrew Philip Carlisle

AVON BOOKS NEW YORK

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

To Bill, who brought us "the Bone," and to Diana Conway, wherever she is

AVON BOOKS A division of The Hearst Corporation 1350 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10019

Copyright C 1991 by LA. Jance Published by arrangement with the author

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-6945

ISBN: 0-380-71107-9

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

Published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, Inc.; for information address Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019.

First Avon Books Printing: September 1992

AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN other COUNTRIES, MARCA RISTRADA, RECHO EN CANADA

Printed in Canada

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