Kiss of the Bees (16 page)

That wasn’t news. Astrid Ladd had never been one to keep her feelings or opinions to herself. Her unbridled enthusiasm for Candace Waverly—of the Oak Park Waverlys, as Astrid was fond of adding when introducing Candace and Davy to one of her upscale friends—was also well known.

“I’m going to miss her, too,” David managed.

“How much?”

“What do you mean, how much?”

“You know what I mean,” Astrid said slyly. “Are you or are you not going to give her a ring before you leave town?”

Astrid Ladd had promised her grandson a free ride at Northwestern’s law school if he wanted to go there to study. That “free ride” had included everything—tuition, books, living expenses, food, a place to stay, laundry privileges, and even a car—but it had been far from free. The cost had come in terms of three years spent living his life under Astrid Ladd’s watchful scrutiny, under her eye, ear, and thumb. Astrid’s far too conscientious mothering as well as Chicago’s uncompromising weather—summer and winter both—were the main reasons David Ladd was anxious to go back home to Arizona.

Candace Waverly was the single reason he wanted to stay in Chicago.

“No, Grandma,” he said. “No ring. We’re not ready for that yet.”

“But you told me that you’re . . . what did you call it?”

“Going out,” David supplied. “But that doesn’t mean we’re serious.”

“I wish it did,” Astrid said wistfully. “Because I’m willing to help, you know.”

Davy kept his eyes on the road. “Grandma,” he said patiently, “you already put me through law school. And you just gave me a Jeep Grand Cherokee for graduation. How much more help could you be?”

“You’d be surprised, Davy,” Astrid Ladd said determinedly. “There are one or two more things I could do.”

“Grandma, believe me, you’ve done enough.”

They turned off Sheridan Road onto Dempster. Astrid waited until they stopped for a light. “Hold out your hand,” she commanded.

Sighing, David Ladd obeyed. With a deft twist, Astrid removed a knuckle-sized diamond ring from her finger and dropped it into the palm of her grandson’s hand. “You could give Candace this,” she said.

“That’s your engagement ring, Grandma,” Davy protested. “I can’t take that.” He tried returning it to her. Astrid took it, but instead of keeping it, she leaned over and dropped it into his shirt pocket.

“Why not?” she returned. “Who else is there? You’re my grandson and my only living heir. Who else would I leave it to but you? That’s why I don’t want to sell the house, either. I plan to give it to you and Candace as a wedding present, you see.”

Her voice broke. She sounded close to tears. With a lump in his own throat, David almost drove the DeVille into a passing truck. “You can’t be serious, Grandma,” he protested.

“I’m serious as can be, Davy. If you pass the bar in Illinois and go into practice, in five years, you’ll make partner, especially with Richard Waverly’s connections. You and Candace will need an address like mine to help establish your place in the community. You’ll need to fix it up some, decorate it to suit you and all that, but that’ll be a lot less expensive than buying new.”

“Grandmother,” David Ladd said carefully, wanting to be firm, but not wanting to hurt her feelings. “I don’t want to practice law here. I want to go home, to Arizona.”

Astrid tossed her head. “I can’t imagine why,” she said crossly. “I don’t know how regular people can tolerate living in that godforsaken place. I remember when your grandfather Garrison and I went out there for your father’s memorial service—it wasn’t even a funeral, mind you. It was so ungodly hot. I don’t know when I’ve ever been more miserable.”

It would have been simple to talk about the weather. David Ladd was an expert on that. He had suffered more from both heat and cold during his three years in Illinois than he could ever remember enduring in the desert back home. Although this was only the second week of June, Chicago was already soldiering through the first real heat wave of summer.

During the previous week, afternoon daytime temperatures had hovered in the mid-nineties with humidity much the same—mid-nineties. And although the humidity was that high, the weather forecasts held no hope of rain or relief. Davy was looking forward to Arizona. At least there, the heat was honest. When the summer rainstorms came, evening temperatures could drop as much as twenty degrees in a matter of minutes. In Chicago, the sweltering, smothering heat never let up. And rain, when it came, seemed to make things worse, not better.

At that moment, however, David Ladd couldn’t afford the luxury of a digression into weather. His grandmother had issued a serious challenge, one that had to be met head-on.

“It’s a wonderful offer, Grandma,” he said at last. “It really is, and it’s a wonderful house. But I can’t see myself living there.”

“You can’t?” She sounded shocked. “Why not?”

“Because it wouldn’t ever be really mine,” David answered. “I wouldn’t feel like I had earned it.”

“That’s not it,” Astrid said sharply. “It’s because of your mother, isn’t it? Diana has always resented me, and now she’s turned you against me, too.”

“That’s not true, Grandmother. Not at all.”

David turned into the club entrance and then stopped at the front door to let Astrid out. The place wasn’t all that full, so there were plenty of parking places. Even so, by the time he made it into the dining room, Astrid had already finished her first Bloody Mary and had started on the second.

David Ladd sighed. For a farewell celebration, it was not an auspicious beginning.

Lani Walker left a note for her parents on the kitchen table. “Have fun at the banquet. Remember, Jess and I are going to that dueling bands concert at the Community Center tonight. Her parents are giving us a ride both to and from. I shouldn’t be too late, but don’t wake me for breakfast. Tomorrow’s my day off.”

The Tucson Mountains loomed in deep shadows against a rosy sky when Lani rode her bike up to Mr. Vega’s parking place. She had worried overnight that maybe he wouldn’t show up, but he was there with his easel already set up by the time she braked the mountain bike next to his station wagon.

“Nice hat,” he said. “And nice shirt, too, but you’re right. Those clothes make you look more like a cowgirl than an Indian.”

“Hardly anybody wears feathers anymore,” Lani told him. “And most of the people who go around in leather ride motorcycles.”

“Point taken,” he said, with a mock salute. “I think maybe I’ll have you sit over here on this rock with the saguaro in the background. By the way, do you want anything to drink before we get started? I brought along orange juice just in case you didn’t have time for breakfast.”

Lani took off her hat and smoothed her windblown hair. “Some orange juice would be great,” she said. She settled onto the rock and tried to get comfortable while he brought her a glass of juice.

“What do I need to do?” she asked.

“Relax and try to look natural,” he said.

“That’s a lot easier said than done,” Lani said, taking a long drink of the juice, hoping it would settle her nerves. “I don’t like having my picture taken, either. That might be part of what was wrong with the kids you tried to draw out on the reservation. When the white man first came west and tried taking pictures of Indians, people believed that the photographer would somehow end up capturing their spirits.”

“No kidding.” Mr. Vega was busily sketching with a stick of charcoal now, pausing every few moments and studying Lani’s face. “And you’re saying that some people out on the reservation still believe that’s true?”

“Probably some of them do,” she said.

Lani had no idea how much time passed. She was aware of a sudden buzzing in her head, like the angry hum of thousands of bees. Her first thought was that she was dreaming, that something had brought to mind the old story of
Mualig Siakam
.

“Mr. Vega,” she said, reaching out to steady herself as the mountains around her spun in a dizzying circle.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. Mr. Vega left his easel and walked toward her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel strange, like I can’t sit up, like I’m going to fall over. And hot, too.”

“Here,” he said, reaching out to her. “Let me help you.”

The last thing Lani felt was Mr. Vega’s arms closing tightly around her and lifting her off the ground. Weaker than she could ever remember feeling in her life, Lani let her head drop heavily against his chest.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she mumbled. “I’m so tired, so sleepy.”

“You’re okay,” Mr. Vega said soothingly as he carried her toward the back of the Subaru. “You close your eyes and relax now, Lani. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

He knows my name
, Lani thought.
How come he knows my name? Did I tell him?

She couldn’t remember telling him, but she must have. How else would he have known?

Thirsty as hell, Manny Chavez woke up under a mesquite tree. Fighting his way through an alcohol-induced fog, he sat up and tried to figure out where he was. He remembered stopping off at the trading post at Three Points sometime after dark. He had gone there with a terrible thirst and the remains of his paycheck. Now the sun was high overhead, but the thirst remained.

The rockbound walls of Baboquivari rose up out of the desert far to the south while Kitt Peak was directly at his back a few miles away across the desert. From the looks of the mountain looming over him, Manny figured he was probably somewhere off Coleman Road.

Frowning, he tried to remember how he had come to be there. He had ridden to Three Points with his son, Eddie, and some of Eddie’s friends. They had bought some beer—several cases—and some Big Red fortified wine—and then they had gone off somewhere in the desert, off the reservation rather than on it, to drink it in peace. Now that Delia, Manny’s daughter, had returned to the reservation, Manny could no longer afford to be picked up by Law and Order. Delia had come to the jail and bailed him out once, but Manny’s pride still writhed in shame at the name she had called him.

“Nawmk!”
she had spat at him. “Drunkard!”

Delia had been away from the reservation for so long that he was surprised she still remembered any of the language. But that particular word was probably indelibly printed in Delia’s brain, imprinted there by Ellie, Delia’s mother.

Feeling a lump under him, Manny rolled over and was relieved to find that a pint bottle—still half-full—lingered in his hip pocket. He unscrewed the top and took a long swig, hoping that the wine would help clear his head. It didn’t, but at least it did help slake his thirst. Struggling to his feet, he walked out to a small clearing where mounds of empty cans and bottles as well as the deep impressions of tire tracks told him where Eddie’s truck had been parked.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t there anymore. For some reason, Eddie and his friends had taken off, leaving Manny alone. In the early morning cool, the desert was very still. Far to the north, he could hear the occasional whine of rubber tires on pavement. From the sounds of distant vehicles speeding by, it probably meant the highway wasn’t all that far, especially not as the crow flies. Striking out across the low-lying desert, Manny headed for Highway 86.

Once he hit that, someone was bound to pick him up and give him a ride back home to Sells. There he’d be able to find Eddie and ask him why he had taken off and left Manny there alone. It wasn’t a nice thing for a son to do to his father, even if the father did happen to be drunk.

Quentin Walker woke up fairly early that Saturday morning, hung over as hell and in a state of blind panic. What if someone had broken into his rented room overnight and stolen the money? Or worse, what if the money didn’t exist at all? What if it was a figment of his imagination—a drunken delusion of some kind? Thinking about it, though, Quentin didn’t believe he had been
that
drunk when Mitch Johnson showed up in the bar looking for him.

And it turned out the money was there after all, still hidden in the toe of his mud-spattered work boots, exactly where Quentin had left it before going to bed. He took the bills out and examined them again. One by one he held them up to the light from the grimy bedroom window. There was nothing about the bills that smacked of counterfeit. The vertical, copy-proof strip was there—the one feds had announced they were putting in bills to counter the counterfeiters.

Quentin’s inspection proved that the bills were real enough, but they also posed a real dilemma. Existing from paycheck to paycheck as he did, Quentin Walker had no bank account. Somebody who dressed and looked the way he did couldn’t very well walk into the nearest Wells Fargo bank branch and make a five-thousand-dollar deposit with five bills. If somebody like him turned up in a bank with that kind of money, the teller was bound to notice and remember. While he was there or after he left, people would wonder and ask questions. Pretty soon, his parole officer would be asking questions, too.

On a week-to-week basis, Quenton cashed his paychecks in the bars he frequented—usually ones in his immediate neighborhood—places he could walk to. Quentin had lost both his pickup truck and his driver’s license in the aftermath of that damned DWI accident that had landed him in the state prison.

Cashing a paycheck was one thing, but nobody in a bar was going to fork over change for a thousand-dollar bill. Besides, even if they had that kind of cash in a safe, changing the money in a bar in that marginal neighborhood was far too risky. Somebody might see what was going on and decide to relieve him of the cash the moment he stepped back outside. Quentin Walker knew too well that not all bartenders were honest.

Unable to decide how to proceed, Quentin stood for some time holding the bills in his hand. Finally he stuffed them into his pocket and then moved from the tiny bedroom of his furnished apartment to the equally tiny kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and took out the remainder of the loaf of bread that he kept there to protect it from marauding cockroaches. There were only two slices of bread left in the loaf. His first instinct was to throw them out. He had the two dried crusts in his hand and was ready to drop them in the garbage when he realized what a mistake that would be. The slices of bread themselves were the makings of the perfect hiding place.