by J. A. Jance
“Good,” Andrew Carlisle replied. “Very good. I’m delighted to hear it. Now, tell me about the way you look.”
“What about the way I look?”
“Are you very different from the way you were that night we were together? You’re the last person I ever saw or ever will see,” he added, as his puckered mouth twisted into an oddly one-sided smile. “As a consequence, Ms. Walker, I remember everything about that night as vividly as if it had happened yesterday or the day before. I remember every detail about you, and I would suppose that you remember me in much the same way. We were both operating in what the experts call a non-drug-induced altered state of consciousness.”
“My hair is turning gray,” Diana answered, carefully keeping her voice even. “I’m over fifty. I wear glasses. Two pairs of glasses, actually—one for distance and one for reading.”
“I’m far more interested in your body,” Andrew Carlisle said.
Some blind people seem to gaze off into the far distance when they speak. Andrew Carlisle’s opaque, sightless eyes seemed to pry directly into Diana’s very being. She could barely breathe. An involuntary shudder ran up and down her spine while a hot flush covered her face. She wanted nothing more than to race to the door. She wanted out. She longed to be away from this monster, to be back outside in the straightforward discomfort of the hot desert air.
This must be what Brandon was trying to warn me about, she thought, fighting back panic.
When Brandon had said she would be putting herself at risk, he must have seen that even though Andrew Carlisle would not be able to harm her physically, he might still be able to invade her mind and infect her soul.
Pulling herself together, Diana sat up straight and squared her shoulders. When she spoke, she willed her voice not to quaver.
“Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Carlisle,” she said. “I’m the one calling the shots here. If you want to do this project, we’re going to do it my way. Basic ground rule number one is that we don’t talk about that night. Not now, not ever!”
“But that’s pretty much the whole point, isn’t it?” Carlisle said, smiling his ruined smile. “Everything that happened before led up to it, and everything afterward led away from it.”
“That night isn’t my point,” Diana returned. “And I’m the one writing the book. If you don’t like it, hire yourself another writer.”
“Hire?” Carlisle croaked. “What do you mean, hire? I already told you I can’t afford to pay you anything.”
“I’m being paid, all right,” Diana answered. “My agent has pitched the idea to my editor in New York. The book I’m writing will be written, and I will be paid. The only question is whether or not any of your point of view actually appears in print. That depends on how well you behave, on whether or not you agree to do things my way.”
Diana suspected that Andrew Carlisle was a vain man who was prepared to go to any length in order to be immortalized in print. He must have realized that Diana Ladd Walker was his best chance for getting there. In this case, Diana’s instincts were good. Her threat of cutting his perspective out of the project immediately delivered the required result.
“All right,” he agreed grudgingly. “I won’t mention it again. So where do we start?”
“From the beginning,” Diana said. “With your family and your childhood. Where you were born and where you grew up. I’d also like to interview any living relatives.”
“Like my mother, you mean?” he asked.
Diana remembered being told that Andrew Carlisle’s mother had been there in the yard at Gates Pass the night of her son’s attack. Myrna Louise Spaulding had ridden down to Tucson from her home in Tempe with a homicide detective named G. T. Farrell. At the time Diana had been too preoccupied with everything else to notice. Later on, during the trial, Myrna Louise had been conspicuous in her absence. Diana had mistakenly assumed the woman was dead.
“You mean your mother’s still alive?” Diana asked.
“More or less. She lives in one of those marginal retirement homes in Chandler. From the sound of it, I’d say it’s a pretty awful place, but I doubt she can afford any better.”
“Does she come here to see you?”
“Not anymore. She used to. The first time I was here. Still, once a year, on my birthday, she sends me a box of chocolates. See’s Assorted. I’ve never bothered to tell her I hate the damn things. She’s my mother, after all, so you’d think she’d remember that I never liked chocolate, not even when I was little.”
“If you don’t like the chocolates she sends you, what do you do with them, then?” Diana asked. “Give them away?”
Carlisle grinned. “Are you kidding? The guy in the cell next to me would kill for one of ’em, so I flush them down the toilet. One at a time. It drives him crazy.”
Another shiver of chills flashed through Diana’s body.
“Getting back to establishing ground rules,” Andrew Carlisle continued. “How do you want to do this? We could probably sit here chatting this way, or else I could let you review some of the material I’ve already put together. Some of it is taped, some is on disk. I could print it out for you. That way, you could take it with you, go over it at your leisure, and then you could come back later so we could discuss it.”
“How did you get it on disk?” Diana asked.
He gestured with his damaged arm. “I’ve learned to be a one-handed touch typist,” he said. “Fortunately, this is one of those full-service prisons. Inmates are allowed to have access to computers in the library so they can prepare their own writs. I do that, by the way. Compose writs for those less fortunate than myself—the poor bastards who mostly can’t read or write. Someone else has to do the editing and run the spell-checker. In a pinch, you could probably do that.”
“I suppose we can try it that way.” Diana did her best to sound reluctant, although in truth she was delighted at the prospect of any option that might spare her spending unlimited periods of time, shut up in this awful room, sitting face-to-face with this equally awful man.
“When can you have the first segment done?” she asked.
“A week or so,” he said. “Sorting out the details of my childhood shouldn’t take too long. It wasn’t particularly happy or memorable. I doubt there’ll be very much to reminisce about.”
Diana raised her hand and beckoned to the guard. “I think we’re through here,” she said.
The guard glanced at his watch. “There’s still plenty of time,” he said. “Would you like to see your stepson, then?”
“Yes, please,” Diana said.
Ten minutes after Andrew Carlisle was led from the room, the guard returned with Quentin Walker in tow.
“Oh,” he said, his face registering disappointment as soon as he saw her. “It’s you. I was hoping it was my mother. What do you want?”
A year and a half in prison had done nothing to diminish Quentin Walker’s perpetual swagger.
“I came to see someone else, but I thought I’d stop by and check on you to see if there’s anything you need.”
“What exactly do you have in mind?” Quentin returned. “An overnight pass would be great. Better yet, how about commuting my sentence to time served? That would be very nice. And you might bring along a girl next time. Since I’m not married, I don’t qualify for conjugal visits, but I’ll bet my dear old dad could pull a string or two and help me keep my manhood intact.”
“I don’t think so,” Diana replied. “Your father’s not involved in this in any way. I was thinking more in terms of books or writing materials.”
The superior smile on Quentin Walker’s face shifted into a chilly sneer. “Writing and reading materials?” he asked. “Are we suddenly focused on educating poor lost Quent? Trying to make up for the difference between what you guys did for precious little Davy and that baby squaw you dragged home and what you two did for Tommy and me? I don’t think it’s going to work. Let’s say it’s too little, too late.”
If sibl
ing rivalry was bad, Diana realized, stepsibling rivalry was infinitely worse.
“This has nothing to do with David and Lani,” she said evenly. “And I didn’t come here to argue.” She stood up. “Why don’t we just forget I asked.”
“Good idea,” Quentin returned. “We’ll do that. I don’t need anything from you, not now and not ever.”
“Good,” Diana said. “At least that makes our relationship clear.”
“So that’s how you did it then?” Monty Lazarus asked. For a moment Diana wasn’t sure what he was asking. “He gave you access to the material he had written?”
“Yes.”
“But there’s not really any acknowledgment of that in your book, is there? Shouldn’t there have been?”
The question was a sly one, and Monty Lazarus kept his eyes focused on her face as he asked it. Realizing she was about to fall victim to a case of ambush journalism, Diana tried to play dumb.
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.”
“If you used Andrew Carlisle’s written material, shouldn’t you have said that instead of passing it off as your own work?”
It took real effort to hold off a reflexive tightening of the muscles across her jaw. “It is my own work,” she said coldly. “All of it. I did my own research, conducted my own interviews.”
“Sorry,” Monty Lazarus said. “I didn’t mean any offense.”
The hell you didn’t, you bastard! Diana thought. She took a careful sip of her iced tea before she trusted herself enough to speak. “Of course not,” she said.
Her reaction was so blatant that it was all Mitch Johnson could do to keep from bursting out laughing. And if she was prickly when it came to questions concerning her literary integrity, he wondered what would happen when they veered off into more personal topics.
“What kinds of interviews?” he asked.
“I tracked Andrew Carlisle’s mother down at her retirement home up in Chandler. I thought hearing about him from her might help me understand him better. But he was already several moves ahead of me there.”
Mitch Johnson knew exactly what Diana Ladd Walker was leading up to—the tapes, of course. He and Andy had discussed Andy’s giving them to her in great detail, long before it happened. But he had to ask, had to convince her to tell him.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Andrew Carlisle was a master at mind games, Mr. Lazarus,” Diana answered. “At the time we started the project, I still didn’t understand that.”
“Games?” he repeated. “What kind of games are we talking about?”
“Andrew Carlisle was toying with me, Mr. Lazarus, the same way a cat torments a captive mouse.”
So am I, Mitch Johnson thought, concealing the beginnings of an unintentional smile behind his iced-tea glass.
“In the beginning,” Diana continued, “I don’t think he had any intention of my writing the book.”
“Really. That’s surprising,” Monty returned. “Why, then, did he bother to write to you in the first place?”
“Of all his victims,” she said slowly, “I’m the one who got away. Not only that, even before this book, I had achieved a kind of prominence in writing that Andrew Carlisle could never hope for. I think that ate at him for years. After all, I’m somebody he didn’t consider worthy of being one of his students.”
“That’s right,” Monty Lazarus said. “I remember now. Your husband was admitted to the writing program Professor Carlisle taught, but you weren’t. Your husband—your first husband, that is—was he a writer, too? Did Garrison Ladd ever have anything published?”
“No,” she answered. “He never did.”
“But he was enrolled in Carlisle’s class at the time of his death. Presumably he was working on something, then. What was it?”
Diana shook her head. “I have no idea,” she answered. “I’m pretty sure there was a partially completed manuscript, but I never read it. The thing disappeared in all the confusion after Gary’s death. I don’t know what happened to it.”
“Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what was in it?”
Mitch asked the speculative question deftly like a picador sticking a tormenting pic into the unsuspecting bull’s neck. And it did its intended work. It pleased him to see her struggle with her answer. She took a deep breath.
“No,” she said finally. “I don’t think knowing that would serve any useful purpose at all. Whatever Gary was writing, it had nothing at all to do with Andrew Carlisle’s focus on me, which, in my opinion, boils down to nothing more or less than professional jealousy.”
Oh, no, Mitch wanted to tell her. It’s far more complex than that. Instead, Monty Lazarus looked down at his notes and frowned. “Let’s go back to something you said just a minute ago, something about Carlisle being a couple of moves ahead of you. Something about him never really intending for you to write the book. If that was the case, what was the point?”
“He was hoping to humiliate me publicly,” Diana answered. “I think he thought he could get me to make a public commitment to writing the book and then force me to back out of it. But it didn’t work. I wrote the book anyway.”
For the first time, Mitch was surprised. Diana’s answer was right on the money. Andy had told him that he didn’t think she’d have guts enough to go through with it. That was another instance, one of the first ones Mitch had noticed, where Andy Carlisle’s assessment of any given situation had turned out to be dead wrong.
“It still doesn’t make much sense,” Monty said, making a show of dusting crumbs of tortilla chips out of his lap.
Diana knew it did make sense, but only if you had all the other pieces of the puzzle. Monty Lazarus didn’t have access to those. No one did, no one other than Diana. Those were the very things she had left out of the book, the ugly parts she had never mentioned to anyone, including Brandon Walker.
She had absolutely no intention of telling the whole story to Monty Lazarus, either. Those things were hers alone—Diana Ladd Walker’s dirty little secrets. Instead, she tossed off a too-casual answer, hoping it would throw him off the trail.
“Let’s just say it was a grudge match,” Diana said. “Andrew Philip Carlisle hated my guts.”
Almost a month after that first interview with Carlisle up in Florence, Diana was still waiting for the first written installment, which had taken far longer for him to deliver than he had said it would.
Davy was home from school for a few weeks. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Diana and Brandon had planned to take Lani and Davy up to the White Mountains to visit some friends who owned a two-room cabin just outside Payson. The four-day outing was scheduled to start Thursday afternoon, as soon as Brandon came home from work. Fate in the form of a demanding editor intervened when the Federal Express delivery man came to the door at nine o’clock Thursday morning. The package he delivered contained the galleys for her next book, The Copper Baron’s Wife, along with an apologetic note from her editor saying the corrections needed to be completed and ready to be returned to New York on Tuesday morning.
“I’d better stay home and work on them,” she said to Brandon on the phone that day when she called him at his office. “You know as well as I do that I can’t do a good job on galleys when we’re camped out with a houseful of people up in Payson. I have to be able to concentrate, but you and the kids are welcome to go. Just because I have to work doesn’t mean everybody else has to suffer.”
Brandon had protested, but in the end he had taken Lani and Davy and the three of them had gone off without her. Once they were piled in the car and headed for Payson, Diana had locked herself up with the galleys and worked her way through the first hundred pages of the book before she gave up for the night and went to bed. The next morning, when she went out to bring in the newspaper, she found an envelope propped against the front door. Although it was addressed to her, it hadn’t been mailed. Someone had left it on the porch overnight.
Curious, she had torn t
he envelope open and found a cassette tape—that and nothing else. No note, no explanation. She had taken the tape inside to her office and popped it into the cassette player she kept on the bookshelf beside her desk.
When the tape first began playing, there was no sound—none at all. Distracted by a headline at the top of the newspaper, Diana was beginning to assume that the tape was blank when she heard a moan—a long, terrible moan.
“Please,” a woman’s voice whispered. “Mr. Ladd, please…”
Diana had been holding the newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. As soon as she heard her former husband’s name, she dropped both the paper and the cup. The paper merely fell back to the surface of the desk. The cup, however, crashed to the bare floor, shattering on the Saltillo tile and sending splatters of coffee and shards of cup from one end of the room to the other.
Diana leaned closer to the recorder and turned up the volume. “Mr. Ladd,” the girl’s voice said again. “Please. Let me go.”
“No help there, little lady,” a man’s voice said. “He’s out cold. Can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
The voice was younger, but Diana recognized it after a moment. Andrew Carlisle’s. Unmistakably Andrew Carlisle’s and…the other? Could it be Gina Antone’s? No. That wasn’t possible! It couldn’t be!
But a few agonizing exchanges later, Diana realized it was true. The other voice did belong to Gina Antone all right, to someone suffering the torments of the damned.
“Please, mister,” the girl pleaded helplessly, her voice barely a whisper. “Please don’t hurt me again. Please…” The rest of what she might have said dissolved into a shriek followed by a series of despairing sobs.
“But that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? Don’t you remember telling us that you were taking us to a bad place? It turns out you were right. This is a bad place, my dear. A very bad place.”