Kiss the Bees bw-2

by J. A. Jance

  Knowing the route to the Ladd family plot, he easily threaded his way through the trackless forest of ornate headstones and mausoleums. He didn't much like this cemetery. It was too big, too green, too gaudy, and full of huge chunks of marble and granite. Davy had grown up attending funerals on the parched earth and among the simple white wooden crosses of reservation cemeteries. The first funeral he actually remembered was Father John's.

  A Mil-gahn and a Jesuit priest, Father John was in his eighties and already retired when Davy first met him. He had been there, in the house at Gates Pass and imprisoned in the root cellar along with Rita and Davy, on the day of the battle with the evil Ohb. Father John had died a little more than a year later.

  In all the hubbub of preparation for Diana Ladd's wedding to Brandon Walker, no one had noticed how badly Father John was failing. And that was exactly as he had intended. The aged priest had agreed to perform the ceremony, and he used all his strength to ensure that nothing marred the joy of the happy young couple on their wedding day. Of all the people gathered at San Xavier for the morning ceremony, only Rita had sensed what performing the ceremony was costing the old priest in terms of physical exertion and vitality.

  Honoring his silence, she too, had kept quiet about it-at least to most of the bridal party. But not to Davy.

  "Watch out for Father John, Olhoni, " Nana Dahd murmured as she straightened the boy's tie and smoothed his tuxedo in preparation to Davy's walking his mother down the aisle. "If he looks too tired, come and get me right away."

  The admonition puzzled Davy. "Is Father John sick?"

  "He's old," Rita answered. "He's an old, old man."

  "Is he going to die?" Davy asked.

  "We're all going to die sometime," she had answered.

  "Even you?"

  She smiled. "Even me."

  But Father John had made it through the wedding mass with flying colors. He died three days later, while Brandon and Diana Walker were still in Mazatlan on their honeymoon. The frantic barking of Davy's dog, Bone, had awakened Davy in the middle of the night.

  Keeping the dog with him for protection as he peered out through a front window, Davy saw a man climbing out of a big black car parked in the driveway. As soon as the man stepped up onto the porch, Davy recognized Father Damien, the young priest from San Xavier.

  Even Davy knew that having a priest come to the house in the middle of the night could not mean good news. He hurried to the door. "What's wrong?" he demanded through the still-closed door as the priest's finger moved toward the button on the bell.

  "I'm looking for someone named Rita Antone," Father Damien said hesitantly, as though he wasn't quite sure whether or not his information was correct. "Does she live here?"

  "What is it, Davy?" Rita asked, materializing silently out of the darkness at the back of the house.

  "It's Father Damien," Davy answered. "He's looking for you."

  Nana Dahd unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door. "I'm Rita," she said.

  The priest looked relieved. "It's Father John, Mrs. Antone," he said apologetically. "I'm sorry to bother you at this hour of the night, but he's very ill. He's asking for you."

  Rita nodded. "Get dressed right away, Davy," she said. "We must hurry."

  They left the house a few minutes later. There was never any question of Davy's staying at the house by himself. Ever since Andrew Carlisle had burst into the house on that summer afternoon, there had been an unspoken understanding between Rita and Diana that Davy was not to be left alone. On their way to town, Rita rode in the front seat with the priest while Davy huddled in the back.

  "Where is he?" Nana Dahd asked.

  "He was at Saint Mary's," the priest answered. "In the intensive care unit, but this afternoon he made them let him out. He's back at the rectory."

  At the mission, Rita took Davy by the hand and dragged him with her as Father Damien led the way. They found Father John sitting propped up on a mound of pillows in a small, cell-like room. He lifted one feeble hand in greeting. On the white chenille bedspread where his hand had rested lay Father John's rosary-his losalo-with its black shiny beads and olive wood crucifix.

  Davy Ladd was an Anglo-a Mil-gahn — but he had been properly raised-brought up in the Indian way. He melted quietly into the background while Rita sank down on the hard-backed chair beside the dying man's bed. Out of sight in the shadowy far corner of the room, Davy sat cross-legged and listened to the murmured conversation, hanging on every mysterious word.

  "Thank you for coming, Dancing Quail," Father John whispered. His voice was very weak. He wheezed when he spoke. The air rustled in his throat like winter wind whispering through sun-dried grass.

  "You should have called," Rita chided gently. "I would have come sooner."

  Father John shook his head. "They wouldn't let me. I was in intensive care. Only relatives…"

  Rita nodded and then waited patiently, letting Father John rest awhile before he continued. "I wanted to ask your forgiveness," he said. "Please."

  "I forgave you long ago," she returned. "When you agreed to help us with the evil Ohb, I forgave you then."

  "Thank you," he said. "Thank you so much."

  There was another long period of silence. Nodding, Davy almost drifted off to sleep before Father John's voice startled him awake once more.

  "Please tell me about your son," the old man said quietly. "The one who disappeared in Korea. His name was Gordon, I believe. Was that the child? Was he my son?"

  Rita shook her head. There was a small reading lamp on the table beside Father John's bed. The dim light from that caught the two tracks of tears meandering down Rita's broad wrinkled cheeks.

  "No," she answered. "I lost that baby in California. When I was real sick, a bad doctor took the baby from me before it was time."

  There was a sharp intake of breath from the man on the bed, followed by a fit of coughing. "A boy or a girl?" Father John asked at last when he could speak once more.

  "I don't know," Rita said. "I never saw it. They put me to sleep. When I woke up, the baby was gone."

  "When I heard about the murder, I assumed Gina was…"

  Again Rita shook her head. "No. Gina was my husband Gordon's granddaughter, not yours. Gordon took care of me when I was sick in California that time when I lost the baby. If it hadn't been for him, I would have died, too. Gordon was a good man. He was a good husband who gave me a good son."

  "Gordon Antone." Father John said the name carefully, as if testing the feel of the words on his lips. "Someone else I must pray for."

  "Rest now," Rita said. "Try to get some sleep."

  Instead Father John reached out, picked up the rosary, and then dropped it into the palm of Rita's hand before closing her fingers over it.

  "Keep this for me," he urged. "I have used it to pray for you every day for all these years. I won't need it any longer."

  Without a word, Rita slipped the beads and crucifix into her pocket. Father John drifted off to sleep then. Eventually, so did Davy. When he awakened the next morning, the room was chilly, but Davy himself was warm. Overnight someone had put a pillow under his head and had covered him with a blanket. Rita, with her chin resting on her collarbone, still sat stolidly in the chair beside Father John's bed, dozing. She woke up a few minutes later. The priest did not.

  At age seven, this was Davy Ladd's first personal experience with death. He had thought it would be scary, but somehow it wasn't. He knew instinctively that in the room that night he had shared something beautiful with those two people, something important, although it would be years before he finally figured out exactly what it was.

  In the three years David Ladd had been in Chicago, he had come to Calvary Cemetery often in hopes of establishing some kind of connection between himself and the names etched into the marble monuments of the Ladd family plot. The worldly remains of Garrison Walther Ladd II and III lay on either side of a headstone bearing his grandmother's name. The only difference between Astrid's
grave marker and the other two was the lack of a date.

  Respectfully, David put the wreath on his grandfather's grave first. He had come to Chicago several times to visit his grandparents, first as a youngster and later as a teenager, flying out by himself over holidays along with all those other children being shuttled between custodial and non-custodial parents during school vacations. The flight attendants who had been designated to transfer him from plane to plane or from plane to the Ladds had always assumed that Davy was the product of a cross-country divorce. And some of the time he had gone along with that fiction, making up stories about where his father lived and what he did for a living. That was easier and far more fun than telling people the truth-that his father was dead.

  Finished with his grandfather's grave, David turned to his father's. Breakfast with Astrid had lessened the impact of the latest visitation of the recurring dream. Vivid and disturbing, it had come to him every night for over a week now. Each time it came, he awakened the moment he saw his sister's lifeless body in the middle of the kitchen floor. And when his eyes opened, his body would launch off, sweating and trembling, into yet another panic attack.

  Night after night, the two events came together like a pair of evil twins-first the dream and then the panic attack. One followed the other as inevitably as night follows day. Davy went to bed at night almost as sick with dread at what was bound to come as he would be later when it did. As the days and virtually sleepless nights went by, anticipating the attacks became almost as shattering as the attacks themselves.

  Up to that moment in the cemetery, the attacks themselves had always happened at night, in the privacy of his own room and always preceded by the dream. But right then, kneeling beside the marker bearing the name of Garrison Walther Ladd III, David felt his pulse begin to quicken. Moments later, his heart was hammering in his chest, knocking his ribs so hard that he could barely breathe. His hands began to tingle. He felt dizzy.

  Not trusting his ability to remain upright, David sank down on the ground next to his father's headstone and leaned against it for support. He tried to pray. As a child, the old priest, Father John, had taught him about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And Rita had taught him about I'itoi.

  But right then, in Davy's hour of need, there in the hot, still air of that Chicago cemetery, all he could hear through the trees was the sound of traffic buzzing by on Lake Shore Drive. From where Davy sat, both Heavenly Father and Elder Brother seemed impossibly remote.

  David had no idea how long the attack lasted. Eventually his breathing steadied and his heartbeat returned to normal. Weak and queasy, he returned to himself bathed in his own rank sweat.

  Nothing to worry about, the doctor had said after running all those tests weeks before. After learning that Davy was about to embark on a cross-country drive, the emergency room physician had declined to prescribe any sedatives or tranquilizers that might have caused drowsiness.

  "If you're still having difficulties when you get back home to Arizona," the doctor had told him, "you should consult with your family physician."

  If I get home, David Ladd thought. What if one of these spells came over him in the middle of a freeway somewhere when he was driving by himself? What would happen then?

  David staggered to his feet. Still somewhat unsteady, he stood for some time, staring down at his father's grave. This was one of the reasons he had come to Evanston in the first place, one of the reasons he had accepted his grandmother's generous offer and applied to Northwestern. He had hoped that by coming here, he might somehow come to understand his father's side of the story. After all, he had grown up and spent most of his life hearing his mother's version of those long-ago events.

  But the laudatory tales about Davy's father that his grandmother told him were no help. Davy sensed that there was no more truth in them than there had been in his own mother's clipped, bare-bones answers in the face of her son's never-ending curiosity. And as for visiting the grave itself? That had told him less than nothing.

  Shaking his head, David Ladd turned and walked away, wondering what to do with the solitary hours before the three-o'clock check-in time at the hotel. But by the time he reached the car, he had an answer.

  Almost without thinking, he drove to the Field Museum of Natural History. There he wandered slowly through galleries of lighted displays that told the stories, one after another, of vanished and vanquished Native American cultures.

  David Ladd blended into the throngs of tourists that surged like herds of grazing buffalo through the museum's long hallways. Most were Anglos of one kind or another, with their loud voices and bulging bellies. For most the displays were clearly something foreign and outside their own experience. A few of the visitors were Indian. They came to the displays with a sense of understanding and a reverence that here, at least, their past still existed.

  And standing in the midst of all those different people, David Ladd felt doubly alone. Cheated, almost. He was a blond-haired, blue-eyed outsider. He felt no connection, no sense of brotherhood, with the Mil-gahn tourists with their Bermuda-shorts-clad legs and their ill-behaved children. But here in this place, he felt no connection to The People-to the Indians-either.

  Then, almost as though she were standing beside him, he heard Rita Antone's voice once more, speaking to him out of the distant past. She sat at a kitchen table with the fragrant, newly dried bear grass and yucca laid out on the table. There was a fistful of grass in one hand. Her awl-her owij — was poised but still in her other hand. The raw materials for Rita's next basket lay arrayed on the table, but the old woman's real workbench was forever her ample, apron-covered lap.

  "The center must be very strong, Olhoni, " she had said, "or the basket will be no good."

  Whenever Rita had started a basket, she always said something like that. The words reminded him of the words that usually accompanied taking the Holy Sacrament. The words were almost always the same, and yet they were always different.

  With tears misting his eyes, David Ladd fled the museum. I have lost the center of my basket, he thought despairingly. I don't know who I am.

  With Lani Walker there in the Bounder with him, Mitch tried to keep Andy's failure clearly at the forefront of his mind. Much as he wanted her, much as he physically ached to use that slender body, he was equally determined to deny himself the pleasure. Andrew Carlisle had allowed his base nature to overwhelm his intellect. Mitch Johnson had no intention of making the same mistake.

  Watching Lani sleeping peacefully on the bed, Mitch's physical need for her was so great that he forced himself to turn his back on her and walk away. That was the only reasonable thing to do-put some distance between himself and what he knew to be an invitation to disaster.

  For a time he busied himself with his art materials, setting up his easel and getting out his paper. He waited until he was once more fully under control before he turned to look at her once again, before he allowed himself to gaze down at her. Her long dark lashes rested softly on bronze cheeks. It surprised him to notice, for the first time, that here and there on the bronze skin of her body were occasional light spots, reverse freckles, almost. He wondered vaguely what might have caused those blemishes, but he didn't worry about them long. It was time to tie her, to use the four matching, richly colored teal-and-burgundy scarves he had bought for that precise purpose.

  He had bought them in four separate stores, paying for them in cash. "It's for my mother's birthday," he had told the first saleslady, who waited on him at Park Mall. "For my Aunt Gertrude's eightieth," he told the second one in a store at El Con. "For my next-door neighbor," he explained, smiling at the third salesclerk in the first store in Tucson Mall. "She takes care of my two dogs when I'm out of town." By the fourth store Mitch was running out of imagination. It was back to his mother's birthday.

  As an artist, Mitch Johnson possibly could have done without the scarves altogether and painted them in later from either memory or imagination. But when it came to this parti
cular picture, Mitch Johnson was a perfectionist. He wanted to do it right. He took care to arrange the scarves properly, so that it was clear they were restraints, holding the girl against her will, but beautiful restraints nonetheless. He arranged the loose ends of the scarves in drapes and folds around her as an opulent counterpoint to the naked simplicity of the girl's body. Contrast, of course, is everything.

  He also spent a considerable period of time creating just the right angle and perspective. For that he finally settled on three pillows. Two he used to raise her head and neck enough so that both her face and that funny necklace at the base of her throat were clearly visible. The third pillow went under her buttocks, raising her hips high enough so that what lay between her spread legs was fully visible. To Mitch, anyway.

  That was the whole tantalizing wonder of this particular pose. Had Mitch been an ancient Greek sculptor, he would have opted for the use of fig leaves, perhaps. The painters of the Renaissance had gone in for the strategic drape of robes to conceal what shouldn't be seen. Mitch was a purist. He wanted to use the girl's own body to create the desired illusion. Nicolaides had taught him to look for edges and to draw those.

  Afraid the shock of cold water might awaken her, he dampened his fingers with warm water from the tap. Then he petted the wild tangle of soft black pubic hair, teasing and coaxing it into place. He used the hair itself to create a concealing veil until it curved around and over what he wanted to hide from any other casual viewers if not from himself. No one else would be able to see under it, but any person viewing the picture would know unerringly that the artist himself had drunk his fill.

  His hand still reeked with the heady, musky smell of her when, weak-kneed, he returned to his easel and began to work on the quick gesture sketch, using broad lines and circles to capture the general form of her.

  As the charcoal scraped comfortingly across the paper, he felt himself settling down once more. As he worked, the chorus of an old Sunday-school hymn came unbidden to his mind. "Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin." Smiling to himself, he sang as many of the words as he was able to remember.