Hour of the Hunter: With Bonus Material: A Novel of Suspense

by J. A. Jance

  Now, though, as Davy’s words slipped into her heart, Rita Antone realized that he regarded the Anglo scientists as different somehow, as a people apart from his own kind. For the first time, she wondered if she had done the right thing.

  Nana Dahd loved her little Olhoni more than life itself, but had she gone too far? Did blond-haired Davy Ladd believe he was disconnected from “those white men” and their telescopes? Had she created an Anglo child who would always watch westerns on television and in the movies with an Indian child’s inevitable dread of impending defeat?

  Rita Antone had wanted desperately to pass on her legacy of wisdom, knowledge gleaned from her own grandmother, a much-respected Ban Thak wisewoman. She had expected that wisdom to flow through her own son, Gordon, to Gina, her granddaughter. But Gina had been stolen from her, and during the terrible troubles that followed Gina’s death, Diana Ladd alone had been Rita’s constant ally. That was a debt that demanded repayment, and she was paying it back in the only wealth she had at her disposal.

  When Olhoni was born, Rita had looked at the fatherless child and had known instinctively that Diana’s ability to mother the child had somehow been obliterated with the death of the child’s father. So Rita had stepped into the breach, taking on the role of godmother and mentor to the little bald-headed baby. She had been happy to find willing ears into which she could pour all that she knew. The old woman had lavished on Davy the kind of love Diana Ladd couldn’t wring from her own rock-hard heart.

  At sixty-five years of age, Nana Dahd usually knew her own mind. She lived with a Papago’s stolid and abiding faith in life’s inevitabilities. This sudden attack of uncertainty caused new beads of sweat to break out on her forehead.

  While Davy dozed contentedly in the sunlit rider’s seat, Nana Dahd struggled with her conscience. Down by the shrine where Gina had died, Rita had crossed herself and prayed to the Anglo God, to Father John’s God, her mother’s God, asking for His blessing on Gina’s eternal soul. But here, on Ioligam, on I’itoi’s sacred mountain, the Anglo God seemed far away and deaf besides.

  “Ni-i wehmatathag I’itoi ahni’i,” she whispered, her voice almost inaudible beneath the groaning engine of the laboring GMC. “I’itoi, help me.”

  But she wasn’t at all sure He would.

  3

  AT ALMOST SEVEN thousand feet, a brisk breeze struck their faces as Rita and Davy stepped down from the GMC. After the heat of the desert floor far below, the cool mountain air felt almost chilly.

  In the sparsely occupied observatory parking lot, Rita left Davy to unload baskets while she limped toward the gift shop. A little blond-haired girl sitting on sun-soaked steps regarded the Indian woman curiously as she tapped lightly on the visitor center’s side entrance. At this hour, visitors inside would be watching a movie. Rita disliked walking past them on her way to the craft shop.

  Edwina Galvan, manager of the shop, came to the door. Edwina, a Kiowa transplant to the Papago, had fallen in love with and married a young Papago fire fighter who now, as a middle-aged man, served as tribal-council representative from Ban Thak.

  Even in her forties, Edwina’s classic Plains Indian features and good looks met and exceeded all the visiting tourists’ “real Indian” expectations. She augmented a stunning natural beauty with a varying wardrobe of antelope bone or squash-blossom necklaces that she wasn’t shy about removing and selling on the spot if a likely purchaser showed sufficient interest.

  Since coming to the Papago and assuming management of the Kitt Peak gift shop, she had developed a reputation as a shrewd and knowledgeable basket trader, one with an unerring eye for superior craftsmanship. For years, the Kiowa woman had been Rita Antone’s sole customer.

  Edwina smiled when she saw Rita’s broad weathered face waiting outside the door. “So,” she said. “If you’re here, it must be June. It’s sure a good thing. Your baskets are all gone.”

  She didn’t say that because of their unrivaled superiority, Rita Antone’s baskets were always the first to sell. Such high praise would be considered excessive and rude. It was enough to say that Rita’s baskets were gone. The old woman nodded a brief acknowledgment of the understated compliment.

  Davy appeared just then, lugging the first box of baskets. He waved at Edwina, then hurried back after the next load.

  “The bald-headed baby isn’t bald anymore,” Edwina observed as the door closed behind him. “He’s sure big. Is he in school?”

  “He just finished kindergarten. He’ll be in first grade next year,” Rita answered.

  Davy returned with the second box of baskets, smiling shyly at Edwina as he put it down on the floor. Edwina had heard all the reservation grumblings about Rita Antone, often called Hejel Wi’ithag, or Left Alone, by other Papagos. Gossips said it wasn’t right for her to squander all her hard-earned knowledge on Davy Ladd, an Anglo at that—a boy whose father, convicted or not, was ultimately responsible for Rita’s own grandchild’s death. No one could understand why she would abandon her people to go live in Tucson with the killer’s Anglo widow and her white-skinned baby.

  Edwina, still considered a reservation newcomer after a mere twenty years, accepted as a given the special bond that existed between Rita Antone and Diana Ladd. She remembered how the people had unaccountably closed ranks against the bereaved woman after Gina Antone’s death, saying that the old woman was bad luck. Diana and Rita, united by nothing more than mutual grief, had been each other’s strongest allies in that time of trouble. Edwina Galvan didn’t fault either woman for their continuing alliance, nor did she begrudge Left Alone her devotion to the blond-haired boy. In fact, Edwina rather liked him herself.

  It took Davy several more trips before all the baskets were assembled in a pile on the floor in front of the counter. By then, Rita was seated on a chair behind the counter drinking a glass of water and fanning herself while Edwina went through the boxes one by one, examining each basket in turn, writing the price on a piece of masking tape that she affixed to the bottom of each basket after first making a note in the ragged notebook that served as her master record.

  “You’ve sure been busy,” Edwina commented offhandedly as she worked. “What are you going to do with all your money?”

  “Saving it for my old age,” Rita answered. At that, both women laughed. Rita was sixty-five years old. Among the Papago, in a population with the highest blood-sugar count of any known ethnic group in the world, one decimated by the ravages of both diabetes and alcoholism, Rita Antone was already well into a venerated old age.

  “Does she give you any of that cash?” Edwina asked Davy with a smile. He shook his head seriously. Edwina reached into her pocket and extracted a quarter. “Here, I’ll give you some,” she said. “Go get yourself a Coke. The machine’s right outside.”

  Davy dashed eagerly out of the gift shop. Rita and his mother didn’t let him have sodas often, so this was a special treat. He found the machine with no trouble and felt terribly grown up as he inserted the coin all by himself and pressed the selection button. A can rolled into the slot with a satisfying thunk. Grabbing it and turning at the same time, he ran headlong into the little Anglo girl who had watched him make trip after trip carrying loads of baskets. The impact of the unexpected collision knocked the soda can out of his hands. It fell to the ground and rolled away.

  “Watch where you’re going, dummy,” he muttered. He retrieved the can, but when he opened it, half its contents blew into the air. Disappointed, he flopped down onto the steps to drink what was left. Moments later, the little girl joined him, bringing her own soda with her.

  “Is that woman you’re with a Indian?” she asked.

  It was bad manners to ask such questions, but Davy answered anyway. “Yes.”

  “Are you a Indian, too?” she persisted.

  “Maybe I am,” Davy answered, growing surly. “And maybe I’m not, either. What’s it to you?”

  With that, he stomped away, not sure what about the question had made him so a
ngry. He hurried across the parking lot to where two quarrelsome ground squirrels argued over an abandoned crust of bread. Suddenly, the automatic door of an outbuilding opened, and an ambulance eased into the sunlight.

  At first Davy thought he was going to get to see it drive off with lights flashing and siren blaring. Instead, the driver parked directly outside the door, shut off the engine, then went back into the garage. He returned moments later carrying a bucket of soapy water, a brush, and a fistful of rags.

  Disappointed, Davy finished what was left of his soda and went looking for Rita.

  Andrew Carlisle took his time. He was in no hurry to leave the scene of his triumph and return to the car. After drinking his fill from the rocky pool, he washed the blood from his back, shins, and knees, letting the hot sun dry the moisture from his chafed skin. He took real pleasure in knowing that his victim had fought him and lost. He was a slight man, but the years of working out in prison, especially his total concentration on strengthening his hands, had paid off.

  Only after he was fully dressed did he once more turn his attention to the dead woman. Andrew Carlisle was not a man accustomed to cleaning up his own messes, but in this case he made an exception. Dragging her by one arm, he hauled her into the shallow stream and washed her thoroughly, carefully rinsing off whatever traces of himself he might have left behind. Touching her now no longer aroused him, but he enjoyed looking at the ruined breast and knowing he had caused the damage. That was a trophy of sorts, something to be proud of.

  When he finished cleaning her up, he dragged her back out of the water and arranged her to his liking, leaving her lying faceup in the searing sun, then he surveyed the area, gathering her clothing and sandals into a small, tidy stack. He shook an almost full package of Winstons out of the woman’s shirt pocket, and was happy to see that a book of matches had been shoved inside the cellophane wrapper.

  He squatted there and smoked his cigarette. Little time had passed, but already a few alert flies and ants were beginning to do what flies and ants do with dead flesh. He observed their purposeful movements with detached amusement, wondering idly how the insects knew about the unexpected bounty good fortune had laid at their doorstep. Was there some kind of secret signal, some code? Did an alert scout sound a special buzzing alarm that said, “Hey guys, follow me. Come see what I found”?

  By the time Carlisle finished the cigarette, there were far more ants and flies than there had been when he first lit up. He ground out the cigarette and placed the butt along with the accumulated stack of clothing. He returned to the corpse and removed the jewelry—three rings, a Timex watch, and a single gold-chain necklace—wresting them roughly from the body not because they might be valuable or worth selling but because any delay in identifying the body would work to his advantage.

  Systematically, he went through the pockets of her shorts and shirt, finding nothing but the car keys and his own sixty-five dollars. “You should have asked for more, honey,” he said aloud to the dead woman as he returned the bills to his wallet. “Believe me, your pussy was worth it.”

  He returned to the pitiful stack of belongings and wrapped them as well as his discarded cigarette butt into a secure bundle, which he stuffed inside his shirt. The cigarettes, matches, and car keys went into a pocket. He made one last careful search of the area to make sure he had missed nothing.

  Most of the terrain was rocky except for the hooker’s makeshift earthen bed. With a mesquite branch, he swept the area clean of footprints, adding the branch to his bundle as well. When he was certain he had removed all visible incriminating evidence, Andrew Carlisle turned and walked away.

  Welcome to the world, he thought. Payback time has started.

  Diana Ladd leaned away from her typewriter and rolled her shoulders, trying to relieve the tension caused by several uninterrupted hours before her trusty Smith-Corona. The writing wasn’t going particularly well, but she refused to quit.

  It was probably weariness that made her drop her guard for a moment, allowing the unwelcome, errant thought into her consciousness—if only Gary were here to give her a back rub.

  Disgusted with herself, she choked the thought off smothering it as quickly as she could. Seven years after Gary’s suicide, her mind and body both still played those kinds of tricks on her. She felt betrayed by the treachery of her own flesh, by the aching longings that sometimes awakened her in the middle of the night. Gary was dead, dammit, and she wouldn’t have wanted him around any longer even if he weren’t.

  When the boy was gone, Mister Bone, as Diana often called the dog, lay at her feet. As soon as the typing stopped, he raised his head, hoping Diana might throw the ball for him. When she got up and padded to the kitchen, he followed, stopping by the kitchen sink to take a long, sloppy drink from his water dish while she retrieved a pitcher of warm sun tea from the patio.

  Diana Ladd knew that her friends were losing patience. One by one, they had all taken the trouble to tell her that it was high time she got over Gary’s death, time that she dated someone else and found a father figure for poor little Davy. That was what they always called him—“poor little Davy.” Well, she hadn’t chosen very damn well the first time, and she didn’t have any faith she’d do better the next time around. Besides, she had tried it—once.

  She had gone out for one miserable evening with a traveling encyclopedia salesman who had made a presentation to the school faculty at Sells. He had taken her to dinner at the Iron Mask in Tucson and then to the Maverick, a country-western place on Twenty-second Street. She had done all right until the band had played “The Snakes Crawl at Night.” When they did that number, she had asked him to take her home, and she’d refused to go out with him again. Months later, he still called her periodically.

  Taking the glass of iced tea back to her room, Diana settled down at the desk and read through the five pages she had written since Rita and Davy had left at noon. It was tripe, she knew it, but she resisted the temptation to wad it all up into a ball and throw it in the garbage. Later, after she’d given it a rest, some of it might still be salvageable. If she was going to finish the book this summer—that was her stated goal—she couldn’t afford to throw everything away.

  Although she thought of the book as a novel, it was autobiographical, of course. Someone had said that all first novels are autobiographical. It was the story of a woman’s attempt to go on living in the aftermath of her husband’s betrayal and subsequent suicide. The problem was the main character. There was no joy in her heroine, no life.

  Diana rolled another clean sheet of paper into the machine, then sat there staring at it. In the stillness of the darkened room, her parents’ voices returned to haunt her. Once they started up, she had no choice but to let them play on to the end of whatever tape had surfaced in her head. All of the arguments and battles were there, preserved indelibly in her memory. The details varied occasionally, but the basic theme was always the same.

  It had usually started around dinnertime when her father would come in from working in the woods near Joseph, Oregon.

  “Where’s that lazy daughter of yours, Iona? Why the hell isn’t she down here helping you?”

  Her mother’s voice would come drifting up the stairs to her then—calming and soothing, as always. “She’s studying, Max. Leave her alone. I don’t need any help. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  But Max Cooper was never one to be easily dissuaded. He would come to the bottom of the stairs, and his voice would boom through the house like a clap of thunder announcing a sudden storm over Oregon’s Willowa Mountains.

  “Diana Lee, you get your ass down here. Now!”

  Knowing better than to argue or fight back, Diana would hurry downstairs. Inevitably, he would be waiting for her at the landing, swaying dangerously, hiking up his pants, tugging at his suspenders. She’d try to slip past him, but he would catch her by the braids, snapping her head back, pulling her hair until her eyes watered. She must have been twelve then, because her mother had cu
t off the braids right after her thirteenth birthday.

  “What were you doing up there?” he demanded.

  “Reading a book. For my book report.”

  At twelve Diana Lee Cooper hadn’t known that her father was illiterate. Diana didn’t find that out until much later, when her mother was dying. Max Cooper’s inability to read was part and parcel of the helplessness that bound Iona Cooper to him. Aside from the fact that Diana wasn’t a son, her love of reading was another reason for Max to despise their only child. Diana’s love of books and schooling both mystified and infuriated him.

  Diana tried to slip away, but he yanked her braids again, shaking her, lifting her off her feet. The skin all over her head smarted, but she didn’t cry out. Wouldn’t cry out.

  “How come you’ve always got that snooty nose of yours stuck in a book, young lady? You get your butt out into the kitchen, girl, and learn something useful for a change.”

  Twenty years later, Diana Ladd could still smell his stale, beer-saturated breath and see the spikes of stiff nose hairs in his flaring nostrils.

  “Once you learn how to cook and clean and please a man, then’s time enough for you to sit on your ass and read books.”

  He had shoved her away from him then, propelling her toward the kitchen. Somehow she managed to keep her legs under her. In the kitchen, Iona Cooper, lips clenched, bent over the stove, concentrating on stirring the gravy or mashing the potatoes, refusing to meet Diana’s gaze. She never said anything aloud, never said anything her husband might overhear and use against them both, but a conspiracy of silence existed between the woman and her daughter.

  Afterward, Diana Lee Ladd remembered that battle in particular and counted it as a watershed. A spark of rebellion caught fire that evening, one that Max Cooper was never able to stifle or beat out of his daughter no matter how hard he tried.