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

by J. A. Jance

  From her pottery-making place, Understanding Woman had seen and heard all that was said. Oks Amichuda sided with her son on the subject of Dancing Quail’s education, but an old woman who lives under her daughter-in-law’s roof must be circumspect. She got up and hobbled after her grandchild. In the shadowy adobe house, she went to the storage basket in which she kept her few treasures. Understanding Woman extracted something and brought it to where Dancing Quail was rolling her dress into the blanket.

  “He’eni,” the old woman said urgently. “Here! Take it.”

  Dancing Quail looked up. Her grandmother was holding out a small, tightly woven medicine basket.

  The child’s eyes grew large. “Ni-kahk,” she said, shaking her head. “Grandmother. Not your medicine basket.”

  “Yes,” Understanding Woman insisted, “to keep your spirit safe.”

  So the medicine basket went into the bundle. When Dancing Quail emerged from the house, Alice handed her a rolled tortilla filled with beans. Soon Big Eddie returned, bringing with him five other children from the village. Bravely, Dancing Quail climbed into the wagon behind him. She didn’t look back. She didn’t want her mother to see that she was crying.

  Brandon Walker found the noisy silence in the car disturbing. His mother, Louella, who had never suffered an introspective moment in her whole life, spoke at tedious length about anything and everything. Women who didn’t talk made the detective nervous.

  What was Diana Ladd thinking about as she sat there wordlessly on the far side of the car with the wind whipping long tendrils of auburn hair around her face? She seemed oblivious to it and made no effort to brush it away.

  Finally, he could stand it no longer. “When did you quit teaching on the reservation?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer, and he glanced in her direction, thinking she had drifted off to sleep, but no, her eyes were open. He tried again, almost shouting to be heard above the rushing wind.

  This time Diana turned toward him in acknowledgment. “I didn’t quit,” she replied. “What made you think that?”

  “You’re living in Tucson,” he returned. “I thought you had free housing with the district as long as you taught out there.”

  “I wanted a house of my own,” she said, and turned her face away from him, effectively cutting off all further conversation.

  In 1943, long before the era of sanitary landfills, garbage dumps were still called garbage dumps and bums still scrounged through the accumulated trash, living on whatever crumbs they could scavenge. It was then that the moderately progressive town fathers of Joseph, Oregon, bought the old Stevens place down by the creek to use as the town dump. Through a fluke, the ramshackle old house came with the deal. Initially, the intention was to tear the house down, bulldoze it into the ground, but then someone came up with a better idea.

  Everyone in town knew that Iona Anne Dade had made a terrible mistake in marrying Max Cooper—everyone, that is, except perhaps Iona herself, who by then was already alarmingly pregnant with her daughter, Diana. In those days, when good Catholic girls made matrimonial mistakes, they had no choice but to stand pat and make the best of a bad bargain.

  So when Max Cooper—an indifferent, sometime logger—was offered the position of garbage-dump caretaker in Joseph, Oregon, it was more as a humanitarian gesture toward his pregnant young wife than it was a vote of confidence about Max’s own dubious job skills or work ethic. And when the Stevens house, such as it was, got thrown into the bargain, it was out of deference to Iona’s daddy, the late Wayne Dade, who had spent many years loyally serving on the town council.

  The ladies of Joseph in a rare show of true Christian charity, for once put aside their differences in creed, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work on the place. Baptists did most of the scrubbing and cleaning, Methodists painted, and Catholics sewed curtains. Even stand-offish Mormons signed on to braid rag rugs for the bare linoleum floors.

  From the time Max and Iona Cooper moved into their newly refurbished quarters, Max was known in the town of Joseph as the Garbage Man. In the winter when it was too cold to work in the woods and in the summer when it was too hot, or when he wasn’t down at the tavern too drunk to walk, Max Cooper minded the gate, collected the dump fees, and kept the riffraff out. The rest of the time his wife handled it.

  Iona Cooper did her housework or gardening, all the while listening for the bell over her kitchen sink that announced someone’s arrival at the garbage dump’s locked gate. Rain or shine, summer heat or bitter winter’s cold, she would drop what she was doing and hurry across the field.

  People knew that she was the person who usually opened the gate, who collected the fees, and who returned the change, but no one ever thought of Iona Cooper as the Garbage Woman. She was always Iona Dade Cooper, Wayne’s daughter, the lady who sold milk and eggs, who pickled tomatoes and canned peaches, and who always could find some little something in her pantry for the hungry bums who invariably turned up on her doorstep. She baked wedding cakes for hire and sewed matching bridesmaid dresses. And everybody respected her for what she did, because if you were married to a worthless oaf like Max Cooper, that’s what it took to keep a roof over your head.

  Nobody ever once mentioned the word divorce, least of all Iona Dade Cooper.

  Brandon Walker slowed the car when they came onto the open-range part of Highway 86. He knew that in the cool of the evening, livestock would be making its nightly way to water and forage. He didn’t want to take any chances.

  What was she thinking about, huddled over there against the far door? Was she just worried about her son, or was she thinking about something else—about that time seven years ago when their lives had collided once before, about how he had told her back then that she should trust the system? Diana Ladd had been naive back then. So had he.

  Driving along, Brandon himself rehashed the entire case in his head, how Gina Antone—he remembered her name now—was found floating facedown in a retention pond after an all-night rain dance at San Pedro Village. Initial presumption was death by drowning, but subsequent investigation indicated murder. Not only murder, but mutilation and torture as well.

  The water hole where the body was found was outside reservation boundaries, so the Pima County Sheriff’s Department was called in on the case. Dead Indians didn’t count for much around Jack DuShane’s Sheriff’s Department. As a result, the case was delegated to the newest kid on the block—Brandon Walker, recently returned from Southeast Asia.

  Even a novice like Walker found it simple to follow the trail that led to Garrison Ladd, who had been seen at the dance in the company of both the dead woman and a man named Andrew Carlisle, a professor of creative writing from the University of Arizona. As soon as the long arm of the law threatened to close in on them, Gary Ladd took himself out to the desert and put a bullet through his head, leaving his buddy Carlisle to take the rap for both of them.

  Under questioning, Carlisle maintained that the two men were just out to have a little harmless fun. “You know how things get out of hand at rain dances,” he told the investigators. He maintained the girl was already drinking when they picked her up at Three Points. The three of them went to the dance, sat in the circle, and drank the cactus wine. Afterward, at the girl’s insistence, they left the village and stopped off at the water hole to polish off a few beers.

  Carlisle claimed that he passed out only to waken later and be unable to find Ladd or the girl anywhere. He made his way back to the pickup and started it up, planning on driving home. He was still so smashed that he didn’t realize Gary Ladd had, for some unaccountable reason, tied a rope around the girl’s neck and fastened the rope to the bumper of the truck.

  After driving only a few feet, he was startled to find Ladd, who had passed out in the bed of the truck, pounding frantically on the window, motioning for Carlisle to stop. Too late they hurried back to check on the girl; Gina Antone was already dead.

  Still drunk, the men took her back to the water hole a
nd sat there, drinking warm beer and talking about what to do. Carlisle claimed to know nothing at all about what had happened to the girl’s breast. Carlisle took no responsibility for anything else that might have transpired between Gary Ladd and Gina while he himself was asleep. Carlisle’s claim of drunken innocence galled the detective, but without contradictory testimony, he couldn’t shake the story.

  Throughout the questioning process, Carlisle maintained that they put the body in the water, hoping no one would notice for a while, and that when they did, people would assume Gina had drowned. Things didn’t work that way. As soon as the girl’s grandmother reported her missing, the people of San Pedro remembered the two drunk Mil-gahn who had escorted Gina Antone at the dance. Word was passed along, first to the tribal police, and later to Brandon Walker of the Sheriff’s Department.

  Much to his dismay, Sheriff DuShane found himself stuck with a solved murder and a very prominent murderer—a University of Arizona professor, no less. Those were complications DuShane hadn’t counted on when he assigned Brandon Walker to the case. Offending the university community didn’t bode well for DuShane’s political future. Several pointed damage-control suggestions were made to Detective Walker advising him to back off. Rather than quitting, Walker renewed his efforts.

  He called on Diana Ladd in the aftermath of her husband’s suicide. “What about the bite on Gina’s breast?” a tearful Diana had demanded when he questioned her not only about the suicide, but also in regard to Gina Antone’s death. Word of the grisly mutilation had somehow found its way into newspaper accounts of the murder.

  “What about it?” Brandon asked.

  “Gary would never do something like that. Never. Isn’t there some way to check it, to do an impression of the bite mark and compare it with Gary’s dental records? They won’t be the same, I know they won’t.”

  Of course, the one ghoulishly mutilating bite wasn’t all Gina Antone had suffered, not by any means. There were burns and cuts and signs of innumerable forced entries. But the bite itself could have provided the most telling testimony had Brandon Walker been able to check it, but pertinent information about the bite somehow had disappeared from Gina Antone’s file. For years now, that missing piece of paper had haunted Brandon Walker. Would the outcome have been different had it been found?

  There was no way to tell for sure, but without it, Andrew Carlisle’s lawyer managed to plea-bargain the more serious charges down to one of second-degree rape and voluntary manslaughter. The judge on the case, hard-nosed Judge Clarence Barker, took an immediate and intense dislike to Andrew Carlisle. Barker threw the book at Carlisle anyway, handing out eight years. That much of a stretch was a long time for a first-time offender, especially when the perpetrator was an Anglo and the victim was an Indian, but Barker made it stick, and no amount of appealing changed it.

  For some reason Brandon Walker could never fathom, during the legal maneuverings, Diana Ladd became Rita Antone’s constant companion and champion. All the while maintaining her own husband’s innocence, she made it her business to see that Andrew Carlisle got what was coming to him. She was outraged by the plea-bargaining arrangement. From her point of view, eight years in Florence was a mere pittance of punishment, almost as good as Carlisle getting off scot-free.

  Years later, Walker could see that Gary Ladd hadn’t exactly got off, either. Dead by his own hand, he went to his grave under a cloud, convicted of suicide and innocent of murder and rape only by the narrow technicality of never having come to trial. Walker considered both Ladd and Carlisle guilty as hell. Both were equally despicable, but most of the burden for their crimes had fallen on Diana Ladd’s narrow shoulders.

  Justice really was blind, Walker thought humorlessly. Gary Ladd was dead, but his widow was still paying.

  Back in the deserted English Department office, standing with his arms crossed, Garrison Walther Ladd leaned against the receptionist’s desk regarding Diana’s fetching backside with considerable interest while she distributed the packets of dittoed material to the various mailboxes. Knowing he was looking at her made her nervous. A deep flush spread up her neck and across her cheeks, not stopping until it reached the roots of her auburn hair.

  “You’re serious about what you do, aren’t you?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” After what Garrison Ladd had just told her, what else could he expect?

  “Most girls your age are more…well, lighthearted, I suppose.”

  She resented his making small talk. After all, the president was dead. Shouldn’t they be talking about that? “Most girls don’t have to pay their own way,” she returned.

  “Do you? Really? Pay your own way, I mean.”

  “No,” Diana answered bitterly. “I’m just working to wear out my new clothes.”

  Garrison Ladd laughed then, blue eyes twinkling with hearty merriment, white teeth flashing in the fluorescent lighting. “You’re something else!” he said. “You really are.”

  She wished he would go away and let her be, but he probably didn’t want to be responsible for leaving her alone in the office after the place had been closed up and secured for the weekend. She had wanted to work all five of her scheduled hours that morning and afternoon. Her budget was so tight that she couldn’t afford to miss work from any of her three jobs. She only had a few more paychecks to accumulate enough money to pay off next semester’s tuition and books.

  She finished distributing the dittos and checked the empty box where instructors sometimes left typing for her.

  “So what are your plans for the afternoon?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Go back home, I guess. Nobody left any typing for me.”

  “Want to stop by the I-Hop for a cup of coffee?” he asked. “I don’t much feel like working, either.”

  Diana wanted to point out that not wanting to work and not being able to were two entirely different things. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  He offered her a ride, but she insisted on bringing her bike. “The I-Hop puts me partway home,” she told him. “No point in having to come all the way back here.”

  “You mean you live off campus and you don’t have a car?”

  She nodded.

  “Like I said before, you’re something else.”

  The gurney wheeled Rita down the hallway from the recovery room. When the movement stopped, Dancing Quail was standing beside a wagon in the broad, dusty street. She watched fearfully as a strange-looking Mil-gahn woman—the outing matron—moved toward the children. She was tall and thin with short, bright-colored curls the color of red hawk’s tail. Indian hair was usually long and black and glossy, like a horse’s tail. Not only was the outing matron’s hair red, it was curly, too. She peered sternly down at the children through two round pieces of glass that somehow stayed perched on her nose.

  Big Eddie ordered the children out of the wagon. One by one, they tumbled down, taking their small bundles of belongings with them. They lined up alongside the wagon and waited expectantly while the outing matron examined each of them in turn. The woman stopped in front of Dancing Quail and glared down in disapproval. Dancing Quail shook under the white woman’s fierce gaze. She stared at the ground, wondering what was the matter. What had she done wrong?

  Beside her, some of the other children giggled and whispered. “Dancing Quail has no shoes,” one of them said.

  Instantly, the woman shushed the speaker, but by then Dancing Quail, too, knew what was wrong. Looking up and down the line, she could see that from somewhere in their bundles, all the other children had managed to find shoes. They were scuffed and ragged, but of all the children, only Dancing Quail still stood with her bare toes poking holes in the soft, dusty ground.

  The woman spoke sharply in a strange language.

  “She wants to know your name,” Big Eddie said in Papago.

  Dancing Quail swallowed hard. “E Waila Kakaichu,” she began, but the woman cut her off saying something Dancing Quail didn’t understand.

 
; “Your papers at the agency say your name is Rita,” Big Eddie explained. “Here in Tucson and in Phoenix, that is your name.”

  Dancing Quail swallowed hard and tried not to cry. She didn’t want another name. She liked her old name.

  “Rita,” someone was saying. “Rita. Wake up.”

  The old woman battled Effie Joaquin’s summons. She didn’t want to wake up. It would have been easier to stay where she was, back in that hot long-ago summer day with her toes warm and bare in the sandy dirt. Rita’s throat hurt. She felt sick. One arm wouldn’t move at all. It dangled uselessly above her head on some kind of rope and pulley.

  “Wake up now. Would you like some ice?”

  Effie held up a teaspoon filled with crushed ice and ladled some of it into Rita’s mouth. The cold slivers of ice felt good as they slithered down her parched throat.

  “Davy…” she whispered.

  “He’s all right,” Effie assured her. “Dr. Rosemead is with him right now. So’s his mother. She just got here a few minutes ago. They’ll take him to a hospital in Tucson for stitches.”

  “He’s not hurt bad?”

  “No.” Effie smiled. “Not nearly as bad as you.”

  Rita Antone breathed a huge sigh of relief. The pain it caused in her broken ribs brought tears to her eyes, but she didn’t care. Davy was all right. Olhoni was all right.

  Dancing Quail’s long-ago tears, and Nana Dahd’s new ones, coursed in matching tracks down Rita Antone’s weathered cheeks.

  When Dr. Rosemead took Diana and David Ladd into an examining room, Brandon Walker made his way to the pay phone in the corner. It was almost nine, but even so, he had to wait his turn before he could use the phone. There were two Indians in line ahead of him.