by J. A. Jance
His mother’s answering voice was sharp and angry. He knew he was in trouble as soon as she picked up the phone.
“Hi, Mom,” he said brightly. “How’s it going?”
“Why did you take so long to call back?” Louella demanded.
“I couldn’t help it, Mom. I’m at work. We’ve been busy.”
“When will you be home?”
“That’s hard to say. I’m out at Sells right now.”
“Sells! Out on the reservation? Are those Indians busy killing one another again?”
“It’s a car accident,” he explained patiently. “I’m just helping out.”
“Well, it’s great that you have time to help those Indians. What about your parents?”
“That’s why I’m calling. What do you need?”
“Five checks are missing from the checkbook. I’ve asked your father what he did with them. He says he doesn’t know.”
“Is it possible that you wrote checks and forgot to write them down?”
Louella Walker’s response was as predictable as it was arch. “Certainly not! I don’t forget to write down checks. You know me better than that.”
“Maybe you should take my advice and close that account.”
Brandon and his mother had had several heated arguments about his parents’ joint checking account since the previous month, when it had been seriously overdrawn by several checks. Without consulting anyone else, Toby Walker had made a number of wild purchases, including an even dozen Radio Flyer wagons and two new couches and chairs. Sending back the couches and chairs had been easy. Returning wagons to a mail-order house had been far more difficult.
“You know I can’t do that,” Louella countered. “I couldn’t possibly do such a thing to your father.”
Then you’re going to have to suffer the consequences, Brandon felt like saying. Sometimes his mother seemed like a willful child—both his parents did—and he was losing patience.
“Write down the missing numbers,” he said. “We’ll call the bank in the morning and put a stop-payment on them.”
“But that’ll cost too much money.”
“Not as much as sending back another set of wagons.”
“All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “When will you be home?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Late probably.”
“Should I leave your dinner out on the counter?”
“No,” he told her. By the time he got home, Brandon Walker didn’t think he’d be hungry.
Andrew Carlisle waited until he thought his mother was asleep. Then, clad in Jake Spaulding’s red flannel robe, he tiptoed back down the short hallway to the cluttered bathroom. He rummaged through a drawer until he found what he needed—a pair of scissors as well as a razor and a new package of blades.
One careful handful at a time, he began cutting off his hair, shearing it off as close to his scalp as he could. He didn’t hear or see his mother come up to the open doorway. The option of leaving even a bathroom door open behind him was still a sensation worth savoring.
“Andrew,” Myrna Louise said with a frown. “What in the world are you doing?”
“Cutting my hair.”
“I can see that, but it’s terrible. It’s all clumpy.”
“This is just the top layer. When I finish with the scissors, I’m going to shave the rest of it off with a razor.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to be Yul Brynner when I grow up. Don’t all women think Yul Brynner is sexy?”
“I don’t. I don’t like bald men.”
“But you’ll still like me, won’t you, Mama?”
“I suppose,” she sighed.
He returned to the haircut while she continued to watch. “You know, I still have it,” she said musingly, almost dreamily.
“Have what?”
She hesitated before answering. “Your baby curl. From your very first haircut. I’ve kept it in my music box all these years. No matter where I’ve lived, I’ve always kept that curl with me.”
This revelation surprised Andrew Carlisle. “No shit,” he said.
“Why, Andrew!” Myrna Louise exclaimed indignantly. “You know better than to speak to your mother that way.”
“Sorry,” he returned. “After a while, you get used to not having a mother around.”
He hadn’t deliberately set out to hurt her feelings, but instantly her eyes filled with tears.
“You know I would have come to see you if I could have. Florence is so far away from here, and you know how I hate to ride buses. Besides, tickets cost so much.”
She was crying now, leaning against the doorjamb and sobbing brokenly.
Andrew went to her and took her in his arms. “It’s all right, Mama. I didn’t expect you to show up there. It was a terrible place. It would have given you nightmares.”
“It did anyway,” she responded. “I had nightmares the whole time you were gone.”
6
“THIS IS DETECTIVE Walker, Davy,” Diana Ladd said, introducing her son to Brandon when the session in the Indian Health Service examining room was finally over. “He’s giving us a ride back to Tucson.”
“Detective?” Davy asked. He looked warily up at Brandon Walker through long blond lashes. “Are you a real policeman?”
“Yes, I am.” The detective nodded. Little kids were usually dazzled once they understood they were talking to the genuine article. As far as children were concerned, detectives were something rare and wonderful who existed only in the exotic worlds of television or the comics.
“Not only that,” Walker added with a grin, “you’re going to get to ride back to Tucson in a real police car.”
David Ladd’s reaction was diametrically opposed to what Walker expected. The child scuttled away from both the detective and his mother, pausing only when he had planted himself firmly beside a bemused Dr. Rosemead, who was still standing in the doorway of the examining room.
“No,” Davy declared adamantly. “I don’t want to.”
“We have to,” his mother said. “You heard the doctor say you can’t stay here.”
Davy had listened while Dr. Rosemead explained why non-Indians couldn’t be treated by the Indian Health Service. The boy couldn’t understand why Big Toe Indians didn’t count since that’s what Rita said he was, but right then being a Big Toe Indian wasn’t his biggest worry. The alarming presence of a detective was.
“I’ll go in Rita’s truck,” Davy insisted. “I’ll go with my mom.”
“Rita’s truck is broken, remember?” Diana explained patiently. “And I didn’t bring my car.”
The boy glared up at the tall detective with the funny short red brush of mustache marching across his upper lip. “Are you going to take us to jail?” Davy asked.
“To jail? Of course not,” Brandon Walker answered. He wondered where Davy Ladd would have got such a strange idea.
Diana Ladd laughed outright. “Come on, Davy, don’t be silly. Detective Walker’s just going to give us a ride back home, then I’ll take you to the hospital in Tucson for stitches.”
Davy didn’t care about stitches. He remembered what the Indian women had said about him, speaking in Papago when they thought he didn’t understand. If it was true, if he really was Killer’s Child, then his mother must be a killer. This tall, scary detective was probably going to arrest her, take her away to jail, and keep her forever. If his mother went away, what would happen to him? Other kids had two parents. Davy didn’t. With his father dead and Nana Dahd hurt, how would he live? What would he eat? How would he take care of Oh’o?
Davy stood his ground, shaking his head and refusing to budge. Diana lost all patience. “Come on,” she ordered. “Now! It’s late, and I’m tired. This has gone on long enough.”
She held out her hand. Rita had taught Davy never to disobey an adult’s direct command. One tiny, reluctant step at a time, he inched toward her outstretched hand.
Dr. Rosemead smiled and nodded. “Goo
d,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll be fine, but if you’re worried about a possible concussion, Mrs. Ladd, you can always wake him up every hour or so for the next twenty-four, just to be on the safe side. We’ll call on ahead so the doctors at St. Mary’s are expecting you.”
Diana and Davy led the way to the car, but Brandon could see that the boy was hanging back. He was clearly frightened, although the detective couldn’t imagine why. It offended him for little kids to be afraid of cops. Didn’t they teach kids that policemen were their friends? Wasn’t there some project called Officer Friendly working in the schools these days?
As he opened the car door, the detective tried once more to smooth things over with the boy. “Do you want to sit in front?” he asked.
“No,” the boy asserted stubbornly, shying away from the detective’s outstretched hand. “I’ll ride in back.”
Myrna Louise couldn’t stand to stay there in the hallway and watch the entire hair-cutting process. It was too hard on her, brought back far too many painful memories. Even though Andrew was almost fifty—he would be in a few months since she had already turned sixty-five—she still thought of him as her little boy, her baby.
All her husbands had said she spoiled Andrew rotten, except the last one, Jake. He’d never met Andrew. They’d fallen in love and married and almost got divorced while Andrew was—away. That’s how she always thought of it—away. She never allowed herself to think about Andrew’s last seven years in anything other than the vaguest of terms.
On reflection, she supposed it was true—she had spoiled Andrew, whenever she got the chance. That was her one regret in life, that she had seen so little of him after she lost custody. She’d never forgiven her first mother-in-law for that, for encouraging Howie Carlisle to go to court to take her little boy away from her, to have her—Myrna Louise—declared an unfit mother. That was still a terrible blow even though the judge had softened it some by agreeing to let her see Andrew sometimes. When she had a decent place to stay, she’d been able to have him with her during the summers for as long as a month or so and maybe again around Thanksgiving or Christmas, but that was all. In her mind, she’d never functioned as a real mother.
Myrna Louise leaned back in her rocker and closed her eyes, remembering Andrew as he had been when he was little—so cute, so smart, so mischievous. “Full of the devil,” is what Howie used to call it.
Because of the tufts of soft gray hair spilling in a heap onto the bathroom floor, Myrna Louise recalled as if it were yesterday that long-ago time when Roger, her second husband, took her little boy to have his first haircut.
Roger was offended by Andrew’s headful of adorable blond curls. He insisted it was time the child have a real boy’s haircut, that the curls made him a sissy. Before the two of them left for the barbershop, Myrna Louise took her son aside and talked to him, telling him how he should behave.
“You mind your uncle Roger,” she said. “You do everything he tells you.”
“He’s not my uncle,” Andrew muttered stubbornly under his breath.
“What did you say?”
“He’s not my uncle. Granny said so.”
Any mention of her former mother-in-law threw Myrna Louise into unreasoning rage. “He most certainly is, too,” she insisted, “and that’s what you’re going to call him.”
“No,” Andrew said.
“Yes,” she returned.
“Say ‘Uncle.’”
“Uncle,” Andrew replied sullenly.
“Say ‘Roger.’”
“Roger.”
“Now say ‘Uncle Roger.’”
“I can say ‘Uncle,’” her son responded, “and I can say ‘Roger,’ but I can’t say ‘Uncle Roger.’ ”
And he never did. Not once.
Without humidity to hold it back, the heat peeled away from the desert floor like skin from a sun-ripened peach. Brandon and Diana tried driving with the Ford’s windows wide open, but it was too chilly on Davy, who had stretched out lengthwise in the backseat and fallen sound asleep, so they rode with the front windows barely cracked, making conversation possible.
“Davy’s a cute kid,” Brandon offered tentatively. Riding with this strangely silent woman still made him uncomfortable.
Diana nodded. “He takes after his dad.”
Walker had noticed Davy’s physical resemblance to his father, but he hadn’t wanted to mention it. The boy’s wide-set blue-gray eyes and blond good looks were a long way from his mother’s brown-eyed, dark-haired features. Brandon hoped, for Davy’s sake, that looks were all he’d inherited from his father. If genetics were destiny, then David Ladd was doomed.
“Sometimes he does funny things, bizarre things,” Diana mused, “and I wonder if it’s anything like the way his father was when he was a child, but I don’t have any way of knowing.”
“You don’t see your in-laws?”
Diana shook her head. “They wanted me to come back to Chicago and live with them, but I wouldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Rita,” Diana answered simply. “They didn’t understand about Rita. Since I couldn’t bring her along, we didn’t go.”
Diana’s in-laws weren’t the only ones who didn’t understand about Rita, Brandon Walker thought, about the strange bond that existed between the young Anglo woman and the much older Indian. It didn’t make sense to him, either.
“Davy’s grandparents don’t stay in touch?”
“They send Christmas presents. That’s about all.”
“That’s too bad.”
“It’s their loss,” Diana added.
Garrison Ladd told Diana Cooper about his parents that very first November afternoon during their three-hour coffee marathon at the I-Hop. “I don’t like them much,” he said. “Especially my dad.”
This was something about Garrison Ladd that Diana Lee Cooper could relate to. She knew all there was to know about hating your own father. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“He’s brilliant for one thing, and expects everyone else to be the same. He’s worked his way up to being a big-cheese executive with Admiral back in Chicago. He started out in electrical engineering between the wars after graduating from the Armour Institute of Technology, with honors and two degrees. He was determined that I follow in his illustrious footsteps.”
Diana Cooper would have loved to have a father who was undeniably brilliant, someone who would encourage her to go on to school of any kind rather than being, like Max Cooper, a solid wall of resistance.
“Your father doesn’t sound so bad,” she ventured.
“Oh yeah? This man doesn’t understand the word vacation. All he does is work, work, work, and make money. He’s probably richer than Midas by now. He and my mother live in this fantastic house on the shores of Lake Michigan. They have all these smart friends, but they’re boring as hell, and they don’t have any fun. They don’t know how.”
“That still doesn’t sound so bad,” Diana ventured.
“Why? What does your father do?” Gary Ladd asked, leveling that disconcerting blue-eyed gaze of his on her.
Diana flushed, both because he was looking at her and because of the question. She knew that particular question would come eventually, and she dreaded it. When she told him about Max, would Gary Ladd stalk out of the restaurant and leave her to pay for her own coffee? Sick at heart but incapable of doing anything else, Diana felt obliged to answer straight from the hip. If, after she told him, Garrison Walther Ladd, III, walked out and left her sitting there alone at the table, then all she’d be out was a single cup of I-Hop coffee.
“He’s a garbageman,” Diana replied.
Garrison slammed his cup into the heavy china saucer, slopping coffee. “You’re kidding!”
“No.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“It’s no joke. My dad runs the garbage dump in Joseph, Oregon.”
“Joseph? Where’s that?”
“In the Willowa Mountains. On the other
side of the state, a town at the end of a road. You might say I’m a deadend kid.”
It was easier for Diana to make fun of herself and Joseph first, rather than waiting for other people to do it. From his initial reaction, she couldn’t tell if Garrison was making fun of her or not. He seemed intrigued.
“Fascinating. How many people live in Joseph?”
“Eight hundred, give or take.”
“My God! That’s amazing.”
“What’s amazing about it?”
“Look, I’m from Chicago. When I came here, I thought Eugene was small, but eight hundred people? Jeez, that’s wonderful.”
“It doesn’t seen particularly wonderful to me.”
“Just think about it,” Garrison Ladd continued, his face alight with enthusiasm. “It’s hard to believe that there are still places like that in this country, wide-open spaces.”
“It’s wide open, all right,” Diana returned dryly. “It’s so open there’s nobody there.”
“So what do people do?”
“For a living? Farming, ranching, logging.”
“No mining?” he asked.
“No mining.”
Garrison Ladd folded his arms across his chest, shook his head, and grinned at her. He had a very engaging grin. “Too bad,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Did you ever listen to Stella Dallas, or are you too young?”
“Who’s Stella Dallas?”
“That’s what I get for messing around with younger women. Stella Dallas used to be on the radio back in Chicago when I was growing up. They said she was a girl from ‘a small mining town in the West.’ I always told my mother that Stella Dallas was the kind of girl I was going to marry. Right up until you told me there was no mining in Joseph, I thought maybe I’d marry you.”
At that preposterous statement, Diana Lee Cooper burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. The few other patrons in the restaurant that afternoon, the ones who weren’t at home glued to their television sets, regarded her disapprovingly. This was a day of mourning, a day of national tragedy, as citizens of the country, regardless of political leanings, began to come to grips with the bloody drama playing itself out in Dallas. It was not a time for levity, but Diana laughed anyway.