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

by J. A. Jance

  Afraid to sleep for fear of falling off, Dancing Quail tried to stay awake, but eventually the rhythmic racket of metal on metal lulled her eyes closed.

  “Rita!”

  Someone from far away was calling her by that other name, the same name the outing matron had used.

  “Rita,” the voice called again, more firmly this time.

  Dancing Quail didn’t want to answer. She didn’t want to wake up because she knew when she did that it would be the same as it had been that long-ago morning when the train finally reached Phoenix. The sun would be bright overhead, and Understanding Woman’s magic rock would be gone forever. Sometime during the night it had slipped from her grasp and fallen from the swaying boxcar.

  More than half a century later, Dancing Quail still mourned its loss.

  Juanita Ortiz rose stiffly from the uncomfortable chair where she had spent the night at her sister’s bedside. She went to look out the window, while the nurse woke Rita to take her pulse and temperature.

  Gabe hadn’t come by the BIA compound to summon his mother until late, not until after Diana Ladd had picked up Davy. Fat Crack had given Juanita some lame excuse about promising Rita not to leave the child alone. His mother didn’t approve. It wasn’t right that Gabe should have waited with the little white boy all that time without coming to tell his own family about Rita’s injuries. How could an Anglo’s needs come before those of Gabe’s own family?

  Looking out the window, Juanita Ortiz shook her head in frustration. There was much she didn’t understand about her son, and she understood her sister even less.

  Of all the people on the reservation, only a few—Juanita Ortiz among them—still remembered that, as a child, Rita Antone had once been called Dancing Quail. And only Rita remembered that their father’s pet name for baby Juanita had been S-kehegaj, which means Pretty One. That was all a long time ago. Dancing Quail no longer danced, and no one had called Juanita pretty in more than forty years.

  With chart in hand, the nurse left the room. Juanita went back over to the bed. Dr. Rosemead had told her that Rita’s injuries weren’t nearly as serious as he had at first supposed, but that if she hadn’t been in the ambulance when her heart stopped, she surely would have died.

  “Ni-sihs,” Juanita said softly. “Elder Sister, how are you?”

  “Thirsty, ni-shehpij,” Rita answered, opening her eyes and speaking formally to her younger sister. “I sure am thirsty.”

  The nurse had left a glass newly filled with crushed ice on the nightstand. Juanita ladled a spoonful of ice into Rita’s parched mouth.

  “I must see S-ab Neid Pi Has,” Rita whispered as soon as she could speak again after swallowing the ice.

  Instantly, Juanita Ortiz’s eyes hardened. S-ab Neid Pi Has, Looks At Nothing, was an aged, blind medicine man who lived as a hermit in Many Dogs, an almost-abandoned village just across the Mexican border from the rest of the reservation. He was a man who lived according to the old ways, who long ago had divorced himself from white man’s liquor, whose lungs smoked only Indian tobacco.

  Juanita had converted from Catholic to Presbyterian as a young woman when she married Arturo Ortiz. She heartily disagreed when her son, Fat Crack, went off and joined the Christian Scientists, but at least, she conceded, he was Christian. Juanita staunchly drew the line at the idea of summoning a medicine man.

  “Ni-sihs,” Juanita scolded disapprovingly. “Sister, you are in a hospital. Let the doctors and nurses take care of you.”

  But Rita still remembered those three huge buzzards sitting with outstretched wings on the row of passing telephone poles. The Anglo doctors with their bandages and thermometers could fix her broken body perhaps, but those three ominous buzzards represented Forebodings, something that required the ministrations of a medicine man. They were symptomatic of a Staying Sickness—a disease that affects only Indians and one that is impervious to Anglo medical treatment with its hospitals, operating rooms, and bottles of pills.

  “I must see Looks At Nothing,” Rita insisted stubbornly. “Please ask Fat Crack to go get him and bring him here.”

  When Andrew Carlisle told his mother that he was going to Tucson to check on his storage locker, Myrna Louise wondered if he might go away and not come back. She made him a huge jar of sun tea and iced it down in a Thermos. Andrew always liked to do that, she remembered, to travel with lunches and drinks packed from home rather than stopping off someplace to buy meals. It made sense to travel that way, with prices in all the restaurants higher than a cat’s back.

  She made him a good breakfast, too—toast and coffee and eggs over easy. He said he’d seen nothing but scrambled for years. Powdered scrambled. Those couldn’t be any too good.

  He didn’t talk while he ate, and he didn’t look at her. Myrna Louise didn’t know what to do or say, so she hovered anxiously in the background, pouring more coffee into his cup long before it was empty, offering to make more buttered toast or fry a few more eggs.

  “Look,” he said crossly, pushing his cup away before she could fill it again. “Don’t fuss over me, Mama. I can’t stand it when you fuss.”

  Myrna Louise’s eyes clouded with tears, and she hung her head. “I was only trying to help,” she said, her voice quavering. “I mean, I don’t know how you expect me to act.”

  He turned on the charm at once, a trick he’d been able to perform at will since childhood, forcing his mother to smile through her tears in spite of herself.

  “Treat me like I just got back from Istanbul, Mama.”

  “But I don’t know anything at all about Istanbul.”

  He laughed. “Believe me. They probably don’t have over-easy eggs there, either.”

  Diana brought a mug of coffee into the room and slammed it onto the coffee table in front of Brandon Walker. Davy, always attuned to his mother’s moods, looked at her guardedly.

  “Are you mad, Mom?” he asked.

  “I’m not mad at anybody, Davy,” she said, her tone contradicting the words. “Go get dressed. We’ll drive out to Sells and see how Rita is.”

  Davy hurried away with the dog padding behind him.

  “I’m sorry about last night, Diana,” Brandon began. “It’s just that, under the circumstances…”

  “Forget it,” she snapped, cutting him off in mid-apology. “It doesn’t matter.”

  But it did matter, at least to him. It had been late at night, some time after they came back from getting Davy’s stitches. Davy was asleep in his bedroom, but the grown-ups were wide awake. They were sitting on the couch drinking lemonade and talking when the calm after the storm was suddenly too much. Diana dissolved into an unexpected squall of tears. It was natural for her to fall against Brandon Walker’s shoulder, natural for him to put a comforting arm around her. The electricity had been there for him from the first moment he laid eyes on the woman. Holding her that way brought it all back to him in a rush.

  He wanted her. God, how he wanted her, just like he’d wanted her years earlier when he was still married and she was pregnant as hell. The sweet, clean, smell of her hair filled his nostrils. The touch of his fingertips on bare, smooth skin stirred his whole body and aroused a part of Brandon Walker that he kept on a very short leash.

  He wasn’t sure when the comforting arm he’d draped around her shoulder evolved into a caress, or when exactly he began to kiss that soft, sweet-smelling hair, but he was painfully aware of her abruptly sitting up straight and pushing him away.

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Go now, please. Just go away.”

  He was almost glad she’d stopped it when she did, before things got out of hand. He wanted her, but not like this, not when she was at the end of her emotional rope. Brandon Walker wanted her, and he wanted Diana Ladd to want him back.

  But in the aftermath of that one unexpected kiss, she was overtaken by a sudden fit of unaccountable fury. She accused him of taking unfair advantage and ordered him out of the house. Walker simply refused to leave.
Telling her he wasn’t going to leave her alone with an injured child no matter what, he kicked off his shoes and stretched his long frame out full length on her living-room couch. Short of using a gun, that didn’t leave Diana many options. Still angry, she stalked off to bed.

  During the night, they reached a truce of sorts. He insisted on getting up with her every time she went to check on Davy anyway. Finally, at five in the morning, she knuckled under and gave him an alarm clock. Now, though, awake and sipping coffee, she seemed angry again, and Brandon didn’t know what to do about it.

  He looked around the room with its freshly stuccoed walls and open-beam ceilings, searching for a reasonable topic of discussion that would keep the conversation out of harm’s way.

  Hanging on the wall behind the couch was a basket Brandon recognized as a Papago maze with I’itoi standing in the cleft at the top of the design. He had seen Papago baskets like that before, but this one was unusual in that the design work was done in red rather than the traditional black.

  “Great basket,” he said.

  Diana nodded. “It was a housewarming present from Rita when we first moved in here.”

  “I’ve never seen a red one before.”

  “They’re fairly rare,” she told him. “The color isn’t dyed; it comes from a yucca root. Killing live yuccas to make baskets doesn’t go over too well these days.”

  “It suits the room,” he said stupidly, groping for something to say. “It goes with the rest of the house.”

  Brandon Walker knew he must sound like a complete jackass, but talking about the basket seemed to have blunted the worst of Diana’s anger.

  “You should have seen it when we first moved in,” Diana said. “It was awful. Rita was a huge help. Between the two of us, we managed to make the place habitable.”

  Brandon changed the subject. “I heard Davy telling the doctor that you’re writing books. Is that true?”

  Diana flushed. “I’m trying,” she said. “Nothing published yet, but I’m working at it.”

  Brandon frowned as a trace of memory surfaced. “Isn’t that what your husband…?”

  He broke off the question as soon as he saw the pained expression on her face, but it was too late. The damage was done. He berated himself for blundering and making things infinitely worse rather than better.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what Gary was studying before he died. Writing. As a matter of fact, he told me that on our very first date. That he was going to write the great American novel someday.”

  Brandon Walker thought he already knew the answer, but he asked the question anyway, just to be polite. “Did he?”

  Diana Ladd stood up abruptly and swept both coffee cups off the table.

  “No. Gary never finished anything he started,” she said bitterly, heading toward the kitchen. “He had a very short attention span.”

  They were still in the booth at the I-Hop, drinking their eighth or ninth cup of coffee. The waitress was growing surly.

  “You’re shitting me!” Gary Ladd exclaimed in delight. “You’re going to be a writer, too?”

  After hearing about Gary Ladd’s Pulitzer Prize ambitions, Diana Lee Cooper shyly mentioned her own interest in writing. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do,” she added, surprised to find herself confiding in this semi-stranger.

  Diana’s desire to write wasn’t something she confessed to others openly or often. People in Joseph, Oregon, laughed uproariously at the very idea. Here at the university, she always felt unworthy, underqualified. But Gary Ladd didn’t seem to share that opinion.

  “Hey, that’s great,” he said, giving Diana’s shoulder an encouraging pat accompanied by one of his engaging grins. “What say we do it together—matching typewriters on a single table, right?”

  She laughed and nodded. “Right.”

  From near the cash register, the waitress glared at them pointedly. Garrison Ladd grabbed Diana’s hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go before they throw us out.”

  On the way outside, Diana glanced down at her watch. “Oh, my God,” she said in dismay. “I’m late.” She started for her bike with Garrison Ladd right behind her.

  “Late for what? Where are you going?”

  “Ushering. I have to get home, change, and get back down here in less than an hour.”

  “Ushering?” he asked. “What’s this about ushering?”

  “At Robinson Hall. It’s my second part-time job,” she explained. “I make three dollars a night.”

  November’s early darkness was settling over Eugene, bringing with it a chill winter rainstorm as she knelt on the wet ground and struggled with the stubborn lock on her bicycle chain.

  “Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You work in the English Department fifteen hours a week, and you usher in the auditorium as well. Do you have any other jobs I don’t know about?”

  “Only the newspaper,” she told him.

  “What newspaper?”

  “The Register-Guard. I deliver ninety-six papers during the week and a hundred-ten on Sundays.”

  “When do you find time to eat and sleep?” he asked.

  “When I can. I told you, I have to pay my own way. This is what it takes to stay in school.”

  “That may be, but you sure as hell don’t have to ride that thing home in this downpour. Don’t be stubborn. Let me load it into my van.”

  She accepted gratefully. The radio was on as they drove toward the rambling house off Euclid where Diana lived in a tiny apartment over a garage. They were almost there when the local announcer began a public-service listing of all the functions for that evening that had been canceled or postponed in a show of respect for the slain president. Among them was the performance of the Youth Symphony scheduled for Robinson Hall.

  “Damn.” Diana bit her lip in disappointment and fought back tears. There went another three bucks she wouldn’t have come next payday. Along with the other two she had missed by not working all afternoon at the department, payday would be very short indeed in a budget that was already tight right down to the last nickel. At this rate, how would she ever accumulate enough money to buy next semester’s books?

  “That means you’re off tonight?” Garrison Ladd was saying.

  Not trusting herself to speak, Diana nodded.

  “What will you do instead?”

  “Study, I guess,” Diana answered bleakly. “I’ve got some reading to do.”

  “How about dinner?”

  “Tonight? Isn’t that…”

  “Tacky?” he supplied with a wink. “You think just because somebody knocked off the president, the rest of us shouldn’t eat?”

  “It does seem…well, disrespectful.”

  “From what I hear about JFK himself, he’d be the last one to want us missing out on a good time. Come on. I’ll take you someplace special. How about the Eugene Hotel? They have terrific steaks there.”

  Diana found herself salivating at the very mention of the word steak. She hadn’t tasted one since the previous summer’s rodeo-queen supper. Her school budget seldom made allowances for hamburger, let alone steak. She let herself be enticed.

  “All right,” she said. “But I’ve never been to the Eugene Hotel. What should I wear?”

  “We’ll manage,” he said.

  Despite Iona’s warnings about not inviting men up to her room, it didn’t seem polite to leave Garrison Ladd waiting outside in the cold car while she went up to change. After all, he was an instructor at the university. Surely, someone like that was above reproach.

  She started having doubts though when, after closing the apartment door behind him, he stopped just inside the threshold and didn’t move.

  Diana turned back and looked at him. “Have a seat,” she said. “I’ll go into the bathroom and change.”

  He studied her curiously. The undisguised appraisal in the look made her nervous. “What’s the matter?”

  “Come here,” he said, crooking his finger at her.

&
nbsp; “Why?”

  “Just come here.”

  Against her better judgment, she did as she was told, walking toward him slowly, woodenly. What was going on? she wondered. Maybe her mother was right. Maybe she shouldn’t be here in her room alone with this man.

  Diana stopped when there was less than a foot between them. “What?” she asked.

  “Has anyone ever told you how lovely you are?”

  “Come on,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t give me that old line.”

  She started to move away from him, but he caught her wrist, imprisoning her hand in his and drawing her closer. With his other hand, he brushed the hair back from her face and then traced the slender, curving jaw with a gently caressing finger.

  “It’s not a line,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

  “People in Joseph don’t talk to the garbageman’s daughter that way,” she said stiffly. Tentatively, she tried to free her hand, but he didn’t let it go.

  No doubt about it. Her mother was right. She’d made a serious mistake in inviting him up here, and she didn’t know how to get rid of him. She tried again to loosen his grip on her wrist, but he held firm.

  “They don’t? How do they talk to her?”

  Now Diana was genuinely scared. Her apartment was a long way from the main house. If she yelled for help, no one would hear her.

  “Let me guess,” Garrison Ladd continued, still holding her captive. “They’d probably say something gross, like ‘Fall down on your back, honey, and spread your legs.’ ”

  At once hot, humiliating tears stung Diana’s cheeks. This was the very thing she had hoped to escape by running away from Joseph, by running away from home. Those words, those exact same words, were ones her father had shouted at Iona in one of his drunken, raging tirades when neither one of them knew their daughter was in the house.