by J. A. Jance
But then Andrew Carlisle had been a battleground from day one, from the moment she first heard his name. She had almost finished earning her bachelor’s degree by then. Carrying extra loads and going to summer school she had graduated only one semester late. Gary was eager to get out of Eugene. He said he was only keeping his promise about going elsewhere and starting over. She found out much later that he had nearly come to blows with his adviser over plagiarism in his dissertation. If he hadn’t left the University of Oregon voluntarily, he would have been thrown out.
Gary was the one who first heard about the creative-writing program being offered in Arizona. He claimed that a similar one being offered in Eugene wasn’t nearly as good. Both Diana and Gary had applied, but only one was accepted. Diana still smarted at Gary’s words the day the two matching envelopes came. They matched on the outside, but the contents differed. One said he was in while the other announced that she wasn’t.
“I guess there’s only going to be one writer in our family,” Gary had said with that infuriating grin of his, “and I’m it.”
Those words gnawed at her still, kept her tied to her desk when she ought to have been outside enjoying her child and her life. Later, when Gary learned how hurt she was over it and, more important, when he’d wanted her to find a job in Arizona to support them, he claimed it was all a joke, that he hadn’t meant a word of it. But that was after his parents learned about the canceled dissertation at the U. of O., after they cut their fair-haired boy off from any further financial aid.
And so, in the spring of 1967, Andrew Carlisle entered Diana’s and Gary’s lives—insidiously almost, like some exotic, antibiotic-resistant strain of infection that ordinary remedies don’t touch. Diana didn’t like the man from the moment she met him at that first faculty tea, the only one to which spouses were invited. She had wanted to be there as a full participant, not as some extraneous guest. She resented what she regarded as Professor Carlisle’s oily charm.
Gary, on the other hand, was captivated. Once classes started, that was all he could talk about—Professor Carlisle this and Professor Carlisle that. Sometime during that first semester, she couldn’t remember exactly when, the “Professor” part was dropped, first in favor of last name only and later in favor of “Andrew.”
Meanwhile, she found herself a job. Not in Tucson, where applicants outnumbered positions ten to one. She went to work in the boonies, teaching on the Papago for one of the most impoverished school districts in the entire country. The pay wasn’t all that bad, and the job did come with housing, a thirteen-by-seventy mobile home parked in the Teachers’ Compound at Topawa. It wounded Diana’s pride to be forced to accept company housing, but with Gary in school full time, every penny counted.
At first Gary carpooled into Tucson with two other students, but then, as his days got longer, as he came more and more under Carlisle’s spell, he bought himself a beater pickup so he could come and go as he liked.
Did Diana see trouble brewing? Did she read the writing on the wall? Of course not, she was too much her mother’s daughter, too busy maintaining a positive mental attitude in the face of mounting disaster, too busy believing that what Gary Ladd said was the gospel. Every once in a while, the smallest splinter of doubt might worm its way into her consciousness, but she ruthlessly plucked it out. Gary was working hard, she told herself. The stack of typewritten pages on his desk grew steadily taller, offering mute testimony about work on his manuscript. Besides, Diana had interests enough of her own to keep her occupied.
There weren’t any Indians living in Joseph, Oregon, when Diana was growing up. The Nez Perce had long since been exiled from their ancestral lands to the wilds of Oklahoma and back to a reservation in Idaho, but Diana had learned something about them in her reading, had discovered in books things about Chief Joseph and his loyal band of followers that would have given her father apoplexy. After all, to Max Cooper’s unenlightened way of thinking, the only good Indian was still a dead Indian.
So the job teaching school on the Papago was good for Diana in more ways than one. It supported them while Gary was in school, it gave them a place to live, and it provided another avenue of attack in her unrelenting rebellion against her father. She threw herself into her work with all the enthusiasm and energy she could muster. If she was going to be a teacher for the time being, she’d be the best damned teacher the reservation had ever seen.
While doing that, she was also, unwittingly, giving Gary Ladd more and more rope—enough rope to hang himself, enough rope to destroy them both.
“Gary,” she had pleaded finally. “For God’s sake, tell me what’s the matter!”
It was early afternoon the following Friday, a full week after he’d stayed out until broad daylight after the dance at San Pedro.
“I can’t,” he whimpered, “I don’t know what to do.”
She went to him then, held him and comforted him as she would have a small lost child or a wounded animal. She couldn’t believe those frightened, despairing words came from the lips of the man she loved, from the mouth of Garrison Walther Ladd, III, someone who always had a ready answer for everything.
It had been a terrible week for Diana, a debilitating, virtually sleepless week. She alternated between bouts of fury and bleak despair over what was wrong with her husband, all the while battling her own recalcitrant body, which seemed determined to throw off every morsel of food she attempted to put in her mouth.
Gary spent the week in front of the TV set, watching everything from news to soap operas to game shows with almost catatonic concentration. He ate a bite or two of the food she brought him and sipped the iced tea or coffee, but he barely spoke to her, barely moved. With every passing moment, her sense of foreboding grew more overpowering, until she wanted to scream at the very sight of him.
Once, while he slept, she went out and examined the pickup in minute detail, looking for a clue as to what might have happened. She dreaded finding evidence that he had been in an accident, maybe a hit-and-run, but the combat scars on the Ford’s battered body were all old, rusted-over wounds. In a way, finding nothing made Diana feel worse. What was the matter? she asked herself. What had panicked her otherwise self-assured husband to the point that he couldn’t leave the house?
On Tuesday morning, Andrew Carlisle called to find out why Gary had missed class the previous day. Diana put her husband on the phone despite his desperately signaled hand motions to the contrary. He stammered some lame excuse about food poisoning that didn’t sound at all plausible to Diana and probably not to Andrew Carlisle, either. Gary promised faithfully that he’d be in class the next day, but Wednesday came and went without him moving from the couch other than to visit the bathroom.
On Thursday evening, Andrew Carlisle himself showed up at the door. Diana was surprised to see him, amazed that he’d go so far out of his way in an attempt to talk Gary out of his stupor. She didn’t like Andrew Carlisle, but she grudgingly gave the man credit. She wasn’t privy to the conversation that passed between them, but she was grateful that Gary seemed in much better spirits after Carlisle left.
“What did he tell you?” she asked curiously, after the professor drove away.
“That all creative people go through black periods like this,” Gary told her. “He says it’s nothing unusual. It’ll pass.”
On Saturday morning, Diana went to the High Store for groceries. The trading post on top of the hill was abuzz with talk about the murder and the now identified victim, Gina Antone. Diana bought a newspaper and read the ugly story for herself. She was shocked to discover the victim was the granddaughter of someone she knew.
Diana worked at the school and so did Rita Antone—Diana as a classroom teacher and Rita as a cook in the cafeteria, although the two women were only slightly acquainted. Rita was known for striking terror in the hearts of children who came to the garbage cans to dump their lunch trays without first having tried at least one bite of everything on their plate.
Rita, s
tanding guard over the garbage cans like a pugnacious bulldog and waving a huge rubber spatula for emphasis, would order them, “Eat your vegetables.” Usually, the frightened Indian kids complied without a murmur. So did a few cowed Anglo teachers.
By the time Diana got back to Topawa with both the groceries and the newspaper, it was almost noon. She was in the kitchen fixing lunch when Gary turned away from the television cartoons and picked up the paper. She saw his face go ashen. The knuckles on his hands turned white.
He let the paper fall to the floor and began sobbing into his hands. She went to him. Kneeling on the floor in front of him, she begged him to tell her what was wrong. For a long time, he sat weeping with his face buried on her shoulder. The paper lay faceup on the floor with the headlines screaming at her. Without his saying a word, she knew. Terror and revulsion took over. She drew away from him, grabbed up the paper, crumpled it into a wad, and shook it in his face.
“Is it this?” she demanded, not caring that her voice had risen to a shriek. “Is this what the hell’s the matter?”
And he gave her the only answer she ever got from him, an agonized three-word reply that offered no comfort even while she pinned her every hope for both the past and present on it.
“I don’t remember.”
Not, “Of course not!” Not, “How could you say such a thing?” Not, “That’s crazy!” But, “I don’t remember”—a murderous kings X, as though he’d kept his fingers crossed while Gina Antone died.
The room reeled around her. Overwhelmed by nausea, she dashed for the bathroom and vomited, while her chicken-noodle soup cooked to blackened charcoal splinters on the kitchen stove.
When Diana came back out to the living room, Gary was gone. She ran to the door in time to see his pickup turning out of the Teachers’ Compound onto the highway, headed for Sells. She could have driven like a demon and caught up with him on the highway, but what would she have done then, forced him off the road?
Behind her, an unearthly howl from the telephone receiver told her that the phone hadn’t been hung up properly. At first, staring after the receding pickup, Diana was unable to respond. Soon a disembodied voice echoed through the house telling her to please hang up and try again. Shaken and too spent to do anything else, she put the phone back on the hook.
Gary left the house, and she never saw him again, not alive anyway, and that last phone call, placed to Andrew Carlisle’s home just before Garrison Ladd fled the house to go to his death, was one of the key pieces of evidence that linked the two men together.
Yes, Diana thought almost seven years later, going into the house in Gates Pass, closing and locking the door behind her, Andrew Carlisle was the invader here, the enemy. He had not yet set foot inside her home, but when he did, he would meet with implacable resistance, to-the-death resistance.
Rita Antone had said so, and so had Diana Ladd.
Detective Geet Farrell of the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department was a cop’s cop, someone who had been in the business a long time, someone who knew his way around people. Everyone in the Arizona law-enforcement community was familiar with the problems in the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. At first Farrell was worried that Brandon Walker might be one of Sheriff DuShane’s bad guys.
“You dragged me all the way down here with some cockamamy story, so tell me, who is this character?” Farrell asked, leaning back in the booth, eyeing Brandon Walker speculatively.
“His name is Andrew Carlisle,” Walker answered. “Formerly Professor Andrew Carlisle of the University of Arizona.”
Years earlier, the professor’s case had been notorious, statewide. Farrell remembered it well. “If it’s the same case I’m thinking about, he got himself a pretty slick plea-bargain.”
“That’s the one,” Walker nodded. “The other guy, his student and co-conspirator, committed suicide rather than go to jail.”
“Tell me about the bite.”
“Like I said on the phone. One nipple was completely severed, and the key piece of evidence that could have been matched to a bite impression, the thing that would have determined once and for all who was responsible, disappeared off the face of the earth.”
Farrell nodded. “You boys have a man-sized hole in your evidence room down there. Somebody ought to plug that son of a bitch.” Both men knew Farrell was referring to DuShane himself and not some mythical hole.
“They ought to,” Walker agreed, “but that’s easier said than done.”
“What makes you think Carlisle’s my man?” Farrell asked.
“He was released from Florence at noon on Friday, put on the bus for Tucson. My guess is that he never made it that far.”
“How’d you know about Margie Danielson’s nipple?” Farrell asked. The Pinal County detective didn’t play games. He had already made a favorable judgment call about the quality of his Pima County colleague.
“From two Indians,” Walker answered, “an old one, a medicine man, and a younger one, too. At least I think the younger one is a medicine man. They’d heard you’d arrested an Indian.”
“Arrested but not charged,” Farrell agreed, “but how’d they know about that?”
“They didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. They were also the ones who came up with a possible connection between this case and the old one. They came to town this morning and asked me to find out whether or not Andrew Carlisle was out of prison.”
“And he was,” Farrell finished.
Walker nodded. “At exactly the right time. Florence released him Friday at noon.”
Farrell blinked at that, as though he hadn’t made the connection the first time. Noon Friday. From Florence to Picacho Peak a few hours later was indeed the right time and place. “So where is he now?”
“That I don’t know. I talked to a guy named Ron Mallory who’s assistant superintendent at Florence. He played real coy, acted like he had no idea where Carlisle might have gone, but the person in Records let something slip when I was talking to her. She mentioned that most of the time Carlisle was locked up, he worked as Mallory’s inmate clerk, so chances are, Carlisle’s got something on Mallory. He’s not going to lift a finger to help us.”
“Unless somebody holds his feet to the fire,” Farrell said. “Now tell me, Walker, what’s the real reason you’re here? What’s your beef? I can see how your ego might be hurt because this guy slipped off the hook once, but it seems like there’s more at stake here than just the usual problem with the crook that got away.”
“The other man’s wife,” Walker said. “The widow of the guy who committed suicide. At the time, I convinced her that we’d take care of Carlisle. All she had to do was trust the system.”
“And the system screwed her over?”
“Without a kiss.”
“So it is ego damage. That’s something this old man understands,” Farrell said with a sly grin. “I’ve been there, too. Finish your coffee, Detective Walker. We’ll go have a look up the mountain.”
Rita lay in the hospital bed and thought about her plan. It was a daring trickster plan, one both I’itoi and Coyote would have liked. She was surprised Diana had agreed so readily. After all, Diana would run the greatest risk, for she was the bait, the one Carlisle would come looking for. They would lure Carlisle to the deserted cave by Rattlesnake Skull Village and dispose of him.
Would he fall for it? Rita couldn’t be sure, but she knew that people saw what they wanted to see, heard what they wanted to hear. She had already tried that once, and back home, in Tucson, she had Understanding Woman’s original medicine basket stored safely away among her treasures as proof that it worked.
Mrs. Charles Clark wasn’t particularly nice as she conducted the initial interview with her new employee. The Clarks were not accustomed to dealing with girls of dubious virtue, but Father Mark had begged them to make an exception in this case. Rita would be allowed to remain and work providing her behavior was absolutely above reproach. She must attend church regularly, do no drinking or smokin
g, and have no male visitors.
There was another young Tohono O’othham working in the household, a slender, shy girl named Louisa Antone. Rita and Louisa shared the same last name, but they were not related. Rita was from Ban Thak, while Louisa came from Hikiwoni, or Jagged Edge.
Although Louisa was two whole years younger than Rita, she was much more well versed in the ways of the Clark household. Louisa explained Adele Clark’s complex housekeeping system that allowed every room in the house to be dusted at least twice a week. It wasn’t until the third day that Dancing Quail opened the door to what was known as the basket room.
She remembered Father Mark saying that the Clarks were interested in baskets, but until she entered the sweet-smelling room, she had seen no evidence of it. When she stepped inside, the clean, dry smell of yucca and bear grass overpowered her. Smelling them made her want to weep for her home, for her grandmother, and for all that was both familiar and lost to her. Tempted to cry, she forced herself to work.
Dancing Quail came from a society where baskets and livestock were signs of wealth. At home she had never seen so many baskets in one place. Many were crammed together, stacked against walls or piled haphazardly in corners, as though they’d been gathered in a hurry and no one had yet taken the time to sort them. The girl recognized some of the designs and patterns as ones from the Tohono O’othham, but there were baskets of many other tribes as well—Hopi, Navajo, Yaqui, even some of the hated Apache.
Slowly, savoring the smell and touch of familiar objects, Dancing Quail worked her way around the room, coming at last to a glass-enclosed case where someone, had bothered to arrange the fine baskets displayed there. Cautiously, she opened one door, propped it up on its hinge, and began moving the baskets around on the shelf, gingerly dusting each basket as well as the shelf beneath it.