Kiss of the Bees w-2

by J. A. Jance

And a day later, Quentin Walker had reluctantly agreed, right along with everyone else, that for some unknown reason his brother Tommy must have run away.

  From that day on, no amount of drinking ever held the awful memories quite at bay. In his sleep, Quentin Walker often dreamed about his brother lying limp and lifeless on the floor of the cave. And now, after all the intervening years, for the first time, Quentin Walker was headed back there.

  He didn’t know for sure if Tommy’s body was still in the cave. It probably was, but by the time Mitch Johnson arrived on the scene, it wouldn’t be there anymore. Quentin couldn’t afford for Tommy to be found now. Back at the beginning, when it first happened, people might have believed it was an accident. If they found out about it now, who would believe that story, especially if it was coming from Quentin Walker, from somebody who was an ex-con?

  Tommy Walker had been missing all these years, and his brother Quentin was determined that he stay that way—missing forever.

  8

  As the two men led the woman back toward the village, many of the Little People went away, but there was always a swarm of bees or wasps to guard the woman. On the fourth day of the journey, the woman pointed to the sky and began to dig holes in the ground. And the bees were very excited. They sang, “Rain, rain, rain!”

  In two more steps of Tash—the Sun—in what the Mil-gahn would call hours, the clouds appeared, and the rains came. The two men filled their water baskets and were glad. But the happiest of all was Jeweth—the Earth.

  When the rain was over, the two men wanted to continue on, but the woman would not go. So the two men left the woman some pinole and went back to their own people. After a time the Indians returned to their own country. When they came to the place where the two men had left the strange woman, they found many houses. This kihhim—this village—had been built by people from the south. They said they had come to be near the great Medicine Woman of the Tohono O’othham. Gohhim O’othham—Old Limping Man—was curious and asked where this Medicine Woman lived. The people of the village took him to a house made of sticks of ocotillo and covered with mud. There were two rooms in this house. The inside room was dark with an odd noise in it—a strange kind of buzzing.

  When Kulani O’oks—Medicine Woman—came out, Old Limping Man saw it was the same woman whom the Little People had saved. And so this great Medicine Woman, whose name was Mualig Siakam—Forever Spinning—told Old Limping Man how she had been among strangers in the south. When she had returned alone to join her own people, the Tohono O’othham, she found her home village deserted. All the Desert People were gone. There was no water. The animals had gone too, and so had all the birds.

  And so this woman, who had been left alone in the burning desert, sent up a prayer for help. Pa-nahl—the Bees—were the first to come. The Bees sent for help and brought Wihpsh—the Wasps. Then came Mumuwali—the Flies, Komikam—the Beetles, and Totoni—the Ants. They all came to help her, all the Little People who had not yet left the burning desert.

  The woman said the Little People had told her to go to sleep and they would watch over her. That was all she knew.

  As the endless questions droned on, Diana was more than slightly bored. Megan, her publicist in New York, had given her such glowing advance notices on Monty Lazarus that Diana had expected him to be someone who would come up with an original take on the standard author interview. Then, just when she was about to decide the whole thing was destined to be a flop, Monty surprised her.

  Sitting back in his chair, studying her over his glasses and under steepled fingers, he finally asked one of the questions she had been waiting and wanting to answer.

  “Tell me,” he said. “After all this time, what made you finally decide to write this book?”

  “I wanted answers,” she said. “And some closure.”

  “After almost twenty years?”

  “It’s twenty-one now. It was seventeen when I started. That’s the thing about being a victim of violent crime. I don’t think you ever get over it, not completely. If you let your guard down, the memories are always there, just under the surface, waiting to come flooding back and zing you when you least expect them. I thought that by facing Andrew Carlisle down, by once and for all confronting everything he did to me, that I could put it in the past. I thought that maybe I’d be able to finally reach the other side of the nightmare and gain some perspective.”

  “Did it work?”

  “I don’t know. The jury’s still out. I still dream about him sometimes.”

  “About the rape itself? We could talk about that if you like.”

  After all the innocuous questions that had gone before, that one rocked her. It meant that Monty Lazarus had read Shadow of Death after all. Diana felt blood warming her cheeks.

  “I’ve talked about the rape all I’m going to—in the book itself. Megan was supposed to tell you that subject was off limits. Not only that, if you’ve already read the book, why did you ask me all those other questions?” she asked. “You must have known the answers to most of that stuff.”

  Monty Lazarus smiled. His eyes were very blue—a startlingly intense sky blue that was almost the color of Garrison Ladd’s. Almost the color of Davy’s.

  “When you’re writing, how many drafts do you do on a book?” Monty asked.

  Diana shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. Three—four maybe. I can’t tell. Every time I open up a chapter on the computer, I end up changing something. Maybe it’s nothing more than shortening a sentence here and there or breaking up a paragraph in a different way so the words look better on the page. Sometimes I find places where I’ve used the same word twice within two or three lines. At that rate, everything’s a different draft.”

  “And you’re polishing as you go.”

  “Yes, always.”

  “Do things ever change in all that polishing?”

  “Well, probably, but—”

  “You see,” Monty Lazarus said with a smile, “the reason I like to do in-depth interviews is that I want to hear what the person is saying in his or her own words—without all the polishing. Without all the real feelings and emotions cleaned up and taken out. Those are the things that never show up on the pages of a book.

  “For instance, a little while ago we were talking about your marriage to Brandon Walker. When I asked how long you’d been married, you said twenty years. Were you aware, though, that when you told me that, there was a little half-smile playing around the corners of your mouth?”

  “No,” Diana conceded. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “And when I asked you about your children and you started discussing your stepchildren, you looked as though you’d put what you thought was a piece of candy in your mouth and discovered, too late, that it was really dog shit. See what I mean?”

  Diana smiled. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do.”

  Monty Lazarus smiled in turn and then leaned back in his chair, regarding Diana thoughtfully over the low coffee table between them. “I want you to tell me a little about the process of this book. Did you seek out Andrew Carlisle, or was it the other way around?”

  “He asked me,” Diana said. “He wrote to me in care of my publisher.”

  “Let me get this straight. The man who killed your husband, and raped you, wrote you a letter and asked that you write his story? And despite everything that had happened before, despite all that history, you still agreed?”

  “Shadow of Death tells both stories,” Diana corrected. “His and mine.”

  “I’d have to say that the book is generally pretty unflinching,” Lazarus said. “Blazingly so at times, but there’s a gap that I find puzzling.”

  “Which gap is that?”

  “You barely mention the interviews themselves,” Monty Lazarus said. “I’m assuming they took place in the state prison up at Florence, since that’s where Carlisle was incarcerated. Is that true?”

  “Yes,” Diana said. “In the visiting room up there to begin with. Then late
r on, when he was hospitalized for symptoms related to AIDS, they let me interview him in the infirmary.”

  “But why didn’t you talk about that?” Lazarus persisted. “It seems to me that’s an important part of the story, for the victim to triumph over the perpetrator, as it were. For you to see your tormentor laid low—blind, crippled, horribly disfigured, and finally dying of AIDS. I’m surprised you didn’t share that satisfaction with your readers, that sense of vindication.”

  “I didn’t write about satisfaction or vindication because they weren’t there,” Diana answered quietly.

  “They weren’t?” Monty Lazarus asked. Then, after a moment, he added, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. What did you feel then, when you met him again after all those years?”

  “Horror,” Diana said simply.

  “Horror?” Lazarus repeated. “At the way he looked? Because of the burns on his face and chest? Because of his mangled arm?”

  Diana shook her head. “No,” she replied. “It had nothing at all to do with the way he looked. It was because of what he was—what he stood for.”

  “Which was?”

  “Evil,” she said. “Outside catechism classes, I had never actually met the devil before, somebody who could pass for Satan. I was afraid that if I wrote about him that way, no one would believe me. He seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect on people, certainly on my first husband. If Andrew Carlisle told Garrison Ladd that black was white and vice versa, I think Gary would have gone to his death trying to prove it was true.”

  “I see,” Monty said, writing something down in his notebook, but Diana Ladd Walker wasn’t at all sure he understood. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure she did, either.

  The morning of Diana’s first scheduled interview with Andrew Carlisle had dawned clear and dry and hot. Already dressed for work himself, Brandon Walker lounged in the doorway between their bedroom and the master bath, drinking a cup of coffee and watching as his wife carefully applied her makeup.

  “I could always take the day off and come along with you,” he offered. “That way I’d be right there in case anything went wrong.”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong, Brandon,” Diana said, trying to sound less anxious than she felt. “It isn’t as though I’ll be alone with him. There are guards. There’ll be other visitors in the room as well. I’ll be fine.”

  For a time after that, Brandon Walker sipped his coffee in silence. “Are you going to try to see Quentin while you’re there?”

  Diana put down her mascara brush. Her gaze met Brandon’s in the neutral territory of the bathroom mirror’s steamy reflection. “I could,” she said finally. “Do you want me to?”

  Brandon’s older son had been locked up in the state penitentiary at Florence for months now. On occasion, Brandon and Diana had talked about driving up there to see him, but each time, Brandon had changed his mind and backed out at the last minute.

  “I guess,” he said hollowly. “I do want to know how Quent’s doing. I just can’t bring myself to go there to see him. Still, no matter what he’s done, he’s also my son. Nothing’s going to change that. Since we’ve already lost Tommy, we can’t very well just abandon Quentin, can we?”

  Brandon looked away, but not before Diana glimpsed the anguished expression on his face. She tried to read that look, tried to fathom what was behind it. Betrayal? Despair? Pain? Anger?

  “No,” Diana agreed at last. “I don’t suppose we can. I can’t promise I’ll see Quentin today. It depends on whether or not there’s enough time left in visiting hours after the interview with Carlisle is over. If they’ll let me, though, I will.”

  “Thanks, Di,” Brandon said gruffly. “I appreciate it.”

  And it turned out that there had been enough time for Diana Ladd Walker to see both prisoners that day. She had been waiting in the Visitation Room, amidst a group of other women who, armed with whatever difficulties were besetting them on the outside, had come either to rail at or to share their woes with their husbands or boyfriends or sons. Diana had brought only a yellow pad and a pencil, along with a pervasive sense of dread.

  As one door after another had clanged shut behind her, Diana felt a sudden resurgence of that long-ago fear. In her ignorance, she had thought of the house in Gates Pass as a safe haven, yet Carlisle had found a way inside the house and had attacked her there, despite her careful precautions and numerous locked doors. Maybe, here in the prison, despite the reassuring presence of guards and iron bars, her presumed safety might once again prove illusory.

  Andrew Carlisle was here, and so was Diana Walker. She was already locked inside the same complex. Soon the two of them would be within the same four walls. Would she be able to stand it? For the first time, Diana’s courage wavered. At that moment it would have taken only the smallest nudge from Brandon to convince her to walk away and forget the whole project.

  Quaking, fighting an almost overpowering urge to bolt and run, Diana followed the escorting guards into the grimly functional prison Visitation Room. It was lit by sallow, artificial light that gave everyone in the place a jaundiced, sickly look. The walls were posted with rules and regulations, many of them made illegible by layers of graffiti. The chairs in the room were all bolted to the floor. It was a hard, desperate place where people with no hope waited to see loved ones who had even less.

  The guard leading Diana took her directly to the far side of the room, where the wall was made of thick Plexiglas so yellowed and scratched that looking through it seemed more like peering through a veil of smutty L.A. smog than anything else. Directed to a chair, Diana sat and waited.

  The last time she had seen Andrew Carlisle had been years earlier at his double murder trial. One of his arms—the one Bone had snapped in two at the wrist—had been encased in a heavy plaster cast, and his face had still been swathed in bandages. The prison warden had told Diana in advance of that first visit that the injured arm had been permanently damaged, leaving him with only limited use of his fingers.

  The mangled arm was one thing—more Bone’s doing than Diana’s. What she dreaded seeing was his unbandaged face, the one into which she had flung a frying pan full of searing-hot bacon grease. That grease had been Diana’s last desperate line of defense against Andrew Carlisle’s brute force and sharp knife. The grease had worked far better than she could have hoped. He had fallen on the slick floor, clawing at his scorched face and howling in agony.

  This day, though, when Carlisle was led into the room, there was no such mummylike mask to lessen the horrible impact of what she had done to him. The guard brought him into the room, seated him on a chair across from Diana, and then placed the intercom receiver, one used to communicate through the Plexiglas barrier, in his good hand. All the while, Diana could only sit and stare. The third-degree burns had molded his once chiseled features into a grotesquely twisted, lumpy grimace. They had also ruined his eyes. Andrew Carlisle was blind.

  No amount of anticipation could have prepared Diana for the way he looked. It stunned her to think that she had intentionally inflicted that kind of injury on another human being. Still, faced with the same set of circumstances, she knew she would have made the same decision and fought him again with the same ferocity.

  “I’m told I’m quite ugly these days,” Andrew Carlisle said into the intercom mouthpiece as Diana picked up hers to listen. “They’re supposedly doing remarkable things with skin transplants and plastic surgery these days, but not for convicted killers with AIDS. Nobody exactly jumped to the plate and offered to get me the best possible care back then, or now, either, for that matter. Come to think of it, I wonder? Doesn’t denying someone proper medical care constitute cruel and unusual punishment? What do you think? Maybe I could take the Pima County Sheriff’s Department to court and sue them for damages.”

  “I have no idea,” Diana said. “That’s up to you.”

  He laughed then. “You sound quite sure of yourself, Ms. Walker. Have you changed much then sin
ce I saw you last?”

  “Changed how?”

  “Anything,” he replied. “You haven’t turned into one of those born-again Christians, by any chance, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” He sounded relieved. “After you agreed to come see me, I started worrying that maybe you had transformed yourself into one of those religious zealots. They are all eager to come pray over me to save my immortal soul. Some of them even want to grant me forgiveness.”

  Diana took a deep breath and managed to find her conversational sea legs. “No,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about that, Mr. Carlisle. I’ve never forgiven you, and I never will.”

  “Good,” Andrew Carlisle replied. “Very good. I’m delighted to hear it. Now, tell me about the way you look.”

  “What about the way I look?”

  “Are you very different from the way you were that night we were together? You’re the last person I ever saw or ever will see,” he added, as his puckered mouth twisted into an oddly one-sided smile. “As a consequence, Ms. Walker, I remember everything about that night as vividly as if it had happened yesterday or the day before. I remember every detail about you, and I would suppose that you remember me in much the same way. We were both operating in what the experts call a non-drug-induced altered state of consciousness.”

  “My hair is turning gray,” Diana answered, carefully keeping her voice even. “I’m over fifty. I wear glasses. Two pairs of glasses, actually—one for distance and one for reading.”

  “I’m far more interested in your body,” Andrew Carlisle said.

  Some blind people seem to gaze off into the far distance when they speak. Andrew Carlisle’s opaque, sightless eyes seemed to pry directly into Diana’s very being. She could barely breathe. An involuntary shudder ran up and down her spine while a hot flush covered her face. She wanted nothing more than to race to the door. She wanted out. She longed to be away from this monster, to be back outside in the straightforward discomfort of the hot desert air.