J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

“You mean my daddy wanted to write books?”

The man looked startled. “Sure. Didn’t you know that?”

“I don’t know anything about my daddy. He died before I was born.”

For a moment, the man’s eyes grew serious, and then he nodded. “I’ll tell you what, Davy, you tell me what you know about Rita Antone, and I’ll tell you what I know about your father. Deal?”

He held out his hand, and the boy placed his own small one in it. “Deal,” Davy said gravely, and they shook on it.

Louella Walker sat up straight and chatted almost hopefully as they returned from their brief trip to the bank. The lady there had been most helpful.

“The same thing happened to my grandmother,” Anna Bush had said sympathetically, when they explained the situation. She graciously made arrangements to drop service charges on the bounced Steinway check.

“The only sensible thing to do is to start a new account with just your signature and your son’s on it, if that’s all right.”

In the end, that’s what they did.

“She was very nice,” Louella was saying to her son as they drove home, “although I still feel a little underhanded. It’s like I’m robbing your father of his dignity.”

She said that as they turned off Swan onto Fifth and came within sight of their own driveway three blocks away. Brandon saw the problem long before Louella did.

“Oh, my God!” he muttered grimly.

“What’s the matter?”

“My car,” he said. “The department’s car. It’s gone.”

As a homicide detective, he took his county-owned vehicle home in case he was called to a crime scene over the weekend when the department was seriously understaffed. For years, everyone in the family had hung car keys on a kitchen pegboard upon entering the house. Pure reflex, it was a habit no one thought to change in the face of Toby Walker’s failing mental capacity.

“Your car?” Louella asked, puzzled, not yet grasping the seriousness of the situation. “Wherever would it be?”

When Diana came down the hall from Rita’s room, Davy wasn’t waiting in the lobby. She found him outside, drinking a forbidden Coke. He seemed distant, uncommunicative.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Are you worried about Rita?”

“I guess,” he told her.

“Well, don’t be. Dr. Rosemead says she’s going to be fine.”

Diana was tired when she and Davy got back home. She put the boy down for a nap and decided to take one herself. Locking the door to her room, she stripped off her clothes and lay naked under the vent from the cooler, letting the refreshing, slightly PineSol-scented air blow across her body.

She was tired, but she couldn’t sleep. Instead, she lay there and castigated herself for her unreasonable outburst at Brandon Walker. After all, she was the one who had started bawling on his shoulder. What red-blooded American male wouldn’t have got the wrong idea? It was just that she didn’t want this particular male anywhere in her vicinity. His presence brought up too many unpleasant memories, reminded her of a time in her life that she wanted to keep buried far beneath the surface of conscious thought.

So, of all possible people in the world, why had she chosen Brandon Walker’s shoulder to cry on? She realized now that she was lonely for male companionship, but was she so desperate that she would throw herself at the first available man who chanced across her path?

But then, what was so new and different about that? she asked herself grimly. Nothing at all. The loneliness had always been there, for as long as she could remember, and it had always made her do stupid things-Garrison Ladd being a prime case in point.

They’d been inseparable that first weekend, and he had insisted on helping her with her Sunday papers. Then, after the paper route, they’d eaten bacon-and-egg breakfasts at the Holiday Inn before going back to his apartment, where, he told her with a guilty grin, he happened to have a real, full-sized double bed.

“I’ll only be a minute,” he said, leaving her in the doorway of his book-lined living room. “Wait right here.”

She was sure he wanted to straighten the room and make the bed before he invited her into it, which she was equally certain he was going to do. Diana Lee Cooper didn’t object. Going to bed with him was a foregone conclusion, the reason she’d agreed to come to his apartment in the first place.

She knew he wanted her again, that he couldn’t get enough of her, and Diana Lee Cooper was willing. In fact, she was more than willing.

As she meandered around the room, looking through the collection of books-volumes of poetry and philosophy, a Middle English version of The Canterbury Tales complete with margins full of carefully handwritten notes-she realized that she’d do whatever it took to capture and keep this Garrison Ladd.

Here was someone she wanted-a man of intellect, a man of some refinement and grace, a man she could respect, who was, as far as she could tell, as different from her own backwoods father as he could possibly be. That difference was exactly what she’d been searching for-someone not the least bit like Max Cooper.

And if “spreading her legs,” as her father would have said, was all it took to win him, then bring on the double bed and spread away. She knew what those words meant now, and she was beginning to have some sense of her own power. She’d show her father, all right. If sex was the bait and Gary Ladd was the prize, she’d screw until Garrison Ladd couldn’t walk or talk or see straight, if that’s what he wanted. She’d do whatever he asked and more besides.

As she stood there in the apartment’s small living room waiting for him, Diana Cooper couldn’t see that the furnishings were relatively cheap. Compared to what she knew from Joseph, it was palatial. What she saw convinced her that she’d found the man of her dreams, one worthy of her undying loyalty, someone she could afford to lavish her love on, someone who would give her love and laughter in return.

She was so smitten, so convinced by her own initial, naive assumptions, that it was years before she began to question them. By then, it was too late.

“You can come in now,” he called.

As she’d suspected, the bed had been hastily made, with lumpy covers pulled up over pillows but not properly tucked in. He was closing the closet door when she walked into the bedroom.

For the first time, Garrison Ladd seemed slightly unsure of himself. “The couch isn’t very comfortable,” he said hesitantly. “I thought we could lie here and watch television or something.”

The fact that he seemed nervous filled her again with that headspinning, newfound sense of power. Without a word, she kicked off her shoes, slipped out of her jeans, and peeled the University of Oregon sweatshirt off over her head. When she looked up from unfastening her bra, Garrison Ladd was still standing with his hand frozen to the knob on the closet door. He stood unmoving, his eyes feasting hungrily on her nakedness.

“Well?” she said airily, moving toward the bed and turning down the covers. “Are you coming or not?”

He jumped away from the closet.

“You didn’t want us to watch television with our clothes on, did you?”

“No,” he said with a startled laugh. “No, I guess not.”

He hurried out of his own clothes then, dropping them on the floor as he went, and flipping on the switch of the tiny television set as he came to the bed. Gradually, the picture appeared, but the sound stayed off.

Laughing, Garrison Ladd fell across the bed and landed on top of Diana, knocking the breath out of both of them, making them both laugh some more. He kissed her once and then settled his head on the pillow beside her.