J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

“Will you be coming by in person?”

“No,” he said. “Someone will be in to pick it up.”

“Fine. What report is it you need?”

“The accident that happened on the Kitt Peak Road last Friday.”

“Case number?”

“I don’t have it with me.”

“Anything else?”

“No. That’s all.”

“Very good. That’ll be one hundred fifty dollars, cash on delivery. Please place the cash in an envelope. We’ll have another envelope here waiting for you. What name should I put on it?”

“Spaulding,” he said, suddenly unable to resist the joke. “Myrna Louise Spaulding. She’ll be in to pick it up around noon.”

“Very good. Anything else?”

“No, ma’am,” Carlisle responded cheerfully. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

Fat Crack brought Looks At Nothing home to his house where Wanda Ortiz, the younger man’s unfailingly cheerful wife, served them a dinner of chili, beans, and fresh tortillas. She was mystified about her husband spending so much time with the old medicine man, but she said nothing. As a good husband and provider, Gabe was allowed his little foibles now and then.

“We will need some clay,” Looks At Nothing said, “white clay from Baboquivari to make the gruel.”

Fat Crack nodded. “Right. I know where to find such clay.”

“And the singers?” Looks At Nothing asked.

“I know nothing at all about singers.”

“The best ones for this come from Crow Hang. It will be expensive. You must feed them all four days.”

Fat Crack nodded. “My aunt says she will pay whatever it costs from her basket money. The singers can stay here at my house. Wanda will do the cooking. I will see about them tomorrow when I pick my aunt up from the hospital to take her home.”

“Your wife is a god woman,” Looks At Nothing said. “You are lucky to have her.”

“I know,” Fat Crack agreed.

They were sitting outside under the stars. Looks At Nothing lit another crooked cigarette from his seemingly endless supply. He took a puff and passed it. “Nawoj,” he said.

“Nawoj,” Fat Crack replied.

Far away from them, across the horizon, a bank of clouds bubbled with lightning. The rains were coming, probably before the end of the week.

“You would make a good medicine man,” Looks At Nothing said thoughtfully. “You understood how the enemy could be both Apache and not Apache long before I did. Perhaps I am getting too old.”

“You are old,” Fat Crack returned, “but not too old. Besides, in my religion I am already a medicine man of sorts, a practitioner.”

“What kind of religion is this? White man’s religion?”

“Christian Scientist.”

“Christian I understand. This is like Father John. What is Scientist?”

Fat Crack considered for a moment. “We believe,” he said, “that God’s power flows through all of us.”

Looks At Nothing nodded. “You are not practitioner,” he insisted firmly. “You are a medicine man.”

Fat Crack smiled into the night at the old man’s stubbornness. “Perhaps you are right,” he said laughing. “A medicine man with a tow truck.”

With Brandon Walker gone and Davy fast asleep in his room, Diana was wide awake and stewing. It had been easy to turn on the bravado when the detective was there, to act as though she were ten feet tall and bulletproof, but it was a lie. She was petrified.

Having Walker confirm that he, too, believed Carlisle was coming for them gave form and substance to a once-vague but threatening specter. Walker’s fear added to Rita’s as well as her own created in Diana a sense of fear squared, terror to a higher power. What before had seemed little more than a fairy tale was now disturbingly real. Brandon Walker wasn’t in the business of fairy tales. Cops, particularly homicide cops, didn’t joke about such things.

Diana went to bed and tried to sleep, but found herself tossing and turning, hounded by a series of waking nightmares, each more terrifying than the last. What was it like to die? she wondered. What did it feel like? Did it hurt? When her mother had died, it had been a blessing, a release from incredibly agonizing pain and worse indignity. But Diana wasn’t terminally ill, and she wasn’t ready to die. Not yet.

That hadn’t always been the case. In those first black days right after Gary’s death, she hadn’t much cared if she lived or died. She was so physically ill herself that sometimes death seemed preferable. That was before she found out the cause of her raging bouts of nausea, before she knew she was pregnant-newly widowed and newly pregnant.

Max Cooper didn’t come to Gary’s memorial service for the simple reason that he and his second wife were neither notified nor invited. Gary’s folks flew in first class from Chicago and took over. Gary’s mother, Astrid, wanted a big funeral at home in her home church with all attendant pomp and circumstance. Diana respectfully demurred. All she could handle was an unpretentious and poorly attended memorial service at the faded funeral home on South Sixth. Afterward, Gary’s parents left for Chicago and the real production number of a funeral, while Diana skulked back home to the reservation and shut herself up inside the trailer.

By the time the authorities finally got around to releasing the bodies, Gina Antone’s funeral was scheduled two days after Gary’s hurried memorial service. With no one to offer guidance, Diana Ladd spent the two days agonizing over what she should do about it. Should she go or stay away? Would her appearance be considered an admission of guilt or a protestation of Gary Ladd’s innocence?

For Diana Ladd believed wholeheartedly in Gary’s innocence. She believed in it with all the ferocity of a child who clings desperately to his soon-to-be-outgrown belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. She could not yet look at who and what her husband really was. Accepting the burden of his guilt, the only option offered her by Brandon Walker, the detective on the case, would have forced the issue. Instead, she took the line of least resistance. Gary’s three-word, equivocal statement transformed itself into full-fledged denial. “I don’t remember,” became “I didn’t do it,” guilt became innocence, and fiction became truth.

With all this boiling in her head, Diana peeked out between threadbare panels of drapes and looked across the muddy quagmire that separated the Topawa Teachers’ Compound from the village proper. The church parking lot was filling rapidly with cars and pickups as Indians gathered to pay their final respects. It was time for Diana to make a decision, and she did.

Dressing quickly, she put on the same blue double-knit suit she had worn to Gary’s memorial service, the same suit he had picked out as her going-away dress for their honeymoon. She pulled her hair back in a bun and fastened it up with hairpins the same way Iona used to wear hers. Wearing it that way made Diana look older, much older. It made her look like her mother.

Dressed in the suit, but with sandals on her feet because of the mud, Diana Ladd started across the hundred yards or so of no-man’s-land, the vast gulf between the Anglo Teachers’ Compound and the Indian village, between her home and Gina Antone’s funeral, between Diana’s past and what would become her future. Once she set foot on that path, there was no turning back.

The mission church was filled to capacity, but people in the back row shifted aside just enough to let her in. She wanted to be small, invisible, but her arrival was greeted by an inevitable and whispered notice. Everyone knew she was there. She felt or maybe only imagined the stiffening backs of people around her. She flushed, sensing that they disapproved of her presence although no one had the bad manners to say so outright.