Authors: J. A. Jance
At the house, Davy had gone straight into Rita’s room. He had stayed there for only ten minutes or so. He had come out carrying Rita’s prized but aged medicine basket. His face was pale but he was dry-eyed. “I’m ready to go back now,” he said.
He and Brandon had set out in the car. “She gave me her basket,” Davy said a few minutes later.
“I know,” Brandon said. “I saw you carrying it.”
“But it’s not mine to keep,” Davy added.
Brandon Walker glanced at his stepson. His jaw was set, but now there were tears glimmering on his face. “I get to have Father John’s rosary and Rita’s son’s Purple Heart. Everything else goes to Lani. It isn’t fair!”
Brandon was tempted to point out that very little in life is fair, but he didn’t. “Why, then, did she give it to you today?” he asked.
“Because Lani’s only seven, or at least she will be tomorrow. She can’t have the rest of it until she’s older.”
“When are you supposed to give it to her?”
Davy brushed the tears from his face. “That’s what I asked Rita. She said that I’d know when it was time.”
Brandon pulled up in front of the dorm, but Davy made no effort to get out. Instead, he opened the basket, picked through it, and removed two separate items, both of which he shoved in his pocket. Then he put the frayed cover back on the basket.
“Dad,” he said. “Would you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?” Brandon asked.
“I can’t take this into the dorm. No one would understand. And somebody might try to steal it or something. You and Mom have a safety deposit box down at the bank, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind putting this in there and keeping it? I mean, if it isn’t really mine, I don’t want to lose it. I need to keep it safe—for Lani.”
“Sure, Davy,” Brandon said. “I’ll be glad to. If you want me to, I’ll drop it off this morning on my way to the department.”
“Thanks,” Davy said, handing the basket over. “And tell Fat Crack that I’ll come back out to the house as soon as I’m done with my last class. I should be done by three at the latest.”
But Rita Antone was gone long before then. She died within half an hour of the time her little
Olhoni
left, taking Understanding Woman’s medicine basket with him.
Nine years later, the bank had gone through several different mergers and had ended up as part of Wells Fargo. The bank had changed, but not the medicine basket, at least not noticeably. Maybe it was somewhat more frayed than it had been a decade earlier, but the power
Oks Amichuda
had woven into it years before still remained and still waited to be let out.
The day after Nana
Dahd
died was the worst birthday Lani ever remembered. It seemed to her that a terrible empty place had opened up in her life. The cake had been ordered well in advance, and everyone had tried to go through the motions of a party, just as Rita would have wanted them to. When it came time to blow out the candles, however, Lani had fled the room in tears, leaving the lighted candles still burning.
Brandon was the one who had come to find her, sitting in the playhouse he had built for her in the far corner of the backyard.
“Lani,” he called. “Come here. What’s the matter?”
She crept outside and fell, weeping, against him.
“Nana
Dahd’s
dead, and Davy’s mad at me,” she sobbed. “I wish I were dead, too.”
“No, you don’t,” he said soothingly. “Rita wouldn’t want you to be unhappy. We were lucky to have had her for as long as we did, but now it’s time to let her go. She was suffering, Lani. She was in terrible pain. It would be selfish for us to want her to stay any longer.”
“I know,” Lani said, “but . . .”
“Wait a minute. What’s that in your hand?”
“Her
owij,
” Lani answered. “Her awl. She gave it to me yesterday. She said I must always keep making baskets.”
“Good.”
“But why was Davy so mean to me?” Lani asked. “I called him at the dorm and asked him if he was going to come have cake with us. He said he was too busy, but I think he just didn’t want to. He sounded mad, but why would he be? What have I done?”
“Nothing, Lani,” Brandon said. “He’s upset about Rita, the same as you are. He’ll get over it. We just have to be patient with each other. Come on, let’s go back inside and have some of that cake.”
Obligingly Lani had followed him into the house. The candles were already out. She managed to choke down a few bites of cake, but that was all.
Three days later, at the funeral at San Xavier Mission, Lani was shocked to see Rita lying in the casket with her head propped up on a pillow.
“But Nana
Dahd
doesn’t like pillows,” Lani had insisted, tugging at her father’s hand. “She never uses a pillow.”
“Shhhh,” Brandon Walker had said. “Not now.”
On the face of it, that was all there was to it. There was never any further discussion. Brandon’s “not now” became “not ever,” except for one small thing.
From that day on, Dolores Lanita Walker never again used a pillow.
Not until now.
10
On the Fourth Day I’itoi made the Sun—Tash. And Elder Brother went with Tash to show him the way, just as Sun travels today.
For a long time
Tash
walked close to the earth, and it was very hot.
Juhk O’othham
—Rain Man—refused to follow his brother,
Chewagi O’othham
—Cloud Man—over the land, and
Hewel O’othham
—Wind Man—was angry and only made things hotter and dryer.
All the desert world needed water. The Desert People were so thirsty and cross that they quarreled. When
u’uwhig
—the Birds—came too near each other, they pulled feathers.
Tohbi
—Cottontail Rabbit—and
Ko’owi
—Rattlesnake, and
Jewho
—Gopher—could no longer live together. So
Jewho
became very busy digging new holes.
When the animals had quarreled until only the strongest were left, a strange people came out of the old deserted gopher holes.
These were the
PaDaj O’othham
—Bad People—who were moved by the Spirit of Evil. They came from the big water in the far southwest, and they spread all over the land, killing the people as they came until every man felt that he lived in a black hole.
The Desert People were so sad that at last they cried out to the Great Spirit for help. And when
I’itoi
saw that the
PaDaj O’othham
were in the land, he took some good spirits of the other world and made warriors out of them.
These good spirit warriors chased the Bad People but could neither capture nor kill them. And because his good soldiers from the spirit world could not destroy the Bad People, who were moved by the Spirit of Evil,
I’itoi
was ashamed.
“That must have been very interesting,” Monty Lazarus was saying.
Diana snapped to attention and was embarrassed to realize that she had once again allowed her mind to wander. Talking and thinking about Andrew Carlisle still had the power to do that. She had thought that writing the book about him would have cleared the man out of her system once and for all. Her continuing discomfort during this interview seemed to suggest that wasn’t the case.
She wondered if she’d said anything stupid. Whatever she had said, no doubt Mr. Lazarus would quote her verbatim.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m getting tired. What was interesting?”
“Interviewing Andrew Carlisle’s mother.”
Diana didn’t remember when the interview had veered into discussing Myrna Louise, but it must have. “Right,” she said. “It was.”
“She’s still alive then?” Monty asked.
“Not now. She died within weeks of the time I saw her. It’s a good thing I went to see her when I did. Other than talking to Andrew Carlisle himself, my interview with Myrna Louise was one of the most important ones I did for the book. I was nervous about seeing her after what I’d done to her son—leaving him blind and crippled. I had no idea how she’d respond to me. Just because a court had ruled I had acted in self-defense didn’t mean that would carry any weight with the man’s mother.”
“Didn’t you say in the book someplace that he tried to kill her once?”
Diana nodded. “He did, but she got away. What I found strange was that she didn’t seem to hold it against him. She told me that there wasn’t any point in carrying grudges and that he was her only reason for still hanging on. She said that if she was gone, he wouldn’t have anyone at all.”
“So when you went to interview her, how did it go?” Monty Lazarus asked.
“It was fine,” Diana said. “Myrna Louise Carlisle Spaulding Rivers couldn’t have been more gracious.”
The first time Diana had met Myrna Louise, it was mid-morning in the somewhat grubby lunchroom of the Vista Retirement Center in Chandler, Arizona. Andrew Carlisle’s mother, with a walker strategically stationed nearby, was seated on a stained bench shoved carelessly up to a chipped table in the far corner of the room. She looked up at her visitor from a game of solitaire played with a deck of sticky, dog-eared cards.
“You must be Diana Walker,” Myrna Louise said as Diana walked up to the table. “I’ve seen your picture before. On your books.”
“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” Diana said.
Myrna Louise smiled. “I didn’t have much choice, now, did I? I’m not going anyplace soon. I figured I could just as well.”
Her hair, an improbable color of red, was thin and wispy. Her face may have been made up with a once-practiced hand, but now there were a few slips. A dribble of mascara darkened one cheek, and some of the too-red lipstick had smeared and edged its way up and down into the wrinkled creases above and below her lips. The teeth were false and clicked ominously when she spoke, as though threatening to pop out at any moment.
“Anyway,” she added, “I wanted to meet you. I wanted to apologize.”
“Apologize? For what?”
“For my son, of course. For Andrew. He was a good boy when he was little. Good and so cute, too. I used to have the curls from his first haircut, but I finally threw them away when I moved here. Carlton made me get rid of them.”
“Carlton?”
“Carlton Rivers, my late husband. My latest late husband. Anyway, when I told him about what Andrew had done—or rather, what he had tried to do—he said I should just forget about him. He said I should forget I’d ever even had a son. He said I should leave him in prison and let him rot. Andrew tried to kill me, you see. The same day he tried to kill you, as a matter of fact. I got away, though. When he got out of the car at that storage place, I just drove myself away. You should have seen his face. He couldn’t believe it—that I was driving. I almost couldn’t believe it myself. I’d never done it before—driven a car, that is. Not before or since.”
Diana took a deep breath. “You’re not responsible for your son’s actions, Mrs. Rivers. There’s no need for you to apologize to me.”
“A reverend comes by and conducts church services here every Sunday,” Myrna Louise continued as though she hadn’t heard Diana’s response. “I tried to talk to him about Andrew once or twice after I found out about the AIDS business. I suppose you know about that?”
Diana nodded.
“I asked him if he thought that was God’s way of punishing Andrew. You know, an eye-for-an-eye sort of thing. Just like he lost his eyesight over what he did to you.”
“God didn’t throw the bacon grease,” Diana said. “I did.”
“But God’s responsible for the result, isn’t he?” Myrna Louise insisted. “If God had wanted it to work that way, he could have just burned him, but he wouldn’t have been blind. Don’t you see?”
“Not exactly,” Diana said.
“Well, anyway, now I hear you’re writing a book about him.”
“Yes, although it’s not just about him. It’s about all the people whose lives he touched. Whose lives he changed.”
“Or ended,” Myrna Louise added sadly. “It serves him right that he doesn’t get to write his own book. He asked you to do that, to write it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s hard for me to believe, but I don’t suppose anything about Andrew should surprise me anymore. I would think he would have wanted to write it himself, even if he couldn’t get it published. He’s still angry with me about the manuscript, you know.”
“What manuscript?”
“Of his book. The book he wrote when he was in prison the first time.”
“And what happened to it?” Diana asked.
“I burned it,” Myrna Louise said thoughtfully. “One page at a time.”
“There aren’t any copies left?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And what did your son call this book?”
Myrna Louise shook her head. “I don’t remember the name of it now. After all these years, I guess I’ve managed to forget what it was exactly, although I remember the title had something to do with Indians. I didn’t read the whole thing, just parts of it. It was awful. I couldn’t believe anyone could write such terrible stuff. The things his main character did to other characters were just awful. It made me feel filthy just having in my hands. But of course, I know now that he must not have made some of that up.”
“What do you mean, he didn’t make it up?” Diana asked.
“That he had actually done some of those things himself. And that there were others.”
“Other what?” Diana asked.
“Other victims,” Myrna Louise answered. “Ones the police knew nothing about.”
For several moments after that, Diana didn’t trust herself to speak. She was thinking about the ashes of the cassette tape she had swept out of the fireplace and thrown into the garbage can before Brandon and the kids came home from Payson. If there were other victims, did that also mean there were other tapes?
“You told me a little while ago that he tried to kill you the same day he attacked me.”
“He didn’t exactly try,” Myrna Louise corrected. “He was going to. He planned to, but I drove away before he had a chance.”
“Did he have a tape recorder or tapes with him that day?”