Kiss of the Bees (57 page)

“How is Quentin?” Lani asked.

“Out of the hospital,” Fat Crack replied. “But he checked himself into a drug and alcohol rehab program.”

“Will he be better?” Lani asked.

Fat Crack shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “He has let go of the secret of his brother’s death. Secrets like that can be very bad. They eat at you. Perhaps now, he’ll be able to get better.”

“Perhaps,” Lani agreed.

They were quiet again. Far off to the east, flickers of lightning touched the horizon. The summer rains were coming. They would be here soon—by the end of the week at the latest. In a way, Lani was sorry that when the deluges began she would be living back inside the house in Gates Pass with a regular roof over her head rather than a canvas tent.

Lani Walker wasn’t a smoker—not even of regular cigarettes. By the time the last of the wild tobacco smoke had eddied away into the nighttime air, she felt light-headed.

“Have you ever heard of divining crystals?” Fat Crack asked. His voice seemed to come to her from very far away.

“I’ve heard of them,” she said. “But I’ve never seen any.”

Fat Crack reached into the medicine pouch and pulled out the chamois bag. Untying it, he held open Lani’s hand and poured the four crystals into it.

“Looks At Nothing said I should keep them until I found a successor worthy of them,” he said. “It was through using these that I knew to look for you near Rattlesnake Skull that morning. Now I want you to try it.”

“Me?” Lani asked. “But I don’t know what to do.”

“Take your piece of pottery,” Fat Crack directed. “Look at it for a time through each of the different crystals and tell me what you see.”

One at a time, holding them up to the firelight, Lani examined the pottery through each of the first three crystals. “I’m not seeing anything,” she said, when she put down the third. “It’s not going to work.”

“Try the last one,” Fat Crack urged.

This time, instead of putting the crystal down, Lani continued staring at it for a long time. First a minute passed, and then another. Finally she looked up at him.

“The Apache warrior—
Ohb-s-chu cheggiadkam
—came back here looking for his lover, didn’t he? He came looking for Betraying Woman. Somehow his spirit found its way into Andrew Carlisle.”

Fat Crack nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “And into Mitch Johnson as well.”

“And now they’re free?”

“Yes,” Gabe Ortiz answered. “When you broke Betraying Woman’s pots after all this time, you set all of them free.”

Gabe reached out. One at a time he picked up each of the four divining crystals and returned them to the bag. When the bag was tied shut, he placed the crystals—chamois bag and all—inside Lani’s medicine basket.

“They belong to you now, Bat Meeter,” he said with a smile. “They are a gift from Looks At Nothing to you, from one wise old
siwani
to a young one. Use them well.”

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the work of Dean and Lucille Saxton and their invaluable book,
Papago/Pima-English Dictionary,
and Harold Bell Wright for his wonderfully vivid retelling of Tohono O’othham legends in
Long Ago Told.
She also expresses her thanks to Special Collections at the University of Arizona Library for making available materials that otherwise would have been impossible to obtain. Without these crucial contributions, this book would not exist.

About the Author

J. A. Jance is the American Mystery Award-winning author of the J.P. Beaumont series as well as eight enormously popular novels featuring small-town Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady. She has also written two critically acclaimed thrillers, Kiss of the Bees and Hour of the Hunter. Jance was born in South Dakota, brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington.

More about J. A. Jance

A s a second-grader in Mrs. Spangler’s Greenway School class, I was introduced to Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. I read the first one and was hooked and knew, from that moment on, that I wanted to be a writer.

The third child in a large family, I was four years younger than my next older sister and four years older then the next younger sibling. Being both too young and too old left me alone in a crowd and helped turn me into an introspective reader and a top student. When I graduated from Bisbee High School in 1962, I received an academic scholarship that made me the first person in my family to attend a four year college. I graduated in 1966 with a degree in English and Secondary Education. In 1970 I received my M. Ed. in Library Science. I taught high school English at Tucson’s Pueblo High School for two years and was a K-12 librarian at Indian Oasis School District in Sells, Arizona for five years.

My ambitions to become a writer were frustrated in college and later, first because the professor who taught creative writing at the University of Arizona in those days thought girls “ought to be teachers or nurses” rather than writers. After he refused me admission to the program, I did the next best thing: I married a man who was allowed in the program that was closed to me. My first husband imitated Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little. Despite the fact that he was allowed in the creative writing program, he never had anything published either prior to or after his death from chronic alcoholism at age forty-two. That didn’t keep him from telling me, however, that there would be only one writer in our family, and he was it.

My husband made that statement in 1968 after I had received a favorable letter from an editor in New York who was interested in publishing a children’s story I had written. Because I was a newly wed wife who was interested in staying married, I put my writing ambitions on hold. Other than writing poetry in the dark of night when my husband was asleep (see After the Fire), I did nothing more about writing fiction until eleven years later when I was a single, divorced mother with two children and no child support as well as a full time job selling life insurance. My first three books were written between four a.m. and seven a.m.. At seven, I would wake my children and send them off to school. After that, I would get myself ready to go sell life insurance.

I started writing in the middle of March of 1982. The first book I wrote, a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that happened in Tucson in 1970, was never published by anyone. For one thing, it was twelve hundred pages long. Since I was never allowed in the creative writing classes, no one had ever told me there were some things I needed to leave out. For another, the editors who turned it down said that the parts that were real were totally unbelievable, and the parts that were fiction were fine. Myagent finally sat me down and told me that she thought I was a better writer of fiction than I was of non-fiction. Why, she suggested, didn’t I try my hand at a novel?

The result of that conversation was the first Detective Beaumont book,
Until Proven Guilty.
Since 1985 when that was published, there have been fourteen more Beau books. My work also includes eight Joanna Brady books set in southeastern Arizona where I grew up. In addition there are two thrillers,
Hour of the Hunter
and
Kiss of the Bees
that reflect what I learned during the years when I was teaching on the Tohono O’Odham reservation west of Tucson, Arizona.

The week before Until Proven Guilty was published, I did a poetry reading of After the Fire at a widowed retreat sponsored by a group called WICS (Widowed Information Consultation Services) of King County. By June of 1985, it was five years after my divorce in 1980 and two years after my former husband’s death. I went to the retreat feeling as though I hadn’t quite had my ticket punched and didn’t deserve to be there. After all, the other people there were all still married when their spouses died. I was divorced. At the retreat I met a man whose wife had died of breast cancer two years to the day and within a matter of minutes of the time my husband died. We struck up a conversation based on that coincidence. Six months later, to the dismay of our five children, we told the kids they weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they’d do, and we got married. We now have four new in-laws as well as three grandchildren.

When my second husband and I first married, he supported all of us—his kids and mine as well as the two of us. It was a long time before my income from writing was anything more than fun money—the
Improbable Cause
trip to Walt Disney World; the
Minor in Possession
memorial powder room; the
Payment in Kind
memorial hot tub. Seven years ago, however, the worm turned. My husband was able to retire at age 54 and take up golf and oil painting.

One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that everything—even the bad stuff—is usable. The eighteen years I spent while married to an alcoholic have helped shape the experience and character of Detective J. P. Beaumont. My experiences as a single parent have gone into the background for Joanna Brady—including her first tentative steps toward a new life after the devastation of losing her husband in
Desert Heat
. And then there’s the evil creative writing professor in
Hour of the Hunter
and
Kiss of the Bees
, but that’s another story.

Another wonderful part of being a writer is hearing from fans. I learned on the reservation that the ancient, sacred charge of the storyteller is to beguile the time. I’m thrilled when I hear that someone has used my books to get through some particularly difficult illness either as a patient or as they sit on the sidelines while someone they love is terribly ill. It gratifies me to know that by immersing themselves in my stories, people are able to set their own lives aside and live and walk in someone else’s shoes. It tells me I’m doing a good job at the best job in the world.

Other Books by JA Jance

J. P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES

1   Until Proven Guilty

2   Injustice for All

3   Trial by Fury

4   Taking the Fifth

5   Improbable Cause

6   A More Perfect Union

7   Dismissed with Prejudice

8   Minor in Possession

9   Payment in Kind

10 Without Due Process

11 Failure to Appear

12 Lying in Wait

13 Name Withheld

14 Breach of Duty

15 Birds of Prey

JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES

1   Desert Heat

2   Tombstone Courage

3   Shoot/Don’t Shoot

4   Dead to Rights

5   Skeleton Canyon

6   Rattlesnake Crossing

7   Outlaw Mountain

8   Devil’s Claw

9   Paradise Lost

10 Exit Wounds

AND

Hour of the Hunter

Kiss of the Bees

Partners in Crime

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KISS OF THE BEES. Copyright © 2001 by J. A. Jance. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

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MS Reader edition v 1. August 2001 ISBN 0-06-001046-0

Print edition first published in 2001 HarperCollins Publishers

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