'Where?' 'One of the villages, San Pedro.'
'What time did he get home?'
'Saturday. In the morning. The dance lasted all night.'
'Did he go by himself?'
'No. His professor went with him, his creative-writing professor from the U., Andrew Carlisle.'
'And did this Andrew Carlisle come home with your husband?'
'No. Gary came home by himself.'
'How did he seem when he came home? Was he upset?
Did he act as though something was wrong?'
Diana had been answering his questions as though in a fog. Now, she seemed to rouse herself 'I shouldn't be talking to you,' she said evasively.
Brandon played dumb. 'Why not?'
'You're going to trap me into saying something I shouldn't.'
'So he was upset?'
'I didn't say that he was fine when he came home. Tired from being up all night and maybe from having had too much to drink.'
'He was drinking?'
'A little.'
Brandon stared meaningfully at the newspaper lying on the floor, its front page crumpled into a wad. He made sure there could be no doubt about where he was looking.
'You've seen the paper,' he said. 'Did you know the girl?'
In the stricken silence that followed, both became aware of the steady drum of wind and rain on the outside of the trailer. For the longest time, Diana Ladd didn't answer.
'No,' she said at last. 'I didn't know her.'
'What about her grandmother, Rita Antone? She lives just across the way a few hundred yards.'
Diana nodded. 'I know Rita from school, but we're not necessarily friends.'
'Did your husband know Gina?'
'Maybe. I don't know everyone my husband knows.'
'Why did he go to the dance?'
'Why does anyone? To eat at the feast, to drink the wine.'
'Is your husband a student of Indian customs?' he asked.
'My husband is a writer,' she answered.
By the time the detective finally left the house, he drove into the teeth of a raging desert storm. Fierce winds shook the car, while sheets of rain washing across the windshield made it difficult to see.
Walker had been told that the dance at San Pedro had been a traditional rain dance. It worked with a vengeance, he thought, as he slowed down to pick his way through a dip already filling with fast-moving brown water. Two miles east of Three Points, he was stuck for forty-five minutes at one of the larger dips, waiting for cascading water to recede.
He was still there when a call came over the radio telling him to turn around and go back to the reservation. A pickup truck had been found in a flooded wash off Highway 86 west of Quijotoa. When the highway patrol was finally able to reach the.vehicle, they found a body inside-that of a male Caucasian with a single, self-inflicted bullet hole in his head.
That was how Brandon Walker first laid eyes on Garrison Ladd. As he told Davy years later, Garrison Ladd was dead from the bullet wound long before Walker met him.
Rita had hated living with the Clarks.
All that week, no matter what she did, the Mil-gahn woman found fault with Dancing Quail's work. She didn't work fast enough, she wasn't thorough enough, she wasn't good enough. And all that week, Dancing Quail kept silent in the face of Adele Clark's angry onslaughts, but she began planning what she would do.
'I'm very unhappy here,' she told Louisa one night as they were getting ready for bed in their stuffy upstairs room. 'I must go someplace else to find work.'
'My brother Gordon is in California,' Louisa offered. 'I could write and ask him. He might know someplace you could go.'.
'How far is California?' Dancing Quail asked.
Louisa shook her head. 'A long way.'
'How can I go there?'
'On the train, I think,' Louisa answered.
'Will you write down where your brother is so I can find him?'
