Kiss of the Bees

the FBI?”

“Brandon is handling it.”

“What can I do to help?” Davy asked urgently.

“Nothing much, for right now,” Diana answered. “I just wanted you to know, that’s all.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Are you and Dad going to be all right?”

Diana felt herself choking on the phone. “We’ll be okay,” she said. “But hurry home. Hurry as fast as you can. And call every night so we can keep you posted.”

“I will,” Davy said. “I promise.”

A stricken David Ladd handed the phone over to Candace. “I was right,” he said. “Something awful has happened. Lani’s gone.”

Candace was the one who put the phone back in its cradle and switched on the light. “Gone where?” she asked.

Davy shrugged. “Nobody knows.”

“Your parents think she’s been kidnapped?”

“Maybe, but they’re not sure. Candace, I’ve never heard my mother this upset. She never even asked who you were.” While he spoke, Davy had crawled out of bed and was starting toward the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” Candace asked.

“I’m going to shower and get dressed.”

“But why?”

“So I can leave. You heard me. I told Mom I’d be there as soon as I can. If I go right now, I can be halfway to Bloomington before morning rush hour starts.”

“We,” Candace said pointedly. “If we leave right now. Besides, it’s Sunday; there isn’t going to be a rush hour.”

David nodded. “I meant we,” he said.

“Doesn’t that seem like a stupid thing to do?” Candace asked.

“Stupid? Didn’t you hear what I said? This is a crisis, Candace. My family needs me.”

“I didn’t say going was stupid. Driving is. Why not fly?” Candace asked. “We can put the tickets on my AmEx. If we take a plane, we can be in Tucson by noon. Driving, that’s about as long as it would take us to make it to the Iowa state line.”

“What about the car? What about all my stuff?”

“I’ll call Bridget,” Candace said decisively. “She works only a few blocks from here. If we leave the parking claim ticket at the desk, she can come over on Monday after work, pick up the car, and take it home with her. She and Larry can keep it with them until we can make arrangements to come back and get it later. In the meantime, we can take a cab to the airport. That’s a lot less trouble than fighting the parking-garage wars.”

Candace wrestled a city phone book out of the nightstand drawer and started looking through it.

“What are you doing?” David asked.

“Calling the airlines to find the earliest plane and get us a reservation.”

David looked at her wonderingly. “You’d do this for me? Go to all this trouble?”

She looked at him in mock exasperation as the “all lines are busy” message played out in her ear. “David,” Candace said, “we’re a team. I’ve been telling you for months now that I love you. If there’s a crisis in your life, then there’s a crisis in mine, too.”

Just then a live person somewhere in the airline industry must have come on the phone. “What’s your earliest flight from Chicago to Tucson?” she asked. There was a long pause. “Six A.M.?” she said a moment later.

Looking at the clock on the nightstand, Candace groaned. “Not much time for sleep, is there? But that’s the one we need. Two seats, together, if you have them.” There was a pause. “The return flight?” She glanced questioningly in David’s direction. “I don’t know about that. I guess we’d better just leave the return trip open for now.”

After making arrangements to pay for the tickets at the counter, Candace put down the phone. “Don’t you think we ought to try to sleep for another hour or so? We don’t want to get there and be so shot from lack of sleep that we can’t help out.”

Obligingly, Davy lay back down on the bed, but he didn’t crawl back under the sheets because he didn’t expect to fall asleep again. He did, though. The next thing he knew, the alarm in the clock radio next to his head was going off. It was four-thirty.

From the light leaking out of the bathroom and from the sound of running water, he could tell that Candace was already up and in the shower. Moments later, David Ladd was, too.

He was standing under the steaming spray of water when he remembered his dream from the day before—the dream and Lani’s horrifying scream.

Rocked by a terrible sense of foreboding, Davy braced himself against the shower wall to keep from falling. He knew now that the scream could mean only one thing.

Dolores Lanita Walker was already dead.

14

When the Indians heard the bad news—that PaDaj O’othham were coming again to steal their crops—they held another council. Everybody came. U’uwhig—the Birds—told their friends the Indians about a mountain which was not far from their village and quite near their fields. The people went to this mountain, and on the side of it they built three big walls of rock.