Kiss of the Bees

“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.

Appendix

A Statement by J.A. Jance

When Kiss of the Bees starts, twenty years have passed since the end of Hour of the Hunter. Diana Ladd—who desperately wanted to be a writer back then—has just been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Her son, Davy, has grown up and has just graduated from law school. Her husband, a struggling detective in Hour of the Hunter, has spent years as the sheriff of Pima County, but he has recently lost a bid for reelection. And the crazed killer from back then is dead and out of the picture, right? Wrong!

When it came time to write the sequel to Hour of the Hunter I knew only one piece of the puzzle. Twenty-five years earlier, when I was a school librarian on the reservation, a young girl, a toddler who had been abandoned by her birth parents, almost died after being stung by ants. Her elderly caretaker was deaf as a post and didn’t hear the child screaming. This harrowing tale, one that stuck in my heart and wouldn’t go away, was the only story I was determined to use in the upcoming book, one that still didn’t have a name the night before I was set to start writing it.

I went to the bedroom, worrying about whether or not I’d be able to summon the same kind of magic that had sustained me while I was writing Hour of the Hunter. I went to the bookshelf and took down a copy of Harold Bell Wright’s Long Ago Told, where I had found the legends that had been woven into the background of my first thriller.

Getting into bed, I allowed the book to fall open. I found myself reading a legend about a woman who, in a time of terrible drought, was saved from death by the beating of the wings of a huge swarm of bees. When the drought was over and the woman was still alive, she went on to become the Tohono O’Odham’s greatest medicine woman. As soon as I read that story, I leaped out of bed and went to tell my husband, “The magic’s back. Now I can write this book.”

Not only was the magic back, it had given me my title, Kiss of the Bees.

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.

Also by J.A. Jance

HOUR OF THE HUNTER

Joanna Brady Mysteries

DESERT HEAT

TOMBSTONE COURAGE

SHOOT/DON’T SHOOT

DEAD TO RIGHTS

SKELETON CANYON

RATTLESNAKE CROSSING

OUTLAW MOUNTAIN

DEVIL’S CLAW

J.P. Beaumont Mysteries

UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY

INJUSTICE FOR ALL

TRIAL BY FURY

TAKING THE FIFTH

IMPROBABLE CAUSE

A MORE PERFECT UNION

DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE

MINOR IN POSSESSION

PAYMENT IN KIND

WITHOUT DUE PROCESS

FAILURE TO APPEAR

LYING IN WAIT

NAME WITHHELD

BREACH OF DUTY

And in Hardcover

BIRDS OF PREY