complete impunity. There was power in that.
Mitch stood at the bar waiting for the bartender to finish dealing with some kind of inventory issue. Even that slight suspension in the action was annoying. Now that the interview was about to begin, his whole body was alive with anticipation. The moment when Diana Ladd Walker had come across the room toward him was already one of the high points of his life. He would never forget the cordial smile on her face as he rose to meet her or the way she had held out her hand in greeting. The touch of her fingers had been absolutely electrifying because, like the poor, unfortunate bull, Diana Ladd Walker didn’t suspect a thing.
She had no idea that her precious daughter belonged to the man whose hand she was shaking. She didn’t have a glimmer that he had spent almost the entire morning with Lani Walker spread out before him as a visual feast for his sole enjoyment. The girl was his, both physically and artistically. Lani was a prisoner of his charcoal and paper as surely as her hands and feet were secured to the trundle bed’s sturdy little corner posts. Diana Ladd Walker had no idea that her interviewer had spent several delightful morning hours being alternately tortured and exhilarated by the process of re-creating that delectably innocent body on paper; that, by controlling his aching to take Lani— because it would have been so easy to do so—he had reveled in the rational victory of denying that physical craving, that fundamental bodily urge. So far Mitch’s violation of Lani Walker had been mainly intellectual, but that wouldn’t last forever.
“Sorry about the delay, sir,” the bartender said. “Can I help you now?”
“A glass of chardonnay for the lady,” Mitch Johnson said. “And a glass of tonic with lime for me.”
For the first half hour of the Monty Lazarus interview, the questions followed such a well-worn track that Diana could have given the answers in her sleep.
“How long have you been writing?” he asked.
“Twenty-five years, give or take.”
“You must have studied writing in school, right?”
Diana shook her head. “No,” she said. “I applied for the creative writing program here at the university, but I wasn’t admitted. I became a teacher instead.”
“That’s right,” Monty said. “I remember something about that from the book. Your husband was admitted using material you had actually written while you weren’t allowed in, and Andrew Carlisle turned out to be the instructor.”
Diana nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything to add.
“Did you and he ever talk about that?” Monty asked.
“About what?”
“About the fact that he had admitted the wrong student, that he had given your place to someone who turned out to have far less talent.”
“We never discussed it,” Diana said. “There wasn’t any need. After all, I won, didn’t I?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Professor Carlisle didn’t let me into his class, but I got to be a writer anyway.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“The University of Oregon,” she answered. “I got my M.Ed. from the University of Arizona.”
Monty Lazarus continued to ask questions that reeked of numbing familiarity. Diana had answered the same questions dozens of times before, including two weeks earlier on
“How did you sell your first book?”
“I submitted it to an agent I met at a writer’s conference up in Phoenix.”
“And how long have you been writing full-time?”
“Until I married my husband Brandon, my second husband, I had a full-time teaching job out on the reservation and only wrote during the summers. That’s
As Diana went through the motions of answering the questions, it occurred to her that if Monty Lazarus had actually read her book, he would have known the answers to some of those questions without having to ask. She remembered dealing with many of them as part of the “back” story in
She bit back the temptation of mentioning to her interviewer that it might have been a good idea for him to do his homework. It wasn’t at all smart to tell an interviewer how to do his job, not unless she wanted a hatchet job to appear in the periodical in question. Instead, Diana Ladd Walker answered the questions with as much poise and humor as she could muster.
Having filled several pages with cryptic notes, Monty Lazarus finally put down his pen. “Okay,” he said. “Enough of that. Now, let’s turn to the more personal stuff.
“Where do you live?”
“Gates Pass, west of Tucson.”
“For how long?”
“Since 1969. I moved there right after my first husband died. Brandon Walker came to live there after we got married in 1976.”
“Where were you from originally?”
“Joseph, Oregon,” she said. “My father ran the town garbage dump. We lived in the caretaker’s house the whole time I was growing up.”
