Kiss of the Bees

desperate and not knowing what else to do, Quentin tied the rope around his unconscious brother’s chest— fastening it under both his arms so it wouldn’t slip off. Then he climbed back up to haul Tommy out.

It had worked, too. With almost superhuman effort and after a half-hour struggle, Quentin finally dragged Tommy’s dead weight up out of the shaft. He heaved him out of the hole and rolled him onto the jagged floor of the cave like a landed fish, but by then Tommy Walker wasn’t breathing anymore. He was dead.

“Goddamn it!” Quentin had screamed, gazing down at his brother’s still and rapidly cooling form. “How dare you go and die on me! How dare you!”

He had started to go for help even then, but halfway to the car the second time, he changed his mind. What if, in the process of pulling Tommy up and out, Quentin had done something to him—what if he had broken something else, caused some other damage that hadn’t happened in the fall? What if it was Quentin’s fault that his brother was dead? And maybe it was anyway. After all, Quentin was the one who had driven them there in the first place. It was Quentin’s car, Quentin’s driver’s license, and Quentin’s gas.

And finally, because he didn’t know what else to do; because he didn’t know how to go about beginning to face the enormous consequences of what he had done, he climbed into the car and drove away. He went home. Later that night, when Janie asked where Tommy was, Quentin said he didn’t know. He claimed he had no idea.

And a day later, Quentin Walker had reluctantly agreed, right along with everyone else, that for some unknown reason his brother Tommy must have run away.

From that day on, no amount of drinking ever held the awful memories quite at bay. In his sleep, Quentin Walker often dreamed about his brother lying limp and lifeless on the floor of the cave. And now, after all the intervening years, for the first time, Quentin Walker was headed back there.

He didn’t know for sure if Tommy’s body was still in the cave. It probably was, but by the time Mitch Johnson arrived on the scene, it wouldn’t be there anymore. Quentin couldn’t afford for Tommy to be found now. Back at the beginning, when it first happened, people might have believed it was an accident. If they found out about it now, who would believe that story, especially if it was coming from Quentin Walker, from somebody who was an ex- con?

Tommy Walker had been missing all these years, and his brother Quentin was determined that he stay that way—missing forever.

8

As the two men led the woman back toward the village, many of the Little People went away, but there was always a swarm of bees or wasps to guard the woman. On the fourth day of the journey, the woman pointed to the sky and began to dig holes in the ground. And the bees were very excited. They sang, “Rain, rain, rain!”

In two more steps of Tash—the Sun—in what the Mil-gahn would call hours, the clouds appeared, and the rains came. The two men filled their water baskets and were glad. But the happiest of all was Jeweth—the Earth.

When the rain was over, the two men wanted to continue on, but the woman would not go. So the two men left the woman some pinole and went back to their own people. After a time the Indians returned to their own country. When they came to the place where the two men had left the strange woman, they found many houses. This kihhim—this village—had been built by people from the south. They said they had come to be near the great Medicine Woman of the Tohono O’othham. Gohhim O’othham—Old Limping Man—was curious and asked where this Medicine Woman lived. The people of the village took him to a house made of sticks of ocotillo and covered with mud. There were two rooms in this house. The inside room was dark with an odd noise in it—a strange kind of buzzing.

When Kulani O’oks—Medicine Woman—came out, Old Limping Man saw it was the same woman whom the Little People had saved. And so this great Medicine Woman, whose name was Mualig Siakam—Forever Spinning—told Old Limping Man how she had been among strangers in the south. When she had returned alone to join her own people, the Tohono O’othham, she found her home village deserted. All the Desert People were gone. There was no water. The animals had gone too, and so had all the birds.

And so this woman, who had been left alone in the burning desert, sent up a prayer for help. Pa-nahl—the Bees—were the first to come. The Bees sent for help and brought Wihpsh—the Wasps. Then came Mumuwali—the Flies, Komikam—the Beetles, and Totoni—the Ants. They all came to help her, all the Little People who had not yet left the burning desert.

The woman said the Little People had told her to go to sleep and they would watch over her. That was all she knew.

As the endless questions droned on, Diana was more than slightly bored. Megan, her publicist in New York, had given her such glowing advance notices on Monty Lazarus that Diana had expected him to be someone who would come up with an original take on the standard author interview. Then, just when she was about to decide the whole thing was destined to be a flop, Monty surprised her.

Sitting back in his chair, studying her over his glasses and under steepled fingers, he finally asked one of the questions she had been waiting and wanting to answer.

“Tell me,” he said. “After all this time, what made you finally decide to write this book?”

“I wanted answers,” she said. “And some closure.”

“After almost twenty years?”

“It’s twenty-one now. It was seventeen when I started. That’s the thing about being a victim of violent crime. I don’t think you ever get over it, not completely. If you let your guard down, the memories are always there, just under the surface, waiting to come flooding back and zing you when you least expect them. I thought that by facing Andrew Carlisle down, by once and for all confronting everything he did to me, that I could put it in the past. I thought that maybe I’d be able to finally reach the other side of the nightmare and gain some perspective.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t know. The jury’s still out. I still dream about him sometimes.”

“About the rape itself? We could talk about that if you like.”

After all the innocuous questions that had gone before, that one rocked her. It meant that Monty Lazarus had read Shadow of Death after all. Diana felt blood warming her cheeks.

“I’ve talked about the rape all I’m going to—in the book itself. Megan was supposed to tell you that subject was off limits. Not only that, if you’ve already read the book, why did you ask me all those other questions?” she asked. “You must have known the answers to most of that stuff.”