or ever will see,” he added, as his puckered mouth twisted into an oddly one-sided smile. “As a consequence, Ms. Walker, I remember everything about that night as vividly as if it had happened yesterday or the day before. I remember every detail about you, and I would suppose that you remember me in much the same way. We were both operating in what the experts call a non-drug-induced altered state of consciousness.”
“My hair is turning gray,” Diana answered, carefully keeping her voice even. “I’m over fifty. I wear glasses. Two pairs of glasses, actually—one for distance and one for reading.”
“I’m far more interested in your body,” Andrew Carlisle said.
Some blind people seem to gaze off into the far distance when they speak. Andrew Carlisle’s opaque, sightless eyes seemed to pry directly into Diana’s very being. She could barely breathe. An involuntary shudder ran up and down her spine while a hot flush covered her face. She wanted nothing more than to race to the door. She wanted out. She longed to be away from this monster, to be back outside in the straightforward discomfort of the hot desert air.
When Brandon had said she would be putting herself at risk, he must have seen that even though Andrew Carlisle would not be able to harm her physically, he might still be able to invade her mind and infect her soul.
Pulling herself together, Diana sat up straight and squared her shoulders. When she spoke, she willed her voice not to quaver.
“Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Carlisle,” she said. “I’m the one calling the shots here. If you want to do this project, we’re going to do it my way. Basic ground rule number one is that we don’t talk about that night. Not now, not ever!”
“But that’s pretty much the whole point, isn’t it?” Carlisle said, smiling his ruined smile. “Everything that happened before led up to it, and everything afterward led away from it.”
“That night isn’t
“Hire?” Carlisle croaked. “What do you mean, hire? I already told you I can’t afford to pay you anything.”
“I’m being paid, all right,” Diana answered. “My agent has pitched the idea to my editor in New York. The book I’m writing will be written, and I will be paid. The only question is whether or not any of your point of view actually appears in print. That depends on how well you behave, on whether or not you agree to do things my way.”
Diana suspected that Andrew Carlisle was a vain man who was prepared to go to any length in order to be immortalized in print. He must have realized that Diana Ladd Walker was his best chance for getting there. In this case, Diana’s instincts were good. Her threat of cutting his perspective out of the project immediately delivered the required result.
“All right,” he agreed grudgingly. “I won’t mention it again. So where do we start?”
“From the beginning,” Diana said. “With your family and your childhood. Where you were born and where you grew up. I’d also like to interview any living relatives.”
“Like my mother, you mean?” he asked.
Diana remembered being told that Andrew Carlisle’s mother had been there in the yard at Gates Pass the night of her son’s attack. Myrna Louise Spaulding had ridden down to Tucson from her home in Tempe with a homicide detective named G. T. Farrell. At the time Diana had been too preoccupied with everything else to notice. Later on, during the trial, Myrna Louise had been conspicuous in her absence. Diana had mistakenly assumed the woman was dead.
“You mean your mother’s still alive?” Diana asked.
“More or less. She lives in one of those marginal retirement homes in Chandler. From the sound of it, I’d say it’s a pretty awful place, but I doubt she can afford any better.”
“Does she come here to see you?”
“Not anymore. She used to. The first time I was here. Still, once a year, on my birthday, she sends me a box of chocolates. See’s Assorted. I’ve never bothered to tell her I hate the damn things. She’s my mother, after all, so you’d think she’d remember that I never liked chocolate, not even when I was little.”
“If you don’t like the chocolates she sends you, what do you do with them, then?” Diana asked. “Give them away?”
Carlisle grinned. “Are you kidding? The guy in the cell next to me would kill for one of ’em, so I flush them down the toilet. One at a time. It drives him crazy.”
Another shiver of chills flashed through Diana’s body.
“Getting back to establishing ground rules,” Andrew Carlisle continued. “How do you want to do this? We could probably sit here chatting this way, or else I could let you review some of the material I’ve already put together. Some of it is taped, some is on disk. I could print it out for you. That way, you could take it with you, go over it at your leisure, and then you could come back later so we could discuss it.”
“How did you get it on disk?” Diana asked.
He gestured with his damaged arm. “I’ve learned to be a one-handed touch typist,” he said. “Fortunately, this is one of those full-service prisons. Inmates are allowed to have access to computers in the library so they can prepare their own writs. I do that, by the way. Compose writs for those less fortunate than myself—the poor bastards who mostly can’t read or write. Someone else has to do the editing and run the spell-checker. In a pinch, you could probably do that.”
“I suppose we can try it that way.” Diana did her best to sound reluctant, although in truth she was delighted at the prospect of any option that might spare her spending unlimited periods of time, shut up in this awful room, sitting face-to-face with this equally awful man.
“When can you have the first segment done?” she asked.
“A week or so,” he said. “Sorting out the details of my childhood shouldn’t take too long. It wasn’t particularly happy or memorable. I doubt there’ll be very much to reminisce about.”
