Kiss of the Bees

“No,” she answered. “He never did.”

“But he was enrolled in Carlisle’s class at the time of his death. Presumably he was working on something, then. What was it?”

Diana shook her head. “I have no idea,” she answered. “I’m pretty sure there was a partially completed manuscript, but I never read it. The thing disappeared in all the confusion after Gary’s death. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what was in it?”

Mitch asked the speculative question deftly like a picador sticking a tormenting pic into the unsuspecting bull’s neck. And it did its intended work. It pleased him to see her struggle with her answer. She took a deep breath.

“No,” she said finally. “I don’t think knowing that would serve any useful purpose at all. Whatever Gary was writing, it had nothing at all to do with Andrew Carlisle’s focus on me, which, in my opinion, boils down to nothing more or less than professional jealousy.”

Oh, no, Mitch wanted to tell her. It’s far more complex than that. Instead, Monty Lazarus looked down at his notes and frowned. “Let’s go back to something you said just a minute ago, something about Carlisle being a couple of moves ahead of you. Something about him never really intending for you to write the book. If that was the case, what was the point?”

“He was hoping to humiliate me publicly,” Diana answered. “I think he thought he could get me to make a public commitment to writing the book and then force me to back out of it. But it didn’t work. I wrote the book anyway.”

For the first time, Mitch was surprised. Diana’s answer was right on the money. Andy had told him that he didn’t think she’d have guts enough to go through with it. That was another instance, one of the first ones Mitch had noticed, where Andy Carlisle’s assessment of any given situation had turned out to be dead wrong.

“It still doesn’t make much sense,” Monty said, making a show of dusting crumbs of tortilla chips out of his lap.

Diana knew it did make sense, but only if you had all the other pieces of the puzzle. Monty Lazarus didn’t have access to those. No one did, no one other than Diana. Those were the very things she had left out of the book, the ugly parts she had never mentioned to anyone, including Brandon Walker.

She had absolutely no intention of telling the whole story to Monty Lazarus, either. Those things were hers alone—Diana Ladd Walker’s dirty little secrets. Instead, she tossed off a too-casual answer, hoping it would throw him off the trail.

“Let’s just say it was a grudge match,” Diana said. “Andrew Philip Carlisle hated my guts.”

Almost a month after that first interview with Carlisle up in Florence, Diana was still waiting for the first written installment, which had taken far longer for him to deliver than he had said it would.

Davy was home from school for a few weeks. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Diana and Brandon had planned to take Lani and Davy up to the White Mountains to visit some friends who owned a two-room cabin just outside Payson. The four-day outing was scheduled to start Thursday afternoon, as soon as Brandon came home from work. Fate in the form of a demanding editor intervened when the Federal Express delivery man came to the door at nine o’clock Thursday morning. The package he delivered contained the galleys for her next book, The Copper Baron’s Wife, along with an apologetic note from her editor saying the corrections needed to be completed and ready to be returned to New York on Tuesday morning.

“I’d better stay home and work on them,” she said to Brandon on the phone that day when she called him at his office. “You know as well as I do that I can’t do a good job on galleys when we’re camped out with a houseful of people up in Payson. I have to be able to concentrate, but you and the kids are welcome to go. Just because I have to work doesn’t mean everybody else has to suffer.”

Brandon had protested, but in the end he had taken Lani and Davy and the three of them had gone off without her. Once they were piled in the car and headed for Payson, Diana had locked herself up with the galleys and worked her way through the first hundred pages of the book before she gave up for the night and went to bed. The next morning, when she went out to bring in the newspaper, she found an envelope propped against the front door. Although it was addressed to her, it hadn’t been mailed. Someone had left it on the porch overnight.

Curious, she had torn the envelope open and found a cassette tape—that and nothing else. No note, no explanation. She had taken the tape inside to her office and popped it into the cassette player she kept on the bookshelf beside her desk.

When the tape first began playing, there was no sound—none at all. Distracted by a headline at the top of the newspaper, Diana was beginning to assume that the tape was blank when she heard a moan—a long, terrible moan.

“Please,” a woman’s voice whispered. “Mr. Ladd, please . . .”

Diana had been holding the newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. As soon as she heard her former husband’s name, she dropped both the paper and the cup. The paper merely fell back to the surface of the desk. The cup, however, crashed to the bare floor, shattering on the Saltillo tile and sending splatters of coffee and shards of cup from one end of the room to the other.

Diana leaned closer to the recorder and turned up the volume. “Mr. Ladd,” the girl’s voice said again. “Please. Let me go.”

“No help there, little lady,” a man’s voice said. “He’s out cold. Can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

The voice was younger, but Diana recognized it after a moment. Andrew Carlisle’s. Unmistakably Andrew Carlisle’s and . . . the other? Could it be Gina Antone’s? No. That wasn’t possible! It couldn’t be!

But a few agonizing exchanges later, Diana realized it was true. The other voice did belong to Gina Antone all right, to someone suffering the torments of the damned.

“Please, mister,” the girl pleaded helplessly, her voice barely a whisper. “Please don’t hurt me again. Please . . .” The rest of what she might have said dissolved into a shriek followed by a series of despairing sobs.

“But that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? Don’t you remember telling us that you were taking us to a bad place? It turns out you were right. This is a bad place, my dear. A very bad place.”

There was a momentary pause followed by another spine-tingling scream that seemed to go on forever. Diana