APRIL 2002
Under a clear blue April sky, Brandon Walker swam his laps one after the other. He didn’t bother about timing them. At age sixty-one, he was no longer interested in setting speed records, and he didn’t count laps, either. What he wanted was to maintain his endurance, so he swam until he couldn’t swim any longer, then he stopped. He was a little winded, but not too bad. The heated water in the newly installed lap pool was kind to his joints, especially his right hip and left knee, both of which had been giving him trouble recently.
When he had gone in for his annual physical, Dr. Browder had hinted that it was about time to discuss the possibility of hip- and knee-replacement surgery. Brandon was considering the possibility all right, but not very seriously. He’d get around to having joint replacement surgery about the same time someone perfected the art of human brain transplants. In the meantime, he’d get along as best he could without complaining. If he didn’t gripe about it, maybe he could keep his wife, Diana Ladd, from setting another doctor’s appointment.
The cordless phone he had carried out to the patio rang with the distinctive ringer that said someone was calling from the locked security gate at the front wall. Had he been home alone, he would have had to scramble out of the pool to see who was there and let them in. Fortunately, Diana was home and in her study, locked in mortal combat with the stalled beginning of her next book. Convinced she would welcome any interruption, Brandon kept swimming. Besides, the visitor was probably UPS or FedEx bringing some new missive or assignment from Diana’s New York publishers. Most of the mail, packages, and e-mails that arrived at their Gates Pass home near Tucson these days were part of Diana’s ongoing business. Years after Brandon’s failed reelection bid for the office of Pima County sheriff, he had adjusted to being retired and mostly out of the loop. Diana Ladd was still working hard; Brandon was hardly working.
His wife came out through the sliding door onto the patio trailed by Damsel, a now three-year-old long-eared mutt Diana had found as a shivering, starving, and abandoned pup outside their front gate on a chilly Thanksgiving morning two and a half years earlier. Brandon and Diana had agreed that, with their daughter Lani off at school, the last thing they needed was a puppy. In the end, however, sentimentality had won out over good sense. Their Damsel in Distress-Damn Dog, as Brandon often called her, since she was usually underfoot-was now a well-loved and decidedly spoiled member of the family.
Walking toward the pool, Diana beckoned her husband to climb out. They had been married for more than twenty-five years, but in his eyes she was still as beautiful as she had been that stormy summer afternoon some thirty years earlier, when he had knocked on the door of her mobile home in a teachers’ living compound near the Papago village of Topawa. He had gone there looking for Diana’s first husband, Garrison, who was a suspect in a homicide that then Pima County homicide detective Brandon Walker was investigating.
By the time Brandon arrived at Diana’s house, Garrison Ladd was already dead of what would be ruled a self- inflicted gunshot wound, but neither Brandon Walker nor Diana Ladd had known that then. The detective had sat across from her in the living room of a threadbare single-wide mobile home, asking tough questions about her husband’s doings and whereabouts. As he did so, Brandon was struck by Diana’s delicate beauty; by the hard-won poise with which she answered his troubling questions; and by her unwavering loyalty to her jerk of a husband, even though by then she must have suspected some of what had gone on behind her back.
That very afternoon, as Diana Ladd struggled to cope with the looming disaster that was about to engulf her life, Brandon Walker had longed to take the distraught woman in his arms and comfort her, but he hadn’t-not then. Married at the time, Brandon had managed to maintain his professional distance then and six months later, as well, when a profoundly pregnant Diana Ladd had worked determinedly to see to it that her dead husband’s accomplice, Andrew Carlisle, was sent to prison. Six years after that, when Carlisle was released from prison and came stalking Diana, Brandon Walker had once again been thrown into Diana’s orbit. During those intervening years, a divorced Brandon Walker had looked at a few other women and even dated one or two, but none of them had measured up.
Brandon remembered how someone somewhere had once asked him if he believed in love at first sight. Naturally he had laughed off the question and brushed it aside as if it were too inane to bother answering, but deep down he knew better. He had fallen in love with Diana Ladd the moment he saw her. And he loved her still.
“What’s up?” he asked as she came toward the pool, holding out a towel.
“You may want to go in the back way to dress,” she said. “Somebody’s here to see you.”
Brandon took the proffered towel and scrambled out of the pool. “Who is it?” he asked.
“An old Indian lady named Emma Orozco,” Diana replied. “She’s using a walker, so I left her in the living room.”
“She’s on a walker and drove here by herself?”
“No. Her son-in-law brought her. He’s waiting out front. I offered to invite him in, but she said no, he’d stay in the car.”
“What does she want?”
Diana shrugged. “Beats me. Something about her daughter.”
Once out of the water, Brandon found the morning air far chillier than expected. He hurried to the sliding door and let himself into the bedroom. After dressing he made his way into the spacious living room, where a wizened Indian woman, her face a road map of wrinkles, sat primly erect on the leather sofa, one gnarled hand resting on the crossbar of her walker.
“Ms. Orozco?” Brandon asked tentatively, taking a seat opposite the old woman. “I’m Brandon Walker.”
She turned to look at him and nodded. “Your baskets are very nice,” she said.
Brandon glanced around the living room. Diana’s collection of Native American baskets, many of them finely crafted museum-quality pieces, were arrayed around the room with wild extravagance. They had been part of the household furnishings for so long that Brandon Walker no longer noticed them.
“Thank you,” he replied. “Some of them were made by Rita Antone, a Tohono O’odham woman who was once my wife’s housekeeper and baby-sitter.”
Emma Orozco nodded again. “I knew Hejel Wi i’thag,” she said. “Her nephew is the one who sent me to talk to you.”
Despite years of living around the Tohono O’odham, the Desert People, Brandon was still struck by the lingering influence of old ways and old things. Rita Antone had been dead for fifteen years, yet on the reservation she was still Hejel Wi i’thag-Left Alone. As a little orphaned girl named Dancing Quail, Rita had been given the name Left Alone in the early part of the twentieth century, long before Emma Orozco had been born. No doubt stories about Hejel Wi i’thag and her odd loyalty to an Anglo woman named Diana Ladd were now an enduring part of reservation lore.
Rita Antone’s nephew, retired Tribal Chairman Gabe Ortiz, and his wife, Wanda, were longtime family friends. In the Walker/Ladd household, Gabe was usually referred to by his familiar name of Fat Crack-Gihg Tahpani. Not wanting to betray what might seem like undue intimacy, Brandon made no reference to that name now.
“How’s Mr. Ortiz doing?” Brandon asked.
“Not so good,” Emma Orozco replied.
This was not news. A few months earlier, Fat Crack had been diagnosed with diabetes. A student of Christian Science, Fat Crack had, in middle age and with some reluctance, answered a summons to become a Tohono O’odham medicine man. Once aware of his diagnosis, Fat Crack had refused to accept the services of the Indian Health Service physicians and “get poked full of holes.” Instead, he was dealing with his ailment-one so prevalent on the reservation that it was known as the Papago Plague-with diet and exercise, along with an unlikely regimen of treatments that was as much Mary Baker Eddy as it was Native American.
“I don’t know why he has to be so damned stubborn,” Brandon’s daughter Lani had railed. Home for Christmas vacation from her pre-med studies in North Dakota, she had heard about the diagnosis while visiting Wanda and Fat Crack in their home at Sells. “He should be under a doctor’s care,” Lani had declared. “But he won’t even consider it.”
Dolores Lanita Walker was a Tohono O’odham child who, as a toddler, had been adopted by Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker. She had been reared by them and, for the first several years, by Rita Antone as well. Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz were Lani’s godparents, and Fat Crack and Lani had always been especially close.
“You can’t take this personally,” Brandon had counseled his daughter. “Fat Crack has to deal with his illness in his own way, not your way.”
“But he’s going to die,” a suddenly tearful Lani had objected. “He’s going to die and leave us, and he doesn’t
