“Rita Antone,” he repeated. “An old lady who was hurt in a car wreck yesterday.”
“I don’t know her,” the clerk said.
Davy couldn’t believe his ears. This was the very same clerk who had, only minutes before, given his mother the number to Rita’s room.
“They told me she came here by ambulance. Did she die?”
“I don’t know,” the clerk repeated blankly.
With an impatient sigh, the man gave up, stuffed the notebook back in his pocket, and retreated the way he had come. Almost without realizing what he was doing, Davy followed the man outside and caught up with him as he climbed into his car.
“I know Rita,” Davy said.
Surprised, the man swung around and looked down at him. “You do? Really?”
Davy nodded. “That woman in there told a lie. Rita is too in there. My mom’s with her.”
The hot sun shone on Davy’s stitches, making them itch. Unconsciously, he scratched them.
“Wait a minute,” the man said suspiciously, kneeling and staring at the sutured wound. “Wait just one minute. What happened to your head?”
“I cut it. Yesterday.”
“How?”
“When the truck turned over, I guess.”
“Rita Antone’s truck?” the man asked.
Davy nodded, wondering how the man knew about that.
“So you must be the boy who told my friend about the ambulance on the mountain?”
“You know the man in the red car?” Davy returned.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” the man said with a smile. “You’re actually the person I wanted to see. Let’s go over there in the shade and talk.” They left the man’s car and headed toward a mesquite-shaded concrete bench just outside the hospital door. “What’s your name?”
“Davy.”
“Davy what?”
“Davy Ladd.”
“And where do you live, Davy?”
“In Tucson.”
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“Diana.”
The man had taken the notebook back out of his pocket and was scribbling furiously in it. Now, he paused and frowned, cocking his head to one side. “What’s your daddy’s name?”
“I don’t have a daddy,” Davy told him. “My daddy’s dead.”
“I’ll be damned!” the man exclaimed. “You’re Garrison Ladd’s son, aren’t you!”
Davy could hardly believe his ears. He knew from his grandmother’s Christmas letters that Garrison was his father’s name, but he had never heard it spoken by anyone other than his mother when she was reading those letters aloud. His blue eyes grew large.
“You mean you knew my daddy?”
“I sure did,” the man answered. “We had a class together at the U back when I still thought I was going to be a novelist when I grew up. I guess Gary did, too. We were both wrong.”
“You mean my daddy wanted to write books?”
The man looked startled. “Sure. Didn’t you know that?”
“I don’t know anything about my daddy. He died before I was born.”
For a moment, the man’s eyes grew serious, and then he nodded. “I’ll tell you what, Davy, you tell me what you know about Rita Antone, and I’ll tell you what I know about your father. Deal?”
He held out his hand, and the boy placed his own small one in it. “Deal,” Davy said gravely, and they shook on it.
Louella Walker sat up straight and chatted almost hopefully as they returned from their brief trip to the bank. The lady there had been most helpful.
“The same thing happened to my grandmother,” Anna Bush had said sympathetically, when they explained the situation. She graciously made arrangements to drop service charges on the bounced Steinway check.
“The only sensible thing to do is to start a new account with just your signature and your son’s on it, if that’s all right.”
In the end, that’s what they did.
“She was very nice,” Louella was saying to her son as they drove home, “although I still feel a little underhanded. It’s like I’m robbing your father of his dignity.”
She said that as they turned off Swan onto Fifth and came within sight of their own driveway three blocks away. Brandon saw the problem long before Louella did.
“Oh, my God!” he muttered grimly.
“What’s the matter?”
“My car,” he said. “The department’s car. It’s gone.”
As a homicide detective, he took his county-owned vehicle home in case he was called to a crime scene over the weekend when the department was seriously understaffed. For years, everyone in the family had hung car keys on a kitchen pegboard upon entering the house. Pure reflex, it was a habit no one thought to change in the face of Toby Walker’s failing mental capacity.
“Your car?” Louella asked, puzzled, not yet grasping the seriousness of the situation. “Wherever would it be?”
When Diana came down the hall from Rita’s room, Davy wasn’t waiting in the lobby. She found him outside, drinking a forbidden Coke. He seemed distant, uncommunicative.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Are you worried about Rita?”
“I guess,” he told her.
“Well, don’t be. Dr. Rosemead says she’s going to be fine.”
Diana was tired when she and Davy got back home. She put the boy down for a nap and decided to take one herself. Locking the door to her room, she stripped off her clothes and lay naked under the vent from the cooler, letting the refreshing, slightly PineSol-scented air blow across her body.
She was tired, but she couldn’t sleep. Instead, she lay there and castigated herself for her unreasonable outburst at Brandon Walker. After all, she was the one who had started bawling on his shoulder. What red-blooded American male wouldn’t have got the wrong idea? It was just that she didn’t want this particular male anywhere in her vicinity. His presence brought up too many unpleasant memories, reminded her of a time in her life that she wanted to keep buried far beneath the surface of conscious thought.
So, of all possible people in the world, why had she chosen Brandon Walker’s shoulder to cry on? She realized now that she was lonely for male companionship, but was she so desperate that she would throw herself at the first available man who chanced across her path?
But then, what was so new and different about that? she asked herself grimly. Nothing at all. The loneliness had always been there, for as long as she could remember, and it had always made her do stupid things-Garrison Ladd being a prime case in point.
They’d been inseparable that first weekend, and he had insisted on helping her with her Sunday papers. Then, after the paper route, they’d eaten bacon-and-egg breakfasts at the Holiday Inn before going back to his apartment, where, he told her with a guilty grin, he happened to have a real, full-sized double bed.
“I’ll only be a minute,” he said, leaving her in the doorway of his book-lined living room. “Wait right here.”
She was sure he wanted to straighten the room and make the bed before he invited her into it, which she
