Brandon Walker remembered the whirlwinds.
A fierce wind was kicking up a line of them and propelling them across the desert floor as he drove south toward Topawa for the second time. The first trip had been the day before to notify the victim’s grandmother that Gina Antone was dead. The second time he returned to Topawa, he was looking for Gina’s killer.
Walker was called in on the case as soon as it was determined that the water hole in which the body had been found was in the county rather than on reservation land. A dead Indian wasn’t high on Sheriff DuShane’s list of priorities. As a result, Walker wasn’t assigned in a very timely fashion.
The body was discovered by a pair of city-slicker hunters out shooting coyotes mostly for the hell of it, and only incidentally for the bounty paid for each stinking coyote carcass. The two men found the girl floating facedown in the muddy pond and had called the sheriff’s office to report it only after getting back to town. Walker theorized that some of their hunting may have been on reservation land and they hadn’t wanted to call attention to either the body or themselves until after the dead coyotes were well away from Papago boundaries.
A deputy was dispatched to the scene. Not realizing that the fence with the cattle guard took him onto the reservation and the second took him back off, he left the girl where he found her and reported that it was up to the Papago Tribal Police. Only after all jurisdictional dust settled was Brandon Walker assigned the case. By then, someone had already collected the body. He went to the scene accompanied by a tribal officer named Tony Listo and discovered the crime scene area so picked-over that there was nothing left to find.
Tony pointed Brandon in the direction of the
That hadn’t stopped the great white hunters, Walker thought. “You mean Indians don’t like to come here?”
“Yes,” Listo nodded. “They sure don’t.”
“You’re saying the girl wouldn’t have come here on her own?” Brandon Walker asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Listo replied.
This short exchange happened prior to the autopsy, while speculation was still rife that the young woman was nothing but a drunk who had fallen in the water and drowned. Later, after the autopsy, the rope burns on her neck and wrists among other injuries had more than borne out Listo’s initial theory. Gina Antone hadn’t gone to the water hole because she had wanted to but because she was forced. The other things that happened to her weren’t by choice, either.
Walker left the
He waited by the door. “Are you Rita Antone?” he asked.
She nodded. He held out his card, which she looked at but did not take.
“I’m with the Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “I came to talk to you about your granddaughter.”
“I know,” the old lady said. “My nephew already told me.”
Silent now, Brandon and the boy waited until Diana returned to the living room bearing a tray laden with glasses of iced tea and a plate of freshly made tuna sandwiches.
“We have to eat to keep up our strength,” she said.
The air of false gaiety in her tone grated on Brandon’s nerves. She still wore the gun. Who the hell was she trying to kid, Brandon wondered-him, her child, or, more likely, herself?
“I heard you two talking,” she said, placing the tray on the table in front of the couch. “What about?”
Davy shot the detective a quick, meaningful look. “I asked him if my hair would grow back,” Davy replied. “You know, the part they shaved off. He said yes.”
Brandon Walker was impressed. The kid was a talented liar. They had indeed talked about Davy’s hair growing back, but they had talked about a lot of other things besides. Walker was surprised that Davy didn’t mention any of them. Something was going on between the boy and his mother, an undercurrent, a tension that had been missing when he had seen them on Friday and Saturday.
“How long will it take?” Diana asked, chewing a bite of sandwich and falling completely for Davy’s lie of omission.
It took a moment for Brandon to reorient himself to the conversation. “To grow out his hair? A few weeks,” he said. “Not much longer than that. A crew cut would help.”
“I don’t do crew cuts,” Diana said. “I don’t have clippers.”
And that was the end of that. Davy took his sandwich, tea, and dog, and melted ghostlike into another room, leaving the two grown-ups in another moment of awkward silence.
“I can’t get over how you’ve changed,” Brandon said, still thinking about the gun. “Since that first time I met you, I mean.”
“Murder and suicide do that to you,” she responded. “They make you grow up quick. You’re never the same afterward. No matter how hard you try, you can never be the same.”
After watching Gary drive off and hanging up the phone, Diana stumbled blindly back to the couch and sat there for what seemed like hours, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Briefly, she thought about jumping in the car, driving into town, and looking for him, but where would she go?
Gary had mentioned lots of places where he and Andrew Carlisle hung out together, lowbrow places where Andrew said you could see slices of real life-the Tally Ho, the Green Dolphin, the Golden Nugget, the Grant Road Tavern, the Shanty. She knew the names of the bars, the joints, but she hadn’t been to any of them personally and couldn’t bear the humiliation of going now, of trailing after him, of being just another foolish, hapless wife asking jaded, snickering bartenders if they had seen her drunk of a husband.
Because Gary was drinking more now, she finally admitted to herself, just like her father, and she she, just like Iona, continued to stand by him for no apparent reason. She could see now that she should have stayed in Eugene, should never have agreed to come to this terrible place where she would be without resources and where he would fall under the spell of that man.
That man-Andrew Carlisle. It was easy to blame all of Gary’s shortcomings on Andrew Carlisle. Diana saw the professor as a sort of evil Pied Piper, as someone who had cast a terrible spell over her husband’s psyche and bent it to his own purposes.
Some of Carlisle’s catchphrases whirled back through her memory just as Gary Ladd had reported them to her. “Write what you know.” “Experience is the greatest teacher.” “If you want to write about it, do it.”
Do it? Do what? For the first time, she allowed herself to frame the question: What was Gary writing? She had never asked to look at his manuscript, had never interfered with his work. That was an act of faith on her part, a self-imposed test of her loyalty. Of course, she had passed the exam with flying colors. She was, after all, Iona Dade Cooper’s daughter. How could she do anything else? She had buried her head in the sand and refused to see anything beyond the fact that the stack of manuscript pages on his desk in the spare bedroom had grown gradually taller. That had been the only proof she’d ever required to convince herself that Gary was working, that he was doing what he was supposed to and living up to his part of the bargain.
But now, trembling with fear, Diana sprang from the couch and went looking for the manuscript. Naturally, it wasn’t there. The Smith-Corona still sat on the desk in the spare bedroom, and the blank paper was there where it should have been, but the manuscript itself was gone. She had seen it earlier in the day, when she’d been straightening up the house. That could mean only one thing. Gary had taken it with him when he left.
Why? she wondered. Why would he?
Diana looked at Brandon Walker across the top of her iced tea glass. She seemed much more composed now, as though she had made up her mind about something while she was making the sandwiches.
“So why are you here?” she asked. “Why did you come all the way out here? Are you worried about
