three-word, equivocal statement transformed itself into full-fledged denial. “I don’t remember,” became “I didn’t do it,” guilt became innocence, and fiction became truth.
With all this boiling in her head, Diana peeked out between threadbare panels of drapes and looked across the muddy quagmire that separated the Topawa Teachers’ Compound from the village proper. The church parking lot was filling rapidly with cars and pickups as Indians gathered to pay their final respects. It was time for Diana to make a decision, and she did.
Dressing quickly, she put on the same blue double-knit suit she had worn to Gary’s memorial service, the same suit he had picked out as her going-away dress for their honeymoon. She pulled her hair back in a bun and fastened it up with hairpins the same way Iona used to wear hers. Wearing it that way made Diana look older, much older. It made her look like her mother.
Dressed in the suit, but with sandals on her feet because of the mud, Diana Ladd started across the hundred yards or so of no-man’s-land, the vast gulf between the Anglo Teachers’ Compound and the Indian village, between her home and Gina Antone’s funeral, between Diana’s past and what would become her future. Once she set foot on that path, there was no turning back.
The mission church was filled to capacity, but people in the back row shifted aside just enough to let her in. She wanted to be small, invisible, but her arrival was greeted by an inevitable and whispered notice. Everyone knew she was there. She felt or maybe only imagined the stiffening backs of people around her. She flushed, sensing that they disapproved of her presence although no one had the bad manners to say so outright.
Topawa mission itself was small and plain and reminded Diana of the church back home in Joseph, Oregon. There was no side room where Gina’s mourning relatives could have grieved in private. They sat stolidly, shoulder to shoulder, in the front row next to Rita. In addition to the grandmother, there were two couples, an older one and a younger. Were two of them Gina’s parents? Did they know she was here in church with them? Diana wondered. What would they do when they found out? Spit at her? Throw her out?
The service started. Gradually, Diana allowed herself to be caught up in the familiar strains of the mass, the sounds and smells of which came back from the dim reaches of her childhood.
Iona Anne Dade Cooper’s daughter, Diana Lee Bernadette, had been a devout child growing up in Joseph, but she had left the church without a backward glance in early adulthood, not only over the issue of birth control, but also over her marriage to a non-Catholic. Garrison Walther Ladd, III, the only son of staunch Lutherans, never would have consented to his child being brought up in the Catholic Church.
Somehow, in a way Gary’s memorial service hadn’t, Gina’s funeral became a requiem for everything Diana had lost-her childhood as well as her marriage, her husband, and her mother. When the mass was over, instead of bolting out first as she had intended, she was too overcome to leave until after Rita and the others had already trudged down the aisle and were waiting at the door to greet the attendees.
There was no escape. As soon as she stood up, the people parted around her as though she were a carrier of some contagious, dread disease. And that was how she arrived in front of Rita Antone, isolated and alone, in the midst of the crowd.
The old Indian woman held out a leathery hand and grasped Diana’s smooth one. The younger woman looked up and met Rita’s fearsome bloodshot gaze. “I’m so sorry,” Diana whispered.
Rita nodded, pressing her hand. “Are you coming to the feast?” the old woman asked.
“The feast?” Diana stammered uncomprehendingly.
“At the feast house after the cemetery. You must come. We will sit together,” Rita said kindly. “You see, we are both
“Pardon me?”
“We are both left alone. You must come sit with me.”
Behind them, people in line shifted impatiently. Stunned by such kindness and generosity, Diana could not turn it down. “I’ll come,” she murmured. “Thank you.”
Detective G. T. Farrell arrived in Florence in the late evening and set about putting the Arizona State Penitentiary on notice. Farrell was a man unaccustomed to taking no for an answer. When one person turned him down, he automatically moved up to the next rung on the ladder of command and turned up the volume. By two o’clock in the morning, he had done the unthinkable-Warden Adam Dixon himself was out of bed and working on the problem. When the warden discovered that Ron Mallory’s home phone was either conveniently out of order or off the hook, he sent a car to fetch him.
Ron Mallory made his way into the warden’s well-lit office feeling distinctly queasy. Obviously, he should have paid more attention to the guy on the phone, the one who had been looking for Andrew Carlisle earlier, because whoever was looking for him now had a whole lot more horses behind him.
“What seems to be the problem?” Mallory asked, putting on as good a front as possible.
“Carlisle’s the problem,” Warden Dixon growled. “Where the hell is he?”
“Tucson, as far as I know, sir,” Mallory answered quickly. “We put him on the bus to Tucson.”
“Where in Tucson?”
“He had rented an apartment, down off Twenty-second Street somewhere, but that fell through the day of his release. The landlord called me while I was waiting for a guard to bring in the prisoner. The guy told me Carlisle couldn’t have the apartment he wanted after all. Since he was already half signed out, there wasn’t much I could do but let him go. He said he’d check in as soon as he found some other place to stay.”
“Has he?”
“Not so far as I know, sir. I glanced at my messages on the way in. I didn’t see anything from him, although I’ll be glad to go back and check.”
“You do that,” Warden Dixon said. “You go check, and if you don’t find it, you might consider cleaning out your desk. Come tomorrow morning, you’re going to find yourself back on the line, mister. I kid you not.”
In the cell-blocks? Mallory’s jaw dropped. “I don’t understand. What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on. This detective here thinks Carlisle went on a rampage within minutes of checking out of this facility. Do you hear me? Within minutes! We’ve got one woman dead so far, a dame over by a Picacho Peak with her tit bitten in two. Does that ring any bells with you, Mr. Mallory? Because if it doesn’t, it by God should?”
Mallory took a backward step, edging toward the door.
“Furthermore,” Dixon added ominously, “you shake up whatever clerks there are on duty around here and you start them looking through every goddamned record we have for any name or address that might give this detective a lead. You’re in charge, Mallory. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir. Perfectly.”
“Get moving then.”
Mallory bolted from the room. As he panted toward his soon-to-be-former office, he swore under his breath. If he ever got his hands around Andrew Carlisle’s neck, Assistant Superintendent Ron Mallory would kill the bastard himself. Personally.
Diana fell asleep at last and dreamed about Gina’s funeral, except it wasn’t Gina’s at all, it was her mother’s. The two were all mixed up somehow. Instead of being in the mean funeral home in La Grande where Max had held the funeral in real life, with half the mourners having to stand outside the doors because there was no more room, it was in the mission church at Topawa. Even the graveside part was in Topawa.
And that, too, was like Gina’s. Instead of a mortuary’s canopy, four men from Joseph had stood as corner- posts holding up a sheet to provide shade while someone else, she couldn’t tell who, intoned a prayer. Although he hadn’t attended Iona’s real funeral, one of the four sheet-holders was George Deeson, her rodeo-queen mentor, another was Ed Gentry from the First National Bank. There was Tad Morrison from Pay-and-Tote grocery, and George Howell from Tru-Value Hardware.
At Gina’s graveside, an old blind man in Levi’s and cowboy boots had offered a long series of interminable Papago prayers that, out of deference to Diana, the only Anglo in attendance, were translated into English by someone else. This was true in her dream as well, except instead of a blind man in cowboy boots, the main speaker was a priest praying in what seemed to be Latin. After that, they moved on to the feast.
Like the rest, this, too, was a strangely muddled mixture of Topawa and Joseph, of near past and far past, of Anglo and Indian. Instead of traditional Indian fare, the food was like the food at the Chief Joseph Days barbecue,
