Hour of the Hunter

Damn that woman anyway! He’d teach her to interfere.

A door opened in the yard below. He trained his binoculars on a long-legged Diana Ladd. Tanned and wearing shorts and a tank top, she emerged from the back of the house carrying a tall plastic trash can that she emptied into a rusty burning barrel at the far end of the yard. Then, using a series of matches, she set fire to the contents of the barrel and stood watching them burn.

While she tended the fire, a huge black dog gamboled up to her and dropped a tennis ball at her feet. Obligingly, the woman picked it up and threw it across the yard. The dog raced off at breakneck speed to retrieve it. They played like that for several minutes, When the woman went inside a short time later, so did the dog, still carrying the ball and leaving Andrew Carlisle sitting alone on the mountain, pondering this newest wrinkle in his well-laid plans. That dog would have to go, he thought. He worried about the gun she was wearing. Someone might have warned her. Why else would Diana Ladd be walking around with a leather holster strapped to her hip?

Of the two, the gun and the dog, the dog was really far more serious. Surprise could take away any advantage having a weapon gave her, but the dog could bark and rob him of the initiative. Andrew Carlisle thought about the problem for some time, considering the issue from every angle like a scientist dealing with some small but pesky detail that stands in the way of completing a major project. When the idea finally came to him, he acted on it at once.

Sticking to the thin cover as much as possible, he made his way down the mountainside and back to the Matador, which he had left parked at a shooting-range parking lot half a mile away. Once in the car, he headed for the nearest grocery store. Cheap hamburger was easy to find in any part of town, but liquid slug bait wasn’t. For that, he would have to go a little father afield to a top-notch nursery halfway across Tucson proper.

He hurried through traffic, careful not to speed, not calling any undue attention to the all-too-distinctive red- and-black car. A nice white Ford would have been better, but the Matador’s price was right. Besides, he didn’t expect to keep it for long.

Driving was easier than sitting on the mountain watching the house. It calmed his nerves. The more he thought about it, the more determined he was that he would be careful. Just because he’d been forced to telescope his plans didn’t mean he had to blunder around or make any more costly mistakes. Letting Myrna Louise slip away was bad enough, but if things worked out the way he hoped, he’d soon have her back in hand.

They say it happened long ago that a woman lived near the base of Baboquivari Mountain with her husband and her baby. During the day, the husband would go to work in the fields that were close to the village. After working hard in the fields, he often did not want to make the long trip home, so he would stay in the village and visit with friends. This made the woman sad, but she stayed with her baby and waited for her husband, who did not come home.

One night, when the woman was all alone, she heard Ban, Coyote, call, but this was not the usual call of Coyote, so she went out to look for him. It was very dark. At first she could not see, but finally she saw his eyes, glowing like coals in the firelight. He was a large old Coyote, but even when she came close to him, he did not move. At last she came close enough to see that he was lying beside a pool of water.

“Brother,” she said, for this was when the Tohono O’odham, the Desert People, still knew I’itoi’s language and could speak to the animals. “Large Old Coyote, why did you call to me?”

“I came to this pool to drink the water,” he told her. “This rock shifted and trapped my foot. Will you help me?”

So the woman moved the rock, but by then the Large Old Coyote’s foot was so badly injured that he still could not walk. So the woman fed him and watered him and nursed him back to health. She called him Old Lame Coyote.

In the evening, when the woman’s husband did not come home and she was very lonely, Old Lame Coyote would tell her news of the desert-where to find honey, when the rains would come again, where the best pinon nuts could be found. In this way, the lonely woman and Lame Old Coyote became good friends.

Once she got out of the car, it was all Myrna Louise could do to make it into the house and down the hall to her room. Without taking off her clothing, she fell sideways across the bed. She was no longer angry with Andrew, and she hoped by now that he was over being angry with her. It was too bad that whenever they spent any time together, they always ended up quarreling.

She was awakened by a knock on the door, and there was Lida, from next door, holding the newspaper and two pieces of mail.

“Back so soon?” Lida asked. “From the way Phil talked this morning, I thought you’d be gone for at least a week. I already told the newspaper boy to stop delivery, just like Phil said, but he had to deliver today’s and maybe tomorrow’s. Here’s your mail. I picked that up, too. No sense leaving it for someone to go snooping through.”

Myrna Louise stared blankly. Lida’s words made no sense. She had stopped the paper and was collecting the mail? What was going on? “I’m sorry, Lida,” Myrna Louise said. “I’m not feeling well.”

“No wonder you came back. I was afraid the kind of trip Phil was planning would be too much for you. Driving to the Grand Canyon isn’t my idea of a picnic.”

Grand Canyon? Myrna Louise thought. Who’s going there? It was more than Myrna Louise could stand. “You’ll have to excuse me, Lida, I’ve got to go back and lie down.”

Brandon Walker took off right at five. He drove straight to the house. He parked the Galaxy and pocketed the keys, then he drove his mother’s Olds to the hospital. Louella was sitting in the ICU waiting room. Brandon had planned to stay at the hospital for only a few minutes, but as soon as he saw his mother’s ravaged face, he knew there was trouble.

She ran to him and buried her head against his shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she sobbed. “I’ve done what the first doctor said, I’ve turned off the machine. The nurse told me I could go in now and wait, but I’m afraid to be there alone. Stay with me, Brandon, please. Stay until it’s over.”

What could he do, tell his mother he had a prior commitment? Taking Louella gently by the shoulders, he looked down into her grief-stricken face. “I have to make a phone call,” he said.

“You won’t leave me, will you?”

“No, Mom,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll be right back.”

Chapter 19

Sorting through Iona’s boxes was all the emotional baggage Diana could handle for one day. Gary’s would have to wait. When she finished, she carried the garbage outside, dumped it, and set fire to the trash barrel. As she stood there watching it burn, she felt a peculiar satisfaction, the lifting of a lifetime’s burden.

Diana watched the flames lick through Iona’s ancient oven mitt and understood at last why her mother considered herself “damaged goods,” why she had stayed with Max Cooper no matter what. Iona owed him. He grudgingly lent Iona the use of his name for her baby, for Diana, thus saving Iona’s family and reputation from savaging by Joseph’s sharp-tongued scandalmongers, but Iona paid a heavy price for that dubious privilege, paid with every waking and sleeping moment of her life.

The flames in the burning barrel soared higher, kicking up and over the surrounding metal. In the leaping flames, something else caught fire, something more than just Francine Cooper’s useless castoffs. Max Cooper’s hold on his supposed daughter was being consumed as well. At last Diana grasped why Max had despised her so, why he had hated her and berated her for as long as she could remember. She understood now why he had so resented the rodeo-queen escape hatch that a resourceful Iona, with George Deeson’s timely help, had managed to open for her.

But knowledge brought with it an ineffable sadness. If only she had known the truth earlier, while there was still time to ask her mother about her real father or maybe even ask George Deeson himself. Would he have told