Diana nodded. There didn't seem to be anything to add.
'Did you and he ever talk about that?' Monty asked.
'About what?'
'About the fact that he had admitted the wrong student, that he had given your place to someone who turned out to have far less talent.'
'We never discussed it,' Diana said. 'There wasn't any need. After all, I won, didn't I?'
'What do you mean by that?'
'Professor Carlisle didn't let me into his class, but I got to be a writer anyway.'
'Where did you go to school?'
'The University of Oregon,' she answered. 'I got my M.Ed. from the University of Arizona.'
Monty Lazarus continued to ask questions that reeked of numbing familiarity. Diana had answered the same questions dozens of times before, including two weeks earlier on The Today Show.
'How did you sell your first book?'
'I submitted it to an agent I met at a writer's conference up in Phoenix.'
'And how long have you been writing full-time?'
'Until I married my husband Brandon, my second husband, I had a full-time teaching job out on the reservation and only wrote during the summers. That's Tohono O'othham — spelled t-o-h-o-n-o new word o'-o-t-h- h-a-m, by the way. The school where I taught is in Topawa, south of Sells, about seventy or so miles from here. After Brandon and I married, I cut back to substitute teaching. I did that for about three years, and I've been writing full-time ever since.'
As Diana went through the motions of answering the questions, it occurred to her that if Monty Lazarus had actually read her book, he would have known the answers to some of those questions without having to ask. She remembered dealing with many of them as part of the 'back' story in Shadow of Death.
She bit back the temptation of mentioning to her interviewer that it might have been a good idea for him to do his homework. It wasn't at all smart to tell an interviewer how to do his job, not unless she wanted a hatchet job to appear in the periodical in question. Instead, Diana Ladd Walker answered the questions with as much poise and humor as she could muster.
Having filled several pages with cryptic notes, Monty Lazarus finally put down his pen. 'Okay,' he said. 'Enough of that. Now, let's turn to the more personal stuff.
'Where do you live?'
'Gates Pass, west of Tucson.'
'For how long?'
'Since 1969. I moved there right after my first husband died. Brandon Walker came to live there after we got married in 1976.'
'Where were you from originally?'
'Joseph, Oregon,' she said. 'My father ran the town garbage dump. We lived in the caretaker's house the whole time I was growing up.'
'So yours is pretty much one of those Horatio Alger stories,' Monty Lazarus offered.
Diana smiled. 'You could say so.'
'And do you have children?'
'Yes.'
For the first time in the whole interview, she felt suddenly wary and uneasy. That was stupid, because she had answered all these same questions time and again. She took a deep breath.
'In 1975 I was a widow raising an only son, a six-year-old child. In 1976, Brandon and I married. He had two children, two sons. In 1980 we adopted a fourth child, our daughter, Lani.'
'Four,' Monty Lazarus repeated. 'And where are they all now?'
Maybe knowing that question would automatically follow the first one was the source of some of her anxiety. She opted for putting all the cards on the table at once.
'The two older boys were Brandon's. My one stepson disappeared years ago while he was still in high school.'
'He ran away from home?'
'Yes. At this point, he's missing and presumed dead. His older brother got himself in trouble and ended up in prison in Florence. I believe he's out now, but I have no idea where he's living. We don't exactly stay in touch. The two younger ones, my son David, and our daughter, Lani, are fine. David just graduated from law school in Chicago, and Lani is a junior at University High School right here in Tucson.'
Monty shook his head sympathetically. 'It's tough,' he said. 'Raising kids is always a crapshoot. So it sounds as though you're running about fifty-fifty in the motherhood department.'
'I guess so,' Diana agreed. Fifty-fifty wasn't a score she was proud of. She would have liked to do better.
Monty Lazarus glanced down at his watch. 'Yikes,' he exclaimed. 'We've been at this for over an hour. I'll go flag down a waitress. Can I get you anything? Another glass of wine, maybe?'
Diana shook her head. 'I'd better switch to iced tea,' she said. 'No sugar, but extra lemon.'
As Monty Lazarus sauntered away, Diana was left mulling his sardonic words about raising kids. Crapshoot. That just about covered it.
Tommy, Brandon's younger son, had walked out of their lives one summer afternoon between his freshman and sophomore years in high school. Over the years they had gradually come to terms with the idea that Tommy was probably dead-he had to be. The situation with Quentin wasn't nearly as clear-cut. Diana sometimes thought they would have been better off if Quentin had died as well.
The moment she met Quentin Walker, Diana recognized he was both smart and mean. Even as a ten-year- old, his conversation had shown intermittent flashes of intellectual brilliance. No, lack of brainpower had never been one of Quentin's problems. Curbing his tongue was, his tongue and his temper. He was manipulative and arrogant, angry and unforgiving. Not only that, by the time he was in high school, he had already developed a severe drinking problem.
Five years earlier, he had been driving drunk. He had crashed his four-wheel-drive pickup into a compact car, a Chevette, killing the woman driver and her two-year-old child. As if that weren't bad enough, the woman was six months pregnant. The baby was taken alive from his dead mother's womb, but he, too, had died three days later.
Brandon was still sheriff at the time of the trial, and the whole ordeal had been a nightmare for him. Not that he was responsible. Quentin was an adult and had to deal with his own difficulties. Brandon Walker's whole life had been committed to law and order, yet here was his son, a repeat drunk-driving offender, who had blithely killed three people. And when the judge had shipped Brandon Walker's son off to Florence for five years on two counts of vehicular homicide (the dead unborn fetus didn't count), it had almost broken Brandon's heart. It had seemed at the time that things couldn't get any worse. And then they did.
Three years and a half years after he was locked up, shortly after Diana had started work on Shadow of Death, Brandon had come home from work and told her the latest bad news in the Quentin Walker department.
The moment Diana caught a glimpse of his face as Brandon stumbled into the house, she knew something was terribly wrong. His face was so gray she initially thought he might be having a heart attack.
'What's happened?' she had asked, hurrying to his side. 'What's going on?'
Shaking his head, he walked past her proffered embrace, opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a pair of beers-one for each of them. He sank down beside the kitchen table and buried his face in his hands. Concerned, Diana sat down beside him.
'Brandon, tell me. What is it?'
'Quentin,' he groaned. 'Quentin again.'
'What's he done now?'
'He's hooked up with a gang of extortionists up in Florence,' Brandon answered. 'They've been operating out of the prison, supposedly accepting bribes on my behalf. It's a protection racket. They've been telling people that if they don't pay up, something bad is going to happen to their building or business, without any cops being there to
