hope waited to see loved ones who had even less.
The guard leading Diana took her directly to the far side of the room, where the wall was made of thick Plexiglas so yellowed and scratched that looking through it seemed more like peering through a veil of smutty L.A. smog than anything else. Directed to a chair, Diana sat and waited.
The last time she had seen Andrew Carlisle had been years earlier at his double murder trial. One of his arms-the one Bone had snapped in two at the wrist-had been encased in a heavy plaster cast, and his face had still been swathed in bandages. The prison warden had told Diana in advance of that first visit that the injured arm had been permanently damaged, leaving him with only limited use of his fingers.
The mangled arm was one thing-more Bone's doing than Diana's. What she dreaded seeing was his unbandaged face, the one into which she had flung a frying pan full of searing-hot bacon grease. That grease had been Diana's last desperate line of defense against Andrew Carlisle's brute force and sharp knife. The grease had worked far better than she could have hoped. He had fallen on the slick floor, clawing at his scorched face and howling in agony.
This day, though, when Carlisle was led into the room, there was no such mummylike mask to lessen the horrible impact of what she had done to him. The guard brought him into the room, seated him on a chair across from Diana, and then placed the intercom receiver, one used to communicate through the Plexiglas barrier, in his good hand. All the while, Diana could only sit and stare. The third-degree burns had molded his once chiseled features into a grotesquely twisted, lumpy grimace. They had also ruined his eyes. Andrew Carlisle was blind.
No amount of anticipation could have prepared Diana for the way he looked. It stunned her to think that she had intentionally inflicted that kind of injury on another human being. Still, faced with the same set of circumstances, she knew she would have made the same decision and fought him again with the same ferocity.
'I'm told I'm quite ugly these days,' Andrew Carlisle said into the intercom mouthpiece as Diana picked up hers to listen. 'They're supposedly doing remarkable things with skin transplants and plastic surgery these days, but not for convicted killers with AIDS. Nobody exactly jumped to the plate and offered to get me the best possible care back then, or now, either, for that matter. Come to think of it, I wonder? Doesn't denying someone proper medical care constitute cruel and unusual punishment? What do you think? Maybe I could take the Pima County Sheriff's Department to court and sue them for damages.'
'I have no idea,' Diana said. 'That's up to you.'
He laughed then. 'You sound quite sure of yourself, Ms. Walker. Have you changed much then since I saw you last?'
'Changed how?'
'Anything,' he replied. 'You haven't turned into one of those born-again Christians, by any chance, have you?'
'No.'
'Good.' He sounded relieved. 'After you agreed to come see me, I started worrying that maybe you had transformed yourself into one of those religious zealots. They are all eager to come pray over me to save my immortal soul. Some of them even want to grant me forgiveness.'
Diana took a deep breath and managed to find her conversational sea legs. 'No,' she said. 'You don't have to worry about that, Mr. Carlisle. I've never forgiven you, and I never will.'
'Good,' Andrew Carlisle replied. 'Very good. I'm delighted to hear it. Now, tell me about the way you look.'
'What about the way I look?'
'Are you very different from the way you were that night we were together? You're the last person I ever saw or ever will see,' he added, as his puckered mouth twisted into an oddly one-sided smile. 'As a consequence, Ms. Walker, I remember everything about that night as vividly as if it had happened yesterday or the day before. I remember every detail about you, and I would suppose that you remember me in much the same way. We were both operating in what the experts call a non-drug-induced altered state of consciousness.'
'My hair is turning gray,' Diana answered, carefully keeping her voice even. 'I'm over fifty. I wear glasses. Two pairs of glasses, actually-one for distance and one for reading.'
'I'm far more interested in your body,' Andrew Carlisle said.
Some blind people seem to gaze off into the far distance when they speak. Andrew Carlisle's opaque, sightless eyes seemed to pry directly into Diana's very being. She could barely breathe. An involuntary shudder ran up and down her spine while a hot flush covered her face. She wanted nothing more than to race to the door. She wanted out. She longed to be away from this monster, to be back outside in the straightforward discomfort of the hot desert air.
This must be what Brandon was trying to warn me about,she thought, fighting back panic.
When Brandon had said she would be putting herself at risk, he must have seen that even though Andrew Carlisle would not be able to harm her physically, he might still be able to invade her mind and infect her soul.
Pulling herself together, Diana sat up straight and squared her shoulders. When she spoke, she willed her voice not to quaver.
'Let's get one thing straight, Mr. Carlisle,' she said. 'I'm the one calling the shots here. If you want to do this project, we're going to do it my way. Basic ground rule number one is that we don't talk about that night. Not now, not ever!'
'But that's pretty much the whole point, isn't it?' Carlisle said, smiling his ruined smile. 'Everything that happened before led up to it, and everything afterward led away from it.'
'That night isn't my point,' Diana returned. 'And I'm the one writing the book. If you don't like it, hire yourself another writer.'
'Hire?' Carlisle croaked. 'What do you mean, hire? I already told you I can't afford to pay you anything.'
'I'm being paid, all right,' Diana answered. 'My agent has pitched the idea to my editor in New York. The book I'm writing will be written, and I will be paid. The only question is whether or not any of your point of view actually appears in print. That depends on how well you behave, on whether or not you agree to do things my way.'
Diana suspected that Andrew Carlisle was a vain man who was prepared to go to any length in order to be immortalized in print. He must have realized that Diana Ladd Walker was his best chance for getting there. In this case, Diana's instincts were good. Her threat of cutting his perspective out of the project immediately delivered the required result.
'All right,' he agreed grudgingly. 'I won't mention it again. So where do we start?'
'From the beginning,' Diana said. 'With your family and your childhood. Where you were born and where you grew up. I'd also like to interview any living relatives.'
'Like my mother, you mean?' he asked.
Diana remembered being told that Andrew Carlisle's mother had been there in the yard at Gates Pass the night of her son's attack. Myrna Louise Spaulding had ridden down to Tucson from her home in Tempe with a homicide detective named G. T. Farrell. At the time Diana had been too preoccupied with everything else to notice. Later on, during the trial, Myrna Louise had been conspicuous in her absence. Diana had mistakenly assumed the woman was dead.
'You mean your mother's still alive?' Diana asked.
'More or less. She lives in one of those marginal retirement homes in Chandler. From the sound of it, I'd say it's a pretty awful place, but I doubt she can afford any better.'
'Does she come here to see you?'
'Not anymore. She used to. The first time I was here. Still, once a year, on my birthday, she sends me a box of chocolates. See's Assorted. I've never bothered to tell her I hate the damn things. She's my mother, after all, so you'd think she'd remember that I never liked chocolate, not even when I was little.'
'If you don't like the chocolates she sends you, what do you do with them, then?' Diana asked. 'Give them away?'
Carlisle grinned. 'Are you kidding? The guy in the cell next to me would kill for one of 'em, so I flush them down the toilet. One at a time. It drives him crazy.'
Another shiver of chills flashed through Diana's body.
'Getting back to establishing ground rules,' Andrew Carlisle continued. 'How do you want to do this? We could probably sit here chatting this way, or else I could let you review some of the material I've already put together.
