Queen of the Night

I did that, Diana thought, gasping involuntarily at the sight of those horrifying scars. I’m responsible for doing that to a living, breathing human being, back when he was alive.

Which Andrew Carlisle was not. The man sitting across the table from Diana was most definitely not alive. She knew that for certain. He had been alive when he had come to her house years earlier, intent on rape and murder. Before it was over, he had left Diana with his own special trademark—a fierce bite mark that even now still scarred her breast. But Carlisle had underestimated her back then. He hadn’t expected Diana to fight back or to leave him permanently disfigured in the process. All of that had happened long ago—before he had gone to prison for the second time and before he died there. Back in those days there had been no swimming pool or fountain or gazebo in Diana’s walled backyard, and she most certainly hadn’t been working on a laptop.

“We are not having this conversation,” she said to him now.

“Come on, Diana,” he urged. “For old times’ sake. Let bygones be bygones. Tell me, how’s the writing going? What are you working on now?”

She was dealing with some backed-up business correspondence, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

“What I’m working on is none of your business,” she responded.

“Of course it’s my business,” Carlisle insisted. “I’m always interested when one of my students goes on to achieve remarkable success in the publishing world.”

“I was not your student,” Diana told him flatly. “My first husband was your student, remember? I never was. Go away and leave me alone.”

“Give me a break, Diana. I’m still annoyed that Shadow of Death won a Pulitzer. You never would have won that award without me. I was the guy who came up with the idea, and the whole book was all about me. You should have given me more credit.”

“You didn’t deserve more credit,” she said. “You didn’t write it. I did.”

“Oh, well. No matter,” he said with a sigh. “After all, fame is fleeting. I thought you’d be glad to see me. Mitch may drop by a little later, too. And Gary. You’d like to see him again, too, wouldn’t you? Although, come to think of it, maybe not. That self-inflicted bullet left a hell of a hole in his head. Not so much in the front as in the back. Exit-wound damage and all that. I’m sure you know how those work.”

Living or dead, Diana had no desire to see her dead first husband, Garrison Walther Ladd III, nor did she want to see Mitch Johnson, the surrogate killer Carlisle had sent to attack her family in his stead when Carlisle himself could no longer pose a direct threat.

“Shut up,” she said.

Tires crunched on the gravel driveway. Damsel, Diana’s aging nine-year-old mutt, pricked her ears and raised her head at the sound. She had come to Diana and Brandon as a rollicking pound puppy some eight years earlier when her antics had earned her the title of Damn Dog. Now she was a well-behaved grizzled old dog with a nearly white muzzle and a game hip. She stood up and steadied herself for a moment. Then, with an arthritic limp, she hurried over to the side gate, barking in welcome.

“My daughter’s coming,” Diana said. “Go away.”

“Lani is coming here?” Carlisle sounded delighted. “The lovely Lani? Do tell. Wonderful. Maybe she’ll show me her scar.”

“What scar?”

“Oh, I forgot. You don’t know about that.”

“What scar?” Diana insisted.

“Ask her about it if you don’t believe me. I understand Mitch left her a little something to remember him by. Let’s just say it’s a token of my esteem.”

Lani had been sixteen when Mitch Johnson, Andrew Carlisle’s minion, had kidnapped Diana’s daughter.

“What?” Diana asked. “What did he do to her?”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Determinedly, Diana turned her attention back to her laptop. She thought Carlisle would disappear when she did that, but he didn’t. He stayed right there with his face turned in her direction. Since he was blind now, he could no longer stare at her, but the same expression was on his face—the same disparaging smirk he had aimed at her once before, long ago in a courthouse hallway.

“You’re not welcome here,” she told him. “Go away.”

Highway 86, West of Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 12:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

Eight-year-old Gabriel Ortiz sat up straight in Dr. Lani Walker’s car and seemed to be studying the scenery as it whizzed by outside the windows of the speeding Passat. This was the first time Lani could remember his being tall enough to ride in the front seat. He evidently liked it.

“Where are we going again, Lani Dahd?” he asked.

Dahd was Tohono O’odham for godmother, and that was Lani Walker’s role in Gabe’s young life. She had been there to deliver him in the back of her adoptive mother’s prized Invicta convertible eight years earlier, and she had been there for him ever since, spending as much time with him as possible whenever she was home on breaks—first from medical school and later from her hospital residency in Denver.

She was doing her best to be Gabe’s mentor and to give him the benefit of everything she had learned from the mentors in her life, her own godparents, namely Gabe’s great-aunt, Rita Antone, and his grandfather, Fat Crack Ortiz. Of course, those people in turn had learned what they knew from the old people in their own lives, from a blind medicine man called Looks at Nothing, and from Rita’s grand-mother, Oks Amachuda, Understanding Woman.

“We’re going to stop by the house to pick up my mother,” Lani answered. “Then we’re going to a place called Tohono Chul.”

Gabe frowned. “Desert corner?” he asked.

Lani smiled at his correct translation. She was glad he was learning some of his native language, and not just from her, either.

“Not a corner, really,” she corrected. “It’s a botanical garden, devoted to preserving the desert’s native plants.”

“You mean like a zoo but for plants?” Gabe asked.

Lani nodded. “Exactly. There’s a party there tonight. My mother and I are invited, and I thought you should go, too. After all, you’re eight—that’s old enough.”

“What kind of party?” Gabriel asked. “You mean like a birthday party with candles?”

“More like a feast than a birthday party, but with no dancing,” Lani explained.

Gabe shook his head. A feast with no dancing clearly made no sense to him.

“There may be candles,” Lani added, “but they won’t be on a cake. People will be carrying candles around with them so they’ll be able to see in the dark.”

“Why not use flashlights?” he asked.

Lani smiled to herself. Gabe was nothing if not practical. From his perspective, flashlights made more sense than candles. Gabe wanted light, not atmosphere.

“Candles make for a better mood,” she said. Lani waited while Gabe internalized her response. After eight years, Lani was accustomed to answering the boy’s questions, and she did so patiently enough. That was a godmother’s job. As for Gabe’s parents? His father, Leo, was too busy running the family auto repair business, and his mother, Delia Cachora Ortiz, was too busy being the tribal chairman to take time out to provide thoughtful answers to Gabe’s perpetually complicated questions.

Besides, truth be known, Gabe’s city-raised mother probably didn’t know most of those answers herself anyway, at least not the traditional ones—the old ones— Gabe was searching for, the ones he wanted to understand. Delia could probably do a credible job of reciting the meteorological reasons for hot summer days like today when the horizon was dotted with fast-moving whirlwinds, but she didn’t know the vivid stories of Wind-man and Cloud-man, who were the mysterious Tohono O’odham movers and shakers, the entities who stood behind those dancing whirlwinds. Little Gabe Ortiz was always searching for the wisdom and the teachings of the old ways, and those were the ones Lani Walker provided.

“Will there be other Indians there?” Gabe asked now.

“Probably not.”

“Only Anglos and us?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

That was by far Gabe’s favorite question—the one for all seasons and all reasons. “But why does the ocotillo turn green when it rains? But why do rattlesnakes shed their skin? But why does I’itoi live on Ioligam? But why does it thunder when it rains? But why did my grandfather have to die before I was born? But why? But why? But why?”

Although Gabe’s parents were often too preoccupied to answer the curious little boy’s constant questions, Lani never was. He reminded her of Elephant’s Child in that old Rudyard Kipling story, where the baby elephant was forever asking questions of everyone within hearing distance. Gabe, too, was full of “satiable curiosity,” just as Lani had been when she was a child. She, far more than either of Gabe’s parents, understood how and why those questions needed to be answered, just as Nana Dahd and Fat Crack Ortiz had patiently answered those same questions for her.

“Because Tohono Chul is in Tucson,” Lani said firmly. “Not that many Indians live in Tucson these days.”

“Rita used to live in Tucson,” Gabe responded wistfully. “Now she lives with us. Not with us really. She lives next door.”

For a moment Lani thought he was referring to that other Rita, to Lani’s Rita, to Rita Antone, Nana Dahd, the wrinkled old Indian woman who had been godmother to Lani in the same way Lani was godmother to Gabe. Eventually she realized Gabe was referring to his thirteen-year-old cousin Rita Gomez. That Rita, sometimes called Baby Rita, had been named after her great-aunt, Rita Antone, who was Gabe’s great-aunt as well.

There was silence in the car for the next several minutes as Lani considered how the threads of the Ortiz family had frayed, drawn apart, and then seamlessly repaired themselves.

Charlotte Ortiz Gomez, Gabe’s auntie and Baby Rita’s mother, had been estranged from Gabe’s grandparents, Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz, for a number of years. During that time Charlotte had lived in Tucson with her jerk of a husband and her daughter. When Fat Crack died, Charlotte had adamantly refused to come to the reservation, not even for her own father’s funeral.

A year or so later, however, when Charlotte’s marriage had ended in divorce, she had come crawling back to the reservation, begging forgiveness. She and Baby Rita had moved into her widowed mother’s mobile home in the Ortiz family compound behind the gas station, where Charlotte had looked after her mother until Wanda’s death two years ago.

“Well?” Gabe prompted. “If there won’t be any Indians there, why do we have to go?”

“Because the Milgahn who are coming tonight want to hear the legend of Old White-Haired Woman,” Lani answered. “Tonight is the one night a year when the night-blooming cereus blossom all over the desert. They have a lot of those plants at Tohono Chul and a lot of people will come to see them. I promised the lady who organizes the party that I would come there to tell the story of Old White-Haired Woman.”

Gabe’s jaw dropped. “But you can’t,” he objected.

It was Lani’s turn to ask. “Can’t what?”

“You can’t tell that story,” Gabe replied. “It’s an I’itoi story,” he added earnestly, “a winter-telling tale. The snakes and lizards are already out. If you tell that story now and one of them hears you, they could hurt you.”

Lani had once asked Gabe’s grandfather, Fat Crack Ortiz, about that very same thing. The old medicine man had been invited to come to a party just like this one for the same reason—to deliver the story at Tohono Chul in honor of that year’s blooms.

“When they asked me to come, I wondered about that,” he said. “So I took the invitation they sent me, I rolled some sacred tobacco, some wiw, and I performed a wustana. By blowing the sacred smoke over the invitation, I knew what I should do.”

“And what was that?” Lani had asked.

“Some of the people have forgotten all about Old White-Haired Woman,” Fat Crack had told her. “Yes, the I’itoi stories are supposed to be winter-telling tales, but on this one night, I’itoi himself doesn’t object to having that story told.”

“The snakes and lizards won’t hurt me,” Lani told Gabe now. “I’itoi doesn’t mind if the story is told on the night the flowers bloom. It’s a good story. People need to remember.”

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

“Your hair looks great,” Nicole said, looking up at Abigail Tennant over the bubbling pedicure bath. “Is this a special occasion?”

Abby nodded. “Our anniversary,” she said. “Jack and I met five years ago today. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Where’s he taking you?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s a surprise.”

“Someplace good, I hope?” Nicole asked.

“It better be,” Abby answered with a smile. “This will be the first night-blooming cereus party I’ve missed in fifteen years.”

When the manicure/pedicure appointment ended, Abby took her time leaving Hush. Not wanting to chip her polish, she waited an extra twenty minutes before making her way out to the parking lot. When she arrived two hours earlier, she had lucked out and found a bit of shade under a mesquite tree. She unlocked the old Mark VIII with its push-button door code and found the temperature inside was hot, but not nearly as hot as it would have been without the shade augmented by the fold-up reflecting sunscreen she had placed on the inside of the windshield.

The car had been beautiful and sporty when she bought it new fifteen years earlier and days before she set off for her new life in Arizona. She had lived through a brutal divorce in Ohio. After thirty years of marriage, Hank Southard had seen fit to trade Abby in on a much younger model, a woman named DeeAnn who was barely half his age and extremely pregnant by the time Hank and Abby’s divorce was finalized. Two days later Hank had trotted off to Nevada where he had made an honest woman of his mistress by way of a quickie Las Vegas wedding.

Abby had never been able to understand how her son, Jonathan, could have come to the completely illogical conclusion that the divorce was all Abby’s fault; that she had, through some action of her own, been the cause of Hank’s betrayal. Because Jonathan was an adult by then, it hadn’t been a question of custody but a question of loyalty, and Jonathan had stuck with his philandering father.

“Sounds like he was just following the money” was the uncompromising way Jack had explained it to Abby some time later. “Kids are like that. They know which side their bread is buttered on. Hank’s pockets probably looked a lot deeper to Jonathan than yours did. Maybe he’ll wise up someday.”

So far that hadn’t happened, but that ego-damaging time was far enough in the past that it no longer hurt Abby quite so much. When she thought about it now, it seemed like someone else’s ancient history.

For one thing, Abby was an entirely different person than she had been then. After being a stay-at-home mom and a dutiful corporate wife for all those years, she had been devastated by the divorce. It had been that much worse when her former husband, his new wife, and their new baby had settled down in a Columbus neighborhood not far from where she and Hank had lived for much of their married lives. In fact their love nest was close enough to Abby’s home that they had occasionally run into people who had been friends of Hank’s and Abby’s back before the divorce. Those supposedly good friends had never failed to mention to Abby that they had run into Hank and DeeAnn buying groceries at Kroger’s or flats of annuals at Lowe’s.

It wasn’t long before Abby found herself stressing that every time she left the house for any reason, she might come around a corner in the grocery store and stumble into them.

She finally decided she had two choices. She could become a recluse and never leave the house again or she could make a change—a drastic change. It took a while, but eventually that’s what Abby did—she bailed. She had heard about Tucson, had read about Tucson. She had come here on a wing and a prayer with few friends and fewer preconceived notions, determined to start over. And she had.

Jack’s comment about following the money notwithstanding, Abby was fairly well fixed. Thanks to the efforts of an amazingly tough and capable divorce attorney, she’d come away from the marriage in reasonably good financial shape. Abby had invested years of her life supporting Hank’s career, and she deserved every penny of whatever settlement came her way. When it was time for Abby to leave town, the divorce settlement had made it possible for her to put Hank and DeeAnn and her previous life in her rearview mirror. Taking a page from Hank’s playbook, Abby decided it would be a brand-new rearview mirror.

Without consulting anyone, she had driven her stodgy old silver Town Car over to the nearest Lincoln dealer, where she had traded it in on the metallic-green Lincoln Mark VIII. She hadn’t agonized over the deal. She hadn’t spent hours in painful negotiations with first the salesman and later the sales manager the way Hank always used to do, making a war out of trying to work the dealership down to the very lowest price. Abby had spotted the make, model, and color she wanted parked on the showroom floor. She had asked the salesman to bring it out so she could test-drive it, and she had driven away with it signed, sealed, and delivered less than two hours later.

Fifteen years after that purchase, the Mark VIII’s metallic-green paint was starting to deteriorate in Tucson’s unrelenting sun—even though the vehicle spent most days and nights safely stowed in a garage and out of direct sunlight. Much to her satisfaction, however, the vehicle still ran perfectly . . . well, almost perfectly. It had less than 25,000 miles on the odometer. It was one of those cars about which one could truly say, “one-owner vehicle—driven to church and museums.” Because that’s mostly where she drove it—to church, to the grocery stores, and to Tohono Chul, a Tucson botanical garden where Abby was a faithful volunteer.

As for Hank? Unfortunately for him, Danielle, the headstrong daughter he had fathered with his new wife, apparently took after her mother, and not necessarily in a good way. She was gorgeous but dumb as a stump. Halfway through high school, her GPA was so low that acceptance at even a third-rate college was questionable. Hank had always been brainy. So had his only son, Jonathan. Hank had zero patience with people who weren’t as smart as he was. Abby understood better than anyone that having to deal with an intellectually deficient off-spring would be driving the man nuts.

Abby still had friends in Columbus, the same ones who, in the old days, had been only too happy to carry tales to her about what Hank and DeeAnn were up to. Now the tables were turned, and those same friends were still happy to carry tales.

It was through them that Abby had heard that her son, Jonathan, Esther (the wife Abby had never met), and the two grandkids she had never seen were living somewhere in the L.A. area, where he worked for a bank. It was also through those same friends that Abby had learned about Danielle Southard’s dismal academic record, which had resulted in her being dropped from the varsity cheerleading squad. There had also been a huge brouhaha when Danielle and several other girls were picked up for shoplifting during what was supposedly a chaperoned sleepover.

Abby had eagerly gobbled up the morsels of news about JonJon, as she still thought of her son. As for Danielle’s unfortunate missteps? Abby tended to gloat a bit about those. She couldn’t help it.

Hank’s getting his just deserts, Abby thought. He’s stuck dealing with a dim-bulb angst-driven teenager with issues. All I have to worry about is having my Mark VIII repainted. Such a deal. Seems fair to me.

Chapter 2

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 A.M.

69º Fahrenheit

AS JONATHAN SOUTHARD sat in the car, watching and waiting, he was amazed at how cold it had been overnight out here in what was supposed to be the desert, and also at how much his arm hurt. It was feverish and throbbing. That was worrisome.

At the time, it hadn’t seemed like that big a deal. Only a little bite, not a big one. That worthless damn dog had never liked him. As far as he was concerned, the feeling was mutual. Major was Esther’s dog—the kids’ dog. It seemed to him that the beagle was beyond dim, but as stupid as the dog had always seemed, that night Major had somehow read his mind and known what was going to happen. How could that be? It seemed weird.

Esther wouldn’t have had a clue that he had come into the room behind her if the dog hadn’t warned her, springing at him from the back of the couch, growling and with his teeth bared. The ferocity of the unexpected attack had forced Jonathan to dodge away and take a step backward. Major had nailed his wrist before he got quite out of reach, drawing blood and knocking the gun from his hand.

When Esther turned around, she didn’t see the weapon. All she saw was her husband. “No!” she yelled at Major. “Come here!”

The dog listened to her and paused for a moment—a moment that allowed Jonathan to retrieve the gun. Naturally he had shot Major first. Then he shot Esther. Once he could hear again, once his ears stopped reverberating, he stood there with the gun still in his bleeding hand and listened, afraid the kids would wake up and come running to see what had happened.

In all honesty, that was the first time he even thought of the kids. What about them? He could call the cops and turn himself in, but what would happen to Timmy and Suzy then? He seemed to remember setting up a guardianship thing so that if something happened to Esther and him together, the kids would go first to Esther’s sister, Corrine. But what would their lives be like if their mother was dead and their father was in prison for killing her? That might even be worse than growing up as Abby Southard’s no-good, worthless son.

He had decided the next step in that instant. If Timmy and Suzy died in their sleep, he could spare them all that suffering—the suffering of living. And that’s what he did—he shot them while they slept, one bullet each. That way they would never have to wonder if their parents loved them. Then he closed their bedroom doors and left them there. As long as the doors were shut—as long as he didn’t venture back into the living room where Esther lay sprawled on the couch, he didn’t have to remember that they were dead. As far as Jonathan was concerned, they were just sleeping.

He went into the bathroom then and collected the whole set of medication bottles Esther kept there. Antidepressants, sleep aids; whatever bottles he could find that said “Do Not Use with Alcohol.” You name it; Esther had it. He took them down to his study along with a bottle of single-malt Scotch.

He poured a full glass, but sat there thinking before he swallowed that first pill. He remembered seeing a movie called The Bucket List, the one about making sure you did all the things you wanted to do before you died.

He decided right then and there that he would go out with a bang, not the way he had left the bank, slinking out after everyone else had left for the night, carrying the personal possessions from his office in a single disgraceful cardboard box.

Hoping to prove his mother’s dire predictions wrong, he had spent his adult life doing what he was supposed to do all this time, twenty-four/seven. Now he was going to do some of the things he wasn’t supposed to do. He closed the open pill bottles. Then he showered and dressed, packed a suitcase with a week’s worth of clothes, and tossed the collection of pill bottles into the mix. The last thing he did before he walked out the door was set the thermostat down to 65 degrees. Who cared if he ran up the electricity bill? He wouldn’t be the one paying it.