Читать книгу Queen of the Night - J. A. Jance - Страница 4

Prologue

THEY SAY IT happened long ago that a young woman of the Tohono O’odham, the Desert People, fell in love with a Yaqui warrior, a Hiakim, and went to live with him and his people, far to the South. Every evening, her mother, Old White- Haired Woman, would go outside by herself and listen. After a while her daughter’s spirit would speak to her from her new home far away. One day Old White-Haired Woman heard nothing, so she went to find her husband.

“Our daughter is ill,” Old White-Haired Woman told him. “I must go to her.”

“But the Hiakim live far from here,” he said, “and you are a bent old woman. How will you get there?”

“I will ask I’itoi, the Spirit of Goodness, to help me.”

Elder Brother heard the woman’s plea. He sent Coyote, Ban, to guide Old White-Haired Woman’s steps on her long journey, and he sent the Ali Chu Chum O’odham, the Little People—the animals and birds—to help her along the way. When she was thirsty, Ban led her to water. When she was hungry, the Birds, U’u Whig, brought her seeds and beans to eat.

After weeks of traveling, Old White-Haired Woman finally reached the land of the Hiakim. There she learned that her daughter was sick and dying.

“Please take my son home to our people,” Old White-Haired Woman’s daughter begged. “If you don’t, his father’s people will turn him into a warrior.”

You must understand, nawoj, my friend, that from the time the Tohono O’odham emerged from the center of the earth, they have always been a peace-loving people. So one night, when the Hiakim were busy feasting, Old White-Haired Woman loaded the baby into her burden basket and set off for the North. When the Yaqui learned she was gone, they sent a band of warriors after her to bring the baby back.

Old White-Haired Woman walked and walked. She was almost back to the land of the Desert People when the Yaqui warriors spotted her. I’itoi saw she was not going to complete her journey, so he called a flock of shashani, black birds, who flew into the eyes of the Yaqui and blinded them. While the warriors were busy fighting shashani, I’itoi took Old White-Haired Woman into a wash and hid her.

By then the old grandmother was very tired and lame from all her walking and carrying.

“You stay here,” Elder Brother told her. “I will carry the baby back to your people, but while you sit here resting, you will be changed. Because of your bravery, your feet will become roots. Your tired old body will turn into branches. Each year, for one night only, you will become the most beautiful plant on the earth, a flower the Milgahn, the whites, call the night-blooming cereus, the Queen of the Night.”

And it happened just that way. Old White-Haired Woman turned into a plant the Indians call ho’ok-wah’o, which means Witch’s Tongs. But on that one night in early summer when a beautiful scent fills the desert air, the Tohono O’odham know that they are breathing in kok’oi ’uw, Ghost Scent, and they remember a brave old woman who saved her grandson and brought him home.

Each year after that, on the night the flowers bloomed, the Tohono O’odham would gather around while Brought Back Child told the story of his brave grandmother, Old White-Haired Woman, and that, nawoj, my friend, is the same story I have just told you.

San Diego, California

Saturday, March 21, 1959, Midnight

58º Fahrenheit

Long after everyone else had left the beach and returned to the hotel, and long after the bonfire died down to coals, Ursula Brinker sat there in the sand and marveled over what had happened. What she had allowed to happen.

When June Lennox had invited Sully to come along to San Diego for spring break, she had known the moment she said yes that she was saying yes to more than just a fun trip from Tempe, Arizona, to California. The insistent tug had been there all along, for as long as Sully could remember. From the time she was in kindergarten, she had been interested in girls, not boys, and that hadn’t changed. Not later in grade school when the other girls started drooling over boys, and not later in high school, either.

But she had kept the secret. For one thing, she knew how much her parents would disapprove if Sully ever admitted to them or to anyone else what she had long suspected— that she was a lesbian. She didn’t go around advertising it or wearing mannish clothing. People said she was “cute,” and she was—cute and smart and talented. She didn’t know exactly what would happen to her if people figured out who she really was, but it probably wouldn’t be good. She did a good job of keeping up appearances, so no one guessed that the girl who had been valedictorian of her class and who had been voted most likely to succeed was actually queer “as a three-dollar bill.” That was what some of the boys said about people like that—people like her. And she was afraid that by talking about it, what she was feeling right now would be snatched away from her, like a mirage melting into the desert.

She had kept the secret until now. Until today. With June. And she was afraid, if she left the beach and went back to the hotel room with everyone else and spoke about it, if she gave that newfound happiness a name, it might disappear forever as well.

The beach was deserted. When she heard the sand- muffled footsteps behind her, she thought it might be June. But it wasn’t.

“Hello,” she said. “When did you get here?”

He didn’t answer that question. “What you did was wrong,” he said. “Did you think you could keep it a secret? Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

“It just happened,” she said. “We didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“But you did,” he said. “More than you know.”

He fell on her then. Had anyone been walking past on the beach, they wouldn’t have paid much attention. Just another young couple carried away with necking; people who hadn’t gotten themselves a room, and probably should have.

But in the early hours of that morning, what was happening there by the dwindling fire wasn’t an act of love. It was something else altogether. When the rough embrace finally ended, the man stood up and walked away. He walked into the water and sluiced away the blood.

As for Sully Brinker? She did not walk away. The brainy cheerleader, the girl who had it all—money, brains, and looks—the girl once voted most likely to succeed would not succeed at anything because she was lying dead in the sand—dead at age twenty-one—and her parents’ lives would never be the same.

Los Angeles, California

Saturday, October 28, 1978, 11:20 P.M.

63º Fahrenheit

As the quarrel escalated, four-year-old Danny Pardee cowered in his bed. He covered his head with his pillow and tried not to listen, but the pillow didn’t help. He could still hear the voices raging back and forth: his father’s voice and his mother’s. Turning on the TV set might have helped, but if his father came into the bedroom and found the set on when it wasn’t supposed to be, Danny knew what would happen. First the belt would come off and, after that, the beating.

Danny knew how much that belt hurt, so he lay there and willed himself not to listen. He tried to fill his head with the words to one of the songs he had learned at preschool: “You put your right foot in; you put your right foot out. You put your right foot in, and you shake it all about. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about.”

He was about to go on to the second verse when he heard something that sounded like a firecracker—or four firecrackers in a row, even though it wasn’t the Fourth of July.

Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam.

After that there was nothing. No other sound. Not his mother’s voice and not his father’s, either. An eerie silence settled over the house. First it filled Danny’s ears and then his heart.

Finally the bedroom door creaked open. Danny knew his father was standing in the doorway, staring down at him, so he kept both eyes shut—shut but not too tightly shut. That would give it away. He didn’t move. He barely breathed. At last, after the door finally clicked closed, he opened his eyes and let out his breath.

He listened to the silence, welcoming it. The room wasn’t completely dark. Streetlights in the parking lot made the room a hazy gray, and there was a sliver of light under the doorway. Soon that went away. Knowing that his father had probably left to go to a bar and drink some more, Danny was able to relax. As the tension left his body, he fell into a deep sleep, slumbering so peacefully that he never heard the sirens of the arriving cop cars or of the useless ambulance that arrived far too late. Danny had no idea that the gunshot victim, his mother, was dead long before the ambulance got there.

Much later, at least it seemed much later to him, someone—a stranger in a uniform—gently shook him awake. The cop wrapped the tangled sheet around Danny and lifted him from the bed.

“Come on, little guy,” he said huskily. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Thousand Oaks, California

Monday, June 1, 2009, 11:45 P.M.

60º Fahrenheit

It was late, well after eleven, as Jonathan sat in the study of his soon-to-be-former McMansion and stared at his so-called wall of honor. The plaques and citations he saw there—his Manager of the Year award, along with all the others that acknowledged his years of exemplary service, were relics from another time and place—from another life. They were the currency and language of some other existence, where the rules as he had once known them no longer applied.

What had happened on Wall Street had trickled down to Main Street. As a result, his banking career was over. His job was gone. His house would be gone soon, and so would his family. He wasn’t supposed to know about the boyfriend Esther had waiting in the wings, but he did. He also knew what she was really waiting for—the money from his 401(k). She wanted that, too, and she wanted it now.

Esther came in then—barged in, really—without knocking. The fact that he might want a little privacy was as foreign a concept as the paltry career trophies still hanging on his walls. She stood there staring at him, hands on her hips.

“You changed the password on the account,” she said accusingly.

“The account I changed the password on isn’t a joint account,” he told her mildly. “It’s mine.”

“We’re still married,” she pointed out. “What’s yours is mine.”

And, of course, that was the way it had always been. He worked. She stayed home and saw to it that they lived beyond their means, which had been considerable when he’d still had a good job. The problem was he no longer had that job, but she was still living the same way. As far as she was concerned, nothing had changed. For him everything had changed. Esther had gone right on spending money like it was water, but now the well had finally run dry. There was no job and no way to get a job. Banks didn’t like having bankers with overdue bills and credit scores in the basement.

“I signed the form when you asked me to so we could both get the money,” she said. “I want my fair share.”

He knew there was nothing about this that was fair. It was the same stunt his mother had pulled on his father, making him cough up money that she had never earned. Well, maybe the scenario wasn’t exactly the same. As far as he knew, his mother hadn’t screwed around on his father, but Jonathan had vowed it wouldn’t happen to him—would never happen to him. Yet here it was happening—and then some.

“It may be in an individual account, but that money is a joint asset,” Esther declared. “You don’t get to have it all.”

She was screaming at him now. He could hear her and so could anyone else in the neighborhood. He was glad they lived at the end of the cul-de-sac—with previously foreclosed houses on either side. It was a neighborhood where living beyond your means went with the territory.

“By the time my lawyer finishes wiping the floor with you, you’ll be lucky to be living in a homeless shelter,” she added. “As for seeing the kids? Forget about it. That’s not going to happen. I’ll see to it.”

With that, she spun around as if to leave. Then, changing her mind, she grabbed the closest thing she could reach, which turned out to be the wooden plaque with the bronze Manager of the Year faceplate, and heaved it at him. The sharp corner of the wood caught him full in the forehead—well, part of his very tall comb-over forehead—and it hurt like hell. It bled like hell.

As blood leaked into his eye and ran down his cheek, all the things he had stifled through the years came to a head. He had reached the end of his rope, the point beyond which he had nothing left to lose.

Opening the top drawer of his desk, he removed the gun—a gun he had purchased with every intention of turning it on himself. Then, rising to his feet, he hurried out of the room, intent on using it on someone else.

His whole body sizzled in a fit of unreasoning hatred. If that had been all there was to it, any defense attorney worthy of the name could have gotten him off on a plea of temporary insanity, because in that moment he was insane—legally insane. He knew nothing about the difference between right and wrong. All he knew was that he had taken all he could take. More than he could take.

The difficulty is that this was only the start of Jonathan Southard’s problems. Everything that happened after that was entirely premeditated.