by Susan Dunlap
“They looked, but they didn’t find anything. Sheriff seemed mad. I guess he doesn’t have any leads.”
“Did the sheriff tell you what Edwina was going to say?”
Bert stopped. “How’d he know?”
“Well, if Edwina was going to make an announcement important enough for her to go to the trouble of getting television cameras here, she must have wanted to be sure of what she would be saying. She wouldn’t just speak off the top of her head.”
“She did that plenty,” Bert said, from habit. Then he looked away. “No, you’re right. I’ve seen her give speeches for her historical society. She always had notes.”
“Then those notes must have been in her pocketbook.”
“Nope.” Bert headed toward the door.
“They weren’t? How do you know?”
“Because I saw her put something in the podium drawer and lock it. That was in the afternoon, before you came to check the meter. I wasn’t about to ask her what. And then, what with all her orders, and you coming, and then Hooper coming to help me set up, I just forgot about it.”
“But how come the sheriff didn’t find the drawer?” We were at the old podium now. It was a standard oak piece, with the slanted paper stand, a three-inch panel beneath it, and then a space that went down to the floor. I looked at the panel, but other than the seam where it attached to the slanted stand, there was no break in the wood. And there was certainly no visible lock. “Are you sure there’s a drawer here, Bert?”
“Oh, yes. Edwina’s had this podium for years. It was her father’s. She carts it around if she can, or if she can find someone like me to cart it for her.” He bent down, poking his head under the panel. “Look. See, here’s the lock.”
“I suppose the key was in Edwina’s purse,” I said with a sigh.
“She wouldn’t be about to leave that around. Not after she locked it up.”
Eyeing the lock, I said, “Bert? You can get it open, can’t you?”
He hesitated.
“We could call the sheriff and have him come and open it.”
Still he didn’t move.
I knew I should insist on calling the sheriff. But having to deal with him about Edwina’s murder was not something I wanted to do right now. And if the podium drawer held nothing more than notes on Edwina’s discovery of another nineteenth-century photo or a previously unknown grave marker, I didn’t want to face Wescott’s derision. I said to Bert, “Do you want the sheriff’s whole entourage back out here?”
Without pause to think, he pulled a screwdriver from his pocket, stuck it into the crack, and hit the end with his hammer. It took only three blows to break the lock.
Bert pulled open the drawer and stared in. It was nearly a minute before he moved far enough back that I could see over his shoulder. I had expected to find notes or even a handwritten draft of a speech, but what the drawer held was several sheets of parchment. The first was headed “Treaty between the State of California and the Pomo Nation.” It was dated 1851.
Lifting it carefully, I put it on the paper stand, and Bert and I read it together.
“Son of a gun!” Bert said. “Old Edwina really had a find here.”
“You mean she discovered this treaty?”
“You see here”—he pointed to a sentence in the middle of the page—“where it mentions a Pomo rancheria on the river?”
“What’s a rancheria?”
“A little reservation. Sometimes real little.”
“So the treaty sets up a little Pomo reservation on the Russian River. I don’t remember any reservation.”
“That’s because there isn’t one,” Bert said triumphantly. “That means that Edwina must have discovered this. No wonder she fussed around for days about how the lodge looked. No wonder she got that television cameraman out here, thinking he was going to report on the Slugfest. This treaty will put her on the map of historians.”
“But Bert, why didn’t she just call a news conference? I mean, the treaty is way more important than the Slugfest. She could have gotten coverage from San Francisco, maybe Los Angeles, for that.”
“Yeah,” he snorted. “She should have got that kind of news. But she wouldn’t have. Edwina didn’t have a good record with these people. I’ll have to admit it wasn’t all their fault. See, she’d been calling news conferences for years. Every time she unearthed the foundation of a pioneer house or the remnants of one of the old railway cars abandoned in the underbrush along where the tracks used to run, she’d call the papers and the TV people. Got so that if she’d found the hundred-year-old remains of General Kuskoff from the Russian settlement up at Fort Ross, she couldn’t have gotten a photographer.” He leaned an elbow on Edwina’s podium, carefully avoiding the treaty. “They thought she was a joke, a crank—the newspeople and the historians. Makes me damned mad. Even when she found legitimate historical stuff, no one paid any mind. And the real kicker is that Edwina was sure there were rancherias up here. Every year she’d give one lecture on the Indians of the river area, the Pomos, and she always said that there had to be more than just the big reservation up at Stewart’s Point.”
“Why did she think that?”
“You know, she gave pretty much the same talk every year. I’ve probably heard it fifteen times. If you want an answer to that question, you’re asking the right person. Edwina said that the Pomos didn’t live like one big tribe. They were more like separate village groups, real loosely joined together. She said it made sense that one of the settlers who aimed to open a mine or log the area would have been empowered by the government to deal with the Indians. That would have saved the government the trouble. And Edwina was sure that one of these guys probably bought off the Indians—got some local chief to sign some treaty. Probably the local chief had no idea what he was signing—how could he, it’s in English. And”—he raised a finger—“Edwina figured that before there was any question of rounding up the Pomos and putting the whole village on a little scrap of land like this, the Pomos cleared out anyway. After eighteen-seventy the Pomos were all but gone.”
I nodded. “It’s a good theory. But if Edwina was so sure, why didn’t she go to wherever it is they keep treaties and check it out?”
Bert snorted again. “There’s another slap for you. Edwina got cards to the university libraries. She went right in there and did her research. But treaties like this, you know where they were kept?”
“No.”
“In the secret files of the United States Senate in Washington, D.C.!”
My look of amazement must have been sufficient, for Bert nodded three times and said, “Edwina told us. It seems that when the main batch of Indian treaties were signed in the eighteen-fifties, they got sent to Sacramento to be ratified. But by that time there was plenty of opposition, and the guys there didn’t want to deal with them so they passed them on to Washington. But the senators in Washington didn’t want to be bothered either, so they plunked the whole batch into their secret files. Not a one of them came to light until after the turn of the century.”
“If they weren’t ratified, were they valid?”
That stopped Bert. “Don’t know. Since none of them were local, Edwina didn’t go into that.”
“Do you think this was one of them?”
“Could be. But maybe because the rancheria is so small, it got taken care of in Sacramento. Maybe there wasn’t so much opposition to this little one.” He picked up the last page of the treaty and put it on top. It was a map showing the river and the rancheria. “See, it’s just big enough to put a couple houses on. You’d hardly recognize the river from this.”
The gently curving line didn’t begin to resemble the tight, sharp angles of the river, and the only names on the map that corresponded to those of today were Fort Ross, where the Russians under General Kuskoff had established the southernmost settlement of their North American explorations, and the Russian River itself. The rancheria was a rectangle spanning the river. On that rectangle were drawn
two trees, close together.
“Do you have any idea where this is?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. Those trees, they’re the last two of the Nine Warriors. See.” He pointed to markings along the river on the map. “Here are the other seven Warriors. They were giants a hundred years ago. Good landmarks. But you can tell this spot where the rancheria is—it’s the only place where there are two Warriors that close together with a curve in the river like this. You know where the W curve is, don’t you?”
“Sure. But are you certain there was never a rancheria there?”
He stepped back from the podium. “Vejay, I grew up here in Henderson. I had to take California history in school. If there had been an Indian reservation right near here, don’t you think they would have told us about it in school?”
“Maybe—”
He put a hand on my arm. “You’re going to say maybe it lasted only a little while, or my teachers weren’t very well educated. Could be. But listen, I’ve known Edwina Henderson since I was in school. She’s been crazy about Henderson history and anything in this area that affected Henderson since she was a kid. You can believe that if there was anything written about a rancheria, anywhere, Edwina would have found it. She would have taken the news down to her Indian support group and they would have had a big powwow together.”
“If she’d announced it here last night,” he went on, “by today there would have been reporters on the phone to her. But she wouldn’t even be here to answer. She’d be on her way to Sacramento; she’d be showing the treaty to all those historical bigshots who couldn’t be bothered with her before. It’s not every day someone discovers an Indian treaty. I remember Edwina telling us at one historical society meeting a year ago, when she gave her Pomo talk, what she’d do when she discovered her rancheria. She got kind of carried away. You could tell she’d spent a lot of time day dreaming about her big find. She said there’d be a lot of publicity, but she wouldn’t be able to stay here to see it. She said if she found something like this treaty here, she’d have to get it up to Sacramento pronto, to the experts there. She said as soon as people knew about it, there would be people out to destroy it.” Inadvertently, he glanced toward the kitchen. “She was close on that, wasn’t she. Just a little off. Didn’t destroy it, it destroyed her.” He swallowed. Recovering his composure, he went on quickly. “From what Edwina told us, you can bet that if she’d announced that treaty here last night, she wouldn’t have been in town today. She’d have been up in Sacramento, keeping guard while those big experts went over it. She told us she’d never trust a treaty out of her sight. Said she’d stay up there as long as it took. She said, ‘Bert, if I can ever prove there was a rancheria around here, you better be prepared to come in and take over the Tobacconist’s for as long as I’m gone.’ I remember we all laughed then and said that all her Asian refugees, Indians, and even the Nine Warriors would have to get along without her. But that comment of hers, it was even quoted in The Paper when they wrote up the meeting. Edwina wasn’t any too pleased about that. Like I said, she’d gotten carried away. She didn’t need the whole world to know it.”
Suddenly Bert swallowed hard and looked away from me. “Biggest find of her life and she has to die before she can announce it. I’ll tell you, Vejay, if there’s a heaven, Edwina’s looking down from it now, and she’s furious.” He swallowed again. “And if there’s such a thing as the dead having power, I wouldn’t be the person who robbed Edwina of her chance. Edwina wasn’t one to forget. When she held a grudge, she clutched it hard and long, and she made her victim pay plenty.”
I thought of Edwina’s ongoing pique over Donny Fortimiglio’s experience with her tobacco, and of her not speaking to Leila for months. I wondered what she had done to the “unworthy” person who Leila had had the affair with. “How did she make them pay?”
Bert looked at me quizzically. “In the past? That’s gone now. Edwina’s gone.” He glared down at the treaty. “All because of this. Just not fair.”
I could see I wasn’t about to get any more lucid comments from Bert. Either he was just what he seemed—too disheartened to be bothered with the past—or he was putting on a good show, to cover his unwillingness to answer. If Angelina had been Leila’s lover, and Bert had been her father’s close friend, he wouldn’t be about to tell me how great Edwina’s retribution had been. He wouldn’t give me Angelina’s motive for the killing.
With a sigh, I said, “I guess I’d better call the sheriff.”
CHAPTER 12
“I MIGHT HAVE KNOWN!” Sheriff Wescott had made excellent time getting to Steelhead Lodge. As he strode toward me, with his photographer and print man, he glared. “I don’t know why I bother to tell you anything.”
“Look,” I said, “we are giving you a document you never would have found on your own. The natural response to that should be ‘Thank you.’ ”
“You were tampering with evidence—fooling around with that podium.”
“It wasn’t evidence until we discovered the treaty. Till then it was just another piece of furniture to be carted back where it belonged.”
“If you hadn’t been poking around here, in a murder case I just warned you to keep clear of, you wouldn’t have been anywhere near this podium, right?” He was standing in front of it. “And you wouldn’t have been wrenching the drawer open!”
“And you wouldn’t have the treaty now.”
With a silent shake of the head, he turned his gaze to the podium. This was as close as I would get to an admission that I was right. It was probably the only time I’d get the last word. But a victory over the sheriff has its drawbacks. I decided a low profile would serve me best now. So I stood back and watched the print man work. I listened as Bert recounted an edited version of how we came to find the treaty. Either Bert was still subdued from the reality of Edwina’s loss, or he was on his best behavior. He didn’t end each sentence with “sir,” but he might as well have. It was a very un-Bert-like performance.
After the print man finished, Sheriff Wescott turned to me and said, “Of course there won’t be any good prints now, after you two have been over it.”
“There never would have been good prints,” I retorted. So much for lying low.
“Do you know something I don’t, something else you’ve been holding back?”
In the past I had withheld information. It was a sore spot with him. I said, “It’s nothing you couldn’t figure out yourself, if you took the time instead of badgering me. The reason you wouldn’t have found the murderer’s prints on that podium is that the treaty is still there. If the murderer’s prints were on the podium, he would have found the treaty and it would be gone.”
“That’s fine for speculating in a vacuum, Miss Haskell, but have you considered that maybe the murderer did try to get into that drawer? Maybe there were marks of attempted entry that you have now destroyed. If you had thought … If you had called us before breaking in—”
“Sheriff Wescott, we didn’t know there would be anything in the drawer,” I said in exasperation.
“You suspected or you wouldn’t have forced the drawer open.”
“Did you want us to call you every time we had an idea or opened a drawer?”
“I want you to do as I told you and stay out of this. How much clearer do I have to make that?”
I shrugged theatrically. It would have been hard to keep a higher profile than I was. I knew that, but I was too angry to rein myself in. “Is that all, Sheriff?”
“Just a final warning. I don’t want to see you near anything to do with this case. I don’t want you within ten feet of this podium, or of Edwina Henderson’s house, and unless you have a lighted cigar in your mouth, don’t go anywhere near the tobacco shop.”
“Then I assume I can leave.”
“Yes,” he snapped.
I strode out, too angry to close the door softly even though I knew how adolescent it was to bang it. I climbed into my pickup, backed it up, and screeched out of the park
ing area. I was all the way to North Bank Road before I realized that I didn’t know where I was headed.
I turned toward town. Though the day was still overcast and windy, traffic built up as I neared the commercial block of North Bank Road. This wasn’t anything like it would be in summer, when the tourists in their campers, station wagons, and pickup trucks filled every parking space along the street and down by the town beach. Now traffic slowed as drivers considered whether to turn up Zeus Lane or eyed parking spots by Thompson’s Grocery or Gresham’s Hardware. I slowed too, and when a car pulled out across from the café, I scooted in.
I might have been headed home, for lack of any other destination, but the sight of the café reminded me that it was nearly two in the afternoon and it had been a long time since breakfast. Meter reading brought with it a big appetite. I’d seen former meter readers who’d been promoted to office jobs balloon into Humpty Dumptys. But considering Mr. Bobbs’s opinion of me, that was a problem I was unlikely to face. Right now, my days of climbing up and down the hillside or walking a quarter of a mile up a driveway too potholed for the truck to handle made three hefty meals essential.
As I settled at a table, Marty came over. “Well, don’t be a stranger. It’s been a couple hours since you were here last. You ready for our new Special—coffee without a doughnut?”
I laughed, at first softly, then too loudly. Leave it to Marty to dissipate anger. That, of course, was why he’d gotten this job. In summer, dealing with the frustrations of customers lined up to get into the only eatery in town required a high level of diplomacy. “One a day’s my limit,” I said. “Give me a tofu scramble sandwich.”
“On black bread?”
“Of course. Do you serve it on Wonder?”
Marty made a show of grimacing. “Coming up.” Marty was a vegetarian. Given the slightest encouragement he would announce the vitamin content of every ingredient in your meal, and if that particular meal should be a hamburger, he’d expound on the carcinogenic effects of high heat.
I walked past the counter to the bathroom. No line—a sure sign it wasn’t tourist season yet. Then I settled at the table, sniffed at the enticing aroma of garlic and soy sauce as Marty mixed them with the tofu, and pondered Edwina’s treaty.