From Here to Paternity jj-6

by Jill Churchill

  She knew the stone-faced Indian was a stereotype, but at that moment it was quite true of the people in this room. None of the tribe members whose faces she could see were overtly registering any emotion at all — no hint of a smile, no suggestion of a frown. The others, the genealogists and other resort guests, all looked slightly distressed. Their expressions ranged from sympathy to guilt to anger.

  HawkHunter opened the book to another page and read a passage about himself as a child. A very different piece — at first. It was about the joy of being a boy who was part of the land, nature, and a nurturing extended family. It was a charming, romping, happy story, and then it veered off into an account of some drunken white cowboys wandering onto the tribal land and raping his young aunt. It ended with HawkHunter, as an eight-year-old boy, hiding behind a rock so that the elders wouldn't see him cry.

  He finished reading, closed the book, and shut his eyes for a moment as if overcome by the emotion of the experience all over again. Then, as a fitful spatter of applause started and quickly grew, he opened his eyes, made a suggestion of a bow, and said, "Are there questions now? Or anything in particular someone would like to discuss?"

  Jane stood quickly. "Mr. HawkHunter, I notice you're still missing your tooth. I found it in the snow. Would you like to have it to give to your dentist?"

  There was a ruffle of sound. A little bit of amusement, some tutting disapproval.

  "I appreciate that, but you're mistaken. My tooth was broken, but not lost. Other questions—?"

  "No, I believe this is your tooth," Jane said, holding up a tissue that was folded and taped.

  Little Feather had risen, scowling, and come hastily down the side aisle. When she reached Jane, she snatched at the little package roughly and went back to the podium. HawkHunter was looking at Jane with contemptuous amusement. "Well, ma'am, if you say so," he said with a laugh. He pointed to someone in the audience who was holding her hand up to be called on.

  Jane felt her face flush, but Shelley nudged her and she went on, overriding the woman who was attempting to ask about HawkHunter's research. "Mr. HawkHunter, the odd thing about that tooth is that it doesn't belong to an Indian."

  He glanced at her with irritation. "Certainly not this Indian," he said. He turned to the other questioner. "My research began with a childhood of stories, stories told by my grandmother and grandfather—"

  "What were their names — your grandparents'?" Jane all but shouted.

  "Look here, lady, I don't know what you're trying to do, but you're disrupting this meeting and I suggest you find someplace else to go."

  "How about the Sheepshead Bay court?" Jane asked. "They have very interesting records, you know."

  At that, HawkHunter grabbed the podium with one hand as if to keep his balance. "I don't know what—"

  "I think you do," Jane said. "Let me tell you about one of those records." She had the sheet of fax paper in her hand and ready. She held it up and said, "This is a copy of the record of Johan Aulkunder changing his name to John HawkHunter on his eighteenth birthday. And this" — she flourished another sheet of paper—"is a picture of Johan Aulkunder in his high school yearbook. Even on a fax, it's apparent how much he resembles the picture of you on the back of your book. Of course, neither of those pictures resembles you today very much. You've had a lot of plastic surgery, haven't you, Mr. HawkHunter? But you couldn't change the shape of your teeth, or the characteristics of your skull. It's very easy to disprove American Indian heritage. And Doris Schmidtheiser knew that. She was very indiscreet, too, and mentioned to you that she'd found this record when she was rummaging around for evidence of Gregor Roman changing his name."

  HawkHunter's mouth was working, but words wouldn't come. He turned and looked at Little Feather. She ripped open the little tissue package and held up a small, hard item. "This is just a rock!" she said, flinging it toward Jane. Her aim was bad. Frantic. The bit of gravel pinged off the wall.

  The room was deathly still. HawkHunter groped to recover the situation. "This is exactly the kind of libelous nonsense the whites have always used on Indians! The nitpicking pseudo-science that is meant to discredit. Next she'll be spouting nonsense about brain size—"

  The dauntingly large man in the red plaid shirt in the front row had stood up and joined him at the podium. He took hold of HawkHunter's arm in a vise-like grip. "I'd like to hear what more this lady has to say," he said in a deep voice.

  "What I'm saying is this: that man is no more a Native American than I am," Jane replied. "In fact, I've probably got a couple of generations on him as far as our tenure in America goes."

  There was a nasty undertone in the room. Whether it was directed at her or HawkHunter or both of them, Jane couldn't guess.

  "Don't you see, Leon, what's she's trying to do?" HawkHunter said. "Just what the whites have always done — tried to turn us against our own people. And once again it's working! You can't believe her! You're betraying your own people!"

  "It's easy to prove," Jane said. "Will you agree to have a skull X-ray and your teeth examined?"

  "No! He will not!" Little Feather shrilled. "He doesn't have to prove a damned thing to you, you white bitch!"

  This time the rumble of discontent had a clear target. Little Feather had made a big mistake.

  "Maybe not, but he has to prove it to me," the big man named Leon said. He still had a grip on HawkHunter's arm and was looking down at him.

  "Excuse me, sir, but are you Leon Whitewing? The president of the tribal council?" Jane asked.

  "I am."

  "Then it was you who signed the contract with HawkHunter on behalf of the tribe," Jane said, brandishing a copy that Linda Moose foot had made for her.

  "I did," Leon Whitewing said.

  "Would you give the gist of that contract?"

  "I don't see why not. It's not a secret. We engaged HawkHunter to represent our interest in regard to the legal ownership of Flattop."

  "And what are you paying him for that?" Jane went on.

  "Nothing," Leon said. "It's a pro bono situation."

  "Is it?" Jane asked.

  Leon responded slowly, as if his mind were running about ten times as fast as his mouth. "Well, officially he's to get ten percent of the profits from anything that's done with the land if he wins the suit. But since we'll just restore it to its cemetery status—"

  He seemed startled as the tall woman in the second row whipped her head around to look at Jane. Jane nodded to her and the woman stood up.

  "Mr. Whitewing, this is Susan Maxwell," Jane said. "You may have seen her around lately in a red ski outfit. She's with a firm of architectural engineers. Susan, would you tell Mr. Whitewing what you've been doing?"

  Susan Maxwell glared for a long minute at HawkHunter, then said, "Since it appears that I'm going to get stiffed for my fees in all likelihood, I might as well. John HawkHunter hired me to look over the summit of the hill you call Flattop Mountain and draw up preliminary plans for a casino complex to be built there."

  There wasn't a stony face in the room anymore. Everyone was either stunned or confused and frankly showed it.

  Jane explained. "Tribal lands — reservations — are federal lands. They aren't subject to state laws. It's possible that if HawkHunter had gotten that land depart of the tribal land — either through legal methods or by intimidation — a very large gambling operation could have gone up on the hill. A large and extremely profitable operation, of which he would have received a percentage for the rest of his life."

  Little Feather was edging toward the door. The sheriff shifted himself directly in front of the doorway and folded his arms. HawkHunter had been trying to gently extricate himself from Leon Whitewing's grasp, but now he gave a great lurch sideways. Leon didn't loosen his grip and jerked HawkHunter back like a rag doll.

  "You've got a lot to explain to the tribe — white boy!" Leon said.

  "He's got a lot to explain to the sheriff, too," Jane said. "About the deaths of Doris Schmidt
heiser and Bill Smith."

  Chapter 24

  There was a big table set in the dining room and Jane had been urged to sit at the head of it. Tenny had arranged for desserts, coffee, and brandy to be served, and was now sitting with the group, which included Linda Moose foot and Thomas Whitewing as well as his uncle Leon. Lucky had managed to lose Stu Gortner in order to join them, and the bookstore owner had come along too.

  "… a lot of things," Jane was saying. "And they all came together at once. Linda had called Little Feather a professional Indian, and Shelley and I had laughed at HawkHunter's vanity in making himself look more typically Indian. But I hadn't put those two things together until I was staring at that list of names Doris had in her notes. I'd looked at them several times and they didn't mean anything. Then I started mumbling them out loud. And suddenly I realized that while 'Aulkunder' and 'HawkHunter' don't look anything alike, they sound alike."

  "Lucky helped us contact a genealogist in Brooklyn to run down and look at the original records this morning," Shelley said. "And sure enough, they showed that it was him. As it turns out, this man is a teacher at the high school Johan Aulkunder attended. He called around to some of the older teachers and put together an interesting profile of the boy who turned himself into HawkHunter."

  "Profile? What do you mean?" Tenny asked.

  "According to the teachers who remember him," Shelley explained, "he was one of those sad, shy, brilliant loners who created a fantasy life for himself. He'd lived in a series of foster homes and, maybe because he had no real family of his own, became obsessed with Indians. Read every book in the library about them. Drew headdresses in his notebooks, had a vast collection of arrowheads, that sort of thing."

  Jane picked up the story. "The day he turned eighteen, he changed his name and moved away. Nobody at the school had any idea what had become of him, and by the time he made a name for himself, it was a different name, with a more mature and possibly already slightly altered appearance. No one made the connection."

  Leon Whitewing was nodding. "I understand now about the book."

  "What do you mean, Uncle Leon?" Thomas asked. He was still looking very upset at the crumbling of HawkHunter's image.

  Leon had a battered copy of the book with him. He opened it to the introduction and jabbed his finger at the last paragraph. "He says here that while the book is true in essence, he's altered the name of the tribe and the personal names of his relatives to protect both the tribe and his own family from unwanted public attention. But that wasn't why. It was because it was all a lie!"

  The lady from the bookstore was sitting next to him and spoke up. "Now, Leon, that's not really fair. He probably meant it as fiction to begin with and put that in as a sort of flourish. Like Waller did— claiming he learned the story of Francesca and what's-his-name from the family."

  Leon looked at her blankly. "Waller? Francesca?"

  "Never mind, Leon. I just mean lots of authors add things like that to give the fiction a greater semblance of realism. And from what Mrs. Jeffry says about his background, the book probably started out as a way of recording a fantasy that was terribly important to him. Imagine this lonely boy with no real family inventing a family for himself. Generations of family. But the fantasy became a book and the book took off and he was suddenly a figure of respect, almost idolatry. He got trapped in his own lie."

  "Which he probably didn't mind," Leon said grumpily.

  "Who would mind?" Jane said. "We'd all like that kind of adoration. Not to mention the income that went with it."

  "I still don't understand how Mrs. Schmidtheiser came into it all," Tenny said.

  "She was a snoop," Jane said. "That's all. She was rummaging around in some records and saw his name change. She made a note of it, and quite innocently mentioned it to him. In fact, I think I probably saw her do it right here in this room. She was with him at a table where he was sitting alone. I assumed she was haranguing him to come to the debate later that day. He looked taken aback and I thought it was just from the force of her personality, but it was probably shock that she'd found out his deepest, most dangerous secret. He had to silence her."

  Lucky shook his head. "Poor Doris. She was obsessed with celebrities and never caught on that most of them didn't like her delving into their pasts. I'll bet most of the rest of the people on that list changed their names to something we'd recognize."

  "I think she was showing him that list when I thought she was trying to get him interested in the debate. That's how he knew what to look for in her cabin. But he had no way of knowing she'd dropped it and I'd picked it up."

  "Like Mel said to us last night, being an Indian had become his lifework," Shelley said. "His income, the prestige he'd become dependent on even more than the money — his whole way of life was precariously balanced on a lie. And here was this strange, babbling woman who knew the lie and was shooting off her mouth about it and flinging around documents that proved it in a public dining room where anyone might hear."

  "But wasn't she poisoned with her own heart pills?" the bookstore woman asked. "How did he do that?"

  "I don't know for sure," Jane answered, "but I can imagine one scenario. Everybody had seen her popping those pills like they were breath mints. If he went to her condo to talk over what she'd found out, she'd have been fawning all over him. If she went to the kitchen to fix him coffee, he could have gotten the pills from her bag. And then, when the coffee was on the table, all he'd have had to do was ask for something else — cream or sugar, maybe — and she'd have run right back into the kitchen. It wouldn't have taken a second to drop them in her cup while she was gone."

  "And then just sit there and wait?" Linda Moose foot asked with a shudder.

  Tenny said, "But how on earth did Uncle Bill get involved?"

  Jane looked at Mel, who had been allowed to go to the police station immediately following the reading and subsequent revelations.

  "She told Bill," he said. "That's all. And Bill mentioned knowing it."

  "When?" Tenny asked.

  "When he went for a walk and HawkHunter caught up with him in the woods at the edge of the bunny slope. HawkHunter was probably making some new threat in regard to his lawsuit, and Bill used this shiny new weapon — the truth about HawkHunter's real background. HawkHunter killed him then and there," Mel said. "It seems that HawkHunter was actually a guest here, which Jane and I didn't know. And his condo was the closest to the spot where Mr. Smith was killed."

  "I knew, of course," Tenny said, "but never had any reason to mention it. You never asked. How do you know what happened between them?"

  "From Little Feather," Mel said. "She's talking as loud and fast as she can to try to save herself from going down with HawkHunter's ship. She says the weapon was one of those indestructible plastic thermos bottles. He threw it into the woods. They may not find it until the spring melt."

  Linda Moose foot spoke again. "But why the snowman?"

  Mel shrugged. "The easiest way to hide the body, I suppose. HawkHunter had to put it someplace, and concealing it right on the spot was a whole lot easier than carrying it around. Simply heaping snow on top would have looked suspicious, and as soon as Bill was known to be missing, somebody would have gotten curious. But the snowman could have stood there for weeks if Jane hadn't run into it."

  Linda still wasn't satisfied. "But why the robe and crown? To implicate somebody from the genealogy group?"

  Jane shook her head. "I think that was just a fortunate coincidence for him. I think the blanket was just because it was so hard to get the snow to stick together. With the blanket, he only had to cover half the body. As for the fruit bowl, I don't know. Maybe just an afterthought. Possibly even Little Feather's idea when she saw what he'd done and realized the blanket looked like a royal cape."

  They fell silent for a moment. A waiter approached the table with a box, which he handed to Tenny. "Thanks, Kevin," she said, rising and taking the box around the table to Jane.

  "
What's this?" Jane asked.

  "Oh, just something I thought you'd like," Tenny said, preoccupied.

  Jane opened the box and discovered it contained the set of small bowls Tenny had said were being fired to match the bowl Jane had purchased. Surprised and pleased, she thanked Tenny effusively, and as soon as she'd stopped gushing, die party started breaking up.

  Leon Whitewing stood majestically. "Well, he sure fooled a bunch of dumb Indians, I'll say that for the bastard."

  "Leon, he fooled everybody," Tenny said. "You know, if he'd just told the truth — that he wanted the top of the reservation land so the tribe could build a casino — it wouldn't have necessarily been a bad thing. The tribe could have made a fortune, and the resort would have been the logical place for a bunch of rich gamblers to stay."

  Leon grinned. "You got a point there, Tenny."

  "I do, don't I?" she said, her face lighting up. "It would be another good reason for people to stay at a ski resort that has almost no ski facilities."

  Leon took her arm in a courtly manner. "We've got some things to talk about."

  They all said their good-nights and Jane, Mel, and Shelley trudged up the hill to their cabins. When they got to the one Jane and Shelley were sharing with the girls, there was a commotion going on in the living room.

  "What's wrong!" Jane asked, alarmed. The girls were squatting on the living room floor next to each other.

  Katie moved aside and revealed Willard with a collection of bandages stuck on his muzzle. "Mom, I let Willard out and he caught up with that white cat. It beat him up, then rolled him around in the snow." She was trying to stifle her giggles and sound sympathetic.

  "Poor old Willard," Jane said.

  He whined in response.