From Here to Paternity (22 page)

Shelley, salting her fries, joined in. "We should be, but I have a feeling we know the solution and just don't know we know."

Mel rolled his eyes, but Jane agreed. "I think so, too, Shelley. I keep having the sense that if we'd just put the right facts and impressions into the correct order, the answer would be obvious. I still haven't given Lucky the file folder that Doris dropped. Maybe when I do, he'll let me look at some of her other documents. Maybe there's something there that will make things fall together."

"But, Jane, we don't know enough about genealogy to make any sense of her notes anyway. What we need could be in them, but it's like reading a foreign language. One of those courses they were giving was about how to construct a tiny tafel."

"What's that?" Mel asked.

Shelley shrugged. "I have no idea, except that it's a list of some kind. I just remembered it because it was such a weird phrase. That's the point. If the motive does have to do with genealogy, you and I don't know where or how to look, and we wouldn't recognize it if it walked up to us with a tag around its neck."

Mel was shaking his head while he chewed. The women waited patiently for him to swallow.

"In my experience," he finally said, "murder usually has to do with money or passion. High passion. Not things like power or prestige. Those are pretty pale emotions compared to passion. Now, most of these people, including the two victims, were, to put it politely, 'mature' individuals. Most people of that age have their passions well under control. If they didn't, they'd be in jail or a mental institution. Can you really imagine Mrs. Schmidtheiser and Bill Smith having a wild sexual affair? If so, you can cast Mrs. Smith in the role of suspect."

"Mel!" Jane said, scandalized.

"The other kind of passion is all sorts of things that fall under the heading of self-defense," he went on, ignoring her. "Defense in physical terms, of course, but often defense of a lifework. Let's say you—wait, let me think of a good one. Okay, suppose you'd won an Olympic gold medal in something like speed skating, and in forty years your record still hadn't been broken. You've spent those forty years teaching, pontificating, being a celebrity on the strength of it. Every four years when the Olympics roll around, the newspeople come and do nice, flattering film pieces on you. Then one day someone comes up to you and says he has proof that you had tiny little rockets attached to your skates when you won."

Jane smiled at the image.

"It's silly, but don't you see? You've made that record your lifework. Your entire reputation rests on a cheat and here's somebody threatening your life, in a sense."

Jane nodded. "Like Bill's resort, which was his lifework, and Doris's research, which was hers."

"But, Jane, the difference is, I'm talking about perpetrators—and they were the victims," Mel said.

There was a moment's thick silence before Jane said, "Hell! So what's the point?"

"Don't get defensive," he said. "I'm just pointing out the reasons I think it has to come back to money. It's the only thing that makes sense and provides a strong enough motive."

"And the only large amounts of money at stake here involve the resort," Shelley said.

"If that's true, how does Doris figure in?" Jane asked. "It's not as if she'd stand to profit if the resort was sold or wasn't."

"Unless she knew something that would prevent the sale," Shelley said. "If either Pete or Tenny really thought they would profit from the sale and Doris knew—oh, maybe that Bill wasn't really Gregory's son and thus didn't really own the land—wouldn't that make it worthwhile to stop her from telling anyone?"

"Jeez! That's a bizarre thought," Jane said. "Everybody's been concentrating on who Gregory really was, but nobody's questioned who Bill really was. And Doris had spent years snooping around the family relationships."

"I'm afraid I was just giving an example, Jane," Shelley said. "And a bad one at that. You're forgetting about that old photograph."

"Not entirely. That little boy looked a lot like the mother in the picture, but he was just a cute little boy who could have grown up to look like anybody. He might not have been the older man we knew as Bill Smith. Remember, Tenny told us that the mother died when Bill was very little, and Gregory pretty much left it to some of the tribal women to take care of him. Suppose, for some weird reason, one of them had substituted another child—"

And even as Jane was speaking, she heard how stupid it sounded.

"I'm sorry," she said. "My brain's run amok."

"I'm so glad you were the one to say that," Mel muttered. "Everybody done? Let's get back to see what that fleabag dog of yours has done."

After they'd gotten back on the road and were nearing the resort, Shelley said, "Jane, I think I've got a blister on my heel. I want to run in the gift shop and get a bandage for it. Will you come along and walk back with me?"

"I'll come with you, too," Mike said. "There's something I need."

Mel took the rest of the kids back to the cabins and Jane sat in the lobby, waiting for Shelley and Mike to return. As she waited, Lucky passed through with an armload of notebooks and file folders. When he saw her sitting alone, he came and sat down. "Are you teaching a class?" she asked.

"No, just finished one. The last of the evening."

"Oh! I'm glad I ran into you," Jane said. She'd reached into her jacket pocket for a tissue and had felt something else. She pulled out the tooth. "I've been meaning to give you this. It's HawkHunter's tooth. I found it out by the front door. The snow had melted back there and it appeared. If you think it might help in making a mold or something for a bridge, you can give it to him."

Lucky took the tooth, glanced at it, and handed it back. "Sony, but that's not HawkHunter's tooth."

Jane laughed. "How many people have lost teeth by the front door?"

"I don't know, but this is someone else's," Lucky said.

"How do you know?"

"It's easy," he said. And he showed her.

When they got back to the condo, they found Linda chatting with the girls. "Hi, Mrs. Jeffry, Mrs. Nowack," she said, heading for her jacket. "I stopped in to check that everything was all right here. The sheriff called Tenny and said he couldn't find any of you."

"What did he want us for?" Jane asked.

"Nothing in particular," Linda said. "At least I don't think so. Just wondered where everybody had gone. Don't worry, I'll call him back for you. Unless you want to talk to him?"

"God forbid!" Jane exclaimed. "Has Willard wrecked anything?"

"Willard?" Linda got a mushy expression. "He wouldn't do a thing like that. Oh, the Sunday papers were all over the living room and there was an awful lot of dog spit on the sliding glass doors—"

"That cat's been back, I'd guess," Jane said.

"I took him out for a while and he chased some squirrels," Linda said. "That made him happy. I'm going home. It's been a long day. Is there anything else you need before I leave?"

"Nothing. Thanks. Oh—there is one thing," Jane said.

"What's that?"

"I know you're going to think I've lost the last of my marbles, but—well—as dumb as it sounds, could I look at the back of your teeth?"

Linda burst out laughing. "Do you think you can fit your head in my mouth to do that?"

Jane was blushing with embarrassment, which made her feel all the sillier. "No, I just want to stick my compact mirror behind your front teeth."

Linda nodded. "Oh, I get it."

"I don't!" Shelley exclaimed. "Have you both gone nuts?"

Jane fished her compact out of her purse and slipped the edge of the mirror behind Linda's upper teeth. Linda was grinning around the mirror. "Shelley, look at the back of Linda's front teeth—"

"Okay," Shelley said suspiciously.

"Now, get another mirror and look at the back of mine."

Shelley did as she was told. Her eyes widened and she looked at each of them again. "Wow!"

Linda removed the mirror. "Shovel incisors, it's called. Indians' front teeth cup on the back side. I think Orientals' teeth do, too, but Occidentals are much flatter."

"That's so strange!" Shelley said.

"There are skull differences, too, but I don't know what they are," Linda said, pulling on her outdoor boots.

"Jane, how did you know about this?" Shelley asked.

"I ran into Lucky and told him I'd found HawkHunter's tooth in the snow. He just glanced at it and said it couldn't be HawkHunter's because of this shovel-incisor thing."

"How weird," Shelley said. "How many people do you think have lost a tooth by the front door lately?"

Jane shrugged. "I don't know. I guess it might even be an animal's tooth. I didn't ask him that."

"Well, if you think I'm letting you stick my compact in Willard's mouth—!" Shelley said, horrified.

"I'm sure Willard wouldn't mind," Linda said. There was a knock on the door. "That's Thomas come to walk me home. See you ladies later."

They thanked her effusively for her attentions and Jane stood at the door, waving her off. Thomas Whitewing had an arm around her as they slogged off through the darkness. When Jane came back in, Shelley had poured each of them a glass of white wine.

"You were very quiet on the way back here," Shelley said. "Were you thinking about that weird tooth thing?"

"No, actually I was thinking about immigrants. Or, I guess they're emigrants when they move within their own country. You and I were struggling and gasping as we came up the hill through the snow, but think of the thousands of women who literally walked over this mountain without the benefit of fancy waterproof snow boots and down-filled nylon parkas."

"Funny, I'd thought about that, too, as we were driving back here this afternoon," Shelley said. "But I was thinking that many of them either set out pregnant or became pregnant along the way. Some even had babies just before or during the trek."

Jane got up and prodded at the fire Mel had started before taking the boys back to his place. "I was talking to Mel about being homesick. I guess that's what started me thinking about it. We can go anywhere in the world now and not be too far from contact with those we left behind. Even if you're a missionary in the Andes, you can still walk down the mountain to a town and send a fax or make a long-distance call. But when all those immigrants came here, they were really leaving behind everything and everybody they knew. If you left some little village along the Rhine to move to St. Louis or some place, you could pretty well count on never seeing the people at home again. Your parents, maybe. Brothers and sisters. You could write—if you knew how—but letters could take months to get back and forth, if they made it at all. You'd leave knowing you wouldn't be able to go to your mother's funeral or ever see your sister's next baby—"

Shelley shook her head. "Not necessarily. That's one of the things the teacher talked about in that beginner's class I took the other day. It's something called chain migration. A town would sometimes collect the money to send some representatives of a couple of families to America to find a suitable place to move to. Then, once the place was chosen, they would follow along in a chain. The young bachelors first, to buy land and build a few houses, then some young families, and eventually the older generation. Sometimes, the teacher said, virtually the entire town moved itself halfway around the globe."

Jane smiled. "That's interesting. And it makes me feel better about it. I'm going to have to call my mother when we get home and see what she knows about our family's history."

"Aha! You're hooked."

Jane sipped her wine. "Well, maybe a little."

"Let's look at Doris's file."

Jane went and got it and, removing the papers, put them into tidy piles. The first pile was the census reports, which Shelley enjoyed as much as Jane had. "Look at the size of the families!" she exclaimed. "Good Lord! Here's a woman who says she's forty-six years old, and she has a four-year-old child at home as well as a twenty-four-year-old and a dozen in between! Twenty years of steady childbearing."

Jane was studying another sheet. "This one's odd. The mother is twenty-seven, but there's a child of fifteen. That doesn't seem likely."

"It doesn't seem
nice
, either," Shelley said. "No, look. The husband is forty. I'll bet these older ones are his children from a previous marriage. At least I hope so. See, the children are fifteen, thirteen, eleven, and then there's a gap, then a six-year-old and a three-year-old."

"I wonder who she was looking for on these," Jane said. "There isn't any highlighting or notation on the back of any of the reports. Where are they from?"

Shelley shuffled the papers. "One from a township in New York State. One from Denver—no, two from Denver. And one that looks like a farm community in Colorado someplace."

"How can you tell it's a farm community?" Jane asked.

"For one thing, all the men give their occupation as farmer."

Jane laughed. "I think that's a good way of guessing. I'm not sure I'm cut out to be a genealogist. Do you see any names that mean anything to you?"

Shelley ran a finger down the left column of each page. "I don't think so. Some of the names in the farm one look vaguely Russian or Slavic, but no Romanovs or even a Smith."

As Shelley folded up the census reports, Jane handed her the pile of clippings and photos. "Some of these aren't even in English," Shelley complained.

"No, but they each have a number written on the back. There are translations in the stack of paperwork. Most are Romanov cousins and people from Holnagrad, according to Doris's translations."

"Here's an obituary of Gregory Smith."

"Yes, but don't get excited," Jane warned her. "It doesn't tell much of anything about him. Just that he came from Europe and arrived in the community in the 1920s. Most of it's about his late wife, who was connected to the town. I'd guess that either Bill or his sister gave the information to the paper, and they either didn't know much more or were respecting their father's lifelong secrecy and didn't say what they knew."

"I wonder if this Sergei person in the portrait photograph with the Tsar is supposed to be Gregory's father."

"I have no idea."

"What else do you have there?" Shelley carefully bundled up the clippings and pictures and traded them for a thin sheaf of papers Jane had put together with a paper clip.

"Some of it is translations of the clippings. There are a lot that seem to be typed-up transcripts of interviews with old-timers around here who claimed to remember Gregory Smith."

"Have you read them all?"

"Only skimmed them, I'm afraid."

"Okay, you take half. I'll take half."

They dutifully read in silence for a while. Katie strolled through, stared at them for a minute, and said, "You look like you're doing homework. Want to do some of mine when we get home?"

"In your dreams, kiddo," Jane answered.

"Can't hurt to ask," Katie replied breezily.

"What's this about?" Shelley asked, handing Jane the typed sheet with the lists of names and book and page numbers.

"I don't know, except what it says. Sheepshead Bay court records."

"I can see why the two names are starred," Shelley said. "Roman and the one Smith name. Maybe that's the court where Gregor changed his name. If he did. But I wonder why one Smith is starred and the other one isn't. And why did she record the rest of these names?"

Jane understood these to be rhetorical questions and didn't answer. Instead she just put the page on her lap and gazed at it.

A moment later, she gasped.

"What's wrong?"

Jane sat with her mouth open for a minute, then said, "Did you see those greeting cards in the gift shop? The ones with the busy little repetitive patterns on them and you're supposed to stare at them for a long time and imagine you're looking
through
the page-"

"Yes, I think they're a Communist plot to brainwash people like you into thinking you're seeing a secret message."

"But I did see the message on them. And I have a feeling I'm seeing one here. Sort of through the page, if you know what I mean."

"I have no idea what you mean!"

"Look at the list. Look at the names that
aren't
starred. You're right. There's a reason for the rest of the names!"

Shelley went through the list and looked back at Jane blankly. "No secret message."

"Wait a minute. Let me think this out before I open my mouth and make a complete fool of myself," Jane said. She got up and paced for a few moments. Shelley waited patiently, pouring herself another scant tablespoonful of wine and putting another log on the fire.

Finally Jane sat back down and took a deep breath. "I think I know."

She talked for five minutes straight, pointed out the evidence of her theory in Doris's notes and with two other objects; then she sat back, feeling mentally exhausted.

"If this is right—and I suspect it is—I have two questions," Shelley said.

"Fire away."

"Don't sound so cocky," Shelley warned. "First, how did Bill Smith know?"

"Doris told him," Jane said smugly.