From Here to Paternity (19 page)

"Linda, it was
a joke
!" Thomas protested.

"So is the tomahawk chop at football games."

"No, that's different. That's—"

"Excuse me!" Jane said. "I didn't mean to start a fight."

"Fight?" Thomas and Linda said in unison, then laughed at each other.

"This isn't a fight," Linda went on. "This is a pleasant chat. We rent the V.F.W. hall and sell tickets when we
really
have a fight. Anyway, there's one thing we do agree on in all this. Little Feather."

"Who is that?" Jane asked. "The woman I saw with HawkHunter in the native costume?"

"Costume is right," Linda said. "She's his wife and she's a bitch."

At this Thomas nodded. "A professional Indian."

Jane smiled. "What does that mean?"

Linda explained. "She's the daughter of a woman who may or may not be one-quarter Indian and a Vietnam vet, also part Indian, who came home and went quietly crazy someplace in the mountains in California. Little Feather, whose real name is something like Sally Jones, grew up one of those malcontents who had to find somebody to blame for everything that was wrong with her life, so she latched onto being an Indian. All that silly feathers-and-beads getup, the medicine woman mystique. She's just a fraud. And I suspect she makes good money on it along the way. That suede outfit wasn't cheap, and she drives a BMW. Even if it's only a rental, it still costs big bucks."

"You know a lot about her," Jane said.

"My cousin Gloria went to school in California with Little Feather's cousin."

A group of customers entered the room and Thomas Whitewing leaped to his feet to go back into waiter mode. "We need to walk off dessert, Jane," Mel said. "We'll see you around, Linda."

As they left the dining room, Mel took Jane's arm and said, "You amaze me. You're the only person I know who can get so completely involved in gossiping about people you don't even know."

"Oh, Mel," she said sorrowfully. "Someday I'll have to explain to you the difference between common gossip and research into the human condition. There's a fine distinction."

"Sure there is," he said.

Sunday morning, Jane got up early and prowled around the silent cabin from window to window, watching it snow heavily. She put her boots on and threw a blanket over her nightgown and robe to let Willard out. He didn't enjoy the frigid, blowing snow any more than she did, and they both decided the best plan was to go back to bed. Willard dropped right off, but Jane couldn't get back to sleep. Too many naps, she decided.

Or too many murders on her mind.

After forty-five minutes, she got up again and made herself some hot cocoa. Pulling a chair and an ottoman nearer the glass doors, she settled down with her cocoa and watched the now-diminishing snow. The white cat popped its head up over the railing of the deck. Jane looked around quickly and discovered that Willard hadn't followed her. If he saw the cat and went haywire, he'd wake everybody. The cat sat preening and washing, glancing at Jane every now and then as if for admiration.

"I wonder what you know," Jane said out loud. "If only you could talk."

So much for Shelley's assurances that once they'd organized their thinking, the subconscious could be counted on to sort it all out and supply an answer.

Jane was more confused now than she had been last night. Far from having any glimmer of a solution, she felt mired in unrelated facts, opinions, and information.

Still, she had a weird sense that there was a light on behind a door somewhere in her brain.
In the madman's worn
.

She smiled to herself at the recollection. Once, in college, she'd had a rather strange English professor who had assigned as the class's term-paper subject, "Imagination." The students were to come up with a concrete theory that explained imagination, especially in regard to the writers they'd studied that semester. Jane had invented "The Warehouse with the Madman in the Back Room," and hadn't thought about it again for years.

The theory went like this: your brain is a great warehouse where every fact, experience, and sensation is stored. There are acres and acres of shelving. All fairly neatly organized and labeled. At least at first. A child has only a relatively few, but very big, important things stored, and the warehouse manager keeps all that big, important stuff on low shelves near the front where it's easily accessible. The madman— Imagination—can romp around freely, putting a gadget from this fact on that sensation, substituting a gizmo from one bit of information for a thingamabob holding together another two facts. This is why young children are so creative and uninhibited with their imaginations: the madman has free run of the place.

But as time goes on, the warehouse manager, and the outside world, conspire against the madman. The shelves get fuller and fuller. Parents and teachers start requiring the warehouse manager to get his act together and be able to find and supply things more efficiently when they're required. Of necessity, stuff starts getting put on higher shelves, and the warehouse manager can't have the madman capering about recklessly while the manager is climbing ladders to find things.

So the madman gets put away in the back room during the day. He's only free at night, while the manager is sleeping. At night, the madman rules the warehouse, making dreams and nightmares. And sometimes he plays with the shiny new stuff—the nine times tables or the geography of South America. Other stuff he ignores, or actually dislikes enough to destroy—like the seven times tables and the necessity of writing thank-you notes for birthday presents.

And still life goes on. New things keep coming in. The warehouse manager starts running out of easily accessible room, so he begins shoving old stuff farther back on the shelves and putting the new stuff in front. And he's getting older, too. His enthusiasm for doing a perfect job is waning. His organizational skills start slipping. And that damned curious, capering madman is driving him crazy. So eventually he locks the madman up entirely. Only on rare occasions does the manager forget to lock up the madman's room at night, and he gets out and bats around, creating wild dreams.

In Jane's theory, a writer could make use of the madman, but not with any reliability. When the writer needed something, the warehouse manager would tear up one aisle and down another, tossing random bits of this and that, old movies, new sensations, mislabeled facts, dusty old memories into a basket, which he'd then toss in the back room to the madman. The madman, thrilled with these toys, would reassemble the bits into something barely recognizable and toss it back out for the writer to use. It was all supplies from the writer's own mental warehouse, but in a form nobody had ever imagined before.

Jane hadn't thought about the madman for a long time, but now she sensed that the light was on in his little cell at the back of the warehouse. She'd been here for only two full days, but she'd dumped a lot of new material on the doorstep of the warehouse and she had the belief—or was it only the longing to believe?—that she knew nearly everything she needed to know to make sense of the seemingly senseless deaths. If only the warehouse manager would toss the right facts, impressions, and sensations to the madman. Maybe she could figure out why Bill Smith and Doris Schmidtheiser had been killed. Then she could close off the "Colorado Vacation" shelf and get on with her life without having to keep on wondering.

But forty-eight hours from now she'd be on her way home—provided the sheriff didn't detain her! No, she couldn't even contemplate that. Even getting away from here was going to be awful. They had an eight o'clock flight, which meant that they'd all have to be up and moving pretty briskly by five at the latest to get everything, including Willard, packed up, down the mountain, through rush-hour Denver traffic, and to the airport. They'd have to return the rental car, check Willard and the baggage through, and all without losing any of the kids. Ugh! What a thought. It might just be easier to stay up very, very late and never go to bed at all Monday night. If only there were an airport closer.

She stared out the window at Flattop.

Airport… ?

Airport!

She leaped up and ran to the bedroom. Shaking Shelley's arm, she said, "Wake up, Shelley. I've got to talk to you. I've got an idea!"

"What time is it?" Shelley asked her pillow.

"Time? Oh, time. Almost nine, I think."

"Fix… coffee…" Shelley mumbled.

"Okay, but hurry and wake up."

She started the coffeemaker and ran back to the bedroom to check on Shelley's progress. Her bed was empty and the shower was running. Good.

Jane paced around excitedly until the coffee was ready and Shelley emerged. "Now, what is this?" Shelley demanded as Jane handed her a steaming cup.

"Come to the window. Look at the hill."

"Uh-huh. It's still there."

"Describe it."

"A little mountain with the top cut off," Shelley said.

"But it's long and flat. It isn't a mountain, it's a long, straight ridge with the top cut off. Now, do you remember the last thing I said up there before we skied down?"

"Something about breaking your neck and me raising your children?"

"No. You were saying it was a long, flat place where you might expect to find a cemetery, and I said you could land a 747 up there."

Shelley turned from contemplating the mountain to stare at Jane. "An airport," she said quietly.

"Yes. An airport. Think how good for business an airport up here would be."

Shelley sat down on one of the sofas. "Let me think."

"Don't you see how much more valuable an airport would make this place?" Jane said. "And HawkHunter wants the Indians to own that land. From what Tenny said, he was making threats to try to take the whole resort, but I'll bet that was just a ploy to get Bill, or the new owners, to settle and get rid of him by giving the tribe the hill. Just that little old useless, bunny-slope hill. With the cemetery at the top that Linda Moose foot had never heard of, even though she's part of the tribe."

Shelley shook her head as if to clear it. "Okay. Okay. Say HawkHunter had this airport idea and was trying to force somebody to give up the land to the tribe so they could build an airport and make a—forgive the term—killing. Are you casting him as Bill's murderer because of it?"

Jane stopped pacing and flung herself onto the other sofa. "I was, but I'm not sure why." She thought for a minute. "Okay. Here's one way: HawkHunter wants to get this land from Bill and thinks Bill's more likely to cave in than the investors—"

"Logical so far."

"But when Bill gets Paul up here, and Bill is apparently going through with the sale, HawkHunter stages the protest to make things difficult. Bill is mad at HawkHunter for queering the deal and tells HawkHunter if he doesn't lay off, Bill will just keep the damned place and build the airport himself on the top of the ridge. The tribe knows Bill is a man of few words, but he really means the few words he says. HawkHunter sees his cause is lost now. But if he kills Bill, he accomplishes two things. He really scares the investors off, which is what it looks like has happened with Paul clearing out,
and
he doesn't have to worry about Bill's threat to build the airport. He knows from the tribe that Joanna wouldn't take on a big, new project like that. She'd be hard pressed just to keep the place going on an even keel. Besides, Joanna is much more likely to cave in to Hawk-Hunter's demands than Bill ever was."

She sat back, looking smug.

"What about Doris?" Shelley asked.

Jane stopped looking smug. "I don't know. Hell. Maybe she overheard them talking about it?"

Shelley shook her head. "And if killing Bill was a deliberate attempt to scare off the investors, why dress the snowman up like a king and make it look like it had to do with the genealogists?"

"Okay. Good points," Jane said sadly.

"Cheer up," Shelley said. "We may be on the right track with this airport thing and just be looking at it wrong. What would you think about just talking to Tenny about the idea of an airport here—without voicing any suspicions of anyone—and seeing what she says?"

"I think it's a good idea. We might learn something valuable."

Shelley gave Tenny a call and said she'd like to talk to her about something. Tenny seemed glad to hear from her and said she was on her way to the re-sort office to do a little paperwork. They could just ask for her at the desk there whenever they wanted.

Jane and Shelley dressed hurriedly and woke Katie to say they were leaving for a bit and not to let anyone in while they were gone. Then they set out to trudge to the lodge. The heavy snow was now only a blowing mist off the pines, and everything looked incredibly clean and crisp. "It's hard to believe there's mud and pine cones and trash under all this, isn't it?" Jane said.

Halfway down the road, they had to climb onto the snowbank at the side to let a snowplow grumble by. As they stood there, Shelley said, "Don't look right now, but there's somebody following us."

Jane's heart gave a frantic lurch, but she pretended to gaze around casually and spotted a man in a navy ski outfit lurking farther up the road. "I think I recognize him," she said quietly. "One of the sheriff's men."

"I wonder if he's protecting us or spying on us," Shelley said.