From Here to Paternity (20 page)

"I don't think I like either choice."

When they got to the lodge, the receptionist said that Tenny was, indeed, in her office, but was on the phone now if they wanted to wait.

"Let's go to the gift shop," Shelley suggested.

"I can't afford to go in there again," Jane said. "I'll wait out front. I want to see what's become of our 'escort'."

"Get a load of the bulletin board," Shelley said.

A listing of events on a large board in the lobby was constantly being updated. This morning it announced that HawkHunter would be doing a reading from his best-selling book,
I
,
HawkHunter
, in Lounge A at 7:00 p.m. on Monday night. Public invited. Reception to follow. Cost: $5, to be donated to the Native American Legal Rights Fund.

"I don't know if it's admirably open-minded or just plain stupid of the Smiths to offer him a forum," Shelley muttered. She went off shaking her head in wonder.

Someone had just shoveled the front walk and the sun had emerged for a moment. The light hitting the brickwork made it steam. Jane sat down on one of the benches and looked around. There was no sign of the navy-clad officer. Maybe he'd come into the lodge behind them and was watching her from inside. Or maybe he was trailing after Shelley.

Jane gazed at the bricks at her feet. She hadn't noticed before, but they were laid in a very unusual herringbone pattern. She'd been thinking about bricking over her cement patio in the spring, and this would be a nice pattern to copy. At first, as she studied the design to memorize it, she wasn't consciously aware of the oddly shaped, shiny white pebble next to her foot. Then she picked it up idly to toss away and realized it wasn't a pebble.

It was a tooth! Of all the weird things to find. But of course! It must be HawkHunter's tooth. The one Pete had knocked out in their fight right here. She couldn't quite bring herself to throw it away. When HawkHunter got over being so proud of missing it, he'd probably want to get the hole in his mouth filled in, and the original tooth might serve as the best model for a replacement. She'd give it to Linda Moose foot to give back to him, she thought, slipping it into her pocket.

"Jane, I've discovered the mother lode of the best cinnamon rolls in the world," Shelley said from behind her. "I'm going to hate going home to my own cooking."

Tenny joined them in the casual dining room just as they were being seated. When the waiter had brought their coffee and taken orders, Shelley said, "Tenny, we were wondering about Flattop. Had your uncle ever thought of using it for an airport runway?"

"Of course," Tenny said. "He talked about it for years, but he had some geologists out three years ago, and it's impossible. Shelley, what's wrong? You look as disappointed as Uncle Bill was."

"It has to do with the quality and type of the rock," Tenny went on. "The central core of the ridge is very hard, but too narrow for a runway. At least a runway that would take a big plane. You could land puddle jumpers up there, but not anything really commercial. Everything to the sides is—I can't remember the name they called it—something too soft and crumbly anyway. Uncle Bill had two different groups of geologists in and they both agreed that you'd have to virtually shore up the entire ridge along the length to take the impact of a heavy plane landing. That's all in the report Uncle Bill prepared for your husband. Why do you ask?"

"No reason," Shelley said. "It just crossed our minds that it might be an option." She glared at Jane as if it were all her fault.

"Is there any word about your uncle?" Jane asked, hurriedly changing the subject.

"From the sheriff? No, I'm afraid not. He says he's 'pursuing several leads', but won't say what they are."

I hope having that silly deputy follow me around constitutes pursuing a lead
, Jane thought grumpily.

"I brought something along that might interest you," Tenny said, reaching for an accordian-file folder she'd been carrying and had laid aside when they first sat down. Extracting a five-by-seven white envelope, she removed from it an old picture—a posed professional photograph mounted in a fancy brown cardstock designed to fold out and stand up. "Aunt Joanna and I found this with some of Uncle Bill's things. It must be the one photograph I told you he once mentioned."

The picture was of a couple and two young children. The boy, presumably Bill Smith, was about three and wearing a "farmer's boy" outfit, little overalls with a plaid shirt, but these weren't clothes just for a picture. A barely discernible patch on one knee attested to the fact that these were the best of his everyday clothes. The little girl, Pete Andrews's mother, was about two years old and wearing a very simple, unfrilly little dress that likewise was probably the best of everyday. She had a blond Buster Brown hairdo, ornamented with a big bow that matched her dress.

The mother was a thin, tired-looking woman. She must have died not very long after this picture was taken, and there was a hint of illness already in the drawn lines of her pretty face. Although the picture must have been taken in the early 1930s, the age of bobbed hair, the woman either hadn't known the fashion or hadn't chosen to follow it. Her hair, dark blond and curly, was pulled into a thick knot at the back of her neck. Wispy tendrils had escaped around her face. She wore a severe dress of a light, print pattern with only a narrow white collar and matching belt as decoration. This was clearly a farm wife, but oddly enough, with her plain garb and hair, she wore what looked very much like diamond earrings and a rather elaborate, sparkling necklace. She also wore two rings on the hand that came around the toddler on her lap. Her other hand, behind the little boy and probably hanging onto him as he stood on the photographer's plush little bench beside her, wasn't visible.

"Look at the jewelry," Jane said softly to Shelley as they both studied the photograph.

"It was in an old-fashioned wooden cigar box with the picture," Tenny said, also lowering her voice. "The necklace, earrings, and three rings. I'm putting them in a safe-deposit box first thing in the morning."

"Did you and your aunt know about this jewelry?"

"I didn't, but she did. Uncle Bill tried to give it to her when they were first married, but she said it wasn't her style and he'd better save it for when they had a daughter. Of course, they never did, and she said after a while she forgot about it and didn't remember until we found it. She's given it to me." Tenny started to tear up as she spoke and took a quick gulp of her coffee.

Jane turned her attention to the man in the picture. The first thing one noticed about him was the difference in the colors of his face. He was obviously a man who was normally bearded and hatted and out in the sun, but he shaved the beard and put aside the hat for the photograph. His upper cheeks, nose, and the lower half of his forehead were a good three shades darker than the rest of his clean-shaven face. His hair, long and shaggy, had been slicked back, leaving his face looking vulnerable and oddly naked.

Yet it was a rather startling face. Handsome in a tierce way, with thick brows, an imposing jaw, and the kind of large, somewhat close, almost transparently blue eyes often seen in Civil War-era photographs. It was obvious from that lean, strong, almost angry face that having a picture taken wasn't his free choice. He wore a black suit that must have been old-fashioned even during those days, and a suspiciously stiff white collar that bit into his strong, thick neck. It must have been purchased specifically for the photo and was probably never worn again. In fact, Jane could imagine him ripping it off and flinging it away as soon as the photographer snapped the shot.

And yet, for all his fierceness, he rested one hand gently on his wife's arm. It was a tender gesture— protective, supportive—and obviously spontaneous rather than posed. Perhaps he suspected that she would not grow old with him. Maybe that was why a man who wouldn't permit a photograph of himself had shaved and put on his good suit—probably his only suit—and posed for this. Not to have a picture of himself, but to have one of her before it was too late.

The studio name printed on the cardboard surround was located in Denver. So this thin, frail, doomed wife must have persuaded him to have the picture taken (perhaps not so very much against his will), not locally, but in the city where no one would know them. In those days, before I-70 and the Eisenhower Tunnel, the trip must have been a long, arduous one. Jane tried to imagine driving up over the Continental Divide in a 1920s vintage automobile and shuddered. Maybe there'd been a train instead.

"Jane?" Shelley elbowed her.

"I'm sorry. My imagination was running away."

Jane answered. "Tenny, are you sure this is Bill and his family?"

"Yes. There is another picture, a wedding picture, of this woman that is labeled. It's clearly the same person. And there are several other pictures of Uncle Bill as a child, and they are the same child as this little boy."

"But this isn't labeled?" Jane asked, turning it over.

"No. We slid it out of the folder to look, and there's no writing on the back."

"Your uncle certainly took more after his mother than his father," Shelley said.

"And he doesn't look Rasputin-ish in this picture," Jane said. "In fact, he's quite good-looking."

They chatted for a while about the details of the pictures; then Tenny carefully put the photograph back into the envelope. "I'm glad we found this and I appreciate having someone to show it to, but I'd be very grateful if you didn't tell anyone from the Holnagrad Society about it," she said. "I understand their enthusiasm and interest, but I don't want them harassing Aunt Joanna just now."

"Tenny, we wouldn't mention it to anyone, even if you hadn't asked," Jane assured her.

"Thanks, Jane. Now I've got to get going."

"Tenny, just one question before you run off," Shelley said. "I noticed the announcement in the lobby about HawkHunter doing a reading Monday."

"Yes," Tenny said grimly. "Another clever arrangement of Pete's. Before he and HawkHunter fell out. I'd love to find a way to cancel that, but HawkHunter is so damned litigious, I don't dare."

"Has Pete turned up?" Shelley asked.

"Oh, yes. About eight this morning. Hung over. Apologetic. Inclined to weep," she said contemptuously.

Shelley watched Tenny as she threaded her way through the tables and out of the dining room. "What are you thinking?" Jane asked her.

"Bad thoughts," Shelley said. "Very bad thoughts." She glanced around, making sure nobody else was close enough to overhear them. "You know, we've been trying to figure out how Pete, for example, could be the murderer. Mainly because we don't much like him and because he's pretty much of a moral weakling. But we don't know that, really. We know only what Tenny has told us about him. And we believe it because Tenny says so and we like her. She's
us
, if you know what I mean. She's a fortyish woman, speaks our language, and appears to be quite forthright."

"Agreed," Jane said, suspecting she knew what was coming next.

"But murderers can, in theory, be quite pleasant, normal-seeming people. You're always hearing people say, when someone's arrested for murder, "We never suspected! He seemed so normal!" So—"

"So maybe we've been taken in by Tenny? I'd hate to think that."

"So would I, but it's possible, Jane. And she's certainly involved in everything here and might be a good deal more involved than we suspect."

Jane nodded reluctantly. "I bet the same thing triggered this in you as it did in me. The mention of that jewelry."

"Exactly. It's hard to tell in a black-and-white photo, but it looked to me like the jewelry Bill's mother was wearing was worth a king's ransom. It really could have been some of Russia's—or Holnagrad's—crown jewels."

"It probably was real. The way the woman was dressed, it was clear that she didn't care about what my grandmother would have called 'fripperies'. She obviously had very simple taste. And yet she was wearing jewelry that was completely inappropriate to her clothing, not to mention to the frontierish way she must have lived. So the jewelry was out of keeping and very probably worn because her husband believed that if you had those jewels, you wore them in pictures. I loved that picture, by the way. It made me feel I knew those people. I found myself imagining that I knew them very, very well, in fact."

"I could tell you were taken with it," Shelley said affectionately. "The way you got that goofy, faraway look. Anyhow, my thinking was this: if I were a murderer—"

Jane snorted.

"No, listen. If I were a murderer, or somebody with anything important to hide, I would try to be as open and honest as possible. People are naturally suspicious of anyone who's secretive and guilty-acting or unpleasant. If you ask someone a seemingly innocent question and they answer by saying it's none of your damned business, or by being excessively sly about not answering, your first thought is that they're hiding something, right?"

"Or that it really is none of my business and I was damned rude for asking," Jane said. "Sorry. No jokes. Yes, I agree. If I were trying to hide something, I'd give as much of the truth as I could, and hope that the parts I left out weren't very noticeable."

"Exactly. So what might her seeming openness be hiding? To be blunt, she came out of Bill Smith's death with what might well be a fortune in jewelry."

"—and cotrusteeship of a huge estate—"

"—And possible proof of a valuable genealogical connection to the Tsars of Russia."

"Not proof of
her
connection," Jane pointed out.

"But proof mat might be valuable to someone else. Proof that might be either provided or withheld. For a price. She asked us not to mention that picture to anyone, remember? That could be innocent. Just a natural desire for privacy. Or it could be because she wants to spring the picture on someone else at the optimum moment."