“Not yet I don’t,” John said. “You’re telling me what’s true in there.”
“Very well,” Fitzroy said. “Doeface did marry one Henry Track-Of-Skunk, a full-blooded Choctee, and lived with him on the reservation. They did have a daughter in 1970 named Little Feather, and shortly after that the marriage ended.”
John said, “Then what?”
Fitzroy shrugged. “They left the reservation, mother and daughter.”
“And she took back her maiden name, like it says in the letter?”
“Unlikely,” Fitzroy said. “She didn’t keep the name Track-Of-Skunk, but I can find no telephone listing for a Doeface Redcorn anywhere in the West throughout the seventies.” Turning to Andy, he said, “The Internet is very good on things like that, you know. If there’s a list, the Internet will find it, and old phone books are nothing but lists.”
John apparently didn’t care much about the wonders of the Internet. He said, “So Doeface disappeared, and you don’t know what name she used.”
“I would guess she married again,” Fitzroy said. “And, once they left the reservation, I would imagine the mother changed Little Feather Track-Of-Skunk’s name, too. The child would have been less than a year old, and it’s unlikely she has any idea she was ever called by that name.”
John said, “But you don’t know where she is, and you don’t know what her name is, but she’ll be about the same age as this Little Feather here.”
“Yes,” Fitzroy said.
“So, when this gets into the news,” John said, “and it will, this casino, all this money, inherited all of a sudden by this pretty girl here—”
“Thank you, John.”
“Anytime,” he said, then said to Fitzroy, “So she’s on the news, and the real Little Feather says, ‘Hey, that’s me.’ Then what?”
Irwin said, “Why then, the way to prove out the competing claims is, let’s do a DNA test on the only known relative of Little Feather we can find, which is Joseph Redcorn, and guess what?”
Andy said, “What about baby prints?”
Most of the others looked blank, but Irwin said, “You mean footprints of babies taken shortly after birth, for later ID. They didn’t do that in a very poor reservation infirmary in 1970.”
Tiny said, “What about Skunkface?”
“Track-Of-Skunk,” Irwin corrected, and Fitzroy said, “What about him?”
“What if he shows up? And says, ‘There’s my baby girl.’”
Little Feather knew the answer to that one. “So what?” she asked. “I’m inheriting a third of a casino through my mother, nothing to do with him. Maybe I can get him a job driving the parking lot bus.”
Andy said, “What if he says, ‘There isn’t my baby girl’?”
Little Feather said, “Why would he? The last time he saw me, I was ten months old.”
Andy said, “Identifying marks? Strawberry birthmarks, stuff like that?”
Fitzroy said, “From what I’ve learned about Track-Of-Skunk, I doubt his eyes ever focused quite that clearly on his baby daughter. If he’s alive, he probably doesn’t remember her at all.”
John said, “Social Security number.”
“Under the name of Shirley Ann Farraff,” Little Feather said.
John looked at her. “I have the feeling that’s the name you started with.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So?”
Fitzroy said, “Tell him the story, Little Feather.”
“Sure.” She gave him her most honest look, which wasn’t particularly honest, and said, “My mother, Doeface Redcorn, had me on a reservation somewhere, father unknown, named me Little Feather Redcorn. When I was two, my mother moved in with Frank Farraff. I don’t think they ever married, but my mother renamed me Shirley Ann Farraff, because we weren’t living on the reservation. When I was fourteen, Frank tried to rape me, and my mom wouldn’t stand up for me, so I left. But by that time, I already had my Social Security card, so I went on being Shirley Ann Farraff.”
John said, “How much of that is true?”
“Everything from where my mother moved in with Frank.”
“And who was your mother?”
“Doris Elkhorn, full-blooded Choctee.”
“So that’s what it says on your birth certificate.”
Little Feather shook her head. “The only time I ever saw my birth certificate,” she said, “my mother had to show it when I started school. I remember it said ‘Baby Elkhorn, female, father unknown.’ My Little Feather story is, I’ve never seen a birth certificate, wouldn’t know whom to ask. Investigators can look for a birth certificate under Farraff and never find one.”
“And under Redcorn and never find one,” John pointed out.
Guilderpost said, “John, if people start looking into Little Feather’s past, they can’t get further back than Shirley Ann Farraff. It’s clear she was born under some other name, but no one will ever prove that name wasn’t Little Feather Redcorn.”
“But,” John objected, “she can’t prove it was Redcorn.”
“DNA,” said Irwin.
John nodded, absorbing that, then apparently grew tired at last of sitting on half his ass, squeezed in beside Tiny. Standing, shaking himself all over a little like a dog, he said, “Fitzroy, what I want to know is, how come you know all this? How come you can set it up?”
“I’ve been setting it up,” Fitzroy told him, “off and on for six years. I was first putting together some Dutch land grants along the Hudson River, very nice paper, clouding the ownership of any number of valuable properties, and the owners were always relieved, even grateful, at the modest price I would ask to sell them the grants, ending all likelihood of later dispute and making it possible for them to sell their properties if they were ever of a mind to—a very nice enterprise, if I say so myself—when some collateral research led me to the Silver Chasm Casino and the died-off Pottaknobbees. I asked myself, Could one find a Pottaknobbee who could be tweaked into just one more living relative?” He gestured theatrically at Little Feather. “The result, you see before you.”
John and Andy and Tiny looked at one another. Tiny shrugged, and the bed groaned, and apparently bounced Andy to his feet, where he turned and said, “Well, Fitzroy, it sounds pretty good.”
“Thank you.”
John said, “And tomorrow’s the day.”
“It all depends on Little Feather,” Fitzroy said.
“Thanks, I needed that,” Little Feather said.
John said to her, “You’ll be okay. What time you gonna call them?”
“Two in the afternoon.”
“So whatever’s gonna happen,” John said, “we should all know about it by six, huh?”
Fitzroy said, “We could meet here again tomorrow at six, if that’s your suggestion.”
“Good,” John said.
Fitzroy said, “And, if we’re not back yet when you arrive—”
“That’s okay,” Andy assured him, “we’ll just let ourselves in.”
“That isn’t what I was going to say.”
Andy said, “You want us to stand out there in the cold, attracting attention?”
Little Feather said, “No, he doesn’t.” Rising, she said, “If you three also think we got a shot, that’s good. Fitzroy, drive me back now, will you?”
“Of course, my dear.”
The two trios parted outside the door, with expressions of warmth and mutual respect, and then Little Feather reversed the process homeward: car to supermarket, shop, cab to Whispering Pines.
Little Feather spent a quiet evening with her exercise tapes and her reading—she particularly liked biographies of famous women, like Messalina and Catherine the Great—and the next afternoon at two, she left the Winnebago to go to the Whispering Pines office to call the casino. She shut the motor home door, turned, and saw two men wearing dark suits under their overcoats walking toward her. One said, “Miss Redcorn?”