“I don’t imagine,” Fitzroy said, “we’re looking at its final color change. But where do you suppose they are?”
They all got out of the Voyager, looking this way and that, and Irwin said, “Suppose they got cold and they’re waiting in the office?”
“Wouldn’t they see us drive in?”
Little Feather said, “Fitzroy, why don’t you look in your room?”
They stared at her, then at the closed door of Fitzroy’s room. Fitzroy bustled to it, pulling out his key, muttering something about “Can’t possibly” or some such, and when he got the door open, there they were, watching a soap, Andy in one of the two chairs, John in the other, Tiny a kind of profane Buddha on the bed, back against the headboard.
“There you are,” Andy said, cheerful as ever, getting to his feet as John offed the TV with the remote. “Little Feather, here, have my chair.”
Fitzroy seemed to have lost some of his self-assurance. “Did you,” he asked, “did you ask the maid to let you in?”
“Oh, why bother people when they’re working?” Andy said. “Come on, Little Feather, take a load off. We all wanna see this letter of yours.”
I’m enjoying these clowns, Little Feather thought as she crossed to say, “Thank you, Andy, you’re a gentleman,” and take the chair that had lately been his.
Fitzroy, sounding put out, said, “I’m surprised you haven’t read the letter already. It’s in the drawer over there.”
Andy affected hurt surprise. “We wouldn’t poke around in your personal possessions, Fitzroy. We all respect one another, don’t we?”
From the bed, Tiny said, “Yeah, we’re all gonna get along now, that’s the idea.”
John said, “We’re all kinda anxious to see this famous letter.”
“Show it to them, Fitzroy,” Little Feather said. “Let’s see how it plays.”
Fitzroy could be seen to decide not to make a federal case out of a simple breaking and entering. They’d been invited, and here they were. “Of course,” he said, crossing to the room’s flimsy little desk. “I’m quite proud of it, in fact,” he said, opening the drawer and taking out the copy they’d made at the nearby drugstore. “Only one copy, I’m afraid.”
So the way they worked it, Tiny stayed where he was on the double bed, holding the letter, and Andy and John sat to either side of him, scrunched on the edges of the mattress, and all three read it at once. And Irwin took the opportunity to sidle into John’s chair.
They finished, and Tiny handed the letter to Andy, who stayed where he was but leaned forward to hand it to Fitzroy, saying, “Has a nice naïve quality to it.”
“Thank you,” Fitzroy said.
Tiny rumbled, “United at last with my own people.”
Irwin grinned. “Heart-tugging, that part.”
John said, “How much of it is true?”
“Almost all of it,” Fitzroy assured him.
The three stayed where they were. Crowded together on the bed, the wide man in the middle, the other two bracing themselves with feet out to the side, they looked like an altarpiece from some very strange religion, but none of them seemed ready or willing to move.
John said, “All those named in the letter, that family tree?”
Holding the letter, Fitzroy went down the names: “Joseph Redcorn, he’s real. You know that, you met him.”
Andy said, “You mean, we unburied him.”
“Exactly. His daughter-in-law Harriet Littlefoot Redcorn, she’s real, or she was. She’s dead, but there are records.”
John said, “And Doeface?”
“Harriet’s daughter,” Fitzroy said, nodding. “Completely real. All trace of her is lost.”
“And her daughter.”
“You mean Little Feather here,” Fitzroy said.
“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.”