Little Feather was edging toward the door. The sheriff shifted himself directly in front of the doorway and folded his arms. HawkHunter had been trying to gently extricate himself from Leon Whitewing's grasp, but now he gave a great lurch sideways. Leon didn't loosen his grip and jerked HawkHunter back like a rag doll.
"You've got a lot to explain to the tribe — white boy!" Leon said.
"He's got a lot to explain to the sheriff, too," Jane said. "About the deaths of Doris Schmidtheiser and Bill Smith."
Chapter 24
There was a big table set in the dining room and Jane had been urged to sit at the head of it. Tenny had arranged for desserts, coffee, and brandy to be served, and was now sitting with the group, which included Linda Moose foot and Thomas Whitewing as well as his uncle Leon. Lucky had managed to lose Stu Gortner in order to join them, and the bookstore owner had come along too.
"… a lot of things," Jane was saying. "And they all came together at once. Linda had called Little Feather a professional Indian, and Shelley and I had laughed at HawkHunter's vanity in making himself look more typically Indian. But I hadn't put those two things together until I was staring at that list of names Doris had in her notes. I'd looked at them several times and they didn't mean anything. Then I started mumbling them out loud. And suddenly I realized that while 'Aulkunder' and 'HawkHunter' don't look anything alike, they sound alike."
"Lucky helped us contact a genealogist in Brooklyn to run down and look at the original records this morning," Shelley said. "And sure enough, they showed that it was him. As it turns out, this man is a teacher at the high school Johan Aulkunder attended. He called around to some of the older teachers and put together an interesting profile of the boy who turned himself into HawkHunter."
"Profile? What do you mean?" Tenny asked.
"According to the teachers who remember him," Shelley explained, "he was one of those sad, shy, brilliant loners who created a fantasy life for himself. He'd lived in a series of foster homes and, maybe because he had no real family of his own, became obsessed with Indians. Read every book in the library about them. Drew headdresses in his notebooks, had a vast collection of arrowheads, that sort of thing."
Jane picked up the story. "The day he turned eighteen, he changed his name and moved away. Nobody at the school had any idea what had become of him, and by the time he made a name for himself, it was a different name, with a more mature and possibly already slightly altered appearance. No one made the connection."
Leon Whitewing was nodding. "I understand now about the book."
"What do you mean, Uncle Leon?" Thomas asked. He was still looking very upset at the crumbling of HawkHunter's image.
Leon had a battered copy of the book with him. He opened it to the introduction and jabbed his finger at the last paragraph. "He says here that while the book is true in essence, he's altered the name of the tribe and the personal names of his relatives to protect both the tribe and his own family from unwanted public attention. But that wasn't why. It was because it was all a lie!"
The lady from the bookstore was sitting next to him and spoke up. "Now, Leon, that's not really fair. He probably meant it as fiction to begin with and put that in as a sort of flourish. Like Waller did— claiming he learned the story of Francesca and what's-his-name from the family."
Leon looked at her blankly. "Waller? Francesca?"
"Never mind, Leon. I just mean lots of authors add things like that to give the fiction a greater semblance of realism. And from what Mrs. Jeffry says about his background, the book probably started out as a way of recording a fantasy that was terribly important to him. Imagine this lonely boy with no real family inventing a family for himself. Generations of family. But the fantasy became a book and the book took off and he was suddenly a figure of respect, almost idolatry. He got trapped in his own lie."
"Which he probably didn't mind," Leon said grumpily.
"Who would mind?" Jane said. "We'd all like that kind of adoration. Not to mention the income that went with it."
"I still don't understand how Mrs. Schmidtheiser came into it all," Tenny said.
"She was a snoop," Jane said. "That's all. She was rummaging around in some records and saw his name change. She made a note of it, and quite innocently mentioned it to him. In fact, I think I probably saw her do it right here in this room. She was with him at a table where he was sitting alone. I assumed she was haranguing him to come to the debate later that day. He looked taken aback and I thought it was just from the force of her personality, but it was probably shock that she'd found out his deepest, most dangerous secret. He had to silence her."
Lucky shook his head. "Poor Doris. She was obsessed with celebrities and never caught on that most of them didn't like her delving into their pasts. I'll bet most of the rest of the people on that list changed their names to something we'd recognize."
"I think she was showing him that list when I thought she was trying to get him interested in the debate. That's how he knew what to look for in her cabin. But he had no way of knowing she'd dropped it and I'd picked it up."
"Like Mel said to us last night, being an Indian had become his lifework," Shelley said. "His income, the prestige he'd become dependent on even more than the money — his whole way of life was precariously balanced on a lie. And here was this strange, babbling woman who knew the lie and was shooting off her mouth about it and flinging around documents that proved it in a public dining room where anyone might hear."
"But wasn't she poisoned with her own heart pills?" the bookstore woman asked. "How did he do that?"
"I don't know for sure," Jane answered, "but I can imagine one scenario. Everybody had seen her popping those pills like they were breath mints. If he went to her condo to talk over what she'd found out, she'd have been fawning all over him. If she went to the kitchen to fix him coffee, he could have gotten the pills from her bag. And then, when the coffee was on the table, all he'd have had to do was ask for something else — cream or sugar, maybe — and she'd have run right back into the kitchen. It wouldn't have taken a second to drop them in her cup while she was gone."
"And then just sit there and wait?" Linda Moose foot asked with a shudder.
Tenny said, "But how on earth did Uncle Bill get involved?"
Jane looked at Mel, who had been allowed to go to the police station immediately following the reading and subsequent revelations.
"She told Bill," he said. "That's all. And Bill mentioned knowing it."
"When?" Tenny asked.
"When he went for a walk and HawkHunter caught up with him in the woods at the edge of the bunny slope. HawkHunter was probably making some new threat in regard to his lawsuit, and Bill used this shiny new weapon — the truth about HawkHunter's real background. HawkHunter killed him then and there," Mel said. "It seems that HawkHunter was actually a guest here, which Jane and I didn't know. And his condo was the closest to the spot where Mr. Smith was killed."
"I knew, of course," Tenny said, "but never had any reason to mention it. You never asked. How do you know what happened between them?"
"From Little Feather," Mel said. "She's talking as loud and fast as she can to try to save herself from going down with HawkHunter's ship. She says the weapon was one of those indestructible plastic thermos bottles. He threw it into the woods. They may not find it until the spring melt."
Linda Moose foot spoke again. "But why the snowman?"
Mel shrugged. "The easiest way to hide the body, I suppose. HawkHunter had to put it someplace, and concealing it right on the spot was a whole lot easier than carrying it around. Simply heaping snow on top would have looked suspicious, and as soon as Bill was known to be missing, somebody would have gotten curious. But the snowman could have stood there for weeks if Jane hadn't run into it."