Missing his wife, Fair walked into the barn, looked up, and saw Simon. “Hey, fella.”
“Hey,” said Simon, then scuttled away.
Fair entered the tack room. “Simon is such a scaredy-cat. ’Course, most possums are.”
“It helps if you feed him.” Harry leaned her chin on her hand. “Molasses on bread or molasses in the snow.”
“I know, but when am I going to have time to feed a possum? When do you have time?”
She smiled up at him. “I do it every day.”
“Feeds us, too,” Shortro, the athletic Saddlebred horse in the stall next to the tack room, called out.
Tomahawk, Harry’s beloved Thoroughbred, also nickered. “We love Harry,” he declared.
All the horses agreed, and up in his nest even Simon squeaked, “Me, too.”
The two cats entered the tack room just as Harry finished telling Fair about her failure to find any information on the mysterious name.
“Here.” He leaned over, typed a bit, then stood back. “You did the logical thing. You assumed Walter was a student’s name because the paper was found in the teacher’s desk. I just punched in his name to see what would show up. There you go.” Fair started to read over her shoulder. “Hmm, not so good,” he said.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Harry, delighted that her husband was smart, was equally put out by her own slowness on this subject.
She read along with him. “ ‘Paper genocide is often the term used to describe the actions of Walter Ashby Plecker, the government employee who was head of Vital Statistics in Virginia from 1912 to 1946.’ ”
Fair continued. “ ‘Plecker replaced the term Indian with the term colored on all official documents, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, and voter registration forms.’ ” He stepped back a moment. “Paper genocide.”
She looked up at her husband. “Fair, what does it mean exactly?”
“I’m not sure but I think it means that if everyone is jammed under one umbrella, you can treat or mistreat everyone the same. This is bizarre.” He read more as she scrolled down the text. “ ‘Members of Virginia Indian tribes are severely handicapped in proving they are indeed Indians according to federal standards. They can’t apply for scholarships or receive federal funds for housing, health care, or economic development.’ ” He stopped looking at the screen, looked at his wife. “And, of course, they can’t open casinos, which brings in big bucks. Wait a minute, here. Says the Virginia tribes do not want to open casinos and have signed away those rights.” He’d returned his gaze to the computer screen.
“Fair, this is a terrible thing.” She read more on the subject. “ ‘Seven Virginia governors, irrespective of party affiliation, have supported federal recognition of Virginia’s Indians.’ But, in so many words, they’ve been told to sit on a tack.”
“Hey, look at this. No Virginia tribe member can return their ancestors’ bones to a rightful and respectful burial. Harry, this is outrageous. I mean, I had no idea. This is one of the most disgusting things I have ever read.”
“Well,” Harry said, “a bill, H.R. 783, the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2011, is presently working its way through Congress. Yeah, right. And how many bills prior to this have died in one subcommittee or another?”
Fair rarely swore but he let it fly. “Bastards.”
“Walter Ashby Plecker appears to have been the biggest bastard of the bunch, and it’s just rolled on from there.” Stunned and deeply disturbed, Harry clicked off her computer. “Let’s call Coop,” she said, standing.
“Why?”
“Come on. Let’s go inside and use the house line. Anything ever spoken on a cellphone is out there somewhere.”
Intrigued, he followed his wife into the kitchen, as did the two cats and the dog.
Harry rang Cooper up on the kitchen wall phone and explained what she and Fair had discovered about Walter Ashby Plecker. “It’s only a scrap of paper but maybe you should ask Sarah Price if you can go through Hester’s desk to see if there’s a link. After all, Hester had Cherokee blood on her mother’s side, and Josh was a member of the Upper Mattaponi tribe.”
“I’ve asked Sarah to go through Hester’s things on Monday, and I’ll be there with her.”
Urgency in her voice, Harry prodded. “Move it up. Go tomorrow, Sunday, if she’ll do it.”
“Harry, this isn’t much to go on.”
“It’s a long shot, a really long shot, Cooper, but right now it’s one of the few links between the two murders, other than both corpses were dressed for Halloween, cleverly disguised.”
A long, long pause followed this. Over the phone line, Harry could almost hear Cooper’s mind whirring. “All right.”
Husband and wife remained silent after Harry hung up.
Finally, Fair said, “While you were on your computer in the barn, I was on mine. Come on. I have something to show you.”
Once inside his small, tidy office, he showed her an article reporting that jobs exposing women to plastics and man-made chemicals greatly elevate a woman’s chance of developing breast cancer.
He pointed to the screen. “A long-term study of more than two thousand women in Ontario found those who worked for at least ten years in food canning and automotive plastics developed cancer at a rate five times higher than women in other jobs. Chemicals such as BPA—bisphenol A—are to blame.”
She replied, “I’m a farmer. Well, I worked in the post office after college. I’ve checked out fine at every exam for the last two years, and after my next checkup, I won’t have to go back for six months. I’m okay.”
Fair, who had felt shocked, frightened, and useless when his wife was diagnosed with stage I breast cancer two years ago, still carried with him the fear that it might return. Because of this, he was vigilant concerning cancer research and treatments. “Read on.”
“Pesticide exposure is also elevated for female farm workers.” She quieted for a moment. “I rarely use much of anything.”
“What about your father?”
She nodded. “He used more. Cut back later on, but he said that in the beginning they thought those things were a godsend.”
“Our air, food, and water are loaded with chemicals unheard of even fifty years ago. BPA and phthalates, to name a few, are known hormone disrupters. I see so much more cancer in horses than I did when I started practicing as a vet.” Harry’s husband looked stricken.
“Honey, my cancer is not coming back,” she assured him.
“I know.” He kissed her cheek. “But now that you’ve been through it, I want to keep abreast of recent research, forgive the pun.”
They both laughed and she hugged him when he stood up. “You’re stuck with me.”
“Better be, which reminds me: Carry your father’s old snubnosed .38.”
“I can’t shoot cancer cells.”
“No, but you can’t keep your nose out of those two murders. I know you. Just carry the gun.”
“A Montblanc Diplomat,” Cooper said the next afternoon, holding up the fancy pen, which she had fetched from the drawer of Hester’s desk.
“She didn’t have much or spend much, but what she had was the very best.” Sarah smiled, remembering her aunt’s lectures on prudent expenditures. “If she was going to fork out cash, it had to be for something that would last.”
“This certainly will.” Cooper studied the gold point. “Medium.”
“How do you know so much about pens?”
Cooper laughed. “How do you?”
“Drilled into my head: Write in your own hand on good paper. Always write a thank-you and a condolence, and, of course, the condolence should never be on pastel paper. The rules, but I’m glad I know them. Of course, who in my generation practices such etiquette?”