From Here to Paternity

and the woman stood up.
    “Mr. Whitewing, this is Susan Maxwell,“ Jane said. “You may have seen her around lately in a red ski outfit. She’s with a firm of architectural engineers. Susan, would you tell Mr. Whitewing what you’ve been doing?“
    Susan Maxwell glared for a long minute at HawkHunter, then said, “Since it appears that I’m going to get stiffed for my fees in all likelihood, I might as well. John HawkHunter hired me to look over the summit of the hill you call Flattop Mountain and draw up preliminary plans for a casino complex to be built there.“
    There wasn’t a stony face in the room anymore. Everyone was either stunned or confused and frankly showed it.
    Jane explained. “Tribal lands—reservations—are federal lands. They aren’t subject to state laws. It’s possible that if HawkHunter had gotten that land depart of the tribal land—either through legal methods or by intimidation—a very large gambling operation could have gone up on the hill. A large and extremely profitable operation, of which he would have received a percentage for the rest of his life.“
    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