From Here to Paternity

inelegant? Barbecue, maybe? Burger King would be even better.'

Everybody else agreed, but Jane was outvoted on Willard. 'Either he's destroyed the place by now or he hasn't. Another half hour isn't going to matter,' was Mel's opinion, and the others agreed.

'Besides,' Shelley put in, 'Linda Moose foot has been around to clean, most likely, and she probably let him out, seeing as we were all gone.'

There was a Burger King diagonally across the interchange. They considerately let the kids go in first so they wouldn't have to be seen traveling with adults; then Jane, Shelley, and Mel wandered in a moment later and took places at the opposite side of the room.

'You're very quiet today,' Mel said while he and Jane waited for Shelley to bring their food.

'I was thinking about Russia and old Gregory Smith and a lot of things. And, I have to admit, I'm a little bit homesick — and I'm enjoying it.'

'You're liking being homesick?' Mel asked.

'Yes. See, the whole time I was growing up, we had no home. With my father being in the diplomatic corps, we were always moving. I never went to the same school for two years. Sometimes I didn't even manage two semesters in the same place. And we didn't really even have a home base. We lived in some pretty fancy surroundings every now and then, but they were never ours to keep and come back to. So when we bought the house I live in, back when Mike was a baby, I was determined I wouldn't leave until I was taken out on a gurney. And it's neat to discover that I really have become so attached to one place that I miss it.'

Mel took her hand and just smiled at her.

'On the other hand,' she went on, 'homesick or not, I'm not real sure the sheriff is going to be willing for me to leave, and even when I do, it'll drive me wild not ever knowing what happened here. Sure you feel that, too, Mel.'

He opened his mouth to deny the charge, but stopped and reluctantly shook his head. 'I'm on vacation, I keep telling myself. But I still hate to see an investigation of a murder — very possibly two murders — going nowhere. But I don't have access to any inside information. For all I know, they're working round the clock on fiber analysis, DNA testing, fingerprinting, and who knows what. But without knowing any of the results, I can't see how I can form any opinions.'

Shelley had arrived and was distributing their food and drinks while he said this. 'But, Mel, all that has to do with after the crime,' she said.

He looked at her blankly. 'Of course it does. Why would anybody bother with it before a crime is committed?'

'No, what Shelley means is that the crime itself has something to do with relationships. Not with science. The relationships and the emotions they provoke are the cause, and if you can figure out the cause, then the science part can fill in the rest.'

Mel nodded. 'So what do you see as the cause?'

'That's the problem,' Jane said. 'I don't know. There are so many possibilities. The potential sale of the resort is certainly one element that might have provoked the crime, or crimes. There's nothing like money to get people's emotions to a fever pitch. And the genealogy thing, the claim that Bill Smith was the rightful Tsar, has endless possibilities of emotional involvement. Money again. Glory. Power. Jealousy. For that matter, the motivation could, in some complex way, be related to both the sale and the claim to the tsardom — if that's a word.'

Mel had been unwrapping his burger and removing anything that resembled a vegetable. 'So if you don't have a suggestion, aren't we right back to science and not having access?'

Shelley, salting her fries, joined in. 'We should be, but I have a feeling we know the solution and just don't know we know.'

Mel rolled his eyes, but Jane agreed. 'I think so, too, Shelley. I keep having the sense that if we'd just put the right facts and impressions into the correct order, the answer would be obvious. I still haven't given Lucky the file folder that Doris dropped. Maybe when I do, he'll let me look at some of her other documents. Maybe there's something there that will make things fall together.'

'But, Jane, we don't know enough about genealogy to make any sense of her notes anyway. What we need could be in them, but it's like reading a foreign language. One of those courses they were giving was about how to construct a tiny tafel.'

'What's that?' Mel asked.

Shelley shrugged. 'I have no idea, except that it's a list of some kind. I just remembered it because it was such a weird phrase. That's the point. If the motive does have to do with genealogy, you and I don't know where or how to look, and we wouldn't recognize it if it walked up to us with a tag around its neck.'

Mel was shaking his head while he chewed. The women waited patiently for him to swallow.

'In my experience,' he finally said, 'murder usually has to do with money or passion. High passion. Not things like power or prestige. Those are pretty pale emotions compared to passion. Now, most of these people, including the two victims, were, to put it politely, 'mature' individuals. Most people of that age have their passions well under control. If they didn't, they'd be in jail or a mental institution. Can you really imagine Mrs. Schmidtheiser and Bill Smith having a wild sexual affair? If so, you can cast Mrs. Smith in the role of suspect.'

'Mel!' Jane said, scandalized.

'The other kind of passion is all sorts of things that fall under the heading of self-defense,' he went on, ignoring her. 'Defense in physical terms, of course, but often defense of a lifework. Let's say you — wait, let me think of a good one. Okay, suppose you'd won an Olympic gold medal in something like speed skating, and in forty years your record still hadn't been broken. You've spent those forty years teaching, pontificating, being a celebrity on the strength of it. Every four years when the Olympics roll around, the newspeople come and do nice, flattering film pieces on you. Then one day someone comes up to you and says he has proof that you had tiny little rockets attached to your skates when you won.'

Jane smiled at the image.

'It's silly, but don't you see? You've made that record your lifework. Your entire reputation rests on a cheat and here's somebody threatening your life, in a sense.'

Jane nodded. 'Like Bill's resort, which was his lifework, and Doris's research, which was hers.'

'But, Jane, the difference is, I'm talking about perpetrators — and they were the victims,' Mel said.

There was a moment's thick silence before Jane said, 'Hell! So what's the point?'

'Don't get defensive,' he said. 'I'm just pointing out the reasons I think it has to come back to money. It's the only thing that makes sense and provides a strong enough motive.'

'And the only large amounts of money at stake here involve the resort,' Shelley said.

'If that's true, how does Doris figure in?' Jane asked. 'It's not as if she'd stand to profit if the resort was sold or wasn't.'

'Unless she knew something that would prevent the sale,' Shelley said. 'If either Pete or Tenny really thought they would profit from the sale and Doris knew — oh, maybe that Bill wasn't really Gregory's son and thus didn't really own the land — wouldn't that make it worthwhile to stop her from telling anyone?'

'Jeez! That's a bizarre thought,' Jane said. 'Everybody's been concentrating on who Gregory really was, but nobody's questioned who Bill really was. And Doris had spent years snooping around the family relationships.'

'I'm afraid I was just giving an example, Jane,' Shelley said. 'And a bad one at that. You're forgetting about that old photograph.'

'Not entirely. That little boy looked a lot like the mother in the picture, but he was just a cute little boy who could have grown up to look like anybody. He might not have been the older man we knew as Bill Smith. Remember, Tenny told us that the mother died when Bill was very little, and Gregory pretty much left it to some of the tribal women to take care of him. Suppose, for some weird reason, one of them had substituted another child—'

And even as Jane was speaking, she heard how stupid it sounded.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'My brain's run amok.'

'I'm so glad you were the one to say that,' Mel muttered. 'Everybody done? Let's get back to see what that fleabag dog of yours has done.'

After they'd gotten back on the road and were nearing the resort, Shelley said, 'Jane, I think I've got a blister on my heel. I want to run in the gift shop and get a bandage for it. Will you come along and walk back with me?'

'I'll come with you, too,' Mike said. 'There's something I need.'