That was a long speech, for Kate. Dr. Adams. He was the head of surgery or some such thing, big honcho at Sunrise General. He'd probably fished the bullets out of both women.
"Sampling error." Caroline shook her head. "He couldn't have found enough shifts she didn't work to make a valid statistical comparison."
Aunt Alice suddenly glanced around, eyes wide, noticing the abnormal quiet. "Where are the girls?"
Damn! That would freak her out. "Mom stopped by and picked them up. She said she'd promised to start teaching them to make baskets, and this was as good a weekend as any. She'll see they get to school on Monday."
Alice took a deep breath, looking bleak. "Just as well. Getting back to your father, I think we need to hold a séance. Pry into some Morgan secrets."
Séance. Summon the "spirit" of Ben Morgan. He'd also played that old Morgan trick — another faked death, another "Lost at Sea." That one was a favorite, what with the number of sailors and fishermen who found that as their real grave. No body necessary to keep up the fiction. Both her father and his brother Daniel had been "lost at sea," twenty years apart.
Kate frowned and pushed back from the table. Her bowl was empty again. "I need a cigarette." Then she was limping out the kitchen door.
"What bit her?"
"Attack of conscience." Alice shook her head. "Got a wild hair up her ass about being a good cop. She doesn't want to hear anything she shouldn't about people with memorial tablets gathering moss in the Morgan graveyard. Don't ever develop a conscience, girl. It'll just get in your way."
"Small chance of that, with you as my shining example."
Alice shrugged. "Like I said, it gets in the way of the job. The Woman does what she has to do. Anyway, how's your Latin?"
"So-so. What the hell's that tangent about?"
"Not a tangent. Most of the earliest Morgan archives are written in Latin, church Latin rather than the classic. That's what their tame priests knew, and they were the only ones who knew how to write. God help us if we had to read their tortured notion of Welsh spelling."
She paused for another bite of bread slabbed with butter — fresh butter from Jed Prouty's farm about ten miles up the road. At least Caroline had handed over a sack of Greenings in trade for that.
Then Alice swallowed and smiled, her first genuine smile since walking through the door. "Hey, maybe you could use those tattered sheets of sheep-hide to finesse your Professor Stevens. Here you've got this unique chance for some research, genuine unpublished source materials covering the first contact between aboriginals and the European settlers. Don't need to tell him any little details like the dates involved."
It figured. Her first real smile would involve some touch of twisty thinking, some way of achieving three ends with one move. Haskell thinking.
On the other hand . . . "Dad's people have caused me a lot of trouble with my field work. They owe me."
Alice lifted her right eyebrow. "Eh? Now who's going off on tangents?"
"Ya ta hey. I had a hell of a time getting past Grandmother Walks-with-the-moon. She thought we were too assimilated to count as real Indians. Not that she used two-dollar words. 'Brown skin, white heart,' that was her exact phrase. We've lived with those damned Welshmen for too long. We live in villages along with the whiteskins, speak English, eat English, work English, don't do sings, don't dance, don't drum or wear fancy feathers. Never got herded into reservations or starved or massacred. Not real Indians."
Alice sat there, her face quiet. "And yet she let you enter the kiva. How did you change her mind?"
"I sat in front of her door."
"And?"
"I sat in front of her door."
Now Alice lifted her left eyebrow. "And?"
"I thought about our Spring. That Arizona sun gets to you after a while."
"How long did it take?"
"She offered me water on the third morning. Said that no English could be that stubborn." Caroline's mouth quirked a smile. "If she thinks I'm stubborn, she's never met you."
Alice just stared at her, quiet, ignoring the jab. Finally she nodded to herself. "That would get you past the first wall, maybe the second. What got you into the heart?"
"I told her about us, of course. After we'd swapped stories for about a year, I chanted her our creation myth. The real one, including the lines about the Sea People from the land of the dawn and their white swan canoes. About how we assimilated the whiteskins, the first time around, them and enough of their diseases that the Colonial epidemics mostly passed us by. About how we used the Sea People as camouflage when the English showed up and tried to take our homes."
Caroline paused, glanced at the door still resolutely shut behind Kate, and cut a couple of slabs of apple pie. She consulted the state of her stomach and added one for herself with a side order of a cheddar wedge. Prouty cheddar.
"Then it got complicated. I had to explain about the difference between the Welsh and English tribes, about how to outsiders they might look the same, like Blackfoot and Crow, but that they were really ancient enemies. About how half the French thought we were English, and half the English thought we were French, and how we dodged them both by being neither. Switching sides so fast the paint never dried on the road signs, was the way I explained it."
That drew a snort from Alice. "You tell her about us?"
Caroline understood the accent on that word — "us" the family, not "us" the tribe. "I had to. You don't get far, trying to hide things from Grandmother Walks. Anyway, as soon as I mentioned epidemics, she was all over that like a tall dog. I had to give her an explanation a lot stronger than that we'd met some of those germs before. Summoning the spirits of the
