“After marrying my daughter,” Dark Bear said, “Earnest Behn returned to Europe twice. When Sam was three years old, Earnest went to speak with Pandora, the mother of his brother Augustus, about an important family matter. The second trip was for Pandora’s funeral, just after Bright Cloud died, and he took Sam along with him. Pandora bequeathed him something he had to retrieve in person, Earnest told me. When he came back to Idaho, he left the reservation for good.”
I had just one more question. And luckily I was so accustomed by now to off-the-wall answers, I hardly even flinched anymore.
“How was it that you went to live with Lafcadio, after your mother Halle died?” I asked Bambi. “Did you already know Uncle Laf well?”
“My mother never died. She’s still quite alive, I’m afraid to say—though I haven’t seen her since I left home ten years ago,” Bambi said, narrowing her eyes. “But I thought you must have understood, all along, that it is she who remains in the shadows, behind everything!”
If Bambi’s mother, Halle von Hauser, was “behind everything,” as Bambi said—and if she was truly so awful that her husband ran off and married Bright Cloud, and even her daughter Bambi left home at age fifteen to live with Uncle Laf—then it was clear what this suggested about Wolfgang’s connection to the dark side of our family.
But what about Augustus’s role? I asked Olivier if he knew.
“Your father’s very high on our list,” Olivier told me. “Apparently, he hasn’t been involved with Bambi’s mother romantically in years—each has by now married someone else—but they do seem to understand one another extremely well. About ten years ago, your father helped set up Halle von Hauser in a position of prominence in Washington, D.C., from which she is now able to exercise significant political influence, both here and abroad. Indeed, there’s a delicacy involved in unraveling with whom these two have connections. In Halle’s position on the boards of several museums and a major newspaper, she’s the capital’s most influential social beast—”
Holy shit.
“That paper wouldn’t by chance be the Washington Post?” I interrupted. “And Halle’s new husband wouldn’t by chance be named Voorheer-LeBlanc?” It did sound Dutch-Belgian, part of the very region of Himmler’s nouveau paradis.
Olivier smiled. “You certainly have been doing your homework.”
Naturally she would have picked a different first name, like Helena, in case anyone ever mentioned a person with a memorable name like Halle. I recalled, too, how interested my father and stepmother Grace had been to see what I knew about my inheritance, at dinner that night in San Francisco. They’d thrown a press conference afterwards to try to dig out even more from the estate executor. That would also be a good cover motive for someone else to phone and pump me, maybe with more success, about just which manuscripts were included in Sam’s estate. When Ms. Voorheer-LeBlanc of the Washington Post phoned later, she never said she was a reporter, just that she wanted to buy my manuscripts. I had little doubt at this point that she was none other than Wolfgang’s and Bambi’s mother, Halle von Hauser.
Did Jersey know her sister was alive, or what she and my father had been up to since they’d left the bedroom? She hadn’t told me, but Dark Bear soon explained why.
“Naturally, I had many suspicions regarding the sudden, unexplained death of Earnest’s first wife and child,” he told me. “But I never had evidence they were alive, until Sam’s recent research trip to Utah. Sam thinks your mother and Earnest believed the best way to protect you children from the past was simply to maintain silence.”
I was about to pursue the point when Dark Bear slowed the Land Rover nearly to a standstill and carefully pulled off the road into the woods. The forest floor, thickly padded with layers of pine needles, gave off a heady scent as we passed. Bambi and Olivier and I fell to a hushed quiet as we watched Dark Bear carefully maneuver the large vehicle through narrow passages among the trees, as tight as threading an embroidery needle. After what seemed ages, the land started to rise gradually, until at last we were headed straight uphill. When the rugged terrain became too steep, Dark Bear stopped at the edge of a narrow crevasse and switched off the engine. He turned to me.
“I am to take you as far as the river, then my grandson will come and meet us,” he told me. “He is expecting me to bring only you, however—so perhaps these others should stay behind and wait here at the car.”
I turned to Olivier and Bambi with a raised brow, to see what they thought.
“I should like to accompany you,” Bambi told me. “And to help in any way I can. I consider myself responsible for much of what has happened to you and your cousin—our cousin,” she corrected herself. “Had I told you everything about my brother the moment I knew you had met him, it all might have been avoided.”
“Well, that cinches it,” said Olivier, coating his québecois with a western drawl. “No self-respecting feller’d let two fillies like you run loose, alone in them thar hills.”
But he dropped his jaw when Bambi whipped from her jacket pocket a small Browning automatic, which she pointed toward the roof with a professionalism rivaling Annie Oakley’s. Olivier had always claimed he was searching for the cowgirl of his dreams, but now he flung up his hands.
“For heaven’s sakes,” he cried, “put that thing away before someone gets hurt! Where on earth did you get it?”
“My grandfather Hillmann was advanced group trainer in the Ballermann Gewehrschiessen—the
