1:32 P.M.
“Here’s the stuff you asked for on the Shoshones.”
Mick set the file on my desk with a thump. It was a big one, about two inches thick. The stack of manila folders on my side table was high, and growing: articles on genealogy; lists of databases; printouts from Web sites; text of Division 13 of the California Family Code, regulating adoptions. That last one had been slow going; I often amused myself by dipping into law books, but after spending an hour with the civil statutes, I had to admit that I found the criminal code more diverting.
“All this,” I said to Mick, “on one little tribe?” I’d asked for the information because of my growing conviction that Fenella’s visit to the reservation was directly connected with my adoption, but I hadn’t expected to be inundated.
He propped his hip on the edge of the desk, looking smug, as he always did when he knew more about a subject than I. “They’re not a little tribe, Shar. There’re all sorts of Shoshones: Bannocks, Lemhis, Northern, Eastern, Duckwater, Elys, Fallon Paiutes. And they’re scattered all over Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Nevada, Arizona, here in California. I got you everything I could off the Net, plus ordered some books.”
“On what?” I rubbed my forehead over my right eyebrow, where a headache was rapidly blossoming.
“History, customs, religion, arts and crafts. The reservation system and its current status. I figure if you’re gonna trace our family’s roots, you ought to know as much as possible.”
Mick thought I’d assigned him this project out of a simple interest in the family background brought on by Pa’s death. He was still reeling from that loss, and I hadn’t wanted to further shake him up by revealing I was adopted. Not yet, anyway.
“Don’t look so discouraged,” he added. “It’s pretty easy reading. Most of the stuff off the Net is kinda sketchy.”
I eyed the folder disbelievingly. In college I’d been a fanatical researcher, often emerging cross-eyed from the library at closing time to realize I’d stood up a date. But nowadays the volume of information available by computer was formidable. By the time I’d plowed through it and determined where and how to start my search, my biological parents would be long dead (if they weren’t already), I’d be an old lady, and my agency would have gone to hell because of my inattention.
As if to prove the point, the phone buzzed and Ted’s voice said, “Glenn Solomon on line two.”
“Tell him I’ll call back.”
“He says it’s urgent.”
I sighed. With Glenn, a prominent criminal defense attorney who regularly channeled business my way, it was always urgent. “Okay, I’ll talk with him. Thanks.” As I picked up, Mick saluted me and went out onto the iron catwalk that fronted our second-story suite, his somewhat melancholy whistle echoing off the vaulted ceiling of the pier.
Half an hour later I’d taken down the details of the embezzlement case Glenn was defending, explained them to Charlotte Keim, my best investigator in the financial area, and told her to set up an appointment with Glenn’s client. Then I dialed John’s office number in San Diego.
“Hey, it’s my afternoon for sisters,” he said. “I just talked with Charlene and Patsy.”
“When did Charlene and Vic get back from London?”
“Yesterday. They cut the trip short; she’s taking Pa’s death really hard.”
“And Patsy?”
“Well, you know how she keeps things bottled up inside. Neither of them has heard from Joey. I’m starting to think we’ll never get to tell him about Pa.”
“He’ll show up when he’s ready.” Last winter he’d left his job as a waiter in McMinnville, Oregon, and hadn’t surfaced till June, when he sent Ma a birthday card from Eureka, a lumber town in northern California.
“Yeah, I guess so.” John hesitated. “Ma’s called me a couple of times.”
“Oh? What did she want?”
“For me to talk some sense into you.”
“And do you plan to try?”
“I couldn’t if I wanted to.”
“Did you tell Charlene and Patsy what I found out?”
“Not my place to, but I’m sure Ma’ll spread the word of what an ungrateful child you are.”
“She said that?”
“Implied.”
“Jesus!”
“So what’d you find out from Jim and Susan?”
I told him, adding, “I’d like to ask a favor of you. Go over to Pa’s house and look through those legal papers. See if there’s anything like a marriage license for Great-grandma and -grandpa. Or birth certificates for Fenella and Grandpa James. Something that’ll show what Mary McCone’s birth name was. And while you’re at it, see if Pa kept anything of Fenella’s.”
A long pause. “Shar, maybe Ma’s right. Can’t you just let go of this? Aren’t the rest of us family enough for you?”
“It’s not family I’m after.”
“What then?”
A question I’d been asking myself. Identity, I supposed. A history. The truth. And something more that I couldn’t yet put a name to.
“Just take a look, will you? Please?”
“Only if you say ‘Pretty please with peanut butter on it.’”
Was he deliberately trying to remind me of our shared childhood, hoping to reinforce the bond between us?
“Say it!”
I sighed. “Pretty please with peanut butter on it. The super-chunk kind.”
9:47 P.M.
From where she crouched on the back of the sofa, Alice the calico cat regarded me with slitted eyes. On the hearth rug her orange tabby brother, Ralph, telegraphed unease with the tip of his tail. Both had picked up on my restless tension and were probably afraid they’d done something to provoke it.
I dropped the file Mick had put together on the Shoshones on the floor. Alice levitated and streaked for the kitchen. Ralph tried to play it cool by yawning and stretching before he followed. When in doubt, check the food bowl for crunchies.
Hy was staying at his ranch in the high desert country tonight, so I’d taken advantage of his absence to plow through the mound of information I’d amassed, starting with adoption and ending with Native Americans. The adoption and genealogy material was dry and boring, often incomprehensible, but the Shoshones were another story: Photographs accompanying the text Mick had provided convinced me they were my people. Made me suspect that at least one of my birth parents was somebody Fenella had met on that trip to the reservation.
There wasn’t a whole lot of consensus about the tribe, and that pleased me because it indicated complexity. The name was variously spelled Shoshone and Shoshoni, and some writers called them Snake Indians. Historians—mostly non-Indian—lauded them for their friendship toward the white man, while citing epithets applied by their more warlike brethren that ranged from “false Indians” to “dirty dog eaters.” It didn’t help their stock with other tribes that one of their women, Sacajawea, volunteered to guide the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific coast.
One fact about the Shoshones put me off: their neighbors, the Comanches, introduced them to the horse in the early eighteenth century, and they took to the animal with enthusiasm, expanding their hunting and fishing territory west from Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains to Idaho’s Snake River, and south from the Yellowstone River to the Uinta Mountains of Utah. I, on the other hand, flat-out hated horses. The critters sensed right off that they could push me around, and in my limited experience with them I’d been stepped on, knocked over, thrown, and kidnapped by a recalcitrant beast that galloped miles down the beach near Half Moon Bay, then refused to return to the stables.
The Shoshone religion was based on the belief in one Creator, visions, and dreams, and every year was expressed in the Sun Dance ceremony.
Well, as far as I was concerned, the jury was still out on the Creator, but I did rely on my dreams for insights into my cases.
This religion was said to foster courage, self-reliance, and wisdom. The Shoshones were skilled in dealing with life’s problems in a difficult and often hostile environment.
Wise I wasn’t, but any good investigator has to be brave and self-reliant. And as for dealing with a difficult and hostile environment, as an urbanite I contended on a daily basis. Thrived on it, actually.
During the reservation era, the Shoshone were forced onto three reserves: Wind River in west central Wyoming; Fort Hall on the Snake River in southeastern Idaho; and Lemhi Valley in northern Idaho. In 1907 the latter was closed and the few remaining Lemhi removed to Fort Hall, thus ending a decades-old struggle to stay on their ancestral lands.
That meant the reservation Fenella had visited was either Wind River or Fort Hall. I went to the bookcase, took down my atlas, and located them. To my Californian’s eye they seemed remote, isolated, and I thought of all the time I’d need and distance I’d have to cover in order to find my roots.
It was after ten now, and John hadn’t called me back. He’d said he would go over to Pa’s house right after work, but I supposed something more pressing had come up. Either that, or he hadn’t found anything and didn’t feel any urgency about letting me know. If the latter was the case, what would be my next logical step…?
The phone rang. I looked at the base unit, saw the receiver wasn’t there. Just as the call was about to go to the machine, I located it on the kitchen table under a bundle of clothes I’d put out to take to the dry cleaner.
John. “Sorry I took so long to get back to you. A client came into the office just as I was closing up, insisted on taking me to dinner. Anyway, I’m at Pa’s. There’s a box of stuff here that looks like it belonged to Fenella. What should I do with it?”
“Can you FedEx it first thing in the morning?”
“Sure. There’s also a marriage certificate for Great-grandma and -grandpa, tucked inside a family Bible that nobody’s written in since Uncle Jim was born. Her maiden name was Tendoy.”
Tendoy. Somewhere in my reading I’d run across it.
Tendoy was chief of the Lemhi Shoshones from 1863 until his death in 1907, a buffalo hunter with close ties to the white community and a fondness for the white man’s whiskey. He spearheaded the Lemhis’ efforts to stay on their land in the Idaho River valley. Through periods of extreme privation, when allotments of food and clothing from Washington were inexplicably given to less friendly tribes and withheld from the Lemhi, he kept his people together and eventually saw the establishment of a small reservation. But, as usual, the government stinted: the land allotted to the Lemhi amounted to one-tenth of an acre per individual, as opposed to one and a half acres at Fort Hall—not nearly enough for the agriculture-based existence the federal powers-that-be were determined to impose on the tribe. When the governmental push for the Lemhi to move to Fort Hall began, Tendoy vowed he would never do so; and after many lobbying trips to officials throughout Idaho and Montana, as well as to the nation’s capital, he kept that promise by falling off his horse into a creek and dying of exposure—drunk on whiskey supplied by an unscrupulous white man.
As he lay dying in the creek bed, Chief Tendoy may well have reflected that the humiliation of such a death was nothing compared to the humiliation of his tribe at the hands of the U.S. government.
I stood in the door of my home office, surveying the new iMac computer that looked out of place on my old-fashioned desk. The machine seemed to call to me, a siren song of cyber-language.
You and I are friends now! Let’s take it further!
Dammit, why had I—in a fit of boredom—taught myself to use the Macintosh that Hy kept at our seaside retreat in Mendocino County? If I hadn’t gone up alone one fateful week last summer to monitor our contractor’s progress on the new house we were building there, I’d still be pure.
Think how good we’ll be together!
And then why had I returned home and bought the iMac? Indulged in the guilty pleasure of selecting printer and software—to say nothing of color? (Tangerine.) Then taken the machine home, made it comfortable, honed my technique, learned the delicious curves of the Information Highway?
Disgusting, McCone. Just disgusting.
Come on over here and play with me!
Seduced. Shamefully seduced.
You can do anything you want with me! Anything at all!
I went over, pushed the power button. The machine gave a happy, welcoming chime, and soon the screen glowed.
Anything!
Not tonight. It’s late.
Anything…
Including a trace on Mary Tendoy McCone’s surviving relatives.
Let’s do it now!
I reached for the mouse—rolling over for the very technology I’d sworn never to embrace.
White pages/yellow pages. Click on white.
City & state. Fort Hall, Idaho.
Party. Tendoy.
Searching.
Thirteen Tendoys in the Bingham County directory.
Print.
White pages/yellow pages. Click on white.
City & state. Fort Washakie, Wyoming.
Party. Tendoy.
Searching.
Two Tendoys listed in Fremont County.
Print.
Late now. Too late to start calling. But tomorrow…