Jill Churchill - From Here to Paternity

"Well, it did look that way to me, too, but there was a lot of talk about baptismal documents, FHC film numbers, something called tafels —God knows what that means I think it's some kind of list of all your relatives— Oh, here's Mel."

Jane waved and he joined them, looking grim.

"I got curious," he said abruptly as he sat down. "Called the sheriff. Seems they found an empty pill bottle in her purse. The residue in the bottle matched the residue in the coffee cup. Except the dosage in the cup was about twenty times what a person can take."

"You were right. It was murder," Jane said.

"I'm not the one who thought that, Jane," he reminded her. "And the sheriff told me that proved his theory. Suicide."

"Suicide?" Shelley exclaimed.

"Right," Mel said wryly. "She'd been humiliated in public over her research, so she came home, poured all her remaining heart-medicine pills into a cup of coffee, knocked it back, threw the offending research all over the room, and dropped dead in the one place where none of the papers had landed."

"What a dolt!" Jane said.

"Aren't you going to ask me what he said about fingerprints on the medicine bottle?" Mel flipped open the menu angrily.

"Okay. I'll bite," Jane said. "What was his response?"

"Silence! He obviously hadn't even thought about it. Probably every lab tech in the county handled the damned thing. Now, of course, he has to stick with this suicide thing or his job will go up in flames."

Jane considered this for a minute or two while Mel tried to calm down enough to read the menu. When he looked up, she said, "I think we ought to make damned sure that's exactly what happens."

"But I'm on vacation!" Mel said brokenly.

"And I hope you're enjoying it."

They all looked up guiltily. Tenny Garner had approached the table without any of them noticing.

"I — ah, yes. It's a great place you've got here," Mel said. "Will you join us?"

Tenny glanced around the room and said, "Maybe for a minute. I'm looking for Uncle Bill. You haven't seen him around, have you? He's disappeared."

Chapter 10

Tenny took the chair next to Shelley's.

"When did somebody see him last?" Mel asked.

"Last night. After that poor woman died. I went to tell him and found him cleaning up the lost-and-found room."

"But what about your aunt?" Jane asked. "Didn't she see him after that?"

"No, he never came back to their place."

"Oh, dear—" Shelley said.

Tenny smiled. "No, no, don't worry. I didn't mean to alarm you. I'm certain he's just gone off to do a little hunting. He'll turn up in his own good time."

"Does he do that? Just go away without telling anyone?" Mel asked.

Tenny nodded. "Every once in a while. He's an old mountain man with only a thin veneer of civilization. Something nicks the veneer deep enough and he takes off. He'll turn up by lunchtime, muddy and bloody and as cheerful as a chipmunk. Well, maybe that's going too far. As cheerful as he's capable of being, I should say."

"Tenny, what did he really think about Mrs. Schmidtheiser's claim that he was the rightful Tsar?" Shelley asked.

Tenny thought for a minute. "That's really two questions and I know the answer to only one of them. The first question is: is he the person she claims he is? And the second question is: does he want to act on it in any way? On the first, I have no idea. On the second, no way! He's not interested in politics. I don't believe he's ever even voted once in his life. Joanna is always telling him it's his patriotic duty, and he says anybody who wanted to try to run a country or even a county was crazy to begin with, so there was no difference between them."

"He could have a point," Jane said. "But hasn't he ever talked about who he is? Or rather, who his father was? Father or grandfather? I've forgotten already."

"His father," Tenny confirmed. "Oh, he talked about him some, but only to Aunt Joanna and me. And then not often. Mainly just things old Gregory had told him about hunting or mountain lore or nature."

"So you don't know anything about Gregory?" Mel asked.

"Oh, I know some. But most of it's from a local history book somebody here in the county did about twenty years ago. The author of the book was taken with the legend of old Gregory Smith and interviewed a lot of the old-timers about him. How accurate any of it was is anybody's guess."

She thought for a moment. "Old Gregory turned up in Colorado sometime in the 1920s, I believe. Nobody knew where he lived or what he did. He'd just show up from time to time and trade gold for supplies. Apparently he had a small mine someplace in the mountains. Or maybe a stream he was panning. Then, in about 1925 or so, he came out of the mountains with a substantial amount of gold, bought this land, married a local girl, and settled in. People figured his mine had played out, and he didn't exactly deny it, but he told folks he thought a man didn't have the right to take more from the earth than he needed."

"Interesting attitude," Mel said. "Sort of suggests there might be a mine still worth mining."

The waiter came with Jane's and Shelley's breakfasts, and Tenny's recital was halted while Mel ordered.

"One of the things Doris found out," Tenny went on when the waiter had gone, "was that the gold he used to buy the land was melted down into little ingots — I think that's what you call them."

"So?" Jane said.

"So it wasn't proper nuggets or dust out of the ground or a streambed. Doris thought it was melted-down jewelry rather than anything he mined."

"Could that be true?" Shelley asked.

Tenny shrugged. "I don't know much about it, but I don't think the process for melting down either nuggets or jewelry is awfully high-tech. Anyway, he married and the two children — my uncle Bill and his sister, Carol, who was Pete's mom — were born and then their mother died. Uncle Bill says he has no memory of her at all. Old Gregory stuck around after that. Did some hunting, a little farming, and some of the women from the tribe helped him raise his children. That's why Uncle Bill's always been so close to the tribe. Gregory died at just about the end of World War Two, when Bill was only sixteen, and Bill, who'd been hunting practically since he could walk, built the little hunters' cabins. There were about a dozen of them and a big cookhouse-lodge. A few of the cabins are still around. We use them for storage."

"What was Gregory like? What did he look like?" Jane asked.

Tenny shrugged again. "I never saw him. And as far as I know, nobody dared take a picture of him. He was known for not allowing it. Uncle Bill once said he had a picture of himself with his mother and father, but when I asked to see it, he hemmed and hawed and said he'd lost it. Years later, I asked him about it again and he said I'd imagined the conversation. So I don't know if there really is one or not. But even if there wasn't, don't assume that means anything. Most of the old-timers around here were like that. Private to the point of paranoia. The local history book has a drawing of Gregory, based on what people said he looked like. To tell the truth, the drawing resembles Rasputin more than it does any tsar," she said with a laugh. "Long, straggly beard, spooky-looking eyes. But then, half the men in the mountains used to look like that. Apparently a beard is real warm in the winter."

Jane noticed that Mel was gazing into the middle distance and stroking his chin. "Don't even think about it," she said.

He grinned. "You don't see me as a mountain man?"

"Was there anything else about him in the book that encouraged Doris in her claims?" Jane asked Tenny.

"Yes. The book said he spoke with a heavy, mysterious accent. And Uncle Bill did say that though his father couldn't read or write English, he kept his account books in something that looked like Russian."