The Last Annual Slugfest (12 page)

“Fort Ross,” he said. “Whole family went up, camping. She wanted Gordon to see the old Russian fort.”

I waited, hoping he would indicate whether Gordon was her husband or son. But he didn’t. “How is Gordon?”

“Brightest little smolt you’d ever want to see.” He smiled.

Were smolts one-year-old salmon or two-year-old salmon? They couldn’t be much more than that. Salmon didn’t live very long. “His first trip up to Fort Ross?”

“Knowing Angelina, he’s lucky to be going now. I never thought she’d take the day off. But, like I say, she surprised me when she married. She kind of surprised everyone—don’t know why she bothered—if you know what I mean.”

“After that affair.” I nodded. When Maxie didn’t pick up on that, I said, “The one she had in high school, or was it right after?” Leila had been in high school. Angelina was older than she. Angelina could have been home from college the summer of the affair.

Maxie looked like he was trying to recall it.

“I guess maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it after all these years,” I said. “I just assumed you’d know. It’s not really a secret anymore. The scandal died down years ago.”

When he still didn’t say anything, I made my final stab. “I mean, it’s not such a big thing to be involved with another woman nowadays.”

Now he did respond. His sallow skin turned bright red. He flung open the gatehouse door, banging it into the side of my truck. He grabbed hold of the window, and thrust his head inside. “I don’t want to hear that kind of trash about Angelina. No wonder she’s huffy, if you’re the kind of friend she has. You’re no friend of hers, carrying on with lies like that. Filth. Lies and filth. Now you just get yourself out of here before I do what I feel like doing. You hear me? Only ’cause I’m on duty, I’m holding myself back. But if you show up here again, I won’t. And don’t try coming round here when I’m not on duty, neither. I’m going to give Dutch the word. He’s just been waiting for the chance to smash ass. Now you get out.”

I considered arguing, but a look at his crimson face and his fleshy fists pressed against the side of my window decided me otherwise. I wanted to get out of his sight before he realized he’d seen me before, or before my face seared a mark on his memory so that he recalled the incident the next time I came to read the meter. He pulled his head back out of the window. I made a U-turn and headed back for the road.

I wished I could be sure the friend whose visit had pushed Angelina out of shape was Leila Katz. A girl she babysat certainly suggested Leila. Now that Angelina was married, did she want nothing to do with Leila, nothing to bring up the past?

I
DROVE BACK, PASSING
the light green hillocks that rose from the river. Small flocks of sheep and cattle grazed, and the occasional bull, whose main interest in life was likely to be threatening meter readers. Driving by St. Agnes’s Roman Catholic Church, I glanced at Father Calloway’s vegetable beds. Unlike the flourishing rose bushes at the Russian River Fish Ranch, these beds were bare. Whatever Father Calloway had planted either had died a lingering death at the hands of the elements or a sudden one at the mouths of deer or raccoons. No plant in that garden made it to maturity; Father Calloway admitted that. His gardening taught him nonattachment, he said.

Father Calloway would know about Angelina’s past. He had surprised me more than once by the extent of his awareness of the seamier side of Russian River life. But, alas, he was another person I couldn’t ask about Angelina. Not straight out. No, on a matter like this my chances were better with Rosa. Rosa would hate to think Angelina had seduced the girl she had once babysat. She wouldn’t want to believe that her daughter Katie’s high-school friend could be a poisoner. Rosa would be uncomfortable with it all, but she’d tell me.

I drove on, pausing briefly to glance at the first two of the Nine Warriors. The giant redwoods stood a hundred yards apart. Once, when I had stood between them and looked up, they had appeared to be identical. “The Lord’s candles,” Father Calloway had called them.

The fourth of the Warriors was opposite the Fortimiglios’ drive. I pulled into the driveway, parked next to the kitchen steps, and got out.

But Rosa was not home. Rosa, Donny informed me, had gone to Steelhead Lodge.

But when I got to Steelhead Lodge, she wasn’t there either. I was beginning to wonder if anyone was where they were supposed to be today.

“You just missed her,” Bert Lucci told me. “I kind of hoped she’d come out to help me. I had the sheriff’s men here all morning, and they didn’t make things any better. Now I’ve got to do something with this place.” Bert leaned back against the veranda railing. He was dressed in his usual work clothes, but today they seemed too big, as if he had withered within them.

“It must have been a hard night for you,” I said.

“Worst I can remember. You know Edwina and I had our outs. But I would never have wanted her to die like that.”

“Did the sheriff tell you what kind of poison it was?”

“The sheriff didn’t
tell
me anything. He and his men just barged around like I wasn’t even here. They looked over this; they eyeballed that. After all the dusting and picture taking they did last night, there was nothing in the whole place they didn’t get some kind of picture of.”

“Well, what were they looking at today, then?”

“They took everything in the kitchen for starts. I don’t know how they expect me to eat. The spices, I could see that. But the chopping board and the spatulas, and my own dishes that Edwina wouldn’t allow on the table! What are they going to do with those?” He pushed himself up and began to pace.

“Then they went over the table on the stage like they were looking through a microscope. And they were just about to start on the podium when I told them that no one used it.” He swallowed. “Edwina didn’t live long enough to make her great pronouncement.”

Edwina’s announcement! I forgot all about that. And that was the whole point of her bringing the Slugfest here. “Bert, what was she going to say?”

“Damned if I know.” He continued to pace in a halfhearted way. It was obvious that the subject of Edwina’s announcement didn’t interest him at all. Her death and the lodge’s mess seemed about all he could deal with.

“Surely they must have looked at the podium.” I couldn’t imagine Sheriff Wescott letting something like that pass unchecked.

“They looked, but they didn’t find anything. Sheriff seemed mad. I guess he doesn’t have any leads.”

“Did the sheriff tell you what Edwina was going to say?”

Bert stopped. “How’d he know?”

“Well, if Edwina was going to make an announcement important enough for her to go to the trouble of getting television cameras here, she must have wanted to be sure of what she would be saying. She wouldn’t just speak off the top of her head.”

“She did that plenty,” Bert said, from habit. Then he looked away. “No, you’re right. I’ve seen her give speeches for her historical society. She always had notes.”

“Then those notes must have been in her pocketbook.”

“Nope.” Bert headed toward the door.

“They weren’t? How do you know?”

“Because I saw her put something in the podium drawer and lock it. That was in the afternoon, before you came to check the meter. I wasn’t about to ask her what. And then, what with all her orders, and you coming, and then Hooper coming to help me set up, I just forgot about it.”

“But how come the sheriff didn’t find the drawer?” We were at the old podium now. It was a standard oak piece, with the slanted paper stand, a three-inch panel beneath it, and then a space that went down to the floor. I looked at the panel, but other than the seam where it attached to the slanted stand, there was no break in the wood. And there was certainly no visible lock. “Are you sure there’s a drawer here, Bert?”

“Oh, yes. Edwina’s had this podium for years. It was her father’s. She carts it around if she can, or if she can find someone like me to cart it for her.” He bent down, poking his head under the panel. “Look. See, here’s the lock.”

“I suppose the key was in Edwina’s purse,” I said with a sigh.

“She wouldn’t be about to leave that around. Not after she locked it up.”

Eyeing the lock, I said, “Bert? You can get it open, can’t you?”

He hesitated.

“We could call the sheriff and have him come and open it.”

Still he didn’t move.

I knew I should insist on calling the sheriff. But having to deal with him about Edwina’s murder was not something I wanted to do right now. And if the podium drawer held nothing more than notes on Edwina’s discovery of another nineteenth-century photo or a previously unknown grave marker, I didn’t want to face Wescott’s derision. I said to Bert, “Do you want the sheriff’s whole entourage back out here?”

Without pause to think, he pulled a screwdriver from his pocket, stuck it into the crack, and hit the end with his hammer. It took only three blows to break the lock.

Bert pulled open the drawer and stared in. It was nearly a minute before he moved far enough back that I could see over his shoulder. I had expected to find notes or even a handwritten draft of a speech, but what the drawer held was several sheets of parchment. The first was headed “Treaty between the State of California and the Pomo Nation.” It was dated 1851.

Lifting it carefully, I put it on the paper stand, and Bert and I read it together.

“Son of a gun!” Bert said. “Old Edwina really had a find here.”

“You mean she discovered this treaty?”

“You see here”—he pointed to a sentence in the middle of the page—“where it mentions a Pomo rancheria on the river?”

“What’s a rancheria?”

“A little reservation. Sometimes real little.”

“So the treaty sets up a little Pomo reservation on the Russian River. I don’t remember any reservation.”

“That’s because there isn’t one,” Bert said triumphantly. “That means that Edwina must have discovered this. No wonder she fussed around for days about how the lodge looked. No wonder she got that television cameraman out here, thinking he was going to report on the Slugfest. This treaty will put her on the map of historians.”

“But Bert, why didn’t she just call a news conference? I mean, the treaty is way more important than the Slugfest. She could have gotten coverage from San Francisco, maybe Los Angeles, for that.”

“Yeah,” he snorted. “She should have got that kind of news. But she wouldn’t have. Edwina didn’t have a good record with these people. I’ll have to admit it wasn’t all their fault. See, she’d been calling news conferences for years. Every time she unearthed the foundation of a pioneer house or the remnants of one of the old railway cars abandoned in the underbrush along where the tracks used to run, she’d call the papers and the TV people. Got so that if she’d found the hundred-year-old remains of General Kuskoff from the Russian settlement up at Fort Ross, she couldn’t have gotten a photographer.” He leaned an elbow on Edwina’s podium, carefully avoiding the treaty. “They thought she was a joke, a crank—the newspeople and the historians. Makes me damned mad. Even when she found legitimate historical stuff, no one paid any mind. And the real kicker is that Edwina was sure there were rancherias up here. Every year she’d give one lecture on the Indians of the river area, the Pomos, and she always said that there had to be more than just the big reservation up at Stewart’s Point.”

“Why did she think that?”

“You know, she gave pretty much the same talk every year. I’ve probably heard it fifteen times. If you want an answer to that question, you’re asking the right person. Edwina said that the Pomos didn’t live like one big tribe. They were more like separate village groups, real loosely joined together. She said it made sense that one of the settlers who aimed to open a mine or log the area would have been empowered by the government to deal with the Indians. That would have saved the government the trouble. And Edwina was sure that one of these guys probably bought off the Indians—got some local chief to sign some treaty. Probably the local chief had no idea what he was signing—how could he, it’s in English. And”—he raised a finger—“Edwina figured that before there was any question of rounding up the Pomos and putting the whole village on a little scrap of land like this, the Pomos cleared out anyway. After eighteen-seventy the Pomos were all but gone.”

I nodded. “It’s a good theory. But if Edwina was so sure, why didn’t she go to wherever it is they keep treaties and check it out?”

Bert snorted again. “There’s another slap for you. Edwina got cards to the university libraries. She went right in there and did her research. But treaties like this, you know where they were kept?”

“No.”

“In the secret files of the United States Senate in Washington, D.C.!”

My look of amazement must have been sufficient, for Bert nodded three times and said, “Edwina told us. It seems that when the main batch of Indian treaties were signed in the eighteen-fifties, they got sent to Sacramento to be ratified. But by that time there was plenty of opposition, and the guys there didn’t want to deal with them so they passed them on to Washington. But the senators in Washington didn’t want to be bothered either, so they plunked the whole batch into their secret files. Not a one of them came to light until after the turn of the century.”

“If they weren’t ratified, were they valid?”

That stopped Bert. “Don’t know. Since none of them were local, Edwina didn’t go into that.”

“Do you think this was one of them?”

“Could be. But maybe because the rancheria is so small, it got taken care of in Sacramento. Maybe there wasn’t so much opposition to this little one.” He picked up the last page of the treaty and put it on top. It was a map showing the river and the rancheria. “See, it’s just big enough to put a couple houses on. You’d hardly recognize the river from this.”

The gently curving line didn’t begin to resemble the tight, sharp angles of the river, and the only names on the map that corresponded to those of today were Fort Ross, where the Russians under General Kuskoff had established the southernmost settlement of their North American explorations, and the Russian River itself. The rancheria was a rectangle spanning the river. On that rectangle were drawn two trees, close together.