“Museum” wasn’t exactly what she would have called it. It looked more like the leavings of the attics for miles around for the past several generations. There was an attempt at outlining the county history in the first room, but after that, it had been dusty glass case after case full of mostly unlabeled flotsam. Without a doubt, some of it was genuine and valuable; the Civil War artifacts, for instance—

But right beside war diaries that screamed for proper preservation were stuffed squirrels, stuffed birds, stuffed fish …

… a mummified mermaid … a shrunken head … someone’s collection of jelly jars.…

And the relics.

She nearly doubled over with nausea; she couldn’t even bear to touch the case. Scalps, medicine bags, articles of clothing, weapons, and three or four dozen skulls, all of them crying out to her of death. Bloody, horrible death. Kestrel had come very near to starting a mourning keen until the Jennifer persona took over.

She staggered to the front of the museum and managed to ask about that particular case. The attendant, a girl who was obviously trying to do her best, first described the terrible problem she was having, trying to preserve the things worth preserving with no money. She carried on at length about the importance of the papers and belongings of the settlers.

Gradually it dawned on Jennifer that this girl never said a word about the Indians; so far as she was concerned, the history of the area began and ended with the white settlers.

When she finally got the girl to tell her about the case of bones and artifacts, the girl shrugged dismissively. “Mound builders of some kind,” she said. “Abram Vanderzandt found them when he arrived looking for a place to homestead, and they were all dead. Probably some other tribe killed them, and he could have taken credit and turned in the scalps for bounty, but he was an honest man and he just collected a few souvenirs.”

The girl continued, apparently blithely unaware—or uncaring—that Jennifer was Native American, that she had dismissed the taking of “souvenirs” from the victims of the massacre as casually as if they had been nothing more important than the stuffed squirrels.

For a moment, Jennifer was outraged—until the girl continued. And it became clear that she attached sanctity to no one’s dead, and would have happily looted every graveyard in the county if she thought she could get any kind of information from the graves.

And it was her attitude that only those who had left written accounts of themselves—the white settlers—were worthy of attention that gave Jennifer an idea.

“Well, the reason I asked about that particular case,” she said, interrupting a plaint of how the Civil War relics were falling to pieces, “is that I collect Indian relics. I don’t suppose you’d be able to sell me those, would you?”