The girl gaped at her, then stammered something about “county property.” Jennifer nodded, and said, “So who’s in charge of county property? The Assessor? Or the County Commissioner?”

It took several phone calls before it was established that the County Commissioner did have the authority to sell property deeded to the museum. Jennifer was not going to let this opportunity slip through her fingers, and the volunteer was not about to lose a chance at some funding for her pet project. So when Jennifer urged, “Let’s go ask him,” the girl led the march straight to the tiny office on the fourth floor.

She had the feeling that she could have bought half the museum if she’d wanted; the Commissioner was overjoyed to sell something the girl assured him was “worthless.” He was probably very tired of her pleas for money; now she had some, and maybe she’d leave him alone for a while.

Jennifer was fairly certain that the sale was only quasi-legal at best, and she hadn’t cared. It was doubtful that anyone would pursue her.

It had taken every ounce of determination to take the box of relics, smile, and thank them.

The place where the settler in question had discovered the massacre was now in the middle of a state park. That made things easier.

Whatever the tribe’s rites had been, no one knew them now. Jennifer could only inter them near where they had died, trying to recreate a rite as best she could from her own intuition and Medicine knowledge, as well as from things she had learned about the Peoples who had once lived in the area, gleaned hastily from the county library. She found a place she thought would be undisturbed, one of the lesser, less interesting mounds near what had been the village, and spent most of the day digging into the side. At sunset, she had laid them to rest as best she could.

Then she covered her tracks, and went back to the job she was being paid to do.

But that had given her an idea. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts in profane hands, all over the country. Not just museums, but in the hands of people like private collectors, and in the hands of the descendants of Indian agents. Some agents had been good, well-intentioned, if woefully Judeo-Christian–centered people, but some had been thieves who took anything they could get their hands on, and others had felt the only way to “pacify” the Indians was to destroy their culture. Most of those artifacts didn’t matter; much—but some—