It didn’t make sense. It didn’t even make sense if you figured in the possibility that he might have counted anyone working for this developer as a traitor. He would know how other Indians would feel about deaths in their own ranks. Especially very insular types who still harbored prejudices against any Indian from another nation. She’d heard enough stories about treacherous Blackfeet and—from her own folk—traitorous Cherokees to know that. An incident like this would not foster solidarity, it would create divisions.

No. No, this was not adding up. This made no sense whatsoever.

Time to call home again. Dad’s got the best grapevine in the county; maybe he’s heard something. If he hasn’t, and I ask him to keep his ear to the ground, he might.

She dialed the familiar number without even looking at the buttons, and waited. It was picked up on the first ring this time.

“Talldeer residence, Sarah Talldeer speaking. Can I help you?”

Jennifer grinned to herself, and replied in Cherokee, “Beloved Mother, you are going to get yourself stolen by a marauding Japanese seller-of-goods if you continue to answer the telephone that way. We shall have to go on the war trail in order to steal you back, and you know the Japanese have no good horses to take! How shall we get your worth in raiding with no horses to carry off?”

“Jennie darling, you are going to confuse the hell out of the nice FBI man tapping the phone if you keep speaking foreign languages,” her mother countered, this time in English. She laughed, and so did Jennie.

That was a family joke, although at one point there probably had been a tap on the phone, either because of Jennifer’s activism or because of her current occupation. There might be again. Oddly enough, no one in the family really cared. Sarah Talldeer’s attitude was that since no one in her family had anything to hide, there was no reason to worry. Jennifer, although she would have been outraged when she had been in college, was now fairly philosophical about it. And both her brothers and her father took a kind of puckish pleasure in the idea that some poor fool might be listening in.

Sarah thought the whole idea of a phone tap was rather stupid. If someone really wanted to listen to long conversations with her real estate clients, or the trials and tribulations of the adolescent and college-age Talldeers, they were welcome, so far as she was concerned. And heaven help them if they weren’t also fluent in Osage and Cherokee; the family used all three languages, as they had all their lives, to make certain that their children were fluent in the tongues of their heritage.