The Litter Of The Law

Later that afternoon, after Harry finished her barn chores, she set up shop at the computer in the tack room. Outside, the sun was already setting as Simon, the possum, peeped over the hayloft.

Patrolling the barn’s center aisle while the horses munched away, Mrs. Murphy heard the possum’s squeak.

“Murphy?”

“What, Simon?”

“What does she do in there? I see that bluish light. She sits there for hours! It’s unnatural for people to sit still that long.”

“Ha.” Pewter, faking her patrol, stopped to look up. “Millions of people sit on their butts for weeks and years. After a while, part of them is in the next zip code.”

“Look who’s talking,” sassed Tucker, plonked down on an aisle tack trunk.

For a fat girl, Pewter could move. She flew down the aisle, jumped onto the tack trunk, batted the corgi with an extended claw, then leapt off in an attempt to flee the barn, Tucker in pursuit.

“I loathe violence.” Simon closed his eyes.

“Mmm,” was the tiger cat’s reply, since she often considered batting Pewter, as well as Tucker. Well, more Pewter than Tucker—she could reason with Tucker.

Heavyset though she was, Pewter easily flummoxed the dog. She could zig and zag so quickly that Tucker would skid out trying to catch her. Then Pewter would run straightaway, Tucker would make up lost ground, and once again the cat would turn. She even stopped dead in her tracks, faced the onrushing dog, then soared right over Tucker, who by now was barking nonstop.

“I hate you!” barked the corgi. “I really, really hate you.”

“Peon!” Pewter gleefully tormented the dog.

“What now?” Hearing the clamor, Harry pushed away from the computer and walked outside. “All right, you two. Calm down.”

“Kill. I want to kill!” Tucker practically foamed at the mouth.

“Bubble Butt, Tailless Wonder!” Pewter was merciless as she climbed a gum tree, then spread out on a lower branch like a courtesan, tail swaying to and fro. “You’ll never catch me,” she taunted.

“You have to sleep sometime.” Tucker stood on her hind legs, reaching as high as she could with her front paws on the thick ridged bark.

“I sleep with one eye open,” Pewter called down in a singsong voice.

“What a liar she is,” laughed Mrs. Murphy, now with the human.

Grabbing Tucker by her rolled leather collar, Harry pulled the enraged dog away from the tree. Pewter watched from above, enjoying the spectacle.

“Tucker, leave it,” Harry ordered.

“Really, Tucker,” Mrs. Murphy counseled. “She’s not worth this much emotion.”

Tucker stared imploringly at Harry. “You don’t know how awful she is. You don’t know how I suffer.” She thought a moment, searching for further damning ideas. “I think she’s a member of a Confederate underground. She’s gray, you know. She wants to restore the old ways. She’s really, really awful.”

Mrs. Murphy laughed, while poor Simon, who had run to view this chase from the opened upper hayloft door, wrung his front paws. “Tucker, she would be the same no matter if it was the old days or these days,” he said.

“She’d be worse. I know it.” Tucker still stared at Harry, who reached down to pat her silky head.

As though singing an aria, Pewter meowed, “She can dish it out but she can’t take it.”

“Pewter, that’s the worst screeching ever,” Harry insulted the cat. “Now, here’s the deal. If you don’t behave, it’s lockdown. Separate rooms. Closed doors. No treats. Hear that? No treats.”

Tucker growled low. “I’d starve to get even.”

“I wouldn’t.” Pewter hastily backed down the tree, circled Tucker so she would be behind Harry, then rubbed the human’s legs while purring mightily.

“How can she fall for this?” Crestfallen, Tucker lowered her head.

“Because she likes me better.” Pewter kept rubbing.

“I can’t concentrate when you all carry on like this,” Harry complained. “Too much noise. If we were in the house, God only knows what would have been smashed to bits. Now come on. Settle down.” She turned to go back to the barn.

Dutifully, Tucker stuck by the human’s heels while Pewter, in a flash of glory, or so she thought, raced ahead, tail straight up. She paused for a moment, then Mrs. Murphy zoomed up next to her and the two cats chased each other, in good fun, to the barn.

Harry loved watching animals play. “Tucker, cats are, well, cats. They’ll chase each other, play-hiss, howl—it’s just dumb stuff. You, being a sober and responsible dog, are above it.”

Tucker considered this and thought for a fraction of a moment that maybe Harry did understand. To some extent, she did. Anyone who lives with cats figures out soon enough they will do what they want.

Back in her tack room chair, Harry wiggled to get comfortable. The lamp she was using until she could buy the Italian light bulb—which is how she thought of it—couldn’t shine its light as precisely as the designer one, but it was okay.

Tucker flopped at her feet. This made Harry happy because she always enjoyed reporting her progress to the dog, who invariably perked her ears at Harry’s voice.

“Tucker, I have gotten into the county records for students, but the records for Random Row are spotty at best. I’m trying to find a student’s name that was on a piece of paper in the teacher’s desk.” She scrolled through the years. “The years before 1918 aren’t even entered. They microfilmed the written records back in the 1960s. Maybe the handwritten records are in a forgotten vault somewhere in the county building.” She kept clicking the mouse. “Oh, hey, they actually scanned them in. The handwriting is beautiful. I can’t make some of this out, but there does not appear to be a student named Walter Ashby Plecker.”

Missing his wife, Fair walked into the barn, looked up, and saw Simon. “Hey, fella.”

“Hey,” said Simon, then scuttled away.

Fair entered the tack room. “Simon is such a scaredy-cat. ’Course, most possums are.”

“It helps if you feed him.” Harry leaned her chin on her hand. “Molasses on bread or molasses in the snow.”

“I know, but when am I going to have time to feed a possum? When do you have time?”

She smiled up at him. “I do it every day.”

“Feeds us, too,” Shortro, the athletic Saddlebred horse in the stall next to the tack room, called out.

Tomahawk, Harry’s beloved Thoroughbred, also nickered. “We love Harry,” he declared.

All the horses agreed, and up in his nest even Simon squeaked, “Me, too.”

The two cats entered the tack room just as Harry finished telling Fair about her failure to find any information on the mysterious name.

“Here.” He leaned over, typed a bit, then stood back. “You did the logical thing. You assumed Walter was a student’s name because the paper was found in the teacher’s desk. I just punched in his name to see what would show up. There you go.” Fair started to read over her shoulder. “Hmm, not so good,” he said.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Harry, delighted that her husband was smart, was equally put out by her own slowness on this subject.

She read along with him. “ ‘Paper genocide is often the term used to describe the actions of Walter Ashby Plecker, the government employee who was head of Vital Statistics in Virginia from 1912 to 1946.’ ”

Fair continued. “ ‘Plecker replaced the term Indian with the term colored on all official documents, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, and voter registration forms.’ ” He stepped back a moment. “Paper genocide.”

She looked up at her husband. “Fair, what does it mean exactly?”

“I’m not sure but I think it means that if everyone is jammed under one umbrella, you can treat or mistreat everyone the same. This is bizarre.” He read more as she scrolled down the text. “ ‘Members of Virginia Indian tribes are severely handicapped in proving they are indeed Indians according to federal standards. They can’t apply for scholarships or receive federal funds for housing, health care, or economic development.’ ” He stopped looking at the screen, looked at his wife. “And, of course, they can’t open casinos, which brings in big bucks. Wait a minute, here. Says the Virginia tribes do not want to open casinos and have signed away those rights.” He’d returned his gaze to the computer screen.

“Fair, this is a terrible thing.” She read more on the subject. “ ‘Seven Virginia governors, irrespective of party affiliation, have supported federal recognition of Virginia’s Indians.’ But, in so many words, they’ve been told to sit on a tack.”

“Hey, look at this. No Virginia tribe member can return their ancestors’ bones to a rightful and respectful burial. Harry, this is outrageous. I mean, I had no idea. This is one of the most disgusting things I have ever read.”

“Well,” Harry said, “a bill, H.R. 783, the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2011, is presently working its way through Congress. Yeah, right. And how many bills prior to this have died in one subcommittee or another?”

Fair rarely swore but he let it fly. “Bastards.”

“Walter Ashby Plecker appears to have been the biggest bastard of the bunch, and it’s just rolled on from there.” Stunned and deeply disturbed, Harry clicked off her computer. “Let’s call Coop,” she said, standing.

“Why?”

“Come on. Let’s go inside and use the house line. Anything ever spoken on a cellphone is out there somewhere.”

Intrigued, he followed his wife into the kitchen, as did the two cats and the dog.

Harry rang Cooper up on the kitchen wall phone and explained what she and Fair had discovered about Walter Ashby Plecker. “It’s only a scrap of paper but maybe you should ask Sarah Price if you can go through Hester’s desk to see if there’s a link. After all, Hester had Cherokee blood on her mother’s side, and Josh was a member of the Upper Mattaponi tribe.”

“I’ve asked Sarah to go through Hester’s things on Monday, and I’ll be there with her.”

Urgency in her voice, Harry prodded. “Move it up. Go tomorrow, Sunday, if she’ll do it.”

“Harry, this isn’t much to go on.”

“It’s a long shot, a really long shot, Cooper, but right now it’s one of the few links between the two murders, other than both corpses were dressed for Halloween, cleverly disguised.”

A long, long pause followed this. Over the phone line, Harry could almost hear Cooper’s mind whirring. “All right.”

Husband and wife remained silent after Harry hung up.

Finally, Fair said, “While you were on your computer in the barn, I was on mine. Come on. I have something to show you.”

Once inside his small, tidy office, he showed her an article reporting that jobs exposing women to plastics and man-made chemicals greatly elevate a woman’s chance of developing breast cancer.

He pointed to the screen. “A long-term study of more than two thousand women in Ontario found those who worked for at least ten years in food canning and automotive plastics developed cancer at a rate five times higher than women in other jobs. Chemicals such as BPA—bisphenol A—are to blame.”

She replied, “I’m a farmer. Well, I worked in the post office after college. I’ve checked out fine at every exam for the last two years, and after my next checkup, I won’t have to go back for six months. I’m okay.”

Fair, who had felt shocked, frightened, and useless when his wife was diagnosed with stage I breast cancer two years ago, still carried with him the fear that it might return. Because of this, he was vigilant concerning cancer research and treatments. “Read on.”

“Pesticide exposure is also elevated for female farm workers.” She quieted for a moment. “I rarely use much of anything.”

“What about your father?”

She nodded. “He used more. Cut back later on, but he said that in the beginning they thought those things were a godsend.”

“Our air, food, and water are loaded with chemicals unheard of even fifty years ago. BPA and phthalates, to name a few, are known hormone disrupters. I see so much more cancer in horses than I did when I started practicing as a vet.” Harry’s husband looked stricken.

“Honey, my cancer is not coming back,” she assured him.

“I know.” He kissed her cheek. “But now that you’ve been through it, I want to keep abreast of recent research, forgive the pun.”

They both laughed and she hugged him when he stood up. “You’re stuck with me.”

“Better be, which reminds me: Carry your father’s old snubnosed .38.”

“I can’t shoot cancer cells.”

“No, but you can’t keep your nose out of those two murders. I know you. Just carry the gun.”