The Litter Of The Law

“A Montblanc Diplomat,” Cooper said the next afternoon, holding up the fancy pen, which she had fetched from the drawer of Hester’s desk.

“She didn’t have much or spend much, but what she had was the very best.” Sarah smiled, remembering her aunt’s lectures on prudent expenditures. “If she was going to fork out cash, it had to be for something that would last.”

“This certainly will.” Cooper studied the gold point. “Medium.”

“How do you know so much about pens?”

Cooper laughed. “How do you?”

“Drilled into my head: Write in your own hand on good paper. Always write a thank-you and a condolence, and, of course, the condolence should never be on pastel paper. The rules, but I’m glad I know them. Of course, who in my generation practices such etiquette?”

“We’re close in age. I kind of think these things are coming back. I mean good stationery, fountain pens, elegant clothing, and hats for men, too. Cycles. Then again, how many butt cracks can you observe before you decide that maybe low-rise trousers are not the way to go?”

Sarah, emitting peals of laughter, snatched a heavy wooden ruler from the desk. “This would solve a lot of problems in that regard.”

Cooper laughed, too, as they both kept rooting through the long drawer of the antique desk.

Sarah pulled out a Smythson leather-bound day calendar. “Probably you should keep this, and take a lot of time with it.”

“Right.” Cooper ran her forefinger over the textured leather. “I don’t see a computer anywhere in here.”

“Aunt H didn’t have one at home, just one at the stand, which you know about. I’d bug her about it but she said when she came home she didn’t want to think about work.”

“We’ve already got someone working on the store computer with Lolly. Lolly still needs it to transact business. Working in the evening, our computer whiz found sales, purchases, and a soil map for Albemarle County with the farms she did business with clearly marked. Wherever she bought anything from anyone, she checked their soils. She really was a very thorough person.”

“About most everything. Dad was that way, too. ‘If you’re going to do it, do it right.’ Must have heard that a thousand times.” Sarah sighed and smiled. “I miss them. I will miss their generation and my grandparents’ generation. I never really thought about it much before.” She blinked. “Sorry. You’re here to go through Aunt H’s effects and I’m babbling on.”

“Not babble. It does kind of dawn on you that nobody is here forever. Then you have to realize you won’t be here forever either. I see enough death in my line of work to give me great respect for life.”

Sarah tilted her head. “Officer, that’s a wonderful thought.”

“Will you call me Cooper? I’m not even in uniform. Thank God. I mean, have you ever seen a law enforcement uniform that looked good on a woman?”

“Now that you mention it, there’s never quite enough room for …” Sarah made a rolling motion over her breasts.

Again they both laughed.

“Nothing here,” Cooper said, glancing at an empty drawer. “There’s still this big one on the bottom, the double drawer. Let me get on my knees and hand you the files.” She did just that.

Sarah arranged the files in neat piles. “Hmm,” she said, reading the tabs. “A lot on fertilizer, pesticides, wildlife studies. County soil and water maps.”

“Probably hard copies of the maps that are on the work computer.” Cooper pulled out the map file, flipped it open, and unfolded a large county map.

Sarah reached into the open folder. “Here’s the info key.”

Cooper studied the numbers and the outlines, all in different colors. “Number one is her own holdings. Pretty good soil. Number two is eastern Albemarle. Hmm, not as much produce over there. She has most of it marked as hay.” Cooper ran her finger back to western Albemarle. “Morrowdale, that’s a beautiful farm out on Garth Road, where we found the first body. According to Hester, good soil, but she has the pesticide sign near some of the acres. I guess that means they were sprayed.”

“Look at all three yellow outlines. Someone owns a lot of property,” Sarah remarked.

Cooper checked the key again. “That’s Buddy Janss, the big man who served punch at the reception. He rents most of it.”

“He must be rich.”

“Land poor might be another way to put it.” Cooper smiled. “He owns maybe eight hundred acres outright. Rents the rest, so he has a lot of money sunk into soil improvement. That’s the conundrum of renting land. You usually need to improve it. Most landowners, especially suburban or city people who buy in the country, don’t want to spend money on their fields and don’t realize how important it is. Buddy dutifully fertilizes, weeds, tests soil. He doesn’t want to sell his acres if he can help it. And he’d buy what he rents if he could.”

“Who is in chartreuse?”

Cooper ran her finger down the list. “Neil Jordan. Hester marked what’s owned, what’s rented, and what’s for sale. She must have updated this weekly.”

Cooper folded the map and placed it back in the manila folder, then pulled out the file on fertilizers. “This is full of equations,” she exclaimed.

Sarah studied the figures. “Aunt H took high school chemistry. Maybe she took more when she was at Mary Baldwin.”

“Bet she did. This stuff is complicated.” Cooper shook her head.

“The brochures aren’t.” Sarah handed her a pile of glossy brochures for fertilizer products, featuring photos of lush fields of corn, wheat, soybeans, even orchard rows.

Cooper examined a pamphlet. “Here’s one that Neil Jordan wrote on the back of, telling your aunt to call him if she had questions. It’s for a new fertilizer.”

“If it was a natural product, she probably did call him, but she was wary, as you know, and she was really opposed to anything petroleum based,” said Sarah. “She would say something about it to me every now and then, but not too much since I don’t understand agriculture.”

“Did she ever ask you about your work?”

“A little. Enough to tell me it’s boring, which it is.” Sarah looked directly at Cooper. “Insurance is a good thing to have but so much of it is oversold on fears. I’ve done well, but I, well …” She shrugged. “I think I can walk away from it now, thanks to Aunt H.”

“She must have loved you very much.”

Sarah’s eyes teared up, then she laughed her tinkling laugh. “I was her only heir. I suppose she had to love me.”

“Big Mim put the word out that you’re going to move here. Live in Hester’s house. Keep the family place alive. Oh, Big Mim runs Crozet, which I should have told you or someone should have told you before the reception.”

“Susan Tucker filled me in on all the locals. I learned who, what, when, and where, and sometimes why. Aunt H, when I’d come on visits, didn’t much talk about other people.”

Chin on her hand now, Cooper pulled out another folder, flipping it open.

She sat up straighter. “Here are the procedures for officially establishing an American Indian group as an Indian tribe.” She read a footnote. “The seven criteria are presented here in abbreviated form. ‘For the complete federal text, refer to 25 CFR Part 83.’ Huh?”

Sarah rummaged through the files. “She’s got some really old stuff here. Stuff before computers took over. It looks to be clearly presented. It’s all about the Virginia Indian tribes. What about the criteria you have, is it more recent stuff?”

“Number one is, ‘The petitioner has been identified as an American Indian entity on a substantially continuous basis since 1900.’ ”

“My list says, ‘Be identified from historic times until the present on a substantially continuous basis as American Indian or aboriginal.’ ”

Each reviewed the other’s list and the language.

“Your list is clearer,” Sarah said.

“It is. Number two: ‘Prove that a substantial portion of members lives in a specific area or lives as a community viewed as American Indian and distinct from other populations of the area; and prove that members of this community are descendants of an Indian tribe.’ ”

“That’s easy to do in the western states.” Sarah read on for Cooper. “Number three: ‘Prove that it has maintained tribal political influence or other authority over its members as an autonomous entity throughout history until the present.’ ”

Cooper read on, then threw up her hands. “All this crap about documentation. If you’ve been moved around or removed, how can you provide documentation to the very same government that’s screwing you?” She stopped herself. “Sorry.”

“No, no. I understand, but this is even worse.” While flipping through the papers, Sarah had plucked out the criteria needed for an individual to prove he was Indian, as described by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “This is real betrayal. Worse than ‘screwing you.’ Look at this.”

Cooper read the passage, then said, “This is flat-out impossible. You have to give the maiden names of all women listed on the request for the Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. So you need, at the least, your mother and grandmother’s maiden names. You can abbreviate that to CDIB. How helpful.”

Sarah continued in Cooper’s line. “Birth certificates? Okay, that’s reasonable. ‘Delayed birth certificates,’ what in the devil does that mean? Death certificates … and ‘the Indian tribe must have a duly adopted tribal ordinance concerning the issuance of such documents.’ So you can’t be born or die according to your customs, you have to do it the U.S. government way and prove it? And your degree of Indian blood can only be computed if there are records of ancestors of Indian blood who were listed on an official roll.” Sarah caught her breath. “This is a bureaucratic paper nightmare.”

“Paper genocide,” Cooper whispered.

“What?”

Cooper explained what Harry had told her about Walter Ashby Plecker and the peculiar phrase linked to him.

Sarah was silent for a long time, then said, “It is genocide. Dear God, it is. Why did Aunt H have all this stuff?”

“Do you think she might have wanted to prove her own Cherokee blood?”

“No. There would be no way to prove it and by now it’s so intermingled with, for lack of a better description, British Isles blood.” Sarah shook her head.

“Yeah.” Cooper stared at the folder, then turned more pages. “Obviously, Hester was fascinated with this. And you know about the Virginia tribes not being recognized by the federal government?”

As Sarah did not, Cooper explained. Sarah exploded, “They’re totally ripped off. It isn’t even the loans and all that stuff. It’s needing to be recognized for surviving at all, for keeping their cultural integrity intact. This may sound odd but one of the main reasons I go to Mass is for the liturgy, for the tradition. It’s my culture. It has been intact for two thousand years. I am saying and praying what people before me prayed throughout the centuries. I need that. Doesn’t it make sense that those of Indian blood need their customs, spiritual solace?”

Cooper returned to the file. “It does make sense. It’s more important than the money, but I’m willing to bet the reason this is all so complicated and difficult is the government doesn’t want thousands of people applying for scholarships, loans, you name it.”

“Everything comes down to money. Like divorce. A relationship devolves into fighting over money and who gets the couch. Pretty much the whole thing repulses me.”

“Divorce?” Cooper half-smiled at her.

“Yeah, but what I’m really talking about is bean counting. That’s what I do at the insurance company: I count beans.”

Cooper took in what the young woman said, then returned her gaze to the file in front of her. “Says here that tribes may purchase or reacquire traditional lands and have the property placed in trust status, exempt from state or county rules, including, in some cases, zoning restrictions.” She read more. “This states the possible land base for Virginia Indians is too small here.”

“I don’t believe that,” Sarah said. “It’s just that the land has been in other hands for centuries. White folks got here in 1607. Well, earlier if you count the city of St. Augustine down in Florida.”

“Here’s something else,” Cooper said. “If a close affiliation with a property can be shown, the tribe might reclaim the lands or demand damages for its ‘illegal’ usage—‘illegal’ is in quotes—many years ago. Means church and school lands used by the Catholic Church, Quakers, etc., could possibly be reclaimed, bought back, and some sort of reparation deal structured.”

“What a mess, except it isn’t because it’s hidden,” Sarah said. “Squelched. People nowadays are too busy downloading the latest film to even think about something like this.”

Cooper smiled again at Hester’s niece. “I don’t think being self-centered is unique to our time. We simply have more ways to pursue it.” She then looked down before exclaiming, “Big bucks!”

Sarah took the paper from Cooper’s hand and read, “ ‘The Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut run the biggest moneymaker in the western hemisphere with their casino.’ All the other tribal-owned casinos are listed here with profits. And there’s a note at the bottom.”

Cooper read out loud: “ ‘Dear Hester, Per your request. It’s fascinating. Think of the fly rods one could buy with even a sliver of those profits. Ha. Your buddy, Josh.’ ”

Cooper’s face turned pale. “He was onto something. He had to be. He couldn’t have been killed in such a bizarre way for finding an accounting error in the books of the local convenience store.”

“Maybe he wanted to push for a casino.”

“But the Virginia Indians signed away that possibility.”

“Laws can be overturned. It must be something like that, Cooper, because my aunt would never, ever be involved in something underhanded. She wanted just enough to live decently and wished the same for others.”

“Sarah, I know that’s the truth, but your aunt Hester discovered something dangerous, and I’ll bet she shared it with Josh.”