“Really?”

“Oh lord, yes. They’ll have eight, ten kids – and that’s a lot, isn’t it? Especially when these are kids with issues.” She sighed and sipped her tea. “Jack got slapped around by one foster mother’s boyfriend, and then he was in a couple of these warehouse-type deals. When he came to me and Alan, he was… guarded. It took a while to win his trust. But then…” She shut her eyes and Burke saw tears glitter in the corners.

“We really did become a family.”

“How long was he with you?”

“Until he was sixteen. Six years. Alan and I… we helped him look into his heritage and made sure he knew about Paiute history. I took him to Pyramid Lake and introduced him to the people there. Would you like to see a picture?”

“Sure.” Burke followed her into a tiny room.

“This was Jack’s room,” she told him. “And that’s Jack with Peter Whitecloud.” She pointed to a framed photograph of a twelve-year-old boy smiling beside an older man in blue jeans and a sweater. “Peter was head of the tribal council then. A real V.I.P.”

“Is he still around?” Burke asked.

“No,” Mandy said. “He passed a few years ago.”

There was a posterboard next to the bed, and Burke went over to it. “What’s this?” he asked.

“Oh, that – that was a ninth-grade project Jack did. He got an A plus!”

Under the heading 200 Years of Losing Ground was a series of beautifully drawn maps of the continental United States. Burke looked closer and saw that color-coded areas represented the lands of various tribes. There were six maps in all, starting in 1775 and ending in 1975. Sidebars in small boxes noted the enactment of laws and treaties affecting the Indians, mostly for the worst. The maps dramatized the rapid diminution of land belonging to Native Americans.

In the last map, there were only a few specks of color east of the Mississippi. In the West, the biggest chunks of Indian land were in the Dakotas and in the Four Corners region. Even in Oklahoma, the whole of which had been declared “Indian Territory” in 1835, reservation land was now but a tiny fraction of the state.

“They’re still suffering,” Mandy said. “Folks think the casinos have changed it all, but the truth is, Native Americans are still the least healthy, least wealthy, and least educated of all the peoples in the United States.” She sighed, and led him back to the living room. “I don’t mean to rattle on,” she said.

“What happened when Jack was sixteen?” Burke asked. “Where did he go?”

The old woman squeezed her eyes shut. “My husband got liver cancer. They can’t really do a damn thing for it – except, maybe, a transplant. Alan was on the list, but… we ran out of time.” She sighed. “Anyway, when Alan was diagnosed, I didn’t let on about it. I should have, I know, but I was afraid they’d take Jack away.”

“You mean Child Services? Why would they do that?”

“Because we were old – or not ‘old,’ but old to be Jack’s foster parents. I was fifty-five and Alan was sixty when he came to us. It was just pure old-fashioned luck that we got him. They had to place him, we were willin’, and at the time, they had nobody else. But when they found out that Alan was sick and that I was spending a lot of time taking care of him, that was that.” A quick intake of breath.

“I’m sorry.”

She dabbed at her eyes with her knuckles. “He didn’t want to go. We were all the family he had, plus he knew I couldn’t take care of Alan by myself. Without Jack’s help, Alan would have to go to a hospice. And that’s what he did.” A sigh. “I had to be real firm with Jack. I knew he’d try to run away and come back, but I made him promise not to. I told him that it would be the death of me if he spoiled his chances. Even back then, he wanted to go to Stanford, and I knew he had a real shot at it. But not if he got into trouble. And ‘running away,’ they treat that like it’s a felony, you know?”

Burke nodded.

“Jack got to a place in town that wasn’t too bad – lots of kids and they made him pray all the time. But Jack was old enough by then to look after himself. And he got to stay at the high school, which was great. He went with me to visit Alan most weekends, and I met him at the library a bunch of times. We did his college applications there.”

“But they didn’t let him come back after your husband died?”

She shook her head. “I was too old to look after him – that’s what they said.”

“But he got into Stanford.”

“I was so proud! Bright as he was, it was still a miracle. And then to do so well. And that invention! He was so excited! It would have been a tremendous boon. He was going to buy me a house, which I didn’t need. But he would have loved to do that. It would have made him feel… I don’t know. Real good about himself.” She sighed and her shoulders slumped. Suddenly, she looked very tired. “I still can’t believe what happened,” she said. Her eyes teared up, but she didn’t cry. “Now, maybe he was mad – he certainly had the right to be mad – but he never would have hurt anybody. Not my Jack.”

“Not then, but… what about now?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Burke leaned toward her. “What worries me is… I think he might be involved with this Culpeper thing. And that Culpeper might not be the end of it.”

“Oh my God-” Her hand flew up to her mouth. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know a thing that could help you.” Her damp eyes shone like crushed jewels. “I don’t know him anymore. I only know the person he used to be. Even in court, even by then, he was different. You could see it. Eyes closed down, hard as a stone.” She shook her head. “He’s been out for months now, and he hasn’t called.”

“But if he does…”

She pursed her lips, and nodded. “If he does, I’ll call you.” She offered a square of paper from a basket. It was the reverse side of a page from a one-a-day calendar of flower photos. He gave her his number in Dublin, and told her he’d check his messages each day.

He was saying good-bye, on his way out the door, when her voice stopped him. “You know…” she said.

When he turned, she was looking at the calendar page.

“I don’t see how this can help,” she told him, “but if Jack… does something… I can guess the date.”

“When? How?”

“June twenty-two. It’s an important date for a lot of Native Americans. Because it’s the solstice.” She pressed her lips together. “You say ‘sundance’ now and everybody thinks of Robert Redford. But the Sun Dance was the biggest ceremony of the year for many tribes. The government outlawed it way back when – and I know Jack wrote a paper about it in high school. He said it was like outlawing Christmas.”

“Why was it outlawed?” Burke asked.

She shrugged. “Because it was bloody – for some of the tribes, at least. White people were repulsed by it.”

“What did they do?”

“It was different from tribe to tribe, but it always involved a lodge pole, like a May Pole, but bigger, standing in the ground. The Plains tribes would attach a buffalo skull to the pole, and stuff it with offerings of grass. Other tribes tied a buffalo penis to the pole. But the idea was the same: The land should be fertile, and the people, too. There was always a lot of drumming and dancing and singing, and, well, this is the part that got so many whites upset. Some of the men would be tethered to the pole by straps attached to hooks in their chests or backs.”

“Jesus,” Burke exclaimed.

“Well, you can imagine,” Mandy said. “They’d fast and suffer for days, dancing in a circle around the pole, pulling against their own flesh, hallucinating and having visions. The way Jack explained it in his paper, it was a symbolic death, part of the great cycle. When they finally broke free from the pole, it was like… a resurrection.” She frowned. “Anyway, Jack’s essay won a prize and all. I’m thinking that if he was going to make a gesture, that’s when he’d do it.”