Megs nodded. “If the rest of you agree, I’ll look into it.”
There was general assent, and so the meeting was over.
Chaska took Naomi’s hand. “Everyone’s heading to Knockers. Would you like to go with them, or would you rather—”
His cell phone buzzed.
He drew it out of his pocket, saw that it was Tina. “This is Belcourt.”
“Are you someplace where you can talk?”
“Hang on a second.” He turned to Naomi. “I need to take this. It won’t be long.”
There was wariness in her eyes. “Is it your grandfather?”
“It’s Tina.” He walked out of the ops room and out the bay doors. “Go ahead.”
“I’m standing here with Maggie Otter Tail’s youngest grandson, Doug, and he has a few questions for you about the medicine wheel and this woman who wears it.”
“Okay. Put him on.”
As it turned out, Doug had more than a few questions, and Chaska did his best to answer them. No, he didn’t know Naomi’s date of birth. He only knew that she was twenty-seven. Yes, she’d been found in Martin, close to dying, with the medicine wheel tucked in her blanket. No, police had never found her mother. No, she hadn’t been raised among the Lakota. Would she agree to a paternity test?
Chaska had no idea how Naomi would feel about taking a paternity test, and he wasn’t about to ask her without knowing what was going on first. “Why do you ask? What is this about?”
“That medicine wheel used to belong to me.”
Chapter 19
The moment Chaskastepped into the ops room again, Naomi could see that something had happened. There were lines of tension on his face, his brow bent. His gaze warmed when he saw her. “Let’s go home. I’ll make dinner.”
“Aren’t we going to Knockers with the others?”
“Not tonight. That was Tina calling with news. We need to talk.”
Naomi’s heart beat against her breastbone, voices drowned out by the thrum of her own pulse. “Did they find her?”
“No.” Chaska walked with her to his truck. “But they might have foundhim.”
Him? Herfather?
“You mean my father?”
He opened the door for her. “Let’s talk at home.”
He climbed into the truck, sent a text message to someone, and then drove the short distance to the house, the wait grating on Naomi’s nerves.
She managed to contain herself until they were inside the front door. “What did Tina say? Who is he? How do they know he’s my father?”
“No one knows anything for sure at this point.” Chaska walked with her back to the kitchen, poured them each a glass of lemonade, and sat beside her at the table. “I don’t have all the details, but Maggie’s younger grandson, Doug Otter Tail, told my grandfather and Tina that the medicine wheel belonged to him. Tina said he recognized it right away and wanted to know how she’d gotten a photo of it.”
Naomi had to know. “Did he leave me in that alley?”
She’d always thought it must have been her mother, given that she’d been a newborn, her umbilical cord uncut and still attached to the placenta.
Chaska shook his head. “I don’t think so. Doug says he gave the medicine wheel to awasicugirl he met twenty-eight years ago at a summer youth camp. He said they had sex a couple of times. He lost touch with her after that. He was fifteen. She was sixteen.”
“How do we know he’s telling the truth?”