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approving.”
    Alison regarded me for a moment and said, “Sometimes you talk like a corporate P.R. man, Paul, not a private detective.”
    I smiled in spite of myself. “So I’ve been told,” I said.
    “I’m not changing my mind on this,” she said, looking at Melissa. “Not now. Talk to me when we don’t have plumbing issues and unexpected guests, then maybe, okay?”
    “Okay.” Melissa pretended to be disappointed.
    “Okay,” Alison echoed. “I have to go. Tony is putting in a new toilet upstairs, and Mrs. Robson wants blue towels in her room, not yellow ones.” She stopped just short of rolling her eyes.
    “Why?” Maxie asked.
    Alison was almost out the door, heading for the linen closet. “Does it matter?” she asked as she left.
    If I were able to perspire, I believe I would have wiped the sweat from my brow after Alison was gone. It was our sheer luck that she hadn’t been able to see Antinanco. Alison bristles at the idea of investigating (although I suspect she actually enjoys it deep down), and given her present circumstances would not have reacted well to another person like me in her house.
    “Antinanco,” I said, returning to our investigation before Maxie could threaten to bring out the rubber hose, “you have given us a great task to perform. But in order to do so successfully, we need help from you. We need you to give us a direction. You said your father was a very important man in the Lenni-Lenape. Maybe we can find out something about him, and that might lead us to your mother. What was your father’s name?”
    The boy’s eyes widened for a brief moment, then he seemed to recover and blinked twice. “He was called White Eyes,” he said quietly. “He was the first chief to make peace with the white people.”
    I looked to Maxie, who knew I was asking her to check out that fact, and she immediately left to find Alison’s laptop. Once Maxie vanished, Melissa walked closer to the young native boy and dropped her voice to a camp counselor type of soothing cadence. “Antinanco, do you have anything that belonged to your mother? Something we might be able to trace?” It was an excellent question. I think Melissa would make a wonderful investigator, though her mother would probably not be pleased to hear that. There are things we keep from Alison for her own good.
    But Antinanco shook his head. “I do not have any of my mother’s possessions,” he said. “The arrowhead you hold is all I carry with me.” He pointed at me, accusing me of holding his precious memento hostage, which technically I was. “Can I have it back?”
    “I will give it back to you when we find your mother,” I reminded him. “Until then, I want to be sure I know where you are, and that you’ll keep coming back to see us.”
    “I have given my vow,” the boy said. “I will do as I said I would do.”
    “Good,” I answered. “So will I.”
    Antinanco left soon after that, vanishing out through the far wall toward the beach just as Maxie, concealing the laptop in her trench coat, dropped down from the ceiling. “There was a Lenni chief named White Eyes,” she said. “But I think the kid is lying about him being his father.”
    Maxie isn’t always as polite as she should be, but her instincts are usually sound, so that concerned me. “Why?” I asked.
    “This guy White Eyes died in 1778,” she told us.
    “That is the right time period for Antinanco,” Melissa pointed out. “It’s when he said he was alive.”
    “Yeah, but this chief signed something called the Treaty of Fort Pitt the same year he died,” Maxie said, pulling the laptop from her coat and opening it to a web page about the Lenni-Lenape. “And that was during the Revolutionary War, right?”
    “Sure,” Melissa said. “Only two years after the Declaration of Independence. The war was going on then, and they didn’t know who would win.” She was an excellent student, and despite her misgivings about the teacher dating her