The Sheriff's 6-year-old Secret

Her steps slowed until they stopped altogether.

As she tarried, refusing to face the honest-to-goodness truth, she couldn’t help but admire the year-old stone-and-wood structure. When Gwen had accepted the job as first-grade teacher here on Smoke Valley Reservation, she’d read all the books she could find on the Kolheek, its culture and its history. She’d been interested in the rez itself, too. The principal of the rez school, Mrs. Halley, was full-blooded Kolheek and had been happy to take Gwen on a tour. Mrs. Halley had explained how there hadn’t been an architect living at Smoke Valley when plans for the Community Center had been first brought up by the tribe’s Council of Elders. But a granddaughter of one of the Elders, a young woman living in the Midwest, was working as an architectural engineer, and she had eagerly agreed to travel to Vermont to design the new building.

The rock had been hewn right from the mountainside, the timber harvested from the thick forests of the reservation. When Gwen had entered the building for the first time, she remembered marveling at how the outside of the structure was circular, yet the meeting rooms inside gave the illusion of being square—or nearly so. Yet at the very center of the building was a huge, round auditorium, a platform at its core, a high, domed ceiling overhead.

There was no doubt that the Community Center was an impressive building. Mrs. Halley had boasted, as only a native of the rez could, about how inexpensively the tribe had built the structure, most of the materials having come from Kolheek land and all the decorations having been donated by local Native American artisans.