First stop: day care for Peppy. There were a number of day boarders in town, but the one that got the best reviews was Free State Dogs: Where Dogs Run in a Free State. They had space if I could get my vet to fax them her health record and if her temperament passed muster.

“And if your environment works for her,” I said sharply.

After I finished with my vet, I called Lawrence’s hospital for humans. Sonia was no worse, still breathing on her own but no better. The ward head told me briskly that one shouldn’t give up hope, as if I were her sister, which made me think I was the only person concerned enough about her health to call the hospital. How sad, especially since my chief concern wasn’t her well-being but whether she would ever recover any memory of whom she’d encountered in the bar or of the field where she’d spotted August filming her.

The hospital also told me that Nell Albritten had been discharged; her son, Jordan, had escorted her home. This afternoon, after I’d inspected Sea-2-Sea’s experimental farm, I could pay a neighborly visit to check up on her.

This meant identifying the property lines both for Doris McKinnon and for Sea-2-Sea. I was only two blocks from the Lawrence Public Library, so I went there first, before dropping off Peppy.

A reference librarian helped me find Doris McKinnon’s farm and stepped me through decades of records, with their changing property lines. I had always imagined farms as static, land handed down unchanging across the centuries. Instead pieces were always being bought and sold, not all of them contiguous.

Most of McKinnon’s land was a substantial chunk around the farmhouse where I’d found her body yesterday. In 1967 the U.S. government had seized three acres from her through the right of eminent domain for the Kanwaka Missile Silo. As I inspected the maps over the next several years, it looked as though special roads had been constructed, one from the west and one from the south, to connect the silo to existing county roads.

In 1967 Emerald Ferring was in Hollywood, just starting her career with Jarvis Nilsson. Her mother was probably still pipetting specimens for Dr. Kiel—I doubted that Emerald was making enough money at that point to support Lucinda. Doris McKinnon herself would have been in her thirties, fully capable of working her land on her own.

Over the next sixteen years, Doris bought and sold smallish parcels that lay in other parts of the county. Then, in September 1983, the United States took another fifteen acres from her, to the south and east of the silo. The southern edge now abutted one of the east-west county roads.

That was 1983—the year of the abortive effort to reenact Greenham Common, the year of Matt Chastain’s disappearance (his death?), Jenny Perec’s death, Cady Perec’s birth.