Cady brightened. “I never thought of that. Maybe she put me under the sleeping bag to save me and went to try to get help. Doris used to say the six weeks she was alive with me, she bragged to everyone how I was going to grow up to save the world. What would she think if she knew all I was doing was teaching social studies to twelve-year-olds?”

“She’d think you were saving the world. She’d know you were raising many children to think clearly about the serious issues we all face on this planet.”

I leaned over to squeeze her hand, knocking the plate of chicken off my lap. Peppy bounded over: Cleanup in Aisle Five? I’m here, ready for work. This made us both laugh, breaking the tension. Cady squatted on the floor to help me pry chicken bones out of the dog’s mouth.

When we’d gotten the mess cleared up and Peppy was sulking in the bathroom, I pulled out my maps and asked Cady to show me where her mother had gone off the road.

“This is another thing that doesn’t make any sense,” Cady said. “See, she was on the old highway, which is maybe a half mile north of K-10, the one you probably drove today when you went out to the silo. They’d just opened the new K-10, so I guess if she was panicking, she didn’t think to go the extra distance.”

Cady pointed to the Kanwaka silo, five miles east of town, and Old K-10, which ran close to it. “But she was going east. If she thought she needed help, she should have driven the other way, back to Lawrence, to Gram or a hospital or something. Maybe you’re right, maybe she had some kind of brain damage or a seizure and didn’t know where she was or where she was going.”

I imagined Jenny covered with chemical burns, racing to the river to bathe herself head to toe, so maddened by pain that it didn’t occur to her to drive to Doris’s house. Or she’d been running after her lover who’d run off without her. I could see that, too, but that vision I kept to myself.

The Wakarusa was a small stream, a tributary from the big Kansas River—the Kaw, Cady told me to call it.

“Only strangers and Google Maps call it the ‘Kansas River,’” she explained. “When I was in my teens and trying to get at the truth—or at least more information than I can ever pry out of anyone in Lawrence, including my own grandmother—I went and asked the sheriff if I could see the file on my mom’s death.”

“Gisborne?” I asked.