I scrolled through the plot summary. Ferring played a young woman raised in a wealthy black enclave on Cape Cod. It’s 1964, Freedom Summer, and she’s a freshman at Vassar who volunteers to go to Mississippi, against the wishes of her parents. She is arrested during a voter-registration drive. Her parents bail her out and try to bring her home, but she insists on staying in prison with the other detainees. After her release she gets involved with a sharecropper and witnesses his murder at the hands of the Klan. At the end of the movie, she withdraws from Vassar, following a hot altercation with the college president along with her parents, and returns to Mississippi to help run a Freedom School.

Wikipedia didn’t offer much about Ferring. Neither did my databases, but they told me she’d been born in Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1944. The account of how she’d met Nilsson was sketchy, but she’d made two other films with him after Pride of Place, both of which had also disappeared after a minimal release.

Her current home was in Chicago, where she’d settled while filming Lakeview, a series that sounded like a thinly disguised remake of The Jeffersons: the show’s theme song was “Moving On Up to the North Side.” I wondered how much litigation that had spawned.

Ferring had given August her autograph and a personal message; maybe she’d also let him confide his dreams and plans. Maybe he’d even told her where he was going. It was a long shot, but I didn’t have any close ones.

Ferring lived down on Ninety-sixth Street, in the Washington Heights neighborhood, a few blocks from the church where Barack used to worship when he was a state senator.

My calendar was clear until midafternoon, when I needed to be in court to testify in a warehouse-supply scam I’d helped uncover. I could get down to Ninety-sixth Street and still make my court date, if I hustled to my office for my case files. I changed quickly into my courtroom costume, a severely cut suit in superfine wool, but as I was stuffing keys and laptop into my briefcase, I recalled the aloof, regal face in August’s poster. That photo was almost fifty years old, but Ms. Ferring didn’t look like the kind of person a stray detective could just barge in on.

My databases had given me Ferring’s unlisted number. A man with a deep, soft voice answered on the fifth ring.

When I announced myself and asked if I could speak with Ms. Ferring, the deep voice became cold. “What are you selling?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m a private investigator—”

He hung up on me. A son or a butler whose job was to protect Ferring’s privacy?

I tried phoning again. This time my call went straight to voice mail. Announcement only, no way to leave a message.