I texted Cady, asking if I could interrupt her workday for five minutes. “Something odd came up connected to Doris McKinnon’s land. Would you undergo a DNA test?”

Cady was so excited that her text jumped off the screen, filled with absurd autocorrections. She broke for lunch at eleven forty-five; she could meet me at the Prairie Shores Café on Eleventh and New Hampshire.

That gave me time to drive to one of the big chain drugstores on Highway 10 and buy a few sterile sample kits and gloves. When I got back to midtown, Cady was hopping on the sidewalk in front of the café.

“What did you find? I can’t go inside—everyone in there knows me. If they hear me talking to you about evidence at the silo, someone for sure will tell Gram. Did you find bones? My father’s? The pearl ring my mother wore? It wasn’t on her when they found her body, unless one of the deputies stole it.”

I felt stricken. “Cady, I haven’t found anything that definite. Some bones turned up that are old enough to have belonged to someone at the missile protest, but the person wasn’t old enough to have been your mother or father. I can’t justify asking for your DNA, but it could help to see if you are related to the dead child.”

As I spoke, my words sounded lame to me, and Cady’s excitement died down. Even so, she let me swab the inside of her cheek and watched me seal it up and label it. We went inside for lunch, but she was nervous and picked at her food. As she’d said, everyone in the café knew her—teachers, people from the courthouse across the park, friends of her grandmother. She couldn’t focus on what anyone said to her. After stirring a bowl of chili for some minutes, so vigorously it slopped over onto her lap, she announced she had to get back to class.

I followed her outside, but she cut off my awkward apology.

“There’s something else,” I said. “Two men who handled Doris McKinnon’s soil samples became gravely ill—one died, the other is fighting for his life. Sea-2-Sea is farming that land. There haven’t been reports of other illnesses in the area, but the company could be suppressing that information. We need to know if Dr. Roque and Dr. Hitchcock caught the same bug and if they got it from McKinnon’s soil.”

“It’s not very likely, is it? None of the farmhands from Sea-2-Sea are turning up sick.”

“Nonetheless—”

“Nonetheless, you are trying to control what decisions I make, and, frankly, Vic, however well-meaning you are, that’s not your call.”