The next segment was so macabre I asked Lou to run it three times before I could finally believe it. A trio of cars arrived, traveling fast judging by the dust clouds. First came Kiel, fishtailing as he pulled up. Behind him a second car decanted Spirova. A beat-up Toyota squealed to a halt in front of Kiel. Matt Chastain jumped out and ran over to Jenny. Her body had been laid on the ground. Chastain flung himself onto it.

It took three air force men to pull him away and to hold him while he struggled. Kiel knelt and looked at Jenny and then looked up. His younger self displayed a wider canvas of emotions than angry spite. He was alarmed, but puzzled as well. Spirova’s smirk appeared again, but only Lou, Ed, and I were watching her.

The air force men put Jenny into the Toyota and drove it away. Matt broke free and tried to run after the car but stumbled and fell. We saw blood spread across his left shoulder: he’d been shot in the back. Two soldiers picked Matt up and laid him in a cart attached to one of the jeeps, shoving aside camera paraphernalia and other equipment to make room for his body. The movie ended there, but on the third viewing I saw fourteen-year-old Sonia’s face peering from behind one of the tents. They laid him on the cartafalque, Sonia had said in the hospital last week. The cart, Matt’s cartafalque.

54
Now the Wench Is Dead

“What was that all about?” Ed demanded when the tail of the film had clack-clacked across the spindles.

“That was all about why Doris McKinnon and Magda Spirova are dead and why August Veriden and Emerald Ferring are in hiding.” My voice was a thin croak; Lou went to the emergency supply cabinet and poured water from a gallon jug into a mug.

I drank it down and leaned against the back of the armchair, eyes closed. Magda Spirova came back to Kansas. In her journals Sonia wrote that she’d taunted “the Magpie,” telling her she’d seen her in the movies. Sonia meant the air force’s private film of the destruction of the protest camp—somehow Sonia had ended up with that film. Back in 1983 or now? She’d watched it, that was clear—it explained why Team Baggetto was so eager to silence her. Maybe it was why someone had stolen her journals from my room.

“How’d that movie end up behind the boy’s plate holder?” Ed asked.

“Doris had it.” I kept my eyes shut, trying to picture what might have happened. “Doris McKinnon. It’s possible Sonia found it, or stole it, back in ’83, during the chaos around the end of the camp. She took it up to McKinnon’s house. Maybe it sat unseen there all these years. I don’t know.