“Lucinda Ferring died right around the time of the fire at the camp. If Sonia or Magda Spirova or even Lucinda herself hid the film in McKinnon’s house, it would have stayed hidden for a long time—it’s an old farmhouse with a lot of cupboards and bureaus.”

I could picture Doris coming upon it, the way you do—you’re looking for that old bank statement from 1983 that proves the air force forced you to sell your land for nothing. You’re scrabbling through every drawer and folder, and you stumble on this movie in an old box.

“She managed to watch it and was outraged and called Emerald for help. Or she found it and thought, ‘Emerald’s in the movies, she’ll know how I can watch it.’ I think that’s more likely, because Emerald left Chicago so hastily. She had met young August, she knew he had film skills, and she paid him to come to Kansas with her—filming her origins story was a side project, not the main event. August could have borrowed a projector, maybe from his old film school.”

I stopped to make a note—I should ask the Streeter brothers to find out if August had recently rented a projector.

“Doris and August and Emerald watch the movie, they know they’re dealing with dynamite. Doris is furious with the air force for seizing her land and then turning it over to Sea-2-Sea. She wants samples to find out what they’d sprayed over her land all those years ago. Because whatever they sprayed killed Emerald’s mother, Lucinda, who was Doris’s close friend.”

“They were in love. Don’t beat about that particular bush, Chicago,” Lou said. “That bit where they moved the girl’s body into the car, what was that about?”

“That was about panic. They couldn’t afford an autopsy to show cause of death. They decided to drive her to the river and make it look like she’d lost her mind and committed suicide. By the time she’d been in the water three or four days, you wouldn’t stop to ask if that was where and how she’d really died.”

“And what did those boys spray on the kids at the silo?” Ed asked. “It was a crop-duster plane. They pour pesticides on them?”

“Plague,” I said. “Pneumonic plague, spread through the air, lethal ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

“That’s criminal!” Lou cried. “Worse than criminal. Spraying innocent people? And that Dr. Kiel? He stood by and let it happen?”

“I think he thought the air force was conducting a test using his bug: it would give you diarrhea but not make you hideously ill. I think he was taken horribly by surprise. It’s why he blew up at his poor young graduate student, the one who got shot in the back.”