It was hard to believe the trail was so easy to pick up: I could have done this by phone from Chicago, saved myself a long drive and the client several hundred dollars. “When was she here, exactly?”

The secretary consulted her computer. “Thirteen days ago.”

“Was there a young man with her?” I pulled out my phone and showed her August’s website photo.

“Yes, that’s the man. Ms. Ferring said he was going to film her childhood home, but all those units were torn down decades ago. The whole fort is configured differently now. The general asked Colonel Baggetto to show Ms. Ferring the location. He took them around, then gave them a pass to the base library so that Ms. Ferring could look at the archives and see maps of the fort from when her father served here.”

“How much time did they spend here? Did they give you any idea where they were planning to go next?”

The secretary didn’t know, but she phoned Colonel Baggetto. “I didn’t see them again, but they might have told him where they were going from here.”

Baggetto was in a meeting but could see me in an hour. While I waited, the secretary printed out some maps of the base, a current one and one from 1943, when Ferring’s father had been stationed here before shipping out to Europe.

“I looked that one up for Ms. Ferring when she got here. We don’t have a record of housing by resident going back that far, but Private Ferring would have been living in this general area.” The secretary blushed as she pointed to a place on the map marked as housing for Negro soldiers. “We’ve come a long way since then, thank goodness, but it was an embarrassing thing to have to show Ms. Ferring. We did turn up a record of her birth at the base hospital, though, and that was a help.”

While I waited for Baggetto, I took the maps and walked around the fort. Cul-de-sacs lined with houses set in immaculate yards, cul-de-sacs with barracks in immaculate grounds, swing sets, schools, shops. And soldiers, many soldiers, moving from Point A to Point B with an alert bearing that said they were on important business, although a number stopped to pet Peppy. (“Ma’am, may I greet your dog?”) Maybe I’d move here—long runs in the Flint Hills and then home to streets without any litter, where bright-faced young men and women spoke to me politely.

The Negro barracks had disappeared into a small nature preserve. I walked through it with Peppy, who followed mysterious tracks in the undergrowth while I kicked aside rotting leaves, looking for some sign of the soldiers who’d been housed there. Not even a foundation stone remained.