I hated leaving Peppy in the car in such a ratty area, especially since the day was unusually warm for November, which meant the windows had to stay open.

“Bite anyone who tries to grab you,” I said.

When I walked past the guard station onto the campus, I saw Jayhawk statues sprouting everywhere, but it was a beautiful campus, with rolling hills and open spaces, a bell tower on one of the high points, overlooking a little pond.

Students flowed around me in a thick stream, texting, scowling, laughing. I’d gone to an urban university, where everyone, even the most affluent—or perhaps especially the most affluent—seemed to think grooming was for the little people. Kansas students looked so scrubbed, so wholesome, that I might have stumbled into a eugenics experiment.

In the administration office, the staff were friendly and polite. They became downright excited when they learned that a film star had been a student there fifty years ago. Ferring had never really been in the public eye, outside the African-American film world, and the young staff in the front office had never heard of her. As soon as I explained what I knew of her history, they were eager to help, but they came up empty. They found a record of her time on campus buried in an old microfiche, but no housing records went back that far. They polled all the offices in the building while I waited: no one had seen or spoken to her in the last few weeks.

The theater building was about half a mile from the administration offices. Perhaps that was what made the kids so wholesome—lots of running miles up and down the campus hills in the fresh air. I jogged over, half my mind worrying about the dog—it had been selfish to bring her with me. I should have sent her to board at Dr. Dan’s with Mitch.

The theater people were like the administration staff: eager to help but unable to tell me anything. The departmental secretary called various faculty and staff and confirmed that no one had seen either August or Emerald. The department chair came out to talk to me personally.

“We’d love to reconnect with Ms. Ferring. She left without graduating when she went to Hollywood to make Pride of Place. We’ve tried writing her—we’d like to give her her degree, and we’d like to talk to her about possibly donating her papers here.” The chair handed me her card. “If you find her, would you see if she’d meet with me?”

Back downtown, I returned to the historical society, but the research associate hadn’t arrived yet. The woman at the front desk apologized.

“She teaches social studies at Central Middle School, and there’s so little call for her here that she doesn’t come in every day. If you want to e-mail her, it’s [email protected].”