Cady nodded. “I have, believe me. And I have her high-school yearbook. She was voted most likely to be the next Marie Curie because she was interested in science, but Gram won’t even tell me if the physics classes she took were what turned her into a disarmament advocate. My mom was only nineteen when I was born, so it’s hard to find people who can tell me much about her. She was good at math, she liked biology, she was an ace soccer player.”

“Your grandmother didn’t have other children?”

“My mom was three when my grandfather was killed. Gram had been putting him through law school, so they were waiting to have more children, I guess, and then she never married again.”

So no aunts or uncles who could talk about the Kanwaka sit-in. I got Cady to let me look at the microfiches from both the Douglas County Herald and the Lawrence Journal-World.

Cady’s focus had always been on a quest for her mother, but I wanted more coverage of Emerald Ferring’s role in the protests. I couldn’t find anything, except for photos that showed a heavy military presence around the missile silo. Any pictures of anti-nuke protesters were obscured by a huge banner that read god bless the united states of america air force, held aloft by people identified as Douglas County Freedom Lovers. It was decorated with pictures of fighter jets and the American flag.

Another story showed people playing softball and barbecuing near the half-moon dome covering the silo.

Americans know the safety of our nation and her citizens is the number one priority of the U.S. Air Force. Douglas County citizens can picnic safely because the Air Force routinely checks radiation levels in the nearby land and water. And they know this missile is here to keep us all safe from the Russian menace.

I wondered how much radiation leakage there was around these old missiles, whether it was really safe to live in one of their silos—assuming your claustrophobia didn’t put you at risk of a mental meltdown first.

I was turning the wheel faster when Emerald’s name jumped out at me. I scrolled slowly back through the pages until I found the story. It didn’t have anything to do with the missile or the Greenham wannabes: Lucinda Ferring, Emerald’s mother, had died of pneumonia at age sixty-four, about six weeks after the protest. Emerald had returned for the funeral, held at St. Silas AME Church. There was a photograph: by 1983 an African-American actor was a celebrity. Emerald was wearing a hat with a veil that covered the top half of her face, so I couldn’t see what she’d looked like without stage makeup.