The associate pastor put a hand on my sleeve, as if to keep me from following Barbara. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to visit Nell Albritten. You’re a detective, which is often alarming, especially to an African-American. Mrs. Albritten is old, she’s frail. It would be kinder to leave her alone.”

“That’s right,” the blazer said. “Barbara has a good heart, and she means well, but she has a distorted sense of race relations. She caused a lot of friction, both here and at St. Silas when we were trying to worship together.”

“That’s unfair!” a woman who hadn’t spoken before cried out. “Barbara did a lot to smooth out decades, maybe centuries of ill will between Riverside and the African-American community.”

The blazer turned stony-faced. “We haven’t been here for centuries, Alison. Speaking for myself, I have to be back at work in half an hour, so I’m going to do the job I came here to do.” She marched over to the row of tables again and upended another plastic bag.

I headed for the exit, but Carmody stopped me again at the door. “You can see there are a lot of different views here on our history in Lawrence and on race. You should stay away from Nell Albritten. You’re a stranger, and you could undo years of bridge building by going to talk to her.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said politely.

A buzz, like swarming bees, rose behind me as I left. Was Barbara sanctimonious, always thinking she was more righteous than the world around her? Did Riverside have a responsibility for some of the violence of the seventies? It was a challenging discussion, one that I lacked the history or theology to take part in. Conflict always interests me, however, and I would have liked to hear more.

17
Junkyard Dogs

St. Silas was a small church at Third and Lincoln, made of wood, which had weathered as the Riverside Church had done, but not as happily. The paint was peeling, and two of the high, narrow windows had cracks in their panes. As the woman from Riverside had foretold, the building was locked up tight.

A faded sign gave the times for Sunday school and Christian worship. A placard in front designated the building as a National Historic Landmark and mentioned its role as a place of hiding for free blacks during the Civil War. Perhaps Emerald and August were hiding in a secret basement, but the building had a desolate, unused feel to it.

The church didn’t have a parking lot, but wheel marks in the wide grass verge along Lincoln showed where people parked. I left the car there and walked the few blocks to Sixth Street, where Nell Albritten lived, two doors down from the house where Emerald Ferring had spent part of her childhood.