“And then the waters receded and we had mud and mold and disease, but would those white landlords lift a finger to help? We had to clean and fumigate on our own. Those flimsy plywood floors, they came to put those back in but wouldn’t clean up the dirt first.”

She began describing the process in numbing detail: the effort to salvage blinds and carpets that were beyond hope, the terrible chest ailments children suffered the winter after the flood, the handouts from the white churches. “Canned food that no one had used that Thanksgiving and clothes with moth holes in them.”

She stopped speaking. I sat silent for a few moments, not sure where her mind was, not sure what I felt able to ask, but finally I said, “What happened to Lucinda Ferring?”

Albritten didn’t look at me. I wasn’t even sure she’d heard me. The silence stretched as if it were a living thing, pushing into me, keeping me from moving or talking. The only motion in the room came from the silent images flickering across the television screen.

The phone rang, and Albritten jumped on it. A man was on the other end, deep voice but soft. Albritten only contributed “Yes” several times, and then, “God’s will. Not always easy to accept.”

When she hung up, she put her hands on her knees and took a breath, bracing herself. The caller had told her to put all her money on Stewball, and she wasn’t sure it was good advice. I tried to put on a Kansas face: honest and empathetic.

“The plywood was the last straw for Lucinda. She demanded a real floor, concrete over the dirt, and the landlord evicted her! So Lucinda took little Emerald and moved out to the country, east of town.

“There was a woman there had a farm, widowed like Lucinda. Even though she was white, she rented rooms to black students up at the university, because the university wouldn’t let them live in student housing. Lucinda had grown up on a farm up north someplace—Minnesota, maybe, or South Dakota.

“When she heard about Miz McKinnon, Lucinda went out to see about exchanging room and board for helping on the farm. Address wasn’t in Lawrence but the little town next door, Eudora, so Emerald could go to school there. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but they’d never gone in for segregation in Eudora the way they did in Lawrence.”

That explained why the Ferring name had disappeared from the phone books. A blot on the detective’s record—she should have thought of looking at other towns nearby.

“McKinnon?” I interrupted. “They mentioned her over at Riverside, a Doris McKinnon whose farmland the government seized for the missile silo. Is that the same one?”