Albritten’s lower jaw moved, the way it sometimes does in the old, but in the pause that followed, it looked as though she were chewing her words, trying to decide which ones to keep, which to spit out.

“Yes, the McKinnon farm is out there near the silo. I don’t have a car, so I didn’t go there often, even before Lucinda passed.”

“Emerald went to the University of Kansas, right?” I said. “But she kept living on the farm?”

“The student housing was still segregated when Emerald started at college,” Albritten said. “So she kept out at the farm, until the week Jarvis Nilsson showed up and discovered her. Lucinda was a technician up in one of the science labs at the university. Sounds fancy, but it was a lot of dirty work. Still, it paid better than housecleaning, with regular hours and benefits, health insurance.”

“Nathan Kiel’s lab,” I said slowly.

“Might have been. I didn’t pay attention to the name. Even after Emerald went to Hollywood, Lucinda kept working. Emerald was making a good living, but nothing like what a white star made back then. Lucinda knew better than to think her daughter was riding on a gravy train.”

Her jaw worked again as she thought about the past. “Two women together, one black, one white, it caused a lot of talk at the time. Even I—my old minister was very old-school. . . . Well, you didn’t come to hear about that. And when Lucinda died, he didn’t fuss about holding her funeral at St. Silas. Of course, Emerald had given him money for a new roof, so that softened his theology some. Our new pastor, he’s a different generation, different views.”

“Where was Lucinda buried?” I was thinking again of Sonia and her lover’s grave. If Lucinda had worked for Dr. Kiel . . . Although Kiel and his wife both denied ever hearing Ferring’s name—but that could be for a lot of reasons, including that they didn’t want to think about their daughter and the old anti-nuke commune.

“Over here, in Maple Grove,” the old woman was saying, meaning that perhaps tomorrow, when it was light, I should go look at the cemetery. Although what would it tell me? I could hardly sweep the ground looking for Sonia’s DNA.

“Does Ms. McKinnon still live on the farm?” I asked.

“She had to stop farming, too old, rents the land—” Albritten tried to drink some tea, but her hand was shaking, and she spilled what was left in the glass on her sweater.

I started to go to her, but she growled at me to sit. “I’ll fix it when you leave. Last I heard, Ms. McKinnon was still out there. Someone would have told me if . . . if . . .”

Albritten’s face turned gray, and the glass fell from her hands. I whipped out my phone and typed in 911.

“No,” she whispered. “No ambulance, no hospital.”