The first days of the trip were uneventful, with most of Penelope’s time spent trying to see a way out of her misfortune. The money from selling the plantation might be enough to live on for a while, but she was still a very young woman and knew that she would have to create some new industry for herself in order to survive. There was talk of purchasing a saloon, maybe one with a few rooms for rent. She and her mother were going over various recipes they thought they could master when there was an explosion near the boilers. Flames engulfed the Magnolia within minutes. Penelope ran for her children as she watched burning men and women jump in the waters of Caddo Lake. She lost track of her mother in the blaze and never found her son. She and her daughter were forced overboard, where they sputtered in the water amid the smoke and haze until being rescued by a fisherman who saw the fire from the nearby town of Uncertain, Texas. It was a fitting name for the land they soon stood on, Penelope dripping and clutching a carpetbag with all the money she had in one hand and her five-year-old daughter’s hand in the other. Her mother, her son, and most of the boat’s crew and their fellow passengers were gone, drowned or killed by the fire, the bodies never recovered. “The slaves were never found again either,” Marcus said. “They were presumed dead, but lot of folks around here believed they ran. Or swam, I should say—”

He stopped because Darren’s phone was ringing—again.

He hadn’t recognized the number the first two times it buzzed, but this was his lieutenant, Fred Wilson. Darren motioned to Marcus that he would have to take this. Marcus, sensing he was losing a captive audience, leaned forward over the table that held his life’s work. “I’m just trying to provide a different perspective on all the gilded-lily-white amnesia that is the tourism industry in this town. Life was always hard in Jefferson for folks like us; wasn’t no belles and balls and all the rest of it. Jefferson threw its hat in with the Confederates, and it deserved everything that came after: The railroads bypassing Jefferson for Marshall. The opening of the Red River that ultimately lowered the water table on Caddo Lake so that steamboats could no longer travel on it. Killed this town almost instantly,” he said with some glee. By now he was mostly talking to himself, and Darren stood and angled away from Marcus. He’d answered the phone.