“Tell me your name again.”

“Foster Pelham, sir.”

“How old are you Foster Pelham?”

“I’m sixteen.”

“And where is it you’re from?”

“New Hampshire. Is where I grew up. But I just came down from Vermont.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, how come, Foster Pelham? Leaving aside the question of this woman you’re looking for, asking after, how come now? You, sixteen years old, chasing off across the country. How’d you get here?”

“I drove.”

Alexander Mebane leaned forward a little and peered out onto the street and spied the Chrysler and looked back at Foster. “That’s your automobile out there?”

“Yes sir. It was my father’s.”

“It was your father’s. He’s not with you?”

“I’m alone. My father’s dead. That’s how—I never knew his family. After he died I found two sisters over to Vermont. And it was them told me about things.”

“What things would that have been?”

“That my grandmother was a Negro woman. From here. That her name was Leah and that the people who owned her were called Mebane. That she ran away from here at the tail end of the war. And that something happened and she hurt one of them, left him hurt, her thinking that person was dead. Somebody she called Lex.”

“And you think that might be me.”

“Yes sir, I’m thinking maybe it was. Said you were a one-armed man.”

“Did they? It’s what they call a distinguishing characteristic, isn’t it? I was a boy when I lost it so I can’t hardly recall what it was like to have both. Most days I don’t even think about it. You’re not a boy that takes things for granted, though, are you, Foster Pelham?”

“No sir. I never had the chance to do that.”

“Still, you chased off halfway down the country after something what might have happened almost sixty-five years ago. Why’d you do that? What is it you think you might find? Other than a single old one-armed man?”

“She came back here. Came back down twenty-five years after she left. Came back to try and find the mother she’d left behind. Or find out what happened to her. It would’ve been September of 1890.”

“That was still a long time ago.”

“I think she saw you that time. When she came back.”

“What in the world makes you think a thing like that? You think I keep track of every vagrant Negro that passes through this town? Why boy, on any given day they come and go at numbers I couldn’t even guess at. If I wanted to. And why would I want to?”

“She was your sister. Your half sister.”