I had finished refilling the Pontiac and stood by the window now. Her face was tilted toward me, those great sunglasses vaguely insectoid. “You must have me confused with someone else,” she said simply.

I might have excused myself then, getting her change from inside and letting her drive off and returning to my book, but for some reason I told her my name and then my grandmother’s name.

“Oh my,” she said. “You’re Cousin Jenny’s grandson?”

I nodded as she removed her sunglasses. The face behind them was older than my memory but just as strikingly beautiful: thin and finely featured, her nose aquiline and her eyes light blue as if lurking in her genealogy was some distant ­Scandinavian ancestry.

She asked if my parents had moved back to the area and when I told her they had not she seemed somehow relieved. “You’re staying where?”

“At my grandmother’s,” I told her.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, nice to see you. Let’s have you and your grandmother over sometime.”

“Great,” I said, unhappy now that I had identified myself at all, for I had no interest in such a visit.

A few more words and then she pulled away and I returned to the shadowed interior of the office, mopping my sweating face before settling into my chair once more. Through the window I watched the Pontiac cross over the freeway, turning north before that big ­Victorian that marked the edge of town. The bumper of the car flashed once just as it disappeared into the high shadow of the fruit sheds, a bright blooming of sunlight reflecting across the open space under which the freeway sped unceasingly. Then she was gone, that apparition of my own lost childhood, and I was once again alone with Nat Turner and the growing rage of his troubled mind.

I HAVE SINCE PONDERED that moment in great detail, for had I said nothing to her, had I simply filled the tank of the Pontiac and let her drive away, I would never have stumbled into the story of Ray Takahashi and his ghost would never have come to ride upon my heart the way it has. In 1969 I only managed to write that single chapter, but my failure to continue his story was not because it had lost its hold on my imagination but instead because I could not see my way around writing about Evelyn Wilson and Kimiko Takahashi and the rest of them, not while they were still alive and their stories still belonged to them, although it is easy enough to see the opposite of that point of view, that they deserved—especially my Aunt Evelyn, or rather the woman I am calling Evelyn Wilson in this book—to see the bare, bold truth printed in black permanent ink.