“Now then.” Justine leaned back. “I’ll let you know where things stand on my end. There’s an old family Bible.” She patted her sister’s hand. “Carolee managed to track it down to our uncle. Our father’s brother Henry. Uncle Hank. When my daddy’s daddy passed, Uncle Hank and his wife loaded up. Some people are just that way. God knows what he wanted with all that stuff, but he filled a damn U-Haul. Twice. And the Bible was in there. It goes back a ways so if Billy’s ours, he’d be listed. All we have to do is get it back.”

“He says we can borrow it,” Carolee put in. “Once he finds it. Claims it’s stored, which probably means it’s buried somewhere in the piles.”

“He won’t be in any rush to dig it out,” Justine continued. “But I talked to my cousin, his daughter. We always got along, and she’ll nag at him for me. Meanwhile, he doesn’t remember a Joseph William Ryder; my father doesn’t either. But Daddy thinks he heard stories from his grandfather about a couple of his uncles fighting in the Civil War, and one of them, he thinks, died at Antietam. But I can’t swear that’s a fact. It might just be Daddy’s remembering it that way because I asked that way.”

“It’s a start,” Hope said. A frustratingly slow one. “I can’t find any Joseph William Ryder listed as buried at the National Cemetery.”

“I’ve got nothing so far,” Owen added. “But there’s still a lot to go through.”

“Daddy said he knows there was an old Civil War bayonet, and some other things—shells, a uniform cap. Even old cannonballs,” Carolee added. “What he didn’t know is if they came down in the family or if they just got dug up in the farming. A lot of old stuff gets dug up.”

“I barely remember the farm,” Justine told them. “It got sold off before you boys were born. Houses planted on it now, and the Park Service bought some of it. But Daddy said—and this he was sure of—there was a little family cemetery.”

Hope straightened. “On the farm?”

“People buried their own in the country sometimes rather than in churchyards or cemeteries. He said it was down an old, rutted lane, backed by some trees. It might still be there.”

“I can find out,” Owen said. “If they exhumed, it takes paperwork to move graves.”

“On the old Ryder farm.” Frowning, Ryder considered his beer. “There’s a pond. A little one.”

“Daddy said they had a little swimming hole. How do you know that?”