When Dad asked if he could run with me the morning after James and I made nice, I knew it was time to tell him about the clinic.

He’s slower than me and can’t make it as far, so my mileage suffers. On the other hand, he doesn’t talk a lot and lets me set the route. That morning I led us down through the southern section of our neighborhood, where the absence of sidewalks keeps the unwashed masses from strolling through. We jogged in the street.

Except for Dad breathing hard, the first two miles were quiet. It felt good going easy, especially after the pounding I’d given myself the two mornings before. Good enough that I decided to wait until we got closer to home to bring up the clinic. I’m not really sure why I worried about telling Mom and Dad my internship had fallen through. Maybe I didn’t want them to think it was my fault—that I’d sabotaged things somehow, or screwed up. Not letting my parents down was a huge part of who I was. Am, really.

But then Dad started talking, and I realized I wasn’t the only one who had something to say.

“You doing okay?” he huffed.

“Yeah,” I said. “How about you?”

He had to work to get the words out. “Well, considering there’s been a murdered body on my family’s property since before I was born, I guess I’m all right.”

That was his angle: Dad wanted to make sure the skeleton hadn’t traumatized me.

I slowed a little so he could catch his breath.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “It creeped me out at first, but I spent some time with the anthropologist the other day. She made it seem less personal and more like science.”

That seemed to satisfy Dad. We ran quietly for a while, dodging kamikaze squirrels and listening to birds. As we passed a big Italian-villa-looking place, Dad pointed out a fox sitting on the walkway. It was small and sharp-eyed, resting on his haunches like a dog.

“He thinks we’re beneath him,” Dad said.

I laughed, because the fox really did look bored, or maybe annoyed, like who were we to be on his street? Which reminded me how James and I had talked about groups of men going around white neighborhoods during the riot, trying to flush out black people in hiding.

“Dad?” I said.

“Yep?”

“How long has our family owned the house?”

He side-eyed me.

“Why?”

“Well, like you said, the body’s been there a long time, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot…”

“Since right after it was built,” Dad said.

“We didn’t build it ourselves?”

“Nope.”

A woman pushing a stroller walked past on the other side of the street. We waved.

“Do you know who did?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. You’d have to check the title.”

“How do I do that?”

“You get it from the title company.”

I sped up a little, hoping he’d have to concentrate so hard on breathing that he wouldn’t have the energy to be suspicious. Only it turned out I didn’t need to bother.

“Ro,” he said, “I don’t have a problem with you playing detective. If things weren’t so crazy at work right now, I’d probably do it myself. So if you want to take a look at the title, just say the word and I’ll call and have them pull it from the vault.”

Which earned him the kind of I-love-you-Daddy smile that still worked surprisingly well.

At 41st Street we cut over to Riverside and started north at a slow jog. Dad was nearly toast, I could tell. So I finally nutted up and told him about the clinic, overexplaining things so there wouldn’t be any questions left for him to ask. He stopped in the middle of the bike path, bending over with his hands on his thighs. “Sounds like you turned a bad situation around for yourself,” he said between big, relieved gasps. “You remind me of your mother more and more every day.” Then he waved for me to go ahead without him. Which I did, sprinting the rest of the way, relieved as hell and thinking how perfect it would be if Arvin showed up at the clinic that morning. He was the last person I needed to get square with.

The last thing I needed to make right.

Arvin never showed. Apart from that, it was a good day. Dr. Woods recognized Dad’s name when I handed her the release. Not that she said anything—I could just tell from the little double take she did, looking from the signature to me and back again. “All right,” she said, tossing the form into the chaos on her desk. “Let’s go.”

I’d chosen a long lab coat from the breakroom closet, hoping I’d look more like a really young nurse than some random high school tagalong. It was wishful thinking; with makeup, I could maybe pass for a college sophomore. But other than some mascara and ChapStick, my face was naked. I wasn’t fooling anyone.

The thing was, nobody cared. Every time we walked into an exam room, Dr. Woods would introduce me as a student and ask the patient if they minded me staying. Not a single person did. They were all so glad to see Dr. Woods, to tell her their problems and show her their rashes and bumps and where it hurt, that they barely noticed me at all.

Dr. Woods listened to every one of them. Her Spanish wasn’t as good as Tru’s, but she held her own. She only looked away to type quick notes into her laptop, and when she got around to the actual exam, there was something so gentle in the way she touched people—resting her fingertips lightly on a coughing man’s shoulder, lifting an old woman’s hand to examine her swollen knuckles—that there was no way anyone could leave feeling like they didn’t matter.

It wasn’t glamorous work. Mostly she did simple stuff, like adjusting prescriptions or talking with people about their diet and how much they exercised and how they should quit smoking. The only remotely exciting thing happened when we got to her very last patient of the day.

He was dressed in suit pants and a tie, and said he had chronic migraines that his old doctor in Little Rock had prescribed Vicodin for. But he’d lost his prescription during the move, so could Dr. Woods please write him a new one?

Instead of a prescription, she handed him a sheet of paper with advice for treating migraines without pills and said he should try to walk at least twenty minutes every day and eat regular meals and avoid soda and coffee and anything else with caffeine.

At first he acted sad and told her he’d tried all those things and they didn’t work. I felt bad, watching him rub his temples and squint against the light from the fluorescent overhead bulbs. But when she said no, he got really insistent. Then mad. Then sad again. Dr. Woods headed him off every time, as if she knew exactly what he’d say next. She told him she’d be happy to see him again in a week if his symptoms didn’t improve, and that she could get him into a guided meditation group that might really help.

He wasn’t interested in any of that, and I doubt he even had migraines to begin with. He was there for pills. But Dr. Woods stayed so kind and firm that he eventually gave up, took the paper, and left.

Afterwards, Dr. Woods turned on Ella Fitzgerald in her office, leaned back in her chair, crossed her legs, and asked me to tell her what I’d seen. I knew she didn’t want me to rattle off a list of diagnoses or anything as easy as that. She wanted to know what I’d seen. So I told her. And she listened like she’d listened to her patients—deep and thoughtful. When I was done, she said, “Not very exciting, was it?”

I thought about that awhile. Dr. Woods made me want to be… more. To stretch out and aim for something better than good enough.

“That depends on what you mean by ‘exciting,’” I finally said.

She asked me to explain.

“Well, if ‘exciting’ means drama and people dying and doctors and nurses rushing around like in the movies, then no, it wasn’t. But if it means doing something that seems small now but can make a big difference in the long run, then it was.”

She smiled. “I’m glad you feel that way, because we’re going to do the same thing tomorrow and every day after that. It’s good that you’re here, Rowan. You’re interesting to have around.”

And you know, I walked out of her office that day feeling even better than I had after my run with Dad, believing there were things I could do that were real and solid and good. It was the opposite of how I’d felt when I drove away from Arvin the other morning.

For the first time in a long time, I thought I knew where I was going. Like maybe there was something useful I could do with my life after all.

I liked it.

I wanted more.

Geneva was lying on her stomach in the back house when I got home, sifting dirt through a mesh screen. She lifted her head, said hi, then ignored me.

At least that time I knew she wasn’t trying to be rude. Succeeding, yes, but definitely not trying. So instead of standing around feeling awkward, I poked through the odd collection of stuff she’d arranged on top of her storage bin.

Her Five Star was there, opened to a page with a sketch of the hole in the floor and an outline of where the skeleton had been. There were four numbered dots inside that, and a key to what they meant at the bottom of the page. At least I think it was a key, because Geneva wrote in some kind of shorthand I couldn’t read. Not that it mattered much; the four objects on top of the bin spoke for themselves.

Two were rusty, dirt-crusted nails. Another looked like a button. And the fourth I had a sneaking suspicion about that Geneva confirmed.

“It’s a tooth,” she said from all fours. “A human one. Help me up?”

I gave her my free hand and pulled her to her feet. She brushed her palms off against her cutoffs and pointed at one end of the tooth with her pinky finger.

“Those are the roots,” she said. “When they’re intact and there aren’t any signs of decay, it can indicate that the owner didn’t part with the tooth voluntarily.”

“You mean someone pulled it?”

“Or knocked it out.”

I asked her if it could have happened when the skeleton got hit in the back of the head.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It wasn’t his. I cataloged him yesterday, and the only tooth missing was a second molar that he lost a long time before he died. He didn’t have third molars, either. Those are wisdom teeth. But I don’t think he had them to begin with. Some people are born like that. Would you like to know what else I found?”

I said I would. Geneva settled onto a stack of tile boxes to talk. Once she got rolling, she didn’t stop.

“Well, for starters, the skeleton did belong to a man. I fed his long bone measurements into FORDISC—”

I interrupted to ask what that was.

“It’s a forensic database that helps me calculate things like height. Your skeleton stood just under six feet when he was alive. Also, I narrowed down his age at the time of death to somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four. Usually I can get closer than that, but all the surfaces touching the ground had degraded. I had to go by how completely the growth points at the tips of certain bones had attached to the main shafts, how fully the plates in his skull had fused, and how completely his teeth had come in. But that’s all part of the game. Sometimes the forensic gods smile down on you, sometimes they give you the finger.”

I laughed. Geneva looked a little insulted; she hadn’t been joking. “Sorry,” I said. She shrugged.

“Beyond that, it doesn’t look like he had any major disfiguring diseases. The size of his right humerus bone and scapula show he was right-handed. He broke his left wrist when he was young, but it healed up well. And from the marks his muscle attachments left on his bones, I’d say he had a naturally sturdy build. I don’t think he did much manual labor, though. The attachments weren’t robust enough for that.”

“You figured all that out already?” I asked.

“Yes.” She put the nails, the button, and the tooth into little plastic bags.

“It’s pretty amazing that you can learn so much from a skeleton.”

Geneva acted like it was no big deal. That’s when I gave up trying to compliment her and asked if there was anything I could do to help.

She shook her head. “No, thank you. I have a system.”

“Okay, then,” I said, figuring she’d be glad if I left. “I guess I’ll see you later…”

Her eyebrows went up. “Don’t you want to know about the holster?”

“The holster?”

“The one that was attached to the front of his belt,” she said. “I forgot you didn’t see it. Anyway, I sent it off to a gun expert friend of mine along with the pistol you found. He should get his report to me soon. Oh, and I sent a tooth from the remains off to the crime lab in Oklahoma City. They’re pretty backed up, so I doubt I’ll get confirmation for a few weeks.”

“Confirmation?” I said.

Her eyebrows went up all over again, and her head tilted sideways. “Of the skeleton’s ancestry. Didn’t I tell you? I’m ninety-nine percent sure the man you found was black.”