James showed up Tuesday night with gelato and a grin.

“Petty crime’s my calling,” he said, handing me a dish of half-melted coconut and chocolate. “And by the way, that’s très chic.” He meant the hideous neck brace I’d finally given in and put on.

Smartass banter didn’t feel natural yet but I played along anyway, hoping it would help get things back to normal.

“Good. That’s what I was going for. Do you have the title?”

James lifted the strap of his messenger bag over his head. “Of course. Because yours truly possesses one of the great criminal minds of the century.”

“They just gave it to you, didn’t they?”

He took a thick sheaf of papers out of the bag. “Didn’t even ask for ID.”

Now, it turned out that reading our house’s title was only slightly easier than reading the clinic’s insurance manual. But it was definitely more interesting. The first few documents were typed on paper as thin as an onion skin. They showed that the land our house was built on had been signed over to the Muscogee Creek Nation by President Millard Fillmore in 1852. There hadn’t even been an Oklahoma then, only Indian Territory.

After that, we read from the yellowed pages how the tribe had given my family’s lot to a seventeen-year-old girl named America Manuel, who was listed as a freedman—a black slave who’d belonged to the Muscogee Creek Nation but had been freed after the Civil War. Which meant that the first person to own our property was a teenage girl with brown skin.

I set the empty gelato cup aside and took the title from James’s hands so I could see her name up close. “That. Is. So. Cool!”

He reached across me and flipped the page. “No doubt. I don’t think she ever lived here, though. She leased the land to a farmer first, then to the Anchor Oil Company. After she sold it in 1904, it changed hands”—he took the title back and flipped pages quickly, counting under his breath—“eight times. But there’s nothing about a house until”—more flipping—“ha!”

“What?” I peeked over his shoulder. He pointed out two names at the top right corner of the page.

“No shit!” I whispered.

“Yup. Stanley and Kathryn bought the lot in 1920. And here’s a construction mortgage in their names for twenty-five thousand dollars, so apparently they built the house, too. Only…”

“What?”

James kept reading. “I’m not sure, but I think… wait. Yeah. Here. Stanley and Kathryn owned the land and built the house, but if they lived here, it wasn’t for very long. See?”

He pointed to a tiny line of type. In November of 1922, my great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother, Flowers and Ora Chase, paid twenty-nine thousand dollars cash for the house James and I were sitting in and the land underneath it. Which meant that since the Victrola receipt and the newest coin in the skeleton’s pocket were from 1921, there was a good chance the body was in the back house before my great-greats ever moved in.

“Maybe there isn’t a murderer in your family tree after all,” James said. “You relieved?”

I flipped the title closed and rolled my eyes, saying, “Oh, so very.”

And you know? I actually kind of was.

William Tillman’s parents built this house. He left home sometime before the Polk-Hoffhine Directory came out in 1922. No one could find him when his father died. And he almost definitely would have had access to the back house while it was under construction. Bottom line: there was a good chance he was either the skeleton or the guy who’d put it there.

Only the more James and I talked things through, the less likely it seemed that the body could be William’s. For one thing, we didn’t see how he could have been black (yes, uncomfortable as it made me, I was willing to give Geneva’s race theory the benefit of the doubt). His father, Stanley, must have been white, otherwise Tulsa’s Jim Crow laws would have made it impossible for him to own any business on Main Street other than a shoeshine box. And when we tracked down the Tillman family tree on Ancestry, William’s mother turned out to have been one of the original 2,228 Osage Indian tribe members given a headright allotment and 160 homestead acres in 1906. That meant she’d had money, because the Osage had made sure the mineral rights for tribal land—translation: the oil rights—stayed communal. And that meant all the profits from oil pumped out of Osage land went into one big account, and four times a year, everyone with a headright got a check for an equal percentage share.

“Now I get how they could have afforded this house,” James said. “I thought it was pretty fancy for a guy who sold record players.”

I took my computer from him and ignored how the glow from the screen made my eyes ache. “It could explain more than just the money,” I said. “Those headrights were valuable. Maybe William tried to claim his mother’s after she died. If he did, we might be able to track him down through tribal records.”

James spotted something on the page I was looking at. “Can I see that for a sec?” he asked. I handed him the laptop.

“Okay, I thought I remembered this,” he said. “A bunch of Osage, especially Osage women, were murdered in the 1920s after the government decided that anyone who was half Indian or more needed a white guardian to manage their money.”

“Lovely,” I said.

James sighed. “I know, right? So, anyway, a lot of white men married Osage women just to get control of their fortunes. Then a bunch of those women started dying in weird ways—drowning in shallow creeks, falling out of third-story windows, turning up with bullet holes in their skulls. No one really looked into the deaths until the FBI finally stepped in. After the white guardians had inherited the women’s money and headrights, that is.”

“Figures,” I said. “But what does it have to do with the skeleton?”

“Well, I know your anthropologist friend said it’s from a black man, but what if she’s wrong? The DNA tests haven’t come back yet, have they? Maybe she isn’t as great as she thinks at telling Native American skulls apart from African American ones. Or it could be that she’s just completely full of crap about being able to judge someone’s skin color by their skulls in the first place.”

I shrugged. “That doesn’t change my question: what does any of that have to do with our skeleton?”

“Well, I was thinking that maybe, just maybe, Stanley Tillman was a cold-blooded bastard and killed his own son to keep him from inheriting Kathryn’s money and headright.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “We know Kathryn didn’t die until 1976—way after Stanley. If he was willing to kill his own son to get her money, wouldn’t he have killed her, too?”

James clicked back to the family tree. “This says that Kathryn Yellowhorse Tillman died in 1976 in Pawhuska—not Tulsa. And she was there when Stanley died in 1937. That’s more than an hour north of here. What’s to say old Stanley didn’t knock off William, let his wife go out of her mind worrying about her missing son, then ship her off to relatives up north while he stayed here in town? He was in charge of her money anyway. Maybe once the son was out of the way, it didn’t matter to him if Kathryn was alive or dead.”

I closed the computer. “Don’t you think your theory might be just a tiny bit influenced by the messed-up father-son dynamic in your house?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But maybe Stanley was a racist prick and didn’t want a half-Indian son to begin with.”

I shoved the computer to the foot of the bed with my toes. “I guess it’s possible, James. But I’m too tired to deal with thinking about that right now.”

He gave me a guilty look. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I know. But you could be onto something with the Osage connection.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Kathryn didn’t die until 1976, so there’s a good chance somebody in Pawhuska remembers her.”

“You’re right!” James said. “In fact…” He opened my laptop back up and typed something into the search bar, clicked a few times, and scrolled. “Look.”

He spun the screen toward me. And there, on the Osage Tribal Museum website, was Kathryn Yellowhorse Tillman, staring out from 1898—where she’d been waiting for us all along.

I dreamed of Kathryn Yellowhorse that night. That’s how I thought of her, because Tillman didn’t fit the girl in the picture—not the black shine of her hair, or the open kindness of her face, or the way her smile played out in her eyes more than her lips. And even though she may never have lived in our house, it’s where I pictured her, gliding through the halls in a white flapper dress and pearls.

When my phone went off just after eight the next morning, I was in the dream myself, doing the Charleston at a party in the Philcade Building downtown that would have made Jay Gatsby jealous.

I squinted at the unfamiliar number on the screen. “Hello?”

“Ms. Chase?”

I sat up. My neck was still stiff, but it was better. “Yes?”

“Ms. Chase, this is Michael Mercury from News-Hacker Media. I was wondering if you could share your insights into Arvin Brightwater’s death. And maybe you’d like to let our readers know how you’re doing, too?”

“What?”

“You’re Rowan Chase, right?”

“Yes, but…” I swung my legs over the edge of the bed.

“The seventeen-year-old driver involved in the car accident that occurred prior to Arvin Brightwater’s death?”

I stood up, wide awake. “How did you get my number?”

“I can’t tell you my source,” he said. “But if you’ll just…”

“No. I won’t just.”

I hung up and sank onto the window seat. With the morning sun glinting off the back house windows, the only thing I saw in them was the reflection of a redbud tree.

I blocked the number that had just called, then searched Arvin Brightwater. The first hit, a CNN story about candlelight prayer vigils scheduled across the country for that night, was a surprise; I didn’t know anyone outside Tulsa had even heard about Arvin’s death. At the same time, it was good. I liked the idea of people holding flames up against the dark in Arvin’s honor. And if that had been all I’d found, maybe I could have let things go.

But it wasn’t. And I couldn’t.

Pages and pages of hits came back.

Jerry Randall was a racist and pushing Arvin in front of the car was a hate crime. Jerry Randall was the victim and had been defending himself against a crazy homeless man. The mental health system had let Arvin fall through the cracks. It was the teenage driver’s fault for causing the accident that led to the confrontation. If the police didn’t go after Randall, Tulsa would be Ferguson all over again.

And on. And on. And on.

Nearly every single person who wrote about Arvin in articles, tweets, and comment sections acted like they knew what had happened. They got it. They were appropriately sad or angry or confused or forgiving or whatever. They understood. Which was funny, because I’d been there, and I was mixed-up as hell. Angry, too, that no one had told me Arvin’s story was blowing up. Mom and Dad, Tru, James—they’d all kept it secret, as if I was too fragile to handle reality.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that reality was exactly what I’d needed all along. It would have helped to know that people were talking about Arvin, remembering him. It mattered. It made his death matter. And it was exactly the kind of thing I had to know if I was going to make sense of what had happened.

I took Geneva’s business card down from the bulletin board over my window seat and ran my finger over the lettering next to the five-pointed Oklahoma star.

It wasn’t even in purple Sharpie like the medical examiner sign in her van.

Geneva was odd, but she’d been straight with me from the start and had never treated me like a child. Maybe she’d learned more about the skeleton or had ideas of her own about who he’d been. Maybe she didn’t.

Either way, it couldn’t hurt to find out.