There were seven messages on my phone the next morning from numbers I didn’t recognize, all saying they were so-and-so from such-and-such website or newspaper, all wanting to know if I’d be willing to talk to them about Arvin. I deleted every one, turned off my phone, and went downstairs. Mom was dressed for work, reading the newspaper at the dining room table.

“It’s official,” she said, handing me the front page.

I skimmed the story just enough to see it wasn’t going to tell me anything I didn’t already know. The DA’s office hadn’t found sufficient evidence to prosecute Jerry Randall. People were angry. I was still a “female teenage driver whose identity is being withheld.” Arvin was still dead.

“How are you feeling about everything?” Mom asked.

“Lousy.” I headed to the kitchen for my juice. Mom followed, pressing me to say something more.

“I liked being around people who knew Arvin yesterday,” I said. “But in some ways it made everything harder. His aunt Tilda told me what he was like when he was a little boy, and there were people who went to high school with him, and his friends from the Day Center for the Homeless…”

Mom looked out the window, giving me time to finish. When I didn’t, she turned back and said, “Your father and I have been talking. We’re not sure the DA made the right call on this one.”

I drank some juice to clear the lump out of my throat.

“Was it self-defense?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do you think he would have done it if Arvin had been white?”

“I don’t know. But he definitely wouldn’t have called him a—”

Mom put her hand up. “Okay,” she said. “That’s all I needed to know. Got plans for today?”

“Just laying around, following doctor’s orders.”

She gave me a dubious look.

“Call if you need anything,” she said, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek. “And no digital screens until Monday.”

I smiled, poured another glass of juice while she gathered up her stuff, waited until her Mercedes backed out, and got my computer.

I had work to do.

Thanks to Geneva, I knew Raymond Fisher was from Decatur, Georgia, and that he and his gun, Maybelle, had gone AWOL from the army while he was on leave for his mother’s funeral. So I started my digging with the 1910 census, which was the last one taken before 1919.

Sure enough, Raymond Fisher was there, in the same household as his mother, Ava. Both of them were listed as being Negro, but other than that, the census didn’t have a lot to say. There was a link to Ava’s death certificate, though, which told me she’d been a seamstress who died of pneumonia in January of 1919. There was also a little window on that page with the names of her children. Raymond was there, born 1902, and so was Virgil, born 1900. There wasn’t anything more about Virgil, who I assumed must have died young.

Raymond’s 1917 World War I draft card was even more helpful. According to that, he’d been single, childless, had dislocated his shoulder when he was sixteen, was tall, stout, and had blue eyes. The top right corner of the page was torn off, and even though there was no specific line for it, the person filling in the card had written Light-skinned and marked it with a star.

There was no death certificate for Raymond, but that wasn’t a big surprise. He’d probably changed his name after he went AWOL, trying to stay out of the army’s way. From 1919 on, Raymond Fisher was literally a dead end.

After that, I searched Arvin’s name and got sucked into reading the online craziness that followed.

There was good stuff, yes. But it didn’t take long to wander into comment threads and forums full of crap so hopelessly messed up that I couldn’t stop reading. Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, racist skinheads, neo-Confederates, the KKK—up until that morning, I’d had no idea those were all different things, or that there were so many different ways to hate black people. Racists, it turned out, were into diversity after all.

Fortunately, the doorbell rang just before ten. Otherwise, I might have spent all day getting sucked into the world’s most depressing wormhole.

It was James, dressed in a pink plaid shirt, Bermuda shorts, and Top-Siders with no socks.

“Road trip,” he said.

I asked if the yacht club knew he’d escaped. He ignored me and came inside, grabbing my hand on his way past.

“C’mon. I was a busy boy yesterday, and it’s my second day in a row calling in sick. We’ve got a lot to talk about on our way to Pawhuska.”

I let him pull me toward the staircase. Other than moving out of Gladys’s way when she came to clean that afternoon, I didn’t exactly have plans.

“Why would I want to go to Pawhuska?” I asked.

He started up the stairs, pulling me behind him. “Get dressed. I’ll tell you in the car.” At the top, he pushed me into my room—gently—and closed the door. “Hurry, Chase. It’s a long drive, and he’s expecting us.”

“Who is?” I hollered, digging through my closet for something clean.

“William Tillman’s son.”

Sixty seconds later, I was fully clothed, yanking the door open so fast that James stumbled inside. My sandals were in my hand. The Victrola receipt was tucked into an envelope inside my purse.

“What are we waiting for?” I said. “Let’s go.”

There’s not a lot to look at between Tulsa and Pawhuska other than fields, hawks, and sky. We roared up Highway 99 north of Cleveland with the windows down and wind whipping our hair. 1969 El Caminos didn’t come with AC, and even though the backs of my knees were damp and a fine layer of Oklahoma dirt had settled on my skin, I felt free.

I kept James’s phone in my hand as we crossed into the Osage Reservation. If I’d turned it on, the screen would have filled with William Tillman’s picture. But I didn’t need to do that—I had every curve and line of his face memorized already.

While I was at Mama Ray’s, James had been faking sick so he could talk to a historian at the Osage Tribal Museum and dig through the high school yearbook collection at the main library branch downtown. He’d found William Tillman inside the pages of the 1921 Tulsa Central High School Tom Tom, looking out from underneath black hair that was slicked back and parted down the middle.

If Geneva was right about the skeleton belonging to an African American, it wasn’t William’s. His features in the picture were round, with broad cheekbones and a softness that somehow came across as strength. He definitely wasn’t black, though. Brownish, maybe, with skin that would darken quickly in the sun. But not black like Mom, or even me.

All that aside, his eyes were what held my attention for so many miles. They were deep set and calm, laughing all on their own as if the photographer had just cracked a good joke and told him not to smile. They were kind, too. Like Kathryn Yellowhorse’s.

James slowed down when we hit the outskirts of Pawhuska. We passed through downtown, with its low-slung brick buildings set against the sky’s wide-open blue. A few storefront windows had displays. Plenty were empty, others had been boarded over. I pulled up directions to Parkside Manor, and we followed them to a depressing one-story building overlooking City Cemetery.

“Shouldn’t they have built their nursing home someplace with a nicer view?” I said.

James jangled the keys in his cupped hand. “I bet they put toe tags on people as soon as they check in.”

Neither one of us unbuckled.

“We should take him something,” I said.

“What?”

“I don’t know. Just… something. What do you think?”

James shifted into reverse.

“I think we should see what we can find.”

“Mr. Tillman?”

The sign next to the door said JOSEPH TILLMAN & HERBERT EBERSOL. I knocked quietly in case either one was asleep.

“Hello?” I peeked inside and saw the ends of two beds. The one next to the window had feet underneath its blankets.

“Mr. Tillman?” I bumped the door with the box of grocery store cookies in my hand. Behind me, James had a potted fern.

The feet moved. A soft voice told us to come in.

“You must be James and Rowan,” the man said. “Please, sit down.”

His shaky hand pointed to a blue plastic recliner and a folding chair. I went to the recliner, trying to ignore the nursing home smell of warehoused human beings. James shook the man’s hand, saying, “Thank you so much for seeing us, Mr. Tillman.”

“I’ll take any visitors I can get,” Mr. Tillman said. “Especially ones who bring me presents.” He eyed the cookie box and patted the top of the hospital tray table next to him. “What have you got there, young lady?”

“Cookies.” I opened the lid and held them out. “Would you like one?”

“I would indeed,” Mr. Tillman said. “There are paper towels in the bathroom. Do you mind?”

By the time I got back, James had set the fern on the windowsill and was sitting in the folding chair. Mr. Tillman tilted the top half of his bed to sit upright. I moved the tray table across his lap and set a cookie on a paper towel.

“I can’t eat all of these myself,” he said. “Won’t you have some, too?”

I took out one apiece for James and me.

“That’s better,” Mr. Tillman said. Then he stopped, drawing a deep breath in through his nose and closing his eyes. As his wrinkled face tightened in pain, I noticed how long his body was underneath the covers, and how broad the gaunt shoulders underneath his hospital gown were. He felt for a cord looped over the bed railing without opening his eyes and pushed the button at the end of it. A few seconds later, his face relaxed and his eyes opened.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I’ve got a touch of cancer, and sometimes the pain gets to be a bit much.” He pointed at the IV bag hanging from a hook above his bed. Morphine, I figured. The heavy-duty stuff.

“But enough about that,” Mr. Tillman said. “I believe you mentioned you have some questions about my family, James?”

James came forward onto the edge of his chair. “Yes, sir, Mr. Tillman,” he said. “Rowan and I—”

The old man interrupted him. “Joe. Call me Joe.”

James smiled. “You got it, Joe. So, Rowan and I are researching the history of her house, and I think your grandparents might have been the ones who built it.”

“Stanley and Kathryn,” Joe said. The smile on his face was so sad and sweet that I could see a young man underneath the wrinkles. Once upon a time, he must have looked a lot like the picture of his father on James’s phone. And even through the morphine glaze, I could see he had his father’s eyes.

“That’s quite a house you live in, young lady,” he said.

I smiled. “It’s been in my family a long time. My great-great-grandparents bought it from Stanley and Kathryn.”

“Imagine that,” Joe said. “Granny Kathryn wouldn’t set foot in that place, you know. Though I suspect the two of you might not be surprised to hear that.”

He looked back and forth between James and me, and I swear he was trying to get information from us as much as we were from him.

I asked him what he meant. He closed his eyes again, only that time he didn’t jack into the morphine. I got the feeling he was doing some kind of complex mental calculation instead, deciding what to say. And when they opened, his eyes weren’t just clear, they were alive.

“I mean you’ve found it, haven’t you?” he said. “After all these years, someone’s finally found the body.”