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“Look. ” Karl seemed in a hurry to move the subject on. “There are a thousand stories about what Green Eyes has been doing out there at the battlefield all this time—but most of the stories I heard when I was growing up, they talked about him like he was there fulfilling an obligation. I mean, he used to be a friend of the native people—”
“The same native people who were run out of this area on the Trail of Tears, right?” Dana interjected. “If he was a friend of theirs, why would he look out for the place after they were gone?”
“But he stayed, tied to the land if not the people. I don’t know why, and I’m not pretending that I do—but after the Trail of Tears, and after Boynton and Van Derveer pushed the park through Congress, he stayed. And I think he must’ve had a good reason to. ”
Something about his apologetics set off a red flag in my subconscious, but I couldn’t figure out what it was until Dana sorted it out for me.
“Wait—who?”
“Who what?”
She fluttered her hand in his direction, trying to draw the sentences back out of him again. “What you said just now. One of those names, it’s familiar. The ‘B’ one. ”
“Boynton? That’s the name of one of the fellows who set up the park, that’s all. ”
I rejoined the conversation with an abruptness that surprised even me. “I’ve heard it someplace else lately, too. But I can’t remember. ”
Cowboy whined, and Karl scratched at his hatless head. “Oh, you mean that murder case, I bet. ”
“A murder case?” Two related ideas were struggling to come together, but I coul
dn’t force them. I could feel them, though—like two mice underneath a rug, blindly running in circles and bound to collide with one another eventually.
“That boy. That Ryan boy. Boynton was his last name, too. Not surprising. Everyone’s related here. ”
“No,” I said. “Not surprising. ” But significant, maybe. “What happened to him? Do you know?”
Karl waved his hat, indicating the newspaper rack, I guess. “Oh, I’m not sure. He went missing a few weeks ago. Big-time football player at the McCallie school over there at the other end of town. They found his truck out in Rossville with blood all in it. Everyone figured he was dead, but it’s only lately that the papers have come out and said so, calling it ‘murder’ instead of ‘missing. ’ It’s too bad, but I think we’ve all known for a while that he’s not coming back. ”
His choice of words gave a jolt to the mice under my mental rug, and they charged towards one another.
The last was dead, and I gave my word.
The sentence came back to haunt me; it popped up before I could even place its origin. Before I dared connect the dots, I reached out and stopped Karl’s gesturing hat with one hand.
“You probably won’t know this, but did Ryan have any family?”
He looked at me with a confused yet willing tangle of eyebrows lifting high. “Well, I do know that, but only because the paper mentioned it. His parents died years ago in a car crash; he was at McCallie on a worthy student scholarship. ”
I let go of Karl’s hat, and he replaced it on his head. “Ladies, if you’ll excuse me, I was headed to the restroom. ”
We both nodded our permission, and he aimed the power wheelchair at the men’s room. Despite his lack of verbal instruction, the dog parked himself outside the door and assumed his best “good dog” stance of loyal attentiveness.
“You think they were related?” Dana asked in a lowered voice that only barely suggested the question mark at the end.
“They might’ve been. ” I drummed the plastic brown coffee stirrer against the table. “You know how people always make jokes about Southerners being related?”
“Are you about to tell me they’re not just jokes? Because in North Carolina, they’re just jokes. ”
I drummed the stick harder, against my cup, against the table, against a napkin. “Kind of. But I think what it really is, is that we admit to more relations than people do in other parts of the world. People talk about their ‘cousins,’ and they might mean their aunt’s kids, or they may mean some far-distant relation three or four times removed. ”
“So what are you getting at?”
The last was dead, and I gave my word.
The phrase haunted me again, and I remembered the source perfectly. I remembered his reflecting eyes and his long, flowing hair. “Is that what he meant?” I asked myself, but I said it loud enough that Dana heard me.
“Who? What?”
