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small-town mayor. Anyway, not what I thought of as a mayor. He wasn’t a guy in a cheap suit and a comb-over, some petty-level bureaucrat who went into public service to work off a bankruptcy. Charlie didn’t own a suit, and if he had hair I never saw it. He always wrapped his skull in a bandana, biker style, changing the bandana as the mood suited him, and today he wore a Snoopy and Woodstock pattern. He had on his usual Lee jeans with a watch fob, denim jacket, and a John Cougar Mellencamp T that dated back to Scarecrow .
    â€œWhoa, whoa,” he said, staggering as the Ford halted. “If it isn’t Odile Dahlquist.”
    I came up alongside the truck and shook his hand. The door to a Porta-Johnny flung open and a boy in a striped shirt hopped out with a trombone in his hand.
    â€œYou all right there, Javi?” the mayor asked.
    â€œI got stuck in there when the parade started,” Javi mumbled, trotting past us.
    â€œHappy Cinco de Mayo,” Charlie Burt said to me. “You know, I heard you were in town, what was it, I think Florence Rasmussen over there on Lombard said she had run into your mother, at the Lutheran church I guess it was.”
    â€œIf it was church, it wasn’t my mother.” Why did I argue? Iowans could go on all day about the minutiae of hearsay.
    â€œWell then it was some such, I guess the potluck they had for the crisis shelter.”
    â€œThat’s possible.”
    â€œI’ll tell you what,” the mayor said, “we’re only going to be parading for another two blocks, what do you say I buy you a corunda and an agua fresca at the fairgrounds.”
    With a lurch, he was off. The parade headed up to the fairgrounds and I followed, like a stray hound. That corunda sounded good but I really wanted that macchiato.
    What if Jean Seberg’s passions had been allowed to flare up and die, as a man’s would be? Maybe there would be no infant buried under the Marshalltown willows, no abandoned Renault. Jean herself, in her seventies and thick with brie, would be wearing muumuus in a Parisian apartment and granting the occasional interview to the perseverant Godard fan or Belmondo biographer. It pleases me to think that the baby, Nina Gary, would have grown like other second-generation Euramericans, dour like her father, plucky like her mother, maybe an actress, choosing roles in communally made Danish films or playing heroin-addicted bounty hunters in gritty indie flicks.
    But Jean was a woman. A woman who had ideas. An attractive woman who had ideas, and this is why she had to be neutralized. Hoover chose her as his mission. While she was busy creating art, or raising money for Watts preschools, Hoover and his band of sweaty gnomes studied her phone calls, letters, meetings transcribed by some poor junkie who ducked jail time by offering Jean Seberg. And the feds, spittle at the corner of their lips, their suspenders strained, their lentil brains taxed, could bend the evidence into a single narrative, the only narrative they could understand: the blonde from Iowa liked dick, and lots of it. In particular, black dick.
    T HE BOY AT the Edna supermarket Starbucks took a lot of pride in his product. He was talking to a woman in a leopard-skin top, thinner than most of the women I saw in Edna, thinner than me.
    â€œThis has two shots,” the boy said.
    â€œTwo shots?”
    â€œYou usually have one so I don’t want to jolt you.”
    â€œOh, what the hell!” The woman slapped the counter and turned to me conspiratorially. “Jolt me!”
    She was middle-aged and wouldn’t know me.
    â€œOdile Dahlquist, as I live and breathe. I heard you were back in town. I think it was Faye Eckhardt at yoga told me she spoke to Cindy Franck at the Golden Cup.”
    The espresso machine squealed.
    â€œYou don’t remember me,” she intuited. “Megan McKibbee. I used to be Megan Sondergaard.”
    The name swam toward me: