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It was hard to tell. In one, she wore a kind of tiara; in the rest, she was unadorned. “It could be.”

“Did she have any identifying marks?”

“Well. Well. She was exactly twelve foot tall. Is that what you mean?”

Pelkin’s eyes narrowed. “Twelve foot? Or twelve foot, three inches?”

“No, exactly twelve foot, as per the broadsides.” He blew out his cheeks. “Of course, that one morning in Denver, she seemed to be twelve-foot-three.”

Pelkin brought his hand down on the table hard enough to make the spoons jump.

“Yes!”

He leaned forward, and said, as if trying to be calm, “Is it possible she was, all those other times you measured her, slouching?”

“I don’t understand.”

Pelkin eased away. He looked over Nash’s shoulder, at the elm trees beyond the window. “Any other marks you remember?” he asked, faintly.

“She had an M on her ear.”

“Like this?” Pelkin thumbed through some photographs until he found what he was looking for, and snap, it went down on the table: It was a close-up of an elephant’s ear.

Nash nodded. “Yes, except Mary had an M and this elephant has an N.”

Weighing that statement with a frown, Pelkin brought out a fountain pen, shook it, then added a single downstroke. “An M like this, is what Mary had?”

“I’m sorry, how many elephants have letters on their ears? Perhaps all of them. I’ve only examined one up close.”

And at once there came forth the bitterness Nash had been trying so hard not to taste. The glimpses he’d had into Mary’s eye, the raw mind he’d seen there, how she had been betrayed.

“One elephant, I’m thinking,” Pelkin said. “There was an elephant named Nommi, with Ringling, and four years ago she killed a man. I think they just hustled her out the back way in the middle of the night, changed her name, and sold her to you.”

“That’s impossible,” Nash said, but as he did, he brought up the photographs one by one and stared at them. “These are Nommi?”

“One of them is. One is of a Sells elephant, name of Veronica. She was a killer too, six years ago. And the name, see, if you—” Pelkin awkwardly put up two fingers to make a V, and then joined with them a finger from the other hand, which made a backward N. He moved his fingers around, trying to get it right, and then gave up. “Before that, Ionia. That’s the one with the tiara.”

Nash wanted to tell Pelkin that he was insane, but could somehow not move his mouth to form the words. He had a sickly feeling, one tinged with guilt, as if he himself were being accused.

“The man Mary trampled in Olson, he was on a horse,” he said, meaning by this to begin a conversation that would end with Mary being, if not blameless or excusable, than at least understandable: an animal pushed beyond her natural limit.

“Mary didn’t exactly trample Phelps, did she?” Pelkin said.

“Well . . .”

Pelkin started packing up his photographs, and Nash hoped this meant it was over. But instead, there was a new photograph to study. It was about eight inches tall, and of such length that it came in a roll, which Pelkin unwrapped. He smoothed it out, then weighted it down at either end with coffee cups.

It was a safari shot. Five men at the center, in white pith helmets, Springfields cracked open across their laps. Native bearers of a tribe Nash did not recognize were to the left and to the right. Some of them covered their faces before the camera, but left the rest of themselves exposed, including the women, a detail Nash dwelt on for a shameful amount of time before realizing what, exactly, he was being shown.

The five hunters were all posing with their trophies: one man atop them, two on either side, two kneeling before them—a half-dozen dead African elephants.

“Oh, my lord,” Nash cried.

There were pencil marks around the men’s faces, which were half-crinkled in the photograph, hardly recognizable to begin with. Pelkin tapped on the image of one man to the right, whose rifle was jauntily slung over his shoulder. “Timothy Phelps,” he said, “when he was a much younger man. The Southern Crescent Railroad, in 1889, took its senior-most managers on