oblivion. Year by year, its population had shrunk; now it was fewer
than fourteen hundred. The main street was lined with the
western-style buildings that had been constructed during the
boom, but they were abandoned. We paused by the largest
storefront, its window darkened with grime and cobwebs. “That
was the Big Hill Trading Company,” Margie said. “When I was
growing up, it was still in business. It was huge and had these
great wooden banisters and old wood floors. Everything smelled of
wood.” I looked down the street, trying to envision what Mollie
Burkhart and Tom White had seen—the Pierce-Arrow motorcars
and the cafés and the oilmen and the aristocratic Osage, the wild
furies that had once burned there. Now, even on a Saturday night,
it was a “ghost town,” as Margie put it.
She drove on again and turned off the main street into a small
residential area. A few of the old mansions remained, but they
were deserted and decaying; some were completely imprisoned in
vines. At one point, Margie slowed down, as if searching for
something.
“What are you looking for?” her husband asked.
“The place where the house was blown up.”
“Isn’t it back the other way?” he said.
“No, it’s—ah, here it is,” she said, pulling over by the lot, where
another house had since been built.
Margie then mentioned something that I had not seen in any of
the FBI records. Her father had told her that on the night of the
explosion he and his sister and Mollie had been planning to spend
the night at the Smiths’ house. But Cowboy had a bad earache, and
they had stayed home. “That’s why they escaped,” Margie said. “It
was just fate.” It took a moment for the implication to sink in. “My
dad had to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him,”
Margie said.