I tried, goodness knows I tried. I spent months if not years trying to figure out what happened to Elvira Corder. The best I could do was an educated guess, speculation born of all that research.

That’s why I’m so surprised when I meet someone who speaks with certainty about Elvira’s fate. It’s happened twice, most recently at a book signing last month.

An interracial couple approached my table. They were middle-aged and talked about a number of things, including their new grandchild. The man was white and the woman was Black. They bought two books, one for themselves and another for their friends, also an interracial couple.

They knew a little about the Condemned for Love story and wanted to know what I thought about Elvira’s disappearance. I answered, as I do in the book, with a list of possibilities, some unlikely, such as moving to Missouri to live with relatives, and others possible, such as starting a new life with her baby in a place of anonymity like Baltimore.

I added that my best guess was that her family killed her, an honor killing in punishment for the shame they believed she had visited upon them.

As I talked, I noticed that the man was listening closely and nodding his head in agreement as I went through the possibilities. But the woman was not. She was looking down, suddenly serious, shaking her head ever so slightly.

To her, there was but one possibility. She believed that Elvira’s family returned to Maryland after killing Arthur Jordan, her lover, and murdered her.

“They were not going to bring that Black baby home,” she said.

What struck me was not the woman’s conclusion. I agreed with her on that point. What impressed me was her conviction. She held her belief with such force as to deny all other options.

Later I thought about what I had witnessed. My conclusion was that the woman had life experiences that led to her certainty. And I thought how different those experiences must have been from mine.

I am encouraged, even expected, to weigh all options, to assign probabilities to the options, and to remember that even unlikely events do sometimes happen.

The woman felt no such obligation. Perhaps earlier in her life she might have been more generous. But not in middle age.

What I saw was that she was not at all surprised by an act of racial hatred. To her, it wasn’t just possible that Nathan Corder would kill his oldest child and only daughter for choosing a Black man. It was certain.