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There used to be an exit off the expressway to Boston's Logan Airport marked "Mystic River Bridge." I passed the sign a thousand times when I was a student, and always wondered what made the river mystic. I assumed that it had something to do with Puritan theology--a passage to the afterlife. Not at all. According to historians, the explorers who first mapped the region either corrupted the Indian word for "great tidal stream"--Missi-tuk--or, and I prefer this explanation, they gave the river its name because they never were able to locate its source. A biographer cutting tracks through the backcountry of an artist's life in pursuit of its enigmas also discovers that ...