Bookman's promise

I wrote him back at once, saying that not only did I want his new books as they came off the press but any new editions of his older works as well, especially if they contained new or amended material. I sent him news from the States. The little garrison at Fort Moultrie was living under a national microscope in the wake of Lincoln’s election, anything could tip us into war, and if there was a chance that his books might fail to arrive through some difficulty with the mails, he should please hold them for me until the trouble was settled.

I followed the events at Moultrie and kept a diary of my reactions, with the silly idea of sending it to Burton at some point and perhaps egging him to do a book on our part of his journey. “Old Gardner has been replaced by a much younger commander, Major Robert Anderson,” I wrote in December. “Captain Doubleday is his right-hand man.” Later that month I wrote again, when the Moultrie garrison slipped into Fort Sumter under cover of night, exactly as Burton had suggested almost a year before. “You must have made far more sense to that captain than either of us thought at the time,” I said. “Of course, having no alternative will change a man’s mind.”

“God help us all now,” I wrote in January. “War cannot possibly be averted more than another two weeks.” But the talks dragged on until April, when a blaze of fire sent us into four years of hell.

All that year the war news was bleak. Any hope for a quick end dwindled in a series of bloody battles that pushed us to new levels of hatred. November brought my severest test with Richard when a Union warship stopped the British mail steamer Trent and two Confederate officials on board were arrested. In London, Lord Palmerston thundered and roared. This was the excuse he had been waiting for. I trembled with rage as thousands of British troops, the vanguard of a certain invasion, were massed on the Canadian border. During those weeks I felt so wracked with suspicion that I decided to torch Richard’s books and be done with him. If I sent him a box filled with their ashes, topped by a petulant note telling him what I thought of his honor and the worthlessness of his word, perhaps that would ease my conscience somewhat. But I couldn’t light the fire: I couldn’t even bring myself to read the truth in his journal, and at last I took it out of my room, out of sight, and, I hoped, out of mind. I waited into January, thank God, when Seward finally announced that the Rebels were being set free, and the crisis with England was defused.

One day a cryptic note came to me. It was months old, written at Christmas in the worst days of the Trent affair. It was only two lines and unsigned, but there was no mistaking that cribbed hand: I made my best case, it said. Now we’ll see what happens. You may he sure, that I join you in hoping for cool heads to prevail. Again I felt riddled with shame. The bad friend had not been Richard but myself, and my lack of faith had nearly brought us to ruin. I made up my mind that I would keep his friendship for the rest of my days. No matter what happened, there would be no further suspicion. And to seal my decision I brought out his journal and put it up on my open shelf, where it has sat unread ever since.

* * *

I got nothing more from him until our war was over, but the cornucopia that followed was one of my great thrills of 1866. A vast collection arrived in two enormous boxes: The Lake Regions of Central Africa, in two volumes, signed to me with an inscription that never fails to warm my heart. To Charles Warren—my dear friend Charlie—I think of you often and hold very dear those days we traveled together through your troubled American South. I read The City of Saints with great interest, wondering why he had written not a word on his time in the South. I knew he hated slavery; why would he not take that opportunity to comment on its evils. A trace of the old suspicion wafted up: Because he was a spy, England will invade us the first chance she gets, and I in my silence am her accomplice. But those dark thoughts I pushed aside: my trust in Richard always returned.

There was more in the boxes: The Prairie Traveler was a book of advice for hardy souls crossing the vast American continent. Abeokuta and the Camaroons Mountains had a striking frontis portrait of Burton, charming despite the posed, formal nature of it. Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Fernando Po and A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome continued his fascination with and exploration of the great Dark Continent. The Nile Basin was a small work that I was happy to have as a book collector but as his friend found unfortunate in its continuation of his rivalry with Speke, who was then dead by his own hand. Later I would learn that its reception in England confirmed my own judgment: you can’t win an argument with a dead man, and Burton should never have published it. But Wit and Wisdom from West Africa was a charming collection of native beliefs, and The Guide-Book: A Pictorial Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina (Including Some of the More Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Mohammed, the Arab Lawgiver) summarized his most famous journey. In the bottom of the second box was the strangest book he ever wrote: a long poem in the form of a dialogue, titled Stone Talk, ostensibly written by a “Frank Baker” but full of Burtonian trademarks. It was a biting attack on religion, embracing Darwin in crude and clever ways, and calling his homeland to account for her hypocrisy and crimes around the world. He penned a tongue-in-cheek inscription and signed it “Frank.” If it becomes known that I wrote this I will be run out of England and banished to the land of the Mormons forever.

This remarkable output totals nearly three thousand pages in three years. Burton had become a veritable writing machine. Immediately I wrote him a laudatory letter and asked to hear from him if ever he could find a moment (pun intended) to write.

He did write. I got occasional notes from distant world ports, and once a year, more or less, he wrote long catch-up letters. These always closed with fond memories of the weeks we had spent together and the hope that our paths might someday cross again.

The years passed and his books kept the spirit of our friendship alive and well. I lived in his words, traveling with him in my mind to Brazil, Zanzibar, Iceland, and the gorilla land of the Congo, and when he was no longer the great explorer, I marveled at his philosophical works and translations. I always found it curious that he never wrote about our days traveling in the South. Never a line or a word, but I kept my silent vow not to doubt his motives again. The curiosity would remain, long after his death, and it remains today in my own old age.

I had my one opportunity to josh him into some kind of comment in 1877. Captain Doubleday, then brevetted to major-general, had just published his short memoir of Fort Sumter and I sent a copy to Richard. In my covering note I referred him to page 58. See how profoundly you affected our history, I wrote. Our war was certainly inevitable, but the way it began was yours to tell.

By Doubleday’s account, he and others had repeatedly urged that the garrison be moved to Fort Sumter as the situation grew more critical. But Anderson had always replied that he was specifically assigned to Fort Moultrie and had no right to vacate it without orders.

At some point he had changed his mind. Either that, or he had hidden his true thoughts, even from his officers, giving them just twenty minutes’ notice on the night they slipped across the harbor in rowboats.

Had Doubleday brought about this change of mind, which had seemed fixed on a very different course?

Did Anderson wrestle with the question of authority, and finally turn it on its head, as Burton had immediately done with the phrase “no orders to the contrary”?

Had Burton been the source of the act that started the war?

Richard never acknowledged it. He never mentioned the Double-day book at all.

Richard’s handwriting, never easy to read, became almost impossible in the last year of his life. I managed to decipher it with the aid of my daughter, the two of us hunched over a thick magnifying glass, sometimes for an hour with a single page. “I have not been feeling well,” he wrote in 1890. “It would be grand to see you again and to laugh over those olden days when we were young and the world was ours to discover.”

Halfheartedly I said, “I should go see him,” and my daughter immediately took up this cause. “You must go, Daddy! You will regret it forever if you don’t.”

“It would be an indulgence,” I said. “That’s all been so long ago now.”

But on the spur of that moment I decided to go to England. That afternoon I wrote Richard a long letter asking if I might visit, say in a month or two or perhaps in the spring. I sent it away on the first of October and waited for a reply.

Less than three weeks later I was shocked by the newspaper headline: sir richard f. burton, noted British explorer, dead at 69.

I was inconsolable. I hadn’t seen him in almost thirty years and his sudden death was a deeper wound than even the loss of my younger brother all those same years ago at Gettysburg. I broke down in tears over the paper, shocking my daughter, who had brought it to me. I deplore displays of sentiment, and she had never seen a tear fall from my eyes except at her mother’s graveside. But in that moment I felt I had lost the only friend who had ever mattered in my life, and I cried. She hugged my head and she cried also at my obvious distress.

How do I explain such a reaction? Burton was certainly not my best friend: How could he have been in so short a time? Still, time doesn’t always tell a true story. You can know a man for years and not know him at all, and another man rises up in a brief acquaintance and is closer than a brother.

I thought of him constantly after his death: the young Burton who had come here defeated and renewed himself on a journey down and across this vast continent. I had been part of that. I know what we did and no one can take that away from me. Even today I hear his voice in the night, fascinated by the power and durability of music, humming Negro spirituals that reach across two continents.

In the spring I got a formal note from his widow. She had come across my letter suggesting a trip to London and had written to ask what it meant. She was intrigued by the familiarity in my lines, frankly because she had no idea who I was.

“Now you have your reason to write it all down, Daddy,” my daughter said.

Over the next week I wrote Lady Burton a long reply. I told in detail how I had come to know Richard and most of what we had done together. But when I read it over I felt like a carpetbagger, a charlatan trying to trump up his own importance on the coattails of a far greater man, and instead I sent her a short note.

I never mentioned his journal and I never looked in it. It couldn’t matter then, after his death, but there was something between us, his spirit and mine, that made me keep that trust.

Long after her own death, Isabel’s question rings in my ears.

Who are you?

Richard never told her.

Who was I?

Well, I was one of his greatest admirers: that cannot be disputed.

But he had many great admirers.

Who are you?

I knew him briefly and was deeply saddened when he died.

Many were saddened.

We went on a journey once, deep into the lost kingdom of cotton. There, on a sunny afternoon in May, Burton might well have influenced the beginnings of our great civil war.

Might have, could have, maybe. Never mind that. What is real? What is certain?

I shrug. I never stopped wondering, since he never used any of it, whatever he was writing in that notebook. At some point in my old age I even entertained the fancy that he intended to leave it behind, in my care, as a record of what he thought and did in those crowded weeks.

But why?

I look at it there on my shelf and it looks unreal.

What is real?

Only Mrs. Burton’s question is real. It is still there in my seventh decade.

Who are you?

I look in my mirror at a withered old man and find one answer.

I am…nobody.

BOOK III - Charleston

CHAPTER 20

We arrived in Charleston after dark, the ground crew rolled out an air stair, and we climbed down into another world. This was more than just an illusion and it was more than just the heat: the air smelled different—I could taste its salty tang—and the humidity was like a battering ram. As we walked across the runway to the terminal I said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Koko,” and she made a face and a go-away gesture with her hand.

I rented a car while Koko bought a street map, a guidebook, and a pictorial history. A few minutes later she navigated me out to Interstate 26 and turned me south toward the city. “We should stay at the Heart of Charleston,” she said, leafing through pages. “That’s a motel they built in the sixties on the site of the Charleston Hotel, where Burton and Charlie stayed. Won’t that be cool? Maybe their ghosts are still lingering there.”

I thought this unlikely, but if I couldn’t share her view of the afterlife, at least I could agree that it would be cool to stay there.

The highway swerved down the Neck and Koko provided a running commentary. In the Civil War, batteries had been built across the peninsula to fight off an attack from the north. The city limit then was far south of here and this was mostly country. Like all cities, Charleston had spread far from its core and the sprawl was still going on. We passed through a grim industrial area and a few minutes later I saw the harbor, ablaze with lights to my left, and a spectacular pair of bridges spanning the river. I got off on Meeting Street and ten minutes later we reached the motel. We took two rooms on opposite sides of the motel and were lucky to get them. There were three conventions in town and rooms of any kind were hard to come by.

By then it was well after ten. We were tired: we had to be after last night—but we were still in the throes of an artificial high, like a Coke sugar rush after a heart-sapping marathon. We met out on Meeting Street five minutes after check-in and found a pub a block away. Koko surprised me by having a beer. I said, “That’ll put hair on your chest,” and she laughed. “What else can I get in a place like this? One won’t kill me.”

She took her first cautious sip. “So what did you think of the tape?”

“I liked the feel of it. If the old lady was conning us she was a very skilled operator. We have to assume it’s real until we learn otherwise.”

“Wait till you hear the others. My case for real gets much stronger then.”

“How much more do you have?”

“Hours and hours.”

“Can you summarize it?”

“You won’t need to listen to the other age-regression sessions. It’s just duplication, repeated just for consistency. Jo tells it without any errors every time.”

“I’ll take your word for that and pass up the repetition. What about the others?”

“It’s still a lot of tape.”

“I didn’t fly down here to sit in a motel and listen to tape, Koko. Where do we start?”

She shrugged. “We’ve got different goals. I want to prove Jo was authentic, you want to find the books.”

“Those things aren’t mutually exclusive, you know. They do have common roots.”

Koko took a big gulp of her beer. I sipped mine and said, “I don’t know why but I feel like my part of the hunt got suddenly warmer.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just a gut feeling. Makes no sense at all. It doesn’t seem logical that the books would be here.”

“I don’t know why not.”

“For one thing there’s the humidity. Humidity like this does terrible things to books. If they were here for any length of time, I’d expect to see some evidence of that on the pages. In a hundred years the paper would’ve become badly foxed unless they’ve been kept in an airtight bookcase all these years. In severe cases, foxing can eat up a book. The ones I bought at auction didn’t have any of that.”

I thought about it some more, then said, “So much for hunches.”

“Don’t lose faith. Please, we haven’t even started yet.”

“I never had much faith to lose. Remember, I just came here on a flyer with you. There never was any reason to think the books might be here, except they’ve got to be somewhere. If they’re in Baltimore, none of those thugs knows where.”

“There you are, then.”

“Where am I? They seem to be divided into two camps: Carl and his gangsters, Archer and Dean. They’re all hunting pretty hard. That must mean none of them knows any more than we do. They’ve got some reason to think they’re in Baltimore, but that may just be because of that book Jo took into Treadwell’s that day.”

“Wouldn’t it be a kick if they were here all along? Right in Archer’s backyard.”

I grinned maliciously. “That would be a real kick, Koko. Hey, your glass is empty. Want another beer?”

CHAPTER 21

We were still up at midnight, fiddling with tapes in her room. She snapped a cassette into the machine and said, “This was done right after that session you heard on the plane.”

Suddenly I heard Josephine say, in her natural voice, “Koko? Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere, dear. I’m right here.”

“I saw him again.”

“Your grandfather?”

“No. I mean yes, I always see him. But that stranger was with them.”

After a long gap, Koko said, “Jo? Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’ve gone pale on us. How are you feeling?”

“What difference does that make? Holy Christmas, I’m almost a hundred years old, how do you think I feel?” A moment later: “I’m sorry. Bad temper doesn’t become me.”

“Don’t let it bother you,” Koko said. “Can I get you something?”

“Not unless you can rig me up so I can see again.”

Koko adjusted the microphone. “Try that. Why don’t you tell me what you remember and I’ll try to be your eyes.”

“That never works.”

“Let’s give it a try. Unless you’d rather not.”

Another gap: forty seconds to a minute. Then: “I saw three of them. They were standing in some kind of fog, talking. Their faces were hidden by the swirling gray. But every so often it would clear up. Just for an instant a breeze would come through and lift the fog, almost enough to make their faces clear. But they were never clear enough.”

“You recognized Charlie, though.”

“By his voice more than anything. He was much younger than I had ever seen him in life. In my childhood, you know, he was always an old man.”

“Did you get any kind of look at him in that awful fog?”

“Just for a few seconds…less than that. But enough to know him, I guess.”

“What did he do?”

“He smiled at me and nodded.”

“You must’ve seen him very clearly, then, at least in that split instant.”

“No, I felt him smile.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Yes,” said Josephine, obviously pleased. “He was so happy to see me again.”

“I can imagine. Then what?”

“He said something to Burton.”

“Ah. So one of the others was—”

“Richard. Charlie only called him Richard, but of course it was Burton. In a while I could see him, too. A fierce-looking man with mustaches and those awful scars.”

“What did they say to each other?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear.”

But almost at once she said, “They were discussing what to do about the third man. It was fairly severe. Then they all moved back in the fog and that’s all I saw.”

“And you never did see the third man?”

“No.”

“You know nothing about him?”

“I didn’t say that. I know his name.”

“How did you learn that?”

“Richard pushed him away and called him by name.”

Again the tape seemed to finish there. It must have been two minutes later when Koko said, “What was his name, Jo? What did Richard call him?”

“Archer,” Josephine said at once.

I heard her take a deep, shivery breath. “His name was Archer.”

CHAPTER 22

I slept nine hours and change, till Koko came pounding on the door at a quarter to ten. I rolled out of bed, sore all over, but I felt rested. My double vision had cleared, I was still alive. I took half a dozen Advils and a shower, and emerged for inspection at ten-thirty.

“You need some dark glasses,” Koko said at breakfast. “That shiner you’re growing matches my own. Together we look like Bonnie and Clyde.”

Her first order of business was to find a department store and get some clothes. “Kerrison’s looks like a good bet. This afternoon I’ll get started in the library.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?”

“Any document that shows Charlie was here and they did what he said. This is a very old library: it was old even then. They have newspapers from the seventeen hundreds. It’s a private library but I can use it for a small fee.”

“I can’t imagine what you think you’ll find there. The press didn’t exactly cover their arrival or departure.”

“You never know. Sometimes the press then did take note when someone visited from abroad. Maybe just a paragraph, or a line somewhere.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“I’ll try to pin down other things. Whether there was a photographer named Barney Stuyvessant on East Bay in May of 1860. That picture he took of Burton and Charlie is lost now, but just getting a definite yes or no on the photographer would be helpful.”

My own day had begun organizing itself late last night as I lis-tened to the Josephine tape. Like a bad penny, Archer just kept turning up.

“I wondered who he was when we made that tape,” Koko said. “Jo had no idea.”

“So she said. No offense, Koko, but you swallowed that story of hers pretty easily.”

She did take offense. “Why shouldn’t I believe her? I had never heard of Archer then.”

“Well, you’ve heard of him now. Don’t you find Josephine a little suspicious at this point? I know you don’t want to hear this but that sweet old gal may have known more about all these people than she ever let on. Has it ever occurred to you that she may be manipulating us from the grave?”

Her temper erupted. “Oh, go away! God, you’re such a cynic!”

“Somebody’s got to ask the hard questions, Koko. Where do you think she got Archer’s name? Did she just pull it out of thin air? Did she pluck it out of the phone book by chance?” I leaned over and stared in her face. “Maybe it came to her in a supernatural daze.”

“No, it did not come to her and I’ve told you before, there’s nothing supernatural about it. Listen, picklepuss, because I don’t intend to say this again. I do not believe in the supernatural. At all. About anything. Do I have to say that again or did you get it this time?”

“Picklepuss?”

She glared. “If the face fits, wear it.”

I countered with deadpan silence. Once in a while our eyes would meet across the table and I’d give her my crushed-dog-in-the-highway look and eventually I got her to laugh.

“That’s better,” I said soothingly. “Now isn’t that better?”

“You mark my words, Cliff, and get ready to eat your own. You’re going to learn there’s a practical answer for everything. Jo heard that name somewhere—she heard it, read it—how and when she got it isn’t important now. But it made an impression and later she dreamed about it. She was describing a dream, you fool, you know how mixed-up dreams are. This can’t be that hard to under-stand, or are you still such a poopy old cop that you always think the worst of everybody?”

“That’s a great way to leave it for now, Koko. You be the pure-hearted optimist, I’ll be the poopy old cop.”

“Poopy old cynical picklepuss cop,” she said with sour amusement.

And on that note we split up.

At least I had a starting point, something to do with my day while she plowed through dusty archives. I prepared to battle pissant clerks who had never been told that public records belong to the public, but this time it was easy. It helps to know what questions to ask and how to ask them, and by late afternoon I had a growing file on Archer.

God, we have become such a depressing nation of numbers. Get a guy’s number and you can get almost everything about him. From Motor Vehicles I had his address and phone number on Sullivan’s Island. I had his Social Security number and the license plate number on his car. I knew he drove a Pontiac, two-tone blue, bought new in the year of his Pulitzer. But a check of his credit turned up a surprise. He had almost lost the car to repo boys in ‘85 and again last year. If the Pulitzer had put Archer on Easy Street, he wasn’t there long. He needed another book, a big one, and soon.

I bullshat my way from office to office, the good-old boy who made people want to help. If a clerk commented on my battered face, I turned on the charm and yukked him around, concocting tall yarns that made him laugh. In the courthouse I learned that Archer had been sued several times for nonpayment of bills. None of these had gone beyond the filing stage: he always coughed up when the wounded party got serious. He was one of those infuriating stonewallers who will not pay even a bona fide debt until he absolutely must, and now he was considered a bad risk by his plumber, his mechanic, and the man who had painted his house after a near-hurricane a few years ear-lier. He had several ugly defaults and a history of leaving others holding bags of various sizes. Some of them never did collect, and these days nobody loaned the famous Hal Archer money. He had kept up the payments on his beach house, but by then I had a hunch that it was always by the skin of his teeth. He had bought the property in 1983, leaving me to wonder why he had moved here from Virginia, where he had spent his entire life until then.

I stopped at the public library just off Marion Square. As I’d figured, Archer was in the latest Who’s Who. Son of Robert Russell Archer and Ann Howard Archer of Alexandria, Virginia, he had married and divorced long ago: a woman named Dorothea Hoskins, who had lived with him only long enough to have a son in 1957. In a vertical file of clippings the library kept on local notables, I learned that Archer had had little to do with his son, and today the boy was a man, living in California with his own family. Archer was a grandfather three times over and he’d never seen his grandchildren. The source of all this was a tabloid tearsheet, not great, but in Archer’s case it had a ring of truth. Suddenly the bitter picture looked tragic: a life wasted, with the big prize little more than a hollow victory. I found it unimaginable that anyone could have a child and not die to be part of that kid’s life.

There were no other marriages cited, no business affiliations, no memberships, and he did not seem to be religious. He had turned fifty-four on his last birthday. He had never served in the military, even though Korea was still causing trouble on his nineteenth birthday. His residence was listed as his business address: the same Sullivan’s Island street number I had gotten from Motor Vehicles. There was a list of his books, unhelpful since I already knew them.

His father, Robert Russell Archer, had been a powerhouse Virginia politician, prominent enough to earn his own entry in past Who’s Whos. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, 1905, he was an academic whiz, graduating from high school at sixteen and with honors from Rutgers in 1925. Married Ann Howard of Baltimore, 1926. Two children, the first named Robert Russell after himself and a few years later our boy Hal, William Harold Archer. Admitted to the Virginia bar 1928. Read law and studied under a prominent judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Public servant prior to starting own law firm: assistant DA in the mid-thirties; U.S. Attorney just before World War II. Too young to be killed in one generation’s war, too old to be maimed in the next. Never a candidate in his prime but always a power behind the scenes: worked hard for Dewey against FDR, even harder for the same poor loser against Truman. Chairman of his state’s Republican party in the early postwar years; a presidential elector from Virginia in 1948. The firstborn son, the namesake, died in 1945, at fourteen. I made a note to find out how.

Many honors were attached to his name. Slowly as I listed them I began to imagine a powerful patriarch, some Burl Ivesian codger from a Tennessee Williams play. He had come out of his shell to run for the U.S. Senate in the early sixties, but had served only five years of his term, retiring because of illness. He died in 1966, aged sixty-one years.

I read it again and thought, What’s wrong with this picture?

The Archers had been like the Huxleys—money, position, power—but Hal Archer was the exact opposite of all that. Hadn’t Lee Huxley described him as dirt poor when they were kids? Maybe it was the Depression. A lot of people lost a lot of money in those days.

I looked deeper and found an earlier Robert Russell Archer, also a lawyer, who had dominated his state’s Republican party in the First War era, all through Prohibition until his own death in 1939. Grandpa, dead at fifty-three. The Archers had a nasty little gene in their makeup that did them in young. At fifty-four, Hal must be looking over his shoulder.

Born in rural Virginia, 1886, Gramps was a real log-cabin kinda guy. Put himself through the U of Virginia, then law school, and in 1907 married a woman named (I kid you not) Betsy Ross. Damn, I love that—I can almost hear “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Only one child, the already mentioned Robert Russell Archer. Apparently the family never used “Jr.” or “the third,” so at least their kids didn’t have to battle that all their lives. Like his son he missed the carnage of his day, 1914-18, but you knew he’d have gone in a heartbeat if he’d been a little younger. He was patriotic to the bone: tireless on Liberty Loan drives, a four-minute man always on the stump. Grandpa took a hand in everything that crossed his path. He never saw a civic need that he didn’t just yearn to fill: worked on an impossible number of worthy campaigns, and later, with his law career in full bloom, was involved in trusteeships, arbitration societies, and a debating club. He held retainers from half a dozen major companies in the twenties. And with all this real life going on, the old boy had still found time for a hobby. I took in a long, slow breath as I read it.

The first Robert Russell Archer—Grandpa—had been a noted book collector.

By then it was almost dusk. Koko would be waiting for me at the motel but at the moment I had an urge to see Archer’s natural habitat. I cruised over the newer spire of the Cooper River Bridge, on through Mount Pleasant, and then, pushed by an incredible sunset, headed east across a broad expanse of marsh. I crossed a drawbridge and came onto the long narrow island, yellow in the fading day. The road dead-ended at a continuous stretch of rolling sand dunes. I knew from my map that Fort Moultrie was a mile to the right, the beach lay just ahead, and Archer’s place was two miles north. I turned left and drove up the island.

The island wasn’t complicated—no more than half a dozen streets running north and south and a grid of short crossing streets, numbered from First to Thirty-second. Archer’s house was near the far end, not far from the inlet that separates Sullivan’s from a sister island called the Isle of Palms, and it took me less than ten minutes to find it. It was built on stilts, eight feet above the beach, with a grand wraparound porch, room under it to walk or park cars, and stairs on both the street side and the beachfront. As I drove past I saw a light somewhere inside and a car parked under the porch: couldn’t tell from there if it was Archer’s car, but all this made it look very much like someone was home. I parked my own car a block away, locked it, and walked along a path through the dunes.

In those few minutes the beach had gone from yellow to purple. The sea was rough, with whitecaps and large breaking waves closer in. I was pelted by heavy gusts of wind as I came abreast of the inlet. Far out at sea a light flashed from an incoming ship. The horizon was already dark, but the sky behind me was still showing a last spectacular sun splash through a thin layer of clouds. I went to the edge of the water and tried to look like some tourist out for a stroll.

I thought about what I had learned that afternoon and what it might mean. The editors at Who’s Who had a standard for brevity, with no word ever wasted on trivial information. When they said Grandpa had been a noted book collector, they weren’t talking about the Little Leather Library or The Rover Boys Whistle Dixie. Grandpa had been a substantial collector of expensive first editions, his collection worth mentioning to an international readership. Wouldn’t this put Josephine’s dream, if that’s what it was, in a new light? If her reference to Archer had meant Grandpa, not Hal, that could make her dream, recalled under recent hypnosis, more than fifty years old.

I walked up a long stretch of hard, wet sand. Archer’s house was just ahead. I could see only enough of the car to know it wasn’t his blue Pontiac, and in the room facing the sea was a light, in addition to the one I had seen out front. As I stood still on the beach, someone moved past the window. I came closer, skirting the house yet drawn toward it, wishing the dark were a little darker but unwilling to wait for that to happen. I stepped into Archer’s yard and went quickly into the dark place under his porch. From there I could hear the faint ringing of a telephone and someone moving around inside the house. The footsteps stopped: I heard a woman’s voice but she spoke too softly for anything more than that fact to be clear. I had a hunch that whatever was going on in that room was germane, important enough to take a chance, so I moved into the pale light at the bottom of the stairs and started up.

She was standing just above me and a bit to my left; the window was open and I could hear soft music playing in the background. It covered what she was saying and what her voice sounded like saying it, so I moved closer. I took the stairs slowly, making no noise, and at the top I eased across the porch and flattened myself against the house. Whatever was happening, the other party was now doing all the talking. I heard an uh-uh and an uh-huh and more silence. I stood against the wall just outside the window, close enough to be charged with groping. She said, “Okay,” and that single clear word turned my head around. I knew that voice and knew it well.

She said, “Yeah, right,” and if I’d had any doubt I kissed it good-bye.

“He should be here soon,” she said. “I’ll let you know when there’s something to report.”

Oh, Erin, I thought.

CHAPTER 23

I eased back toward the stairs, felt my way down, and stood under the house listening. I could hear her up there pacing. She was nervous. Whatever she was here for, the outcome was far from certain. And me, I had only two choices: announce myself or drop back into surveillance. Take the option while you’ve got one, I thought, and surveillance felt right on second guess. But cover your ass, Janeway. Get the car in case you need it.

By then it was quite dark: My cover was as good as it gets, so I walked away from the house, down the beach to the inlet, through the dunes, and up to the road where the car was parked.

A minute later I pulled into Archer’s street and parked in front of the house. It didn’t matter much where I parked: there were other cars along the road and my rental slipped in nicely among them. Archer would have no reason to know that I was within six hundred miles of here.

Nothing was happening on this side of the house. Erin had confined herself to that beachfront room and I played it boringly safe for now.

An hour passed. I watched the clock, imagining Koko tearing her hair.

Of all the jobs I had done as a cop I had always hated surveillance. It’s bad enough when you have a partner to talk to; alone, it’s a killer. But I waited, slumped in my seat, only my eyes moving from the road to the house and back again.

He finally came at ten-thirty. I saw his lights far down the road and I got down deep in my seat. Gradually his lights washed over my car and went away as he turned into his drive. I eased up and looked over the edge of the window. He had pulled under the house and his taillights shone out at the road. I heard the door slam and saw his shadow moving around to the beachfront steps.

When he had gone into the house I got out of my car and walked up the drive. I stopped at his car and opened one of the doors, just enough for the momentary flash of light to confirm the ‘83 Pontiac, two-tone blue. The literary lion had come home to his den. Now came the tricky part: getting close enough to learn something useful without getting caught.

Again I went up the stairs and across the porch. I stood flattened against the wall, two feet from the open window, but so far nothing was going on: no sounds, not even a hint of talk from some other room.

Suddenly the door opened and Erin stepped out. I held my breath. If she moved away from the house or went even partway to the edge of the porch, she couldn’t miss seeing me when she turned around. But a sound drew her back into the room and I heard Archer say, “These goddamn airlines, it’s getting so I hate to fly. How was your flight?”

“It was okay. It got me here.”

“I guess I’m lucky mine was only two hours late. Did you have any trouble finding the key?”

“Right where you said.”

I heard him move again, coming closer to the window: then the clink of a bottle on glass. “How about a drink?”

“Only if it’s a very short one, please.”

“Name your poison.”

“Gin and tonic.”

I heard the sound of pouring and ice. Someone sat down, probably Archer, in the easy chair just to the left of the window. “Come on, Erin,” he said. “Relax.”

I pictured them looking at each other over their drinks, fencing with their eyes.

“Cheers,” Archer said.

A moment passed.

“Do you want to get down to cases now?” Erin said.

It had begun pleasantly enough but suddenly the mood got darker. Archer said, “I’ll tell you when I do. I’ll tell you how it’s going to go too.” There was no missing his intent: he was putting her in her place, letting her know who was boss.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said. “You fly all the way from Denver and now you act like you can’t wait to get out of here. Do I really bother you that much?”

It took her a moment to answer that. “I wouldn’t drive you around if you did, would I?”

“As a matter of fact I’ve been wondering about that. The night of Lee’s party, for example, how it came to be you who picked me up.”

“You found that unusual?”

“Considering how we parted after my book tour a few years ago.”

She said nothing.

“I should apologize for my lack of manners back then,” he said.

“There’s no need for that.”

“What if I feel a need?”

“Don’t, please. It’s not necessary.”

“You must like having that to hold over my head. Does it empower you having seen me in a bad light? Do you think you’ll get a better deal that way?”

“Let’s just talk business, Hal.”

“I am talking business and you’re starting to make me angry again. Do you think it’s easy for a man like me to apologize? About anything?”

“Look, Hal…I told you before, we’re fine.”

“But you’re lying, precious. Besides, maybe you’re not so fine with me.”

“If that’s the case, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry, all right. Because now I’ve got something you want.”

“Which we haven’t even seen yet. I don’t know whether this was written by Richard Burton or the man in the moon.”

This was followed by another awkward silence. Then Archer said, “I’m not gonna give anything away. You’re good-looking, precious, but not that good,” and the tone changed again.

“You know what?” Erin said. “I’ve just decided I’m not in the mood for this.”

“Now there’s the Erin I know. She takes no prisoners. She goes straight for the gonads.”

“Do you want to talk or not?”

“I don’t know, what’s your offer?”

“You know what the offer is.”

“It’s not enough.”

“Then let’s hear your counteroffer.”

“Double it for starters. And you be a lot nicer than you have been. A lot, lot nicer.”

“That’s not going to happen, Hal.” “What isn’t?”

“Either condition. Double would be five times what anybody else would pay. And I will be civil and professional and that’s all you’ll ever get from me. I hope we’re clear at least on that.”

“Don’t put too high a premium on it, sweetheart. It’s just possible that I wouldn’t want anything you’ve got.”

“Then we’re making progress. We have our first item of agreement.”

“You really are one cold, calculating bitch.”

“Another comment like that and I’m on the next flight back to Denver.”

“So who’s stopping you?”

I heard her get up. She moved across the room and came toward the door.

Incredulous, he said, “You’d actually walk out of here? With all that’s at stake…”

“You’ve got a lot more at stake than I do. And the answer is yes. Keep a civil tongue in your head or I’m gone.”

He laughed without amusement. “You really are something else.”

She waited.

“All right, let’s talk,” he said.

She sat. “Start with the offer you’ve got. It’s already generous, as I’m sure you know.”

“That’s your opinion. How much is a lifetime worth? And let’s dispense with the notion that doubling it would be five times anything. There’s no telling what something like this would sell for in a well-publicized auction.”

“I’ve looked at recent auction records.”

“There are no auction records for this and you know it.”

Silence. Finally he said, “We’re talking unique, precious.”

“Maybe it’s so unique it doesn’t exist. You haven’t shown me anything yet.”

Archer laughed. “Now who’s wasting time?”

“Then show it to me. I’ll have to see it anyway, before anything real can happen.”

“Let’s get in the same ballpark first. If I put this at auction it’ll go through the roof.”

“It could also go for much less than you think.”

“Then call me on it.”

More silence.

“I didn’t think so,” Archer said.

“Not to beat a dead horse, but there are reasons why I don’t want this to become public.”

“That’s why you’re going to pay me, isn’t it, precious?”

“I can go up some. Not a lot. Certainly not double.”

“That’s too bad. Double’s where I start.”

“You’re wasting your time. And don’t call me precious again.”

I could almost see him shaking his head when he laughed. “I’ll bet you are one tough cookie in court, cookie.”

“You don’t want to find out.”

“That sounds like a threat. Are you threatening me, Erin?”

“Just agreeing with you.” She sighed suddenly and said, “We’re getting nowhere.”

Abruptly she got up: I heard her walk across the room. “Thanks for the drink. It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to do business but it’s always such a pleasure seeing you.”

“You can’t bluff me.”

Her voice was hard now. “This isn’t a bluff, precious. I’ll negotiate within reason but I haven’t heard anything out of you yet that sounds reasonable. By the way, the offer will only be good through noon Saturday. If I have to go back to Denver without a deal, all bets are off.”

“I’m quaking in my boots.”

“Don’t quake yourself out of a small fortune, Hal.” She moved across the room. “If this doesn’t go well you could lose it all. This way you get your money and nobody’s any wiser.”

“Erin, my goodness, that sounds like you’re talking tax-free money to boot.”

“That’s not what I’d advise if I were your lawyer.”

“But the IRS won’t hear about it from you.”

“No.”

She moved closer to the door. “Sleep on it but don’t forget where I’m staying. Once I’m gone, I’m gone.”

“I want to talk to Lee.”

“I don’t think so, Hal. That’s a bridge you’ve burned pretty badly in recent days.”

“I know him better than you do. He’ll talk to me.”

“Don’t try to take either of those presumptions to the bank. I know Lee pretty well too. He’s angry and he’s wounded. He thought you were his friend. He’s been a friend of yours all his life and this is what he gets for it.”

I could feel the heat of the passing moment. Erin said, “I’m just telling you. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can get too high-handed with us, just because I came all the way out here.”

“We’ll see about that,” Archer said. “Maybe I’ll call you. Maybe

I won’t.“

“Don’t cut it too short. I’m not about to miss my plane for any more games. You’ve got to show me something or this whole deal may fall apart.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

She moved to the door. I heard him say, “Erin,” buying me just enough time to slip down off the porch.

From the bottom of the stairs I heard her say, “What now?”

“Go fuck yourself,” he said.

I barely made it to the ground before she came out and started down the stairs. I dropped into the sand under the house and lay there. She got into her car and backed out toward the street.

What now, indeed? These are the times when you wish you could split yourself in two.

I abandoned Archer and hustled after her. She was still in sight on the long, straight road, and it was easy to follow her back into town.

CHAPTER 24

She turned south off the bridge onto Meeting Street. For a few moments it looked like we might be staying at the same hotel: she kept going that way and I stayed close on her tail. We reached Cal-houn Street just a few car lengths apart and I stopped behind her at a red light on Wentworth.

The light changed. She went on past the Heart of Charleston and across Queen Street to the Mills House, a classy old-world hotel rebuilt in its antebellum excellence, where, according to Koko’s guidebook, Robert E. Lee had stood on the original balcony and watched the city burn.

She handed her keys to a valet and disappeared inside. I parked on the street and hurried up to the door. She was standing in the marbled surroundings just a few feet inside, reading some brochure on a table. From the street I could see no sign of a front desk; just a small room off to my right and a hint of a lobby around the corner to the left. What now? I knew if I let her disappear I might not see her again till I got back to Denver, but how would I confront her? I made the following decisions, all within seconds. I would speak to her now; act as if I had encountered her here by the most incredible chance. She would know better but that didn’t matter; at the moment I was looking only to break the ice and get us going.

This wasn’t great but in another moment she would go upstairs and the opportunity would be lost. I opened the door and followed her around to the desk. The clerk saw me at once: a street person, he’d be thinking, surely not one of ours. His eye went up, looking for the bellboy or the concierge.

“May I help you, sir?”

“I’m just the ghost of Robert E. Lee. Have you seen my horse?”

His scrutiny turned to alarm: not only was I a street person, I was a crazy one. But Erin had also turned at the sound of my voice. Her face showed a flash of surprise, which she bypassed at once. Deadpan, she said, “I saw a horse outside. What’s his name?”

“Traveller. He’s a big ugly stud with an attitude.”

“Can’t help you. The one I saw was a gentle sweetie named Buttermilk.”

“I scorn such horses! That horse belongs to Dale Evans—only lets herself be ridden sidesaddle. Can you imagine what would happen if I rode sidesaddle into Gettysburg?”

“The North would win in one day instead of three.”

She was quick but I knew that. She was also tense: I couldn’t see that on her but I sensed it. She cocked her head and said in a soft voice, barely audible, “Six thousand lives would be saved.”

The voice of the clerk cut across the room. “Do you know this gentleman, Ms. D’Angelo?” he said, and she smiled with a kind of comic disdain. “I’m afraid so. Don’t throw him out yet, let’s hear what he has to say for himself.” She came toward me but stopped after a couple of steps. “What are you doing here, Janeway? What happened to your face?”

“I break out like this once in a while. Where can we find a place to talk?”

“Our lounge is still open for a while yet.” The clerk looked immediately sorry that he had volunteered that but she thanked him and we settled in the lounge. The game began again.

“So what’re you doing here?” I said.

“I asked you first.”

“I needed a change of scenery after you dumped me and told me that fib about going off into the wilderness. I stuck a pin in a map and this is where I came.”

“I didn’t dump you and I didn’t fib. Something else came up.”

“A better offer,” I sniffed. “So you went to the mountains where there isn’t even a honey bucket to pee in, you planned to be gone at least a week, yet somebody managed to track you down and drop a bunch of new work on you.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

I shook my head. “You really need to quit that job.”

“I won’t argue with you about that. But there’s no way Water-ford, Brownwell or God would’ve lured me down after the agonies of Rock Springs. I’m on a mission for a friend.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Can’t talk about it. The friend is also a client.”

“And you don’t talk about a client’s affairs.”

“Especially not to very strange people who wander in off the street. Besides being ethically shaky, it’s not a good idea for practical reasons.”

“Oh, I do understand. I’m here for a client as well, so I can’t talk about it either.”

“You have clients?”

“Sure. You’re not the only one who knows how to pad an expense account.”

“Well, shucks,” she said. “That doesn’t leave us much to talk about.”

In other words, the ball was in my court. I said, “Maybe we can still find some area of mutual interest. Something that violates everybody’s confidence but nobody knows where it came from. How about Richard Burton and his trip through here just before the Civil War?”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“Maybe.” I leaned across the table, serious now. “Actually, I’m pretty good at keeping secrets, Erin. When I was a cop I sometimes had life-and-death situations that depended on me being able to keep my mouth shut.”

“Which means what? Just because you’re not the world-class blabbermouth you seem to be, that doesn’t relieve me from the ethical reality of protecting my client’s business.”

“‘Well, shucks’ is right, then. How’s your drink?”

“Gin and tonic is like small talk. It’s pretty much the same all over.”

“So when do you go home?”

“Saturday afternoon. How about you?”

I shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. Might be weeks yet. We may never get to have that date.” I took a sip of my drink and played a card. “It can take a while to track down a killer.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Think about it for a minute.”

She furrowed her brow and said, “Hmmm,” to good comical effect.

“Think hard about who was killed in the last week or two. It’ll come to you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Do you know how to spell Denise?”

That got to her. “You don’t mean Mrs. Ralston?”

“The late Mrs. Ralston.” I was watching her eyes, which never wavered. “It was in the Denver papers.”

“I went to the mountains, didn’t I just tell you that? I haven’t seen a Denver newspaper since before I went to Rock Springs. What happened?”

“Somebody got in there and smothered her.”

“Oh, Jesus. Oh, that elegant woman. Mr. Ralston must be…”

She turned her hands palms up and I said, “Yeah, he is.”

“Oh, Cliff. Why would anyone hurt that lovely lady?”

“The cops think it was Ralston.”

She shook her head, angry now. “The cops think, give me a break. Do they have any evidence against him?”

“Other than the fact that it’s usually the husband, no. They were hoping to sweat a fast confession out of him. If they don’t come up with something, they’ll have to go with the unknown assailant theory.”

“And it’ll never get solved.”

“That’s the way to bet. Unless, by some hail-Mary piece of luck, I manage to do it.” I gave her my miracles-do-happen look and the moment stretched.

“What would you do? Where would you start?”

“I think it might’ve had something to do with the book I left with her that night.”

She weighed this and said, “And that would be why the police are looking at Ralston?”

“That’s how one cop thinks. Unfortunately, he’s the one running the investigation.”

“Can you talk to him?”

I laughed dryly. “I did that.”

“So it’s one of those. Maybe he’d rather talk to me. Does Mr. Ralston have a lawyer?”

“Mr. Ralston went on the lam.”

“It just gets better and better, doesn’t it?” She sipped her drink. “So what happened to the book, did the killer get it?”

“I got it.”

“Then what makes you think the book was behind it?”

“Just a hunch that got started. There’s one problem with it, though. Only five of us knew they had it: the Ralstons, the doctor, me…”

“And me.”

If ever there was a pregnant moment, that was it.

I said, “I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Well, I didn’t. I went up to the mountains early the next day. Like I told you.”

“It’s conceivable that Ralston might’ve told somebody in the neighborhood. Maybe Denise did herself. If Whiteside’s any kind of cop, he’ll be looking at that now.”

“Randy Whiteside?”

I nodded.

“Oh God,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Oh God. God, God, that poor woman.”

She thought a minute, then said, “If Ralston is arrested or contacts you in any way, I need to talk to him. Immediately, before he says something the cops can use against him.”

I knew my friend Moses would be only too happy to step aside on this one. “If you take him on, it’ll have to be pro bono.”

Her look became prickly. “Did you hear me mention anything about money?”

We had another quick drink. There wasn’t much time left: the lounge was closing.

“They’re about to kick us out,” I said. “Last chance for you to tell me your secrets.”

She looked like she actually was giving this some thought. “I’ll be talking with my client again tonight,” she said. “We might be willing to share certain facts in exchange for the same.”

“Okay,” I said nonchalantly. “It might help if I tell you some of what I already know, just so we don’t rake over stale material. For instance, I know you came here to see Archer.”

She didn’t blink at that, so I went on, hoping I was right. “I know you’re representing Judge Huxley in an attempt to buy a book that Archer claims to have.”

This time she did blink. Encouraged, I kept going: “I know Archer’s being his usual enchanting self, I know he and Lee had a falling-out, and I know some other things as well. I tell you this so you’ll know we’ll have to start well beyond these points. No reinventing the wheel.”

“I wonder how you learned all that. Assuming it’s true.”

“I was a pretty good detective, Erin.”

She smiled wanly. “Unauthorized wiretaps are illegal almost everywhere, Janeway.”

“Thank you, Counselor, for clarifying that so that even a poor old dumb-schmuck ex-cop nonlawyer understands it. For your information, I haven’t done an illegal wiretap in at least a week.”

She stared at me and I could almost see the wheels turning in her head.

“So what do we do?” I said. “Have your people call my people, as you lawyers like to say?”

“Let’s just meet for breakfast, wise guy. Be here at eight and we’ll see what happens. And comb your hair before you come over.”

CHAPTER 25

A note from Koko had been shoved under my door. It seemed to be an account of her day in the library. There were also several pages of photocopies, showing, I assumed, what she had found. I still didn’t hold out much hope for her end: it was a very cold trail she was chasing, so I didn’t read the note immediately, just tossed it on the table and sat on my bed for a few minutes, thinking about Erin. Tomorrow, I hoped, would reveal a lot more. I wanted her to be telling the truth and for the moment I believed what I wanted to believe. She had been genuinely surprised about Denise, I thought. Her explanation rang true. Lee Huxley had been closer to her than her father: he would have her cell phone number, and when his chance came up to buy Burton’s journal, she would be a natural as his representative. He couldn’t come to Charleston himself: his docket was always full and he’d be in the middle of a trial. What else had I learned? That Lee’s relationship with Archer had begun to unravel. That this had happened only recently. And whatever piece of the Charlie Warren-Burton library Archer might have, and from whatever sources, he didn’t have it all by any means. But he was ready to sell what he did have. Archer needed money and he wasn’t above asking a highway-robbery price from an old friend. The book was unique—not even rare, the most overused word in the bookman’s lexicon, adequately described it. Archer himself had said so, and I didn’t have to like him to recognize his excellent command of the English language. He would not be one of those idiots who throw very unique at every common happening. Unique would mean to Archer what it meant to me—one of a kind. I thought of Burton’s journal. What else could it be? And how did he get it?

Richard Burton’s notebook. Burton’s version of the Charlie Warren story: the final word in his own hand, the incontrovertible proof that Josephine’s memories of her grandfather were true or false. I felt tingly just thinking about it, and Koko…God, she’d be faint with excitement and hope.

And then there was this: Erin had hinted that Archer might face legal action. What could that mean? To me it meant that Archer had somehow obtained whatever he had in a questionable manner and that Erin and Lee knew it. Somewhere he was vulnerable. What that meant I couldn’t guess. I couldn’t imagine Lee buying hot goods: it just didn’t jibe with the man I knew. And I couldn’t picture him in such rabid pursuit of any book that he would allow himself to be yanked around, even to this extent, by a two-bit chiseler like Archer. I thought about that and it still didn’t seem real when I applied it to Lee. I knew better, of course: the bookman’s madness can get us all, even a distinguished judge. Some of us put on stoic faces, like expert poker players whose masks hide the fever, but I had known Lee Huxley for fifteen years and I just didn’t believe it. He was a book collector but a sane one, and I’d bet my bookstore on that.

So where was I? I reached for straws and came up only with wild unlikelihoods. Lee was buying the book back for someone who had lost it, maybe years or decades ago. He was righting an old wrong. He was…what? What the hell was he doing?

It was late by then. I went to the table and looked at Koko’s note. I thought I’d read it in the morning but there was an air of breathless excitement in her opening words that drew me in. She had already found proof of something. One of the inns that Burton and Charlie had stayed in upstate had existed. It had been a notorious story: an old woman and her two sons had run a veritable homicide hotel, murdering and robbing wayfarers for God knew how long before they’d been caught and hanged in 1861. The inn had been just about where Charlie had described it—in the middle of nowhere—and the accounts she had read conformed exactly to Charlie’s memory of it. The woman’s name was Opal Richardson and her sons were named Cloyd and Godie. The only name Charlie had heard that night, huddled with Burton in the dark, was Cloyd, but how many Cloyds could there be in the world? To Koko this was proof that they had been there.

But slowly my own initial excitement was tempered by doubt. The fact that it had been so easy to uncover worked against it. That Koko, even with her long experience in libraries, had found it in one afternoon was not a good sign. It meant anyone set on promoting a fraud could also have found it. The thought that Josephine might have just come through Charleston to get background for some tall story was so unlikely it bordered on the absurd. But what if she had been here years ago, found the story of that old inn then, and saved it for another day? She might even have come to believe it. People do such things. When the stakes are great enough they will sometimes believe their own lies. I had a vision of Josephine at forty, hunting feverishly through old documents and newspapers, building the tale in her mind, then chasing it in vain for the rest of her life. But how did that explain the books? So far we had just two, my Pilgrimage and Jo’s First Footsteps. To me this was strong proof, but for Koko to publish anything serious we would need more than that.

I looked through the photocopies Koko had left. Just as I thought, writers had had their way with Opal Richardson and her dimwit sons for a hundred years. It had become a piece of Carolina folklore, with newspaper rehashes every few years for a new readership.

At the bottom of the last page Koko had written, Where ARE you? Call me when you come in. I don’t care how late it is, I won’t sleep till you do.

So I called her and got no answer. That old uneasy feeling began again.

I went outside and crossed the motel to her room. Knocked on the door.

Unease blended into anxiety and became worry.

I went to the desk. A man there told me she had been in and out all evening, asking for me. But he hadn’t seen her for at least two hours.

I called her room from the lobby and let it ring ten times.

By then I was alarmed. Where would she go after midnight? Maybe she was giving me a dose of my own medicine: If you want to keep in touch, picklepuss, you need to stay in touch.

There is nothing quite so helpless as a situation like that. You’re in a strange town. Suddenly you lose someone. There are reasons to be concerned; potentially, there are alarming possibilities, though it is unlikely that your enemies could have found you this quickly. You can’t go to the cops when someone’s been gone just a few hours. But you know something’s wrong.

All I could do was wait.

I walked out into the pungent Southern night and stood on the sidewalk looking up and down Meeting Street. Finally I retreated to my room, where I tried to watch the TV.

I stared at the screen.

At two-thirty my telephone rang. I picked it up with a feeling of dread and was overjoyed to hear her voice. She said, “Hey,” but her voice was flat. I could hear her tremble as she took a breath.

“What’s going on?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Hey, Koko, where are you?”

“In my room.”

“Where you been?”

“Walking around.” She sniffed. “Listen, I’ve got to go home.”

Uneasily I said, “Okay.”

But it wasn’t okay. Something was wrong with her. “I’ll go with you,” I said.

“Cliff…”

“I’m coming over.”

“I’ve got to go home,” she said again.

Then she sighed, very deep, and said, “They’ve burned my house down.”

CHAPTER 26

We talked for an hour: Koko in her sadness, me as a release from the hot wrath I felt boiling inside me. Everything she’d had was in that house. Furniture handed down from her mother, books from her father and the books she herself had bought for years. Pictures, documents, the love letters of her parents: everything that told who she was and where she’d come from. I didn’t argue with her: I listened to her plans, knowing I couldn’t possibly let her fly back to Baltimore. It would be better if she realized that on her own, but I would restrain her if I had to.

She had called a friend, a woman she knew in Ellicott City. That’s how she’d learned about her house. “I needed her to water my plants. Now there aren’t any plants.”

“Koko…”

She looked at me.

“It’s a little late for me to ask you this,” I said. “Do you wish now you had never heard of Charlie or Josephine or Burton? Or me?”

“No way.”

I took heart from that, but I didn’t push it. I let her see on her own what it meant and how it had inevitably led to this point.

“No,” she said again when she did see it. “No way.” Then she smiled and said, “Well, there are times when I can do without you.”

I reached over and squeezed her hand. “You see what this means now.”

“I can’t go home.”

“Not for the moment. It’s a chance we can’t take.”

“What about the police? I could have them arrest those people.”

“If they left any evidence. My guess is, they had a torch do it. A professional fire man who leaves no trace. And they will all have alibis for the time when it happened.“

She just stared at the floor.

”It’s hard being a cop,“ I said. ”People don’t realize. We’ve got to play by all the rules while thugs like Dante can do what they want. Unless they make a mistake.“

“Won’t the police at least protect me?”

“I’m sure they’ll try. But they can’t watch you around the clock forever. There’ll come a time when you’ll be vulnerable.”

A moment later she said, “You’re the one they really want.”

I nodded. “They’ll use you to get to me. But they won’t be able to let it go at that.”

“Then what can I do?”

“Let’s take it one thing at a time. How’s your insurance situation?”

“The house is covered. It’s all my other stuff that’s lost.”

“Do you have a lawyer? Someone you can trust?”

She nodded. “My lawyer drew up my will. His father knew my father.”

“Does he have your power of attorney?”

“I never gave it to him. There never was any need.”

“You can do that easily enough. Then he can handle the house. Dealing with the insurance company, stuff like that.“

”Will I ever be able to go home?“

”I think so.“

It took another moment for the implication of that to settle. Her eyes opened wide and she said, ”You’re going to kill him.“

”That’s not something you should worry about.“

”Oh please. Don’t treat me like I’m some fool who’s not involved.“

”I told him what would happen. He decided not to listen. At this point it’s him or us.“

She shook her head, horrified.

“Don’t waste your tears,” I said. “He’s a brutal man. He’d kill us without a thought.”

But she couldn’t get past the idea of it. “What if it wasn’t him?”

“That’s pretty unlikely, under the circumstances.”

“But what if it wasn’t? I don’t even know how the house caught fire at this point.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Cliff…what if you’re wrong?”

“Then I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”

“Don’t make a joke of it, please. This is too awful to joke about.”

“It’s him or me, Koko. Think about that.”

“What about the others?”

“They don’t matter. They’ll fold up like a house of cards when Dante’s gone.”

Suddenly her eyes opened wide. “Oh my God.”

“What?”

“I just remembered. I think I did something stupid tonight.” She closed her eyes and muttered what sounded like a curse. “I told my friend where I am.”

“Did you tell her not to tell anybody?”

“I didn’t think of it.” She put her hand over her eyes. “I didn’t think!”

Almost a full minute passed.

“Oh, I am so stupid!”

“It’s okay, Koko,” I said softly. “We’ll work with it.”

CHAPTER 27

The telephone rang at seven-fifteen. I rolled over on the bed, thanked the desk man for the wake-up, sat up, leaned over my knees, and stared at the phone. First thought of the day—call Denver. It would be like calling pest control for a rat problem. Call Denver from Charleston and a rat would die in Baltimore tonight.

I was first amazed by the detachment I felt and then by its slow reversal. It was as if only now had I begun to see the consequences, not for Dante but for me. To get this far, to be sitting here looking at that phone, I must have stepped naively indeed through the first half of my life and never thought about what such acts make of the men who do them. I had spent a lifetime on the right side of the law. Could I really be thinking now of becoming a cold-blooded killer? Never mind the reasons or the justifying. Never mind that someone far away would pull the trigger or that I had killed men myself in more forgivable ways. Make this one call and I’d be going all the way over to the dark side: I’d be an animal, just like him. And I knew that Dante, one of the real dark men, had seen this weakness in me that night at Treadwell’s. For all my tough talk, he was betting I’d never make that call, and in the end it would just be him and me.

I shaved, took my shower, and dressed well. I combed my hair for Erin’s sake.

It’s a beautiful day, I thought as I stepped out into it. Not too hot, not too much Charleston humidity. I left Koko a note and let her sleep. She needed it and her presence would only inhibit whatever was about to happen with Erin.

I stood at a traffic light on Market Street and thought about Dante. The light changed and I walked across Meeting and down the street to the Mills House.

Erin was at a table in the corner, looking through the News and Courier. She folded the newspaper and put it away as I came in. I sat across from her, waiting for her lead. The waitress hadn’t even brought my coffee when she said, “Lee wants to talk to you.”

“Okay. Any idea what’s on his mind?”

“He’s thinking of opening a bookstore on East Colfax and he wants your advice.”

I laughed politely. “Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.”

“We’ll call him in a little while.” She looked at her watch. “It’s still only six forty-five back there. In the meantime you can eat your breakfast and talk to me.”

“I won’t complain about that. Is this going to be a business talk or pleasure?”

“All business, I’m afraid.”

I snapped my fingers. “Alas.”

She regarded me with quiet amusement, then said, “As you guessed, we are involved with Archer in a delicate negotiation for a book Lee wants. We’re afraid your sudden appearance will complicate things and might make it impossible for us.”

“Well, so far Archer has no idea I’m here.”

“We’d like to keep it that way.”

“I hope you’re not going to offer me money to go away.”

She shook her head a little, but I didn’t think she meant no.

“That would be very disappointing, Erin.”

I could almost see her changing tactics. “We certainly don’t want to insult you,” she said.

“Glad to hear it. I like Lee and I respect him greatly. As for you…”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I like you too.”

“That’s nice to know.”

“Yeah. But it does make things difficult.”

“I don’t see why it should.”

I smiled. “I think you do.”

She said, “Look, would we rather you weren’t here? Yes, we would. Would we rather you went away? Yes, we would. Lee likes you more than you know, but he will be very upset if you get into this and mess it up. So will I.”

“Is that supposed to make me cut and run back to Denver?”

She looked unhappy, and this time I did not smile. I said, “So far you’re not doing too well, Erin. I know you’re a better negotiator than this. I know you know not to come into a situation and ruffle your adversary, unless it’s some knucklehead like Archer who takes offense at everything. And at this moment I am your adversary. If you want me to be your friend I’ll be happy to do that. But my friend is dead and, frankly, whether Lee gets another book or not doesn’t matter much alongside that fact. If you want peace between us, you two had better level with me.”

She leaned back in her chair. “God, you’re touchy this morning. Did you have a bad night?”

“You might say that. I’ve got my own moral dilemmas to work out.”

The waitress brought my coffee. I ordered lots of calories and she wrote that down and went away. Erin said, “The last thing we want is to get in the way of finding out who killed Mrs. Ralston.”

“Now that’s a much better start.”

“But I don’t see how we’re doing that.”

“That’s why I’m here. I’ll tell you if you do.”

Abruptly she said, “Okay, we’ll level with you. That’s what I was told to do anyway.”

“Told when?”

“Last night after you left I called Lee from my room. I told him you’re here asking questions about the book. His instructions to me were simple. ‘Tell him the truth,’ he said. That’s all.”

“That’s what I would expect from Lee. So why didn’t you just do that?”

“My own judgment call. A lawyer never wants to tell a third party anything about her client’s business, even when the client tells her to.”

“See? Right has a way of winning out over treachery and guile after all. Now you can get off to an even better start by telling me what book we’re talking about.”

“A handwritten journal kept by Richard Burton when he was here.”

“Gosh, that almost sounds like one of the Charlie Warren books.”

“At this point we don’t know whose it was, originally.”

I looked dubious.

“Look,” she said testily. “Archer has a book. He wants to sell it. He claims it’s been in his family for generations. He says he has rock-solid provenance.”

“And the thought of Mrs. G’s books never occurred to you?”

“Of course it occurred to me, do you think I’m stupid? That’s the first thing Lee and I did when the subject came up: I sat him down and went point by point over what had happened to the old woman, and what would happen if this turned out to be a stolen book.”

“And what conclusion did you come up with?”

“That Lee would be at risk if that turned out to be the case.” She shrugged. “He wants to take that chance.”

“And give up the book if he has to.”

“Yes, of course. That’s the chance you take if you want to play the game. In all likelihood there’ll never be a challenge. All the people are dead.”

“As far as you know.”

The moment stretched.

At last I said, “That would be a pretty good book, wouldn’t it? It might even put a new slant on history. I don’t think we’re talking about a revision on the order of, say, the South suddenly wins the war, but you can bet historians as well as book collectors will be interested.”

“Yes,” she said.

“The book would get a lot of attention.”

“Yes, it would. If the owner wanted it to.”

“I can see a story like that on the front pages of quite a few newspapers. And that might make it worth a lot more as a rare book.”

“That’s been Archer’s point all through the negotiations, and we agree with him. Where our negotiations break down is over how much that should be.”

“What are you offering?”

She stared at me.

“I tend to ask impertinent questions,” I said. “I guess that was one of them.”

“Yes, it was. But Lee wants me to tell you everything, so our offer was $250,000.”

“Wow.”

“So? You’re a bookman. Is that fair?”

“You want me to be your arbiter now? Somehow I don’t think Archer will go for that.”

“Not for attribution, just for my own information. I’m curious.”

“A quarter of a million is a helluva price for any book. You could get Tamerlane for less, if you could find one to buy.”

“Then you agree it’s a fair price.”

“I haven’t seen the book. And remember, I’m no expert.”

She looked annoyed.

I said, “Hey, I’m sorry, but content is everything. I’d have to read it to offer even an incompetent opinion.”

“All right, forget I asked. We haven’t seen it yet either.”

The waitress came with my breakfast, set it nicely on the table, and left.

“Archer wants half a million,” Erin said.

I laughed. “That’s our boy.”

“Certainly is. We should be glad he’s not asking a full million, or two, or ten. It wouldn’t matter. What he does want is still out of the question. Lee is not a poor man, as I’m sure you know, but he hasn’t got that kind of money to throw around on something this shaky.”

Abruptly I said, “I hear you were pretty hard on Archer last night.”

She scoffed, “You hear, indeed.”

“I hear you even threatened him, in an oblique way, with legal action.”

“You’d better get your hearing checked. Whatever I might’ve said was nothing more than part of a negotiation.”

“Tactics.”

“Exactly.”

“Still, you’ve got to have a valid reason for a threat like that.”

“I never threatened him. If he thinks I did…” She shuddered.

“The deeper I get into this deal, the less I like it. I wish Lee would just tell Archer to get lost and be done with it. But he thinks the book is so historically important that it’s got to be bought.”

“I understand that, all right. There are books like that, that must be bought. So does Lee think Archer might actually have stolen this book? How would he have done that?”

“That’s the rub, isn’t it? We just don’t know.”

“But they had a falling-out over something.”

“Over Archer’s greed. Lee thought they had a deal, then Archer got greedy. In Lee’s mind, you don’t do that to a friend. You know, as kids they were almost like brothers. But Archer was different then. He was a grand guy. I know that’s hard to imagine, but if Lee says it was so, I believe him. Hal Archer was a kind, generous, wonderful friend in those days.”

“So what screwed him up?”

“Everything, starting with his grandfather. He was never good enough, either for his father or grandfather. His older brother was named after the father and grandfather. He was the one who was supposed to rule the estate, like some stupid progression in royalty, and he would have if he hadn’t been killed in an auto wreck. Hal’s first mistake was being born second; his second mistake was not wanting to be a lawyer.”

“So the Archers loved books but wouldn’t let their son write ‘em.” “I don’t think that’s so unusual. Would you want your son to be a writer? Or your daughter to marry one?”

“If that made them happy, why not?”

“Because most of the time it doesn’t make them happy. Most writers I know lead difficult, hand-to-mouth lives. In the first place the odds against selling a book are enormous. A big New York publishing house may get twenty thousand manuscripts in a year and publish two hundred. Most of those slush-pile books are horrible, so there’s an expectation of failure that’s tough to overcome even with decent work. Those first-readers can’t expect to find much, so they don’t.”

“And this is what you want to give up law for?”

“That’s probably exactly what Archer’s father said, in far stronger terms.” She shrugged. “At least I’ve got some money in the bank. I’m not going to starve and I can always go back to law, but I’m still a good case in point. I suppose I’m like every other wannabe writer with a huge ego. I believe my talent and sheer persistence will overcome the odds, even when I know what the odds are. I’m facing a long, uphill battle, but at least I know it. That’s why I can talk about Archer’s life with some understanding even if I don’t like him much as a man.”

“So Archer was estranged from his family fairly early.”

“To put it mildly. He was sent to the University of Virginia, the old man’s alma mater, in the hope it would straighten him out. But he was put on notice and given no money for anything. He dropped out after a year and the family made him an outcast. In effect he was on his own from then on. He went to New York, lived in a hole in the wall, and started to write stories.”

“And had a terrible time selling them.”

“Oh yeah. Miranda’s right: Archer’s a real bastard, but what a great talent. That should have been evident from the start, publishers should have been clamoring to get at his stuff. Instead he met a wall of indifference that broke his spirit and finished the job his family had started. Can you imagine what it’s like to write for years and get nowhere? To know in your heart that you’re something special and watch your books get rejected and rejected and rejected, over and over till the paper they were typed on begins to come apart. I’ll tell you what happens to writers like that. One day they wake up and they’re old. All that promise just seems to flush away overnight and they’ve got nothing to show for it except a wasted life. It comes faster than they could’ve imagined. Archer was in his forties when he published his first book. It had gone everywhere and finally David McKay bought it. McKay was a small house and the book sank like a lead balloon. Then they rejected his next book, and there he was, starting from scratch, looking for a publisher. His book had made him less than three thousand dollars, and that was spread over several years. Try to live anywhere on that. Try living in New York.”

She took some more coffee. “His next publisher was St. Martin’s Press, a real mixed bag. They’ll put money into a big book, but a lot of their fiction is nickel-and-dime, with half of a very modest print run going to libraries. Archer made nothing from them; he refused to send them his next one and they parted company in mutual anger. Archer had to start his hunt from scratch again and no one would touch him. He fired his agent, his agent fired him, or they each fired the other at the same moment. By then there may have been a grapevine at work, I don’t know. It would stand to reason that publishers hear things, and why would they publish someone whose books come with a bad attitude and don’t sell anyway? Those two factors will offset a whole bunch of literary excellence, even in the minds of dedicated editors. So Archer toiled away and began to lash out at everyone. Finally in pure desperation he let Walker have the book. You know about Walker.”

“Yeah, there’s a shaggy-dog joke in the trade about Walker and St. Martin’s. Their print runs sometimes are so small that some of their authors become instant rarities. Those books are only a few years old and they sell for hundreds of dollars.”

“What’s the joke?”

“How do you become a millionaire in the used book business? Buy five copies of everything St. Martin’s and Walker publish. How do you go broke in the book biz? Same answer.”

She smiled. “As you can imagine, then, nothing happened with Walker. Archer’s bitterness got deeper and he became even more unbearable. Hindsight may be twenty-twenty, but in fact he should’ve been published by Random House or Doubleday, with six-figure advances and book tours, the whole nine yards. But all he could see coming out of the big houses was trumped-up suspense junk and mindless bodice rippers.”

“You sound bitter yourself, Erin, and you haven’t even started yet. As if nothing good ever gets published. I know you know better than that.”

“I’m talking as Archer now. You asked how he got screwed up and I’m telling you.”

“So he turned to nonfiction and the Viking Press found him,” I said. “But apparently the Pulitzer did him no good at all.”

“Didn’t do much for his attitude, did it? If anything it made him angrier. Instead of being overjoyed that he’d finally made it, he felt only rage that his whole writing life had been spent getting there. The Pulitzer was confirmation of his greatness, and of the stupidity he saw everywhere he looked.”

“Hey, he’s not dead yet. What about his new book? Viking’s not chopped liver, I imagine they’ve given him a good advance.”

“I don’t want to talk about that. It was told to Lee in confidence. Nobody else knows, not even Miranda. I think you’ve got to ask Lee that question.”

I ate my breakfast and watched her think. Over coffee I asked what her strategy would be if Archer continued to stonewall. She shook her head. “Can’t talk about strategy. You’ll have to ask Lee that as well.”

“Then call him up.”

* * *

She called from the table. “Hi, it’s me. We’re just finishing breakfast and I’ve got a couple of sticky points. You know where. He asked if I knew the status of Archer’s new book. I still don’t want to talk about that, for obvious reasons.”

She looked directly into my eyes while she talked. “I know what you said, Lee, I just don’t like it. He also wants to know what we’ll do if Archer continues to be unreasonable.”

After a short silence, she said, “I’ve got to tell you again, I wouldn’t advise that.”

She said, “If he gives his word, yes, I do think we could trust him.”

I nodded superseriously.

“That’s not the point,” she said.

Lee said something and she shook her head. “I’m against it.”

She frowned. “You’re the boss, but I don’t think we need to tell anybody, including Mr. Janeway, what we might or might not do. Especially what we won’t do. That’s hardly pertinent to anything he’s doing, and it’s just not smart.”

She shook her head. “Well, I knew you’d say that. But I still don’t like it.”

She handed me the phone.

“Hi, Lee,” I said.

“Cliff.” Lee sounded tired. “I’m sorry you’ve been put in the middle of this mess. But it sounds like Erin’s giving you what you need.”

“She’s great. She does have a couple of concerns, which are probably reasonable.”

“She’s being lawyerly, covering my flank. You know how it is. But she’ll talk to you now.”

For a moment I listened to the phone noise: all the distance between us.

“Erin said you wanted to talk to me too,” I said.

“Just to make sure you get what you need and to tell you not to worry. Whatever you have to do, I understand. Your cause comes before mine.”

“Thanks for that.”

“We’ll see you when you get back. And good luck with it.”

I hung up the phone.

“I’ll answer your questions now,” Erin said, “but you’ve got to respect our confidence. This can go no further.”

“I won’t tell a soul.”

“You asked about Archer’s new book. When he was in Denver he got drunk, cried on Lee’s shoulder, and told him some things he probably wishes he hadn’t. Turns out the great one is suffering from the granddaddy of all writer’s blocks. In the years since he won the Pulitzer he hasn’t written a publishable line. Or if he has, he’s second-guessed himself into fits of depression and destroyed whatever he’s done. If the prize has done anything, it’s given him a sense that nothing he does can ever measure up to his own…you know.”

“Legend,” I said sourly, loathing that dumbest of all modern buzzwords.

She looked sad, as if Archer’s plight had suddenly touched her. “I told you writers are screwed up. Archer took a lot of money from his publisher on a two-page plan to produce a groundbreaking work in a specified period of time. That time has passed. Viking has been more than sympathetic: they even came through with more money. The Pulitzer is a powerful wedge and they really do want to publish him. But their patience will run out sometime, and as of now, six years later, Archer has nothing to show them.”

All I knew about writers and their hang-ups was what I’d read here and there. But it seemed strange to get stuck over a work of nonfiction when most writer’s blocks seemed to come over some creative lack of faith. “I wonder if he promised them more than he’s got,” I said. “He may still be doing that, only now Lee is the mark, not the Viking Press.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. Lee doesn’t worry about that nearly enough, but this journal will have to be meticulously examined before I allow him to give Archer a dime.”

“Even then you won’t like it.”

She shook her head. “I think Lee is putting a lot of money at risk. What would you advise him, as his friend?”

“Check the provenance, six times over.”

CHAPTER 28

She leaned across the table and said, “Your turn, Janeway, talk to me,” and I had to tell her about Koko and Baltimore. Then, with deliberate understatement, I told her about Dante and what had brought us to Charleston: how stealth, not electronics, had given me such insight into her dealings with Archer. She shook her head and tried to look disgusted, but a small smile gave her away. The smile faded when I told her that Dante had burned Koko’s house.

“This is a bad man you’re playing tag with,” she said.

“I’ve been going on that assumption.”

“What can I do? As a lawyer maybe I can give him some grief.”

“Don’t even think about it. I don’t want you anywhere near this creep.”

“I don’t think you automatically get the final word on that.”

“The hell I don’t. I don’t want him to even hear your name.”

She looked angry but I cut her off with my own look. “Listen, goddammit, you make me more vulnerable, not less. I’ve got enough on my hands with Koko and myself.”

She made a little arch with her fingers and held them up to her face like a woman praying. I looked at her fiercely and said, “Don’t make me sorry I told you.”

“Nice try, but I’m not buying that.”

“You’d damned better buy it.”

She came straight up in her chair. “Or what’s gonna happen? Gonna take my dolls away?”

What I said next was stupid and false. “Erin, I appreciate your concern—”

She wadded up her napkin and bounced it off my head. “Don’t give me that imperious male baloney. If you want me out of your life, at least be man enough to say so in plain language. Is that what you want? Yes or no.”

“God, no.”

“Then shape up. Behave yourself. Don’t talk down to me. Don’t try to protect me.”

I thought about what to say and settled on this: “In your world every conflict has a legal answer. You think you can just file a brief in Denver District Court and force him to become human, but it doesn’t work that way. Don’t take this personally, but you’re out of your league with this boy.”

“And you’re not?”

“I don’t know.”

She shook her head. “I can’t just stand by and do nothing.”

“Well, you’ve got to.”

“And if he kills you, and there’s no evidence, what am I supposed to do then?”

“Nothing. What can you do anyway but get killed yourself?”

“I can’t accept that.”

“What can you do about it?”

“I’ll hold him down while you cut him a new one.”

It was one of those crazy unexpected comments and at once we were convulsed. She dabbed her eyes and said, “Stop it, this isn’t funny,” and we laughed all the more. I said, “Listen, I’m going to handle this,” and we laughed like idiots. “Don’t you make it harder,” I said, and we laughed.

I coughed. “I’m sorry, was that too much imperious male baloney?”

“Yeah, it was, but the groveling tone helps.” She smiled at me from somewhere far behind her face. “How much time do you think you have before he finds you?”

“I don’t know that either. There’s no reason yet to assume he knows where we went.”

“You hope.”

I fiddled nervously with the saltshaker.

“Are you afraid of him?”

“I’m…wary. I’ve had enemies before, some of them real badasses. I just get the feeling there’s no limit with this guy. My biggest fear is I may never see it coming.”

She was sober now, the laughter of the moment gone and forgotten. “This makes our little rivalry pale by comparison, doesn’t it?” A moment later she said, “I want to tell Lee.”

“What good will that do?”

“I don’t know, maybe none.” She looked away, then back. “Three heads are better than two.”

“Tell him, then. If he’s got the good sense I think he has, he’ll tell you to stay out of it.”

“Lee doesn’t own me and neither do you. You really are annoying when things don’t go your way.”

“That’s why people want to kill me.”

She gave the waitress a high sign and took out a credit card. “I want you to think about something else while you’re still alive. The possibility that your old lady was a clever fraud.”

“I’ve always been aware of that. Why bring it up now?”

“I don’t know: just a feeling I have. Something’s not right there. Did you ever have the handwriting on your book checked?”

“Not personally. The auction house is reputable and I know what Burton’s handwriting looks like.”

“But you’re no expert.”

I shook my head, suddenly aware of how much of my business is taken on faith.

“That might be worth doing,” she said. “Something’s afoot there, I can smell it. Doesn’t it strike you as odd?”

“When you’ve been in the book business awhile, everything is odd.”

“But you were primed to believe it. Look, I know she was a sweet old gal and I don’t want to think bad things about her. But it’s not something we can dismiss.”

“She was in her nineties. That’s pretty old to be pulling a scam. And who pulls a scam when they’re dying? People who have lied all their lives tend to tell the truth on a deathbed. All she wanted was for the books to be put in a library in her grandfather’s name.”

“Maybe she was crazy, did you ever think of that? Maybe she heard that story years ago and transposed herself into it. Maybe Charlie became a grandfather in her mind.”

“She had the book.”

“She had a book. You don’t know where she really got it, or when, or how. Maybe getting the book is what started it all. She may have had Burton on the brain for a long time.”

“Koko checked a lot of this out.”

“That may be well and good, but I don’t know Koko from a sack of beans. She may have her own agenda, as the boys in the boardroom like to say. Don’t get defensive, just think about it.”

I controlled my imperious male baloney and let her pay the tab. “I guess I won’t see you again before you leave,” I said. “What’re you doing tonight?”

“I thought you’d never ask. I’m facing a miserably lonely hotel room.”

“Want to test Charleston’s restaurants?”

And that’s how we had our first date.

When I got back to the motel Koko was gone. I tracked her down at the library, where she was searching through old records for some evidence of the East Bay photographer’s existence. She had found nothing new since her discovery of the murdering innkeepers the day before and her mood was bleak. “I’m beginning to think this is all going to be a waste of time.”

I stayed with her, following her instructions, reading my share of old newspapers and documents. Occasionally she would powwow with one of the librarians, the librarian would bring out another folder or have a bound volume of newspapers brought up from the basement, and we would start in again. At noon she called her lawyer in Baltimore and got things moving on her house. We started in again after a quick lunch, but the work was frustrating and by four-thirty we had nothing. “A waste of time,” she said. “You got your head kicked in and my house got burned down, for what? And we’ll never be able to go home again.”

At the motel she showed me a chart she had made of the whole block where Burton and Charlie had supposedly been photographed. Every building along the street had a name written neatly in its square. “This is it,” she said: “every tenant on that stretch of East Bay in May 1860 accounted for, and I don’t see any photographers there.”

There was a cafe and a beer hall, a glass shop, a blacksmith, a druggist. Some used only personal names: Phillips, Jones, Kelleher, Wilcox. “Phillips turned out to be a dealer in rugs,” she said. “Jones was a butcher. Kelleher was a dentist and Wilcox owned a grocery store. If Burton and Charlie had their picture taken, where was the photographer?”

She received the news about Erin deadpan, but over the next hour her mood darkened. “I’m going out to Fort Sumter tomorrow,” she said, “take a break from this monotony and let you have fun with your friend.” She apologized reluctantly for the catty remark and tried to look ahead. “Don’t mind me. If she’s a lawyer, maybe she’ll have some idea how we can get out of this mess.” “I think she wants to take on Dante in a bare-knuckles brawl.” “You already did that and look where it got us.” She tried to turn the talk back to Fort Sumter. “One of the librarians told me there’s a ranger out there who knows something about Burton. Maybe he can shed some light.” I didn’t say anything but I doubted it. I asked her about tonight. “I’ll be fine,” she said. She had found a health food store and she planned to lock herself in, eat in her room, meditate, exercise, go nowhere, and not answer the phone. “Don’t bother me unless there’s an earthquake.”

* * *

At six o’clock I retrieved my car and drove the three blocks to the Mills House. Erin came down looking lovely and I told her so. I was on my best behavior, somewhere between smarmy and suave, decked out in my dark coat and tie. I held the door for her and took her hand as she sank into the car, and for the moment there were no wisecracks between us. I had found a seafood place on Shem Creek in Mount Pleasant. We were early enough to get a spectacular table near a window facing a sweeping marsh. The food was good, fishing boats passed beneath us, and the setting sun turned the creek into a ribbon of fire.

It was the pleasantest evening I’d had in a long time and there were long, casual moments when the specter of Dante and his thugs seemed very far away. Outside, she said, “You know what I’d like to do? Take off my shoes and walk on a beach somewhere, without much risk of running into Archer.” I consulted my map and a few minutes later we were heading back through the city, over the Ashley River and out to the coast. It was a good drive across miles of marshlands dotted with small wooded islands, and I could imagine what it had been like before growth, the scourge of our time, had turned too much of it into a long, continuous suburb.

Folly Beach is a little town with a few flashing neon blocks, a shooting gallery, a game room, pavilion, and rides. The carnival atmosphere disappeared at once as I turned south into the night. I found a place to park and we kicked off our shoes and went barefoot in the moonlight along the edge of the surf. The wind was strong and a little cold for the season; Erin curled her hand into mine and drew herself close. I draped my coat around us like a cocoon, she snuggled against me, we stood wrapped together like that, and at some point I lifted her chin and kissed her. She pulled us tighter and I buried my face in her hair. My old heart was going a mile a minute.

“Now look what you’ve done,” she said. “We can never be friendly antagonists again.”

“I thought that was pretty friendly, actually.”

“Yes, but now what are we going to do about it?”

“That’s a tough one. The answers can range all the way from nothing…”

“…to everything.”

“The prospects boggle the mind.”

“But how to decide? Do we take a vote?”

“That would be pointless without some way of breaking a tie.”

“I’ve never been much for casual sex,” she volunteered airily.

“At the same time, I’m not getting any younger.”

“Are you having trouble with your, uh…”

“No, I’m fine as of today. But the male body was not made for endless periods of celibacy. Deep, unexpected flabbiness can occur.”

“Maybe I’d better talk faster.”

I had to laugh at that.

She said, “If we eliminate casual sex, where are we?”

“Sounds almost like we’d have to get serious.”

“If that turned out to be the case, what would you say?”

“What do you want me to say, I love you?”

“Not unless it’s true.”

“That’s my point. If I did say that…”

“Yes?”

“How would you know it’s not just some scuzzy male ploy to get my way with you?”

“I’ve got pretty good vibes.”

“Experience will give you that.”

“I beg your pardon! I don’t just fall down for every dude I meet.”

“Still, you must have some way of—”

“Forty days and forty nights.”

I took that under advisement, then said, “I’ll bet there’s a clue there somewhere.”

“Once we reach a certain point, we take forty days and forty nights to get to know each other. But back to the original question: If you did say ‘I love you,’ how would you know? Have you ever been in love?”

“Sure. Once.”

“What was she like?”

“A lot like you, actually. Not as crazy but very quick. Smart as a whip.”

“What happened?”

“My performance left something to be desired.”

“Well, since we’ve already established that you’re not physically challenged, I take it you were being your usual boorish and dictatorial self.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not something you can answer okay to, Janeway. Either you were or you weren’t.”

“I didn’t trust her.”

“That’s a biggie. Oh, that’s very big. You don’t ever want to let that happen again.”

“I’ll try,” I said, but I couldn’t help thinking how often history repeats itself.

She burrowed closer than I thought possible. I felt her fingernails through my shirt.

“You’ve got to give up your need to run things,” she said. “I don’t do well with that.”

“Maybe I could work on it.”

“Would you really?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“We’ll see. I’m about to tell you something that will test you severely. Are you ready?”

I wasn’t but she told me anyway. “I canceled my plane reservation this afternoon. I’m not going back to Denver, I’m staying with you. God help Mr. Dante if he bothers us.”

She unwound herself, spun away, and stood shivering in the wind. “So what do you say, Janeway? You lost once because of your attitude—are you going to blow it again?”

She squinted at her watch. “Hey, I think our forty days and forty nights just began.”

CHAPTER 29

I remembered half a dozen moments in my life, crossroads where everything would be different if I had gone the other way. I could tick them off in no particular order. When I became a cop. When I stopped being a cop. When I discovered Hemingway and Fowles and those three lovely books by Maugham, all in the same month. When I became a bookseller. When I found, won, and lost an unforgettable woman. Now this. Suddenly my world was shaken. Everything in it was different.

We met again at dawn. My telephone rang in the darkness and when I lifted it she said, “You sound awake, I hope.” I said, “I am awake.” She said, “Have you had any sleep?” Not much, I admitted: not enough to matter. She asked for the time; I looked at the clock and told her it was four twenty-seven. That’s what hers said too, as if clocks were suddenly untrustworthy. “Meet me on the Battery,” she said. I told her I’d pick her up, I had to come past her hotel anyway, but she wanted to be met at dawn at the top of the steps where the rivers join and the wall gets higher. “It’ll be so much more dramatic that way.”

The wind of last night had blown dark clouds over the city and the day promised rain. I walked over, arriving at first light after a fifteen-minute hike. She stood looking out to sea like the French lieutenant’s woman. She heard me coming: didn’t turn but wiggled her ringers in an endearing “hi, there” gesture. I climbed the steps to the high wall and wrapped my arms around her. She sank against me and I kissed her neck. “How are we doing?” I said.

“So far, so good. Thank you for not pitching a fit last night.”

I thought the jury was still out on that. Then she said, “Our lives are changing, old man,” and I heard the jury coming back early.

“It looks like there are two of us now,” she said. “That takes some getting used to.”

“Yes, it does.”

“I’ve been on my own forever.”

“Never a guy to answer to. Never somebody to lay down the law.”

“I’ve been way too career-minded. Maybe now I’ve got to be more…what’s the word?”

“The word is reasonable,” I said dryly. I spelled it for her, enunciating each letter clearly.

“You’re a regular walking dictionary. What can this mean?”

“You talk tough and you make a lot of noise. You set your mind on something and that’s it.” I gave her arm a squeeze. “You’ve got a few good points as well.”

“Do I tell you what to do?”

“Not in so many words.”

“How, then? I expect you to make your own decisions. But once you’ve done that, then I get to decide what I’m going to do.”

I could have said, That’s the same thing, but didn’t. I still had the feeling she was somewhere between loving me madly and walking the hell out of my life.

“This is why I actually believe in the forty days and forty nights,” she said.

“That seems like a long time in these wild, permissive days.”

“Does to me too. But it’s a good, honest test. Separates the wheat from the chaff.”

“Then it’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for chaff.”

“Never fear. I’m a little self-conscious saying it, but right now I feel…glorious.”

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s good.”

“It is good, and don’t look so troubled about it all.”

“You know why. It’s this business with Dante. Can we talk about that?”

“Of course. See how reasonable I am?”

“I want you to leave. And it’s got to be soon, before anyone knows you’re here.”

“Now see, that’s a dictator talking. How am I supposed to respond to that?”

“Let’s start again from a more tactful place. Will you please go back to Denver?”

“Certainly. Shall I book a flight for two or will Koko be coming with us?”

I stood at the railing and stared despondently out to sea. Somewhere in that gray void, Fort Sumter would be showing off her ruins for the new day. Right here, Charlie Warren had walked up to Richard Burton and asked what he was drawing in his notebook. Erin put an arm over my shoulder and tousled my heavy head. “Cheer up. Interesting days lie ahead.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“I’m giving up law,” she said a moment later. “I plan to stay current and take on a case if it speaks to me, but my days working for a big law firm are over. I gave notice on Monday.”

“What are you going to do, then? Aside from writing; I mean in real life.”

“I thought we’d settled that. I’m going to buy half an interest in your bookstore.” She tugged at my sleeve. “I’ve got a feeling there’s a world of books out there at a whole different level than where you’ve been playing.”

“Half a dozen levels, and they all take lots of money.”

“I’ve got some money. If we can get past this bump in the road, ‘ life could be fun again. Will you teach me the book business?”

“From the ground up. So to speak.”

Out on the harbor the sun had broken through and the fort appeared, a tiny black dot in a psychedelic mist.

“Koko’s going out to Fort Sumter today.”

“Have you told her about me?” “Yes, I have.”

“That’s a pretty dreary-sounding yes. I take it she wasn’t thrilled.”

“She’s a funny woman. Sometimes it takes her a while to figure out what she thinks.”

“Tell me about her.”

I told her and she said, “God, she hates me already.”

“How could she hate you? She doesn’t even know you.”

“She’s probably heard how unreasonable I am.”

I pushed at her arm and pulled her back again.

“I think you should go to the fort with her,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”

“What’s that going to accomplish?”

“Archer may call, and you can pave the way for me with Koko. Do you like her?”

“Yeah, I do. She can be difficult, like somebody else I know. But she’s got character.”

“I think she likes you too. If you know what I mean.”

“Erin, she’s twenty-five years older than me.”

“Just a hunch I have.” She smiled wisely. “Anyway, do what you can. The three of us are going to be together for a while and it’ll help if we can tolerate each other.”

CHAPTER 30

The threat of rain blew away and by noon the day was sunny. We caught the two-thirty boat, taking seats on the upper deck in a warm sea breeze. It was a thirty-minute ride, sweeping us past the city’s most elegant waterfront homes and on across the harbor to Fort Sumter. Koko had called her lawyer and her insurance company. The wheels were in motion on her house; there was nothing to do but push ahead. Our pilot droned into the PA system about the notable places we were passing in the city and pointed out sites of Civil War action to the west, but I didn’t hear much of it. I was thinking of the days to come, and where our trail might lead if everything here petered out.

Koko wanted to go north, to Florence. She was hoping some record might be found of the Wheeler family, where Burton and Charlie had spent those few days 127 years ago. Charleston had disappointed her. “I didn’t think it would be this hard,” she said. “These people put so much stock in their history, they keep records of everything, that’s why I knew we’d find at least some evidence of that photographer. Now that doesn’t look so good, does it?”

I told her to cheer up, we weren’t dead yet. But that choice of words cast a harbinger across my path and I saw the Reaper’s face in the white, billowing clouds. Whatever was coming between Dante and me was inevitable now, like a river pushing everything out of its path. If he didn’t find me, I’d find him.

Today the harbor held a deceptive sense of tranquillity. Hard to imagine it filled with gunboats and bursting shells on this quiet day 120-odd years later; harder yet to understand the national lunacy that had led us there. For a moment I wondered what those Rebels, strutting around like peacocks, would have done if they’d known what a disaster they were bringing upon themselves and their sons, but I knew. Destroying themselves was just in their nature.

The fortress rose out of the water and took on color and life, a pentagon of red bricks turning pale with age. The boat made a circle and eased in toward the dock. It had a full load of passengers with both decks crowded, and we sat in the sun until most of the people were off. Two rangers met us on the pier. Koko told them she was looking for Luke Robinson, and we were directed inside the fort, where we found a uniformed man giving the tour.

What remained of Fort Sumter was the outer wall, and under it the shadowy gun rooms with vintage cannons, dark passages that went into black places under the wall, and the brick ruins of the officers’ quarters. Running down the length of the old parade ground was a black battery, a fort within a fort that was obviously of a different era. The ranger was explaining it as we came in. It was called Battery Huger, built as part of the coastal defense system during the Spanish American War. Today it housed the museum, rest rooms, and a small living space for him and his wife. Nearby were the remains of a small-arms magazine that had exploded in 1863, killing eleven men and wounding forty, leaving the wall still blackened and leaning from the force of it.

We waited through the tour, about twenty minutes, then the crowd was sent off to explore on its own. Koko approached the ranger, a lanky man in his thirties with a grand mustache.

“Mr. Robinson?”

“Yes, ma’am, at your service.”

Koko introduced us. “I was told you might know about the time Richard Burton spent in Charleston.”

“Oh, wow, where’d you hear that?”

“In town, at the Library Society.”

“I didn’t know librarians talked about people’s private research projects.”

“I’m a librarian myself. I promised her it wouldn’t go any further without your consent. We’re looking for proof that Burton was here in May of 1860.“

“Good luck. You’re chasing a real will-o‘-the-wisp. We haven’t found a single thing you can take to the bank.”

“You seem to believe it anyway.”

“Whatever I believe, it’s just my own opinion—mine and Libby’s. She’s my wife.”

“Would you mind telling us why you believe it?”

He laughed lightly. “How much time you got? Never mind, I know when the boat leaves. It’s just not something I can answer in twenty minutes.”

“I’ll take what I can get.”

“Come on upstairs.”

We climbed a narrow staircase to the upper level of the battery. There, in the smallest imaginable living space—a bed, a bookcase, a microwave oven, a table, two chairs, a small dresser and a closet, all in one tiny room—we met his wife. She was dark-haired and pretty in a crisp uniform, with a ranger hat in her hand, as if she had been about to go out. Instinctively my eyes scanned their books and found all the Burton biographies on the top shelf.

“Libby, this is Ms. Bujak and Mr. Janeway. They’re interested in Burton.“

She brightened at once and we had to go through it all again: how we got their names, what we hoped to find. It turned out that Libby had been the instigator of their Burton research, and only later had her enthusiasm spread to her husband. She was like a pixie, warm and giving, immediately likable. She said, “Sit down, stay awhile,” and we all laughed. Outside, people were already moving back toward the dock. Our time was short.

They insisted that we take the chairs. Libby sat cross-legged on the floor and Luke leaned against the bookcase. “I’ve been interested in Burton all my life,” she said. “Even when I was a child I thought he was the world’s most romantic figure. It was only by accident that I heard he’d been here.”

“How’d you hear that?” Koko said.

“There’s a Burton club here.”

“You mean like a fan club for a dead man?”

“You could call it that. There are Burton clubs all over the world. That’s one of the first things I did when we got assigned here, I went to the Burton club and we got friendly with some of the people. You know how it is: there are always a few in any group who have offbeat ideas. Most of it’s folklore, theory, hot air. There was one old man in the Burton club named Rulon Whaley who was just like that. Very loud and opinionated, but there was so much energy in him that he made me listen. He’d been fascinated by the Burton myth for years. Rulon not only believed Burton had been here but that he spied on us for England. He was determined to prove it but he never did. He died this year.”

“Do you know where he got that idea?”

“Heard it from another old gent long ago, I think. Once he got something in his head, he was almost impossible to defeat.”

Most of the talk that followed was historical rehash, things we all knew. Koko and Libby talked, the ranger and I watched. I especially watched Libby. A certain tone had come into her voice. A look I had seen many times had come into her eyes. As a cop I called it the knows-more-than-she’s-telling look. Koko had missed it because she had spent her life answering questions and I had spent mine asking them.

I asked one now. “Did you ever learn who the other man was?”

Libby shook her head. “He died years ago, so it always seemed rather hopeless.”

“Maybe he left some papers, or some record.”

“No way of knowing now. If he did, I guess I dropped the football.”

Koko stood and said, “Well, thank you for talking to us.”

I glared at her and my look said, Keep still.

“This is awful,” Libby said. “There’s not even enough time to offer you a cup of coffee. I’d love to sit around with you and kick at it for a while.”

“Maybe we should do that,” I said.

“Like when?” Robinson said. “The boat’s going to leave them, Lib.”

“Maybe they could come back.”

“They’d have the same time problem. And none of us really knows anything.” He looked at me apologetically. “You’re certainly welcome to come back but I’m afraid it would just be a waste of your time.”

“You could come back anyway,” Libby said. “If you wanted to you could stay the night. We’d have plenty of time to talk then.”

“Is that allowed?”

“Oh, sure. You’d have to bring sleeping bags. We’re not exactly the Holiday Inn here.”

I had a hunch and so did Libby: I could feel it, like some energy field growing between us. “What do you think he was doing here?” she said.

“Well, we know he wanted to see the States.”

“Do you really believe he came only as a tourist?”

“No.”

She smiled quixotically and I felt Koko stiffen beside me. Koko had come here for information, not to talk too much, and I knew she wouldn’t like the way this was going. Stiffly, she said, “Of course that’s just conjecture. We don’t know any more than you do.”

But Libby was looking at me, not Koko. I said, “Maybe together we’ll all discover stuff we didn’t know we knew. Sometimes you’ve got to give a little to get a lot.”

“What stuff?” Libby said. “Do you actually know something?”

“He used to be a detective,” Koko said dismissively. “Thinks he still is.”

“Really?” Libby smiled at me as if she liked that idea.

“We think Burton came here with someone,” I said.

“Oh, don’t tell them that,” Koko said. “My God, there’s no proof of that at all.”

“Then it doesn’t hurt to tell them, does it? As an unproved theory.”

“Tell us what?” Libby said.

“We think he met a man in Washington and traveled with him. They came through here in May of 1860 and went to New Orleans together. They became close friends.”

Koko’s face was red with anger. She turned away and looked out over the fort.

Libby said, “Do you know what his friend looked like?”

Now there’s a strange question, I thought. I might have expected her to ask whether we knew his name, but who asks about the appearance of a man from a time when photography was so new that few had ever had their pictures taken?

“Do we know what he looked like, Koko?”

“Don’t ask me. How would I know?”

Again Libby made eye contact. I shrugged and Robinson said, “You’re going to miss your boat.” Mischievously, Libby said, “Then they wouldn’t have to worry about the time.”

“That’s her way of saying she wants you to come back,” Robinson said.

“When?”

“Can’t be tomorrow or the next day,” Libby said. “I’m going to school. I’m writing a paper and I’ve got to study for a wicked test. It all hits at once.”

“What about Tuesday?”

“Tuesday would work. Bring good sleeping gear. The ground here’s hard.”

They walked us down to the dock. At the pier we all shook hands. Again they apologized for the hectic schedule. At the very end Libby asked the question I had expected in the beginning. “Do you know the name of the man who came with Burton?”

Before I could answer, she answered it herself. “It wouldn’t be Charlie, would it?”

CHAPTER 31

On the boat, Koko said, “I wonder what she really knows.”

“She’s clever. She wants you to wonder that. She wants us to come back and she timed her bombshell so we wouldn’t have even a minute to get into it.”

“Right now I don’t need clever. I just wish people would say what they mean.” A moment later she said, “Anyway, you were right, I was wrong.”

“Coulda just as easy been the other way.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think so.”

We were sitting on the enclosed lower deck, out of a wind that had turned the harbor into a basin of choppy water. Koko sat near the glass, staring out at the whitecaps.

“I’ve been an old bear lately. Just want you to know I know that and I’m sorry.”

“You’ve had a lot to think about. I didn’t just lose my house.”

She changed the subject. “What a strange day this is. Goes from rainy to sunny and back to rainy again. God can’t get anything right.”

“He’s got a lot on his mind. It’s got to be tough being God sometimes.”

“What’s that from? I used to know it.”

“The Green Pastures. ‘Bein’ God ain’t no bed o‘ roses either.’”

She smiled but it was a sad smile.

“Hey,” I said, leaning over to look at her face. “What can I do?”

“Nothing. Go away. Jesus, I hate self-pity.”

“They’ll build you a new house, Koko.”

“What good is that if I can’t go back and live there?”

“I think you’ll be able to go back.”

“How?”

“We’ll work on it.”

She didn’t look convinced. “It’s not the house anyway, it’s what I lost inside the house.”

“I know it’s tough,” I said, and felt stupid saying it. She confirmed my stupidity with a frigid look. “You don’t know anything,” she said, carving me into a Mount Rushmore of dunces. “What do you know about my life?”

“Nothing. You’re right, I don’t know anything.”

“Take a guess. Wildest guess you can think of.”

“Jeez, Koko, I don’t know.”

“Old-maid librarian is what you’re thinking.”

“I never said that.”

“But if someone asked you, that’s what you’d think. Well, I had a husband once. We had two beautiful children. My son would be just about your age now. I was young and happy and not at all bad-looking. I had a very different life then. My husband was an engineer, I was working on a master’s degree in literature, and I played the violin well enough to try out for our symphony orchestra. We had everything then, the whole world ahead of us, and in one crazy minute a drunk driver took it all away.”

“Oh, Koko…”

“No, don’t say anything.” She turned her face to the glass and spoke to my reflection. “I’m not looking for pity. But don’t tell me you know what I lost, because you don’t know. The only pictures I had of my babies were in that house. I had film of their first steps and tape recordings of their voices. It’s like he killed them all over again.”

What can you say at a moment like that? I left her alone, but I thought of Dante and I felt a shimmering wave of real forty-karat hate. Another reason for us to meet again.

Late that afternoon I got in my rental and drove to a place I had looked up last night in the telephone book. It took me less than an hour to buy a good little gun and fire it on their range till it felt natural in my hand. I bought a snug holster for it, slipped it far back under my coat, and left hot but armed and dangerous, fully dressed for the first time in many days.

CHAPTER 32

That night I got them together for the first time. Koko tried to resist, pleading a headache, but I reserved a table at one of the classiest new restaurants in town and threatened to lay siege to her room until she came out. “Want to drive or walk?” I asked. “It’s an easy walk from here.”

“Let’s walk, then. Looks like that silly old guy, God, blew the clouds away again.”

On the way over, she said, “I’ve had the weirdest feeling. Like I’m being watched.”

I asked for specifics but she had none. “It’s just the jitters. When I went out to the store, there seemed to be a man walking along behind me, on the other side of the street.”

“Did you look at him?”

“At one point I did.”

“But you didn’t recognize him.”

“No, but I’m not sure I’d remember any of those guys anyhow. It was night and I never did get a good look at them.”

Erin was waiting in the lobby of her hotel. I had prepared her for Koko: that afternoon I had called and told her the story and she had immediately become cautious and considerate. “She sounds very fragile right now. I don’t know her but she may be on the verge of some kind of nervous breakdown. She’s been putting all her energy into this Burton hunt, and when that didn’t seem to pan out she began to unravel. Now even the hunt may be losing its appeal. Don’t ask me where my psych degree is, it’s just one of those hunches like you seem to have all the time. I think we’ll have to be careful with her, and the sooner we get this business finished with that madman in Baltimore, the better.”

I made the introductions. Erin smiled warmly and said, “Hey, Koko, heard a lot about you.” Koko said, “Hi there.” They shook hands and we were off.

The restaurant was on Exchange Street near East Bay. We walked side by side, the wide sidewalk of Broad Street accommodating all of us. They talked about the charm of Charleston and the weather, the small talk of ordinary people who live out their lives without ever being threatened by violence or murder. I watched the people passing on both sides of the street.

The restaurant was noisy and already crowded, but there was a quieter dining room off to one side. We were seated in a far corner out of the din. Koko excused herself and went to the rest room and the waiter delivered us a wine list.

“So,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I like her. And I revise my opinion. I think she’s solid.”

“She thinks she’s being followed.”

Erin dealt with that for a moment. “Maybe she is. Even if she’s not, she’s entitled to some frayed nerves.”

“Question is, do we want to talk openly about this stuff?”

“Absolutely yes would be my vote. We have some decisions to make, and she’s got a right to be part of that.” She smiled as Koko returned. “I have some news to report.”

Part of her news was about Archer, who had called with a counterproposal. “He may be willing to show me the journal. If he does, I’ll try to browse it for content. Maybe I can pin down some things you’re looking for.”

“There must be something about Charlie in it,” Koko said. “Even a mention would help.”

“I’d give a year’s pay to get Archer’s fanny in court and ask him a few tough questions.”

Erin had called Lee and told him everything. “He’s concerned about us, of course. He thinks we should all get on the first plane for

Denver and coordinate our strategy from there. That’s actually not a bad idea.“

“It’s not a great one, either,” Koko said. “It means giving up on Burton.”

“Only for now. It’s not so bad if you think of it that way. This story’s been there for more than a hundred years, it’s not going away.”

“You two could go to Denver,” I suggested. “I could stay and see what the woman at Fort Sumter has for us. Then I’d come along in a few days.”

Erin closed her eyes and made that praying motion with her hands. “What are we going to do with this man, Koko?”

“We could each carry around a two-by-four. When he tries too hard to protect us, we could just whack the hell out of him without warning.”

“You bash him on that thick forehead, I’ll get him from behind.”

“Would you two like me to leave so you can talk freely?”

“Look, sweetie. If we don’t do anything else tonight, let’s dispense with the John Wayne routine. It’s way out of date—John Wayne is dead—and it annoys me like crazy.”

“You aren’t going anywhere without us,” Koko said.

“Because if anything happens to you, I will take this Dante on alone if I have to,” Erin said. “Just think about that. I know he’s strong, but I am not without resources and I will get him.”

Koko shivered and laughed at the same time. “This is quite a girlfriend you’ve got here, Janeway.”

The waiter came and we ordered our dinners. Koko gravitated toward the vegetarian items but we were now officially living dangerously and she chose the blackened grouper. We talked over wine and made some decisions. We would stay three more days in Charleston, giving Erin another crack at Archer and us a shot at whatever the Robinsons might know. Erin would move out of the Mills House and take a room near us in the Heart of Charleston. On Wednesday we would see where we were and go from there.

We walked back in a warm summer night. But in two blocks the air became heavy, the humidity bore down, and in the distance lightning flashed over the sea. We left Erin where we had found her, in the lobby of her hotel, and she hugged us both.

“We’re gonna be fine,” she said.

“Of course we are,” Koko said. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

Erin vanished into the elevator and Koko and I walked up the street together.

“I like her,” she said. “I was determined not to, but she’s a good girl.”

“She likes you too.”

At the motel a message had arrived from Koko’s friend Janet in Baltimore. The fire department had officially classified her house as arson. Janet had talked to the reporter at the morning paper, who was still digging around. Yesterday he had put it in the paper that Koko had apparently gone to Charleston. “So they know we’re here,” I said.

We had to assume they had known for almost two days.

CHAPTER 33

In the morning the rain finally came, a steamy downpour that billowed across Meeting Street and left the world slick-looking and empty. I talked to Erin soon after daybreak and she was moved over to our motel by nine o’clock. She circumvented the afternoon check-in by paying for the extra day and was settled into a room near Koko’s with two hours to spare before her meeting with Archer. She had called Lee again and had received instructions to walk out if Archer was abusive or difficult. “Neither of us thinks anybody’s going to go near what Lee’s offering.”

At ten o’clock Erin and Koko sat playing cards at a table in Koko’s room while the rain drummed against the window. I was watching the TV in a stupefied state with the sound turned down. A preacher with larceny in his eyes and lust in his heart was on Channel Five, and on Channel Two I got some kind of political discourse, with the eyes of the senator just like the eyes of the preacher. I could tell from their faces the attitude and vacuous nature of what was being said, and none of it tempted me to turn up the volume. This country is doomed, I thought, not for the first time, and I closed my eyes and sank into boredom.

At ten-thirty I got up and moved to the door. “I’m going out for a little while.”

Erin was immediately suspicious. “Where to?”

“There’s a movie I want to see. Debbie Does the Old Duffers.”

“I heard that doesn’t have much of a plot. Where are you really going?”

“To the store for some male needs.”

They looked at each other and tried not to laugh.

“Hey, I don’t ask about your female needs.”

“Just don’t try anything foolish, like ditching us and going after people on your own.”

“I’ll bet he’s going to buy a gun,” Koko said. “He couldn’t bring the one we had on the airplane, so he’s going to buy another one.”

“Is that where you’re going?”

“Jesus, lighten up. You can’t get a gun on Sunday. I need some razor blades.”

“I only ask because as your lawyer I’m the one who’s got to worry if there are laws here against carrying concealed weapons. Just in case I need to defend you or bail you out.”

“It’s Sunday, Mama,” I said again. “You guys play cards and I’ll be back in a while.”

I walked up Meeting Street in the rain, looking at people on both sides of the street. The gun felt snug against my back.

John Wayne’s ass. These women had no clue.

Erin had left to meet Archer when I got back and Koko was gazing at the same stupid TV fare with the volume off. “So what caliber razor blades did you get?”

“Big enough to fit a size thirty-two razor.”

“Even on Sunday.”

“Rexall’s always open.”

She smiled foxily. “I saw that man again. Same one who followed me up the street.”

“Where?”

“Out on the street. I had to go to the store for some female needs.”

“You’re becoming a real wit, Koko. So tell me about him.”

“Nothing to tell. He was just going into a store up the street when I saw him.”

“I guess it’s possible he’s just some guy who lives around here.”

“What else is possible?”

“Maybe he’s the mayor of Charleston, scouting for people to welcome to his fair city.”

Her face was pensive. “I don’t know how Erin will feel about this. Me, I’m glad you got those razor blades.”

She roused herself from the bed. “I’m going to the library. I don’t expect to find anything, but I’ve got to do something or go mad in this room.”

“Library’s closed today. It’s Sunday.”

“We could go to a movie.”

“I’m for that. Point out this dude if you see him on the street again.”

I had already made up my mind that Erin’s date with Archer was the last thing she would do solo. I wasn’t leaving Koko alone anymore, either. I left a note under Erin’s door telling her to stay put and we drove out to a suburban mall theater. Three hours later we came out frustrated: the film had been like the weather, lousy. “At least it got us through the afternoon,” Koko said. “Just one more day of this. I’ll kill that woman at Fort Sumter if she plays around with us.”

Erin was there when we got to the motel.

“I hope your lunch was charming,” I said.

“Lunch was fine. I waited two hours and ate alone. Archer never showed up.”

In the morning we learned why.

CHAPTER 34

The story was on the front page of the second section in the News and Courier. The headline said author beaten, hospitalized. Hal Archer, a Pulitzer prize-winning historian now living on Sullivan’s Island, had been brutally attacked and was in fair condition at Roper Hospital. Police had no motive and the victim had refused to talk to the press.

“I’m going to see him,” Erin said.

“We’ll all go.”

“I don’t think that’s wise.”

“Maybe not but we’re going with you anyway. We’ll try not to get in your way.”

Roper Hospital was on Calhoun Street near the Ashley River. Erin inquired about Archer at the desk and was given his room number. His condition had been upgraded to good. Koko and I sat in the lobby, where we could watch the flow of people coming and going, and Erin went up in the elevator alone.

We had only been there a few minutes when Dean Treadwell appeared. “Here we go,” I said softly. I got up, motioned Koko to come with me, and we followed him across the lobby to the elevators. We stood waiting in a small crowd, and when an elevator arrived we all got in the same car. Up we went, picking up doctors and nurses until we were all packed tightly together. Dean stared at the floor. The door opened and he got out. We were a few steps behind him as he moved down the hall. I didn’t know till that moment what I would do, but suddenly the sound of Erin’s voice moved me to his side.

“Hey, Dean.”

He stopped and looked at me but I didn’t seem to register. “How’d you know me?”

“I’m a psychic. I looked at your face and you looked like a Dean.”

“That’s interesting,” he said, but the flat tone of voice said it really wasn’t. “‘Scuse me now, I’ve got to go see somebody.”

I put a hand on his arm. “Uh-uh.”

His eyes opened wider.

“He’s got company,” I said. “One visitor at a time.”

He coughed that raspy smoker’s cough I had first heard on the telephone. “Who the hell are you?” he said, coughing into his fist. “You don’t look like any doctor.”

“That’s misleading. I took my Ph.D. in mayhem and hell-raising.”

“So you’re a wise guy.” His eyes narrowed. “Haven’t I seen you before?” He looked at Koko, searching for help.

“This is Ma Barker,” I said. “Ma, this is Dean Treadwell.”

“Hi, Dean,” Koko said with a perfect edge of joyous malice. That was too good to have been intentional, but I winked at her.

Dean patted his shirt pocket for a smoke, then seemed to remember he was in a hospital. “You talk like crazy people,” he said.

“I am a little crazy, Dean. I really get crazy when things don’t go my way. Right now, for instance, I’d like you to go quietly downstairs with us. When my friend comes down, we can all walk quietly up the street till we find a nice, quiet coffee shop. Then we can sit down and have us a quiet talk. I like things quiet. You got any problem with any of that?”

“I don’t guess so,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell you want with me.”

“That’s what we’ll find out, Dean,” I said, and we all went downstairs and waited quietly.

Erin came down almost on our heels. “Who’s your friend?”

“This is Dean, he owns that bookstore in Baltimore. Dean, this is Lizzie Borden.”

“Lizzie Borden my ass. Who the hell do you think you’re fooling?”

“Nobody, but let’s leave it at that. And watch your language, there are ladies here.”

“I know who you are. I don’t know these two but I know you. I’ve been trying to remember your voice and it just came to me.”

“Come on, let’s walk up the street.”

He started to balk. I stepped on his foot and frosted him with a look. He said, “I don’t have to go anywhere with you,” but I pinched his arm hard enough to hurt and he went. We found a drugstore on Rutledge Avenue and I ordered coffees except for Koko, who had some awful-looking carrot juice concoction.

“It’s good your memory’s working, Dean,” I said. “I need to ask you some things.”

Again we had to go through a certain dance but I expected that. The conversation went like this.

“Tell me about Archer.”

“Archer who?”

“You know Archer who.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“He’s the schmuck you were going to see in the hospital, so knock off the stupid routine.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How are your kidneys, Dean?”

“What does that mean?”

“You look like a guy who needs to go to the bathroom. C’mon, I’ll go with you.”

“If you think I’m going in any back room with you, you’re nuts.”

“Then tell me about Archer, and remember I haven’t got all day.”

“Archer’s a customer.”

“I see. Do you always travel all around the country with your customers?”

“If they pay my freight I do.”

“So Archer’s paying you. What’s he paying you for?”

“You’re a bookseller, you know I can’t answer that. That violates all kinds of ethics.”

“Dean’s going ethical on us,” I said to the ladies.

“Would you answer that question?” Dean said.

“No, but I might kick your ass right here in this drugstore if you don’t.”

Erin cleared her throat loudly. I looked in her eyes and said, “Why don’t you ladies meet me back at the hotel. Take the car, I’ll walk.”

Koko said, “Did you ever get one of them two-by-fours, Lizzie?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dean said.

I said, “It means that unless you give us some information, you could be in real trouble. Liz can tell you about it.”

I threw it to her without warning and instantly she began shooting from the hip, part bluff, making it up as she went along. “You’ve been conspiring with a book thief, Dean. We’re not talking about nickels and dimes, this is a work of major historical importance, worth at least way up in five figures. You know what it is. This can bring you serious grief in Maryland, Colorado, or South Carolina. It’s known as grand theft pretty much everywhere, but it does have a bright side: they’ll come feed you three times a day and you won’t have to worry about making a living for a long time.”

“I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about.”

She made a “too bad” motion with her eyes. “Then I guess we’ve got nothing more to say to each other.”

He fished for his cigarettes but I pointed to a no smoking sign just above his head. “That stuff’ll kill you, Dean. Stinks up your books too. I had a guy bring in Hemingway’s signed limited one time and I couldn’t even buy it. He was a chain-smoker and you could smell his book clear across the room.”

“Yeah, yeah, spare me the fucking lecture. And you.” He nodded at Erin. “Why don’t you try saying what you’ve got to say in plain English?”

“Your friend Archer has a hot book. We have good reason to believe you’re mixed up in it. Is that plain enough for you?”

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“With what? I thought you didn’t know what we were talking about.”

“I had nothing to do with any theft that either did occur or might have occurred.”

“I’ve had enough of this bird,” I said. “Let’s stick a fork in him.”

“Just calm down,” Erin said. “Give the man a chance. If I can’t persuade him to be reasonable, we’ll see him in court.”

“What court?” Dean said.

“That’s a question of jurisdiction, isn’t it? Depends on where a theft occurred and where the hot goods are disposed. Doesn’t matter to me, I’ll go after you wherever I can.”

“Let’s get one thing straight. I never did anything illegal.”

“You don’t get anything straight just by saying it. You can tell it to a judge, but I doubt if your word will meet any rules of evidence. No offense, Dean, I know you mean well.”

They all sat quietly. I commented on the rain, the heat, the touristy things: the houses along Rainbow Row, the fact that we had missed Charleston’s fabled azaleas at the peak of their glory. Erin finished her coffee and Koko drank her carrot stuff.

“We’re leaving,” Erin said. “This was your chance and it’s slipping away.”

“I’m not worried,” Dean said. “Archer says the book is his.”

“Archer lies.”

“Well, I believe him. I was never told anything about any theft.”

“That could be a mitigating factor. If you cooperate.”

“Cooperate in what? You’re no goddamn prosecutor; who the hell are you?”

“This is who I am. I represent the injured party. My recommendation in any proceeding will carry some weight, maybe a lot. Are you going to help us or not?”

“Depends on what you want.”

She took out a notebook and a ballpoint pen. “Answer my questions. Then read what I’ve written and sign it; we’ll get a copy made and you get to keep that.”

He didn’t like it. He shook his head and sat coughing.

“Dean?”

“I’ll tell you right now, you won’t like what I’ve got to say. I’ve got nothing that puts Archer in any kind of bad light.”

“Just tell the truth. That’s all I want.”

“Yeah, right. You’re like everybody else. You can’t get along with him so you want to sandbag him.”

A moment later he said, “You’ve got to understand something. Archer’s special. He’s not like you and me. There’s no use talking if you don’t understand that.”

“I do understand it,” Erin said. “I’ve read his books.”

He looked at her for most of a minute. Then he began to talk.

Long before he had moved to South Carolina, Hal Archer had discovered Treadwell’s. As a teenager in the late forties, he had spent time at his parents’ summer home in Baltimore and had bought books from Dean’s father.

Carl and Dean were kids then, working in the store, stocking the shelves, moving stuff, whatever needed doing. One day Archer said something to Dean and that’s how it started. They were about the same age, and whenever he came in they’d pass the time of day. Sometimes Archer would sit on one of the chairs upstairs and tell young Dean Treadwell what a great writer he was going to be.

“Nobody believed in him then, nobody but me. And I had no doubt at all.”

Dean was Archer’s first cold audience. By then Archer had begun to drift away from his few boyhood friends, even the one who later became a judge: “I think he became afraid of Huxley’s judgment; they had been too close, they went back too far, and Huxley was always too kind. What Archer hated most was being patronized, damned by faint praise. Me, I had no reason to care whether his stuff was any good or not. I was the unwashed reader he craved, and right from the start I knew he was a good one.”

Archer began coming to the store with pages of manuscript. He didn’t want any so-called constructive criticism; what he was dying for was hero worship, adulation: he wanted to be someone’s idol, and Dean was simply in awe of his talent.

“I gave him something he needed and he gave me something I loved. He never doubted my sincerity; he had no reason to because it was real. You couldn’t fool him, I knew he would sense any lie right away, but I never had to lie. He had an ability to create a world, he was like God, I never got tired of hearing him read. I loved seeing him come into the store. I loved every line he wrote. Still do.

“We had to hide from my old man. He was a mean son of a bitch about slackers; if he caught me dreaming or slacking off, he’d whip my ass good. So we went way upstairs, Archer and me, where the old man couldn’t go. He had asthma, he couldn’t climb those stairs, and sometimes on Saturdays when the store got busy the old bastard just forgot I was alive.

“I could kill the whole afternoon, dreaming with Archer.”

As time went on, Archer found it difficult and finally intolerable to be with Lee. It wasn’t that Lee ever did anything to make him feel that way. “It’s just that the judge had done everything right in his life and it seemed like Hal had fucked up his own six ways from Sunday.”

He raised an eyebrow at Erin and she smiled, waving off the language.

“Hal needed me. I think he still does. He never got a break from anybody.”

“And by the time he did get a real break…”

“He was full of anger. He even wanted to tell the Pulitzer committee to keep their fuckin‘ prize, shove it up their pretentious asses.” He coughed. “I talked him out of that.”

“Best thing you ever did for him.”

“The best thing I ever did was just believe in him. He sure hasn’t had a happy life. He thinks everybody who came along after the prize was a fair-weather friend.”

“He had Lee. He always had Lee. Lee always wanted the best for him, even if Archer didn’t know or believe it. Now look what’s happening to them.”

“I think there’s some old bitterness there. The judge never took a wrong step. While Archer was scratching to keep body and soul together, Huxley’s legal career was upwardly mobile all the way, always on the fast track.”

“That wasn’t Lee’s fault.”

“Did I say it was? But it does get old if you’re on the opposite end of the stick.”

Erin paused, then said, “Tell me about the book.”

“Nothin‘ to tell. Hal says it’s his and I believe him.”

“Did he ever tell you where he got it?”

“No, and I wouldn’t ask. Tell you this much: I don’t think he stole it.”

“Deny it if you want to, but don’t take that too far, it might come back and bite you.”

“I don’t know anything about it and I don’t want to hear it. Put that down on your paper: Dean Treadwell’s heard every story ever floated about what a bastard Hal Archer is—I don’t need yours too. Look, can we get out of this goddamn place? If I don’t get me a smoke I’m gonna start punching something.”

Out on the street, Dean lit up and we watched him smoke his weed in three mighty drags. “That’s all I got for you, lady,” he said. “If you don’t like it, go ahead and sue me.”

“Thank you. I think I’m done for now.”

“I’ve got a couple of questions,” I said. “Tell me about your brother.”

“Carl’s a flaming asshole but that’s got nothing to do with me. We each inherited fifty percent of the store, but in real life we don’t have much to do with each other.”

“He’s got some bad friends. One of them burned this lady’s house down. You know anything about that?”

“Hell no, but it doesn’t surprise me. That’s why I stay away from him. Ten years ago he started gambling and going around with those hoods. He won big one year but he squandered that trying to impress a pack of thugs. Now he’s got no money left and that gun-sel is calling the shots. Frankly, I don’t give a damn what they do to him, the little bastard deserves everything he gets. I’d get out of the store and let him have it, if I just knew what else to do.”

He lit a new smoke from the old and threw the butt into the gutter. “I’ve been in the book business since I was twelve years old. I’m fifty-five now and I’m tired of bullshit. This used to be a great way to make a living. Now it’s like everything else, polluted with bullshit and fast-buck artists. You’re a bookman, Janeway, but you’re fairly young yet. What’ll you do when the life goes sour?”

He took another massive drag and two contrails of smoke poured out of his nose, obliterating his face. “Your silence says it all, pal. For a bookman there isn’t anything else.”

At the car, Erin said, “That wasn’t exactly what we expected, was it?”

“I don’t know. What did you expect?”

“Almost anything but for Archer to turn into some deity.”

“What about Archer? You didn’t have time for much of an audience with him.”

“They broke his jaw. His face was all wired up and he couldn’t talk. Looks like they broke some of his fingers and his collarbone. He’s in a lot of pain. He got pretty agitated when he saw me, and the nurse asked me to leave.”

“I wonder what the motive was.”

“With Archer, who needs a motive?”

“Yeah, but he’s been a jerk for a long time, why beat him up now? I’m wondering if they just found out about his book. And if they did, whether they took it from him.”

“I don’t know. That was on my list of things to ask.”

We sat at the curb for a while and I watched the traffic fore and aft. A cooling breeze blew through the open car and there was no real incentive to move, no rush to get anywhere. It was just noon and I was trying to figure out what we’d do and how. For some reason Dean’s words kept playing in my head, interrupting my thought pattern. I began playing the What-If Game, something I had done many times as a cop. The game had only one rule: you throw stuff at a mental wall and nothing is sacred; no crazy notion is too crazy to consider.

“Looks like another great day of solitaire coming up,” Koko said. “Whoop-de-do.”

I heard her words but I was only listening with half a brain. She and Erin began talking about tomorrow and Fort Sumter. “We’ve still got sleeping bags to buy,” Koko said. “We’ll need three now.” Absently I nodded yes, we would need three, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dean Treadwell and his strange lifelong friendship with the man everybody loved to hate.

Only later did I begin pondering our escape from Charleston. That afternoon we drove in an apparently aimless circle around greater Charleston till I spotted what I wanted—a sporting goods store in the north area, with parking lots on both sides of the building. I didn’t stop but I noted the landmarks as I drove past. I made a slow loop and headed back downtown.

CHAPTER 35

How do you give people the slip when you don’t know where they are, when you’re not even sure they’re really there and you have no idea how many they might be or what they look like? Sitting in Erin’s room that night, we considered and rejected everything three times over. Go to the police? “With what?” I asked. “Some cock-and-bull story about a Baltimore gangster who we think might have followed us here?” Tell the cops about Archer? “Tell them what?” I said. “That these thugs who beat Archer half to death, we think, are coming after us next?” This might not be half-bad if Archer would corroborate our story; maybe then we could get some police protection long enough to blend into the Southern landscape and give them the slip. Maybe we could get on that boat for Fort Sumter without being seen, return the next day and get out of town. Once we were on the road, we could disappear upstate.

We settled on this: Tomorrow afternoon we would drive to that sporting goods store, leave the rental in the east parking lot, go in and buy three sleeping bags, then exit the opposite door, where a cab would be waiting to take us to the marina. There we would buy our tickets and after that it was a crapshoot. We’d have to wait in the open line, where anybody could see us, until we were inside the boat and under way. As a plan this did not rank with the wooden horse that defeated the Trojans, but it was what we had, what we would do.

We had Pizza Hut send in supper for two. I paid at the door and scanned the lot and what I could see of the street. Nothing. Erin and I ate the pizza while Koko feasted on nuts and seeds and scoops of yummy-looking gray stuff from a plastic bag. We watched the depressing TV fare and later the ladies played more cards. They both left at nine, and for a long time I stood at the window of my room watching the courtyard and saw nothing suspicious.

None of us slept well. When I saw them in the morning they looked haggard and weary.

Another long morning waiting. Gradually we took our suitcases out to the car, watching everything around us. At noon I called a cab company and left an order for a taxi in the south parking lot of the sporting goods place for exactly one-fifteen. I gave them a credit card number and told the dispatcher that the cabbie must be on time and I would pay him double, including time spent waiting, with an extra fifty bucks when we were delivered to the marina at two o’clock.

We didn’t bother to check out: the motel had my credit card number and I’d call them later and have them bill me. We were out of the room and in the car in ten seconds flat. I eased into Meeting Street and turned right toward North Charleston.

It all went like clockwork. I kept an eye peeled, watching my mirrors constantly, and nowhere behind me did I see anything that even hinted of a watcher, a tailgater, or a spook. If Dante or any of his elves were back there, they were mighty good at this.

At the store I watched the crowd while Erin bought the three bags; at the last minute I bought a flashlight and some batteries, and we hustled out the opposite door. The cab was there with its meter running. Koko and Erin got in the back and I rode up front. We drove into town the way we had come up, and the cabbie deposited us at the fort sumter tours sign with time to spare. “Just wait with us,” I told him, and we all sat there for fifteen minutes. I paid him, gave him the half-C, and told him he was a gentleman and a scholar. We scrambled up the dock with only a few minutes to spare.

The boat eased away and the pilot began telling us about the sights we were seeing. Erin came close and took my hand. “Looks like we beat him,” she said. But as I watched the receding buildings, one man in the crowd caught my eye. I saw him for just a second before he disappeared beyond the ticket shack. From that distance I couldn’t quite make him out. But he did remind me of someone, and I wasn’t so sure we beat him after all.

This time Libby was waiting on the dock to greet us. A brilliant smile lit up her face, as if she’d been waiting there for three days doubting our return. Now we had come as budding friends. The ice had been broken and it didn’t seem to matter that we had known each other less than half an hour; we had a common cause. Libby made light of Erin’s unexpected arrival. They were roughly the same age and they chatted easily as we walked up the long pier and turned into the fort. “Luke’s giving the tour again,” she said. “We usually alternate. I do it every other day when time permits, but he’s catching double-duty now that my studies are piling up. Let’s stash your bags and I’ll show you around.”

She gave us a private mini-tour in a low voice as we walked into the shadows under the wall. “This is the sally port. For you laymen, that means the passage in and out. The name comes from the military term sally, to attack and repel invaders. The old sally port was over there.” She pointed to a low place in the wall to our right. “That’s the gorge wall. This is the left flank we just came through. Straight across the fort, on the other side of the battery, is the right flank. The other two walls are the right face and the left face. I will quiz you later, so take notes. You don’t get any supper unless you get a passing grade.”

“In case the enemy attacks us tonight,” Erin said.

“Exactly,” she said, deadpan. “It wouldn’t do if I yelled, ‘Reinforcements to the left flank!’ and all of you fell into the harbor looking for it.”

Erin laughed. “I can see we’re going to get along fine.”

“Speaking of supper,” Libby said. “I hope you’re not finicky eaters. The menu here is not our strong point.”

We stared at each other, somewhat shamefaced. None of us had given food a thought.

“Don’t worry about it. All I’m hoping is that you’re not too put off by TV dinners.”

“We can eat anything,” I said. “Right, Koko?”

“Absolutely,” said Koko. “I’m ready to tear into a raw shark.”

“Can’t help you there,” Libby said. “Maybe I can scare up some canned squid.”

She made a shhh motion as we went past Luke, who stood above a crowd giving the same speech we had heard on Saturday. She moved us down under the left flank wall and continued her lecture in a low monotone.

“Imagine this whole structure two and three levels high. Above us was another tier of casemates—gun rooms—and the enlisted men’s barracks were three stories high on both flanks, with guns on top of each wall.”

We skirted the left face. “This was a formidable fort then,” she said. “That’s all gone, pounded to smithereens in the Union siege. After they shelled that little band of Yankees out, the Confederates held this rock for almost four years, living in rubble much of that time. For two years they were battered by gunboats and by big guns from Morris Island, which we’ll see in a minute. Historians say seven million pounds of iron were fired in here. The Yanks thought they could take anything if they shelled the bejesus out of it long enough. But this old baby was tough, and the more they reduced it, the tougher it became. In the end there was nothing here but piles of bricks and whatever was buried under them—these walls you see and those ruins over there, the remains of a proud old fort. By then the Confederates had replaced their artillery forces with infantry, and the Union still couldn’t take it.”

She gestured at the guns as we walked past. “Some of these cannons were used against the fort by Union forces on Morris Island— moved over here years later.”

We went up to her little apartment in the battery. “Just throw your stuff down anywhere,” she said, and we went out again. She led us along the right flank and we stood facing the sea. “So anyway,” she said, “this is what I call home.”

Koko asked how long they had been here.

“A year. They’ll rotate us; they say it keeps us from going stir crazy, but I’m going to miss this terribly when I leave. I think about it even now, how quickly we move past things, sometimes without ever seeing them. There’s so much here that’s of the past, and soon it will all be part of my own past. Maybe Luke and I will come back years from now as tourists and I’ll think of these days. But I’ll never again be part of it, so I make the most of every day I do have.”

She pointed to a long, sandy beach across the channel, facing the sea to our right. “That’s Morris Island. Fort Wagner sat near the end, just where it hooks in toward the city. Union forces tried their best to take it in the summer of 1863. Get Wagner, get Sumter—that’s how they figured it; get Sumter, get Charleston. Get Charleston and they could close down the whole Southern seaboard. But they never did any of that, not till the Confederates pulled out and left it to them in 1865.”

We stood on the point, the right gorge angle she called it, and looked where she looked. “That narrow beach on Morris Island is where the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Infantry was butchered trying to dislodge the Confederates. Not to take anything away from those black warriors, you’ve got to admire the Southern fighting man. You don’t have to like his cause to know he and his pals were a tough, valiant bunch.”

We stood there for a while. The day was almost perfect, the sun warm, the harbor full of sailboats. Closer in, smaller, power-driven craft skimmed across the water. Libby walked to the right gorge and shaded her eyes, peering out toward the long, flat island. “Lots of ghosts out there,” she said. “Over here too. I just felt a breath tickling my cheek.”

“My gosh, I felt it too,” Koko said. “That wasn’t the breeze I felt.”

Libby put a hand on her arm. “Don’t worry, they won’t bother you. They are ghosts of a time when women were put on pedestals and cherished. You must be sensitive to spirits.”

“I’ve always thought so.”

“That doesn’t happen to everybody but I feel it all the time. I’ll be out here on the wall and suddenly I’ll get a feeling someone’s here with me…as if he’s just touched me or tried to whisper some mysterious thing in my ear. What about you two? You feel anything just then?”

Erin shook her head and Libby gave me a penetrating look. “I never feel anything,” I said. “I never think, I barely believe in people, and I let ghosts alone.”

“Shame on you. If there are spirits anywhere, how could they not be here? I feel a constant connection with the men who died here…Here comes Luke, you’re saved by the bell. I was about to break into lecturitis profundis of a kind that’s not covered on the tour.”

He came toward us from the left face, walking briskly along the edge of the wall. All his reticence from Saturday seemed gone and he greeted us warmly. “Good to see you,” he said, shaking hands. “Libby’s been awaiting your arrival nervously, to say the least.”

“Oh, stop. That’s not nerves, I’m just overworked. Too much to do, too little time.”

I introduced Erin and Luke shook her hand. “Glad you’re here. The more the merrier.”

“I’ve got to go down for a while,” Libby said. “Got a little housekeeping to do and a few last fs to cross before I turn in my paper tomorrow. Luke will show you around, give you the lay of the land. Pay attention, people, it gets dark here when the sun goes down.”

“It gets very dark, even on a clear night,” Luke said. “I’ve got a hunch tonight’ll be cloudy again. In any case, watch where you step. We don’t want any broken legs.”

He walked us around the ruin as the afternoon waned. We went through dark catacombs under the walls, and he told us what each of them had been. When we climbed back to the top, the tour boat was well out in the harbor.

“There she goes,” he said. “You’re officially stuck here till tomorrow.”

Luke suggested a look through the museum while he did a few chores. “That’s probably where you’ll throw down your bags tonight. Last summer we had a fellow who was writing a book and that’s where he slept, on the ramp in front of the original battle flag.”

We spent the next two hours playing tourist, looking at old uniforms and muskets, minie bullets and bayonets, reading exhibit plaques. When we emerged the sky was dark gray in the east, with a thin streak of purple just above the western horizon. The setting sun broke over James Island, casting the harbor in a kind of eerie velvet light. Most of the boats had gone in now, and far away the church spires of the city were barely visible. I figured we still had some twilight time, and while I could see I walked off and made my own tour of the walls and the ruins around them. I walked along the gorge wall and stood where the original sally port had been. The wall dropped to a height of a dozen feet; below was a tiny beachhead, and straight ahead water flowed through the channel to the sea as the tide went out. A lone boat was still out on the water, cutting across the harbor in a slow arc maybe half a mile away: a skiff under power, with a canopy covering and three or four shadowy people on board. The sun cast its last orange rays across the water and I saw a glint from something—maybe a smoke being lit, maybe a light being tested or a tool being used on some sudden trouble. Maybe binoculars. I didn’t know what it was, but I stood still and just watched it.

After a while Koko came up beside me and we tried to find the city, all but invisible in the deepening dusk. “So,” she said. “What are we going to do and how are we going to do it?”

I watched the boat turn in toward the city and I made a few gruntlike thinking noises. At last I said, “My hunch is we’ll have to level with them. Mrs. R. may have some information but she’s like you, she’s cautious about who gets it.”

“I can’t speak for her, but for once I shall try to behave myself.”

“That would be good. I don’t want you clobbering me before we get on an even keel with her. We’ve got a few things on our side if we play it right.”

“Give me a for instance and maybe I’ll feel better.”

“She knows that we know about Charlie but she may not know much more than his name,” I said. “She was fishing pretty hard. She wants what we’ve got.”

“Whatever that is. But you’re still just guessing, and if she doesn’t know anything more than that, what good will she do us?”

“It may help a lot if she’ll tell us where she got that name. Maybe what she knows makes sense only when you put it with what we know. I think she’s got a hunch, just like me. That’s why she saved the Charlie card till the very end on Saturday, and that’s why she was standing on the pier waiting for us. She acts self-confident but I think she’d have been heartbroken if we hadn’t been there.”

“You’re reading way more into her than I would. I still don’t know how much we need to tell her.”

“You get what you give, Koko. I think we should level with her— tell her who Charlie was and where he came from, how Josephine turned up in your life and later in mine. If she asks us a question, answer it. Don’t dangle carrots in front of her, let’s just tell her what we know and try to establish some camaraderie.”

“That’s giving away a lot on a wing and a prayer.”

“But she can’t do anything with it without us, and without her we’re back on first base. She strikes me as a straight shooter.”

“All right, I’ll shut up and follow your lead. Your track record with her so far has been a lot better than mine.”

The boat in the harbor had come to a dead stop, drifting now with no obvious destination. “What’re you looking at so hard?” Koko said, and I told her I was just wondering if those people were in any kind of trouble. Impulsively I put an arm over her shoulder and hugged her hard, as if I could squeeze all the pain out of her unhappy life. I felt her tremble and she looked away, shunning any kind of sentiment as always. I said, “How ya doin‘ these days, Koke?” and I squeezed her hand. She said, “I’m fine, you fool, why wouldn’t I be?” I hugged her again and she laughed up at me. “I’m fine, dammit, go away, leave me alone.” I followed her around the point, pestering. “Talk to me,” I said, and she gave in with a sigh. “What do you want me to say, how glad I am to know you? I’m glad I know both of you, okay? Does that make you happy? No matter how it all turns out, I’m not sorry it happened. Is that good enough?” I hugged her again and said, “Yeah, Koko, that’s good enough for today.”

She walked away and I lingered for a moment, watching the boat in the harbor. There was no real need to worry about those guys, whoever they were, but I worried anyway, in a distant, passive kind of way.

Now in the last moments of daylight Luke and Libby came out to take down the flags. We all gathered on the right flank, where the string of flags represented Union and Confederate forces of the 1860s and the state of South Carolina, with the big modern U.S. flag in the center. Luke lowered the American flag and Libby snapped to attention with a crisp salute. Erin, Koko, and I watched from one side. Carefully they folded the flags, Libby draped them over her arms, and we started back toward their tiny apartment as the last of the sun vanished in the west.

“Time to eat,” Libby said gaily. “Who wants the great white shark fin?”

Their room looked smaller than ever with all of us crowded inside. In fact, it wasn’t much bigger than the utility room of a modern house, and we scattered our sleeping bags, still rolled and tied, and made good use of the floor. We lounged wherever there was a vacant spot while Libby cut greens and made a salad. Erin said, “I won’t even offer to help, I’d just get in your way,” and Libby smiled her appreciation. The time for niceties was at hand. Erin said how awful she felt that we hadn’t brought anything but Libby dismissed that with a wave. “Totally understandable. You didn’t think you were coming to dinner, you came to visit a national monument. Who brings food to something like that?” Luke said, “We’ll come to Denver sometime and you can treat us like royalty,” and Erin said, “I’ll stop feeling bad if you’ll make me a solemn promise to do that.” We were in the first stages of feeling one another out, strangers trying to find a comfortable meeting ground.

“Take off your jacket and get comfortable,” Luke said. “It gets warm in here.”

But I kept the jacket, preferring the heat to the necessity of trying to explain the gun I wore under it. We broke some ice, literally and conversationally. Nothing was said in these early moments about Burton or the quest that had brought us there. Once Libby caught my eye and held it for a moment, as if she knew that whatever was coming would be largely between her and me. I sensed it on her mind, but the moment passed in a lighthearted comment from Luke, leaving the Burton topic to find itself as the night deepened. First came the matter of getting acquainted. We four laughed as if we were old college classmates, and Koko watched us like a dorm mom, quietly amused from a chair by the door.

Luke was from Minnesota; Libby had been an army brat who happened to finish high school in St. Paul. They had defied her father’s attempt to rule her life, had married six years ago and joined the National Park Service as a pair. In their Charleston assignment they had found themselves liberals in a land of hot-blooded segregationists, John Birchers, crackers, and rednecks. “That’s how Libby sees ‘em,” Luke said.

“Not true,” she said. “I’m the first to tell you there are lovely people here.”

“As long as nobody talks race, religion, politics, or anything real. People here think Libby’s a communist. She meets the conservatives coming around the other side. They only avoid bloodletting because, one hundred thirty years after the Civil War, they still think of themselves as knights with pretty young women.“

“This man is a sexist pig,” she said behind her hand. “That remark does nothing but reduce me to some sexual airhead.”

“I’m only talking about what they think, sweetheart. These old birds like nothing better than reforming a young liberal woman. The better-looking she is, the more they enjoy straightening her out.”

“How do I stand him?” she said to the wall.

We commiserated with serious looks, there was more light banter, and in a while the food was ready. We ate with the door pushed open, watching the interior of the fort go from gray to black to really black. Still nothing had been said about Burton, but the night was young, our cautious probing seemed reasonable and our reticence proper. Libby smiled at me fleetingly, again her eyes said it would come when it came, and I hoped my own attitude conveyed no need for hurry. I strived for nonchalance: we were in Charleston, after all, where civilized society always came before business.

It was Luke who brought up the topic almost an hour later. “Lib’s an honor student,” he said. “She’s writing a paper on Fort Wagner. She wanted to do Burton, except—”

“Except there’s no Burton to be done,” Libby said. “I wouldn’t want to turn in a paper full of hot air, would I? I could kiss my honors good-bye then.”

“Maybe it isn’t just hot air,” I said.

“Yeah, but maybe won’t cut it. Look, I know Burton was here. I’ve got no tangible proof of that, but I know it in my heart. Even if he was here, I don’t know if he did anything but drink, chase women, and watch boats on the harbor. It’s all speculation, and academics tend to depreciate that. For me to make any use of it I’ve got to know where he was and when, most of all why. They’ll want to see footnotes and references, some proof that I haven’t been stealing my stuff from all their favorite old historians. If I could pin Burton down with new data, they’d sit up and take notice, but it looks like I’ll have to rehash those gallant black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth. I won’t get extra credit for a single original thought, but I do have a few new diaries, a few sources that haven’t been quoted to death. And that’s a story that never loses its appeal.”

She looked at me suddenly and said, “So what’ve you got for me that I can use in this academic quagmire?”

“We know who Charlie was.”

“That’s a good start,” she said brightly.

“Proving he was here with Burton is the tough part.”

“This will amaze you but I’m in exactly the opposite place. I don’t know who he was, but I know he was here, and Burton was here with him.”

“Still, there’s no proof.”

“Nothing that would change history. But I didn’t just pull the name Charlie out of thin air, either.” She stared me into the woodwork, all kidding aside. “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

“That seems fair enough.”

Behind me I heard Koko cough. I said, “First maybe we should try to figure out what the whole story might be and who gets to write it.”

“That’s a novel approach.” Libby glanced at Koko. “You’re writing a book, I take it.”

“I’ve compiled some data,” Koko said. “Any book that comes out of it would be based on the memoir of an old woman who died recently. It’s actually her book.”

“Do I get to know who this woman was?”

“Charlie’s granddaughter.”

“Oh, wow.” A smile lit up her face. “Sounds like you’ve actually done a lot of work on it. The last thing you’ll want is to get scooped by a college student. And to be asked to contribute to the scooping, what an indignity that would be.”

“At the same time,” I said, “you’ll need it—”

“—nailed down tight. So where does that leave us?”

“Maybe we could give you enough for your paper,” Koko said. “And still leave me what I need for Josephine’s book.”

“Thank you but I doubt it. My paper is of the moment and it sounds like your book will be on the fire for some time to come. If I write a word of this, people will be all over it. And they’ll demand to know where to look for corroboration before they give me any credit at all.”

“Wouldn’t do ‘em much good. They’re not gonna find this in any archive.”

“Meaning what?”

“I’ve got possession of the tapes and transcripts. And there are no other copies.”

“But if you can’t make your sources public, what good is it?”

“It’ll all come out in due time.”

“Way too late for me, it sounds like. How do you know this is real?”

“Good Lord, hon, that’s what we’re chasing all over creation trying to do.”

“How close are you to verifying it?”

“Pretty close,” I said. “Close and yet so far.”

“Well, at some point we’ll have to trust each other,” Libby said. “We are honorable people, you know. If we give you our word, we’ll live up to it.”

“At least that’s what my uncle Dick Nixon always said,” said Luke.

“But I’ll have to know it all,” Libby said. “Everything you’ve got.”

This was met by silence as we considered what she was saying.

“I can’t write anything unless I know everything,” she said.

We ate quietly for a few minutes. I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head.

“Surely you understand that,” she said.

“Of course,” Erin said unexpectedly. “For your paper to be valid, it’s got to be based on source material that’s open to public examination. Or at least available long enough for somebody with impeccable credentials to verify that it’s real.”

“I don’t know any other way. They’d certainly demand to see what it comes from.”

“There might be another source—a more conclusive one—at some point.”

Libby just looked and waited. Cautiously, Erin said, “There’s a journal.”

“As in a journal kept by Richard Burton? In the master’s own hand, do I dare hope?”

Erin said yes with her eyes.

Libby took a deep breath. “What might the master have said in such a thing?”

“We hope it would confirm what Koko has on tape. We don’t have possession yet.”

“Sounds like you intend to get it, though.”

Erin shrugged. “Even if we do, it belongs to another party. It would be up to him what and if anything gets released. It’s totally his call.”

“This gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

“He’s a decent guy, I can vouch for that. My guess is…”

“Yes?”

She shook her head. “That’s crazy. I can’t go there, not till I speak with him. I’ve already said more than I should.”

“Well then,” Libby said. “How about some ice cream?”

We ate our ice cream and thought some more. Finally Erin said, “Look, if anything’s going to get done here tonight, you’ll have to trust each other at least this far. Agree that nothing coming from the other party, either directly or as follow-up, gets used without that party’s permission. And go from there.”

“You talk like a lawyer.”

“Oh, please, don’t hold that against me.”

“What do we do, sign our names in blood?”

“I’d suggest shaking hands and taking each other at our word.”

“That’s not very lawyerly advice.” Libby paused, then said, “I’m okay with it.”

“Koko?”

“Sure,” she said in an unsure voice.

I said, “As a demonstration of good faith, we’ll go first,” and I launched into the tale before anyone could have second thoughts. I told them how Josephine had come into my bookstore, how I had met Erin at the home of a Denver judge, and how Koko had been involved in Baltimore long before any of us. I told her how the old lady had died and of the deathbed promise I had given her. I left out the death of Denise, the Baltimore mob connection, and the facts of Archer’s beating.

“Oh wow,” Libby said again. “You’ve done a lot more on it than I have.”

I shrugged, and the moment stretched.

Suddenly she said what I hoped she’d say. “I’ll give you my part, for whatever it’s worth. Use it if you can. If you can find a way to share it, that would be lovely.”

She poured coffee. “I told you how I heard about the Burton club when I first came here, and about Rulon Whaley, the old man I met who thought Burton was a spy. Rulon was a true Charleston eccentric, but he had a forceful way of making me believe him. He told me about a photographer on East Bay Street who had taken a picture of two men in May 1860.”

“Burton and Charlie,” Koko said excitedly. “How’d he know it was them?”

“Long ago—forty years at least—he bought a bunch of papers at an estate liquidation. Ledgers, records, mostly junk. There was also some personal correspondence, but no one had ever attached any importance to it. Just old letters between obscure, forgotten people, that’s what anyone would think, looking at it. Rulon was then in his late twenties, just starting his law practice, but he had already read everything on Burton, and there was one letter that haunted him all his life. It had been written at the beginning of the Civil War by a young man to a former classmate. Apparently they had been best pals in school, and the fellow who wrote the letter was trying desperately to be a photographer.

“He was having a hard time of it. He was poor and the equipment was expensive. He was young, no one took him seriously, and photography itself was suspicious to a lot of people then. He had borrowed money from his friend to buy a camera and he was trying his best to get established, making portraits when he could get people to sit for him, shooting street scenes, whatever he could do to improve himself.

“One day the two men appeared. One was dapper-looking, the other…well, you could tell he had been around in the world. They had their picture made on East Bay Street. He remembered it because the worldly one had terrible scars on his cheeks. I’ve done a little photography, enough to know that’s the kind of thing you look for, something that sets off a face and makes it unforgettable. I don’t remember the exact date but I’ve got it written down, even to the time of day when the picture was made.”

“It was noon,” I said. “The sun was too bright and the photographer fussed over it. And Burton got impatient and almost walked away.”

“Yes! How did you know that?”

“It’s on my tapes,” Koko said. “Jo’s family had a copy of that picture but it got lost. We tried but we couldn’t find any evidence of a photographer on that stretch of street.”

“That’s because he never had a real place of business. He was living with his sister and her husband, people named Kelleher, and even that was just for a short time. I think he was only there for a month. I doubt if he ever had more than a hand-printed sign stuck in the window. By June, Kelleher had thrown him out.”

“Kelleher was the dentist,” Koko said.

“He was a dentist, and his wife was named Stuyvessant,” Libby said. “The photographer was nicknamed Barney—Barney Stuyves-sant. He was just a kid on fire with the artistic possibilities of the camera. Rulon gave me the letter when he knew he was dying.”

Erin said, “And just from that your friend was convinced Burton had been here.”

“Sure. How many men have scars like that? Rulon had already read everything about Burton, so yes, that’s the first thing he thought when he read Barney’s letter. He knew Burton was in the country then. He knew about the blank period that Burton’s biographers had never been able to pin down. He knew Burton had come through the South. And over time his belief grew stronger, even when there was nothing to back it up. That’s how he was.”

“So this is where we are,” I said. “Koko has a lot of anecdotal material on tape, which no academic or publisher would accept on its face value. You have a photographer’s letter, which seems to back us up, but it’s still not enough. And Erin has a lead on a journal that might solve everybody’s problem.”

“There’s one other thing,” Libby said. “I’ve seen the picture.”

This was a stunning announcement, which she had saved for the last, but she gave it to us with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Poor Barney Stuyvessant had a miserable jerk for a brother-in-law and then had his life cut short to boot. He might have been an important early photographer, but he went into the Confederate Army in 1861 and was killed at Bull Run in July that year. His sister apparently had possession of his records, papers, letters, and books as well as his original glass plates. She had believed in him all her life, but she died in childbirth in 1862, and Kelleher got rid of all that stuff.

“I don’t know what happened to it in the years after the war. Sometime in the 1960s it surfaced in a North Charleston junkshop. Rulon heard about it and went to see it. The man only wanted five hundred for everything: my God, those glass plates alone were a steal at that price, but Rulon was one of those maddening people who never paid the asking price for anything. He certainly could afford it, but he just had to dicker and the fellow got offended. What happened next depends on what you want to believe. Rulon either walked or was thrown out and had second thoughts almost at once. But he had a huge ego, he hated to admit he’d been wrong, and by the time he got back there two weeks later, the junkman had sold it to someone else. And was just delighted to tell him about it.”

“Who bought it?”

“A fellow named Orrin Wilcox, who was traveling through town. He was a…” She looked at Luke. “What was it he called himself? A booksmith, a booksomething, I can’t remember.”

“A bookscout,” I said.

“That’s it. A junkman by another name: someone who deals primarily in books but knows about letters and photographs as well. An eccentric man.”

“Many of them are.”

“By then I was determined to follow it to the end. I tracked him to Charlotte, where he has the most incredibly cluttered bookstore I have ever seen. It wasn’t even a bookstore in the normal sense of the word: it was like a cave of books that went back and back through I don’t know how many rooms, all so crowded with stuff that you could barely move. You got the feeling if you pulled one book out the whole building would tumble down. No place for a claustrophobic. But I went up there and saw this stuff. I had some notion that I was on the verge of a major discovery. Maybe I was, but we’ll never know that now, will we?”

“What happened?”

“I scraped together some money and I left Luke here to mind the store, then I caught a bus for North Carolina. I found Mr. Wilcox with no trouble at all. He was a gnarled little man, very old, very crotchety, so cantankerous I didn’t know what might set him off. But he let me in and for a while we got on reasonably well. I thought I was playing it so cool, but when we got down to brass tacks I got a bit spooked. I asked if he still had the Barney Stuyvessant archive and he said, ‘Whaddaya think I did with it, dearie, threw it out with the blinkin’ trash?‘ I told him I was looking for a picture I had heard might be in there, just a street scene with two men in it, and right away he said, ’Charlie ‘n’ Dick.‘

“I couldn’t believe it. I felt my heart turn over. I said, ‘Oh yes!’ and he got this evil grin on his face and said I should follow him. Back we went into the cave, all the way into a far back room. It was just like the rest of the place—oh, Janeway, you have no idea.”

“Actually, I do.”

“Well, there the stuff was—boxes and boxes of glass plates. I guess he’d long ago sold off the books but the plates were all there, piled in wooden boxes, one on top of another. He found the one I wanted right away. The original label was still on it—Barney had marked each one with a piece of adhesive or some kind of old tape and it was identified in his own hand. The writing said, Charlie and Dick on East Bay. He had taken down only their first names and that’s the title he had given it. The date on it was still legible, May something, 1860. Old Wilcox held it up to the lightbulb and said, ‘That look like what you want?’ And I came a hell of a lot closer than I wanted to come, we stood side by side with our arms almost touching, and I looked up at the image and there they were, in negative, Charlie and Dick, and even on the negative I could make out those shadows on Burton’s cheeks, and behind them was the Exchange Building. I’d know that anywhere, in positive, negative, or CinemaScope. And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ and I tried to keep my heartbeat from knocking us both down, but when I looked in his face he had a grin that was almost cadaverous. I could see his skull right through the skin, and he grinned and said, ‘Bet you’d like a picture of that, wouldn’t you, honey?’ I said, ‘I’d be happy to pay you for one,’ and he said, ‘Only a thousand dollars to you, sweetie.’”