Lincoln’s Dreams

CHAPTER FIVE

Around Christmas of 1861, during the Carolina campaign, Robert E. Lee bought Traveller for a hundred and seventy-five dollars, adding an extra twenty-five dollars to counteract the falling value of Confederate money. “He has been my patient follower ever since,” he wrote Markie. “He carried me through the Seven Days battle around Richmond, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, the last day at Chancellorsville, to Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, and back to the Rappahannock… to the final days at Appomattox Court House.”

Broun didn’t ask me to call in the scene this time. He called it in himself the next morning and then left to talk to a Lincoln expert in Georgetown. “I’m leaving for California tomorrow,” he said belligerently. “Did you find out where Willie Lincoln was buried?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going over to the library right now. Do you want me to go get the ticket first?”

“You can pick it up this afternoon,” he said.

“Fine,” I said, wishing I could say something that would make him less angry with me. I couldn’t apologize because an apology meant an explanation, and I couldn’t explain. Maybe it was just as well he wasn’t talking to me because then there wouldn’t be any questions either. “What about the galleys?”

“What about them?”

“McLaws and Herndon called this morning before you were up. They said they were sending them down Federal Express, they want them back in two weeks at the latest, and no major changes.”

“You can give them the first reading, and I’ll finish them when I get back.”

“Which will be when?”

“I don’t know. A week maybe.”

I waited till he had left for Georgetown and then went upstairs and made sure the answering machine was set on “message.” I drove over and picked up Broun’s ticket from the travel agency and then went to the library.

Kate didn’t have the bibliography ready, and I told her I wasn’t in any hurry, I was going to be there awhile. I spent the rest of the day there, looking up information about Willie Lincoln and thinking about Annie.

She hadn’t called last night. Broun had gone out for dinner, and I had spent the whole evening in his study waiting for her to call, but the phone hadn’t rung even once. By ten o’clock I had come to the conclusion that Richard was somehow keeping her from using the phone, but this morning I didn’t really believe that.

Richard had made it plain he didn’t want me talking to her, but he was hardly going to have the phone disconnected or tie her up to keep her from answering it. She was his patient, not his prisoner, and she had disobeyed him before. He hadn’t been able to keep her from going out to Arlington. He wouldn’t be able to keep her from calling me either, if she really wanted to.

If she really wanted to. Maybe she didn’t want to. She had seemed almost uninterested when I called her and offered her my services. What made me think she wanted to hear about Special Order 191 any more than she wanted to hear about traumas in the subconscious? She hung up on you, I told myself, and she’s still at Richard’s. You don’t need Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams to tell you what that means. She doesn’t want to talk to you. So stop calling her and find out what the hell they did with Willie Lincoln.

I didn’t believe that either, but I pulled out every book on Lincoln and tried to concentrate on the research. I couldn’t find a word about Willie’s burial, I found out what had happened to the pony he’d been riding “in bad weather” when he came down with whatever it was that killed him, though. Several months after Willie’s death, the White House stables caught fire. Lincoln ran across the lawn and leaped a boxwood hedge to save it, but he was too late. The guards hurried him back into the White House, afraid the fire had been started by an assassin to lure him out. Willie’s pony was burned alive.

Every hour or so I went outside to the pay phone and called the answering machine, but there weren’t any messages. By two o’clock I had run out of change and had to ask Kate for a dollar’s worth of quarters. “I’ll have the bibliography ready for you in a few minutes,” she said.

I went out and called the answering machine. Broun’s agent had called, wanting to know why in the hell Broun was still making changes. She’d just talked to McLaws and Herndon and they’d had to reset the type for the galleys. They were talking about charging Broun for the extra plates.

I called Annie.

“I’m glad you called,” Richard said. “I wanted to apologize for my outburst the other day.”

“I want to talk to Annie.”

“She’s asleep right now,” he said, “and I don’t want to wake her up. I know I was out of line the day before yesterday. I was just so upset about her condition. She was obsessed with the idea that she could obtain factual verification for her dream.”

He sounded completely different from the man who had warned me to keep away from Annie. His voice was calm and professional. “It’s a common phenomenon, but a dangerous one. The patient attempts to distance threatening dream images in his dreams by believing they have an objective reality of their own.”

I recognized the voice now. He had worked on it all through medical school. The voice was one of the psychiatrist’s most important tools, he had told me when he was studying psychoanalysis. The proper voice could be used to obtain the patient’s trust, inspire confidence, and convince the patient that the psychiatrist had his own best interests at heart. I had told him I didn’t care what it could do, just not to use it on me.

He was using it now.

“By convincing herself that the house in her dream is Arlington House,” he said, “she is trying to protect herself from the latent material in the dream. The half-buried dead man becomes a Union soldier instead of the image of her own personal trauma, the cat becomes a real cat instead of the symbol of her need to uncover the repressed memory that’s causing the dreams.”

“The cat is a real cat. His name’s Tom Tita. He got left behind when Lee moved out of Arlington.”

“You’re confusing manifest content with latent content,” he said, inspiringly, compassionately. “We all dream real things, objects and people we’ve seen, things we’ve read about or seen in the movies, memories. They make up the visible content of our dreams. But the subconscious puts those real people and objects and memories to its own uses. It’s a process called dream precipitant conversion. Let’s say Annie had a cat as a child.”

“She never had a cat. And she didn’t see this cat, either, or read about it someplace. It’s Tom Tita.”

“I’m sure she was convinced of that when she insisted on going to Arlington, and that was why I objected to the trip. But I was wrong. The trip produced a catharsis, a breakthrough. She realized the house in the dream was really her own house, and that the half-buried soldier was a symbol of her own repressed guilt.”

“What’s the cat a symbol for?” And what about her bandaged hands? I was about to say when I realized that Richard, calm and inspiring and compassionate, hadn’t said a word about the second dream. And what did that mean? That she hadn’t told him? Or that she didn’t want to believe what I had told her and had chosen to accept Richard’s explanations: repressive guilt and manifest content and dream precipitant conversion. Terms that meant no more than bilious fever and rheumatic excitement and were as much help to the patient.

“I want to talk to Annie,” I said.

“I’ll let her know you called as soon as she wakes up,” the Good Shrink said. “I have to warn you that she may not want to talk to you. She identifies you with her rejection of her psychosis.”

I hung up on him and went back inside to Lincoln, who had had terrible dreams, too. But nobody had tried to convince him the East Room wasn’t the East Room. Nobody had told him the corpse with the black cloth over its face was a symbol for repressive guilt or a neural impulse chosen at random by his hormones. Nobody had asked him what he’d had to eat before he went to bed.

Kate brought the bibliography over to me. “I’ve starred the ones we have,” she said, pointing at ink notations in the margin, “and marked the branches these are at. Do you want me to have the branches send them over here?”

“No, that’s all right. I’ll go get them tomorrow.”

“What’s Broun’s new book about?”

“Abraham Lincoln,” I said.

“Oh, I didn’t know Lincoln was sick.”

“What?”

“Prodromic dreams are dreams people have when they’re sick and they don’t know it yet. What disease was Lincoln suffering from?”

“Bad dreams,” I said.

Broun was back when I got home, standing in the solarium looking at his African violets. I handed him the bibliography. “Did anybody call?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said stiffly. “I left the machine on so you wouldn’t miss any of your messages. Did you find out where Willie Lincoln was buried?”

“No.” I started up the stairs. “Was Lincoln sick when he was shot?”

“He was obsessed with the Civil War,” he said bitterly.

I went on up the stairs and into the study and shut the door, but there were no messages on the answering machine, and Annie didn’t call.

I spent most of the next day rounding up the books listed in the bibliography so Broun could take them with him. The galleys came Federal Express in the afternoon. It was overcast all day, and cold. Broun’s plane didn’t leave till five-thirty, and by the time we left for the airport it was getting foggy.

“I want you to go down to Virginia for me,” Broun said stiffly as soon as we turned onto the Rock Creek Parkway. “I know you disapprove of these wild goose chases, but I need you to talk to a doctor in Fredericksburg.”

Fredericksburg was only fifty miles away. If Annie called I could drive back in an hour and a half’s time. If she called. “What’s the doctor’s name?”

He rummaged in his jacket pocket. “Barton. Dr. Barton. Here’s the address.” He had fished out a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it. “Dr. Stone gave me his name. This Dr. Barton has acromegaly. That’s usually treated before there are any overt symptoms, but he’s old enough that his wasn’t. I want you to find out what kind of dreams he has.” He paused as if waiting for me to object.

“When do you want me to go? Tomorrow?”

“Whenever it’s convenient for you to go,” he said.

I drove past the Lincoln Memorial and onto the bridge. “I had no business saying that about the wild goose chases,” I said. “I know how important this book is to you.”

“An obsession, I think you called it.”

I could see Arlington House up ahead on its snow-covered hill. I thought of Richard telling Annie she was obsessed with war and killing. “I had no right to say that either.”

We turned onto the parkway heading south. “Lincoln suffered from acromegaly,” Broun said as if he were apologizing for his rudeness before when I had asked him if Lincoln was sick. “It’s what made him so tall. It’s a gland disorder. The bones grow too much. The hands and nose get wide and the feet get big. People with acromegaly get rheumatism and diabetes and suffer from melancholia. It can be fatal.”

“And you think that’s what killed him?” I said, sarcastically, and then was sorry.

“I thought it might explain the dreams,” he said, and turned and looked out the side window at the foggy darkness.

I wondered if it had occurred to him, through all these theories of repressed guilt and neural impulses, that the dreams didn’t need any explanation. Lincoln dreamed that he had been killed by an assassin, and two weeks later he lay dead in the East Room. He lost his son, and the little boy’s face came to comfort him in dreams. And where in all this did a gland disorder figure?

I didn’t ask him. I wanted some kind of truce before Broun went off to California. When we pulled into the airport, I said, “I’ll go see this Dr. Barton tomorrow.”

He turned and looked at me, and I knew he didn’t want a battle either. “Just have Mrs. Betts next door take the cat and tell her to water the plants. I left the answering machine on ‘message’ and didn’t say where you’d be in case you wanted to take some time off. I’ve been working you too hard. There’s a nice inn in Fredericksburg. You could drive down and stay for a couple of clays, take a little vacation. Stay till I get back from California if you feel like it.”

“Somebody’s got to do the galleys,” I said, “and you won’t have time in California. Listen, don’t worry about me. I’ll take it easy. I’ll run down to Fredericksburg and then I’ll come back and work on the galleys.”

“Well, at least get somebody to help you with them. It takes so long the other way. Why don’t you ask that girl to help you, the pretty little blonde at the reception the other night, what was her name?”

“Annie,” I said. “But I doubt if she’d want to sit for hours reading a book out loud and checking for typos.”

He scratched at the stubble on his chin. “I watched you two the other night. I got the idea she’d do about anything if you asked her. And vice versa.”

“She’s Richard’s girlfriend.”

“Did you hear that from the horse’s mouth? Or did Richard tell you?”

“You’re going to miss your plane,” I said. “Don’t worry about the galleys. I’ll get them done if I have to read them onto a tape recorder and listen to myself.”

He got his suitcase out of the back and then reached forward to give me the piece of folded paper. “Take care of yourself, son,” he said.

“You, too,” I said. “If you find out what caused Lincoln’s dreams, let me know.”

I went home and started in on the galleys, a long chapter about Ben’s brother, who was in Mansfield’s doomed Twelfth Corps, another, even longer one about Colonel Fitzhugh, whose men called him Old Fancypants and who went on for pages about a gentleman’s duty and the glorious South.

“I thought the book was about Antietam,” I had told Broun the first time I’d read those chapters. “And here it is chapter two and still the spring of 1862. The battle of Antietam didn’t happen till the middle of September.”

“It’s not about Antietam,” Broun had thundered, the only time I’ve ever seen him angry at one of my criticisms. “It’s about duty, damn it.” He had refused to take any of it out then, and now I saw that, although he had made so many changes I hardly recognized the book, all the passages about duty had been left in. It was chapter nine before we made it to the morning of September seventeenth and back to Malachi and Toby and Ben:

It was still dark when Ben woke up. “I thought I heard something,” he said, sitting up.

“Not yet,” Malachi said. It was too dark to see him.

“What time is it?” Ben asked. “I thought I heard guns.” It had stopped raining and there seemed to be a little light there to the east, but he couldn’t be sure.

“No more’n three o’clock,” Malachi said, and then Ben must have gone back to sleep because when he opened his eyes again, it was light enough to see Malachi. He was sitting by his little cookfire, stirring the cold ashes, trying to get a spark, but the fire was completely out. A cold fog was drifting through the cornfield they had camped next to, so low he couldn’t see the tassels on the corn.

“How’ll we see to fight if there’s fog?” Ben said, huddling his blanket around his shoulders. His teeth were chattering.

“Fog’ll burn off as soon as the sun comes up, and then it’ll be hot,” Malachi said, and he sounded as calm and wide awake as if he were back on the farm, up at three in the morning for a big day of planting.

“What would happen if we lit out beforehand?” Ben said. His teeth were chattering so hard he wouldn’t be able to hear the guns. “Couldn’t nobody see us in this fog. ”

“I thought you was the one just had to sign up. This here’s what you signed up for. ”

“I know,” he said. “I just hadn’t figured on getting killed.”

“How’s a body supposed to get any sleep with you two clucking like hens?” Toby said. He yawned. “Should you run? Will you git kilt? Me, I can’t get kilt. Not Toby Banks. No, sir, I promised my mama I wouldn’t.” He pushed his blanket down so it covered his feet and rolled over, and Ben lay down again and watched the fog drift across Malachi and the coin fire.

Toby poked him awake with his foot. “You set up all night worrying and then you sleep through the battle,” he said. “Don’t you let Old Fancypants see you sleeping. ”

Ben sat up. The sun was up and the fog was gone. Steam was rising like smoke over the cornfield, Malachi had another fire going. He was roasting ears of corn in the coals. “Me, I been up practicing my Rebel yell for close on an hour,” Toby said.

Ben got up and folded his bedroll, trying to wake up, Toby was whistling something, a jig tune, but when Ben turned to look at him he stopped. He was writing something on a dirty white handkerchief. “I want them Yankees to know who’s shooting at ’em,” he said. He whittled a twig down to nothing and used it as a pin to stick the handkerchief to his shirt. “Not that I’m letting any of ’em get close enough to read it.” He went over to the fire and plucked one of the roasting ears out of the coals. The husk was charred. It smelled wonderful.

She woke me out of a sound sleep. I had the idea that it was almost morning, and I couldn’t think who would be calling at that hour. I answered the phone, and, as I did, it rang again, and I thought, “It’s the answering machine,” and punched what I thought was “play” and had time to be surprised that there was no message before it rang again and I recognized the sound finally as the doorbell.

Annie was standing on the front steps. She had her gray coat on and was carrying a duffel bag. There was a suitcase on the step beside her. It was dark and foggy out, and I thought, “That will burn off when the sun comes up, and it will be hot tomorrow.”

“Can I stay here?” she said.

I still had the idea that the phone had rung. “Did you call?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I know I should have given you some warning, but… if this is a problem, Jeff, I can go to a hotel.”

“I thought I heard the phone,” I said, rubbing at my face as if I expected a scraggly stubble of beard like Broun’s. “What time is it?”

She had to transfer the duffel bag from one hand to the other to look at her watch. “Ten-thirty. I woke you up, didn’t I?”

No, you didn’t, I almost said. That was the problem. She had not, with all her ringing of the doorbell, managed to wake me up. I was still asleep and dreaming her, and they were not somebody else’s dreams. She looked beautiful standing there in her gray coat, her light hair curling a little from the damp fog. She looked as if she had just awakened from a long and refreshing sleep, her eyes clear and bright, and healthy pinkness in her cheeks.

“Of course you can stay,” I said, still not awake enough to ask her why she was here, or even to wonder. I opened the door and leaned past her to pick up the suitcase. “You can stay as long as you want. Broun’s not here. He’s in California. You can stay as long as you want.”

I led the way up the stairs to the study, still unable to shake the feeling that it was very late. The answering machine was blinking rapidly—I must have put it on “call return” in my sleepy fumblings. I wondered what poor soul I had been calling for the last ten minutes. I hit the “pause” button and yawned. I was still not awake. I’d better make some coffee.

“Do you want some coffee?” I said to Annie, who was standing in the door of the study looking rested and wide awake and beautiful.

“No,” she said.

I still had my hand on the answering machine buttons. “I’ve been worried about you. I tried to call you. Did you have another dream?”

“No,” she said. “The dreams have stopped.”

“They’ve stopped?” I said. “Just like that?” I still wasn’t awake.

The answering machine was still flashing. I stabbed at the buttons. The tape clicked. “Annie’s gone,” Richard said. “I think she’ll come to you. You have to make her come back. She’s sick. I only did it to help her. I didn’t have any other choice.”

“Did what?” I asked.

She pulled something out of the duffel bag. “He’s been putting these in my food,” she said, and handed me two capsules in a plastic bag. One of the capsules was cracked and there was a dusting of white powder along the bottom edge of the bag.

“What are they?” I said. “Elavil?”

“Thorazine,” she said. “I found the bottle in his medical bag.”

Thorazine. A drug strong enough to stop a horse in its tracks. “Richard gave you these?” I said, looking stupidly at the plastic bag.

“Yes,” she said. She sat down in the club chair. “He started putting them in my food when I got back from Arlington.”

When I called her I had asked her if she had been asleep, and she had said Richard had made her a cup of tea and sent her to bed. She had been so sleepy she could hardly answer my questions. Because Richard had put Thorazine in her tea. Thorazine. “They use Thorazine in mental hospitals. With uncontrollable patients.”

“I know,” she said.

“How many of these did he give you?”

“I don’t know. He… I didn’t eat anything last night and all day today.”

I had taken her out to Arlington three days ago. She couldn’t have been on the drug more than two and a half days, so there couldn’t be that much in her system, but what kind of dose had Richard given her? Any dose was too much.

“Annie, listen, let me call the hospital. They’ll know what to do. We’ve got to get this stuff out of your system.”

“Jeff, tell me what happened to the horse,” she said quietly. “The gray horse I saw in my dream. It didn’t fall forward on its knees, did it?” I looked at her hands, expecting them to be gripping the arms of the chair, but they were lying quietly in her lap. “Please tell me.”

I knelt down in front of her and took hold of her hands. “Annie, the dream’s not important. What’s important is that you’ve got a dangerous drug in your system. I don’t know what symptoms it can cause, but we’ve got to find out. There might be withdrawal symptoms of some kind. We’ve got to get you to a hospital. They’ll know what to do.”

“No,” she said, still quietly. “They’ll give me something to stop the dreams.”

“No, they won’t. They’ll try to get the Thorazine out of your system, and they’ll run tests so we’ll know exactly how much Richard’s been giving you and for how long. What if he’s been giving you drugs for weeks? What if Thorazine isn’t the only thing he’s been giving you?”

“You don’t understand. They’ll put me on medication.”

“They can’t give you anything without your consent.”

“Richard did. I can’t go to a hospital. The dreams are important. They’re the most important thing.”

“Annie…”

“No, you have to listen, Jeff. I figured out he was giving me something when you called me. When I got up to answer the phone I was so dizzy, and then when you asked me if Richard was giving me anything, I knew that must be it. But I didn’t tell you.”

“Why not?” I asked gently.

“Because it stopped the dreams.” Her hands were ice cold. I chafed them gently between my hands. “When you’d called I’d been asleep all afternoon, and I hadn’t had any dreams at all. Then you called and told me about Special Order 191 and I didn’t even want to listen. I just wanted to go back to sleep. I wanted to sleep forever.”

“That was the Thorazine,” I said.

“I wanted to sleep forever, but I couldn’t. Even under the Thorazine, even when I was asleep, I knew the dreams mattered, and that I had to have them. That’s why I came here. Because I knew you could help me. I knew you could tell me what the dreams meant.”

“Annie, listen.” I looked anxiously into her blue-gray eyes, trying to see if they were dilated. They weren’t. They looked clear and alert. Maybe she had only been on the Thorazine for a couple of days. “Will you at least let me call Broun’s doctor? He’s not a psychiatrist or anything. He’s just a G.P.”

“He’ll call Richard.”

“No, he won’t,” I said, and wished I could be sure of that. If I told him that Richard had given Thorazine to one of his patients without her knowledge, he would immediately think she was a mental patient. He would call Richard, and Richard would tell him that she was highly unstable, that she suffered from delusions of persecution. He would use his Good Shrink voice and Broun’s doctor would believe him. And then what? Would he take Annie back to the Sleep Institute, or would he have Richard come and get her?

“At least let me make you some coffee,” I said, patting her hands. “We need to get that junk out of your system.”

She wrapped her fingers around mine. “Tell me about the horse. Please.”

“It was D. H. Hill’s horse. It was shot out from under him.” I held on to her hands as if I expected her to pull away from me. “Its front legs were shot off.”

“Did Lee see it happen?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I didn’t want to believe it when you told me about Tom Tita and Hill’s red shirt and the lost order,” she said, and her voice was still calm, but her grip tightened. “But I knew it was true, even under the Thorazine. I knew what the dreams were that night at the reception as soon as you told me about the house at Arlington, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

She bent her head so that it almost touched our hands. “That poor man!” she said. “The Thorazine made me sleep all the time, and even when I was awake it was as if I were asleep. It was wonderful. I hadn’t been able to sleep before because I was so afraid I’d dream about the soldier in the orchard, and now I slept and slept and didn’t dream anything. It was wonderful. I was so glad Richard had given it to me.”

She looked up at me. “But even when I was asleep I kept thinking how terrible it was that they didn’t have Thorazine in those days, that there wasn’t anything to stop those awful dreams. He had to keep dreaming them over and over again till he was afraid to go to sleep, too.” She was holding my hands so tightly they hurt. “That’s why I have to have the dreams, that’s why I came to you. You have to help me have the dreams. So he can get some sleep.”

“Who?” I said, but I already knew the answer.

“Robert E. Lee. They’re his dreams, aren’t they?” she said, and it wasn’t even a question. “I’m having Robert E. Lee’s dreams.”

I could almost smell the corn, hear it rustling in the still, hot steam of the morning, and I knew the guns were about to open up and the slaughter begin.

“Yes,” I said.

I got Annie something to eat and made her drink some coffee. I wondered if I should walk her around to try to keep her from falling asleep the way you did for a drug overdose, but she had been asleep for days. I wished Broun had a medical book from later than 1865 so I could look up Thorazine’s side effects.

The phone rang, “It’s Richard, you know,” she said, and took hold of my hands again, “He’ll come and get me.”

The answering machine clicked on. “He won’t know where we are,” I said. “The message on the answering machine says Broun’s in California. He’ll think I went with him.”

“What if he comes over?”

“We won’t be here,” I said. “I have to go to Fredericksburg to do some research for Broun. You can come with me. He won’t have any idea where we’ve gone.”

Annie was asleep before I’d finished talking, still holding on to my hands, her head turned slightly against the back of the club chair, her cheeks as pink as a child’s. I eased my hands out of hers and went and got a blanket from my room to put over her, and then, wide awake finally, I packed a bag and put it and Annie’s things into the car and then came back to the study and read galleys.

Richard called every ten minutes for the next three hours and then stopped, and I turned off all the lights in the study and went downstairs and made sure all the doors were locked. I went into the dark solarium and stood at the window, watching Richard pull up and park across the street and thinking about how the Civil War started.

Lincoln had offered Lee the command of the Union army, but he couldn’t take it, even though he was opposed to secession and hated the idea of war. “I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home,” he wrote his sister. “I know you will blame me; but you must think as kindly of me as you can, and believe that I have endeavored to do what I thought right.”

“I could have taken no other course without dishonor,” he wrote after the war, after he had killed two hundred and fifty thousand of his own men; and Lincoln, that other good man entrusted with mass murder, had said, “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us do our duty as we understand it.”

Our duty as we understand it. “I had to do it,” Richard had said, and had slept with a patient, had given her a dangerous drug without her knowledge, and I had promised I’d take care of her, so I couldn’t let him get away with it, even though he was my old roommate. “He just one day signed up,” Broun’s character Ben had said, “and I knew I had to, too.” And there we were, enemies.

At seven o’clock I went back upstairs and woke Annie up. I called the woman next door and told her I’d changed my mind about going to California with Broun and would she watch the cat, I’d put its food by the door and she could come and get it and the cat anytime she wanted.

Then I said, “And would you tell the police we’re gone? Broun doesn’t usually bother with that kind of thing, but there’s been a car parked across the street with a man sitting in it ever since I got back from taking Broun to the airport last night. I can’t tell if he’s watching the house or not, and I’m probably crazy to think it means anything. But Broun’s got a lot of first editions.”

When the police car pulled up next to Richard’s, I took Annie out through the back door to the garage, and we fled south, into the land of dreams.