“I don’t care if I can’t sleep anymore,” Danny had told the old logger.

Now Carmella, after sighing, appeared to be holding her breath before beginning. “I guess it goes without saying that I’ve read all your books-more than once,” she began.

“Really?” Danny asked her, feigning innocence of where this conversation was headed.

“Of course I have!” Carmella cried. For someone who’s so happy, what is she angry with me for? Danny was wondering, when Carmella said, “Oh, Secondo-your dad was so proud of you, for being a famous writer and everything.”

It was Danny’s turn to sigh; he held his breath, for just a second or two. “And you?” he asked her, not so innocently this time.

“It’s just that your stories, and sometimes the characters themselves, are so-what is the word I’m looking for?-unsavory,” Carmella started in, but she must have seen something in Danny’s face that made her stop.

“I see,” he said. Danny might have looked at her as if she were another interviewer, some journalist who hadn’t done her homework, and whatever Carmella really thought about his writing, it suddenly wasn’t worth it to her to say this to him-not to her darling Secondo, her surrogate son-for hadn’t the world hurt him as much as it had hurt her?

“Tell me what you’re writing now, Secondo,” Carmella suddenly blurted out, smiling warmly at him. “You’ve been rather a long time between books again-haven’t you? Tell me what you’re up to. I’m just dying to know what’s next!”

NOT MUCH LATER, after Carmella went to bed, some men were watching Monday Night Football at the bar, but Danny had already gone to his room, where he left the television dark. He also left the curtains open, confident in how lightly he slept-knowing that the early-morning light would wake him. He was only a little worried about getting Carmella up and going in the morning; Danny knew that Ketchum would wait for them if they were late. The lamp on the night table was on, as Danny lay in bed, and there on the table, too, was the jar containing his father’s ashes. It would be Danny’s last night with the cook’s ashes, and he lay looking at them-as if they might suddenly speak, or give him some other indication of his dad’s last wishes.

“Well, Pop, I know you said you wanted this, but I hope you haven’t changed your mind,” Danny spoke up in the hotel room. As for the ashes, they were in what was formerly a container of Amos’ New York Steak Spice-the listed ingredients had once been sea salt, pepper, herbs, and spices-and the cook must have bought it at his favorite fancy meat market in their neighborhood of Toronto, because Olliffe was the name on the label.

Danny had gotten rid of most, but not all, of the contents; after he’d placed his father’s ashes in, there’d been room to put some of the herbs and spices back in as well, and Danny had done so. If someone had questioned him about the container at U.S. Customs-if they’d opened the jar and had a whiff-it still would have smelled like steak spice. (Perhaps the pepper would have made the customs officer sneeze!)

But Danny had brought the cook’s ashes through U.S. Customs without any questioning. Now he sat up in bed and opened the jar, cautiously sniffing the contents. Knowing what was in the container, Danny wouldn’t have wanted to sprinkle it on a steak, but it still smelled like pepper and herbs and spices-it even looked like crushed herbs and a variety of spices, not human ashes. How fitting for a cook, that his remains had taken up residency in a jar of Amos’ New York Steak Spice!

Dominic Baciagalupo, his writer son thought, might have gotten a kick out of that.

Danny turned out the lamp on the night table and lay in bed in the dark. “Last chance, Pop,” he whispered in the quiet room. “If you don’t have anything else to say, we’re going back to Twisted River.” But the cook’s ashes, together with the herbs and spices, maintained their silence.

DANNY ANGEL ONCE WENT ELEVEN YEARS between novels-between East of Bangor and Baby in the Road. Again, a death in the family would delay him, though Carmella had been wrong to suggest that the writer was once more taking “rather a long time between books.” It had been only six years since his most recent novel was published.

As had happened with Joe, after the cook was murdered, the novel Danny had been writing suddenly looked inconsequential to him. But this time there was no thought of revising the book-he’d simply thrown it away, all of it. And he had started a new and completely different novel, almost immediately. The new writing emerged from those months when what remained of his privacy had been taken from him; the writing itself was like a landscape suddenly and sharply liberated from a fog.

“The publicity was awful,” Carmella bluntly said, at dinner. But this time, Danny had expected the publicity. After all, a famous writer’s father had been murdered, and the writer himself had shot the killer-irrefutably, in self-defense. What’s more, Danny Angel and his dad had been on the run for nearly forty-seven years. The internationally bestselling author had left the United States for Canada, but not for political reasons-just as Danny always claimed, without revealing the actual circumstances. He and his dad had been running away from a crazy ex-cop!

Naturally, there were those in the American media who would say that the cook and his son should have gone to the police in the first place. (Did they miss the fact that Carl was the police?) Of course the Canadian press was indignant that “American violence” had followed the famous author and his father across the border. In retrospect, this was really a reference to the guns themselves-both the cowboy’s absurd Colt.45 and Ketchum’s Christmas present to Danny, the Winchester 20-gauge that had blown away the deputy sheriff’s throat. And in Canada, much was made of the fact that the writer’s possession of the shotgun was illegal. In the end, Danny wasn’t charged. Ketchum’s 20-gauge Ranger had been confiscated-that was all.

“That shotgun saved your life!” Ketchum had bellowed to Danny. “And it was a present, for Christ’s sake! Who confiscated it? I’ll blow his balls off!”

“Let it go, Ketchum,” Danny said. “I don’t need a shotgun, not anymore.”

“You have fans-and whatever their opposites are called-don’t you?” the old logger pointed out. “Some critters among them, I’ll bet.”

As for the question Danny was asked the most, by both the American and the Canadian media, it was: “Are you going to write about this?”

He’d learned to be icy in answering the oft-repeated question. “Not immediately,” Danny always said.

“But are you going to write about it?” Carmella had asked him again, over dinner.

He talked about the book he was writing instead. It was going well. In fact, he was writing like the wind-the words wouldn’t stop. This one would be another long novel, but Danny didn’t think it would take long to write. He didn’t know why it was coming so easily; from the first sentence, the story had flowed. He quoted the first sentence to Carmella. (Later, Danny would realize what a fool he’d been-to have expected her to be impressed!) “‘In the closed restaurant, after hours, the late cook’s son-the maestro’s sole surviving family member-worked in the dark kitchen.’” And from that mysterious beginning, Danny had composed the novel’s title: In the After-Hours Restaurant.

To the writer’s thinking, Carmella’s reaction was as predictable as her conversation. “It’s about Gamba?” she asked.

No, he tried to explain; the story was about a man who’s lived in the shadow of his famous father, a masterful cook who has recently died and left his only son (already in his sixties) a lost and furtive soul. In the rest of the world’s judgment, the son seems somewhat retarded. He’s lived his whole life with his father; he has worked as a sous chef to his dad in the restaurant the well-respected cook made famous. Now alone, the son has never paid his own bills before; he’s not once bought his own clothes. While the restaurant continues to employ him, perhaps out of a lingering mourning for the deceased cook, the son is virtually worthless as a sous chef without his father’s guidance. Soon the restaurant will be forced to fire him, or else demote him to being a dishwasher.