It was the woman who'd been carrying the boxes of hamburger rolls. She had short black, glossy-clean hair cut in a kind of monk's bowl that came down over her ears, although the rather large lobes could still be clearly seen. A small nice nose that peaked up a little at the end, eyes that were almost Oriental and either gray or dusty green. Her lips were full and purplish and I was sure that that was their natural color, although sometimes they got so dark you would have thought that she'd been eating some kind of grape candy. She had on a pair of white carpenter's overalls, a black T-shirt, no jewelry at all, and black rubber flip-flop thongs on her feet. All in all, she was great-looking in a kind of hip, clean, youngish Midwestern housewife way. Where the hell was the Charles Addams character David Louis had referred to? This woman looked like she'd just had the family station wagon washed at the Shell station.

She offered me her hand, and it was soft and cool, not sweaty at all, like mine.

"Are you Thomas Abbey?" She smiled and nodded like she already knew I was. She kept hold of my hand. I'd almost jerked it away when she said my name.

"Yes, uh, hello. How'd you – ?"

"David Louis wrote and told me that you were coming."

I frowned at that one. Why had he done that? If she was the Medusa he'd made her out to be, knowing what I was here for would only make her seal off whatever cracks into her father's life I might have been able to find snooping around on my own, incognito. I vowed to send Louis a ten-page hate letter at the first opportunity. No wonder no biographer had ever had any luck with her. With him running interference, she had a twenty-mile head start.

"Do you mind if I sit down? I've been hopping around here so today in this crazy heat…." She shook her head, and her monk's cut flipped back and forth like a tight little grass skirt.

I realized that I hadn't properly introduced her to Saxony.

"Ms. France, this is my colleague, Saxony Gardner." Colleague? When was the last time I'd used that word?

They smiled at each other and shook hands, but I noticed that their shake was short and barely touching.

"You're a writer too, Miss Gardner?"

"No, I do the research and Thomas will do the writing."

Why didn't she say "Thomas does the writing," rather than put it in the future tense? It would have sounded so much more professional.

I looked at their two faces and tried not to think that Anna was lovely and Saxony was wholesome. Maybe it was just my momentary anger at Sax.

"You want to write a book about my father? Why is that?"

I thought that by now the best thing to do was give it to her straight and see how she reacted. "Because he's the best there is, Ms. France. Reading his books was the only time in my entire life when I was totally gone into the world of the story. Not that it makes any difference, but I teach English at a boy's prep school, and even all of the so-called 'greats' have never affected me the way The Land of Laughs does."

She seemed pleased by the compliment but squinted up her eyes and touched me briefly on the hand. "I have told you a million times not to exaggerate, Mr. Abbey." She smiled like a little girl absolutely delighted with herself. The joke and the smile made me delighted with her too.

What the hell was David Louis talking about when he pictured her as some kind of shrewy weirdo who vamped around in black dresses with a candle in her hand? She was pretty and funny and wore Dee-Cee overalls, and from what I'd seen so far, everyone in town knew and liked her.

"It's true, Miss France." Saxony said it so ardently that we all stopped and looked at her.

"Did David tell you, though, how I felt about a biography of my father?"

Saxony spoke. "He said that you were very much against one being written."

"No, that is not quite true. I've been against it because the people who have wanted to write about him have come out here to our town for all of the wrong reasons. They would all like to become the authority on Marshall France. But when you talk to them, it is easy to see that they aren't interested in what kind of man he was. To them he is just a literary figure."

A kind of low-level bitterness moved in over her voice like a cloud bank. She was facing Saxony, so I only saw her in profile. Her chin was angular and sharp. When she spoke, her white teeth came out from under those dark, heavy lips in sharp contrast, but then they went back into hiding as soon as she stopped. She had long sparse eyelashes that looked recently curled. Her neck was long and white and incredibly vulnerable and held the only wrinkles on her face. I guessed that she was either in her forties or late thirties, but everything about her looked firm and healthy, and I could picture her living to a very old age. Unless she had the same weak heart as her father.

She turned to me and started playing with the blue plastic fork they'd given me for my spareribs. "If you had known my father, Mr. Abbey, you would understand why I'm so sensitive about this. He was a very private person. The only real friends he had outside of my mother and Mrs. Lee were Dan" – she smiled and nodded up toward the grocer; he shrugged and looked modestly at his spatula – "and only a few others in town. Everybody knew him and liked him, but he hated being in the public eye and worked very hard to avoid it."

Dan spoke, but only to Anna, not any of us. "The thing he liked to do best was come into my store and sit behind the butcher counter with me on those little wood-stump stools that I keep back there, you know? Once in a while he'd work at the cash register if one of my regular people didn't come in."

What a great beginning for my biography! Open it with France working at the cash register of Dan's store in Galen…. Even if the possibility of the book was gone, it was a joy to be sitting here with these people who had been so much a part of his life. I envied all of them incredibly.

"And I could tell when he was back there with ya, Dan. There'd never be no service up front!"

Dan scratched his head and winked at us. There was a thought in my mind that wouldn't disappear. Here was this nice little fat guy, a grocer, who'd probably spent what amounted to years in the company of my hero. What could they have talked about? Baseball? Women? Who got drunk at the firehouse last night? It was an obnoxious and condescending attitude to have, but why couldn't I have switched places with him for even one of those afternoons behind the butcher counter? One afternoon shooting the bull with Marshall France and maybe talking about books and fantasy… about the characters in his books.

"Hey, now, Marshall, how did you ever come up with ((fill in the blank))?"

He would lean back against a couple of legs of lamb and say something like, "I knew this sword swallower when I was a kid…."

Then we'd turn on the radio and listen to the ball game in that sleepy and calm way that men get when they're bullshitting and looking off into space. We'd talk about Stan Musial's batting average or Fred's new tractor..

I was off in my dream world chatting with France when I heard Saxony say "something-something-something Stephen Abbey." That brought me around, and when my eyes locked back into the scene, Mrs. Fletcher was staring at me with her mouth wide open.

"Your father was Stephen Abbey?"

I shrugged and wondered why the hell Saxony had let that cat out of the bag. Oh, we were going to have a lovely talk later on.

The soft chain-saw whine of a crying baby cut through the air and covered the halt in conversation.

"The man's father was Stephen Abbey."

That did it. Eyes came up, hamburgers went down, the baby stopped crying. I looked at Saxony with instant death in my eyes. Her face fell and she looked away. She tried to get out of it by saying to Anna that since we both had famous fathers, we probably had quite a bit in common.