"That's what you get from walking around the world. Dammit! I was sure that we'd made this great discovery. A Marshall France character that never appeared in any of his books. Now all he turns out to be is some stiff in the local graveyard."

"You sound like Humphrey Bogart when you talk like that. 'Some stiff in the graveyard.'"

"I'm not trying to sound like him, Saxony. Excuse me for being so unoriginal. We're not all great creators, you know."

"Oh, be quiet, Thomas. Sometimes you pick fights just to see if I'll snap at your bait."

"Mixed metaphor." I stood up and rubbed my hands on my legs to get the dirt off them.

"Sorry, Mr. English Teacher."

We threw halfhearted insults back and forth until she saw something behind me and stopped. In fact, she not only stopped, her whole face shut down like an airport in a snowstorm.

"This is a nice place to have a picnic."

I knew who it was. "Hiya, Anna."

This time she wore a white T-shirt, brand-new tan khakis, and her scruffy sneakers: a cutie.

"Why are you two out here?"

How did she know that we were there? Chance? As far as I knew, the only one who had seen us was the priest, and that was only a few minutes before. Even if he had called her and told her, how had she gotten there so quickly – by rocket ship?

"We're doing some research. Thomas discovered where your father got the names for the characters in The Night Races into Anna. He brought me out here to show me."

My head swiveled around on my neck like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist. I discovered?

"And were you surprised?"

"Surprised? Oh, at this? Yeah. No. Uh, yeah, I guess so." I was trying to figure out why Saxony had lied. Was she trying to make me look good in Anna's cool eyes?

"Who are you visiting? Gert Inkler? Father never used him in a book."

"Yes, we know. The man who walked around the world. Did he ever do it?"

The smile slid right off her face. And Christ, could her eyes get small and mean. "Where did you hear about that?"

"Railroad Stations of America."

My answer didn't bring the sunshine back. Her look reminded me of the way she had treated Richard Lee in the woods the other day. It wasn't the same kind of fire-and-brimstone fury that David Louis had portrayed, but kind of a turn-to-ice, stone-cold anger.

"The librarian in town gave me a book that your father liked. The one on train stations in America? I skimmed through it and found a description of Inkler in one of the margins. I have it at home if you'd like to see it."

"You two are really doing your homework on this already, aren't you? But what if I don't authorize the biography?"

She looked straight at me first, then flicked her eyes over my shoulder to Saxony.

"If you weren't going to let us do it, then why have you been so nice to us all this time? David Louis said that you were a monster."

Good old Saxony. Tactful, sensitive, always there with the right compliment at the right time. The born diplomat.

I was tempted to put my hands over my head to protect myself against the Battle of the Titans, but astonishingly it never came. Instead, Anna sniffed, shoved her hands down into her pockets, and nodded like a doll with its head on a spring. Up and down and up and down.

"Saxony, you are right. I must admit that I do enjoy taunting people sometimes. I wanted to see how long you would wait before you became annoyed with my little games and just asked if you could do it."

"Okay, can we do it?" I wanted the question to sound forceful, convinced, but it crawled out of my throat as if afraid of the daylight.

"Yes, you can. The book is all yours if you want to write it. If you aren't too mad at me, I'll help you in whatever ways I can. I'm sure that there are ways that I can help."

I felt a surge of triumph. I turned to Saxony to see how she'd taken it. She smiled, picked up a little white pebble, and threw it at my knee.

"Well, Miss Sporty?"

"Well what?" She picked up another pebble and threw it.

"Well, I guess we're all set." I reached out and took her hand again. She squeezed it and smiled. Then she turned and smiled at Anna. France's daughter stood there in all of her adorableness, but that moment was for Saxony and me, and I wanted her to know how happy I was that it had come and that she was there with me.

8

"Be careful that you don't break your neck going down these stairs. One of Father's favorite unkept promises was that he would fix them one day."

Anna had the flashlight, but she was in front of Saxony, who was in front of me. As a result, all I saw of the weak yellow beam was a straight snake of it here and there as it darted around their legs.

"Why do all basements smell the same?" I reached out to touch the wall for balance. It was crumbly and damp. I remembered the smell out at the Lee house in the woods.

"What's the smell?"

"Like a funky locker room after the team has taken a lot of showers."

"No, that's a clean smell. Basements smell secretive and hidden."

"Secretive? How can something smell secretive?"

"Well, I know it doesn't smell like a locker room!"

"Wait a minute, here is the light."

A click and then the same kind of piss-yellow light illuminated the large square room.

"Be careful of your head, Thomas, the ceiling is low in here."

I hunched down and looked at the room. An army-green furnace loomed over in a corner. The walls were rough plaster and uneven. The floor was a step away from being dirt. There weren't many things down there besides some tied bundles of old magazines. Pageant, Coronet, Ken, Stage, Gentry. I'd never heard of any of them.

"What did your father do down here?"

"Wait a minute and I'll show you. Follow me."

When she moved, I noticed for the first time an open doorway that apparently led to another room. A snick of a light switch and we went in.

There was a school blackboard on the wall about three feet high and maybe six feet long A chalk holder was attached to one end of it, and it was filled with long, brand-new sticks of' white chalk. It made me feel right at home. I had to restrain a mad urge to go up there and diagram a sentence.

"This is where he began all of his books." Anna picked up a piece of chalk and started to doodle in the middle of the hoard. A kind of crude, not very good rendition of Snoopy from the Peanuts comic strip.

"I thought that you said he worked upstairs?"

"He did, but only after he had mapped out all of his characters here on his board."

"He did it for every book?"

"Yes. He would hide down here for days and create his next universe."

"How? In what way?"

"He said that he always had a main character in mind. For The Land of Laughs it was the Queen of Oil, Richard Lee's mother, He would put her name at the top of the board and start listing other people's names under it."

"Names of real people, or ones that he had made up?"

"Real people. He said that if he thought of the real people first, then the things he wanted to use from their personalities came right to his mind."

She wrote "Dorothy Lee" on the board and then "Thomas Abbey" under it. She drew arrows from both of our names out to the right. Then she wrote "The Queen of Oil" next to the first, "Father's Biographer," next to mine. Her handwriting was nothing like her father's – –it was squiggly and wide and messy, the kind I'd comment on at the bottom of an essay after I'd read it.

Then under "Thomas Abbey – Father's Biographer," she wrote: "Famous father, English teacher, Clever, Insecure, Hopeful, the Power?"

I frowned. "What do you mean by 'the Power?'"

She waved the question away. "Wait. I'm doing it the way he did it. The things that he didn't know about, or didn't know if he wanted to use, he would put a question mark next to."