"Just please don't call them puppets. They're all marionettes. What kind of tea would you like, apple or chamomile?"

The nice smell came from her apartment, and it was incense. I saw several sticks burning in a little earthenware bowl full of fine white sand on her coffee table. There were also a couple of strange, brightly colored rocks on it and what I assumed to be the head of one of the marionettes. I had it in my hand and was checking it out when she came back into the room with the tea and a loaf of banana bread she'd baked.

"Do you know anything about them? That one's a copy of the evil spirit Natt from the Burmese Marionette Theater."

"Is that what you do for a living?" I swept the room with my hand and almost dropped Natt on the banana bread.

"Yes, or I did until I got sick. Do you take honey or sugar in your tea?" She didn't say "sick" like I was supposed to ask what kind of sick, or was she feeling better now?

After I drank what had to be the foulest cup of hot liquid I've ever consumed – apple or chamomile? – she took me on a guided tour of the room She talked about Ivo Puhonny and Tony Sarg, Wajang figures and Bunraku, as if we were all best friends. But I liked the excitement in her voice and the incredible similarity between some of the puppet faces and my masks.

When we were sitting down again and I liked her about a hundred times more than at first, she said she had something to show me that I'd like. She went into another room and came back with a framed photograph. I had seen only one picture of France before, so I didn't recognize this one until I saw his signature in the lower-left-hand corner.

"Holy Christ! Where'd you get this?"

She took it back and looked at it carefully. When she spoke again her voice was slow and quiet. "When I was little I was playing with some kids near a pile of burning leaves. Somehow I tripped and fell into it, and the burns on my legs were so bad that I had to be in the hospital for a year. My mother brought me his books and I read them until the covers came off. Marshall France books, and books on puppets and marionettes."

I wondered then for the first time if France really appealed only to weirdos like us: puppet-obsessed little girls in hospitals and analyzed-since-five boys whose fathers' shadows were stronger than the kids'.

"But where did you get this? I've seen only one picture of him, and that was when he was young, the one without his beard."

"You mean the one in Time magazine?" She looked at hers again. "You know when I asked you why you'd be willing to spend so much money for Peach Shadows? Well, do you know how much I spent for this thing? Fifty dollars. I'm one to talk, huh?"

She looked at me and swallowed so hard that I heard the grumph in her throat. "Do you love his books as much as I do? I mean… having to give this to you actually makes me almost sick to my stomach. I've been searching for a copy for years." She touched her forehead and then ran her fingertips down the side of her pale face. "Maybe you should take it now and just go."

I shot up off the couch and put the money on the table. Before I left, I wrote my name and address on a slip of paper. I handed it to her and jokingly said that she could come and visit the book whenever she wanted. Fateful decision.

3

About a week later I stayed up one night to get some reading done. For once it was nice to be in my mouse-hole apartment because one of those winter storms was blowing outside that go back and forth between mean, hard rain and wet snow. But I've always liked the changes in Connecticut weather after having lived in California, where every day is the sunny same.

Around ten o'clock the doorbell rang and I got up, thinking some clown had probably torn a sink off the wall in the boys' bathroom or thrown his roommate out the window. Living in the dormitory of a boarding school is maybe the third or fourth circle of hell. I opened the door with a halfhearted snarl ready on my lips.

She was wearing a black poncho that hooded her head and then went all the way down to her knees. She reminded me of an Inquisition priest, except that her robe was rubber.

"I came to visit. Do you mind? I brought some things to show you."

"Great, great, come on in. I was wondering why Peach Shadows was so excited today."

She was in the midst of pulling the hood off her head when I said that. She stopped and smiled up at me. It was the first time I realized how short she was. Against the black, rain-shiny poncho, her face glowed wet white. A kind of strange pink-white, but nice and sort of babylike at the same time. I hung up the dripping coat and pointed her toward the living room. At the last moment I remembered her puppets and that she hadn't seen my masks yet. I thought about the last woman who'd come to see them.

Saxony took a couple of steps into the room and stopped. I was behind her, so I didn't get to see the first expression on her face. I wish I had. After several seconds she moved toward them. I stood in the doorway wondering what she would say, wondering which ones she'd want to touch or take down off the wall.

None of them. She spent a long time looking, and at one point reached out to touch the red Mexican devil with the great blue snake winding down his nose and into his mouth, but her hand stopped halfway and fell to her side.

Still with her back to me, she said, "I know who you are."

I leveled one of my best smirks at her lower back. "You know who I am? You mean you know who my father is. It's no big secret. Turn on the television any night to The Late Show."

She turned around and slid her hands into the little patch pockets of the same blue denim dress she'd worn in the bookstore that day. "Your father? No, I mean you. I know who you are. I called the school the other day and asked about you. I told them I was from a newspaper and was doing a story about your family. Then I went to an old Who's Who and some other books and looked up things about you and your family." She two-fingered a little square of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it. "You're thirty and you had a brother, Max, and a sister, Nicolle, who were both older than you. They were killed in the same plane crash with your father. Your mother lives in Litchfield, Connecticut."

I was stunned both by the facts and by her chutzpah in so calmly admitting what she'd been doing.

"The school secretary said that you went to Franklin and Marshall College and graduated in 1971. You've taught here for four years, and one of the kids in your American literature class that I talked to said that you're 'all right' quote-unquote as a teacher." She folded the paper up again and slid it back into her pocket.

"So what's with the investigation? Am I under suspicion?"

She kept her hand in her pocket. "I like to know about people."

"Yeah? And?"

"And nothing. When you were willing to pay all that money for a book on Marshall France, I wanted to know more about you, that's all."

"I'm not used to people getting up dossiers on me, you know."

"Why are you quitting your job?"

"I'm not quitting. It's called a leave of absence, J. Edgar. What's it to you, anyway?"

"Look at what I brought to show you." She reached behind her and pulled something out from beneath her gray pullover sweater. Her voice was very excited as she handed it to me, "I knew it existed but I never thought I'd be lucky enough to find a copy. I think only a thousand of them were printed. I found it at the Gotham in New York. I had been hunting for it all over for years."

It was a small, very thin book printed on beautifully thick, rough-textured paper. From the illustration on the cover (a Van Walt, as always), I knew that it was something by France, but I had no idea what. It was titled The Night Races into Anna, and what first surprised me was that unlike all of his other books, the only illustration was the one on the cover. A simple black-and-white pen-and-ink of a little girl in farmer's overalls walking toward a railroad station at sunset.