"Don't you dare say free will!"

"No, no, I won't. But in a way it was. Look at what happened to Gert and Wilma Inkler: he let them go and do what they wanted with their son. When it got to be too much, he changed them into dogs."

"Our God is a jealous God, eh?"

"Don't say that, Thomas." Two nasty matches lit up in her eyes.

"Don't say what, that he played with them? Look, I don't want to piss you off, Anna, but if all this is true, then your father was the most…" I tried to think of appropriate words that would encompass what he had done, but there weren't any. "I don't know – he was the most amazing human being that ever lived. I'm not even talking about him as an artist either. The man put a pen to paper and actually made people come alive?" I realized that I was talking more to myself than to Anna, but I didn't care. "No, it's impossible." All at once it flooded over me thick and heavy and impossibly gluey. What the hell kind of idiot was I, believing this crap? But then again there was Nails, who had talked to me. And Petals, who had talked to me. And what little I'd read in the notebooks that coincided with what had happened. And Anna knowing that the little boy would die after he got hit by the truck..

"Why was it so important for people to know if the little Hayden boy was laughing, Anna? How does that all fit in?"

"Because he was supposed to be killed that day. He was supposed to be laughing and happy right up to the moment when he got hit by the truck. The problem was that the wrong person was driving the truck. That's what Joe Jordan and all of the others were so upset about. He wasn't laughing, and he was killed by the wrong man."

As long as things went according to France's plans, Anna and the Galeners had little contact with the outside world. Once in a while one of them went shopping or to a movie in a nearby town, and the Galen stores were constantly being replenished by trucks from St. Louis and Kansas City, but that was about all. For appearance's sake, there was a real-estate office in town, but the only things for sale there were in other towns. What wasn't privately owned belonged to the town of Galen, and nothing was ever for sale. Nothing for rent either.

"But what about Mrs. Fletcher's? What about – ?"

"You and Saxony are the first new people to live in Galen since my father died."

"So that's why she didn't mind our not being married that first day that we rented it! She must have told us ten times that she didn't care about that kind of thing. You set us up, didn't you, Anna? It was all a big plan!"

She nodded. "The moment I heard that you were coming out here from David Louis, I called Goosey Fletcher and told her to move upstairs in that big house. Then I sent Nails over to live with her."

"And I thought that she did it for the money."

"Goosey is a very good actress."

"Was she really in the insane asylum?"

"No."

"Just no? Nothing more?"

"How could she he in an insane asylum, Thomas, if she was one of Father's people? You can learn everything, Thomas, as soon as you start reading the journals."

I was right about the biographer from Princeton when I said that he came to the wrong place at the wrong time. Because of its secret, Galen was shut up tight then and nobody was about to tell the guy nuthin' about nuthin'. According to Anna, he stayed a few weeks and then fumed off toward California, where he said that he was going to write the definitive biography of R. Crumb.

But then it started happening. In the last two years, things started going wrong in Galen. A man who was supposed to live to be ninety and die peacefully in his sleep was electrocuted by a high-tension wire that broke and fell on him as he was passing. He was forty-seven. A child who was supposed to adore corn couldn't look at it without throwing up. A woman who had been changed into a bull terrier suddenly bore a litter of nine puppies. None of the dogs had ever done that before: none of them were supposed to.

I put my hands under my armpits to warm them. I yawned for the umpteenth time. "So what went wrong?"

Anna held her empty cup in her hand and tinked a fingernail against it. "Father's powers started to fade. They started to wear off. In one of the journals he wrote about the possibility. You can read it, but I'll just tell you the essence of it now. He said that two things might happen after he died. One was that everything he had created would disappear immediately."

"I read that part." I still had his journal in my hand and held it up for her to see.

"Yes. The second possibility was that everything would be all right afterward because he had filled them with such…" She tightened her lips and hesitated a moment. "He had filled them with such life spirit that they would continue to function even after he was dead."

"And they did. They have, haven't they?"

"Yes, Thomas, they have until two years ago. Until then everything had gone perfectly. But suddenly things were wrong – I told you about some of them. But Father saw this as a possibility too. He wrote about it in the same notebook that you have there."

"Just tell me about it, Anna. I'm really not in the mood to read right now."

"All right." She looked at the cup as if she didn't know how it had gotten into her hands. She put it down on the coffee table and shoved it brusquely away. "He was convinced that since he had been able to create the people in Galen, then if he died, someone somewhere would be able to recreate him."

"What?" Little freezing lizards ran up and down my back.

"Yes, he believed that his biographer" – she stopped and raised her eyebrows at me, his biographer – "if his biographer was good enough, then he could bring Father back to life if he wrote the story of Father's life the right way."

"Anna, Jesus Christ, you're saying that that's me? You're comparing pigs to swine! I mean pearls to swine! Your father was… was… I don't know, God. Who the hell am I?"

"Do you know why I've let you go this far, Thomas?"

"I don't know if I want to know. All right, all right, how come?"

"Because you have the first quality that Father said was necessary: you are obsessed with him. All you ever do is talk about how important his books are to you. His work is almost as important to you as it is to all of us."

"Oh, come on, Anna, it isn't the same thing!"

"Thomas, stop." She held her hand up like a traffic cop. "You don't know this, but since you wrote that first chapter, everything has gone right again in Galen. Things that he wrote to happen in the journals have happened, just as before. Everything – Nails's death was just the latest."

I looked at her and opened my mouth to speak, but there wasn't anything to say. I had just been paid the most outrageous compliment of my life. My mind was stuck in an elevator halfway between green-bile fear and total, life-hugging elation. For God's sake, what if she was right?