9

I heard her flip-flopping into the room in the fuzzy slippers I had bought for her at Lazy Larry's.

She never bothered me when I worked, so I put the pen down and turned to face her. She looked so much better now. Her cheeks had gotten some color and her appetite had returned. In fact she was holding a chocolate-chip cookie in her hand with a half-moon bit out of it. Yours Truly had baked them that morning.

"How far are you now?"

"The same. I'm just copying some stuff over. France is getting on the train to come here. Why?"

She threw the cookie in the wastebasket and looked at me. I looked at my cookie in the wastebasket.

"I have a couple of things to tell you, Thomas. They're two of the reasons why I came back here. But when I arrived I didn't know if I should or not. Then I was sick…. But I've got to tell them to you." She came over and sat down in my lap. She never did that. "Have you ever heard of Sidney Swire?"

"Sidney who? Sounds like an English actor."

"Sidney Swire was the man from Princeton who came out to do the biography of France."

"Really? How did you dig that up?" Saxony was the absolute queen of research. I had been convinced of that months ago, but I was inevitably astonished when she dug up some other totally undiscoverable gem.

"That was one of the reasons why I went to St. Louis. It's not important how I found out."

"Wiggins?" I leaned as far back in the chair as I could.

"Oh, come on, Thomas, please. This is important! Sidney Swire came to Galen for two weeks. When he left, he was supposedly going to California, where he had a brother living in Santa Clara." She licked her lips and cleared her throat. "But he never got there. He got off the bus in Rolla, Missouri, at a rest stop and disappeared off the face of the earth. No one has seen him since, including his brother."

"What do you mean?" The lizard walked halfway up my spine and waited for her to speak before he moved again.

"He disappeared. Nothing. No trace. Nothing."

"Well, what about his brother? What did he do?" I pushed her off my lap and stood up.

"The Swire family had the police out, and then, when they didn't find anything, a private-detective agency spent six months looking around. Nothing, Thomas."

"Well, that's intriguing." I looked at her, and she wasn't smiling.

"There's a second thing I want to tell you that I found out when I was there. Please don't get mad at me. Did Anna ever tell you about a man named Peter Mexico?"

I sat forward in my chair. "Yes, he was her lover when she was in college. He died of a heart attack."

"No, Thomas, it wasn't a heart attack. Anna and Peter Mexico were in a subway station in London and he fell in front of a train."

"What?"

"Yes. There was an investigation, and some things were never cleared up. Besides a drunk who was there, they were the only two people on the platform."

"Anna? What happened to Sidney Swire?"

"Sidney Swire?" She smiled at me and blinked her eyes fast a couple of times. Very flirty and cute. "Sidney Swire left here and, thank God, no one ever saw him again."

"What is that supposed to mean?" I tried to sound curious rather than scared.

"He disappeared. Poof. He left here, took a bus over to Rolla, and disappeared. The police were here for days and days looking around and asking questions. Thank God he wasn't living in town when he vanished. That would have been big trouble for us."

"Didn't it bother you?"

"No, not at all. He was a pompous ass, and good riddance."

"That's a pretty rough thing to say about a guy who's probably dead by now."

"So what? Am I supposed to say I'm sorry? I'm not. One look at him and you could tell that he would never have been able to write Father's book."

As a surprise, I had decided to give her a copy of what I had written. The rough draft of the first section of the book was done, and I thought that it would be a perfect idea to let her see how far along Saxony and I had gotten. Sort of as added insurance for letting Sax stay.

There was so much more to do on the manuscript before it was done that I hadn't, until then, thought about what would happen to us after we had finished. I knew that there were a lot of dangerous possibilities, but it was all in a distant, cloudy future that was both tantalizing and ominous.

Of course I knew that the biography could never be published if it succeeded. Stir up new interest in Marshall France so that people would come gaping and poking at Galen to see where the great man had lived? No, the book was the means to one end. We all knew that. Except Saxony.

But what would happen if I didn't succeed? What did Anna have in mind for us if we failed? Make us live in Galen? Make us vanish like Sidney Swire? Kill us? (How well I remembered now what the guy in the bar had said that night about what they did to the other biographer.) I considered all that, but it was all a long, long way off. Months and months. One thing at a time. Saxony was well again and the book flowed out of me like Niagara Falls, and there were no more Krangs in town or things looking in my window….

Anna handed me a piece of pound cake. Austrian gugelhupf to be exact. It was the one thing that she made well.

"Thomas, how long will it take you to write the scene of Father's arrival here?"

"How long? It's almost done now. I already wrote it once, but Sax said that it should be more drawn out and dramatic. She said that there wasn't enough importance in it."

"Yes, but then how long?"

I nibbled on my cake. "I don't know. Today's what? Tuesday? I guess by Friday."

"Could you… ?" She smiled and looked at the floor shamefacedly, like she had been about to ask an impossible favor.

"What? Could I what?" Seeing Anna embarrassed and shy was a rare thing.

"Do you think you could finish it before five-thirty in the afternoon?

"Sure. Why?"

"Superstition. You see, he arrived on a five-thirty train and… I don't know." She shrugged and smiled. "Superstition."

"No, no, I can understand that, Anna. Especially around here I can understand it!"

"All right, well, I wasn't going to tell you this, but I'm going to have a party for the two of you to celebrate Father's arrival."

"Then you'd better wait about six months and keep your fingers crossed."

"No, I mean symbolically. As soon as I saw how far you had gotten, I got this idea to give you a party on the day he arrives in town in your book. It was going to be a surprise, but just pretend that it is one when everyone comes running up to you."

"You're planning on inviting the whole town?"

I was kidding, but her face lit up and she took both of my arms and pulled me down next to her on the couch. "Well! I guess I have to tell you the whole thing now to let you see what I have in mind. This is the way I want it, Thomas: you write the section on his arriving, all right? But you have to tell me on exactly what day you will finish it, okay? Then on the day, all of us from town will go down to the station at five-thirty and pretend that he is coming in on a train."

"But no passenger trains stop in Galen anymore, do they?"

"No, no, it's pretend! Wouldn't it be great? It will be like a Midwinter Festival! Five or ten minutes later we'll march back up to your house and have a big potluck dinner."

"At my place?"

"Yes! You and Saxony are the ones who will be bringing him back, so we'll bring you offerings. Offerings to the Gods of the Typewriter!" She pulled me over and kissed me on the cheek. I realized how long it had been since we had made love. "Won't it be wonderful? It will be like an old torchlight parade. You and Saxony will be in your house, and then all of a sudden you'll hear this big bunch of us coming down the street. You'll both look out your window and see these hundreds of people carrying food and torches, and they'll come right up to your doorstep. It's marvelous!"