“Annie’s emotionally unstable. By taking her out there, you could have sent her into a complete psychotic break.”

“Like that nutso Lincoln?” I said. “You told Broun old Abe was heading for a psychotic break because he’d dreamed, of all things, about his own assassination. Are you trying to tell me that anybody who dreams about the Civil War is crazy?”

“She’s not dreaming about the Civil War.”

“Then where in the hell did the Union soldiers come from?”

“You did this, didn’t you? While I was upstairs talking to Broun, you were filling her head with a lot of nonsense about soldiers being buried in the front lawn out at Arlington, encouraging this neurotic fantasy of hers. You told her Robert E. Lee had a cat, didn’t you?”

“He did have a cat.”

“And as soon as you told Annie that, she told you the cat in her dream was exactly like Robert E. Lee’s cat, didn’t she?”

I didn’t answer him. I was thinking of Annie clutching the African violet and saying, “Did Robert E. Lee have a cat? A yellow cat? With darker stripes?”

“During dream recall the dreamer’s extremely suggestive,” Richard said. “Anything that’s told to the dreamer then can influence his memory of the dream. It’s called secondary elaboration.”

“Like telling her she’d shot somebody with a cap pistol?” I said. “The Springfield rifle had a percussion cap, did you know that? It looked just like a kid’s cap pistol. The Springfield rifle was used in the Civil War.”

“Did you tell her that?” he said, sounding almost frightened. “You had no business telling her that. You’re interfering with her therapy. As her psychiatrist, I have a duty to …”

“To what? Hit on your patients?”

“I wasn’t trying to hit on her, damn it. It just happened. I was trying to help her. She was afraid to be alone at night. It just happened. Damn it, you’ve seen her.”

I’d seen her, standing in the solarium in her gray coat saying, “You won’t believe me either.” I would have driven her out to Arlington right then, in spite of the snow, if she had asked me to. I would have scaled the locked gates and broken into the attic with an ax to look for Lee’s lost cat. I would have done anything to help her. Help her. Not take advantage of her fear and her helplessness.

“So you told her she was crazy and then climbed on top of her?” I said. “Is that how you helped her?”

“Keep away from her. You’re interfering with her therapy.”

“Is that what you call taking your patients home and fucking them when they’re too scared and tired to say no? What other therapies are you using, Doctor? Have you thought about drugging her so she’ll cooperate?”

He waited so long to say anything that even Broun’s patient answering machine would have switched off. I waited.

“You know what’s really ironic,” he said bitterly, “I tried to call you last week, but you weren’t there,” and hung up.

I looked out at the snow some more and then called the clinic to find out if Richard had phoned me from there. His secretary said, “I’m sorry. He’s not in right now. Can I take a message?”

“Will he be in at all today?”

“Well …” she said as if she were looking at an appointment book. “He has a general staff meeting at four, but that may be canceled because of the weather.”

I didn’t wait for her to ask for my name. “Thanks. I’m a friend of his from out of town, and I’ve got to catch a plane in about five minutes. I just thought I’d give him a call while I was in Washington.”

The phone rang as soon as I pressed down the button. I had the crazy idea that Richard had been listening in on the call and was going to threaten me again, but it was Broun.

“I didn’t make it up here with the last two pages of that damned scene,” he said. “It’s probably on my desk. Can you look for it?”

I rummaged through the pile on his desk. He had stuck it in Randall’s Lincoln the President. “It’s right here,” I said. “Do you want me to Federal Express it?”

“There’s no time for that. They’ve got the book all set up to print. If these changes don’t go in right now, they don’t go in at all. You’ll have to read it over the phone. McLaws and Herndon are set up to record your call at this number.” He gave me the number.

“Are you going to try to come home tonight?”

“No. It’s a real blizzard up here,” he said, and then seemed to catch something in my voice. “Are you all right?”

No, I thought. I’ve just had a conversation I would never have believed I’d have with my old roommate over a girl I’ve just met, and I want you to come home and tell me she’s not crazy. I want you to come home and tell me I’m not crazy. “I’m fine,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

He still sounded worried. “You got my message this morning, didn’t you? You didn’t go out to Arlington in this mess?”

“No,” I said. “The weather’s terrible here, too.”

“Good,” he said. “I want you to take care of yourself. I thought you looked kind of peaked last night.” He paused, and I could hear voices in the background. “Listen, they’re getting impatient on this end for that scene. Get some rest, son, and don’t worry about anything till I get back.”

“I’ll call it in right away,” I said.

I hung up and then wished I hadn’t. What would Broun say if I called him back and told him I’d gone out to Arlington after all, and with somebody who’d dreamed about the battle of Antietam and Lee’s lost cat?

He would say, “There’s a logical explanation for this,” and I had already told myself that—that and a lot of other things. I had gone through every argument there was last night, one after the other, the way I had gone through Broun’s books looking for Tom Tita.

They were only dreams. She was ill. She was crazy. It was all an elaborate scam so she could get close to Broun. There was a logical explanation for the dreams. She had read about the cat somewhere. She’d been to Arlington as a child. It was all a joke. She’d been put up to it by Richard. It was some kind of dopey Bridey Murphy phenomenon. It was just a coincidence. Lots of people dreamed about yellow tabby cats. They were only dreams.

There was no point in calling Broun back. He wouldn’t be able to add any new arguments to that list. Worse, he might not even try to convince me there was a logical explanation. Fascinated as he was by Lincoln’s dreams right now, he might say, “Has she ever dreamed she saw herself in a coffin in the East Room? Do you think you could try to get her to dream Lincoln’s dreams?”

I called the number Broun had given me for calling in the scene, and they put me on hold. I read the scene over while I was waiting.

“You can begin recording now,” a woman said, and I heard a click and then a dial tone. I called again, but the line was busy, so I set the machine to redial the number every two minutes, plugged in the auxiliary mike, and read the revised scene onto the answering machine:

The picket fire slowed up toward dark, and Malachi went back into the woods a little way and built a cookfire.

“What you Rebs havin’ for supper over there?” a voice called from across the river.

“Yankees,” Toby said, and then ducked as if he thought they’d shoot at the sound. There was laughter from across the river, and another voice called, “Any of you Rebs come from Hillsboro?”

“Yeah, and we are on our way to Washington.” Toby shouted back. He put his gun down and leaned on it, “Myself I hail from Big Sewell Mountain, What you want to know ’bout Hillsboro?”

The voice across the river shouted, “I am looking for my brother. His name’s Ben Freeman, You know him?”

Toby stepped forward in plain sight to say something funny, Ben stood up and fired across the river. There was a rapid volley of rifle fire, and Toby dived for the ground, his arms around his gun. Ben walked into the woods and sat down by Malachi’s fire. Malachi didn’t say anything, and after a minute Ben said, “I don’t think we should go talking to the enemy that away.”