“How about drugging patients? Is that a common phenomenon in neurotic psychiatrists?”

Annie was standing in the doorway in her nightgown. She looked frightened. “Who were you talking to, Jeff? Richard?”

“I wasn’t talking to anybody,” I said, and held the phone out to her so she could listen. “It’s the answering machine. Richard doesn’t know where we are, so he’s trying to get you back this way, by remote psychoanalysis. You’ll be glad to know I’m the one who’s crazy today.” I put the phone back up to my ear. “This may take a while. Broun’s answering machine can hold three hours of messages. Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go have breakfast. We’ve got to go see the vet at eleven.”

She nodded and disappeared into the other room. I listened to the rest of Richard’s harangue, made sure Broun hadn’t called in another message, and erased everything on the machine. Broun usually didn’t call in to pick up his messages when he was out of town. He left messages for me as to where he could be reached and then let me get back to him with a list of the things that couldn’t wait. I didn’t think he’d pick up his messages this trip, especially when he thought I was there to do it, but I thought I’d better call the machine once a day to collect them and erase the tape just in case. I didn’t want Broun hearing Richard’s ravings.

Annie came and stood in the doorway again. “You were friends, weren’t you?” she said. “Before all this?”

“We were roommates. I guess we were friends, but we were headed in different directions all along.” I picked up my jacket. “He thought I should study something useful instead of history.”

“I’m sorry,” Annie said.

“About what? My studying history?” I grinned at her. “It hasn’t turned out to be all that useless.”

We went over to the coffee shop. It was crowded with people who looked like they were on their way to church. We had a different waitress from the one who had drenched us in coffee the night before, a pretty redhead not much older than Annie, but she came over immediately with the coffeepot, too. “You two must be tourists,” she said when she saw the map of Virginia I’d brought along. She pulled two menus out from under her arm and handed them to us. “Have you been out to the battlefield?”

“No,” Annie said. “We haven’t been out there yet.”

“Well, you’ve got to go. It’s the only thing Fredericksburg’s famous for.” She set the coffeepot down and fished an order pad out of her pocket. “The National Park Service has it fixed up real nice. They’ve got an electric map and everything. Now, what’ll you have? Eggs? Hotcakes?”

The waitress took our order, gave our still-full cups what she called a warmup, and went off to the kitchen.

“Did you say the appointment with the vet was at eleven?” Annie said.

“Yeah, but it’s out of town so we’d better allow a little time to find it. You didn’t have any other dreams last night, did you?”

She shook her head.

“Was the dream different from the other dreams? I mean, I know it was about Fredericksburg, but was it the same kind of dream as the others?”

She thought about it a minute. “It was clearer than the other dreams. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but they make more sense.” She shook her head again. “That’s not it, exactly. I still don’t have any idea where I am or what the things in the dream are until you tell me afterward, but it’s as if I’m getting closer to understanding the dreams.”

“You mean what’s causing them?”

“I don’t know. It’s … I can’t explain it. They’re getting clearer.” And more frightening, I thought, watching her face. Whatever it is that she thinks she’s starting to understand is terrifying her.

The waitress brought our breakfast and more coffee. I waited till Annie was done with her eggs and then asked her, “When do you usually have the dreams? You said last night you usually don’t have them after midnight.”

“Between nine and midnight. That was why Richard was so worried that night at the reception, because it was after nine. I think he thought I might fall asleep on the loveseat or something, but I don’t have narcolepsy. I just have bad dreams.”

“You said the Thorazine kept you from dreaming that afternoon after I took you home from Arlington. Do you have the dreams during the day, too?”

“When the dreams first got bad I thought maybe if I could stay awake past midnight, the dreams would leave me alone, and it worked for a while, but then I started dreaming as soon as I went to sleep, so then I tried staying up all night and sleeping during the day, but that didn’t work either.”

“And that was two weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“And you were on the Elavil then?”

“Yes. I’d been on it for a month and a half.”

“Did Richard think that was odd, that you were dreaming? Antidepressants are supposed to repress the dream cycle. Did Richard say anything about that?”

“He was a little worried at first, but he said it took the Elavil a while to work and my sleep record was better. I wasn’t waking up so often, and I was getting a lot more rest.”

“What about when the dreams got worse… clearer?”

“He said that was a good sign, that whatever was causing the dreams was trying to break through, that my subconscious was determined to make itself heard.”

I had assumed that he had taken her off the Elavil because it wasn’t working or was even making the dreams worse. If that wasn’t the reason, what was? According to Annie, he hadn’t even been worried about the dreams, but something had happened to frighten him so badly that he had given her Thorazine to try to stop them.

The waitress made a frontal assault on our coffee cups again, and Annie and I both tried unsuccessfully to hold her off. “Maybe we’d better retreat before she drowns us in this stuff.” I looked at my watch. “It’s ten-fifteen. Why don’t we go ahead and see if we can find this Dr. Barton?”

“All right,” Annie said. She folded her napkin and laid it on the table.

“Were you on anything before you came to the Institute? You said your doctor sent you to the Institute. Did he have you on any sedatives or anything?”

We stood up. “Phénobarbital,” she said, reaching for her coat.

“Did Richard know that?”

“Yes, he was upset about it. He said that nobody used barbiturates anymore, certainly not in cases of pleisomnia, that my treatment had been all wrong.”

“You didn’t keep taking the phenobarbital, did you?”

“No.”

I handed Annie the map and got the directions the vet’s wife had given me out of my wallet. South of town, she had said, past Hazel Run on the Massaponax road. A house with a porch.

All the houses had porches, and we meandered along at least three roads marked Massaponax before we found it. Dr. Barton was back from rounds but just barely and he still had a few animals to look at, his wife told us. She was much younger than she had sounded on the phone, not much older than Annie. She told us we were welcome to go around back to the stable and talk to him there.

The vet was young, too, with a thin, boyish mustache, and he obviously had never had acromegaly. He was only about five foot eight. He was wearing a pocketed blue shirt, jeans, and a pair of high boots that made him look like a Union army officer.

“What can I do for you?” he said, looking at a sorrel mare with a bad foot.

“I doubt if you can do anything for me,” I said. “I’ve made a mistake. I was looking for a Dr. Barton who has acromegaly.”

“That was my father,” he said, picking up the mare’s left hind foot. “I told Mary I bet that was who you wanted to see when she told me you’d mentioned Dr. Stone’s name.” He put the foot down. “Dad died of a heart attack this fall. What did you want to talk to him about?”

“I work for Thomas Broun.” The vet nodded as if he’d heard of him. “He’s doing a book on Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had acromegaly.”