“I know,” he said. “Dad was always interested in other people who’d had acromegaly, especially famous people. Edward the First, the pharaoh Akhenaten, but especially Lincoln. I think because late years he got to look like Lincoln. That happens, you know, with the acromegaly. They all get the big ears and nose and the splayed hands.”

He picked up each of the mare’s feet one by one, laid his hand flat against the sole of it, and then set the foot back down so the mare would put her weight on it. When he got to the right forefoot, the mare held the foot above the ground for a minute and then set it down carefully. Annie sat down on a bale of hay and watched him.

“What Broun’s really interested in is Lincoln’s dreams,” I said.

“The boat dream, huh?” He picked up the forefoot, looked at it, and set it down again. This time the mare put it firmly on the ground. “Dad was always fascinated by that.”

“Boat dream?”

“Yeah. Lincoln had this recurring dream.” He started on the mare’s feet again, picking them up, setting them down. When he let go of the right forefoot, the mare put it down and then picked it up again and held it just above the ground. “In the dream he was in a boat drifting toward a dark, hazy shore. He dreamed it before battles: Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg. He dreamed it the night before he was assassinated, too.”

I looked at Annie, worried about what effect all this talk about dreams might be having on her, but she looked more interested in the mare than in our conversation.

“Did your father ever mention having any dreams?”

He pulled a small curved knife out of his shirt pocket. “About boats? I don’t think so. Why?”

“Broun thinks Lincoln’s dreams may have had something to do with his acromegaly. Did he ever mention the acromegaly causing him to dream a lot?”

“That’s an interesting theory.” He thought a minute. “I don’t remember Dad ever mentioning any dreams. If you know anything about acromegaly, you know it produces headaches and depression. My father was a very unhappy man. He didn’t talk much, especially about his acromegaly. He told me as much about his symptoms as this mare does. The only time I ever heard him talk about it was in connection with famous people like Lincoln or Akhenaten. Toward the end it became almost an obsession with him.”

He picked up the right front foot and began scraping away at the bottom of the hoof with the knife. “Speaking of Akhenaten, the Egyptians were big on dreams,” he said. “They wrote them down, hired soothsayers to interpret them, believed their dreams could predict the future. There might be something …” He brushed away the shavings and peered at the bottom of the foot. “No, I doubt if there’d be anything on Akhenaten’s dreams. The next pharaoh who came along, Ramses, wiped out just about every trace of him. Knocked down all his statues, scratched out his name wherever he could find it, burned everything.”

“Then how do they know he had acromegaly?”

“They don’t,” he said. He poked at something on the hoof with the top of the knife and frowned. He let go of the foot and watched as the mare put her foot down. She put her weight on it with no hesitation. “It was just a pet theory of Dad’s. There are a couple of wall paintings and statues that Ramses missed. They show him as having elongated ears and a wide, flat nose, and what records there are comment on his height. One of the hieroglyphics also called him melancholy, which, like I said, is one of the symptoms of acromegaly.”

“Or of knowing the next pharaoh’s going to do his best to make everybody forget you,” I said.

He grinned. “Right. It’s all just a game, guessing what diseases people back in history had. Or guessing what diseases people have now, for that matter.” He took hold of the mare’s bridle and began walking her up and down past us, watching carefully to see which foot she favored.

“With animals it’s really a guessing game. They can’t tell you where it hurts or what they think they have. Like this mare here,” he said, still parading her in a slow circle. “She’s got a sore foot, probably a bruised sole or a prick from a horseshoe nail, but it could be laminitis or corns or something else altogether. I can’t find the infection, so I can’t tell. The only sure way of finding out is to let her alone till it’s gotten really serious. Then the infection will be easy to find—the hoof will be hot to the touch, she won’t be able to put any weight on it, and she’ll have developed a lot of other symptoms. Only problem is, by then it could be too late to do her any good, especially if she’s picked up a nail. I need to find it now.”

“What if you can’t find it?” Annie said.

“Then I’ll give her a tetanus shot and wait till I can, but I’ll find it. The clues to what’s going on are there. You just have to look a little harder to find them at this stage.” He stopped the mare and tied her bridle securely to a rail and picked up the right front foot again. “With animals you either have too many symptoms or not enough, and one’s as bad as the other. I had a bay in here last week had every symptom in the book and then some. Had to sort through a dozen diseases before I got the right one. But I love a good mystery, don’t you?”

He scraped away at the caked dirt on the hoof, turning the knife blade on edge to get in close to the shoe. We weren’t getting anywhere with all this, but the barn was warm and smelled of dry hay, and Annie looked as if she was thinking about the mare’s sore foot and not about that other horse with its legs shot off. Dr. Barton dug in with the knife, and the mare began to shake her head as if telling him to stop. Annie stood up and went over to her, taking hold of the bridle just under the mare’s chin, and stroking her neck.

“Your father never talked about his dreams, not even in connection with Lincoln’s boat dream?”

“Not to me. He moved to Georgia last year when he started having heart problems. Did you know high blood pressure and heart disease were connected to acromegaly?”

“No, I didn’t.”

He stopped scraping and put the horse’s foot down. “Dad might have told my sister his dreams. She was always his favorite, and he used to talk to her more than to the rest of us. Would you like me to call her?”

“I’d appreciate it if you would,” I said, and wrote out our phone number at the inn. “Ask her if he had any dreams. They don’t have to be about boats.”

“Boats,” he said thoughtfully, folding up the piece of paper and sticking it in his pocket. The mare had tangled her mane in the bridle when she tossed her head. Annie pulled the forelock out from under it, smoothed it, and patted the mare’s forehead. “The Egyptians dreamed a lot about boats. Symbol of the passage to the world of the dead.”

We left the vet to the mystery of the sore foot and drove back to the inn. We had lunch at a McDonald’s on the way back into town, and when we got back to the inn, Annie took a nap.

I called the answering machine. There was a jumble of messages from people who hadn’t figured out Broun was gone yet, and Richard had left another message on the machine.

“I’ve been looking at the results of Annie’s blood tests, and I think I’ve found the key to what’s happening here,” he said in his Good Shrink voice. “Her L-tryptophan levels are indicative of cryptomnesia.” He waited long enough for me to ask what cryptomnesia was. “It occurs when the patient presents early memories as reality, something the patient saw or read in a book and the conscious mind has forgotten. The subconscious mind then reintegrates the material as reality. Bridey Murphy. Her memories of an earlier life in Ireland were stories her nurse had told her in a preverbal stage, and under hypnosis she presented them as a previous life.”

“Annie wasn’t hypnotized,” I said. “She was drugged.”

“She obviously had preverbal contact with someone who told her stories about the Civil War, or there’s a possibility of more recent reading of Civil War novels. Maybe she read one of Broun’s books. That would account for her immediate neurotic attachment to you. She’s experiencing schizophrenic dissociation, and you represent Broun.”