“He’s buried in Springfield. In the Lincoln tomb.”

“Not where he’s buried now. During the Civil War. His body wasn’t sent back to Springfield until 1865, when Lincoln was assassinated. Willie died in 1862. I want to know where he was buried for those three years.”

I had no idea what Willie Lincoln had to do with Lincoln’s assassination dream, but I was too tired to ask. “You aren’t still having the reception, are you?” I said, hoping against hope that he would say they weren’t. “The roads are terrible.”

“No, it’s still on.” Broun looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go get dressed. Those damned reporters always come early.” I must have looked like I felt, because he said, “The battle won’t be joined till eight o’clock, and I’ll take care of the preliminary skirmishes. Why don’t you go have a nap?”

“I think I’ll take you up on that,” I said, and heaved myself up out of the chair.

“Oh, would you do one favor for me first?” Broun said. “Would you call Richard Madison and make sure he’s coming tonight? His girlfriend said they’d be here, but I’d like you to call and make sure.”

Lincoln’s dreams and Willie Lincoln’s body and now my old college roommate. I gave up even trying to look like I knew what he was talking about.

“He called while you were gone,” Broun said, scratching at the stubble. “Said he had to get in touch with you right away. I told him I didn’t have a number for you but you’d be calling in and could I give you some kind of message, but he just said to tell you to call him, and then when you called I didn’t have a chance to pass the message on, so I called him to tell him you’d be back today.”

There had to be a connection here somewhere. “You invited him to the reception?” I asked.

“I invited the girlfriend to the reception. Richard wasn’t there. The girl said he was at the Sleep Institute, and I asked her what he did there, and she said, ‘He tells people what their dreams mean,’ and after I hung up I got to thinking about Lincoln’s dreams and wondering what a psychiatrist would say they meant, so I called her back and invited them to the reception so I could ask him. But since I never talked to Richard and since he wanted you to call him, I think it would be a good idea for you to call and make sure they’re coming. And then you’d better go lie down, son. You look like you’re about to fall over.”

He went out. I stood in front of the fire for a minute, wondering why Richard had called me. We’d been good friends when we were roommates at Duke, but we’d hardly seen each other in the six years since we graduated. He’d gone to New York to do his internship and then come back to D.C. for his residency at the Sleep Institute, which meant he was too busy to see anybody. He’d called me exactly once in the last year, and then it was to make me a job offer. One of his patients, a Pentagon big-wig, was doing a study on the long-term effects of the Vietnam war and needed a researcher.

“Not interested,” I’d said. “I haven’t figured out the long-term effects of the Civil War yet.”

“This would be a job where you could do something important instead of wasting your time looking up obscure facts nobody cares anything about for some hack writer,” he’d said.

I had just spent that whole day trying to find out why General Longstreet was wearing a carpet slipper at Antietam. He’d had a blistered heel, a tact that Richard would most certainly put in the category of “facts nobody cares anything about.” Longstreet had probably cared, though, since he was trying to run a war, and so did Broun, which was why I worked for him, but I hadn’t been about to try to explain that to Richard.

“If this Pentagon job is so great, how come the guy’s a patient of yours?” I’d said instead.

“He has a sleep disorder.”

“Well, I sleep great nights,” I’d said. “Tell him thanks but no thanks.” I wondered if he was calling now with another job offer. Broun had said Richard wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to talk to me about, which meant it probably was, and I was in no shape to listen to it.

I took a hot shower instead and then tried for a nap, but I found myself still thinking about Richard and decided to call him and get it over with. I went back into Broun’s study to use the phone. I thought maybe the girlfriend Broun had talked to would answer, but she didn’t. Richard did, and he didn’t have any job offers.

“Where in the hell have you been? I tried to call you,” he said.

“I was in West Virginia,” I said. “Seeing a man about a horse. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Nothing. It’s too late, anyway. Broun said he’d have you call me,” he said almost accusingly. Why was I constantly finding myself in conversations I couldn’t make heads or tails of?

“I’m sorry I didn’t call. I just got home. But listen, whatever it was, we can talk about it tonight at the reception.”

There was dead silence on the other end.

“You are coming, aren’t you?” I said. “Broun’s really anxious to talk to you about Lincoln’s dreams.”

“I can’t come,” he said. “It’s out of the question. I have a patient I—”

“We’re closer to the Sleep Institute than your apartment is. You can give the Institute Broun’s number, and they can call you here if there’s an emergency. I’d really like to see you, and I want to meet this new girlfriend of yours.”

Another dead silence. He said finally, “I don’t think Annie should—”

“Come with you? Of course she should. I’ll take good care of her while you talk to Broun. I’ll tell her all about your wild undergraduate days at Duke.”

“No. Tell your boss I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything to tell him about Lincoln’s dreams that he’d want to hear.”

Somewhere along in there I started to ache all over. “Then tell him that. Look,” I said, “you don’t have to come for the whole thing. The reception starts at eight. You can talk to Broun and still have this Annie person home in bed by nine watching her rapid eye movements or whatever it is you psychiatrists do. Please. If you don’t come, Broun’ll send me to Indiana in this blizzard to look up nightmares Lincoln had as a kid. Come on, for me, your old roommate.”

“I can’t stay after nine.”

“No problem,” I said. I gave him Broun’s address and hung up before he could say no, and then just sat there in front of the fire. Broun’s cat jumped on my lap and I sat there petting it, thinking I should get up and go lie down.

Broun woke me up. “How long was I asleep?” I said, rubbing my hands over my face to try and wake up. However long it had been, the aches were worse than ever.

“It’s six-thirty,” Broun said. He had changed into a dinner jacket with a pleated shirt and string tie. He still hadn’t shaved. Maybe he was trying to grow a beard. If he was, it was a terrible idea. The grayish black stubble seemed to take all the color out of his face. He looked sharp and disreputable, like an unscrupulous horsetrader. “I wouldn’t have wakened you, but I wanted you to take a look at this.” He thrust a sheaf of typewritten pages into my hand.

“What’s this?” I said. “Willie Lincoln?”

He poked at the fire, which had died down to almost nothing while I was asleep. “It’s that first scene, the one I was worried about. I just couldn’t see Ben signing up for no reason at all, so I rewrote it.”

“Do McLaws and Herndon know about this?” Broun’s cat jumped off my lap and started batting at the poker.

“I’m calling it in to them tomorrow, but I wanted you to look at it first. Ben had to have some motivation for enlisting.”

“Why? What about later in the book when he falls in love with Nelly? He doesn’t have any motivation for that. She gives him one spoonful of laudanum, and bang, he’s ready to do anything for her.”

The cat wrapped a paw firmly around the poker, but Broun didn’t notice. He stared into the fire. “It was the war. People did things like that during the war, fell in love, sacrificed themselves—”