She went back to bed. I put the chain on the door and moved the chair over next to it, balanced the book on the arm. I corrected galleys for a while, read Freeman for a while, napped for a while, but I couldn’t sleep in spite of the fact that I had had maybe three hours sleep in the last two nights. It was a good thing.

Annie got out of bed, put on her robe, and tied the belt, all so calmly I thought she was awake. She pushed the chair out of the way. The book thumped onto the carpeted floor, making less noise than I thought it should. She reached for the chain.

“Where are you going, Annie?” I said quietly.

“My fault,” she said. She unfastened the chain.

“It’s not your fault. Let’s go back to bed.” I hooked the chain and led her carefully back to bed, my hand barely touching her arm. She didn’t resist at all. She stopped next to the bed and took off her robe.

“What happened to them?” she asked.

The chicken? Tom Tita? Or all those yellow-haired boys?

“We’ll find them,” I said. She got into bed and lay down. I covered her up. Fifteen minutes later we went through the whole thing again. After I had her back in bed, I wedged the chair under the doorknob and waited.

It took half an hour that time, and then she stood up again, put her robe on, tied the belt, and tried to move the chair. It wouldn’t budge. She turned and looked at me. “What happened to them?” she said angrily, as if I had hidden them from her.

“We’ll find them,” I said, and started back to the bed, my hand lightly on her arm, but halfway there she stopped and took two steps toward the windows.

“My fault,” she said softly. “My fault.”

We were at Gettysburg again, in the woods that were like an oven, watching the soldiers struggle back from Pickett’s Charge.

“My fault,” she whispered, took a few faltering steps forward, and sank down on her knees, her face in her hands.

“What is it, Annie?” I said, squatting beside her. “Is it Gettysburg? Is it Pickett’s Charge?”

She took her hands away from her face and sat back on her heels, staring blindly at whatever it was.

“Can you wake up, Annie? Can you tell me what you’re dreaming?”

She stretched her hand out toward something on the floor in front of her and then drew it back. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

She knelt there for over an hour, me squatting beside her until my legs cramped and I had to switch positions, talking to her, trying to wake her up, trying to get her back to bed. In the end I picked her up and carried her, placing her arms around my neck so she wouldn’t fall back, unfastening them when I had her in bed.

“What happened to them?!’ she asked when I covered her up.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll find out. I promise.”

Five minutes later she stood up again, put on her robe, and went over to the door.

“Annie, you’ve got to wake up,” I said tiredly.

She stopped pushing on the chair, straightened up, looked at the door, at me. “Did I do it again? Did I go outside?”

“You were trying your darnedest to,” I said. “Where were you? Gettysburg?”

“No,” she said, sitting down in the chair. “I was at Arlington again. It had snowed, like in the first dream, and I was looking for the cat. He was out under the apple tree, and I went out to get him, and I stepped on something. It was a Union soldier. He was lying face-down, with his rifle underneath him, and his name pinned to his sleeve.”

She was clutching the tie belt of her robe the way she had clutched the African violet in Broun’s solarium that first night. “I bent down to unpin the paper, but when I did, it wasn’t a blue uniform sleeve, it was white. And then I saw it wasn’t a dead soldier, it was a girl in a white nightgown, asleep under the apple tree.”

She didn’t ask me where it was or what the dream meant. She sat for a while in the chair, looking toward the middle of the room as if she could still see the apple tree and the girl asleep under it.

“I’m sorry I was sleepwalking again, Jeff,” she said. “Maybe you should tie me to the bed.” She took off her robe and lay down, her arms stiffly at her sides, as if she were willing herself not to walk in her sleep.

She lay that way the rest of the night. I didn’t know if she was asleep. She didn’t move when I picked up Freeman from where it had fallen on the floor and went into my room to get the other three volumes, when I locked the connecting door to my room and pulled the desk across it, or when I moved the lamp over by the green chair so I could read by its light.

There weren’t very many index references to Annie Lee, in spite of her having been Lee’s favorite daughter. I looked up the last one first. “I have always promised myself to go, and I think if I am to accomplish it, I have no time to lose,” he had written his son Rooney in 1870. “I wish to witness Annie’s quiet sleep.” She had died during the war at White Sulphur Springs, North Carolina. She was twenty-three years old.

“He was a good man,” Annie had said. His soldiers loved him, his children loved him, and he had had to sacrifice them all to the war, even his favorite daughter. Annie Lee had died of a fever, but she was as much a casualty of the Civil War as any soldier, dying young and far away from home. At least Lee had had the comfort of knowing where she was buried. He had gone to visit her grave in 1870. “I wish to witness Annie’s quiet sleep.”

Poor man. When he had gotten the letter of her death, he had not shown any outward emotion. He had read the letter and then gone on answering his official correspondence with his aide. But when the aide had come back into the tent a few minutes later, he found Lee weeping.

It was four o’clock, one in California. I called Broun at the Westgate in San Diego, at the L.A. number. I called directory assistance and got the number for Dreamtime. There was no answer anywhere.

Just before dawn, Annie got out of bed and put on her blue robe. I put out a restraining hand, afraid she was sleepwalking again. She went over to the window. “Did you find out what the dream meant?” she asked.

I told her about Annie Lee. “She died in 1862,” I said. “Right before Fredericksburg.”

“Willie Lincoln died in 1862. He was Lincoln’s favorite son,” she said, hugging her arms to herself. “What did she die of?”

“I don’t know. A fever of some kind.”

“Poor man,” she said, and I wondered which man she meant, or if she would know if I asked her.

We spent the morning trying to sleep, gave up, and went to see the last tourist attraction in town, Hugh Mercer’s apothecary shop. We looked at silverplated pills and brown glass laudanum bottles and handwritten prescriptions for curing fevers.

We spent the rest of the day in the library. Annie took notes on Lincoln. I read Lee’s letters and tried to find out what Annie had died from. Nobody seemed to know. I found the chicken, though. Its name was little Hen. She had walked uninvited into Lee’s tent one day, and Lee had kept her for over a year. She laid an egg under Lee’s camp cot every day and sat on Traveller’s back, which delighted the soldiers.

We looked for the cat after dinner, but it was nowhere to be found. The neat pile of chicken scraps Annie had left for it was still on the step. “It’s probably holed up someplace warm,” I said. “It’s supposed to turn cold tomorrow.” We went back to the room, and I barricaded the doors, as if I thought I could somehow keep the dreams out.

I needn’t have bothered. Annie didn’t sleepwalk. She lay quietly, and watching her I thought the dreams must not be as bad, though when she told me about them, they were worse than ever.

Her house was on fire and a rider handed her a message which she tried to open with one hand. The message was wrapped around three cigars, and she couldn’t open it because her hands were bandaged. She handed it to the redheaded waitress and she couldn’t open it either, there was something wrong with her arm, and it wasn’t the waitress, it was a girl in a white nightgown and the message wasn’t wrapped around cigars, it was a letter, and Annie was afraid to read it.