“Are you all right?” I asked her. “Did you go see a doctor?”

“A doctor?”

“A doctor,” I said urgently. “The dreams were a warning.”

“I know. They were trying to warn us about Broun’s heart attack, but we didn’t understand them. We were looking at all the wrong clues.”

“Broun isn’t going to have another heart attack, is he?”

She shook her head. “The dreams have stopped.”

“And you’re all right?”

She smiled at me, a sweet smile with no sadness in it. “I’m fine.”

In April, Broun was hospitalized again with chest pains. “I’ve been thinking about what caused Annie’s dreams,” he said, lying against the pillows. He was refusing to let the nurses near him for fear they might shave his beard, and he looked terrible, grubby and disreputable. “Do you remember Dreamtime?”

“The quacks in San Diego?”

“Yes,” he said. “Remember they had that theory that the dead sleep peacefully until something disturbs them, like Willie Lincoln being dug up, and then they start dreaming. Well, what if something like that happened with Lee? What if they moved his body and that’s what started him dreaming?”

“Lee’s body hasn’t been moved,” I said. “It’s still buried in the chapel at Lexington.”

“Maybe the dreams weren’t because of the angina. Maybe they started because his body was disturbed some way. Was his daughter Annie’s body moved?”

“No. She’s still buried in North Carolina where she died.”

He lay silently for a while, glaring at the door whenever a nurse passed, and then said, “They moved Lincoln’s body. First they moved it to Springfield on the funeral train, stopping at every damned one-horse town and whistle stop along the way.” He pushed himself up against the pillows, and the line on the EKG screen behind his head spiked suddenly. “And then there was that kidnap plot and the guard moved him out of the tomb and buried him in a passage of the Memorial Hall.”

“Annie didn’t have Lincoln’s dreams,” I said calmly, reasonably, watching the screen. “They were Lee’s dreams.”

“In 1901, they moved Lincoln back into the tomb again. He was moved four times altogether, not counting the funeral train.” The screen jerked in sharp, dangerous lines. “What if those Dreamtime quacks were right, and all that jostling woke him up?”

“They weren’t Lincoln’s dreams,” I said. “They were Lee’s.”

“Maybe,” he said, sitting up with a motion that sent the EKG lines to the top of the screen. “I want you to bring me some books.”

He asked for books the next three days, and by the end of the week he had half his library in his hospital room. “I’ve got it all worked out,” he said. He was able to sit up by then without setting off the EKG. “They were Lincoln’s dreams.”

He had it all worked out. Lincoln had been the one who had dreams, not Lee, and their dreams wouldn’t have been all that different. They would both have dreamed about Gettysburg and Appomattox. Lincoln had known about Special Order 191 before Lee did, and the cat didn’t have to be Tom Tita, did it? It could have been one of Lincoln’s kittens. Lincoln loved kittens. He had it all worked out.

“What if they were Lincoln’s dreams?” I said when I couldn’t take it anymore. “What would that prove?”

“Lincoln tried to save Willie’s pony from the burning stable. That’s what the house on fire really is, not Chancellorsville.”

“They weren’t Lincoln’s dreams, damn it,” I shouted. “They were Lee’s.”

“I know,” he said quietly, and the EKG line above his head went right oft the screen. “I know they’re not Lincoln’s dreams.”

“Then why did you do all this?”

“Because then she’d be all right. If they were warnings from Lincoln, they wouldn’t have been about apple orchards, they’d have been about boats. I thought if I could make them Lincoln’s dreams, then that would mean she was all right.”

“He’s in no shape to be upset,” Broun’s doctor said. He had yanked me out into the hall again and down to an empty room. The EKG had set off an alarm at the nurses’ station that brought everybody running.

“I know,” I said.

“You look as bad as he does,” he said. “How are you sleeping?”

“I’m not,” I said. If I slept I dreamed about Annie. She was standing on the porch of Arlington with her arms around my neck, crying, and I kept saying over and over, “I don’t want you to leave.”

“Would you like me to prescribe something for you? To help you sleep?”

“What did you have in mind? Thorazine?”

He didn’t get the joke. He pulled out a prescription pad. “Who’s your regular doctor?”

“I don’t have one. Do you want my family doctor? He’s in Connecticut.”

“I don’t like to prescribe without seeing a patient’s records.” He wrote busily on the prescription pad. “I’ll give you something mild for now and then wait till I have your records to put you on anything stronger. You don’t have any health problems I should know about, do you? Diabetes, heart condition?”

“No.” I told him my doctor’s name. “How long will it take to get the records?”

“Depends. If they’re computerized, we’ll have them in a few days. If not, it could take several weeks. Why? Are you having that much trouble sleeping?”

“No,” I said and pocketed the prescription without looking at it. But Annie had been having trouble sleeping. She had been having so much trouble sleeping that Richard had put her on Elavil right away. He hadn’t done an EKG. He had told me in that phone message that the EKG was just back from the lab, but EKGs didn’t have to go to the lab. Broun’s doctors read his as they came off the machine. He had said Annie’s records showed a functional heart murmur, but how could they when it took two weeks to a month to get the records? Annie had told me he put her on Elavil right away. Richard hadn’t done an EKG, and he hadn’t waited for the records from her family doctor. The Elavil had made the dreams worse, but Richard hadn’t taken her off the Elavil then. He had taken her off of it when her records came, when he saw she had a minor heart condition and he had had no business putting her on Elavil in the first place.

He had panicked and called me, only I wasn’t there. I was in West Virginia. What if I had been there? Would he have told me the truth, that he had been so frantic with worry that he had made a terrible mistake, that when he had seen the dreams and what they did to Annie, all he could think about was stopping them and how the hell could he wait for the family doctor’s records when they might take a month to get there? Or would he have used his Good Shrink voice on me even then?

Why had he put her on the Thorazine? To try to stop the dreams? Thorazine could have stopped a train, and it wasn’t contraindicated. (Now: Sudden death apparently due to cardiac arrest, has been reported, but there is not sufficient evidence to establish a relationship between such deaths and the administration of the drug.) Or did he give it to her to keep her from going back to the Institute, from telling Dr. Stone he’d given her a medicine that was explicitly contraindicated for heart patients? Why didn’t Longstreet send his troops up at Pickett’s Charge?

Lee never gave any indication after the war that he considered Longstreet’s actions at Gettysburg as anything more than “the error of a good soldier.” But after the battle, when Colonel Venable said bitterly, “I heard you direct General Longstreet to send Hood’s division up,” Lee had blamed him. And I blamed Richard. I’m trying to do my duty as a doctor. I have your best interests at heart.

I took the prescription out of my pocket and looked at it. Broun’s doctor had written a prescription for Elavil.

In July Broun finally let his doctor perform the bypass he had been resisting. He came through it fine, jubilant because nobody had shaved his beard off while he was under the anesthetic, but he didn’t show any interest in working on the Lincoln book.