Gardener thought about telling her-wanted to tell her, he realized, dismayed. Was that what Bobbi was for, then? Was Bobbi Anderson really no more than the wall he wailed to? He hesitated, wanting to tell her… and didn't. There would be time for that later.

Maybe.

“Later,” he said. “I want to know what happened here.”

“Breakfast first,” Anderson said, “and that's an order.”

Gard gave Bobbi most of the eggs and bacon, and Bobbi didn't waste time-she went to them like a woman who hasn't eaten well for a long time. Watching her eat, Gardener remembered a biography of Thomas Edison he had read when he was quite young-no more than ten or eleven. Edison had gone on wild work-jags in which idea had followed idea, invention had followed invention. During these spurts, he had ignored wife, children, baths, even food. If his wife hadn't brought him his meals on a tray, the man might literally have starved to death between the light bulb and the phonograph. There had been a picture of him, hands plunged into hair that was wildly awry-as if it had been actually trying to get at the brain beneath hair and skull, the brain which would not let him rest-and Gardener remembered thinking that the man looked quite insane.

And, he thought, touching the left side of his forehead, Edison had been subject to migraines. Migraines and deep depressions.

He saw no sign of depression in Bobbi, however. She gobbled eggs, ate seven or eight slices of bacon wrapped in a slice of toast slathered with oleo, and swallowed two large glasses of orange juice. When she had finished, she uttered a resounding belch.

“Gross, Bobbi.”

“In Portugal, a good belch is considered a compliment to the cook.”

“What do they do after a good lay? Fart?”

Anderson threw her head back and roared with laughter. The towel fell off her hair, and all at once Gard wanted to take her to bed, bag of bones or not.

Smiling a little, Gardener said: “Okay, it was good. Thanks. Some Sunday I'll make you some swell eggs Benedict. Now give.”

Anderson reached behind him and brought down a half-full package of Camels. She lit one and pushed the pack toward Gardener.

“No thanks. It's the only bad habit I ever succeeded in mostly giving up.”

But before Bobbi was done, Gardener had smoked four of them.

“You looked around,” Anderson said. “I remember telling you to do that-just barely -and I know you did. You look like I felt after I found the thing in the woods.”

“What thing?”

“If I told you now you'd think I was crazy. Later on I'll show you, but right now I think we'd better just talk. Tell me what you saw around the place. What changes.”

So Gardener ticked them off: the cellar improvements, the litter of projects, the weird little sun in the water heater. The strange job of customizing on the Tomcat's engine. He hesitated for a moment, thinking of the addition to the shifting diagram, and let that go. He supposed Bobbi knew he had seen it, anyway.

“And somewhere in the middle of all that,” he said, “you found time to write another book. A long one. I read the first thirty or forty pages while I was waiting for you to wake up, and I think it's good as well as long. The best novel you've ever written, probably… and you've written some good ones.”

Anderson was nodding, pleased. “Thank you. I think it is, too.” She pointed to the last slice of bacon on the platter. “You want that?”

“No. I

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

She took it and made it gone.

“How long did it take you to write it?”

“I'm not completely sure,” Anderson said. “Maybe three days. No more than a week, anyway. Did most of it in my sleep.”

Gard smiled.

“I'm not joking, you know,” Anderson said.

Gardener stopped smiling.

“My time sense is pretty fucked up,” she admitted. “I do know I wasn't working on it the 27th. That's the last day when time-sequential time-seemed completely clear to me. You got here last night, July 4th, and it was done. So… a week, max. But I really don't think it was more than three days.”

Gardener gaped. Anderson looked back calmly, wiping her fingers on a napkin. “Bobbi, that's impossible,” Gardener said finally.

“If you think so, you missed my typewriter.”

Gardener had glanced at Bobbi's old machine when he sat down, but that was all -his attention had been riveted immediately by the manuscript. He had seen the old black Underwood thousands of times. The manuscript, on the other hand, was new.

“If you'd looked closely, you would have seen the roll of computer paper on the wall behind it and another of those gadgets behind it. Egg crate, heavy-duty batteries, and all. What? These?”

She pushed the cigarettes across to Gardener, who took one.

“I don't know how it works, but then, I don't really know how any of them work -including the one that's running all the juice in this place.” She smiled at Gardener's expression. “I'm off the Central Maine Power tit, Gard. I had them interrupt service… that's how they put it, as if they know damned well you'll want it back before too long… let's see… four days ago. That I do remember.”

“Bobbi-”

“There's a gadget like the thing in the water heater and the one behind my typewriter in the junction box out back, but that one's the granddaddy of them all.” Anderson laughed-the laugh of a woman in the grip of pleasant reminiscences. “There's twenty or thirty D-cells in that one. I think Poley Andrews down at Cooder's market thinks I've gone nuts-I bought every battery he had in stock, and then I went to Augusta for more.

“Was that the day I got the dirt for the cellar?” She addressed this last to herself, frowning. Then her face cleared. “I think so, yeah. The Historic Battery Run of 1988, hit about seven different stores, came back with hundreds of batteries, and then I stopped in Albion and got a truckload of loam to sweeten the cellar. I'm almost positive I did both of those things the same day.”

The troubled frown resurfaced, and for a moment Gardener thought Bobbi looked scared and exhausted again-of course she was still exhausted. Exhaustion of the sort Gardener had seen last night went bone-deep. A single night's sleep, no matter how long and how deep, wouldn't erase it. And then there was this wild, hallucinatory talk-books written in her sleep; all the AC current in the house being run by D-cells, runs to Augusta on crazy errands

Except that the proof was here, all around him. He had seen it.

“-that one,” Anderson said, and laughed.

“What, Bobbi?”

“I said I had a devil of a job setting up the one that generates the juice here in the house, and out at the dig.”

“What dig? Is it the thing in the woods you want to show me?”

“Yes. Soon. Just give me a few more minutes.” Anderson's face again assumed that look of pleasure in telling, and Gardener suddenly thought it must be the expression on the faces of all those who have tales they don't just want to tell but tales they must tell-from the lecture-hall bore who was part of an Antarctic expedition in 1937 and who still has his fading slides to prove it, to Ishmael the Sailor-Man, late of the ill-fated Pequod, who finishes his tale with a sentence that seems a desperate cry only thinly and perfunctorily disguised as information: “Only I am left to tell you.” Was it desperation and madness that Gardener detected beneath Bobbi's cheerful, disjointed remembrances of Ten Wacky Days in Haven? Gardener thought so… knew so. Who was better equipped to see the signs? Whatever Bobbi had faced here while Gardener was reading poetry to overweight matrons and their bored husbands, it had nearly broken her mind.