[NEXT: Drake to 1Zaiford. Stops on the way at vegetable stand to talk to the guy who runs it, old source, needs a good & colorful name. Straw hat. Disneyworld tee-shirt. They talk about Shackleford.]

I turned the roller until the IBM spat this page out, stuck it on top of the manuscript, and jotted a final note to myself: “Call Ted Rosencrief about Raiford.” Rosencriefwas a retired Navy man who lived in Derry. I had employed him as a research assistant on several books, using him on one project to find out how paper was made, what the migratory habits of certain common birds were for another, a little bit about the architecture of pyramid burial rooms for a third. And it’s always “a little bit” I want, never “the whole damn thing.” As a writer, my motto has always been don’t confuse me with the facts. The Arthur Hailey type of fiction is beyond me—I can’t read it, let alone write it. I want to know just enough so I can lie colorfully. Rosie knew that, and we had always worked well together.

This time I needed to know a little bit about Florida’s Raiford Prison, and what the deathhouse down there is really like. I also needed a little bit on the psychology of serial killers. I thought Rosie would probably be glad to hear from me… almost as glad as I was to finally have something to call him about.

I picked up the eight double-spaced pages I had written and fanned through them, still amazed at their existence. Had an old IBM typewriter and a Courier type-ball been the secret all along? That was certainly how it seemed.

What had come out was also amazing. I’d had ideas during my four-year sabbatical; there had been no writer’s block in that regard. One had been really great, the sort of thing which certainly would have become a novel if I’d still been able to write novels. Half a dozen to a dozen were of the sort I’d classify “pretty good,” meaning they’d do in a pinch… or if they happened to unexpectedly grow tall and mysterious overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk. Sometimes they do. Most were glimmers, little “what-ifs” that came and went like shooting stars while I was driving or walking or just lying in bed at night and waiting to go to sleep.

The Red-Shirt &lan was a what-if. One day I saw a man in a bright red shirt washing the show windows of the JCPENNEY store in Derry—this was not long before Penney’s moved out to the mall. A young man and woman walked under his ladder… very bad luck, according to the old superstition. These two didn’t know where they were walking, though—they were holding hands, drinking deeply of each other’s eyes, as completely in love as any two twenty-year-olds in the history of the world. The man was tall, and as I watched, the top of his head came within an ace of clipping the window-washer’s feet. If that had happened, the whole works might have gone over.

The entire incident was history in five seconds. Writing The Red-Shirt &lan took five months. Except in truth, the entire book was done in a what-if second. I imagined a collision instead of a near-miss.

Everything else followed from there. The writing was just secretarial.

The idea I was currently working on wasn’t one of Mike’s Really Great Ideas (Jo’s voice carefully made the capitals), but it wasn’t a what-if, either. Nor was it much like my old gothic suspense yarns; V. C. Andrews with a prick was nowhere in sight this time. But it felt solid, like the real thing, and this morning it had come out as naturally as a breath.

Andy Drake was a private investigator in Key Largo. He was forty years old, divorced, the father of a three-year-old girl. At the open he was in the Key West home of a woman named Regina Whiting. Mrs. Whiting also had a little girl, hers five years old. Mrs. Whiting was married to an extremely rich developer who did not know what Andy Drake knew: that until 1992, Regina Taylor Whiting had been Tiffany Taylor, a high-priced Miami call-girl.

That much I had written before the phone started ringing. Here is what I knew beyond that point, the secretarial work I’d do over the next several weeks, assuming that my marvellously recovered ability to work held up:

One day when Karen Whiting was three, the phone had rung while she and her mother were sitting in the patio hot tub. Regina thought of asking the yard-guy to answer it, then decided to get it herself-their regular man was out with the flu, and she didn’t feel comfortable about asking a stranger for a favor. Cautioning her daughter to sit still, Regina hopped out to answer the phone. When Karen put up a hand to keep from being splashed as her mother left the tub, she dropped the doll she had been bathing. When she bent to pick it up, her hair became caught in one of the hot tub’s powerful intakes. (It was reading of a fatal acci dent like this that had originally kicked the story off in my mind two or three years before.)

The yard-man, some no-name in a khaki shirt sent over by a day-labor outfit, saw what was happening. He raced across the lawn, dove headfirst into the tub, and yanked the child from the bottom, leaving hair and a good chunk of scalp clogging the jet when he did. He’d give her artificial respiration until she began to breathe again. (This would be a wonderful, suspenseful scene, and I couldn’t wait to write it.) He would refuse all of the hysterical, relieved mother’s offers of recompense, although he’d finally give her an address so that her husband could talk to him. Only both the address and his name, John Sanborn, would turn out to be a fake.

Two years later the ex-hooker with the respectable second life sees the man who saved her child on the front page of the Miami paper. His name is given as John Shackleford and he has been arrested for the rape-murder of a nine-year-old girl. And, the article goes on, he is suspected in over forty other murders, many of the victims children.

“Have you caught Baseball Cap?” one of the reporters would yell at the press conference. “Is John Shackleford Baseball Cap?”

“Well,” I said,going downstairs, “they sure think he is.”

I could hear too many boats out on the lake this afternoon to make nude bathing an option. I pulled on my suit, slung a towel over my shoulders, and started down the path—the one which had been lined with glowing paper lanterns in my dream—to wash off the sweat of my nightmares and my unexpected morning’s labors.

There are twenty-three railroad-tie steps between Sara and the lake. I had gone down only four or five before the enormity of what had just happened hit me. My mouth began to tremble. The colors of the trees and the sky mixed together as my eyes teared up. A sound began to come out of me—a kind of muffled groaning. The strength ran out of my legs and I sat down hard on a railroad tie. For a moment I thought it was over, mostly just a false alarm, and then I began to cry. I stuffed one end of the towel in my mouth during the worst of it, afraid that if the boaters on the lake heard the sounds coming out of me, they’d think someone up here was being murdered.

I cried in grief for the empty years I had spent without Jo, without friends, and without my work. I cried in gratitude because those work-less years seemed to be over. It was too early to tell for sure—one swallow doesn’t make a summer and eight pages of hard copy don’t make a career resuscitation—but I thought it really might be so.

And I cried out of fear, as well, as we do when some awful experience is finally over or when some terrible accident has been narrowly averted. I cried because I suddenly realized that I had been walking a white line ever since Jo died, walking straight down the middle of the road. By some miracle, I had been carried out of harm’s way. I had no idea who had done the carrying, but that was all right—it was a question that could wait for another day.

I cried it all out of me. Then I went on down to the lake and waded in.