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this on you, you don’t even know me. It happened, it’s over, and I need to accept what happened. Forget what I said.”
    But as with anything you are ordered not to think about, I couldn’t put it out of my mind.

 
    C HAPTER E IGHT
    M ONDAY NIGHTS WERE reserved for talking to my children. Although I received daily e-mails from Hannah, they were usually photographs of kittens in cute clothes looking mutinous or affirmations about the power of women friends. I was instructed to send those to my twelve best friends, but I deleted them instead. Jason in Santa Fe didn’t have a computer, and Jane’s Facebook updates were mostly photographs of her with friends in upscale bars. It was only by talking to them directly that I could find out how their lives were going.
    I didn’t text or tweet.
    I have to admit there have been a few Monday nights when I was relieved to reach Jason’s answering machine instead of Jason himself. He was always desperate for money, more money than I could give him. Since he had dropped out of Pratt Institute and moved to Santa Fe, his quest for the meaning of life hadn’t taught him the secret of how to attract cash. He could expect no financial help from Colin, who was still furious with him.
    “He won’t find the meaning of life working in a tortilla factory,” Colin fumed. “That’s what college is for.”
    This was no doubt true, but unlike his sisters, Jason had never cracked the secret of succeeding in school either. He had asked incisive questions in class, but by the time the answer came he was thinking about something else.
    Tonight though there was a lot of “Mom, guess what!?”
    “I’ve got a job building an adobe house.” (Jason.)
    “You won’t believe who I met at this sports club!” (Jane.)
    “Dr. Jonas thinks I’ve got a good chance of getting into the vet school.” (Hannah.)
    Because I had been so young when the children were born or maybe because there had been so many so soon, I had never worked out what they should be when they grew up. I wanted them to be good people and happy with their lives, but I had no blueprints for them. On the other hand, maybe I hadn’t needed to decide their life paths. Colin had plans for all of us.
    Buoyed by their successes tonight, I stayed up filling book orders until way past midnight.
    T UESDAY MORNING Istopped at Qwikjava and bought an insulated cup and a chicken wrap. As intriguing as the Eriksons were, I wasn’t planning to eat with them every day.
    The room was still stuffy when I unlocked the padlock and stepped inside, and I almost left the door open to air the studio out. But what if Eve Erikson decided to go for a stroll around the property, and found the door ajar? It would be a quick end to my book assessing career. I shut myself in once more.
    Today the studio felt like less of a shrine. I was anxious to get to the books illustrated by Nate Erikson’s forerunners, N. C. Wyeth, Rockwell Kent, and Howard Pyle, and see if any had been signed. But that was like eating dessert first. I made myself go upstairs and bring down the Complete Sherlock Holmes set that Nate had illustrated.
    Considering that Conan Doyle’s stories were dominated by the same two men, Nate’s illustrations were as dramatic and varied as I had hoped. I especially admired the shadow of the ape outside the window terrifying the young woman in her bed, and the lurid settings of the opium dens. What an imagination Nate had had! When I checked the valuation, I discovered that, as a complete set, the Holmes books were worth several thousand dollars.
    Still, it became tedious examining identical books in German, Swedish, Japanese, and a dozen other languages, checking each one for variations. By noon I was sick of the hound who hadn’t bothered to bark in the night.
    And then I came across a five-by-seven photograph, stuck in a copy of Der Hund von Baskerville . The picture showed the same fair-haired man as in the portrait in the dining room, but