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want you write a check, send it off, and before you know it, the Johnson Smith Company in Racine, Wisconsin, sends you what you need. Seebackoscopes. Gyroscopes. Mardi Gras masks. Orphan Annie dolls. Film clips from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Vanishing cards. Reappearing skeletons.”
    “All that good stuff.” Cardiff smiled.
    “All that good stuff.”
    They laughed quietly together.
    Cardiff exhaled. “So, this is a writers’ township.”
    “Thinking about staying?”
    “No, about leaving. ”
    Cardiff stopped and put his hand over his mouth as if he had said something he shouldn’t have said.
    “Now what does that mean?” Elias Culpepper almost started up from his chair.
    But before Cardiff could speak, a pale figure appeared on the lawn below the porch and started to climb the steps.
    Cardiff called her name.
    By the door the daughter of Elias Culpepper spoke. “When you’re ready, come upstairs.”
    When I’m ready!? Cardiff thought wildly. When I’m ready!
    The screen door shut.
    “You’ll need this,” said Elias Culpepper.
    He held out a last drink, which Cardiff took.

CHAPTER 18

    Again, the large bed was a bank of snow on a warm summer night. She lay on one side, looking up at the ceiling, and did not move. He sat on the far edge, saying nothing, and at last tilted over and lay his head on the pillow, and waited.
    Finally Nef said, “It seems to me you’ve spent a lot of time in the town graveyard since you arrived. Looking for what?”
    He scanned the empty ceiling and replied.
    “It seems to me you’ve been down at that train station where hardly any trains arrive. Why?”
    She did not turn, but said, “It seems both of us are looking for something but won’t or can’t say why or what.”
    “So it seems.”
    Another silence. Now, at last, she looked at him.
    “Which of us is going to confess?”
    “You go first.”
    She laughed quietly.
    “My truth is bigger and more incredible than yours.”
    He joined her laughter but shook his head. “Oh, no, my truth is more terrible.”
    She quickened and he felt her trembling.
    “Don’t frighten me.”
    “I don’t want to. But there it is. And if tell you, I’m afraid you’ll run and I won’t ever see you again.”
    “Ever?” murmured Nef.
    “Ever.”
    “Then,” she said, “tell me what you can, but don’t make me afraid.”
    But at that moment, far away in the night world, there was a single cry of a train, a locomotive, drawing near.
    “Did you hear that? Is that the train that comes to take you away?”
    There was a second cry of a whistle over the horizon.
    “No,” he said, “maybe it’s the train that comes, God I hope not, with terrible news.”
    Slowly she sat up on the edge of the bed, her eyes shut. “I have to know.”
    “No,” he said. “Don’t go. Let me.”
    “But first…,” she murmured.
    Her hand gently pulled him over to her side of the bed.

CHAPTER 19

    Sometime during the night, he sensed that he was once more alone.
    He woke in a panic, at dawn, thinking, I’ve missed the train. It’s come and gone. But, no—
    He heard the locomotive whistle shrieking across the sky, moaning like a funeral train as the sun rose over desert sands.
    Did he or did he not hear a bag, similar to his own, catapult from a not-stopping train to bang the station platform?
    Did he or did he not hear someone landing like a three-hundred-pound anvil on the platform boards?
    And then Cardiff knew. He let his head fall as if chopped. “Dear God, oh dear vengeful God!”

CHAPTER 20

    They stood on the platform of the empty station, Cardiff at one end, the tall man at the other.
    “James Edward McCoy?” Cardiff said.
    “Cardiff,” said McCoy, “is that you?”
    Both smiled false smiles.
    “What are you doing here?” said Cardiff.
    “You might have known I would follow,” said James Edward McCoy. “When you left town, I knew someone had died, and you’d gone to give him a proper burial. So I packed my bag.”
    “Why