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career?”
    “I tossed it around, but after all those
years in school—growing up in schools—I just wasn’t ready for another
classroom. I guess I might have eventually done it, but the bookkeeping thing
came up and I just rolled with the flow.”
    I thought of the isolation that had been
her childhood. Milo had talked about tough times strengthening her—a mugging of
sorts. But maybe it was nothing specific, just an accumulation of loneliness.
    “That’s it,” she said. “Now do you
understand my dream?”
    “Not in the least.”
    She looked at me and laughed. “Well,
that’s straight out.”
    “Better no answer than a wrong one.”
    “True, true.” Laughing some more, but her
hands were tense and restless and she tapped her feet.
    “I guess I’m ticked off,” she said.
    “About what?”
    “Him in my dreams. It’s an... invasion.
Why now?”
    “Maybe you’re ready, now, to deal with
your anger toward him.”
    “Maybe,” she said doubtfully.
    “That doesn’t feel right?”
    “I don’t know. I really don’t think I’m
angry at him. He’s too irrelevant to get angry at.”
    Anger had stiffened her voice. I said,
“The girl in the dream, how old is she?”
    “Nineteen or twenty, I guess.”
    “About your mother’s age when she married
him.”
    Her eyes widened. “So you think I’m
dreaming about his violation of Mother ? But Mother was blond and this
girl has dark hair.”
    “Dreams aren’t bound by reality.”
    She thought for a while. “I suppose it
could be that. Or something else symbolic—the young chicks he always chased—but
I really don’t think I’d dream about his girlfriends. Sorry.”
    “For what?”
    “I push you for interpretations and then
keep shooting them down.”
    “That’s okay,” I said. “It’s your dream.”
    “Yes—only I wish it wasn’t. Any idea when
I’ll get rid of it?”
    “I don’t know, Lucy. The more I know about
you, the better answer I can give you.”
    “Does that mean I have to keep talking
about my past?”
    “It would help, but don’t make yourself
uncomfortable.”
    “Do I need to talk about him ?”
    “Not until you’re ready.”
    “What if I’m never ready?”
    “That’s up to you.”
    “But you think it would be useful.”
    “He was in the dream, Lucy.”
    She started to crack a knuckle and stopped
herself.
    “This is getting tough,” she said. “Maybe
I should call the psychic buddies.”

CHAPTER 5
    After she was gone, I thought about the
dream.
    Somnambulism. Bedwetting.
    Fragmented sleep patterns were often
displayed as multiple symptoms—persistent nightmares, insomnia, even
narcolepsy. But the sudden onset of her symptoms implied a reaction to some kind
of stress: the trial material or something the trial had evoked.
    Her allusion to an incubus was
interesting.
    Sexual intrusion.
    Daddy abducting a maiden. Grinding noises.
    A Freudian would have loved it: unresolved
erotic feelings toward the abandoning parent coming back to haunt her.
    Feelings awakened because the trial had
battered her defenses.
    She was right about one thing: This father was different.
    And relevant.
    I drove down toward the city, taking the
coast highway to Sunset and heading east to the University campus.
    At the Research Library, I looked up M.
Bayard Lowell in the computer index. Page after page of citations beginning in
1939—the year he’d published his landmark first novel, The Morning Cry— and encompassing his other novels, collections of poems, and art exhibitions.
    Covering all of it would take a semester.
I decided to start with the time period that corresponded to Lucy’s dream,
roughly twenty-two years ago.
    The first reference was a book of poems
entitled Command: Shed the Light, published on New Year’s Day. The rest
were reviews. I climbed up to the stacks and began my refresher course in
American Lit.
    In the poetry shelves, I found the book, a
thin gray-jacketed volume published by one of the prestige New York