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it.
    He recognized the sonnet from the first line – it was the rude sonnet to her sister … the sister who, he recalled, had become Fleming’s literary executor after Fleming’s suicide. Ironic.
    He read the first eight lines of the sonnet, his gaze only bouncing over the lines since he had read it many times before:
    To My Sister
    Rebecca, if your mirror were to show
My face to you instead of yours, I wonder
    If you would notice right away, or know
The vain pretense you’ve chosen to live under.
If ever phone or doorbell rang, and then
I heard your voice conversing, what you’d say
Would be what I have said, recalled again,
And I might sit in silence through the day.
    Then he frowned and took a careful sip of the bourbon. The last six lines weren’t quite as he remembered them:
    But when the Resurrection Man shall bring
The moon to free me from these yellowed pages,
The gift is mine, there won’t be anything
For you – and you can rest through all the ages
Under a stone that bears the cherished name
You thought should make the two of us the same.
    He picked up the telephone and punched in Christine’s number.
    After three rings he heard her say, briskly, “Dunn Books.”
    “Christine,” he said, “George – uh – here.” It was the first time he had spoken since seeing the girl disappear, and his voice had cracked. He cleared his throat and took a deep breath and let it out.
    “Drunk again,” said Christine.
    “Again?” he said. “Still. Listen, I’ve got a first here of Fleming’s
More Poems,
no dust jacket but it’s got her name written below one of the poems. Do you have a signed Fleming I could compare it with?”
    “You’re in luck, an eBay customer backed out of a deal. It’s a
More Poems,
too.”
    “Have you got it right there?”
    “Yeah, but what, you want me to describe her signature over the phone? We should meet at the Biltmore tomorrow, bring our copies.”
    “Good idea, and if this is real I’ll buy lunch. But could you flip to the sonnet ‘To My Sister’?”
    “One second.” A few moments later she was back on the phone. “Okay, what about it?”
    “How does the sestet go?”
    “It says,
‘But when the daylight of the future shows / The forms freed by erosion from their cages, / It will be mine that quickens, gladly grows, / And lives; and you can rest through all the ages / Under a stone that bears the cherished name / You thought should make the two of us the same.’
Bitter poem!”
    Those were the familiar lines – the way the poem was supposed to go.
    “Why,” asked Christine, “is yours missing the bottom of the page?”
    “No – I’ve – my copy has a partly different sestet.” He read to her the last six lines on the page of the book he held. “Printed just like every other poem in the book, same typeface and all.”
    “Wow. Otherwise a standard copy of the first edition?”
    “To the best of my knowledge, I don’t know,” he said, quoting a treasured remark from a bookseller they both knew. He added, “We’ll know tomorrow.”
    “Eleven, okay? And take care of it – it might be worth wholesaling to one of the big-ticket dealers.”
    “I wasn’t going to use it for a coaster. See you at eleven.”
    He hung up the phone, and before putting the book aside he touched the ink thumbprint beside the signature on the page. The paper wasn’t warm or cold, but he shivered – this was a touch across decades. When had Fleming killed herself?
    He got up and crossed the old carpets to the computer and turned it on, and as the monitor screen showed the Hewlett Packard logo and then the Windows background, he couldn’t shake the mental image of trying to grab a woman to keep her from falling into some abyss and only managing to brush her outstretched hand with one finger.
    He typed in the address for Google –
sounds like a Chinaman trying to say something
– and then typed “cheyenne fleming,” and when a list of sites appeared he clicked on the top