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with the careful letters of a man just learning to write.
    “My grandfather was fresh off the boat from Russia,” Hilliard explained, “he was still learning English. Jeb Mallory Americanized his name. As you see, they became partners while drinking in a saloon. It’s always been said that Nikolai learned a lot from Jeb Mallory—and probably more than he’d bargained for.”
    “Such as?”
    He shrugged. “If I ever knew, young man, I’ve forgotten. I’m seventy-four years old and at this age you have enough trouble just keeping up with today, never mind the past. Still, I expect it’s all in there, if you’re interested enough to look.” He gestured toward the library. “Everything the Konstants ever wrote is there, neatly bound and put away. There’s probably an old journal or two—women always kept those things in the old days, y’know, gave ’em something to do, I guess, writing up all the births, deaths, and marriages …. It’s no good for my eyes, all faded ink and crabby writing. I was a soldier, y’see, Mr. Preston, an outdoorsman, never had time for all this chitchat. That’s why I’m so bad at it now.”
    Mike was itching to get his hands on all that untapped material, but the old man suddenly looked very tired. “Maybe I should come back tomorrow?” he suggested.
    “Nonsense, nonsense.” Hilliard’s pale eyes were suddenly beseeching. “I haven’t had a chat like this for years, and I don’t mind admitting I’ve enjoyed myself. There’s no one comes here much anymore, y’know,” he added sadly, “just the Japanese gardener you saw—and he doesn’t speak English—not
proper
English. And, of course, there’s Mary, my housekeeper, a nice woman but she watches television all the time … I can’t stand it myself. Have another sherry, won’t you?” he said eagerly, wheeling his chair back into the library. “Tell you what, if you want to go through all this stuff, why don’t you just come and stay a while? You can work late at night, all by yourself—isn’t that what you writers like to do? And then you can ask me questions anytime you want.”
    “It’s a deal,” Mike said, hardly able to believe his luck. But as he shook his hand, the gleam in the old man’s eyes made him wonder uncomfortably what he was up to.
    The big old house was silent but for the ticking of a clock in the hall as Mike pushed the old-fashioned leather chair from the table. He frowned as the casters screeched from rust and long disuse. It was three-thirty a.m. and he’d been reading in the library since eight that evening, when Hilliard Konstant had retired to bed. The big oak table was littered with books and papers, mostly old ledgers and documents relating to the running of the ranch, but they were not what he was seeking.
    He paced the plum-colored carpet restlessly, too alert to go to bed and sleep. The library was thirty feet long and twenty-five wide and lined wall-to-wall with books. Hilliard had given him no clue as to where to begin, he’d simply said, “It’s all there somewhere, young man. Help yourself!” Sometimes Mike would catch Hilliard looking at him with a sardonic twinkle in his pale eyes, as though he was enjoying some secret joke, and he wondered if he knew more than he was telling—like
where
to look on those walls of shelves!
    He wandered restlessly through the hall into the huge drawing room that ran the full length of the house. It was like being in a time warp. Hilliard had told him that the walls were still hung with the same faded blue damask chosen by Rosalia Konstant more than eighty years before, though the matching silk that had once covered sofas and chairs had been replaced sometime later by a mixture of cheerful flower prints. Mike stared at the twin portraits of a boy and a girl hanging over the mantel. These wereRosalia and Nik Konstant’s two children: Gregorius—always known as Greg—and his sister, Angel, the girl who had been born within a few weeks