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hair bouncing a little as she walked. The instant she opened the passenger-side door, he started to ask, but she answered before the words were out of his mouth. “A lot of junk mail, no weird bills—ohh! And we got the advance check.”  
    “Yes! Pizza for everybody!”  
    “Do you have to always equate celebrating with pizza?”  
    “Fine. Make a turkey dinner. I like that better anyway.”  
    Ellen waved the check in front of his face, got out the checkbook and started writing out a deposit slip.  
    “You never see the character on Murder, She Wrote chasing after publishers for a check, do you?” Jack Naile asked rhetorically.  
    “She makes more royalties than we do, so she probably doesn’t have to play chase the check.”  
    “Well, yeah. But we’re cool for a while, and all we’ve got to do is write the little sucker.”  
    “It should be a fun book.”  
    Jack Naile agreed with his wife. Of the dozens of novels they’d done over the years, they’d rarely been able to get some of their pet ideas in print—and this book was one of them. Ellen loved the research end of things and their current magnum opus was far more her idea than his. “Just think about it, kid. Pretty soon, we’ll be immersed in El Cid, the Cave of St. John the Divine in the Greek islands and the Great Pyramid at Giza.”  
    “I wish we could go to the Greek islands—nice sandy beaches. I wish we could go anyplace. Egypt would be nice.”  
    “Not in the summer—wrong season. Anyway, we’ve got some science fiction cons to go to over the summer.”  
    “No sandy beaches, just crowded elevators.”  
    Jack Naile started the car. “Bank?”  
    “Bank.”  
    “Can you do those photos for me today?”  
    “This is another one of those roundup articles, isn’t it? Guns, holsters, knives?”  
    “Yeah, well, but the only way I can write it is having the pictures to work from. Only way to organize it.”  
    “I hate roundup articles.”  
    “Well, people like to read—”  
    “Hey, look at this!” Ellen was sifting through what she had labeled as junk mail. “You’ve gotta see this.”  
    Jack Naile put the car back in park, and he and Ellen leaned close together over the center console, their heads touching. In her hands she held a page from a magazine. Attached to it was a small piece of paper with a few typewritten sentences. “I see your articles in the gun magazines a lot. Thought you’d get a kick out of this. Looks like somebody in your family was gainfully employed at one time.” The note was signed with a name Jack Naile didn’t recognize.  
    “Look at the picture! Look, Jack!”  
    He didn’t have his glasses, but a little squinting helped a lot. A caption beneath a black-and-white photograph described a street scene from northern Nevada in 1903. The street was broad, unpaved, dusty, obviously the main drag. Horses and wagons were in the street, as were various pedestrians. On the far side of the street from the camera was a board sidewalk, several wooden storefronts adjacent to it, the buildings packed together like row housing. One of them, the far left edge of its sign almost obscured by a hanging advertising shingle, read “Jack Naile—General Merchandise.”  
    Jack Naile lit a Camel from a half-empty pack and took the Suburban out of park. He made a right, caught the traffic light and paralleled the railroad tracks, made a U-turn across them and then a quick right into the lot for the bank’s drive-thru. “How’s about a cup of coffee when we get home?” Jack asked.  
    “Sounds good.”  
    They were able to pull up at the actual window, Ellen ready with the deposit slip. He signed the check and passed it to the pretty, smiling woman on the other side of the bullet-proof glass.  
    Jack Naile turned up into their steep driveway and, after stopping briefly to let Ellen out, put the Suburban under the portico; the passenger door couldn’t be opened once the Suburban was