What are you living on these days? Calvin is giving me fifty cents for Bleak Land and being hoity-toity about it in the bargain-but at least it appears under my own name, not Rosemary Burke (and does she ever at the tripe she produces!), probably next April.

Ever yours, especially when I remember that night under the stars, Armand

That didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know from the material Amy had found in the university’s archives. I pulled out my magnifying glass to help me read Kylie’s response.

Dear Armand,

I am tired of the whole wretched business. I did write to Olin Taverner, and received back a reply expressing hauteur to the nth degree, as one would expect from someone who knows he is the sole right-thinking person on the planet-Walker Bushnell is only protecting the rest of America from the likes of you and me, and instead of inveighing against Rep. Bushnell and the rest of his feebleminded ilk I should talk to “those of my own blood” to find out how Taverner got the photograph, etc., etc. If you want to pursue this with Calvin or try to find a public forum for grievance, I won’t attempt to dissuade you-but I leave on the 18th for Africa, where I shall celebrate and renew myself as my mother celebrates and renews herself. Let America chew on itself, I no longer care. I can taste and feel freedom’s canopy over me already.

Her signature flowed from the K, indecipherable as when I’d seen it at the Harsh Collection.

I turned the two documents over and over in my hands, as if somehow

that would make their meaning clearer. When Marcus Whitby found these letters, he’d taken them to Taverner. Surely even Sherlock Holmes would assume that much. Or maybe not. But something had taken Whitby to Taverner, and what else could it be but these letters, Whitby wanting to know about the photo Taverner had sent to the University of Chicago president all those years ago.

I wished Whitby’s notepad had survived the immersion, or that I’d known enough to keep it wet until I got it to Cheviot Labs. Marc had taken notes during his meeting with Taverner, that’s what Taverner’s attendant had said; the mess of gray pilling which Kathryn Chang had sealed into a protective wrapper was all that remained of those notes. Kathryn been able to pull some of it apart into fragments of pages, but only a few individual words survived: inform, disgrace, and, tired, now, the, dead, sixty. I doubt if even the Enigma machine could have put those into a meaningful sentence.

I glanced back at Kathryn Chang’s letter to me. I hadn’t read the last paragraph, in which she explained that Whitby’s PalmPilot had also been in his pocket organizer. She could send it to the electronics division to see if they could recover the data, “but this is likely to be quite expensive, so I don’t want to proceed unless you authorize the work.”